Occupy the Grassy Knoll: We Need a Million Man March on Dealey Plaza on 11/22/13

Image Source:  http://www.amazon.com/JFK-Unspeakable-Why-Died-Matters/dp/1439193886

November 22, 1963 - A Day That Will Live in Infamy

The 50th anniversary of the murder of President John F. Kennedy at Dealey Plaza, Dallas, Texas will be November 22, 2013.

James Douglass, author of the extraordinary 'must read' book above, wrote on page 142:

We have no evidence as to who in the military-industrial complex may have given the order to assassinate President Kennedy.  That the order was carried out by the Central Intelligence Agency is obvious.  The CIA’s fingerprints are all over the crime and the events leading up to it.  

LewRockwell.com has covered the issue of JFK's murder over the years and recently posted a piece by a well known JFK researcher, John Judge.

A Call to Ocupy the Grassy Knoll in 2013

Few people know that Robert Kennedy believed his brother was murdered by a political conspiracy and told close associates that he would reopen the investigation if he was able to be elected into the White House. Even fewer people know that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was high on his list of possible running mates for the presidency in 1968. All these deaths served to kill public hope for social and political change and left the rising Military Industrial Intelligence Complex warned about by outgoing President Eisenhower in 1963, and a permanent war economy and Cold War and nuclear arsenal were left in place to grow, along with the power of the intelligence agencies and the national security and police state who were clearly suspect of playing a role in these murders.

Anticipating ever larger crowds on the 50th anniversary of JFK’s assassination on November 22, 2013, the Coalition has applied for a legal permit in advance over the last three years, only to be told no permit can be issued more than a year in advance. Despite that rule, the Dallas Parks and Recreation Department informed me this year that a permit has been issued to the Sixth Floor Museum and the City of Dallas for the use of Dealey Plaza for the entire week from November 19-24, for exclusive use of the area and that no other permit can be issued for our event. The Director of the Sixth Floor Museum, Jessica Langford, has stated in the Dallas Morning News that they have no event planned for the Plaza, but they wanted to be “proactive” in preventing “a circus atmosphere” and the presentation of “conspiracy theories” in 2013. They also know quite well how many will be there listening. At one point she was asked what sort of an event they want to hold and she told the DMN reporter that she was not sure, “maybe a Moment of Silence”. This direct and content-based refusal of permit for the use of a public and historical site violates the protections of the First Amendment for free speech and expression.

The City of Dallas and the Dallas Police Department were key players in covering up the JFK murder investigation, largely because Lyndon Johnson was an extremely powerful and ruthless.Texas senator with considerable control over everything in TX, including the Texas Democrat political machine, the police and LBJ also had deep ties to Texas billionaires and Wall Street.  Some researchers believe that LBJ was the mastermind behind JFK's assassination and researcher Phillip F. Nelson wrote a book documenting his investigation on this issue: LBJ: The Mastermind of JFK’s Assassination.  

Now the City of Dallas is denying a permit to the JFK organizers, truthers and researchers  for the week of November 19-24, 2013.

EconomicPolicyJournal.com has also followed the JFK murder and recently posted a most interesting piece that asserts that George H.W. Bush was on the ground at Dealey Plaza as a CIA operative carrying out the murder of a popular president.

The George H.W. Bush Photos that You Won't See

A few points to start out: NBC is not an impartial media outlet. George H.W. Bush is not a respectable, admirable man or a national hero. And "33" is not an insignificant number- It is quite relevant and meaningful, in some circles at least.

NBC is owned by General Electric, a "defense contractor and the 2nd largest company in world according to Forbes", which has received over $16 billion dollars in bailouts from American taxpayers. They build and sell engines for the F-16 fighter aircraft and Apache Block III helicopters. For them, war is literally a profit racket; so it makes sense that they would "honor" warmongers.

NBC news far from impartial- they shill for the military-industrial complex and in 2003, fired Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Peter Arnett after Arnett reported the truth from Iraq....

There are no photos of George H.W. Bush in Dallas on the morning of John F. Kennedy's assassination standing in front of the Texas Book Depository in Dealey Plaza, but the photos can be seen here. The photo of the FBI memo acknowledging that Bush was a CIA opeative at that time can be seen here: "FBI director J. Edgar Hoover wrote this memo 5 days after the assassination, naming George Bush as a CIA officer... "The substance of the forgoing information was orally furnished to Mr. George Bush of the Central Intelligence Agency and Captain William Edwards of the Defense Intelligence Agency on November 23, 1963, by Mr. V.T. Forsyth of this Bureau."

Despite the well orchestrated government cover-up at all levels (Congress, LBJ, FBI, CIA, Dallas PD, Texas public officials), much truth has surfaced on JFK's murder and researchers continue to diligently pursue the truth despite the 1964 Warren Commission ordering that all non-published official material be sealed for 75 years (2039).  The public only got the government sanitized version of JFK's murder.  However, Oliver Stone's 1991 film JFK stirred up an intense hornets nest and Congress passed the 1992 JFK Records Act that created the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB), a committee that supposedly decides what records will be released. Although many records were released, it's generally believe that many critical records were not released and researchers continue to fight for the release of these records, here.

President Kennedy’s remains may have been laid to rest but his legacy and the quest for truth, justice and peace have not and continue to haunt us to this day. During JFK’s presidency, Vietnam combat deaths were 182 (16 in 1961, 53 in 1962 and 118 through 11/22/63). On 10/11/63, JFK issued National Security Action Memorandum 263 making it official that the US would withdraw from Vietnam. On November 21, 1963, JFK was given a list of the recent Vietnam casualties and he told his Assistant Press Secretary Malcolm Kilduff  “After I come back from Texas, that’s going to change. Vietnam is not worth another American life”. The next day, JFK was dead. Had President Kennedy not been murdered, there would be no Vietnam War Memorial with the names of 58,261 dead Americans from a senseless war he morally opposed and was committed to ending. Nor would there be millions of dead Vietnamese, Cambodians, Laotians and others.

The Vietnam era is far from being consigned to the dustbin of history and in fact still lives on today in the very same US foreign policy that was responsible for the murder of President Kennedy. If anything, the evil forces that murdered President Kennedy are far more powerful and insidious today than they were in the 1963.

For this reason, President Kennedy’s soul and legacy will never rest until truth and justice prevail and neither will America, the American people and the Kennedy family. Indeed, truth and justice are what President Kennedy not only devoted his entire life too but also sacrificed his own life for in his courageous and relentless quest to save America and humanity from the scourges of murderous militarism gone mad.

It’s as if this injustice has inflicted an evil curse upon America from which we will never be able to recover our personal, family and national honor until truth and justice prevail. In many ways, the American people and the Kennedy family are forever and umbilically connected to that fateful day in Dallas on November 11, 1963.

Above all, it should be about what President Kennedy would want and anyone even remotely familiar with the works of this extraordinary man would categorically conclude that that President Kennedy would settle for nothing less than the truth because above all, he was truly a champion for truth and justice who abhorred the raw and absolute concentration of the very same secretive powers that murdered him.

But so long as that truth remains buried, the curse will follow all of us. If President Kennedy’s life meant anything to him, his family and the American people, it’s long overdue for all of us to honor his life and death with the truth because his scared soul can never rest in peace until he knows that his life had meaning and that his death fulfilled his destiny.

The Death Tax Makes Obama and the Democrats the Grim Reaper

With a slew of new taxes scheduled for implementation in 2013, including Obamacare taxes, and with the 12/31/12 expiration of the Bush tax cuts that will indeed have a profoundly devastating effect on the middle class, small business and the economy, 2013 is destined to herald in more government planned gloom, doom and misery.

But of all the draconian measures to plunder the American people, none is more permanently confiscatory than the estate tax because it constitutes an outright expropriation of small family businesses.

The Bush tax cuts had a $5 million dollar exemption on the estate tax before an estate tax rate of 35% kicked in. When the Bush tax cuts expire, the floor for the estate tax drops to $1 million and the tax rate jumps to 55%. The estate tax will have a devastating impact on small family businesses who simply don't have the cash to pay the tax.

What does this mean?

Are New Inheritance Tax Laws Really Aimed At The Rich? Or Is The Average Joe Getting Caught In The Cross Fire?

What Are The New Inheritance Taxes Going To Be?

Currently, there is a $5 million estate tax exemption, and only those who stand to inherit an estate that exceeds that amount have to pay a tax rate of 35%. In January, 2013, many liberals have been celebrating what they consider to be a fair tax on the rich person. What they don’t realize is that the$ 1 million exemption and 55% taxation for those whose estate exceeds 1 million, will affect many Americans who could hardly be considered as wealthy. In this day and age, it doesn’t take much for an estate to add up to a million dollars. If you consider house, 401(k), savings, and other investments and assets, many people will fall into the new tax category.

What Will Happen To The Average Small Farmer When The New Inheritance Tax Is Imposed

97% of farms, small ranches, and small businesses will be affected by this tax. The problem is, the recipients of the inheritance are small-time people who barely make enough each year to scrape by. Individuals like this will have no option but to come up with the 55% tax to give to Uncle Sam, or they will be forced to sell the family farm or business that has been in the family for generations. Most farmers don’t just have $500k just sitting around as a tax fee for a property worth 1 million dollars.

The new inheritance tax could represent the end of an era. The death of the “family farm” as we know it to be today. Even if you are not a farmer or a business owner, your inheritance may be at stake.

The above estate tax scenario is a crushing blow to small family businesses. Basically, the entire tax structure at all levels is a war on small business, a war on entrepreneurship, a war on the family farm, and a war on the ability of ordinary Americans to earn a living and support their families. Meanwhile, the Democrats can't wait to sink their carnivorous fangs into those productive and entrepreneurial bourgeois that they hold in the highest contempt and vow to reduce to serfs and beggars. A farmer really doesn't have anything of value except his dirt and small family farms and entrepreneurs aren't swimming in cash like trust fund babies.

Welcome to the New America where toiling to earn money to feed your family is verboten and if you dare have the blazing audacity to even attempt it, the government confiscators will be there to crush you.

Racist Origins of Gun Control and the War on Drugs

Much has been written on the racist origins of gun control from a variety of perspectives ranging from the conservative, the liberal, the victims of gun control and and the libertarian view that deems the right to bear arms as a natural right.  If one doesn't possess the right to defend themselves and their families against violent predators, then what rights can any human being possibly have?  None whatsoever.

Gun Control: White Man's Law 1985 issue of Reason Magazine

Chances are that you've never heard of General Laney. He hasn't had a brilliant military career, at least as far as I know. In fact, I'm not certain that he's even served in the military. General, you see, isn't Laney's rank. General is Laney's first name. General Laney does, however, have a claim to fame, unrecognized though it may be.

Detroit resident General Laney is the founder and prime mover behind a little publicized organization known as the National Black Sportsman's Association, often referred to as "the black gun lobby." Laney pulls no punches when asked his opinion of gun control: "Gun control is really race control. People who embrace gun control are really racists in nature. All gun laws have been enacted to control certain classes of people, mainly black people, but the same laws used to control blacks are being used to disarm white people as well."

Laney is not the first to make this observation. Indeed, allied with sportsmen in vocal opposition to gun controls in the 1960s were the militant Black Panthers. Panther Minister of Information, Eldridge Cleaver noted in 1968: "Some very interesting laws are being passed. They don't name me; they don't say, take the guns away from the niggers. They say that people will no longer be allowed to have (guns). They don't pass these rules and these regulations specifically for black people, they have to pass them in a way that will take in everybody."

Some white liberals have said essentially the same thing. Investigative reporter Robert Sherrill, himself no lover of guns, concluded in his book The Saturday Night Special that the object of the Gun Control Act of 1968 was black control rather than gun control. According to Sherrill, Congress was so panicked by the ghetto riots of 1967 and 1968 that it passed the act to "shut off weapons access to blacks, and since they (Congress) probably associated cheap guns with ghetto blacks and thought cheapness was peculiarly the characteristic of imported military surplus and the mail-order traffic, they decided to cut off these sources while leaving over-the-counter purchases open to the affluent." Congressional motivations may have been more complex than Sherrill suggests, but keeping blacks from acquiring guns was certainly a large part of that motivation.

There is little doubt that the earliest gun controls in the United States were blatantly racist and elitist in their intent. San Francisco civil-liberties attorney Don B. Kates, Jr., an opponent of gun prohibitions with impeccable liberal credentials (he has been a clerk for radical lawyer William Kunstler, a civil rights activist in the South, and an Office of Economic Opportunity lawyer), describes early gun control efforts in his book Restricting Handguns: The Liberal Skeptic Speak Out. As Kates documents, prohibitions against the sale of cheap handguns originated in the post-Civil War South. Small pistols selling for as little as 50 or 60 cents became available in the 1870s and '80s, and since they could be afforded by recently emancipated blacks and poor whites (whom agrarian agitators of the time were encouraging to ally for economic and political purposes), these guns constituted a significant threat to a southern establishment interested in maintaining the traditional structure.

Consequently, Kates notes, in 1870 Tennessee banned "selling all but 'the Army and Navy model' handgun, i.e., the most expensive one, which was beyond the means of most blacks and laboring people." In 1881, Arkansas enacted an almost identical ban on the sale of cheap revolvers, while in 1902, South Carolina banned the sale of handguns to all but "sheriffs and their special deputies--i.e., company goons and the KKK." In 1893 and 1907, respectively, Alabama and Texas attempted to put handguns out of the reach of blacks and poor whites through "extremely heavy business and/or transactional taxes" on the sale of such weapons. In the other Deep South states, slavery-era bans on arms possession by blacks continued to be enforced by hook or by crook.

The cheap revolvers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries were referred to as "Suicide Specials," the "Saturday Night Special" label not becoming widespread until reformers and politicians took up the gun control cause during the 1960s. The source of this recent concern about cheap revolvers, as their new label suggests, has much in common with the concerns of the gunlaw initiators of the post-Civil War South. As B. Bruce-Briggs has written in the Public Interest, "It is difficult to escape the conclusion that the 'Saturday Night Special' is emphasized because it is cheap and is being sold to a particular class of people. The name is sufficient evidence--the reference is to 'niggertown Saturday night.'"

It's no secret that that the Ku Klux Klan was the first organization in America to lobby for gun control laws and that these gun control laws were specifically designed to keep African Americans from ever owning or possessing firearms.  It's also important to note that nearly all gun control laws in America originated in the South and were indeed an overt form of racism as well as an abridgment of the civil rights of African Americans.   This issue even managed to catch the attention of the Wall Street Journal in September, 2011 in a review of the book Gunfight: The Battle Over the Right to Bear Arms in America by Adam Winkler in an interestingly titled article.

Love Your Gun? Thank the Black Panthers, Says New Book

In his research for “Gunfight,” Winkler also noted a close intersection between guns and racism. “It was a constant pressure among white racists to keep guns out of the hands of African-Americans, because they would rise up and revolt.” he said. “The KKK began as a gun-control organization. Before the Civil War, blacks were never allowed to own guns. During the Civil War, blacks kept guns for the first time – either they served in the Union army and they were allowed to keep their guns, or they buy guns on the open market where for the first time there’s hundreds of thousands of guns flooding the marketplace after the war ends. So they arm up because they know who they’re dealing with in the South. White racists do things like pass laws to disarm them, but that’s not really going to work. So they form these racist posses all over the South to go out at night in large groups to terrorize blacks and take those guns away. If blacks were disarmed, they couldn’t fight back.”

Winkler also said that in the 1960s, laws passed by social conservatives to disarm black urban radicals like the Black Panthers in turn sparked a backlash that became the modern gun-rights movement.

Adam Winkler's extraordinary piece published in the 9/2011 issue of leftist leaning The Atlantic basically says that white conservatives were largely behind gun control laws because they opposed 2nd amendment rights for African Americans.

The Secret History of Guns

The Ku Klux Klan, Ronald Reagan, and, for most of its history, the NRA all worked to control guns. The Founding Fathers? They required gun ownership—and regulated it. And no group has more fiercely advocated the right to bear loaded weapons in public than the Black Panthers—the true pioneers of the modern pro-gun movement. In the battle over gun rights in America, both sides have distorted history and the law, and there’s no resolution in sight.

THE EIGHTH-GRADE STUDENTS gathering on the west lawn of the state capitol in Sacramento were planning to lunch on fried chicken with California’s new governor, Ronald Reagan, and then tour the granite building constructed a century earlier to resemble the nation’s Capitol. But the festivities were interrupted by the arrival of 30 young black men and women carrying .357 Magnums, 12-gauge shotguns, and .45-caliber pistols.

The 24 men and six women climbed the capitol steps, and one man, Bobby Seale, began to read from a prepared statement. “The American people in general and the black people in particular,” he announced, must

take careful note of the racist California legislature aimed at keeping the black people disarmed and powerless Black people have begged, prayed, petitioned, demonstrated, and everything else to get the racist power structure of America to right the wrongs which have historically been perpetuated against black people The time has come for black people to arm themselves against this terror before it is too late.

Seale then turned to the others. “All right, brothers, come on. We’re going inside.” He opened the door, and the radicals walked straight into the state’s most important government building, loaded guns in hand. No metal detectors stood in their way.

It was May 2, 1967, and the Black Panthers’ invasion of the California statehouse launched the modern gun-rights movement.....

OPPOSITION TO GUN CONTROL was what drove the black militants to visit the California capitol with loaded weapons in hand. The Black Panther Party had been formed six months earlier, in Oakland, by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale. Like many young African Americans, Newton and Seale were frustrated with the failed promise of the civil-rights movement. Brown v. Board of Education, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were legal landmarks, but they had yet to deliver equal opportunity. In Newton and Seale’s view, the only tangible outcome of the civil-rights movement had been more violence and oppression, much of it committed by the very entity meant to protect and serve the public: the police.

Inspired by the teachings of Malcolm X, Newton and Seale decided to fight back. Before he was assassinated in 1965, Malcolm X had preached against Martin Luther King Jr.’s brand of nonviolent resistance. Because the government was “either unable or unwilling to protect the lives and property” of blacks, he said, they had to defend themselves “by whatever means necessary.” Malcolm X illustrated the idea for Ebony magazine by posing for photographs in suit and tie, peering out a window with an M-1 carbine semiautomatic in hand. Malcolm X and the Panthers described their right to use guns in self-defense in constitutional terms. “Article number two of the constitutional amendments,” Malcolm X argued, “provides you and me the right to own a rifle or a shotgun.”

Guns became central to the Panthers’ identity, as they taught their early recruits that “the gun is the only thing that will free us—gain us our liberation.” They bought some of their first guns with earnings from selling copies of Mao Zedong’s Little Red Book to students at the University of California at Berkeley.

While the Black Panthers, Bobby Seal and Huey Newton vigorously defended the 2nd amendment and raised the very legitimate issue of horrific police brutality against African Americans, they were also Marxists and socialists who were perceived as advocates for violent revolution.  The 1960's were extraordinary times for America.  From the assassinations of President Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy to the civil rights marches to anti-war protests, the Vietnam War to the quest for racial equality, the 60's literally ripped the soul of America apart as a new national conscious and consciousness were born.

While it's absolutely true that gun control laws are the Ku Klux Klan's favorite laws, it's also true that Caucasian liberals and conservatives have done everything humanly possible to guarantee that African Americans and other 'brown folks' are unarmed.  In modern American history, the first major gun control legislation was the 1968 Gun Control Act that was signed by President Lyndon Johnson as one of his 'Great Society' schemes to churn America into a Soviet styled 'command and controlled' police state with a state run redistributionist economy. LBJ is reported to have told 2 governors on Air Force One "I'll have those n*ggers voting Democratic for the next 200 years." according to Ronald Kessler's book Inside The White House, here.

The Brandy Handgun Violence Prevention Act, signed into law by Bill Clinton on 11/30/93, required background checks on all gun purchasers through the National Instant Criminal Background Check System, here, and there's an online quiz to determine eligibility to own or purchase a firearm, here. A 'yes' to any of the following questions will generally disqualify an individual from legally purchasing a firearm.

Q: Have you ever been convicted of any crime for which the maximum punishment was two years or more in prison?
Q: Have you ever been indicted for a crime punishable by more than one year?
Q: Do you currently have outstanding criminal warrants?
Q: Are you a user of illegal drugs?
Q: Have you ever been involuntarily committed to a mental institution?
Q: Are you in the United States illegally?
Q: Were you ever dishonorably discharged from the armed forces?
Q: Have you ever renounced your U.S. citizenship?
Q: Are you currently subject to a restraining order for threatening violence?
Q: Have you ever been convicted of a crime involving domestic violence?

It is well documented that African Americans and people of color are arrested, criminally prosecuted and imprisoned at far higher rates than Caucasian folks, probably because they are easy targets, tend to be much poorer and lack the financial means to defend themselves in a court system that is stacked against them.  In a world with sane and equal justice, the criminal justice system should be based on "No Victim, No Crime" but people of color are frequently victimized by a perverted judicial system that bases its success on arrests by the police and convictions by prosecutors.  Many folks of color are arrested, convicted and imprisoned for victimless crimes like pot possession.

In a piece titled Marijuana law just creates criminals CNN reported on June 6, 2012:

More than 50,000 people in 2011 were arrested in New York City for possessing small amounts of marijuana -- the majority of whom were black and Latino -- at a considerable judicial and financial cost. New York City spends about $75 million every year on arresting people for recreational marijuana possession.

But what many people don't know is that the state decriminalized this offense more than 30 years ago, making private possession of less than 25 grams of marijuana a violation punishable by a $100 fine. Possession of the same amount in public view remains a criminal misdemeanor.

Despite this change in law, arrests for small quantities of marijuana over the last decade have skyrocketed, with more than 400,000 people arrested and unceremoniously run through the criminal justice system. Marijuana possession is now the No. 1 arrest category in New York.

Why is this happening?

Each year, hundreds of thousands of people in New York are stopped, questioned, frisked and searched, often without justification, under the "stop and frisk" policy. The vast majority of these people live in communities of color, and almost 90% are immediately released without arrest or even a summons.

Most of the folks arrested in NYC for marijuana possession are blacks and Hispanics. Furthermore, the NYPD's draconian 'stop and frisk' policies specifically target people of color. You better believe that Fuhrer Bloomberg's Militarized Police State is blatantly racist. While this is an issue that gets some media attention, nothing ever changes and these horrid police assaults on folks of color continue unabated and so do the arrests and prison sentences.

The War on Guns and the War on Drugs are closely related as well as overtly racist because because the criminal justice is guilty of imprisoning folks of color for victimless crime convictions like marijuana possession and at far higher rates than Caucasian folks are prosecuted for the same crime despite there being no difference in the rate of marijuana use by people of color and Caucasian folks.  Some folks are awake on the issue of how punitive and racist the War on Drugs really is.

Ron Paul: Drug War In U.S. Has Racist Origins  The Huffington Post

Dylan Ratigan: Racism was rebranded ‘the war on drugs’  The Raw Story

The War on Drugs Is Really a War on Minorities  Alternet

The New Jim Crow: How the War on Drugs Gave Birth to a Permanent American Undercaste
Common Dreams

Racism and the Drug War  The Future of Freedom

Not only is the War on Drugs immoral and racist, it's a hugely expensive waste of money.  Cato estimated a few years ago that we were spending $88 billion a year on the War on Drugs.

Drug criminalization policies in the United States drain $88 billion annually from state, local and federal government coffers, according to a report released Monday by the Cato Institute.

"The Budgetary Impact of Ending Drug Prohibition," by Harvard economist and Cato Senior Fellow Jeffrey Miron and Katherine Waldock, concludes that current drug policy costs governments $41.3 billion each year to implement, while depriving their budgets of $46.7 billion in potential revenues from taxation of legal drug sales.

The revenue figure was derived assuming roughly the same taxation rate currently used for alcohol and tobacco sales. Also factored in is the tax revenue on the income earned by producers--currently concealed in a shadowy black market--that would be subject to standard income and sales taxation.

"State and federal governments in the United States face massive looming fiscal deficits," Miron and Waldock write. "One policy change that can reduce deficits is ending the drug war."

Read the rest here

Cato Institute

Over a period of 40 years, we've spend over $1 trillion dollars on the idiotic War on Drugs, here.   

The War on Drugs is a BIG fail; we totally failed to even put a dent in the flow of drugs and we have more drug users than ever, plus a whole lot of recreational drug users in prison and with criminal records.  The economic impact on the poor who are the primary victims of the government's War on Drugs is devastating.  The War on Drugs needs to be renamed the War on the Poor.

Folks with criminal records can't get jobs, their family suffer enormously and their lives are essentially ruined.  

But then again, that's what government does best - it deliberately and maliciously ruins human lives for the exclusive benefit of the Police State and the Prison Industrial Complex.  The racist origins of the War on Drugs is also well documented and DrugPolicy.org addresses this issue.

Race and the Drug War

The drug war has produced profoundly unequal outcomes across racial groups, manifested through racial discrimination by law enforcement and disproportionate drug war misery suffered by communities of color. Although rates of drug use and selling are comparable across racial lines, people of color are far more likely to be stopped, searched, arrested, prosecuted, convicted and incarcerated for drug law violations than are whites. Higher arrest and incarceration rates for African Americans and Latinos are not reflective of increased prevalence of drug use or sales in these communities, but rather of a law enforcement focus on urban areas, on lower-income communities and on communities of color as well as inequitable treatment by the criminal justice system. We believe that the mass criminalization of people of color, particularly young African American men, is as profound a system of racial control as the Jim Crow laws were in this country until the mid-1960s.

The Drug Policy Alliance is committed to exposing disproportionate arrest rates and the systems that perpetuate them. We work to eliminate policies that result in disproportionate incarceration rates by rolling back harsh mandatory minimum sentences that unfairly affect urban populations and by repealing sentencing disparities. Crack cocaine sentencing presents a particularly egregious case. Since the 1980s, federal penalties for crack were 100 times harsher than those for powder cocaine, with African Americans disproportionately sentenced to much lengthier terms.

When we think about all the injustice and racism we have created with an insanely unjust criminal justice system, by far the biggest victims are people of color.  Yet, hideously immoral and racist Caucasian liberals and Caucasian conservatives continue to endorse this supremely overt and systemic racism.

How Can Anyone Not Realize the War on (Some) Drugs Is Racist?  LewRockwell.com

The drug war is a violent campaign against black men and by extension the black family, among many others (not all of them black, by the way); it has been so since it started. Furthermore, almost every prohibition of substances consumed in the United States of America has had as its raison d'être the subjugation of one group (generally some "minority" group – whatever group happens to partake of that substance) to the benefit of one other specific group of statist, power-mad megalomaniacs.

Equal Protection Under the Law?  Forget it.  It just doesn't exist.  Folks of color are routinely persecuted, prosecuted and denied justice.

If America truly wanted to do something productive and just for folks of color, it would DECRIMINALIZE all victimless crimes and empty the prisons of non-violent folks.  However, the top five lobbies against marijuana decriminalization are the police unions, prison guard unions, the private prison corporations, the beer/booze industry and Big Pharm.

In America, public sector union job security and corporate profits always trump justice.

Federal Employees Average $126,141 in Pay/Benefits or More than Double Private Sector Wages of $62,757

Much has been written about how highly paid and overpaid federal employees are in comparison with comparable private sector jobs, although I doubt that federal employees work anywhere near as hard as private sector employees.  Amazingly, the compensation packages of federal employees continues to widen relative to the pay of the private sector.  To be sure, there is no austerity in the public sector that continues to plunder the private sector to support their outsized lifestyles and compensation packages.

Yes, Federal Workers Are Overpaid Heritage Foundation

The Government Accountability Office’s (GAO) report last week on federal and private-sector compensation showed that four recent studies agree: Federal compensation is higher than the private sector’s.

Unlike private sector employees who pay for a substantial portion of their benefits, federal employees pay for practically none of their costly benefits and when these benefits are factored into the equation, the pay gap between federal and private sector employees widens even further.

Overpaid Federal Workers Cato Institute

In 2010, federal civilian workers had an average wage of $83,679, according to data from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis.5 By comparison, the average wage of the nation's 101 million private-sector workers was $51,986....

When benefits such as health care and pensions are included, the federal compensation advantage over private workers is even larger, according to the BEA data. In 2010, federal worker compensation averaged $126,141, or double the private-sector average of $62,757.

As more and more data surfaces relative to federal pay and compensation, federal employees are lashing out and bitching that that they've already sacrificed over $100 billion in pay cuts.  The nerve of these thieving blood sucking parasites!

Feds mobilize against additional hits on their pocketbooks Washington Post

As the White House and Congress look for ways to avoid a Jan. 1 “fiscal cliff” of budget cuts and tax increases, federal employee groups are increasingly mobilized against more hits on their pocketbooks.

The Federal Workers Alliance (FWA), a coalition of 20 unions representing more than 300,000 employees, scheduled a “federal employee day of action” on Tuesday to pressure officials not to take any more away from the workforce in the name of deficit reduction.

“With so little time left and so little progress being made, we agreed that something had to be done,” said FWA Chairman William R. Dougan. “Federal employees have often been a scapegoat of first resort in last-minute budget deals, and we won’t let that happen again. Federal workers have already seen $103 billion in cuts to their pay and benefits, but many in Congress still don’t get the message. That’s why we’re encouraging our members to contact their elected officials in any way they can, and tell them ‘the bank is closed.’ ”

The alliance is urging workers to contact elected officials by personal visits, phone calls, e-mails, social media, whatever, to deliver this message: “Federal employees have already sacrificed $103 billion in pay and benefits — enough is enough.” 

Sacrifice? I can't see where federal employees have sacrificed a damn thing except for a incredibly modest and insignificant decrease in the rate of plunder.

The Bush Tax Cuts and Why the States are Lusting to Go Over the Fiscal Cliff

Liberals and Democrats are literally foaming at the mouth in anticipation of new tax and Obamacare revenues pouring in starting January 1, 2013.   Going 'over the cliff' is music to their confiscatory ears.   It's what they live for - growing state powers and crushing private business, especially small family owned businesses where entrepreneurship and innovation have historically driven the economy.  According to liberal speak: We don't need no stinking economy because we'll just steal what we want to impose our dream totalitarian society.

Starting with the Bush tax cuts that expire on 12/31/12 and the ongoing 'going over the cliff' fiasco, the out of control deficit spending federal government (Fedzilla) is lusting for new taxes to ring in the New Year, specifically with the implementation of Obamacare taxes and the expiration of the Bush tax cuts. Exactly why the idiot Republicans put an expiration date on the Bush tax cuts as opposed to making them permanent remains a mystery that is easily solved. The Republicans are fundamentally opposed to lower taxes and cutting spending.

Although the Democrats never saw a tax increase they didn't love, the Dems are beginning to perceive ballot box blowback because the Bush tax cuts really did benefit the middle class that the Dems claim to love and perpetually romance with pledges of undying devotion.  For the Dems it's all about endless class warfare. Now the Dems are backing down on letting the Bush tax cuts expire and are finally acknowledging that the Bush tax cuts did indeed accrue to the middle class.

Obama's Middle-Class Tax Flip Wall Street Journal

Here's how President Obama put it during a recent White House event with a group of middle-class Americans: Unless Congress acts, he said, "starting Jan. 1, every family in America will see their taxes automatically go up." 

He went on: "A typical middle-class family of four would see its income taxes go up by $2,200. That's $2,200 out of people's pockets. That means less money for buying groceries, less money for filling prescriptions, less money for buying diapers. It means a tougher choice between paying the rent and paying tuition. And middle-class families just can't afford that now." 

To emphasize that these cuts are a big deal, he asked people to "tell members of Congress what a $2,000 tax hike would mean to you." He is now taking his message on the road, telling a group of Michigan auto workers on Monday that the end of the Bush cut would be "a hit you cannot afford to take." 

In any honest universe, this would be news. President Obama says the middle class benefits mightily from the Bush tax cuts and cannot afford to see them expire.

Clearly, maintaining middle class tax cuts is now a hot potato political issue with significant consequences as the Republicans and Democrats calculate and plot ways to beneficially politicize the issue. In reality the Dems really don't care about going over the so-called fiscal cliff because they've opposed the Bush tax cuts for years.  Moreover, if the Republicans refuse to increases taxes on the rich as the Dems demand and if the middle class incurs taxes increases because of the Republican refusal to raise taxes on the rich (incomes over $250,000 a year), the Dems can just point the finger of blame at the Republicans.  The advantage point goes to the Dems because it's difficult to see how they can lose.

Besides playing the calculated game of political blowback on the Bush tax cuts, there are other profoundly significant issues.  The Bush tax cuts had a $5 million dollar exemption on the estate tax before an estate tax rate of 35% kicked in.  When the Bush tax cuts expire, the floor for the estate tax drops to $1 million and the tax rate increases to 55%.  The estate tax will have a devastating impact on small family businesses who simply don't have the cash to pay the tax.

Are New Inheritance Tax Laws Really Aimed At The Rich? Or Is The Average Joe Getting Caught In The Cross Fire?

What Are The New Inheritance Taxes Going To Be?

Currently, there is a $5 million estate tax exemption, and only those who stand to inherit an estate that exceeds that amount have to pay a tax rate of 35%. In January, 2013, many liberals have been celebrating what they consider to be a fair tax on the rich person. What they don’t realize is that the$ 1 million exemption and 55% taxation for those whose estate exceeds 1 million, will affect many Americans who could hardly be considered as wealthy. In this day and age, it doesn’t take much for an estate to add up to a million dollars. If you consider house, 401(k), savings, and other investments and assets, many people will fall into the new tax category.

What Will Happen To The Average Small Farmer When The New Inheritance Tax Is Imposed

97% of farms, small ranches, and small businesses will be affected by this tax. The problem is, the recipients of the inheritance are small-time people who barely make enough each year to scrape by. Individuals like this will have no option but to come up with the 55% tax to give to Uncle Sam, or they will be forced to sell the family farm or business that has been in the family for generations. Most farmers don’t just have $500k just sitting around as a tax fee for a property worth 1 million dollars.

The new inheritance tax could represent the end of an era. The death of the “family farm” as we know it to be today. Even if you are not a farmer or a business owner, your inheritance may be at stake.

The above estate tax scenario is a crushing blow to small family businesses.  However, the situation is compounded by the fact that the vastly increased estate taxes on middle class entrepreneurs are also endorsed by the states because Fedzilla engineered a revenue sharing  scheme.

Why States May Want to Fall off the 'Cliff'

In an example of federal and state tax law interaction that gets little notice on Capitol Hill, 30 states next year could collect $3 billion more in estate taxes if Congress and President Barack Obama do not act soon, estimated the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, a Washington think tank.

The reason? The federal estate tax would return with a vengeance and so would a federal credit system that shares a portion of it with the 30 states. They had been getting their cut of this tax revenue stream until the early 2000s. That was when the credit system for payment of state estate tax went away due to tax cuts enacted under former President George W. Bush.

With the return of the credit system next year as part of the "cliff," states such as Florida, Colorado and Texas -- which have not collected estate tax since 2004 -- could resume doing so. California Gov. Jerry Brown has already begun to add the anticipated estate tax revenue into his plans, including $45 million of it in his 2012-2013 revised budget.

Basically, the entire tax structure at all levels is a war on small business, a war on entrepreneurship, a war on the family farm, and a war on the ability of ordinary Americans to earn a living and support their families.  Meanwhile, the Democrats are lusting and foaming at the mouth to sink their carnivorous  fangs into those productive and entrepreneurial bourgeois that they hold in the highest contempt and vow to reduce to serfs and beggars.  A farmer really doesn't have anything of value except his dirt.  Why not just take it away from him and give it to Big Ag to grow more taxpayer subsidized GMO poison food?

There Really is No Such Thing as Communism, Socialism, Progressivism etc. Because....

Republicans are notorious for screaming that the Democrats are socialists and communists.   The Democrats scream that the Republicans are the capitalist Great Satan pigs who must be destroyed for the collective good of humanity.  The truth? Capitalism and free markets no longer exist in America but fascism runs wild as an insidious prosperity destroying disease.  If one truly examines all the 'ism's' that folks endlessly obsess about including communism, socialism, progressivism, fascism, state run capitalism, statism etc., they all boil down to essentially the same thing:  totalitarian control of all people and resources by a handful of ruling elites who grow filthy rich by concentrating all wealth and power.  Why worry over mere semantics when the end result is the same?

Interestingly, China is a case study in communism as well as the massive concentration of wealth and power, as documented by Bloomberg.

Mapping China’s Red Nobility 

Bloomberg News mapped the families of Communist China’s “Eight Immortals” to reveal the origins of princelings, an elite class that has been able to amass wealth and influence, and exploit opportunities unavailable to most Chinese. Bloomberg tracked 103 people – descendants including children, grandchildren and great grandchildren, and their respective spouses. The Immortals, now all dead, are revered in communist lore as revolutionary fighters who led China’s economic opening after Mao Zedong’s death. The identities and business dealings of these families are often cloaked in secrecy because of state censorship and complex corporate webs. To document them, Bloomberg scoured thousands of pages of corporate filings, property records, official websites and archives, and conducted dozens of interviews from China to the United States, where many were educated and have at times made their homes.

Those who cling to the warm and fuzzy notion that statism and collectivism are somehow caring, paternal and compassionate are somewhere between severely uninformed or downright stupid.  Collectivism is the most failed ideology in human history, yet folks continue to aspire to it as the noblest of ideas that will satisfy every human want if only the government had enough power.  Well, communist nations had all the power any tyrant could possible hope to achieve and their only achievement in the name of humanity was the biggest pile of dead bodies in history.   It's well documented that communism killed 100 million folks during the 20th century alone, and mostly through starvation attributable to collectivization and central planning.  Life is always cheap and expendable when worship of the state is the only imperative as well as an exalted god that must be obeyed.

The Worker's Paradise in the communist Soviet Union and elsewhere turned out to be a big bust when the impoverished, suffering and hungry proletariat took a peek at their working class comrades in nations with respectable levels of economic freedom.  What a shock!  The working class dudes in those evil capitalist nations were enjoying prosperity and consumer goodies on a scale unheard of in the commie Workers Paradises.   In capitalist nations, the poor were joining the middle class and for the first time in human history the people rather than the ruling aristocracy were actually building wealth and power.

It was a monumental leap for humankind because wealth and power was finally being widely diffused and disbursed among the people for the first time in human history.  Effectively, free markets and property rights represented a transfer of wealth and power from the 1% to the 99%.  For clearly obvious reasons the ruling class panicked because they were no longer in control as their absolute power and privileges were acutely threatened.

Once upon a time the world was owned and controlled by kings and queens, princes and princesses, lords and ladies, and absolute rulers. There were the ruling elites, the upper class, the propertied class, the moneyed class, the educated class, the bureaucratic class and everybody else was a serf of sorts and expected to be compliant slaves – that’s what slaves do, they serve their masters. Such was the fate of humanity for thousands of years. The 1% and the 99% have existed for as long as humans have existed.

Then the unthinkable happened. In Europe, Western Civilization was born as folks started to clamor for political rights, property rights and natural rights. Monarchies began to topple, theocratic powers were usurped and the revolution for human liberty began. Although Europe was a bloodbath on and off for nearly a millennium, the great political theorists and intellectual challengers who conceived and fought to implement such foreign concepts as non-repressive forms of government and individual sovereignty finally succeeded. Eventually, limited personal freedoms and rights translated into much wider economic freedoms which elevated industry and trade while spawning an economically strong middle class.

Throughout the process, we all learned that the vast human potential so inherent in the minds and souls of free thinking human beings is, ultimately, the only catalyst for progress and civilization, without which there can no civilizations, at least none worth noticing or experiencing. Great societies and human liberation are soul mates.

The grand experiment worked wonders as power and wealth was shifting away from the 1% and to the 99%. Shorn of their shackles, mankind prospered for the first time in human history and at an unprecedented rate. A strong and flourishing middle class was born as free markets were delivering good and services, and prosperity for the masses (99%) was achieved. There was peace instead of war and government had limited powers.

But the 1% started screaming “holy shit, we can’t let that happen. We can’t allow the lowlife people and the unwashed masses to prosper with free markets and sound money so we will work to transfer that power back to us.”

Instead of using armies and violence to subdue the people, the ruling class hatched an extraordinarily clever ballot box scheme - democracy (unlimited majority mob rule) would be used to control and manipulate the people into peacefully transferring their power back to the ruling class by conferring voter approved legitimacy upon them.

Throughout most of human history, the people were barely tossed subsistence level crumbs while their overlords lavishly feasted on the finest of everything because they alone controlled all property, all resources and all of humanity.  Human rights, civil rights, property rights and economic liberty dramatically changed the equation.

But lo and behold, the people in America and Europe began to reject the responsibility of liberty and started voting to deliver themselves back into the bondage and shackles of the elites.  The elites of government offered them 'free everything' in exchange for relinquishing their liberty.  Of course, those promises will not be kept.  Just asked the Greeks.  But once liberty is lost and humankind is once again back in the shackles of government, the fiat central banksters and the elites, there is no saddle to mount to escape the tyranny, despotism and misery.

Yet, there are numerous folks in America and Europe who continue to vote for centralized powers, bigger government, massive taxes, income redistribution and the wholesale slaughter of civil and economic liberties. Such folks cling to a dangerous and deadly delusion.

If we think we are suffering now, we have only just begun to reap the poison harvest of a statist economy because the real misery has yet to hit us. When it does, the pinchers of the totalitarian state will really start snuffing out life ruthlessly and brutally. The totalitarian nations wallowing in Marxism/socialism/oligarchy/fascism/statism will always resort to the same tactics as Stalin and Mao who snuffed out 100,000,000 folks during the 20th century alone.

The only difference between the economies of Mao/Stalin that murdered 100 million folks and the so-called soft socialism of the West is that the former never had the luxury of a wealthy and productive economy to loot and plunder. Soon enough though, we will be fully plundered.

Meanwhile, the American people are drinking copious amounts of “Foolaid” as we cling to the delusion that government is the cornucopia of plenty. The lion’s share of the plunder generated by the governments looting machine only accrues to a few elites and insider power players because that's is precisely how statism has always worked throughout history.   The rest are lucky if they are tossed a few crumbs and those crumbs are rapidly dwindling.

Don’t Disarm the Mentally Ill by Mark R. Crovelli

Don’t Disarm the Mentally Ill by Mark R. Crovelli

The US Globalized Military Dictatorship Strangling the Planet with Nukes and Military Bases

Most Americans believe that the US Military exists to defend America. That assumption is no longer true, hasn't been true in decades and in fact may never have been true. The modern US Military exists for one purpose only:  to become the UN's Global Governance Military. The taxpayers of the broke and bankrupt nation of America fund the endless wars for resource control, ruthless militarized people control and a globalized tyranny, all on behalf of the New World Order, defense contractors, the banksters, the corporatists and the statist elites.  Simply put, America murders for corporate profits and empire.

CBS reported that there are 700 US and/or NATO military bases in Afghanistan alone. 

The 700 Military Bases of Afghanistan

Nearly a decade after the Bush administration launched its invasion of Afghanistan, TomDispatch offers the first actual count of American, NATO, and other coalition bases there, as well as facilities used by the Afghan security forces.? Such bases range from relatively small sites like Shinwar to mega-bases that resemble small American towns.? Today, according to official sources, approximately 700 bases of every size dot the Afghan countryside, and more, like the one in Shinwar, are under construction or soon will be as part of a?base-building boom that began last year.

Existing in the shadows, rarely reported on and little talked about, this base-building program is nonetheless staggering in size and scope, and heavily dependent on supplies imported from abroad, which means that it is also extraordinarily expensive.? It has added significantly to the already long secret list of Pentagon property overseas and raises questions about just how long, after the planned beginning of a drawdown of American forces in 2011, the U.S. will still be garrisoning Afghanistan.

How many US military bases dot the planet?  Nobody really knows as some bases are quite large and many are small.  There are also numerous NATO military bases. Estimates of the number of military bases do not include the US Navy that literally operates floating military bases on the seas or the highly secretive CIA bases that are mostly used for torture, drone operations and many other clandestine operations.  The CIA bases generally operate out of the US State Department and many US consulates and US Aid offices are nothing more than CIA fronts that funnel money and arms to terrorists and radical Islamists for the purpose of regime change.  The Benghazi cover-up was a classic CIA mission and it was providing arms and money for Syrian terrorists.

The National Post (Canadian) provided a stellar infographic of US military bases around the world.

Graphic: Mapping a superpower-sized military - United Bases of America

America just isn't strangling the planet with military bases, soldiers, drone operations and CIA bases, it's also strangling the planet with nuclear weapons. Armscontrol.org discloses that America has a staggering 5,113 nuclear warheads.

Nuclear Weapons: Who Has What at a Glance

China: About 240 total warheads.

France: Fewer than 300 operational warheads.

Russia: Approximately 1,499 deployed strategic warheads [1]. The Federation of American Scientists estimates Russia has another 1,022 nondeployed strategic warheads and approximately 2,000 tactical nuclear warheads. Additional thousands are awaiting dismantlement.

United Kingdom: Fewer than 160 deployed strategic warheads, total stockpile of up to 225.

United States: Approximately 5,113 nuclear warheads [2], including tactical, strategic, and nondeployed weapons. According to the latest official New START declaration, the United States deploys 1,722 strategic nuclear warheads on 806 deployed ICBMs, SLBMs, and strategic bombers [1]. The Federation of American Scientists estimates that the United States' nondeployed strategic arsenal is approximately 2,800 warheads and the U.S. tactical nuclear arsenal numbers 500 warheads. Additional warheads are retired and await dismantlement.

How many trillions of dollars have been spent/squandered over the decades to manufacture nuclear weapons and constantly update the inventories? We don't know. However, going forward the US is planning on spending hundreds of billions on nuclear warheads according to Walter Pincus of the Washington Post.

How many nukes does it take to be safe?

The country is engaged in a costly, ambitious modernization of its nuclear weapons complex and development of a new generation of delivery systems — new strategic submarines, bombers and intercontinental ballistic missiles that will be operating more than 50 years from now.

Start with the Navy’s plan for 12 new SSBN-X strategic submarines to replace the 14 Ohio-class subs now in service. A Congressional Research Service (CRS) report on the program, released Dec. 10, asks whether the Navy can stay within the cost targets for their procurement ($4.9 billion each) and whether each sub should carry 16 or 20 missiles.

But shouldn’t the questions be more basic, such as who is the enemy and how many subs would be needed to deter that enemy?

There will be at least four or five warheads on each of the 16 ICBMs carried on each of the new subs. Their destructive power will be eight to more than 20 times that of the atomic bomb that all but destroyed Hiroshima in 1945.

That bomb killed 45,000 men, women and children instantly. Another 19,000 died during the next four months, according to a 1946 study by the Manhattan Engineer District, which built the bomb. The majority of those killed were civilians, though Hiroshima was picked because planners saw it as a military target with army barracks and defense factories. But the bomb — its 12.5 kiloton explosive power [equal to 12,500 tons of TNT], its heat effects and radiation — went well beyond those military targets. Today’s nuclear weapons are 100 kilotons and above.

It’s agreed that nuclear weapons don’t deter terrorist groups. And if history is any guide, the more the United States and other nuclear-armed countries modernize their weapons, the more tempting it is for other countries to want nuclear arsenals.

So how many warheads does the United States need over the next 40 years to deter others?

That’s a multibillion-dollar question, and among those President Obama and his new national security team will have to wrestle with as they try to tighten Defense spending.

I have written before that it’s time to get a rational, long-range nuclear strategy because the cost of replacing the nation’s three nuclear delivery systems will top $100 billion and require another $300 billion over the next 10 years to keep them operational.

Empire and military worship are latest deities that the American people embrace and worship as evidenced by how they vote.  Republican or Democrat, American voters reliably and consistently vote for war and empire.  Even more horrifying is the fact that Americans have also sacrificed their humanity and morality which begs the question: are the American people evil?  Americans have willfully and consciously sacrificed their prosperity and liberty on the alter the the most evil and murderous gods ever to exist in human history.

But by far the worst manifestations of power transgress beyond the horrifying spectacle of the physical carnage of war because those same folks who deceptively internalized that war is noble also become its ultimate victims. Sooner or later the flag waving stops when folks realize that they have been systematically shorn of their own liberty and prosperity. The film clips of euphorically happy flag waving Germans idolizing Hitler and his evil is a stark contrast to the starving, homeless and terrified Germans in bombed out and burned out cities after Nazism was defeated. Worshiping the flag is most dangerous when folks fail to even realize what precisely the flag stands for.

For Americans, they will eventually come to the frightening realization that they put their faith and trust in a government that betrayed them as they are forced to accept that they have been nothing more than pawns on the financial chessboard of empire wherein the wealth and power of the nation has been viciously concentrated into the hands of the ruling few – defense contractors, banksters and their power brokers who delivered unto the people unemployment, economic misery, fiat currency, wars and grim futures. At this point, what does the flag stand for? Nothing but the tens of trillions poured down the scary black hole of dark nothingness and militarism gone mad as they ponder the failures of an evil debt ridden empire that bankrupted a once great, glorious, free and prosperous nation.

This is what U.S. foreign policy has delivered to America, yet we drink the poison because we lack the courage to think the unthinkable and to speak the unspeakable as we sellout out our liberty with each election and march off into totalitarian statist hell.

Law Abiding Citizens In San Francisco Turn In Their Guns For $200 While Criminals Keep Theirs -

Law Abiding Citizens In San Francisco Turn In Their Guns For $200 While Criminals Keep Theirs -

Syria: Religious Police Patrol Aleppo’s Countryside

Syria: Religious Police Patrol Aleppo’s Countryside

NDAA Fuels Militarization, Enriches Defense Corporations, Expands Empire by Rep. Ron Paul -- Antiwar.com

NDAA Fuels Militarization, Enriches Defense Corporations, Expands Empire by Rep. Ron Paul -- Antiwar.com

As Long As Your Car Is Stopped Anyway

As Long As Your Car Is Stopped Anyway

Bitches With Guns

Bitches With Guns

Surviving Economic Calamity Thru Creative Resistance

Americans intuitively comprehend that something is radically wrong even if they don’t understand why it is happening or what caused the economic implosion and calamity. As the economic misery piles up and government becomes increasingly powerless to solve problems, folks are indeed justifiably scared and trembling as they comprehend that life as they know it is has never been more gravely threatened.

First, it’s important to understand precisely what brought America to her knees and created a situation that is literally wiping out the middle class. The evil and insidious root of the poisonous tree that resulted in the downfall of American prosperity is 1913 the Federal Reserve Act that spawned the warfare-welfare state. The sole purpose for the creation of the Federal Reserve was the massive concentration of wealth and power by taking economic power away from the people and free markets, and transferring that power to the ruling elites and the political class. For a concise and scholarly understanding of the Federal Reserve, I highly recommend reading The Creature from Jekyll Island by G. Edward Griffin.

Bad as the Federal Reserve is, the damage that it could inflict was restricted so long as the dollar was still tethered to gold. When Nixon de-tethered the dollar from gold in 1971, the dollar then became a 100% pure paper fiat currency and we got 2 economic and liberty destroying fatal diseases 1. Banksters Gone Wild and 2. Government Gone Wild.

The resulting harm created by the Federal Reserve can be pictorially presented to show its devastating impact on the middle class.

1.  Production Worker’s Hourly Wages in Gold (Source: ZeroHedge.com)

2.      Inflation has soared and the purchasing power of the dollar has shrunk.

3.      The tax burden has dramatically increased.

4.       To maintain their standard of living, Americans resorted to debt.

The above charts document a substantial decline in real wages, a decline in the purchasing power of the dollar, an increase in the tax burden and an exploding consumer debt. That is precisely what the Federal Reserve intentionally delivered, especially after 1971.

But not all folks were equally affected. The poor and middle class were hit the hardest while the rich got richer. Economist Robert Reich stated “The richest 1 percent of Americans last year took home 23 percent of total national income. Back in 1980, the richest 1 percent took home 8 percent of total income. The last time the top 1 percent took home more than 20 percent of total income was in 1928, just before the Great Crash.” I’m not in agreement with the Keynesian economic policies advocated by Reich but he’s correct in his disclosure that the rich are getting richer and the poor and middle classes are getting poorer. Little does Reich understand that the exact policies that he endorses created the great economic disparity.

As the economic carnage grows, there is virtually no hope that the economic mess will reverse itself in the immediate or near future. At best, all folks can do is prepare and plan for a survival strategy. However, just because our tyrannical rulers may be insanely committed to shock and awe economic destruction for no purpose other than to maintain their absolute power doe not in any way imply that the situation is hopeless for the people. In fact, the elites have sown the seeds of their own destruction because the system is so far gone and so out of whack that it’s impossible for the banksters and the elites to do anything to reverse the destructive course that they charted.

Hope lies in Starving the Beast know as Fedzilla (government) through the building of underground economies that will include voluntarism, agorism, trade among individuals, bartering, cyberspace currencies like Bitcoin, homesteading for food self-sufficiency and just about any productive and voluntary economic activity that can be accomplished that is beyond the ever watchful eye of the government.

Government only survives so long as folks perceive a value in supporting the government by conferring legitimacy upon the state and its institutions. It’s all a matter of trust and when trust flies out the window, folks will literally stripe the government of its legitimacy by opting out of the system. Nowhere is this premise more validated than in Greece.

Greece is bankrupt and the Greeks have become notorious for just opting out of the system and not paying taxes. In a PBS article, here, Paul Solman wrote an article titled In Greece, Underground Economy Fuels Financial Crisis. Solman is only partially correct because he blames the Greek aversion to paying taxes to the thieving and corrupt government to be the root cause of Greek financial problems. However, Solman accurately describes the magnitude of the Greek underground economy “If you think there's been a tax revolt in the U.S…consider Greece. The estimates we've heard, from the sources that seem the most reliable: 40-50 percent of the Greek economy is underground. i.e., untaxed..” The US has a very powerful and ruthlessly efficient system of civil asset forfeiture and the government will seize your property, clean out your bank accounts and leave you penniless and homeless if the government believes that you are non-compliant. The secret to Starving the Beast in America requires advanced planning, thinking and the ability to be clever and smart about it. Never advertise or brag on Facebook or social media or in any electronic communication venue that you are proudly ripping off the government.

Successfully Starving the Beast requires a far more subtle approach. Many folks have jobs and are linked to the system with automatic paycheck deposits and they must file tax returns. Folks should file tax returns on all traceable income because the non-filing of tax returns is a giant red flag that gets government attention.

Much is being written about the 1099 independent contractor economy, here and here. One of the biggest obstacles facing the government is its ability to collect taxes. So long as folks are employed as employees, the government easily got its share of plunder right off the top via the federal withholding tax and the Social Security tax, along with other taxes including state taxes. Enforcement of tax collections was never really much a problem for the government so long as most folks were employees. The government didn't need an army of tax collectors because employers functioned as the primary tax collectors for the government.

But with the economy tanking and necessity being the mother of invention, folks are now forced to discover new paradigms of survival and many of those survival techniques involved just opting out of the system to the extent that one can. Forms of passive resistance involve minimizing the ability of the government to track you through your financial transactions like bank accounts, credit/debit cards and any electronic financial transactions. Some folks have embraced the cash and money order economy because such transactions are untraceable.

Finally, folks need to seriously focus on what they can do to strengthen their survival skills while simultaneously being as invisible as possible to the government. The government has finally forced itself in one pickle of a mess because the welfare-warfare state has devastated the economy that feeds government revenues. Moreover, folks who feel angry and betrayed will do everything within their power to stiff the government because that’s basic human psychology in the best of times.

Moving forward, I absolutely do anticipate a massive growth in the underground economy because it constitutes the only reliable and viable mechanism for survival. Governments and fiat central banksters are destined to go down but we don’t have to go down with them. If anything, the human instinct to survive is our strongest instinct and if we are careful and cautious, it won’t fail us.

How the 99% Became the Great Duck Dinner of the 1%

Although there are many excellent books worth reading, one of my favorites is The Creature from Jekyll Island by G. Edward Griffin because it documents and explains how the bankster/political elites took over the world for the express purpose of concentrating all wealth and power by reducing the masses to plantation styled dependency and serfdom.

Chapter 23 of The Creature From Jekyll Island (The Creature) is titled The Great Duck Dinner. If Americans want to understand what has gone wrong in America, look no further than Griffin's incredible parable about the Great Duck Dinner.

Are human indistinguishable from ducks? Our actions say yes. Our masters say yes. If we are ducks it's because we choose to be ducks.

Excerpted from The Creature

The story is told of a New England farmer with a small pond in his pasture. Each summer, a group of wild ducks would frequent that pond but, try as he would, the farmer could never catch one. No matter how early in the morning he approached, or how carefully he constructed a blind, or what kind of duck call he tried, somehow those crafty birds sensed the danger and managed to be out of range. Of course, when fall arrived, the ducks headed South, and the farmer’s craving for a duck dinner only intensified.

Then he got an idea. Early in the spring, he started scattering corn along the edge of the pond. The ducks liked the corn and, since it was always there, they soon gave up dipping and foraging for food of their own. After a while, they became used to the farmer and began to trust him. They could see he was their benefactor and they now walked close to him with no sense of fear. Life was so easy, they forgot how to fly. But that was unimportant, because they were now so fat they couldn’t have gotten off the water even if they had tried.

Fall came, and the ducks stayed. Winter came and the pond froze. The farmer built a shelter to keep them warm. The ducks were happy because they didn’t have to fly. And the farmer was especially happy because, each week all winter long, he had a delicious duck dinner.

.

US Foreign Aid: A $2.3 Trillion Grand Theft

It's no secret that US foreign aid is a monstrous scam that operates like a crime syndicate. Exactly who gets the gobs of money and why remains a mystery. One thing is certain however. Billions of US foreign aid dollars literally disappeared in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Afghanistan

Vast sums of aid continue to be stolen in Afghanistan

Despite years of supposed effort to stop money laundering out of Kabul airport, billions continue to flow from the country unchecked.

In the summer of 2010, the US decided to do something about the enormous sucking sound being generated by the bulk cash shipments funneling through Afghanistan's Kabul airport and on to Dubai, Zurich, and London – every point of the compass, really.

So, the US embassy in Kabul created a "bulk cash flow action plan" and the Karzai government said it was on board. The results since? Well, around $4.5 billion flowed out of Afghanistan in 2011, according to the Congressional Research Service, the vast majority of it unmonitored and unregistered. That's about 22 percent of gross domestic product, an astonishing amount of capital flight.

Iraq

Paul Richter, Los Angeles Times, documented the mysterious disappearance of $6.6 billion from Iraq.

Missing Iraq Money May Have Been Stolen

US Defense officials still cannot say what happened to $6.6 billion, sent by the planeload in cash and intended for Iraq's reconstruction after the start of the war.

After the US-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003, the George W. Bush administration flooded the conquered country with so much cash to pay for reconstruction and other projects in the first year that a new unit of measurement was born.

Pentagon officials determined that one giant C-130 Hercules cargo plane could carry $2.4 billion in shrink-wrapped bricks of $100 bills. They sent an initial full planeload of cash, followed by 20 other flights to Iraq by May 2004 in a $12-billion haul that US officials believe to be the biggest international cash airlift of all time.

This month, the Pentagon and the Iraqi government are finally closing the books on the program that handled all those Benjamins. But despite years of audits and investigations, US Defense officials still cannot say what happened to $6.6 billion in cash - enough to run the Los Angeles Unified School District or the Chicago Public Schools for a year, among many other things.

Because vast amounts of foreign aid are doled out by the Department of Defense and the State Department, accountability is a missing factor in these US engineered money laundering and bribery schemes. To be sure, the bribing of foreign public officials is all part of the game for two reasons. A lot of foreign aid comes right back to US defense contractors and multi-national corporations are constantly in search of foreign resources to exploit and plunder.

The scandal known as US foreign aid is nothing new.  It's been going on for decades.  In fact, in 2007 foreign aid costs were documented at $2.3 trillion, here.  

The West has spent over $2.3 trillion on foreign aid in the past 50 years and despite all the money thrown at the problem of global poverty very little has changed. This provocative statement is what William Easterly’s book, The White Man's Burden, is all about.

William Easterly is a professor of economics at New York University and was the senior research economist at the World Bank for more than 16 years. So if there's anyone who could write a book on the subject this man would seem to be it.

Trillions of dollars just don't vanish into thin air. Somebody got the money for some sinister and evil purpose and those folks would typically include defense contractors, foreign government officials and US contractors.

THE SCANDAL THAT IS FOREIGN AID

The US Agency for International Development (USAID), the State Department entity that administers foreign aid, has admitted that it really has no idea how much US taxpayers’ money is used for its intended purpose and how much lines the pockets of corrupt politicians or winds up in Swiss banks....

Corruption has always been the bane of foreign aid. Consider Sudan, a sub-Saharan country that gets close to $1 billion a year and which ranks first on the list of corrupt governments. A researcher for the Council on Foreign Relations reported just a couple of months ago:

"[S]ince 2005, [Sudanese] state officials and government contractors have stolen an estimated $4 billion from treasury coffers—an amount equivalent to 30 percent of the country’s annual economic output. In a particularly egregious example, the Ministry of Finance and Economic Planning squandered millions of dollars as grain contracts, meant to stave off an anticipated food shortage, was instead awarded to shell companies."...

Ten American for-profit government contractors each received over $200 million from USAID last year and together received $3.19 billion to administer “development” projects; those companies are often run and staffed by former USAID employees under what might be described as a second retirement system. By the time they take out their overhead, fees for the lawyers, lobbyists and public relations specialists, conduct environmental and feasibility studies, pay for first class travel for inspection visits and to attend high-end conferences at the world’s best watering holes, little of the taxpayers’ money is left to do what the dollars were intended for.

Worse, these Beltway bandits become a breeding and feeding ground for left-leaning, progressive, anti-capitalist do-gooders to spread their gospel among the downtrodden countries of the world.

One thing is absolutely certain: trillions of dollars squandered on foreign aid did not benefit humanity or the poor and starving. These folks are just as poor and starving as they were 50 years ago before US foreign aid. The entire foreign aid racket is just another lucrative taxpayer funded scheme for politically connected insiders and campaign contributors who feed off of statism, cronyism and fascism.