Tuesday, September 7, 2010

L.A. County welfare to children of illegal immigrants grows

Payments to U.S.-born children rose to $52 million in July, prompting calls for policy changes

Welfare

[Welfare recipients wait in line at an L.A. County Department of Public Social Services office. (Mark Boster, Los Angeles Times / November 5, 2009)

Welfare payments to children of illegal immigrants in Los Angeles County increased in July to $52 million, prompting renewed calls from one county supervisor to rein in public benefits to such families.

The payments, made to illegal immigrants for their U.S. citizen children, included $30 million in food stamps and $22 million from the CalWorks welfare program, according to county figures released Friday by Supervisor Michael D. Antonovich.

The new figure represents an increase of $3.7 million from July 2009 and makes up 23% of all county welfare and food stamp assistance, according to county records.

Last year, welfare and food stamp issuances totaled nearly $570 million, and the amount is projected to exceed $600 million this year. In addition, county taxpayers spend $550 million in public safety — mostly for jail costs — and nearly $500 million for healthcare for illegal immigrants, Antonovich said.

"The supervisor is very concerned," said Antonovich spokesman Tony Bell. "He believes we have an economic catastrophe on our hands."

Shirley Christensen of the county Department of Public Social Services said the number of households with illegal immigrant parents and U.S. citizen children receiving welfare increased by 7% from January to June of this year.

"With the economy the way it is, a lot of people have had to avail themselves of programs they may not have needed before," Christensen said. "Everyone is taking a hit, including undocumented immigrants."

Amid continued economic gloom, debate has intensified over the public cost of providing benefits to illegal immigrants and their U.S. citizen children. In recent months, calls have grown for a constitutional amendment that would effectively deny citizenship to the children of illegal immigrants, whose numbers increased from 2.7 million in 2003 to 4 million in 2008, according to the Pew Hispanic Center.

Currently, U.S. citizenship is automatically granted to children born on U.S. soil. Last month, U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) announced that he might introduce a constitutional amendment to deny citizenship to children of illegal immigrants. Antonovich and several legal scholars, however, argue that a federal statute would be sufficient to change the law.

But even some immigration hawks are wary of such a move. Steven Camarota of the Center for Immigration Studies, a Washington-based research organization that supports immigration restrictions, said ending birthright citizenship would harm children for their parents' misdeeds, require new federal registration systems and create other problems. The solution, he said, is to continue driving down illegal immigration with tough enforcement.

teresa.watanabe@latimes.com


Asteroid Strikes Colombia – American Media Buries It!

Such a colossal event, so little media coverage.

Around 3:10PM Sunday afternoon residents of Colombia were awestruck when the clear sky was cracked open by a massive fireball that exploded upon impact leaving a 300 foot wide crater and a lot of rattled nerves.

This is not the first time this year that an impact event has been underreported.

Colombia: ‘Giant fireball’ was a meteorite

By Kirsten Begg

Colombian authorities confirmed that a “giant fireball” that fell from the sky in the Santander department, central Colombia, was a meteorite.

The Colombian media has been buzzing with eye witness accounts of the fireball, which caused a massive explosion at 3:15PM local time Sunday.

Andina.com reported that Bucaramanga Mayor Fernando Vargas confirmed that the phenomenon was a meteorite that left a crater 100 meters in diameter when it crashed into the earth in the San Joaquin municipality in Santander.

Read Entire Article

As I started writing this article the top story on CNN was “Dragon Con takes American by storm”, on MSNBC the top story was “Obama assails GOP at Labor Day rally”, and on FOX it was “Obama takes aim at economic woes – and GOP foes”. I looked on each of their websites and not a peep about the impact event in Colombia.

When an object strikes the planet and leaves a huge crater, is it not worthy of western news coverage? Is this event not one of the BIGGER stories in recent times?

Did you know that an asteroid hit Mexico back in February and received no mainstream American media coverage? Here’s a little snippet for you.

Reports are a bit sketchy right now, but apparently a bright flaming object was seen coming down about 100 miles northeast of Mexico City on Wednesday around 18:30 local time. There was a roar that was loud enough to shake buildings. Another news article is reporting a crater 30 meters in diameter was found.

http://www.milenio.com/node/379635

http://www.periodicodigital.com.mx/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=105468&catid=66&Itemid=96

http://www.e-consulta.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=45531&Itemid=258

DNA & Mitochondrial Time Bombs

Hyperinsulinemia may promote mammary carcinogenesis.
Insulin resistance has been linked to an increased risk
of breast cancer and is also characteristic of type 2 diabetes.
[1]

Diabetes and cancer, which are both are expanding dramatically in the world today, can in great part be traced to the increasing radiation, heavy metals and chemicals to which we are all being exposed. Every physician knows that radiation can lead to cancer but few are aware of the connection between heavy metals, general chemical exposures, and cancer. Fewer still understand the connection between toxic exposure and diabetes. See my book New Paradigms in Diabetic Care for a look at how toxicities run head-on into nutritional deficiencies to create diabetic conditions.

Making a connection between radiation and diabetes may seem ludicrous to physicians who recommend and administer dangerous radioactive CAT and PET scans because they are in full denial that they are using tests that cause cancer to diagnose and treat it. Modern medicine is at the head of the line in terms of actively downplaying the rising dangers of both radioactivity and mercury because it’s an industry whose paradigm includes exposing patients directly to these dangerous substances.

One in ten Chinese adults already has the disease and another 16 percent are on the verge of developing it, according to a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine. The rate of increase is much faster than we’ve seen in Europe and in the U.S. and tracks the most rapid increase in air and water pollution ever seen on earth. China is home to the most diabetics in the world as it is home to the worst pollution.

“Depleted (DU) uranium is highly toxic to humans, both chemically as a heavy metal and radiological as an alpha particle emitter,” writes Dr. Rosalie Bertell, Canadian Epidemiologist.[2] A new study, conducted by biochemist Dr. Diane Stearns at Northern Arizona University confirms that, separate from any radiation risks, cells exposed to uranium will bond with the metal chemically.[3]

Uranium and phosphate have a strong chemical affinity for each other and the DNA and mitochondria are loaded with phosphate so uranium is a DNA and mitochondria deep-penetration bomb. The uranium is attacking on fundamental cellular levels while mercury offers a knockout punch by attacking the sulfur bonds so essential for insulin’s proper function.

Exposure to radiation causes a cascade of
free radicals that wreak havoc on the body.
Radiation decimates the body’s supply of glutathione.

Metals such as iron, mercury, arsenic, lead and probably aluminum play a role in the actual destruction of beta cells through stimulating an auto-immune reaction to them after they have bonded to these cells in the pancreas. It is well documented in the medical literature that chemicals and drugs can cause temporary or permanent insulin-dependent diabetes.

Both mercury and uranium oxide are floating in
the environment like invisible clouds that have
spread out everywhere. They are raining down on us,
damaging and damning our future.

Simultaneous exposure to mercury and uranium shows significantly more damage to the kidneys than when exposure is to each metal singly. Lead and aluminum are common metals that have been shown to radically increase the toxicity of mercury so when we have many chemicals, heavy metals, and increased exposure to radiation from medical tests and other sources, we have serious damages to cell physiology that we need to treat.

Thiol poisons, especially mercury and its compounds, reacting with
SH groups of proteins lead to the lowered activity of various enzymes
containing sulfhydryl groups. This produces a series of disruptions in
the functional activity of many organs and tissues of the organism.
Professor I.M. Trakhtenberg[4]
Russia

Nephrotoxicity of the kidneys with necrosis of proximal tubules has been seen to increase significantly with dual exposure to both uranium and mercury.[5] In February 2007 the Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI) reported that the number of new cases of kidney failure jumped 114 percent. The burden of renal disease is also growing rapidly in India. The mean age of ESRD (end-stage renal disease) patients requiring dialysis in India is 32-42 years compared to the 60-63 years in the developed world. Chronic kidney disease (CKD) is a worldwide public health problem.[6]

Dr. Lisa Landymore-Lim in her book Poisonous Prescriptions explains clearly how many drugs used by the unsuspecting public today are involved also in the onset of impaired glucose control and diabetes. She explains using the example of the drugs streptozocin and alloxan, both used in diabetes research to make lab rats diabetic, and Vacor, a rat poison known to cause insulin-dependent diabetes in humans. Allopathic medicine has to face up to the fact that many drugs, including most surprisingly the antibiotics including penicillin as well as an entire host of others, causes changes in the beta cell and/or insulin function.[7]

It is through mercury’s attack on these sulfide bonds (SH) that mercury is able to change the biological properties of proteins and change important physiological functions. Chemicals, heavy metals and radiation combine to act on the very same cellular enzyme pathways. The interaction of lead with sulfhydryl (SH) sites causes most of its toxic effects, which include impaired heme synthesis, inhibition of erythrocyte Na/K ATPase, diminished RBC glutathione, shortened RBC lifespan, impaired synthesis of RNA, DNA and protein and impaired metabolism of vitamin D. Lead may also affect the body’s ability to utilize the essential elements calcium, magnesium, and zinc.

There are three things that determine the toxicity of radioactive materials:

Radioactive effects (includes half-life and energy released) – One gram of DU (1/20th of a cubic centimeter) releases 13,000 alpha particles a second. One alpha particle can cause cancer under the right conditions and certainly it has the capacity to wreck havoc in beta cells and everywhere else.

Particle size – In the nano particle range (diameter of 0.1 microns or smaller) the particulate effect (non-specific catalyst or enzyme) is far more biologically toxic than the first two effects. This is why DU is so devastating.[8]

The Chernobyl incident was a major humanitarian disaster, which has resulted in a plethora of health problems that are still far from being fully recognized. Most studies analyzing the medical consequences of this catastrophe have so far focused on diseases such as thyroid cancer, leukemia, immune and autoimmune pathology[9],[10] even though an increase in the incidence of type 1 diabetes mellitus, a disorder involving the immune system, was observed within the residential population of Hiroshima among survivors of the atom bomb detonation.[11] Studies have also shown that thymectomy and a sub-lethal dose of gamma radiation induces type 1 diabetes in rats.[12]

Researchers at the Pediatric Hospital A. Meyer, Florence, Italy studied this question by assessing the incidence of the disease in children in Gomel, Belarus in the years subsequent to the Chernobyl disaster. The results of the study seem to confirm the hypothesis of the influence of environmental pollution subsequent to the Chernobyl accident can cause diabetes.[13]

Mass screening for diabetes mellitus has been conducted on 64,000-113,000 atomic bomb survivors resident in Hiroshima City since 1961. From 1971 to 1992 a 2.7-fold increase in the prevalence of diabetes mellitus was observed in males and a 3.2-fold increase in females.[14]

Liquidators of the aftermath of the Chernobyl accident (LCA) who had worked within the 30-km zone for not more than three months in 1986 and early in the year 1987, were examined in 1988-1992 and again in 1997-1998. Hyperinsulinemia was recordable in these workers with normal and abnormal body mass index[15] for the space of 3 to 12 years after the accident. Hyperinsulinemia, as the researchers saw it, was related to direct or indirect action of irradiation because those persons with prior acute psychogenic stress along with those who are healthy have been found to be free from hyperinsulinemia. The possibility cannot be ruled out that hyperinsulinemia is a predictor of increased body weight gain and obesity in these workers.[16]

We have a significant and documented increase
in the incidence of type 1 diabetes in children and
adolescents after Chernobyl in the radioactively
contaminated area of Gomel compared to Minsk.
Heinrich Heine University
Dusseldorf, Germany

Dr. Chris Busby, the scientist who revealed increased radiation levels over England after the last attack on Iraq, has made a link between everyday radiation exposure and a range of modern ailments: “There have been tremendous increases in diseases resulting from the breakdown of the immune system in the last 20 years: diabetes, asthma, AIDS and others which may have an immune-system link, such as MS and ME. A whole spectrum of neurological conditions of unknown origin has developed.”

image

According to Moret, it won’t take more than two days
for the uranium particles to reach India from Iran. Egypt, the
Middle East, Central Asia and Pakistan would also be affected.

The probability of a war in Iran is quite high but no one in the world of responsibility – no one in the media or in government – is warning the world of the consequences, which are astronomically high. This part of the world just went hot with all the fires in Russia burning up the forests and soils full of radioactive fallout from previous disasters. A war would double and double again (and worse) the rising toxicities from multiple sources. Easily the peoples of this part of the world are going to meet their makers before others from dramatically less polluted and destroyed areas.

Almost a quarter century after the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear meltdown in Ukraine, its fallout is still a hot topic in some German regions, where thousands of boars shot by hunters still turn up with excessive levels of radioactivity. In fact, the numbers are higher than ever before. Forest soil in regions that were hit hardest after Chernobyl – parts of Bavaria and Baden-Wuerttemberg in southern Germany – still harbor high amounts of radioactive Cesium-137 that the boars burrow into and eat their favorite truffles. This is the proof that radiation contamination for nuclear accidents (of which there have been more than several in the old USSR) and from depleted uranium wars is much more widespread than officials admit.

Medical scientists and doctors in general are heartbreakingly wrong in their ideas of just how much increased background radiation the human body can withstand without long-term effects. Public health officials across the board tend to grossly underestimate the dangers[17] and medical officials are out there claiming, as usual, that toxic substances are actually good for your children. They say that about mercury and they say that about radiation. Meaning they don’t lose any sleep after exposing patients to massive doses of radiation for medical tests they deem necessary.

According to Moret, depleted uranium is the “Trojan horse of nuclear war. It is the ultimate weapon of mass destruction.” The pyrophoric nature of depleted uranium causes it to burn at very low temperatures. This makes it an ideal radioactive gas weapon. “Once it gets vaporized, microscopic particles of uranium oxide remain suspended and form the radioactive component of dust.”

That Trojan horse has already come to roost in Great Britain, where radiation levels, weeks after the last war in Iraq started, went up by a factor of eight from normal levels. Dr. Busby calculated that some citizens in different parts of the country would have inhaled about 26 million particles of uranium oxide. Like Troy burning, the blood in Britain’s citizens is smoldering. Matt Hunt, science information manager at Diabetes UK, said: “By 2010, we estimate that the number of people with diabetes in the UK will increase by around 30 percent to three million.”[18] Thirty percent in three years is a catastrophe.

It’s literally raining mercury and the government is still exploding uranium weapons on American soil but the CDC is only concerned about influenza and the bird flu. Because of this they themselves are recklessly adding to our already heavy body burdens of mercury insisting we get our yearly flu shot, which has about 3,000 trillion atoms (25 mcgs) of mercury in it.

Dr. Dayna Kowata wrote, “I have noticed an upward trend in uranium toxicity in my pediatric patients and not just those with autism. The affected patients come from the Temecula/Murrieta area of southern CA. One of my autistic patients has had an extremely difficult time chelating this metal. We’ve had success with all other heavy metals but the uranium remains consistently high. We’ve used oral DMSA and EDTA.”

Uranium levels 54.6 times the U.S. standard were found in water supplies in a village near Icheon, about 25 miles northeast of Osan Air Base, according to a South Korean government environmental report. South Korea’s Ministry of Environment said it was not ready last week to release its full uranium survey of 93 sites in South Korea, but it issued a news release on its findings. Uranium levels measured 1,640 micrograms per liter in Janpyeong-ri village near Icheon.

“A recent analysis of my hair ordered by my physician indicated a uranium level that is about five times the maximum reference range. How alarmed should I be with respect to this result? I am not exposed to uranium by occupational hazard, as I’m an office manager in a very clean environment. Past ingestion may have been the result of private well water, but I’ve not ingested any of this well water for six years now,” reports one patient.

The most important question of our times is: What is
the safest most effective way to remove uranium, mercury
and an army of other toxins in our and our children’s bodies?


[1] Diabetes Care. 2003 Jun;26(6):1752-8. Type 2 diabetes and subsequent incidence of breast cancer in the Nurses’ Health Study. Michels KB

[3] A radioisotope of an element will bind best to the same substrates which a non-radioactive isotope of the same element will bind. Dr. Stearns has established that when cells are exposed to uranium, the uranium binds to DNA and the cells acquire mutations, triggering a whole slew of protein replication errors, some of which can lead to various cancers. Stearns’ research, published in the journals Mutagenesis and Molecular Carcinogenesis, confirms what many have suspected for some time – that uranium can damage DNA as a heavy metal, independent of its radioactive properties. The biochemical reaction of heavy metals can cause genetic mutations, which in turn can curtail cell growth and cause cancer. Heavy metals that are also radioactive amplify this effect and can cause distortions in shape and thus function even of red blood cells.

[4] Trakhtenberg, I.M. From Russian translation. Chronic Effects of Mercury on Organisms. In Place of a Conclusion

[6] In February, 2007 The Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI) reported that the number of new cases of kidney failure jumped 114 per cent, from just fewer than 1,100 in the first year to more than 2,100 cases in 2004, adding that the incidence of Type 2 diabetes jumped during the same period. In the United States (US), there is a rising incidence and prevalence of kidney failure. The number of patients enrolled in the end-stage renal disease (ESRD) Medicare-funded program has increased from approximately 10,000 beneficiaries in 1973 to 86,354 in 1983, and to 452,957 as of December 31, 2003. In 2003 alone 100,499 patients entered the US ESRD program.

[7]These is some structural similarity between the chemicals streptozotocin, alloxan and vacor: in each, there is at least one oxygen atom joined by two bonds to a carbon atom (C=O), which forms a carbonyl group, which is flanked on each side by a nitrogen (n) atom. This is interesting since carbonyl groups and nitrogen atoms are often reactive species due to their excess of negative charge. That is, they are electron rich sources that very often have an affinity for positively charged species such as zinc ions (ZN)2+.Therefore, they behave like magnets attracting oppositely charged species. Since insulin is stored in the pancreas in combination with zinc, the pancreas has the highest concentration of zinc in the body and could conceivably present a source for chemical attack.

[8] In Science, Volume 311 on Feb. 3, 2006, page 622-628 is an article called ‘The Toxic Potential of Materials at the Nano Level.’ It explains how any kind of material – it could be ordinary carbon or a metal that is not radioactive – if these particles are small enough (tinier than a micron which is a millionth of a meter, or one ten thousandths of a centimeter) if these particles are that small, it turns out they are toxic in themselves, whatever their composition. “That’s exactly what’s happening in the case of nanoparticles which are produced when the uranium burns upon impact and melts steel and the fine particles are so small, they act like a gas. So what you’re getting is a gas of uranium that gets transported around the world and is now proven by these latest measurements,” says Dr. Sternglass.

Depleted uranium shouldn’t be used. It’s a gas, and we’ve
already signed the Geneva protocol not to use gas in warfare.
It’s already illegal. It’s a metal fume. A metal fume is a gas.

Dr. Rosalie Bertell
International Institute of Concern for Public Health

Mankind has lived with low-level background radiation for as long as we have existed but the uranium in a DU weapon explodes on impact as it penetrates a target. It burns with an extremely high temperature (above 5,000 degrees centigrade) and in the process vaporizes into particles so small that more than half them, by mass, are smaller in size than the wavelengths of light. The minuscule radioactive particles then become airborne like a gas and will eventually extend throughout the planet. They are a phenomenon that does not exist naturally and never did before now. They are a totally new, biologically dangerous, and have global reach. These nanometer-size uranium particles are a growing part of our world since 1991 and government and military officials are incredibly cavalier about it.

“Comparing a small DU particle to a red blood cell would be like comparing a man to a 50,000-foot high mountain, a mountain twice as high as Mt. Everest” writes Rolf A. F. Witzsche. The few atmospheric nuclear-bomb tests that were conducted in the 1950s and 1960s utilized only small amounts of uranium, too little to be significant in comparison with the thousands of pounds of the stuff that have been exploded in four battlefield theatres and on many military test ranges.

[9] Kuzmenok O, Potapnev M, Potapova S et al. (2003) Late effects of the Chernobyl radiation accident on T cell-mediated immunity in cleanup workers. Radiat Res 159: 109–116

[10] Lomat L, Galburt G, Quastel MR, Polyakov S, Okeanov A, Rozin S (1997) Incidence of childhood disease in Belarus associated with the Chernobyl accident. Environ Health
Perspect [Suppl 105] 6:1529–1532

[11] Ito C (1994) Trends in the prevalence of diabetes mellitus among Hiroshima atomic bombsurvivors. Diabetes Res Clin Pract [Suppl]:S29–S35

[12] Ramanathan S, Bihoreau MT, Paterson AD, Marandi L, Gauguier D, Poussier P (2002) Thymectomy and radiationinduced type 1 diabetes in nonlymphopenic BB rats. Diabetes
51:2975–2981

[13] J Pediatr Endocrinol Metab. 2002 Jan;15(1):53-7. Incidence of childhood type 1 diabetes mellitus in Gomel, Belarus.Martinucci ME, Curradi G, Fasulo A, Medici A, Toni S, Osovik G, Lapistkaya E, Sherbitskaya E. Regional Centre for Juvenile Diabetes, Paediatric Hospital A. Meyer, Florence, Italy.

[14] Trends in the prevalence of diabetes mellitus among Hiroshima atomic bomb survivors. Diabetes Res Clin Pract. 1994 Oct;24 Suppl:S29-35. Hiroshima Atomic Bomb Casualty Council, Health Management Center, Japan.

[15] The measure correlates highly with body fat. Calculated as weight in kilograms divided by the square of the height in meters (kg/m 2 ).

[16] Lik Sprava. 2001 Jul-Aug;(4):26-8. Analysis of irradiation dose, body mass index and insulin blood concentration in personnel cleaning up after the Chernobyl nuclear plant accident. Zueva NA, Kovalenko AN, Gerasimenko TI, Man’kovskii BN, Korpachova TI, Efimov AS.

[17] It could be possible, for instance, that a mere .001 rise in the rem could generate an increase globally in sickness. And the proximity of the source of rem increase may be less relevant than we think. Long term exposure to >0.001 increased rem overall may be actually be quite profound. Our knowledge of the effects of radiation derives primarily from groups of people who have received high doses so in reality medical science knows and understands very little about low level risks.

US becoming a Third World country?

The United States is on the brink of sliding down to a Third World country, as it struggles with massive debts, rising unemployment and a deteriorating economy.

Some of the warning signs that indicate America's fantastic fall from a First World nation include rising unemployment and poverty.

According to Spiegel Online, the United States is recently faced with a new phenomenon called "the new poor."

In Ventura California -- a luxurious resort city -- about 20 percent of the residents are at risk of homelessness.

The once-rich, who have lost their homes, are now forced to sleep in their expensive cars parked in the city's corners, Captain William Finley, the head of the local branch of the Salvation Army said.

He further added that during the past months, the number of people taking advantage of the organization's free meals program, has doubled. Many drive up in their BMWs to receive free food, he went on to say.

Another signal that marks the demise of America's so-called greatness is the disappearance of the middle class.

During recent years, the gap between the rich and poor has increased at a staggering pace, systematically wiping the existence of the middle class from America.

Income inequality in the US has reached a stage where only one percent of Americans own as much as 37 percent of the total national wealth.

That means that if an average CEO earned 30 times as much as an ordinary worker in 1950, today he would own 300 times as much.

Meanwhile, in its current annual report, the US Department of Agriculture stressed that some 50 million Americans were not able to afford enough food to stay healthy at some point in 2009.

It also noted that one in eight adult Americans and one in four children now survive on government food stamps. These are unbelievable numbers for the world's richest nation, Spiegel wrote.

So far, US politicians have failed to come up with solutions to the growing crisis.

"The lights are going out all over America," Nobel economics laureate Paul Krugman wrote last month. This is due to the fact that many US residents can no longer spend money because they have no savings.

Their houses have lost half of their value; they no longer qualify for low-interest loans; they are making less money than before or they're unemployed. This in turn reduces or eliminates their ability to pay taxes.

As a result, many state and local governments are faced with enormous budget deficits. In Hawaii, schools are closed on some Fridays to save the state money. A county in Georgia has eliminated all public bus services and in Colorado Springs, a city of 380,000 people, a third of streetlights have been shut off to save electricity.

In fact, the United States, which is in the wake of a huge debt crisis of above 90% of GDP, is threatened by a social Ice Age more severe than anything the country has seen since the Great Depression.

This is why last month, a leading online columnist, Arianna Huffington, issued the almost apocalyptic warning that "America is in danger of becoming a Third World country."

FF/HRF

Bush Caught in a Lie About the 9/11 WTC Attacks

President Bush has stated on two occasions that he saw a plane hit World Trade Center 1:

Occasion 1:
President Bush Holds Town Hall Meeting
[CNN, Aired December 4, 2001]

QUESTION: One thing, Mr. President, is that you have no idea how much you've done for this country, and another thing is that how did you feel when you heard about the terrorist attack?

BUSH: Well... (APPLAUSE)

Thank you, Jordan (ph).

Well, Jordan (ph), you're not going to believe what state I was in when I heard about the terrorist attack. I was in Florida. And my chief of staff, Andy Card -- actually I was in a classroom talking about a reading program that works. And I was sitting outside the classroom waiting to go in, and I saw an airplane hit the tower -- the TV was obviously on, and I use to fly myself, and I said, "There's one terrible pilot." And I said, "It must have been a horrible accident."

But I was whisked off there -- I didn't have much time to think about it, and I was sitting in the classroom, and Andy Card, my chief who was sitting over here walked in and said, "A second plane has hit the tower. America's under attack."

RealMedia video download of comment

Occasion 2:
President Holds Town Hall Forum on Economy in California

[whitehouse.gov, January 5, 2002]

"I was sitting there, and my Chief of Staff -- well, first of all, when we walked into the classroom, I had seen this plane fly into the first building. There was a TV set on..." [whitehouse.gov]

WMA download of comment

There is a problem with the above statements. There was no live video coverage of the first plane hitting the tower. There couldn't be. Video of the first plane hitting the tower did not surface until AFTER the second plane had hit World Trade Center 2.

11 a.m. on 9/11. One of the first broadcasts of Flight 11's impact into WTC 1.

WMV video download (831kB)

This Washington Times article states he didn't see the impact at the school...

The president entered a holding room at the school and picked up a secure telephone to speak with National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice at the White House. She was sitting in her office, watching live coverage of the stricken north tower as it belched black smoke into a cloudless sky. "There's one terrible pilot," Mr. Bush muttered. Turning to Mr. Card, he speculated that the pilot must have suffered a heart attack. Mr. Bush, who had yet to see the TV images, drafted a statement pledging federal assistance.

...and this is confirmed by Booker Elementary School Principal Gwen Rigell in this Propaganda Matrix posting:

I had the opportunity to talk with Principal Gwen Rigell of Booker Elementary school for about twenty minutes. ... I asked her if in fact the President had been watching the events of 9-11 unfold on TV before he went into that classroom and she told me "Absolutely not". There was no TV in the corridor or anywhere near that classroom.

Even though Bush is not a very good pilot (he was taken off of flight status for failure to take a medical exam which included a drug test), it would be silly to assume that a passenger jet hitting the WTC in clear weather was pilot error, especially since warnings had surfaced of hijacked commercial aircraft attacking symbols of American culture:

U.S. and Israeli intelligence agencies received warning signals [in July 2001] that Middle Eastern terrorists were planning to hijack commercial aircraft to use as weapons to attack important symbols of American and Israeli culture. [FromTheWilderness]

FBI information [...] indicates patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York. [President Bush Intelligence Briefing 8/6/2001]

If Bush really did see an airplane on TV hitting the World Trade Center then he saw that the aircraft was under control at the time, and he saw it before arriving at Booker Elementary because he was en route to the school when the first plane struck WTC 1 - a closed-circuit live feed to his limo is the only way he could have seen this impact on TV.

Each of us will ... remember the moment the news came -- where we were and what we were doing. [G.W. Bush, September 20, 2001]

It must also be remembered that even after Andrew Card informed Bush of the second impact, by his own admission Bush knew America was being attacked, but he continued listening to the reading skills of a classroom full of children.

Just think about that for a while.

The Hidden but Awkward Origins of World War 2 The unexpected views of four key diplomats who were close to events:

The Hidden but Awkward Origins of World War 2

The unexpected views of four key diplomats who were close to events:

Just consider the following:
Joseph P. Kennedy, U.S. Ambassador to Britain during the years immediately preceding WW2 was the father of the famous American Kennedy dynasty. James Forrestal the first US Secretary of Defense (1947-1949) quotes him as saying "Chamberlain (the British Prime Minister) stated that America and the world Jews had forced England into the war". (The Forrestal Diaries ed. Millis, Cassell 1952 p129).
Count Jerzy Potocki, the Polish Ambassador in Washington, in a report to the Polish Foreign Office in January 1939, is quoted approvingly by the highly respected British military historian Major-General JFC Fuller. Concerning public opinion in America he says "Above all, propaganda here is entirely in Jewish hands…when bearing public ignorance in mind, their propaganda is so effective that people have no real knowledge of the true state of affairs in Europe… It is interesting to observe that in this carefully thought-out campaign… no reference at all is made to Soviet Russia. If that country is mentioned, it is referred to in a friendly manner and people are given the impression that Soviet Russia is part of the democratic group of countries… Jewry was able not only to establish a dangerous centre in the New World for the dissemination of hatred and enmity, but it also succeeded in dividing the world into two warlike camps…President Roosevelt has been given the power.. to create huge reserves in armaments for a future war which the Jews are deliberately heading for." (Fuller, JFC: The Decisive Battles of the Western World vol 3 pp 372-374.)
Hugh Wilson, the American Ambassador in Berlin until 1938, the year before the war broke out, found anti-Semitism in Germany ‘understandable’. This was because before the advent of the Nazis, "the stage, the press, medicine and law [were] crowded with Jews…among the few with money to splurge, a high proportion [were] Jews…the leaders of the Bolshevist movement in Russia, a movement desperately feared in Germany, were Jews. One could feel the spreading resentment and hatred." (Hugh Wilson: Diplomat between the Wars, Longmans 1941, quoted in Leonard Mosley, Lindbergh, Hodder 1976).
Sir Nevile Henderson, British Ambassador in Berlin ‘said further that the hostile attitude in Great Britain was the work of Jews and enemies of the Nazis, which was what Hitler thought himself’ (Taylor, AJP: The Origins of the Second World War Penguin 1965, 1987 etc p 324).
Is all of this merely attributable to terrible antisemitism?

The economic background to the war is necessary for a fuller understanding, before casting judgement on the originators of these viewpoints.

At the end of the First World War, Germany was essentially tricked [see Paul Johnson A History of the Modern World (1983) p24 and H Nicholson Peacemaking 1919 (1933) pp13-16] into paying massive reparations to France and other economic competitors and former belligerent countries in terms of the so-called Treaty of Versailles, thanks to the liberal American President Woodrow Wilson. Germany was declared to be solely responsible for the war, in spite of the fact that ‘Germany did not plot a European war, did not want one, and made genuine efforts, though too belated, to avert one.’ (Professor Sydney B Fay The Origins of the World War (vol. 2 p 552)).

As a result of these massive enforced financial reparations, by 1923 the situation in Germany became desperate and inflation on an astronomical scale became the only way out for the government. Printing presses were engaged to print money around the clock. In 1921 the exchange rate was 75 marks to the dollar. By 1924 this had become about 5 trillion marks to the dollar. This virtually destroyed the German middle class (Koestler The God that Failed p 28), reducing any bank savings to a virtual zero.

According to Sir Arthur Bryant the British historian (Unfinished Victory (1940 pp. 136-144):

‘It was the Jews with their international affiliations and their hereditary flair for finance who were best able to seize such opportunities.. They did so with such effect that, even in November 1938, after five years of anti-Semitic legislation and persecution, they still owned, according to the Times correspondent in Berlin, something like a third of the real property in the Reich. Most of it came into their hands during the inflation.. But to those who had lost their all this bewildering transfer seemed a monstrous injustice. After prolonged sufferings they had now been deprived of their last possessions. They saw them pass into the hands of strangers, many of whom had not shared their sacrifices and who cared little or nothing for their national standards and traditions.. The Jews obtained a wonderful ascendancy in politics, business and the learned professions (in spite of constituting) less than one percent of the population.. The banks, including the Reichsbank and the big private banks, were practically controlled by them. So were the publishing trade, the cinema, the theatres and a large part of the press – all the normal means, in fact, by which public opinion in a civilized country is formed.. The largest newspaper combine in the country with a daily circulation of four millions was a Jewish monopoly.. Every year it became harder and harder for a gentile to gain or keep a foothold in any privileged occupation.. At this time it was not the ‘Aryans’ who exercised racial discrimination. It was a discrimination that operated without violence. It was exercised by a minority against a majority. There was no persecution, only elimination.. It was the contrast between the wealth enjoyed – and lavishly displayed – by aliens of cosmopolitan tastes, and the poverty and misery of native Germans, that has made anti-Semitism so dangerous and ugly a force in the new Europe. Beggars on horseback are seldom popular, least of all with those whom they have just thrown out of the saddle.’

Goodness gracious, Sir Arthur! What made you get out of the wrong side of the bed?

Strangely enough, a book unexpectedly published by Princeton University Press in 1984, Sarah Gordon (Hitler, Germans and the "Jewish Question") essentially confirms what Bryant says. According to her, ‘Jews were never a large percentage of the total German population; at no time did they exceed 1% of the population during the years 1871-1933.’ But she adds ‘Jews were over-represented in business, commerce, and public and private service.. They were especially visible in private banking in Berlin, which in 1923 had 150 private Jewish banks, as opposed to only 11 private non-Jewish banks.. They owned 41% of iron and scrap iron firms and 57% of other metal businesses.. Jews were very active in the stock market, particularly in Berlin, where in 1928 they comprised 80% of the leading members of the stock exchange. By 1933, when the Nazis began eliminating Jews from prominent positions, 85% of the brokers on the Berlin Stock exchange were dismissed because of their "race".. At least a quarter of full professors and instructors (at German universities) had Jewish origins.. In 1905-6 Jewish students comprised 25% of the law and medical students.. In 1931, 50% of the 234 theatre directors in Germany were Jewish, and in Berlin the number was 80%.. In 1929 it was estimated that the per capita income of Jews in Berlin was twice that of other Berlin residents..’ etc etc.

Arthur Koestler confirms the Jewish over-involvement in German publishing. ‘Ullstein’s was a kind of super-trust; the largest organization of its kind in Europe, and probably In the world. They published four daily papers in Berlin alone, among these the venerable Vossische Zeitung, founded in the eighteenth century, and the B.Z. am Mittag, an evening paper.. Apart from these, Ullstein’s published more than a dozen weekly and monthly periodicals, ran their own news service, their own travel agency, etc., and were one of the leading book publishers. The firm was owned by the brothers Ullstein - they were five, like the original Rothschild brothers, and like them also, they were Jews.’ (The God that Failed (1950) ed. RHS Crossman, p 31).

Edgar Mowrer, Berlin correspondent for the Chicago Daily News, wrote an anti-German tract called Germany Puts the Clock Back (published as a Penguin Special and reprinted five times between December 1937 and April 1938). He nevertheless notes ‘In the all-important administration of Prussia, any number of strategic positions came into the hands of Hebrews.. A telephone conversation between three Jews in Ministerial offices could result in the suspension of any periodical or newspaper in the state.. The Jews came in Germany to play in politics and administration that same considerable part that they had previously won by open competition in business, trade, banking, the Press, the arts, the sciences and the intellectual and cultural life of the country. And thereby the impression was strengthened that Germany, a country with a mission of its own, had fallen into the hands of foreigners.’

Mowrer says ‘No one who lived through the period from 1919 to 1926 is likely to forget the sexual promiscuity that prevailed.. Throughout a town like Berlin, hotels and pensions made vast fortunes by letting rooms by the hour or day to baggageless, unregistered guests. Hundreds of cabarets, pleasure resorts and the like served for purposes of getting acquainted and acquiring the proper mood..’ (pp. 153-4). Bryant describes throngs of child prostitutes outside the doors of the great Berlin hotels and restaurants. He adds ‘Most of them (the night clubs and vice-resorts) were owned and managed by Jews. And it was the Jews.. among the promoters of this trade who were remembered in after years.’ (pp. 144-5).

Douglas Reed, Chief Central European correspondent before WWII for the London Times, was profoundly anti-German and anti-Hitler. But nevertheless he reported: ‘I watched during the one-day boycott of Jewish shops the Brown Shirts going from shop to shop with paint pots and daubing on the window panes the word "Jew", in dripping red letters. The Kurfürstendamm was to me a revelation. I knew that Jews were prominent in business life, but I did not know that they almost monopolized important branches of it. Germany had one Jew to one hundred gentiles, said the statistics; but the fashionable Kurfürstendamm, according to the dripping red legends, had about one gentile shop to ninety-nine Jewish ones.’ (Reed Insanity Fair (1938) p. 152-3). In Reed’s book Disgrace Abounding of the following year he notes ‘In the Berlin (of pre-Hitler years) most of the theatres were Jewish-owned or Jewish-leased, most of the leading film and stage actors were Jews, the plays performed were often by German, Austrian or Hungarian Jews and were staged by Jewish film producers, applauded by Jewish dramatic critics in Jewish newspapers.. The Jews are not cleverer than the Gentiles, if by clever you mean good at their jobs. They ruthlessly exploit the common feeling of Jews, first to get a foothold in a particular trade or calling, then to squeeze the non-Jews out of it.. It is not true that Jews are better journalists than Gentiles. They held all the posts on those Berlin papers because the proprietors and editors were Jewish’ (pp238-9).

The Jewish writer Edwin Black notes ‘For example, in Berlin alone, about 75% of the attorneys and nearly as many of the doctors were Jewish.’ (Black, The Transfer Agreement (1984) p58.

To cap it all, Jews were perceived as dangerous enemies of Germany after Samuel Untermeyer, the leader of the World Jewish Economic Federation, declared war on Germany on August 6 1933. (Edwin Black The Transfer Agreement: the Untold Story of the Secret Pact between the Third Reich and Palestine (1984) pp272-277) According to Black, ‘The one man who most embodied the potential death blow to Germany was Samuel Untermeyer.’ (p 369). This was the culmination of a permanent worldwide boycott of German goods led by international Jewish organizations. The London Daily Express on March 24, 1933 carried the headline Judea Declares War on Germany. The boycott was allegedly particularly motivated by the German imposition of the Nuremberg Laws, however imposed in 1935 only, which ironically were similar in intent and content to the Jewish cultural exclusivism practiced so visibly in present-day Israel (Hannah Arendt Eichmann in Jerusalem p 7).

Hitler saw the tremendous danger posed to Germany by Communism. He appreciated the desperate need to eliminate this threat, a fact that earned him the immense hatred and animosity of the Jewish organisations and the media and politicians of the west which they could influence. After all, according to the Jewish writer Chaim Bermant, although Jews formed less than five percent of Russia's population, they formed more than fifty percent of its revolutionaries. According to the Jewish writer Chaim Bermant in his book The Jews (1977, chapter 8):

‘It must be added that most of the leading revolutionaries who convulsed Europe in the final decades of the last century and the first decades of this one, stemmed from prosperous Jewish families.. They were perhaps typified by the father of revolution, Karl Marx.. Thus when, after the chaos of World War I, revolutions broke out all over Europe, Jews were everywhere at the helm; Trotsky, Sverdlov, Kamenev and Zinoviev in Russia, Bela Kun in Hungary, Kurt Eisner in Bavaria, and, most improbable of all, Rosa Luxemburg in Berlin.

‘To many outside observers, the Russian revolution looked like a Jewish conspiracy, especially when it was followed by Jewish-led revolutionary outbreaks in much of central Europe. The leadership of the Bolshevik Party had a preponderance of Jews.. Of the seven members of the Politburo, the inner cabinet of the country, four, Trotsky (Bronstein), Zinoviev (Radomsky), Kamenev (Rosenfeld) and Sverdlov, were Jews.’ Other authors agree with this:

"There has been a tendency to circumvent or simply ignore the significant role of Jewish intellectuals in the German Communist Party, and thereby seriously neglect one of the genuine and objective reasons for increased anti-Semitism during and after World War 1.. The prominence of Jews in the revolution and early Weimar Republic is indisputable, and this was a very serious contributing cause for increased anti-Semitism in post-war years.. It is clear then that the stereotype of Jews as socialists and communists.. led many Germans to distrust the Jewish minority as a whole and to brand Jews as enemies of the German nation." (Sarah Gordon Hitler, Germans and the ‘Jewish Question’ Princeton University Press (1984) p 23).

"The second paroxysm of strong anti-Semitism came after the critical role of Jews in International Communism and the Russian Revolution and during the economic crises of the 1920s and 30s… Anti-Semitism intensified throughout Europe and North America following the perceived and actual centrality of Jews in the Russian Revolution.. Such feelings were not restricted to Germany, or to vulgar extremists like the Nazis. All over Northern Europe and North America, anti-Semitism became the norm in 'nice society', and 'nice society' included the universities." (Martin Bernal, Black Athena vol. 1 pp. 367, 387).

"The major role Jewish leaders played in the November (Russian) revolution was probably more important than any other factor in confirming (Hitler's) anti-Semitic beliefs." (J&S Pool, Who Financed Hitler, p.164).



Hitler came to power in Germany with two main aims, the rectification of the unjust provisions of the Versailles Treaty, and the destruction of the Soviet/ Communist threat to Germany. Strangely enough, contrary to the mythology created by those who had an opposing ethnic agenda, he had no plans or desire for a larger war of conquest. Professor AJP Taylor showed this in his book The Origins of the Second World War, to the disappointment of the professional western political establishment. Taylor says, "The state of German armament in 1939 gives the decisive proof that Hitler was not contemplating general war, and probably not intending war at all" (p.267), and "Even in 1939 the German army was not equipped for a prolonged war; and in 1940 the German land forces were inferior to the French in everything except leadership" (p104-5). What occurred in Europe in 1939-41 was the result of unforeseen weaknesses and a tipping of the balance of power, and Hitler was an opportunist ‘who took advantages whenever they offered themselves’ (Taylor). Britain and France declared war on Germany, not the other way around. Hitler wanted peace with Britain, as the German generals admitted (Basil Liddell Hart, The Other Side of the Hill 1948, Pan Books 1983) with regard to the so-called Halt Order at Dunkirk, where Hitler had the opportunity to capture the entire British Army, but chose not to. Liddell Hart, one of Britain’s most respected military historians, quotes the German General von Blumentritt with regard to this Halt Order:

"He (Hitler) then astonished us by speaking with admiration of the British Empire, of the necessity for its existence, and of the civilisation that Britain had brought into the world. He remarked, with a shrug of the shoulders, that the creation of its Empire had been achieved by means that were often harsh, but ‘where there is planing, there are shavings flying’. He compared the British Empire with the catholic Church – saying they were both essential elements of stability in the world. He said that all he wanted from Britain was that she should acknowledge Germany’s position on the Continent. The return of Germany’s colonies would be desirable but not essential, and he would even offer to support Britain with troops if she should be involved in difficulties anywhere.." (p 200).

According to Liddell Hart, "At the time we believed that the repulse of the Luftwaffe in the ‘Battle over Britain’ had saved her. That is only part of the explanation, the last part of it. The original cause, which goes much deeper, is that Hitler did not want to conquer England. He took little interest in the invasion preparations, and for weeks did nothing tospur them on; then, after a brief impulse to invade, he veered around again and suspended the preparations. He was preparing, instead, to invade Russia" (p140).

David Irving in the foreword to his book The Warpath (1978) refers to "the discovery.. that at no time did this man (Hitler) pose or intend a real threat to Britain or the Empire."

This gives a completely different complexion, not only to the war, but to the successful suppression of this information during the war and afterwards. Historians today know only too well where the boundaries lie within which they can paint their pictures of the war and its aftermath, and the consequences of venturing beyond those boundaries, irrespective of the evidence. Unfortunately, only too few of them have been prepared to have the courage to break out of this dreadful straitjacket of official and unofficial censorship.

E-mail comment received:

I worked and studied in Berlin for three years, have an MA in International Relations and a BA in Government with a minor in History. I am embarrassed to say that until I read this article, I had no idea of the scope and cause for the anti-Semitism in Germany before WWII. The Halt Order at Dunkirk was never mentioned in my studies, nor was the ownership of the media, banks and businesses.

Thank you for the excellent article. It certainly gives me a new perspective. I have always questioned the actual numbers of Jewish victims of the concentration camps, as the numbers didn't make sense based upon Germany's population. Perhaps it was fear of failing or being labeled an anti-Semite by my history professors (all but two were Jewish) and classmates that I refrained from demanding an honest discussion during my classes. I once said that the only reason Israel existed was out of Holocaust guilt, and I was immediately labeled a terrorist sympathizer.

I see what is now happening in Israel and I am aghast. The parallels to WW II are frightening. Even today, one cannot bring up this subject without being labeled a Holocaust denier or white supremacist.

Thanks again for an excellent article. I am forwarding it to several friends.

JBP

Why Americans Elect Awful Presidents

For years I muttered mentally to myself about the insanity of Americans electing George W. Bush president. Now I go through the same agony about the craziness of the nation electing Barack Obama president. As much as I thought Bush was a manipulated second-rate politician that carried out the terribly destructive policies pushed by Cheney and other conservative corporate shills, now I feel equally angry that so many voters fell for the slick rhetoric and lies of Obama. Disgust produces public thirst for change and Obama was wickedly brilliant at selling change. When voters are so easily victimized what does democracy amount to?

All this tells me that any nation that can elect such inept people president can also elect other people that appear to have no right or chance to be president of the United States just as Bush and Obama once appeared before they were sold to the public. That is what is so frightening about the future of this nation. The two-party plutocracy with its stranglehold on the American political system has the power to elect presidents that are an insult to the great ones that once served the nation with pride and competence.

I keep searching for explanations why millions of American voters make such bad electoral decisions. Are they just so stupid, uninformed and distracted that they fall for endless political lies? Have Americans become so easily manipulated and fooled by advertising and brilliant political campaigns that they can be sold terrible presidents as easily as unneeded, low quality and unhealthy products?

Yes, all this seems too true. Delusional voters have produced our delusional democracy which strongly favors corporate, wealthy and elitist interests over ordinary Americans. This explains frightening economic inequality and the demise of the middle class. In the late 1970s, the richest 1 percent of American families took in about 9 percent of the nation’s total income; by 2007, the top 1 percent took in 23.5 percent of total income (less than 5 million people). Two-thirds of the nation’s total income gains from 2002 to 2007 flowed to this sliver of households, which saw a rise of 62 percent, compared to 4 percent for the bottom 90 percent of households. Today, the median male worker earns less, adjusted for inflation, than he did 30 years ago. A corrupt bipartisan system gave us this. Is this the change you were waiting for?

Considering Bush and Obama from a right-left perspective misses their several critical commonalities. Both have wasted the nation’s wealth and lives on two ludicrous, unnecessary wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Both turned out to be pretty good communicators during their presidential campaigns but quite lousy after they became president. The more intelligent and articulate Obama is particularly striking in being totally lackluster when it comes to addressing major issues and crises and building public support for his policies, which now explains his very low approval ratings.

Both pursued public policies and government programs that preferentially benefit corporate and other special interests, especially the financial sector. This is no surprise because both depended on huge amounts of corporate money to get elected. They both have responsibility for the economic meltdown that still exists for a large fraction of the nation. A large majority of Americans correctly see the nation on the wrong track, but more importantly it is hurtling down the wrong track, which President Obama ignores, because he lacks solutions.

What may turn out to be the most disturbing similarity is that Obama may get elected for a second term just like Bush accomplished despite uninspiring performance. If there is anything more disturbing than electing awful politicians with no real record of accomplishments it is reelecting them for a second term! More than anything else this demonstrates the absence of true, effective political competition and the ability to brainwash and manipulate voters.

For years I hoped that some third party presidential candidate would emerge, capture public confidence and offer a true reform program to repair our nation. But sadly the political system has been so corrupted that no third party presidential candidate stands a chance against the two-party plutocracy. The biggest nonsense is that the US is the greatest democracy on Earth. There are many other democracies where multiple political parties give citizens far more choices than Americans have. It pays to remember that no nation ever copied the government structure of the US. Instead, other democracies where citizens also have freedom use parliamentary structures with far more political choices and even the ability to more easily get rid of rotten leaders. Here we suffer with disappointing presidents for far too many years.

The most fascinating aspect of our constitutional republic is that one constitutional path to get true, deep reforms of our government and political system has never been used. This proves how powerful, entrenched interests on the right and left have maintained a corrupt, dysfunctional and costly system. Very, very few Americans know anything about the option in Article V of the Constitution for a convention of state delegates that could propose constitutional amendments. You can learn the facts at the Friends of the Article V Convention website. The one and only requirement for a convention has long been met but Congress refuses to obey the Constitution. They fear it. We need it more than ever.

A constitutional scholar such as President Obama could make history by openly demanding that Congress convene the first Article V convention. But that would require dropping the constitutional hypocrisy that he and so many others have. The rule of law is a farce when an important part of the beloved Constitution is ignored.

Alex Snitker, Libertarian for U.S. Senate in Florida, Meet The Press TV Ad

School closed after boy finds bomb in playground

Boy finds pipe-bomb in school playground

Boy finds bomb in school playground

Children at a school in County Antrim in Northern Ireland were moved to a church on Monday after a pupil found a bomb in the playground.

Eight-year-old Brendan found the bomb, made from a pipe, on the way to school and took it inside to his teacher.

Police were called and all 400 pupils were evacuated and the school was closed for the day.

Police safely removed the bomb and no-one was hurt. They're now trying to find out who left the bomb.

Brendan said he found what looked like a "golden pipe thing" in the playground at St Comgall's when he arrived at school on Monday morning.

He said: "I just got off my bike and just touched it to see if it was okay. Then I just lifted it up."

Brendan's head teacher Hilary Cush said he was angry that an explosive was left somewhere children could find it.

He said: "It's absolutely crazy. It's unbelievable that innocent children should be caught up in something like this."

There was a second bomb alert at St Joseph's Primary School, also in County Antrim on Monday. The school was also closed, but no bomb was found.

US becoming a Third World country?

During recent years, the gap between the rich and poor has increased at a staggering pace, systematically wiping the existence of the middle class from America.
The United States is on the brink of sliding down to a Third World country, as it struggles with massive debts, rising unemployment and a deteriorating economy.


Some of the warning signs that indicate America's fantastic fall from a First World nation include rising unemployment and poverty.

According to Spiegel Online, the United States is recently faced with a new phenomenon called "the new poor."

In Ventura California -- a luxurious resort city -- about 20 percent of the residents are at risk of homelessness.

The once-rich, who have lost their homes, are now forced to sleep in their expensive cars parked in the city's corners, Captain William Finley, the head of the local branch of the Salvation Army said.

He further added that during the past months, the number of people taking advantage of the organization's free meals program, has doubled. Many drive up in their BMWs to receive free food, he went on to say.

Another signal that marks the demise of America's so-called greatness is the disappearance of the middle class.

During recent years, the gap between the rich and poor has increased at a staggering pace, systematically wiping the existence of the middle class from America.

Income inequality in the US has reached a stage where only one percent of Americans own as much as 37 percent of the total national wealth.

That means that if an average CEO earned 30 times as much as an ordinary worker in 1950, today he would own 300 times as much.

Meanwhile, in its current annual report, the US Department of Agriculture stressed that some 50 million Americans were not able to afford enough food to stay healthy at some point in 2009.

It also noted that one in eight adult Americans and one in four children now survive on government food stamps. These are unbelievable numbers for the world's richest nation, Spiegel wrote.

So far, US politicians have failed to come up with solutions to the growing crisis.

"The lights are going out all over America," Nobel economics laureate Paul Krugman wrote last month. This is due to the fact that many US residents can no longer spend money because they have no savings.

Their houses have lost half of their value; they no longer qualify for low-interest loans; they are making less money than before or they're unemployed. This in turn reduces or eliminates their ability to pay taxes.

As a result, many state and local governments are faced with enormous budget deficits. In Hawaii, schools are closed on some Fridays to save the state money. A county in Georgia has eliminated all public bus services and in Colorado Springs, a city of 380,000 people, a third of streetlights have been shut off to save electricity.

In fact, the United States, which is in the wake of a huge debt crisis of above 90% of GDP, is threatened by a social Ice Age more severe than anything the country has seen since the Great Depression.

This is why last month, a leading online columnist, Arianna Huffington, issued the almost apocalyptic warning that "America is in danger of becoming a Third World country."

FF/HRF

GERMAN JEWS FEATURE LATUFF’S LATEST WORK

Image ‘Copyleft’ by Carlos Latuff

No translation needed…. the image says it all.


Cover art for October issue of German progressive Jewish magazine “Der
Semit”:
http://dersemit.de

A Tsunami Approaches: The Beginning of the Great Deconstruction

In the distant horizon, a giant wave is building. There are some who recognized the swell and raised the alarm. There are others who deny the possibility of such a wave. Most remain blissfully unaware. The wave is building and when it reaches our shores, it will hit with the force of a tsunami.

The wave is propelled by government spending and crested with unfunded pension obligations. The Pew Center on the States wrote in The Trillion Dollar Gap (February 2010), “A $1 trillion gap exists between the $3.35 trillion in pension, health care and other retirement benefits states have promised their current and retired workers as of fiscal year 2008 and the $2.35 trillion they have on hand to pay for them.”

Like any tsunami, the wave began long ago and very far out to sea. Thirty years ago the vast majority of union workers were in the private sector. Public employees in unions reached parity with private sector members by 2009. This was aided in part by campaign contributions from the unions to elect Democratic Party candidates and generous pay packages and retirement plans passed by those same politicians in return.

By 2010, the general public received a series of shocks. The first shock was the jobless recovery of the Great Recession that cost 8 million jobs. Most of the job losses occurred in the private sector yet the majority of the $800 billion Stimulus Bill went to “save and create” public sector employment. The second shock was learning that civil servants earned twice that of private workers. According to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, Federal workers received average pay and benefits of $123,049 while private workers made $61,051 in total compensation. The third shock was revelation of incredible retirement plans doled out by politicians since 1999. In 2002, California passed SB 183 that allowed police and safety workers to retire after 30 years on the job with 3% of salary for each year of service, or 90% of their last year’s pay. During the Great Recession, fireman began retiring with $150,000 pensions at age 52 despite a life expectancy approaching 80. In Orange County CA, lifeguards, deemed safety workers, retired with $147,000 annual pensions. The Orange County sheriff, recently convicted of witness tampering, will receive $215,000 annually while in jail. Bob Citron, the Treasurer of Orange County who pushed the county into bankruptcy in the 1990s, receives a pension of $150,000 per year. A tsunami of anger and resentment is building.

As the wave approaches, economists issue thick reports with ominous names like “The Gathering Storm” (Reason Foundation) advising us that the pension obligations we have created are unsustainable. They report cities and states cannot economically allow workers to retire at 52 when they have a life expectancy of 26 years of retirement. They simply cannot pay for these pensions with existing revenue. Services will go down and taxes will go up to pay for these generous pension obligations. Orange County’s CEO, Thomas G. Mauk, predicted that pension requirements in 2014 will take 84% of the county’s law enforcement payroll. It is already 50% today. To exacerbate the problem, The Great Recession forced most states into budget deficits as their revenues decline. For FY2010, every state except Montana and North Dakota has projected a budget deficit. (RedState 3/21/2010).

California once again leads the nation with a $26 billion budget deficit plus an unfunded pension obligation of $500 billion. Its current financial structure is clearly unsustainable. It has an operational structure that in ungovernable with often duplicative agencies, some collecting less in tax revenue than the agencies spend on collection. Wikipedia lists 500 existing public agencies for the State of California. California can no longer afford such a luxury. It must deconstruct these bloated inefficient government agencies, and rid itself of their chairman, staff, offices, cars, pensions and the overhead that such excess represents. A $26 billion dollar deficit is not something that can be corrected with a wage freeze or job furloughs. Bold leadership can lead California to deconstruct its 500 agencies down to 100 functional organizations. California is a classic example of what must change in the coming Great Deconstruction.

One Orange County city has already taken bold steps to correct its $10 million deficit. It may be a model for other cities and states across the country. Internally, it has decided it will not replace any city worker that dies, retires, moves or quits. The city will simply out source the employment to an outside service company and eliminate healthcare requirements and unsustainable pensions. Building inspectors will be out sourced as will city plan checkers, librarians and meter maids. Only essential services like top executives and cops will remain on the city payroll. The city staff will eventually decrease from 220 to approximately 35 personnel. This is the essence of deconstruction.

At the state and local level, the Great Deconstruction has already begun albeit delayed by an infusion of federal stimulus dollars and grants in 2009 and 2010. The federal government must deconstruct as well. It must happen, if only because the revenue is no longer there to sustain all of these often well-intentioned programs. The federal government will not be immune from fiscal reality.

In this sense, the election in November will be a referendum on the very sustainability of our system of government. One party will continue to borrow and spend in order to maintain the 500 agencies in California and the abundance of federal programs. They have not said how long they will be able to borrow money to sustain their system. The other party will try to simply turn off the spigot - now. Either way, one day the money will run out and the inevitable deconstruction will occur.

***************************************************

The Great Deconstruction is a series written exclusively for New Geography. Future articles will address the impact of The Great Deconstruction at the national, state, county and local levels.

Robert J. Cristiano PhD is the Real Estate Professional in Residence at Chapman University in Orange County, CA and Director of Special Projects at the Hoag Center for Real Estate & Finance. He has been a successful real estate developer in Newport Beach California for twenty-nine years.

They caused the Iraq War and remain without shame

During the past week, as the US president Barack Obama announced the withdrawal of US combat forces from Iraq, there was considerable media commentary focusing on the lies that had been utilised to build public support for the war.

The two that received the most attention were the argument that Saddam had an active programme to develop weapons of mass destruction and the assertion, made most vigorously by the then vice president Dick Cheney, that there were “proven links” connecting the Iraqi leadership to the terrorist attacks on September 11.


Both were, of course, deliberate fabrications but both did play important roles in shaping public opinion and justifying the invasion of Iraq. The propaganda effort to win support for the war involved much more.

As I note in my forthcoming book What they are saying to us and why it matters: Arab Voices, proponents for the war, preying on the public’s lack of basic information about Iraq and its people, made exaggerated claims expressing confidence that the effort would be relatively painless.

A former official at the Pentagon termed it a “cakewalk”. Mr Cheney said “it’ll go ... quickly. Weeks rather than months”. Paul Wolfowitz, another advisor in the Bush administration, estimated the cost of the entire enterprise not to exceed one or two billion dollars, with Iraq’s oil revenues quickly kicking in to “finance its own reconstruction”.


Throughout the media universe, commentators echoed these boasts, regularly churning out outrageous claims on a par with Saddam Hussein’s pre–Gulf War warning that the conflict would be the “mother of all battles”.

Before the invasion began, for example, Bill O’Reilly, a commentator of Fox News, wagered “the best dinner in the gaslight district of San Diego that military action will not last more than a week”.

A similarly euphoric (and ultimately equally misleading) statement by Bill Kristol, the editor of the Weekly Standard, soon followed: “There is a certain amount of pop psychology in America that the Shia can’t get along with the Sunni . . . There’s almost no evidence of that at all.” Finally, journalist Fred Barnes, another host of a programme on Fox News, chimed in: “The war was the hard part . . . It gets easier. I mean, setting up a democracy is hard, but not as hard as winning a war.”

This endless and deadly “spinning” didn’t end with the invasion. Six months into the war, Zogby International conducted the first-ever nationwide poll in Iraq showing that a disturbingly high percentage of Iraqis (including almost the entire Sunni population and a strong majority of Shia) wanted the US to leave their country, did not have a favourable view of the US military’s behaviour, and were not inclined to establish a democracy in Iraq.


A few days after these findings were released, Mr Cheney was on a television news programme citing our poll as evidence of “very positive news”, and using them to make his case that all was going well.

The same penchant for fabrication was in evidence in the hype surrounding the “surge” that the Bush administration implemented in early 2007. It is true that sectarian and intra-sect violence declined during this same period.

But the reasons for this decline had more to do with the fact that the “ethnic cleansing” operations launched by sectarian groups had already left Baghdad’s neighbourhoods purged and divided by barricades. Sunni tribal groups had organised and armed themselves to fight against al Qa’eda before the surge of US troops began.


Despite all this, the same cast of characters who promoted the fabrications that led the US into the war had the temerity to upbraid Mr Obama for failing to give George W Bush sufficient credit for successfully implementing measures that ended the war .

The US combat forces have now been withdrawn, but this war is not over, it has not been a success, and US responsibility has not ended. Iraq remains a fragile country, divided internally and surrounded by neighbours, some wary of the country’s instability and others eager to exploit its vulnerability.

In addition to the 4,400 Americans who died, tens of thousands have been severely wounded and their continued care must remain a national priority in the US. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis also perished and 20 per cent of that country’s population at the start of the war are now refugees or internally displaced persons, unable to return home.


Meanwhile, instead of a “beacon of democracy” we see a dysfunctional political order that cannot so easily have closure or implement the results of an election that took place more than six months ago. The nation responsible for this calamity, America, will continue to have a role in Iraq’s future.

The US vice president Joseph Biden was right when he noted that “American engagement with Iraq will continue” with a new mission to help the country through reconstruction and reconciliation. And the story doesn’t end there.


At some point in history those who brought this disaster down on us all must be called to account for the fabrications, the embarrassment to America’s honour, and the death and waste of so many lives. Until that occurs, the conclusion to this sad chapter will not have been written.

James Zogby is president of the Arab American Institute.

Obama To Unveil A New(er) Deal: Here Comes $50 Billion For Rails, Roads And Runways

The New Deal cost America $50 billion in 1930s dollars. How the times have changed - today the White House will announce a new and improved New(er) Deal, which will invest $50 billion in a 3Rs sequel - road, rail and runway, infrastructure developments. It will have roughly one thousandth the impact of the Roosevelt plan, demonstrating once again that in 80 years the only thing that has actually worked in America is the ongoing devaluation of the dollar. But don't call it failed fiscal surplus infinity +1, that would certainly not help the Democrats' InTrade odds this November. But since ARRA has now failed and GDP is stalling, and the Fed is pretty much powerless to create anything except a huge spike in gold prices once it goes full retard on monetary policy, what does one expect the president to do (aside from the obvious which is whatever the teleprompter tells him)? At least Paul Krugman will be giddy: there go two more $25 billion bond auctions to spike the economy for one or two days, only to cause another output vacuum shortly thereafter. And since no Obama plan could be complete without the creation of a czar or a bank to act as chief administration of fund misappropriation and embezzlement, the plan will also see the creation of an "Infrastructure Bank" which Wall Street is already actively plotting how to frontrun and to vicious rob blind at the expense of future generations. So congratulations America: ten days of total tax revenue were just washed down the drain to keep a few road workers busy: we'll skip the obligatory "Change you can..." jokes at this point. We also won't mention the imminent receipt of Warren Buffett's "thank you" card by the administration - that's a given.

More from Politico:

Seeking to bolster the sluggish economy, President Barack Obama is using a Labor Day appearance in Milwaukee to announce he will ask Congress for $50 billion to kick off a new infrastructure plan designed to expand and renew the nation’s roads, railways and runways.

The goals, according to the White House: “Rebuild 150,000 miles of roads — renewing our commitment to the backbone of our transportation system … . Construct and maintain 4,000 miles of rail — enough to go coast-to-coast … . Rehabilitate or reconstruct 150 miles of runway — while putting in place a NextGen system that will reduce travel time and delays.”

The measures include the “establishment of an Infrastructure Bank to leverage federal dollars and focus on investments of national and regional significance that often fall through the cracks in the current siloed transportation programs," and “the integration of high-speed rail on an equal footing into the surface transportation program.”

“To jumpstart job creation, this long-run policy front-loads — through a $50 billion up-front investment — a significant share of the new infrastructure resources,” the White House said in a fact sheet. “As with other long-run policies, the Administration is committed to working with Congress to fully pay for the plan.”

White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel has been pushing an infrastructure plan in West Wing meetings for weeks. But with the November midterms looming, officials were having trouble finding a way for the effects to be felt immediately.

A White House official said: “Today in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, President Barack Obama will announce a comprehensive infrastructure plan to expand and renew our nation’s roads, railways and runways. This proposal is among a set of targeted initiatives that the president will outline in Cleveland on Wednesday to support our economic recovery and ensure long-term sustainable growth.

“The plan builds upon the infrastructure investments the president has already made through the Recovery Act, includes principles the president put forth during the campaign, and emphasizes American competitiveness and innovation.”

At 3:10 p.m. Eastern time, Obama is to deliver remarks on the economy at Milwaukee Laborfest, in Henry Maier Festival Park.

http://www.zerohedge.com/article/obama-unveil-newer-deal-here-comes-50-billion-rails-roads-and-runways