Gaza: 95% oF Factories Are Closed, 93% Of Water Is Polluted

Most of Gaza’s factories have closed and its water is polluted as a result of Israel’s siege policy, according to a new report being released today by the Israeli Human Rights group – B’tselem.

The siege policy has “led to economic collapse in Gaza,” B’tselem noted in a 44-page report (PDF) that looked at Gaza, the West Bank and east Jerusalem during the period from January 2009 to the end of April 2010.

Following is a summery of this report:

• The prohibition on bringing in raw materials and exports into Gaza, which has been in place since Hamas’s takeover of the Strip in June 2007, forced 95 percent of the factories and workshops in the area to close.
• Before 2007, 4,000 types of goods were let into Gaza, compared with less than 150 that come in now. Among the restricted items are building materials such as iron and cement, which are needed to rebuild the 3,500 homes destroyed during last Israeli assault on Gaza – Operation Cast Lead.
• The quantity of goods that comes through the crossings is less than one-quarter of what entered prior to the siege.
• Before 2007, 70 trucks laden with export goods such as furniture, clothing and produce left Gaza daily for Israel. Now, only the export of strawberries and flowers to Europe is allowed in “certain instances”. Goods are coming into Gaza through a system of tunnels set up under the border with Egypt, although the system is not enough to revive Gaza’s economy.
• Electricity is a problem in Gaza. 98% of the residents suffer from blackouts ranging from eight to ten hours a day, while the remaining 2% do not receive any electricity at all.
• The power outages due to lack of fuel and spare parts have prevented the proper operation of wells and desalination plants.
• At the end of 2009, studies showed that 93% percent of the Gaza Strip’s water was polluted, with high quantities of chloride and nitrates.
• “The water supply is defective and thousands of residents are not even connected to the water grid. Waste treatment has also been affected. Every day, some 100,000 cubic meters of untreated or partially untreated waste-water flow into the sea.”
• A lack of pesticides and spare parts for irrigation systems makes it hard for farmers. Those with land near the border with Israel can no longer farm because access is forbidden or restricted, and those who violate these orders risk being shot.
• Fisherman cannot go out farther than three nautical miles, which limits the Strip’s fish supply.
• The number of Palestinian fatalities at the hands of the IOF dropped from 456 in 2008 to 83 from January 21, 2009, through the end of April 2010. These numbers do not include Palestinian deaths that occurred during Operation Cast Lead.
• The report noted that Israel demolitions had continued in Area C of the West Bank, where from January 2009 to the end of April 2010, the occupation forces had destroyed 44 residential structures. The demolitions left 317 Palestinians homeless.
• In 2009, the Jerusalem Municipality demolished 48 buildings in east Jerusalem. The demolitions left 247 Palestinians homeless.
• The report notes that the IOF had not stop building settlements and no outposts been removed.
• According to the report, very few IOF or police investigations into allegations of wrongdoing against Palestinians had actually lead to convictions. From the start of the second intifada in September 2000 to the end of April 2010, B’tselem reported 255 cases of violence to the military advocate-general’s office. Only 11 indictments were filed, and one of those was canceled.
• During that same period, B’tselem turned to the Justice Ministry’s Police Investigation Department concerning 180 cases of violence, but only 12 indictments were filed.
• Since September 2000, B’tselem has submitted 220 complaints to the Israel Police, demanding investigations of cases where Israelis harmed Palestinians or damaged their property. Only nine of these complaints resulted in indictments.

B’tselem executive director Jessica Montell said that the report was being released to mark “the 43rd anniversary” of the end of the Six Day War, which marked “the beginning” of Israel’s occupation.

“The ongoing occupation both violates” Palestinian rights and “poses clear dangers for Israel’s democracy,” Montell said. “For this reason we as Israelis must demand accountability for actions taken in our name in the occupied territories and work to change in policies that infringe human rights.”

With the US trapped in depression, this really is starting to feel like 1932

The US workforce shrank by 652,000 in June, one of the sharpest contractions ever. The rate of hourly earnings fell 0.1pc. Wages are flirting with deflation.

People queue for a job fair in New York. The share of the US working-age population with jobs in June fell from 58.7pc to 58.5pc. The ratio was 63pc three years ago. Photo: EPA

"The economy is still in the gravitational pull of the Great Recession," said Robert Reich, former US labour secretary. "All the booster rockets for getting us beyond it are failing."

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard: Comment

"Home sales are down. Retail sales are down. Factory orders in May suffered their biggest tumble since March of last year. So what are we doing about it? Less than nothing," he said.

California is tightening faster than Greece. State workers have seen a 14pc fall in earnings this year due to forced furloughs. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger is cutting pay for 200,000 state workers to the minimum wage of $7.25 an hour to cover his $19bn (£15bn) deficit.

Can Illinois be far behind? The state has a deficit of $12bn and is $5bn in arrears to schools, nursing homes, child care centres, and prisons. "It is getting worse every single day," said state comptroller Daniel Hynes. "We are not paying bills for absolutely essential services. That is obscene."

Roughly a million Americans have dropped out of the jobs market altogether over the past two months. That is the only reason why the headline unemployment rate is not exploding to a post-war high.

Let us be honest. The US is still trapped in depression a full 18 months into zero interest rates, quantitative easing (QE), and fiscal stimulus that has pushed the budget deficit above 10pc of GDP.

The share of the US working-age population with jobs in June actually fell from 58.7pc to 58.5pc. This is the real stress indicator. The ratio was 63pc three years ago. Eight million jobs have been lost.

The average time needed to find a job has risen to a record 35.2 weeks. Nothing like this has been seen before in the post-war era. Jeff Weninger, of Harris Private Bank, said this compares with a peak of 21.2 weeks in the Volcker recession of the early 1980s.

"Legions of individuals have been left with stale skills, and little prospect of finding meaningful work, and benefits that are being exhausted. By our math the crop of people who are unemployed but not receiving a check amounts to 9.2m."

Republicans on Capitol Hill are filibustering a bill to extend the dole for up to 1.2m jobless facing an imminent cut-off. Dean Heller from Vermont called them "hobos". This really is starting to feel like 1932.

Washington's fiscal stimulus is draining away. It peaked in the first quarter, yet even then the economy eked out a growth rate of just 2.7pc. This compares with 5.1pc, 9.3pc, 8.1pc and 8.5pc in the four quarters coming off recession in the early 1980s.

The housing market is already crumbling as government props are pulled away. The expiry of homebuyers' tax credit led to a 30pc fall in the number of buyers signing contracts in May. "It is cataclysmic," said David Bloom from HSBC.

Federal tax rises are automatically baked into the pie. The Congressional Budget Office said fiscal policy will swing from
a net +2pc of GDP to -2pc by late 2011. The states and counties may have to cut as much as $180bn.

Investors are starting to chew over the awful possibility that America's recovery will stall just as Asia hits the buffers. China's manufacturing index has been falling since January, with a downward lurch in June to 50.4, just above the break-even line of 50. Momentum seems to be flagging everywhere, whether in Australian building permits, Turkish exports, or Japanese industrial output.

On Friday, Jacques Cailloux from RBS put out a "double-dip alert" for Europe. "The risk is rising fast. Absent an effective policy intervention to tackle the debt crisis on the periphery over coming months, the European economy will double dip in 2011," he said.

It is obvious what that policy should be for Europe, America, and Japan. If budgets are to shrink in an orderly fashion over several years – as they must, to avoid sovereign debt spirals – then central banks will have to cushion the blow keeping monetary policy ultra-loose for as long it takes.

The Fed is already eyeing the printing press again. "It's appropriate to think about what we would do under a deflationary scenario," said Dennis Lockhart for the Atlanta Fed. His colleague Kevin Warsh said the pros and cons of purchasing more bonds should be subject to "strict scrutiny", a comment I took as confirmation that the Fed Board is arguing internally about QE2.

Perhaps naively, I still think central banks have the tools to head off disaster. The question is whether they will do so fast enough, or even whether they wish to resist the chorus of 1930s liquidation taking charge of the debate. Last week the Bank for International Settlements called for combined fiscal and monetary tightening, lending its great authority to the forces of debt-deflation and mass unemployment. If even the BIS has lost the plot, God help us.

WAYNE ALLYN ROOT: Barack Obama: The great jobs killer

As former President Ronald Reagan might have said, "Obama, there you go again."

The current occupant of the White House claims to know how to create jobs. He claims jobs have been created. But so far the score is Great Obama Depression 2.2 million lost jobs, Obama 0 -- a blowout.

Obama is as hopeless, helpless, clueless and bankrupt of good ideas as the manager of the Chicago Cubs in late September. This "community organizer" knows as much about private-sector jobs as Pamela Anderson knows about nuclear physics.

It's time to call Obama what he is: The Great Jobs Killer. With his massive spending and tax hikes -- rewarding big government and big unions, while punishing taxpayers and business owners -- Obama has killed jobs, he has killed motivation to create new jobs, he has killed the motivation to invest in new businesses, or expand old ones. With all this killing, Obama should be given the top spot on the FBI's Most Wanted List.

Meanwhile, he has kept the union workers of GM and Chrysler employed (with taxpayer money). He has made sure that most government employee union members got their annual raises for sleeping on the job (with taxpayer money). He made sure that his voters got handouts mislabeled as "tax cuts" even though they never paid taxes (with taxpayer money). And he made sure that major campaign contributors collected billions off government stimulus (with taxpayer money).

As far as the taxpayers -- the people who actually take risks with our own money to create small businesses and jobs and pay most of the taxes -- we require protection under the Endangered Species Act.

You won't find proof of the damage Obama is doing on Wall Street, but rather on Main Street. My friends are all part of the economic engine of America: Small business. Small business creates 75 percent of new jobs (and a majority of all jobs). I called one friend who was a wealthy restaurant owner. He says business is off by 60 percent. He's drowning in debt. He won't last much longer. His wealth is gone.

I called another friend in the business of home improvement. He says business is off 90 percent from two years ago. My contractor just filed personal bankruptcy. She won't be building any more homes. The hair salon where I've had my hair cut for years closed earlier this year. Bankrupt. But here's the clincher -- ESPN Zone just closed all their restaurants across the country. If they can't make it selling cheap food and overpriced beer with 100 big screens blaring every sporting event on the planet to a sports-crazed society, we are all in deep, deep trouble.

I've polled all my friends who own small businesses -- many of them in the Internet and high-tech fields. They all agree that in this new Obama world of high business taxes, income taxes, payroll taxes, capital gains taxes, and workers compensation taxes, the key to success is to avoid employees. The only way to survive as a business owner today is by keeping the payroll very low and by hiring only independent contractors or part-time employees provided by temp agencies.

The days of jobs in the private sector with big salaries, full benefits, and pensions are over. We've all seen where those kinds of jobs get you as a business owner -- in Bankruptcy Court or surviving on government welfare like GM and Chrysler. Or in the case of government itself -- completely insolvent, but surviving by ripping off taxpayers and fraudulently running printing presses at the Fed all day and night to print money by the trillions.

Unfortunately, small businesses don't have the power to impose taxes or print money. So unlike government, we'll just have to cut employees and run lean and mean.

It has now become clear that, outside of the burgeoning field of Census takers, there will be no major increase in new jobs for years to come. Outside government, Obama has created a wasteland of economic ruin and depression that looks much like the landscape of Mel Gibson's first movie "Mad Max." Without a printing press in Obama's world, you're just plain out of luck.

The days of believing the Obama propaganda about a jobs recovery are over. The trillion-dollar corporate handouts (neatly named "stimulus") may have kept big business in the money for the past 18 months, and artificially propped up the stock market, but small business is the real canary in the coal mine.

My small business-owning friends aren't creating one job. Not one. They are shedding jobs. They are learning to do more with fewer employees. They are creating high-tech businesses that don't need employees. And many business owners are making plans to leave the country. In a high-tech world where businesses can be run from anywhere, Obama has a problem. His one-trick pony -- raise taxes, raise taxes, raising taxes -- is chasing away the business owners he desperately needs to pay his bills.

So who is going to pay Obama's taxes? Not his voters. They want government to pay them. Who is going to create Obama's jobs? Not his voters -- they've never created a job in their lives.

So what is Obama going to do? Maybe he can get Pamela Anderson on the line.

Wayne Allyn Root, a former vice presidential nominee for the Libertarian Party, writes from Henderson. His column appears every other week.

BP Used Oil Industry Tax Break to Write Off Its Rent for Deepwater Rig

Transocean, the company that owns the failed Deepwater Horizon rig that caused the Gulf oil spill, used well-known tax havens in the Cayman Islands and Switzerland to lower its U.S. corporate tax rate by almost 15 points. And due to a break in the U.S. tax code, BP was also allowed to write off the rent it paid to Transocean on its own tax bill, saving it hundreds of thousands of dollars per day:

The owner, Transocean, moved its corporate headquarters from Houston to the Cayman Islands in 1999 and then to Switzerland in 2008, maneuvers that also helped it avoid taxes. At the same time, BP was reaping sizable tax benefits from leasing the rig. According to a letter sent in June to the Senate Finance Committee, the company used a tax break for the oil industry to write off 70 percent of the rent for Deepwater Horizon — a deduction of more than $225,000 a day since the lease began.

So, essentially, the U.S. taxpayer paid BP to lease a rig that was incorporated in a foreign country for the purpose of avoiding the U.S. corporate tax. And the U.S. tax code is actually riddled with breaks for the oil industry, despite that industry’s record profits in recent years. Center for American Progress Senior Policy Analyst Sima Gandhi has counted nine different subsidies that the U.S. government gives to the oil industry, including refunds for drilling costs and refunds to cover the cost of searching for oil. If this corporate welfare were cut, it would save $45 billion per year, and according to the Office of Economic Policy at the Department of Treasury, “affect domestic production by less than one-half of 1 percent.” “The flow of revenues to oil companies is like the gusher at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico: heavy and constant,” said Sen. Robert Menendez (D-NJ). “There is no reason for these corporations to shortchange the American taxpayer.”

All republished content that appears on Truthout has been obtained by permission or license.

How Wall Street and government sucked working and middle class Americans into perpetual debt serfdom.

People quickly forget about the nearly 1,000 point “flash crash” brought on by glitches in the Wall Street casino machinery. Still no sensible explanation has been given but today the stock market now stands below the flash crash moment. The middle class is witnessing the largest wealth transfer in history take place and it is all happening because of the Wall Street infrastructure and the government’s lack of respect for the working class of the United States. Even last month as we lost 125,000 workers the unemployment rate actually went down because over 500,000 Americans simply dropped out of the workforce. In other words people simply threw their hands up in exhaustion and gave up. The government is literally not counting tens of thousands of Americans. What does this tell you about how much they value the middle class?

Let us break down some income data first:

47 percent of American households make less than $50,000 a year. 66 percent make less than $75,000. This should give you a sense of the household income in the U.S. Only 4.3 percent of U.S. households make more than $200,000. Income for working and middle class Americans has remained stagnant for one agonizing decade. What has occurred over this time is the artifacts of a middle class lifestyle like a decent home and a college education have been juiced with massive amounts of banking debt. As banks have tried to put their hands on every aspect of American life, prices have zoomed up in every industry they have jumped into. Look at housing and higher education for dramatic examples. 50 years ago most middle class Americans could afford a college education and a starter home without sacrificing every single penny to servicing debt.

Debt has engulfed our nation. If we look at personal consumption as a percent of GDP we can start seeing where problems started:

Personal consumption makes up over 70 percent of our GDP. Banks love using this figure to beat on middle class Americans to blame them for the problems in the current recession. Keep in mind that the above chart also includes giant increases in health care costs and also, large piles of cash going to service debt that banks are so happy to take. Yet the above point of the chart does hold steady. That is, we have gone from producing to spending too much as a nation. It is fun while things are good but is definitely unsustainable. And don’t think this spending came from actual savings:

The drop in personal savings is incredible. As we went negative for a short period of time, banks were capitalizing by allowing people to spend more money than they actually had. If we look at the trillions of dollars given out to banks that made poor bets in the last decade, we’ll see that they are also the largest players in the credit card game:

Source: Reuters

The above chart is basically the too big to fail. They have fed massive amounts of credit cards into the system with little due diligence since they knew in the end, taxpayers would bail them out. Now that things have gotten bad (not for too big to fail banks since they have gotten the ultimate gold plated bailouts) they are now crunching down on the middle class. High interest charges, onerous fees, and other trickery are merely ways of sucking real wealth from those who work to a class that is largely unproductive and has led us into this economic predicament. The government has worked hand in hand with the banks here.

Credit card debt eats up a large portion of annual household income for millions:

Much of what we consider to be middle class living has been kept on life support by banking debt. Yet no system can go on forever with too much debt and too little production. Banks have become a dangerously large part of our economy. That is why so much focus is given to Wall Street and the banking sector. It is a largely idle industry that merely attempts to suck off the wealth creation of actual real work. The housing bubble was the pinnacle of banking neurosis. The idea that you can simply repackage toxic mortgages into “sophisticated” debt products and sell them off as diamonds to unsuspecting fools is appalling. Yet in most cases, all this was legal because our Senators write the laws that should be protecting us. Instead, they have allowed Wall Street to control every aspect of finance and now here we are with 40 million Americans on food assistance and a close to 17 percent unemployment and underemployment rate. Yet things are getting better for the middle class?

The current system is not capitalism but a form of state sponsored cronyism for banks. Most of us can understand that if you have a good product then by all means make a profit. This is the essence of any small business and their survival. But the banking system operates under perverse rules. They created inordinate amounts of debt products that serve no purpose and assured destruction of those taking on the product. Think of option ARMs that actually grew the balance of the mortgage! Horrible products that have destroyed large portions of the real economy and have pushed many off the middle class path. How many foreclosures could have been avoided over the past decade with more prudent banking? Yet this isn’t what the system wants. Banks wouldn’t mind if all you did was work and had to open your beat up leather wallet and pull out 99.99 percent of your net pay to service your debt. In fact, this is probably their ultimate wish.

Where do people spend their money?

Source: BLS

Housing by far is the largest line item above. Yet categories like medical care and education are growing at rates that outpace the overall rate of inflation. Ironically these are areas that are favorites of Wall Street. As long as you can slap a loan onto something, the big investment banks will be there drooling over every penny they can tack on.

There was a time when paying off your mortgage was a good thing. We have a good number of Americans who own their home mortgage free:

Over 30 percent of homeowners in the U.S. own a home with no mortgage. Yet these are typically people from an era that allowed them to pay down their mortgage even with a modest income. How likely is it that someone in say a state like California who bought a home at $500,000 with a $70,000 income is going to pay off that home? They’re not going to do it so that is why in the chart above you see distress levels off the charts.

Even if we look at current metrics for 3 of the largest states, we find that debt is not necessarily a good thing:

California and Florida both had major home price appreciation and relied heavily on the housing bubble. Both areas have seen bubbles pop. The difference however is that Florida prices have come down to more reasonable levels. California prices are still too high. A reasonable metric is 3 times annual household income for home prices (both Texas and Florida are close to that range). California is still out of that range. So why are economic problems still deep? Because current income data will be lower when Census data comes out in September and that is not reflected above.

The ability for Wall Street to turn many things into a commodity has allowed them to gamble and speculate on the well being of middle class Americans. Housing prices would not have gone into a massive bubble without banks pushing other people’s money out the door. Wall Street is good at taking risk when their money is not at stake. They are fine taking the biggest risk since they know the U.S. taxpayer will be on the hook eventually for their irresponsible decisions with a large safety new. Do you think banks would have loaned out of their own treasury like they did if it was their money on the table? Of course not. Yet if something isn’t changed then middle class Americans are going to find it harder and harder to stay afloat while debt starts coming down over them like a tsunami.

It is time to break the chains from the Wall Street banks. Split them up. There is no need to have commercial and investment banking comingled. The banking needs for most Americans are simple. Why mix it up with banks that now operate like hedge funds and take needless risk? If there is no change, people are going to start seeing more and more of their paycheck going to servicing debt and guess who ends up with that money in the end?

Tea party gatherings on the Fourth mix the educational and the patriotic

BEALETON, VA. -- "Tea party" activists across the nation tried to put the "independence" back in Independence Day this weekend with festivals and other gatherings focused on the Constitution -- and how to use it for political gain.

Coupled with an upsurge in organized classes and book clubs, the trend reflects a growing effort among conservatives to teach supporters how to do political battle using an inviolable weapon: the nation's founding documents. It's a change in emphasis for a movement that rose to prominence with spirited and sometimes unruly protests across the nation.

But it's one that organizers hope will yield real political results by arming supporters with the detailed knowledge to back only those candidates who are loyal to their ideals.

"The rallies were a start, but the goal now is to get people to stop and really think about things," said Kerry Scott, an organizer of the Alexandria Tea Party, one of several hundred conservative activists who attended "An American Event," a Fourth of July festival for "God and country" staged by a local farmer on rolling farmland in the foothills of Virginia's Blue Ridge Mountains this weekend.

Amid Civil War reenactors, a reading of the Declaration of Independence and booths selling Native American artwork, Scott handed out strips of white paper, each printed with quotations from such American luminaries as Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and George Washington.

"With knowledge, there is power," she said. "And having an understanding of the Constitution can lead to electing people who will uphold it."

The view that the Constitution does not permit such federal actions as the passage of health reform, the regulation of the environment or the imposition of educational mandates on the states is, of course, a controversial one. Where the tea party sees an encroachment of states' rights, the left sees a valid interpretation of the mandate, described in Article 1, Section 8, to provide for the "general welfare."

Nonetheless, there is ample evidence that this renewed emphasis is making its way into the broader political conversation; in the recent Senate hearings to confirm Solicitor General Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court, a flurry of questions about her interpretation of the Commerce Clause seemed pulled directly from the talking points of the tea party movement.

Scott and others look primarily to the Constitution's 10th Amendment, which grants to the states all powers not specifically given to the federal government. Like those on the left, they also point to Article 1, Section 8, which enumerates Congress's specific powers, including the right to tax and to regulate commerce. In these two passages, conservatives find the evidence that Congress and the executive branch have dramatically overstepped their authority by enacting health reform and regulating the environment, among other things.

Some conservative activists also point to the 17th Amendment, but in this case they oppose it. That amendment established direct election of U.S. senators by popular vote rather than appointment by their state legislatures. The thinking in that case is that the amendment removed the powerful Senate from control by the states.

"The founding fathers were very afraid of a central government," said Rick Buchanan, an organizer of the Fauquier County Tea Party who last started up a 12-week class on the Constitution and advertised it at "An American Event."

Similar events were staged elsewhere across the nation to focus attention this holiday weekend on the founding principles of the tea party movement. As is typical of the movement, there was no central organizing effort but a number of local festivals organized individuals and scattered groups.

They go beyond reenactments of Patrick Henry's "Give me liberty" speech or public readings of the Declaration of Independence. Groups distributed pocket-sized copies of the Constitution and advertised 12-week classes they've organized to study it. They also promoted weekly book clubs, where they are reading such titles as "Capitalism and Freedom," economist Milton Friedman's manifesto on free markets, and "The Five Thousand Year Leap," in which anti-communist W. Cleon Skousen asserts that the United States is a Christian nation whose founders were guided by the Bible.

"So many people have already studied this stuff, and now they're looking for more," said Ken Vaughn, an organizer of Northern Virginia 912 who recently prepared a course of study on the financial crisis for interested members. "We want change, but we don't just want empty change. We want a government that's more accountable to the people."

Groups such as those affiliated with the 9-12 Project, begun in 2009 by talk show host Glenn Beck, and the Campaign for Liberty, started by former presidential contender Ron Paul, have focused on the teachings of the Constitution for well over a year now. But the effort is spreading to tea party groups and others who simply call themselves conservatives.

"I've read the Constitution 20 times in the past two months," said Brock Price, the Fauquier County, Va., farmer who organized "An American Event" Saturday. "People are ignoring it. Politicians do not know anymore what's right and what's wrong."

Debt-ridden Illinois faces fiscal collapse

New York Times News Service
CHICAGO (Jul 5, 2010)

Even by the standards of this deficit-ridden state, Illinois' comptroller, Daniel W. Hynes, faces an ugly balance sheet. How ugly is clear when you examine his daily briefing memo.

He points to a figure in red: $5.01 billion (all figures US).

"This is what the state owes right now to schools, rehabilitation centres, child care, the state university -- and it's getting worse every single day," he says.

For years, California stood more or less unchallenged as a symbol of the fiscal collapse of states during the recession. Now it's Illinois, as its dysfunctional political class refuses to pay the state's bills and refuses to take the painful steps -- cuts and tax increases -- to close a deficit of at least $12 billion, equal to nearly half the state's budget.

Then there is the spectacularly mismanaged pension system, which is at least 50 per cent underfunded and, analysts warn, could push Illinois into insolvency if the economy fails to pick up.

Signs of fiscal crack-up are easy to see. Legislators left the capital this month without deciding how to pay 26 per cent of the state budget. The governor proposes to borrow $3.5 billion to cover a year's worth of pension payments, which would cost about $1 billion in interest.

School districts have fired thousands of teachers, curtailed kindergarten and electives, drained pools and cut after-school clubs. Drug, family and mental health counselling centres have slashed their workforces and borrowed money to stave off insolvency.

The state pension system is a money sinkhole and the most immediate threat. The governor and legislature have shortchanged the pensions since the mid-1990s, taking payment "holidays" with alarming regularity.

The state's last elected governor, Rod R. Blagojevich, is on trial for racketeering and extortion. But in 2003, he persuaded the legislature to let him float $10 billion in 30-year bonds and use the proceeds for two years of pension payments. That gamble backfired and wound up costing billions of dollars.

Legislators this year raised the retirement age and slashed benefits. Although changes apply only to future employees, the legislature claimed immediate savings.

Illinois is caught between blue-state convictions about social safety nets and a red-state aversion to taxes. It spends a minor fortune papering over its budget holes.

In the past, when non-profits needed credit to see them through tough budgets, the comptroller issued letters assuring banks vendors would be paid. Not anymore.

"I don't feel comfortable doing that," Hynes said. "I mean, who knows, right?"

A stock market forecast that says ‘take cover’

With the stock market lurching again, plenty of investors are nervous, and some are downright bearish. Then there’s Robert Prechter, the market forecaster and social theorist, who is in another league entirely.

Prechter is convinced we have entered a market decline of staggering proportions – perhaps the biggest of the last 300 years.

In a series of phone conversations and e-mail exchanges last week, he said that no other forecaster was likely to accept his reasoning, which is based on his version of the Elliott Wave theory – a technical approach to market analysis that he embraces with evangelical fervor.

Originating in the writings of Ralph Nelson Elliott, an obscure accountant who found repetitive patterns, or "fractals," in the stock market of the 1930s and '40s, the theory suggests that an epic downswing is underway, Prechter said. But he argued that even skeptical investors should take his advice seriously.

"I’m saying: ‘Winter is coming. Buy a coat,’" he said. "Other people are advising people to stay naked. If I’m wrong, you’re not hurt. If they’re wrong, you’re dead. It’s pretty benign advice to opt for safety for a while."

His advice: Individual investors should move completely out of the market and hold cash and cash equivalents, like Treasury bills, for years to come. (For traders with a fair amount of skill and willingness to embrace risk, he suggests other alternatives, like shorting the market or making bets on volatility.) But ultimately, "the decline will lead to one of the best investment opportunities ever," he said.

Buy-and-hold stock investors will be devastated in a crash much worse than the declines of 2008 and early 2009 or the worst years of the Great Depression or the Panic of 1873, he predicted.

For a rough parallel, he said, go all the way back to England and the collapse of the South Sea Bubble in 1720, a crash that deterred people "from buying stocks for 100 years," he said. This time, he said, "If I’m right, it will be such a shock that people will be telling their grandkids many years from now, ‘Don’t touch stocks.'"

The Dow, which now stands at 9,686.48, is likely to fall well below 1,000 over perhaps five or six years as a grand market cycle comes to an end, he said. That unraveling, combined with a depression and deflation, will make anyone holding cash "extremely grateful for their prudence."

Prechter is hardly the only market hand to advocate prudence now, but nearly everyone else foresees a much rosier future once current difficulties are past. For example, Ralph J. Acampora, a market analyst with more than 40 years of experience, said he moved entirely out of stocks and into cash late last month. Now a partner at Alverita, a wealth management firm in New York, he said recent setbacks suggested that the market would drop another 10 or 15 percent, probably until September or October, before resuming another "meaningful rally."

Over the next several years Acampora expects an "old normal market," characterized by relatively short-lived swings that will provide many opportunities for smart investors – one that resembles the markets of the 1960s and 70s. "I’ve lived through it," he said.

Like Prechter, he is a past president of the Market Technicians Association, the leading organization of technical market analysts, and he said that his colleague has done "some very good work." But Acampora doesn’t agree with Prechter’s long-term theories, either intellectually or emotionally.

The "mathematics don’t work," Acampora said, because such a big decline would imply that individual stocks would need to trade at unrealistically low levels. Furthermore, he said, "I don’t want to agree with him, because if he’s right, we’ve basically got to go to the mountains with a gun and some soup cans, because it’s all over."

Still, on a "near-term" basis, he said, "We’re probably saying the same thing."

Similarly, Larry Berman, who co-founded ETF Capital Management in Toronto and recently ended his term as the president of the technicians association, says he sees a "classic" short-term negative market trend developing now. But he doesn’t use the Elliott Wave theory, saying Prechter is trying to "measure the market in decades, which is too long a time frame for practical trading purposes or for risk management."

Prechter, 61, lives in Gainesville, Ga., where he runs Elliott Wave International, a forecasting and publishing firm. He graduated from Yale University as a psychology major in 1971, dabbled as a singer, drummer and songwriter in a rock band and became a technical analyst for Merrill Lynch.

Prechter became fascinated by Elliott’s writings, which suggest that the market moves in predictable if complex patterns. Along with A.J. Frost, Prechter wrote "Elliott Wave Principle," a 1978 book that predicted the emergence of a great bull market – a forecast that was largely fulfilled. By 1987, he was widely regarded as an expert in technical analysis. Articles in The New York Times said he was known as "the market’s leading technical guru" – and more. An article in October that year said he had "emerged as both prophet and deity, an adviser whose advice reaches so many investors that he tends to pull the market the way he has predicted it will move."

He has far less day-to-day influence now, after years spent developing a theory he calls "socionomics," which holds "social moods" as the cause not only of market cycles but also of economic and political events. A grand cycle is ending, he says, and the time for reckoning is near.

In 2002, he published "Conquer the Crash," which predicted misery ahead. Even so, he said in 2008 that the market would soon rally sharply – then said late last year that stocks were about to fall and that the great decline would resume.

Since 1980, the advice in his investing newsletters, when converted into a portfolio, has slightly underperformed the overall stock market but has been much less risky, losing money in only one calendar year, according to calculations by The Hulbert Financial Digest. Prechter said he disagreed with the methodology used in these measurements, but offers none of his own.

For his part, Acampora says that the Elliott Wave has some validity as an indicator but that "it’s only part of the story" of technical market analysis, which also needs to be buttressed by economic and fundamental research.

Prechter says his unifying theory, socionomics, is a "young science."

"We’re quantifying it," he said. "We’re working on it." In the meantime, he contends, it has enabled him to "look around the corner" and prepare for a dangerous future.

Cecchini: U.S. Consumers in 'Dire' Credit Situation

Peter Cecchini, chief strategist at BGC Financial, talks to Pimm Fox about the U.S. economy and consumer credit on Bloomberg Television’s "Taking Stock." He says that the 122% percent household debt to GDP ratio is well above the pre-1980 average of 60-80%. Just to get back to a 100% to GDP ratio, we need an additional $2 trillion of deleveraging. In the absence of income growth, you just aren’t going to get these numbers down without deleveraging.

This is the major reason I have said that household deleveraging has just begun and that we will be in a balance sheet recession for the foreseeable future. Cecchini says the fake recovery has really been just a liquidity trade, one that has run out of steam. Could we be on the cusp of another more powerful liquidity trade? I think so. But more on that later in the week.

Ending the Propagandocracy by Returning to Reason, Ethics and Truth

What we in the western world have for a long time believed to be our democracy has somewhere along the way mutated into something wholly different, because we have turned away from reason, ethics and truth.
Rather than being called a democracy, the system we in the western world live in today might far more accurately be called a “propagandocracy”.

It is by the power of deceptive manipulation that we are ruled by an arrogant elitist plutocracy.
These plutocratic “elites” have lost all understanding for basic ethics, as well as all respect for honesty and truth and all sense of compassion. And although this plutocratic ruling class sees itself as the world´s intellectual elite, in reality this “elite” has also lost most of its reasoning capacity .

But loss of reason doesn´t only inflict western society´s economic, intellectual and political elites. Stupidity has trickled down through all levels of society.

Reason, true reason in our relationship with the people around us, means that we consider the other person (or the other group of people, the other nation, the other religion) we encounter in life as an equal partner in these encounters. Reason also means that we consider the other one´s interests as valid as our own.
For in the long run this is the only way to live in peace with others. And if we constantly live in a state of conflict with those around us, we waste a lot of life and energy for no reason at all.
Democracy can´t live without the kind of reason, which seeks a livable compromise with others, a balance of interests, strives for peace.

In our time, however, we all are conditioned to rather seek short-time advantages for ourselves than reasonable long-time solutions for a peaceful and reasonable society.

We seek out the cheapest deals when we shop, even if this means that those people in the developing world, who by their labor have produced the things we are buying, are practically working under slave-labor conditions. In the long run this situation will lead to an unstable world. It will lead to a constant downward pressure for domestic wages, loss of domestic jobs and manufacturing capacity in the developed countries, a flow of illegal immigration into these countrie and increasing poverty for most everybody all over the world.

And we are just as unreasonable when we tend to prefer imported food or food made by agribusiness corporations for its cheap prizes. By doing so we bankrupt our country´s own family farmers. And while we risk our health in that dumb deal, we ultimately also destroy our society´s food security.

In some way we all are accomplices in this state of affairs. More often than not we all seem to have lost our sense for ethics, which ultimately is also a sense of reason.
If we want to stop the deterioration of our society, including our economy, we need to bring back ethical principles.

But even more than ordinary citizens so have most politicians lost their sense of ethics, when it comes to policy making. The same is true for economists, sociologist and scientists of many stripes.

In our society human life is counted in monetary value. When environmental hazards cause health damage to people living in neighborhood of corporate production facility, government employed economists calculate how much this increases health costs or the costs of workers being away from their job. And the media tells us the numbers. The suffering this needless destruction of their health causes to the afflicted people has become next to irrelevant in the discussion.
The corporation then calculates if it is more costly to pay legal fees or preventing the hazards by cleaner production methods. In developing countries, it´s always cheaper to just bribe some government officials than cleaning up the environmental mess.
The same calculations are done in connection to health or accident hazards for the workers.

Sociologist teach politicians and media elites how public opinion on certain issues can be formed or public criticism can be contained.

Psychologists search for ever more efficient ways of manipulating the individual via advertisement or via mind-control techniques or even via psychological and physical forms of torture.

Instead of talking about cooperative means to solve problems to the mutual benefit of everyone concerned, politicians talk about the one-sided interests of powerful groups or nations which can be pursued by any -including violent- means.

Just recently German President Köhler said in regard to Germany´s involvement in the Afghanistan war, that Germany as a country depending on free trade for protecting it´s industrial production and jobs must also be ready to defend it´s trade-lines by military means.

In other words: Germans are helping the Americans to kill Afghani people, so Germany will keep it´s positive trade balance?

But while President Köhler only expressed the ideas of large parts of the German political and economic elite, his ethical blindness so publicly shown was then after all a bit too much for ordinary Germans and so a storm of outrage about the issue caused Köhler finally to resign.

But we have to realize that life without ethics is basically self-defeating. Ethical principles create solidarity between all members of society, the weaker and the stronger among them. Those principles have been at the foundation of laws which were made to further peaceful dealings between individuals and nations.
Those principles also protect the weak from arbitrary violence and oppression by the stronger. But not only the weak are protect by those principles.
In a society without ethics even the strong will eventually loose. They will loose the protection those ethics would give them from those who challenge their leadership.

If society lives by what some call “the law of the jungle”, nobody will eventually feel safe enough to ever relax his guard. This in turn will result in suspicion and fear of everyone against everyone else to the point of a full-blown mass-paranoia.
In the long run without ethics we all would go crazy. Society could no longer function.

How can we define ethics in political terms?

We might start with the first article of the German constitution:

“The dignity of man must never be violated, respecting and protecting this human dignity must be the highest task of all government authority.”

This article actually precedes all others of the German constitution, including the second article which confirms the respect for all human life.

This first passage was written as the direct consequence of the lesson learned from the national disaster of the Nazi era.
The Nazis had shown no respect for human life and even less for human dignity.
In Nazi ideology human beings were categorized in leaders who rule and control and masses who are ruled and controlled to serve the purposes of the rulers.
Then there were “Untermenschen” ( subhumans), people of different ethnic groups.
During the war those people were then used like machine parts without regard to their humanity to further the “war-effort” or they were experimented upon in lethal “medical research”.
And finally there were “unworthy lives” (handicapped people who were considered as being of no use at all and could therefor be “put to death”).
And everyone who protested or resisted the inhumane policies could be incarcerated, tortured and executed.

The writers of the post-war German constitution realized that when respect for human dignity is lost, than respect for human life is lost shortly thereafter.

Respect for human dignity today, according to the international human rights declaration, means an absolute ban on any form of torture, including non-touch torture-methods via water-boarding, stress positions, noise-torture for sleep-deprivation, the use of heat, cold, hunger and the use of sexual abuse and enforced nudity as psychological torture-methods.

After respect for human dignity the most important ethical principle we have to bring back into politics is honesty.

The truth isn´t always easy to find, since it is most often a very complicated set of facts and nobody is capable of knowing and evaluating all the known scientific facts.
Untruth, however, lies and deceptions, can be detected far easier and they must be uncovered. To do so is essential for humanity´s future.

There cannot be any democratic society without respect for truth.
Honesty is a foundation for trust and trust a foundation for a peaceful living together.
If we want peace in our own society or among nations, we need to counter lies and deliberate untruths, so we can built up trust.

But since most people have been deceived by politicians and the media, political lies are often believed without scrutiny.

Falsehoods have become part of the mainline consensus. People have built their worldview and sometimes even their personal identity on false premises.

Even when lies and deceptions are uncovered by clear physical and otherwise undeniable evidence it will not be easy for most people to change their minds on issues they have believed in for such a long time.

I am aware of the psychological difficulties many people have in accepting that the world is so very much different from what they thought it was.
In some cases challenging the mainline consensus, even with the best of evidence, might be considered a provocation, an act of radicalism.

However,while World War III is looming at this very moment like a dark shadow over our heads, backing down from truthful investigations for fear of treading on some people´s sensibilities is, in my opinion, no longer ethical; neither is it justifiable to keep quiet about a provocative truth for fear of becoming ostracized or an outcast.

Truth sometimes hurts, but upholding lies in accordance to a false and only media-created consensus as the unchallenged image of reality has become far more devastating and dangerous for all of us.

Truth is a powerful weapon, even if it is a non-violent one.
Why?
Because truth makes many other weapons less usable or even unusable.

For instance uncovering the truth about false-flag attacks and showing them as what they are as the 9/11 truth-movement is doing, make new false-flag attacks less likely. Because from now on large parts of the population will suspect in every further “terrorist” attack the hand of the government. And the people who have those suspicions will inform their neighbors and friends about them.

From now on the people who plan a false-flag attack on their own population or the population of their allies will have to take into account that those attacks might badly backfire on themselves, and they might themselves come under wide-scale public scrutiny.
The majority population of a nation might no longer be ready to be manipulated into another war against the enemy designated by their corrupt political or economic elites after such an attack. Instead the citizens might turn against their would-be manipulators.

Overcoming the propagandocracies of our times by a collective commitment towards reason, ethics, honesty and truth is vital.
Truth will empower the people, the ordinary citizens of all nations. Truth will help the people to keep their politicians and also the politicians´ rich paymasters or the string-pullers from otherwise powerful elites in check.

When lies and deceptions are uncovered, and the truth is being accepted by more and more people, society will change for the better. This change might take some time, possibly a long time, but it will be inevitable.

Obama biggest recipient of BP cash

POLITICO (Washington) - While the BP oil geyser pumps millions of gallons of petroleum into the Gulf of Mexico, President Barack Obama and members of Congress may have to answer for the millions in campaign contributions they've taken from the oil and gas giant over the years.

BP and its employees have given more than $3.5 million to federal candidates over the past 20 years, with the largest chunk of their money going to Obama, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Donations come from a mix of employees and the company's political action committees - $2.89 million flowed to campaigns from BP-related PACs and about $638,000 came from individuals.

On top of that, the oil giant has spent millions each year on lobbying — including $15.9 million last year alone — as it has tried to influence energy policy.

During his time in the Senate and while running for president, Obama received a total of $77,051 from the oil giant and is the top recipient of BP PAC and individual money over the past 20 years, according to financial disclosure records.

In Congress, Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.), who last week cautioned that the incident should "not be used inappropriately" to halt Obama's push for expansion of offshore drilling, has been one of the biggest beneficiaries of BP's largesse. Her comments created some blowback, with critics complaining that she is too blasé about the impact of the disaster, even though she was among the first lawmakers to call for a federal investigation into the spill.

As the top congressional recipient in the last cycle and one of the top BP cash recipients of the past two decades, Landrieu banked almost $17,000 from the oil giant in 2008 alone and has lined her war chest with more than $28,000 in BP cash overall.

"Campaign contributions, from energy companies or from environmental groups, have absolutely no impact on Sen. Landrieu's policy agenda or her response to this unprecedented disaster in the Gulf," said Landrieu spokesman Aaron Saunders. "The senator is proud of the broad coalition she's built since her first day in the Senate to address the energy and environmental challenges in Louisiana and in the nation. This disaster only makes the effort to promote and save Louisiana's coast all that more important."

Several BP executives have given directly to Landrieu's campaign, including current and previous U.S. operation Presidents Lamar McKay and Robert Malone. Other donors include Margaret Hudson, BP's America vice president, and Benjamin Cannon, federal affairs director for the U.S. branch. Donations ranged from $1,000 to $2,300 during the past campaign cycle.

Environmentalists complain that Landrieu has played down the impact of oil spills.

"I mean, just the gallons are so minuscule compared to the benefits of U.S. strength and security, the benefits of job creation and energy security," Landrieu said at a hearing last month on offshore drilling. "So while there are risks associated with everything, I think you understand that they are quite, quite minimal."

"They own Mary Landrieu and the rest of the Louisiana delegation," said Greenpeace Research Director Kert Davies. "They have more money, disposable income and a fleet of dispensable lobbyists to beat the band."

Other politicians with ties to coastal states or states with BP refineries have also reaped benefits from the fourth largest company in the world.

The top congressional recipients of BP campaign cash include Republican Rep. Don Young of the oil-intensive Alaska delegation, who has received almost as much as Obama, raking in $73,300 during his congressional tenure. Also on the list is Sen. George Voinovich (R-Ohio), whose state has a BP refinery in Toledo and who has raked in $41,400. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) has received $44,899.

"Make no mistake: BP ranks among the most powerful corporate forces in U.S. politics," said Dave Levinthal, spokesman for the Center for Responsive Politics. "It donates hundreds of thousands of dollars every election cycle through its employees and political action committee and is routinely a seven- or eight-figure federal lobbying powerhouse each year."

In 2008 alone, BP gave $37,000 to members of the House Energy Committee and $106,501 to members of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, which deals with security issues facing the nation's oil supply.

BP has also evolved in its corporate giving over the past decade, shifting more money to Democrats. In 2000, the company gave almost 39 percent more to Republicans than to Democrats. But by 2008, Democrats had nearly pulled even with Republicans on BP donations.

Moreover, the company has nearly tripled the amount of money it has spent on lobbying, from about $5.7 million in 1999 to $15.9 million last year, according to lobbying disclosures.

BP has bulked up its K Street team by signing some of the biggest firms in Washington, several of which employ former Hill staffers with deep-seated ties to Louisiana and the Gulf of Mexico coast.

BP representation within lobby shop Alpine Group alone includes lobbyist Bob Brooks, who served as chief of staff to former Rep. Jim McCrery (R-La.), and lobbyist Rebecca Hawes, a longtime counsel for former Sen. John Breaux (D-La.). Jason Schendle worked for Landrieu for nine years, according to lobbying disclosures.

Former Rep. Jim Turner, now a lobbyist for BP with Arnold & Porter, formerly represented the 2nd District of Texas, which includes a large piece of Gulf shoreline. And at DC Legislative and Regulatory Services, BP lobbyist David Marin was formerly the lead Hill staffer for Congress's Select Committee to Investigate the Preparation for and Response to Hurricane Katrina.

"First, they are exceedingly competent. Second, they are. I know the first will help enormously in the next few weeks. I am not so sure about the second," said Republican energy lobbyist Mike McKen­na of MWR Strategies, who predicted that Landrieu would quite likely get "very wide latitude" on the oil issue. "That may not be the case with BP, whose record is a bit more spotty."

(c) Capitol News Company, LLC 2010

Three Interesting Numbers

I used to work at University College, London, getting by as a science historian.

Having written papers on various suitably obscure subjects - from Newton’s lunar theory to the discovery of Neptune - three years ago I made what in retrospect looks like a rather large mistake. I began to take an interest in the published chemical evidence relating to the ‘gas chambers’ at Auschwitz/ Birkenau.

Maybe it was foolish to imagine that hard scientific data was of relevance in this case. It strangely turned out that I was engaging with a predominantly religious issue, and I simply became damned as a heretic.

There is no disagreement that cyanide gas chambers existed at many WW2 concentration camps. These were delousing rooms built to kill the bugs that threatened the health of the camp inmates. They were designed to keep the prisoners healthy so that they could carry out their work effectively. Their purpose was hygienic.

We can nowadays agree that many tons of cyanide (in granular form as the insecticide Zyklon) was used during the WW2 for hygienic delousing technology. Before DDT was invented around 1945, Zyklon was the normal delousing method. Special gas chambers made by a firm called Degesch, 10m3 in volume, were installed in all the German labour-camps in 1942, the year when typhus hit the camps. That epidemic is spread by bugs, so all clothing and bedding had to go repeatedly into the delousing chambers. It was a procedure designed to be safe for regular use.

These chambers still exist at four WW2 labour camp ruins, Madjanek, Dachau, Auschwitz and Birkenau, and can be easily identified because their walls are mostly turquoise blue. There is iron in the walls of the old chambers at Auschwitz and Birkenau and this combined permanently with the cyanide then used, the brick walls being very porous to the cyanide gas. These walls are blue on the inside and on the outside, showing that the cyanide soaked right through them. The blue in the walls is ferrocyanide – just like the colour in a tube of turquoise oil paint.

In contrast to these real gas chambers, the walls of the alleged human gas chambers have no such blue colouring. This simple and obvious fact was one of the first causes of skepticism for some of those who visited the camps.

My contribution to ‘Holocaust Studies’ related to this issue: I spent a while integrating the Leuchter and Rudolf reports – the two big chemical surveys of the walls - and ascertaining what they found to be the control-background levels of residual cyanide. These are levels in samples where no-one is suggesting that mass cyanide gassing took place. Putting together the combined measurable data of these two chemical surveys (42 samples) I got the following three groups:

Delousing chambers 5000 ppm* (15 samples) *parts per million

Washrooms, Kitchens etc (‘Controls’) 2 ppm (11 samples)

Alleged human gas chambers 3 ppm (16 samples)

The ‘official’ explanation given for these figures is that ‘bugs are harder to kill than humans.’ No wonder the cyanide levels in the delousing chambers are higher, they had to kill all those little bugs... well, have a look at those figures. There is no significant difference between the control, background levels of cyanide (2 ppm) and those for the alleged human gas chambers (3ppm). Absolutely none. The fact that there are measurable levels for cyanide in ordinary rooms at Auschwitz is probably because of occasional fumigation to kill bugs living in cracks and crevices in the walls etc.

Whereas there is a two-thousandfold difference between the ‘control’ measurements and the delousing chambers – where the Zyklon was indisputably used hour after hour, day after day. Here the cyanide content, at an average value of around 5000 ppm, is about half of one percent of the samples taken.

The modern books that continue to roll off the presses about Auschwitz and ‘The Holocaust’ advocate a view that some Zyklon went to the delousing chambers, whereas some was ‘diverted’ for ghastly human use. It is important to note here that in 1946 at Nuremberg, no such dual use was posited. All knowledge of the normal, hygienic function was blotted out, and it was assumed that any can of Zyklon was for the ‘human gassing.’ Operators of the delousing chambers did not get to testify.

Over the years there has appeared a growing difference of opinion on the ‘human gas chambers’ issue... In fact it’s almost hard to believe that such a vast, dizzying difference of opinion over a single issue can exist in the world today. It remains that all decent citizens believe that millions of people, mainly Jews, were gassed in huge, cyanide gas chambers, over 1942-45, as the ultimate industrialised mass killing in human history. On the other hand, there are a few down-and-out, ethically-damned loners who have the nerve to affirm that such mass human gas chambers have never existed on Planet Earth…..

Nowhere!

Never!

….and, apart from that, had they existed they would be, in practice, totally unworkable. But that’s another story.

Over the last few years I have noticed that one side of this argument proceeds by trying to debate the evidence while the other uses every time, without exception, name-calling, abuse and ethical damnation.

Understandably it is a subject which many people find unbearable to discuss.….but on even this ‘sacred’ ground the earth is moving. Since startling revelations about 9/11 have been exposed there are increasingly massed ranks of ordinary but shocked and awakened people, now terminally cynical about the capacity of the powerful to lie and deceive in the service of their own interests.

Today, I believe we should formulate the unbearable Big Questions as:

Were the deadly Nazi gas chambers of WW2 used to kill Jews…..or bugs?

Did they work to take lives……or save them?

Did they have people ..... or clothing, put into them?

(Warning: a ‘wrong’ answer here can land you in jail, in ten European nations.)

I’m intrigued by historical questions with a chemical twist to them. Admittedly this one lost me half of my friends, got me thrown out of my College, made me virtually unemployable, and closed the doors of publishers and public venues. However, I cannot regret publishing what I believe to be true about this profoundly important issue. I hold the view that, if the truth about such an important matter is to remain out of bounds and beyond debate, then there is really no point in getting out of bed in the morning.

The truth has to matter.

The truth about the ‘human gas chambers’ particularly matters because much of modern history (and modern calamities) is founded on it.

As a vision of ghastly horror it has become the Most Holy Mystery in this spiritually bankrupt culture of ours. It has a transcendental function in expressing Ultimate Evil. It even seems to be morphing into a new religion, which has replaced the suffering of Christ by the ‘suffering of The Jews.’ The word ‘Holocaust’ actually means a fiery sacrifice.

This has to be the original WMD hoax - but, more than that, the total absence of any physical or chemical evidence for it, is precisely what has lead to ‘the Holocaust’ taking on its present numinous, transcendental nature.

So, are we discussing science or religion? I say that a scientific, rational approach to the subject became possible for the first time in 2003, when two published, chemical investigations appeared in the English language, and were concordant. But, I noticed that my fellow countrymen behaved as if the issue was a theological question about which the expression of doubt was a most serious sin.

Personally I prefer living in the real world and that has to mean discerning the difference between what is real and illusory. It will be a Copernican Revolution when the truth on this issue becomes widely understood. The lid cannot be kept on such lies indefinitely. I’d say that Mother Nature played the trump card: slowly, after the war, the walls of those delousing chambers turned blue, as the ferrocyanide complex developed.

I believe that no happy future can lie in store for humanity, so long as we continue to believe in this nightmare-hallucination. Belief in it is a badge of enslavement, it is the supreme sacred Myth of the New World Order.

Plato in his Republic said every civilisation needed a founding myth – but, he added, that myth did not have to be true. Karl Popper the philosopher of science was shocked by this and disagreed – it had to be true, he averred. I know who I want to believe. The consequences of founding society’s culture and relationships upon false narratives is provably disastrous. We get wars based on lies, global tyranny by bankers, debased, demoralised populations and now quite possibly World War Three.

ENDNOTE

There are five different levels of non-existence of the mass-human-cyanide- gas-chambers, which need to be known and understood by every educated citizen:

No trace of any 3rd Reich documentation has yet been found for any intention or plan of extermination of Jews. If you believe it all happened, you have to believe that the Nazis recorded nothing of their massive diabolical plan. Furthermore, that no single low or medium-level functionary who was caught up in the evil conspiracy committed a reflective or protesting word in writing to any family member or friend about their involvement in a process that must have been, at the very least, troubling.

No trace of any cyanide-gassed bodies have ever been found.

Present remains display nothing resembling a credible human gas chamber, not at any German WW2 labour-camp. Yes, there is the theatrical ‘gas chamber’ that thirty million have trooped through, built by Stalin in 1946. Compulsory school visits there still get their tingle of terror – but those escorting the youngsters are guilty of not informing them, that wall samples from this building have failed to show any significant elevation in cyanide above normal, background levels.

Not one single death was recorded as being due to cyanide poisoning in any German labour-camp. Very detailed and extensive records exist at the Bad-Arolsen archive (in North Germany), and its manager recently disclosed this fact.
No photo exists from an ‘extermination camp’ of any huge pile of stripped-naked mixed-gender corpses (as would have been created by such industrialised mass-killing), nor is there any photo of anything resembling a human mass-gassing chamber.

Modern accounts of such ‘mechanised killings’ by cyanide originate from Rudolf Hoss, Kommandant of the Auschwitz camp, who gave the story at Nuremberg in 1946 - after torture by a British army team for three days and three nights. His story had one or two thousand people marching into a washroom, or what looked like a washroom, then dying within twenty minutes. Re-tellings have to follow this story, because he’s the source! Thank you Fred Leuchter, and thank you Germar Rudolf. Only using their work can we drive a stake through the heart of this nightmare-horror.