Sunday, January 31, 2010
Global ObamaCare and World Population Control
Global ObamaCare and World Population Control | Print | E-mail
Written by William F. Jasper
Tuesday, 19 January 2010 09:48
As reported here on January 16 ("ObamaCare Goes Global, Hillary Clinton Announces") Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's recent celebration of the 15th Anniversary of the United Nations International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) portends a major ramping up of coercive population-control efforts worldwide, especially those aimed at the developing countries.
According to Secretary Clinton, President Obama's Global Health Initiative will be "the centerpiece" of his foreign policy, and even though America is drowning in debt and the U.S. economy is floundering, he has committed $63 billion to his global ObamaCare initiative.
Here are Hillary Clinton's words:
In addition to new funding, we've launched a new program that will be the centerpiece of our foreign policy, the Global Health Initiative, which commits us to spending $63 billion over six years to improve global health by investing in efforts to reduce maternal and child mortality, [and] prevent millions of unintended pregnancies.
This was not the administration's first announcement of the Global Health Initiative (GHI); President Obama issued a statement and fact sheet on the program on May 5, 2009.
What the Clinton and Obama statements do not mention is that the Obama Global Health Initiative is not an Obama initiative at all, but merely his continuation and expansion of the UN's global population control program, which is a priority concern for some of the world's wealthiest elites who want to see the planet's human population drastically reduced. The real initiators of Obama's GHI are Bill Gates, George Soros, Ted Turner, Oprah Winfrey, David Rockefeller, the World Economic Forum, the Clinton Global Initiative, the United Nations Foundation, and the International Planned Parenthood Federation.
The Gates connection to the GHI is so extensive that it is probably not an exaggeration to say the Obama Global Health Initiative represents the successful transfer of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation's global health policies into official U.S. policy, with the costs also being transferred to the U.S. taxpayers. At the conclusion of her January 8 remarks on the ICPD and GHI, Secretary Clinton introduced Dr. Rajiv Shah, the new Administrator of USAID, the State Department agency that administers U.S. foreign aid programs and that will oversee the GHI. Dr. Shah had just been sworn in to his new post the previous week, on December 31. And who is Dr. Shah? According to his USAID biography, immediately prior to joining the Obama administration, Shah worked for seven years for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, serving as a director of the Foundation's Global Health Program and its Global Development Program. Prior to that he was the healthcare policy advisor on the Gore 2000 presidential campaign. And before that he served as a policy aide in the British Parliament and worked at the World Health Organization.
The other person introduced by Hillary Clinton at the ICPD anniversary celebration was Maria Otero, the new Under Secretary of State for Global Affairs. Prior to accepting that post, Otero was president and CEO of Accion International, and before that worked at the Centre for Development and Population Activities (CEDPA). Both ACCION and CEDPA are favored funding projects of the Gates Foundation, as well as the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, two of the leading promoters of aggressive population control for the Third World.
The Secret "Good Club"
On May 24 of last year, the Times of London reported in an online article that a secret meeting of the world's leading billionaires had struck on a plan for curtailing world population. Entitled "Billionaire club in bid to curb overpopulation," it told of a gathering in Manhattan that included Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, David Rockefeller, Oprah Winfrey, and others. (The New American reported on it here.)
The British have a phrase that mockingly describes the kind of important and self-important people we are often directed to admire: "the Great and the Good." This clearly was a meeting of just such an elite. In fact, according to the Times, the gathering was "described as the Good Club by one insider." We will leave it to the reader to decide if the moniker fits.
The Times reported:
SOME of America's leading billionaires have met secretly to consider how their wealth could be used to slow the growth of the world's population and speed up improvements in health and education.
The philanthropists who attended a summit convened on the initiative of Bill Gates, the Microsoft co-founder, discussed joining forces to overcome political and religious obstacles to change.
Described as the Good Club by one insider it included David Rockefeller Jr, the patriarch of America's wealthiest dynasty, Warren Buffett and George Soros, the financiers, Michael Bloomberg, the mayor of New York, and the media moguls Ted Turner and Oprah Winfrey.
The covert palaver took place, revealed the Times story, "at the home of Sir Paul Nurse, a British Nobel Prize biochemist and president of the private Rockefeller University."
To what purpose? Patricia Stonesifer, former chief executive of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, attended the Rockefeller summit. She told the Times the billionaires met to "discuss how to increase giving." But, apparently, they were not simply interested in coordinating their own giving; they want to draft you and me into financially supporting their pet programs as well.
The Times reports that, according to an attendee, "a consensus emerged that they would back a strategy in which population growth would be tackled as a potentially disastrous environmental, social and industrial threat."
"This is something so nightmarish that everyone in this group agreed it needs big-brain answers," said the guest. "They need to be independent of government agencies, which are unable to head off the disaster we all see looming." Bill Gates, it seems, exerted a major influence on their decision. "Taking their cue from Gates they agreed that overpopulation was a priority," reported the Times.
"Global Cabal," "Alternative World Government"?
"Why all the secrecy?" the Times asked. Stacy Palmer, editor of the Chronicle of Philanthropy, told the Times the furtiveness might be "because they don't want to be seen as a global cabal." To which the contemporary "Duh," seems the only appropriate response. An attendee reportedly gave the Times this explanation: "They wanted to speak rich to rich without worrying anything they said would end up in the newspapers, painting them as an alternative world government." Ditto, double "Duhs."
But, are those descriptions — global cabal and alternative world government — unreasonable depictions of what the "Good Club" billionaires are up to? As private citizens, they should be free to shower their billions on whatever charities they deem worthy. But, clearly, in this particular area (and in others as well), they have hi-jacked our government to fund and implement their agenda. According to their anonymous apologist quoted by the Times, they meet secretly because "they need to be independent of government agencies." All well and good — if they truly were "independent of government agencies." But just the opposite is true; they are completely intertwined with government agencies, and with the UN agencies that are also intertwined with and funded by our government agencies.
The so-called Good Club elite that convened at Sir Paul Nurse's domicile — Rockefeller, Soros, Gates, Turner, Winfrey, Bloomberg—- are a top subset of a larger circle of key movers and shakers who do indeed call the shots on global political and economic affairs. And many of them are indeed pushing to transform their various global agendas into eventual formal world government. President Obama's Global Health Initiative is virtually indistinguishable from the identically named GHI launched by the World Economic Forum (WEF) in 2002. Of course, most of the Good Club members are regulars at the WEF annual gatherings of the rich and super-rich in Davos, Switzerland (or other WEF ultra-posh venues), where the Lear and Gulfstream jet sets meet to tell the middle classes and working-class poor how much they need to sacrifice to fund the Davos group's latest "compassion" projects. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is a "Strategic Partner" for the WEF's GHI.
Fanatic Malthusian Elites
Tightly entwined with the WEF and GHI is the Clinton Global Initiative, a massive project of the William J. Clinton Foundation. Launched by former President Bill Clinton in 2005, the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) has already amassed an astounding $57 billion in commitments from corporations, foundations, and individuals. Listed as "Notable Members" of the Clinton Global Initiative are, among others, Bill Gates, George Soros, and Judith Rodin, president of the Rockefeller Foundation. Oprah Winfrey, Ted Turner, and Michael Bloomberg have been participants in CGI events and donors to CGI causes. And one of the major causes that CGI has targeted is "global health," with a particular focus on the same issues of women, reproductive health, and over-population that his wife, Secretary Hillary Clinton, and her boss, President Obama, have chosen to target with their GHI. Just a few months ago, in September 2009, President Obama was introduced by Bill Clinton as a headline speaker at the Clinton Global Initiative gala in Manhattan. In his remarks at the CGI event, President Obama emphasized the "comprehensive global health strategy" of his foreign-aid program.
If we go over to the Global Health Council (GHC), a major advocacy group for GHI, we find that it is heavily funded by the Gates Foundation and has a large representation of Gates' folks directing it. The GHC's board of directors includes Julio Frenk and William Foege, both fellows at the Gates Foundation, and Valerie Nkamgang Bemo, a senior program officer of the Foundation. Director George F. Brown is a former director of the Rockefeller Foundation and former vice president of the Population Council, one of the principal founts of Rockefeller-financed population control propaganda for most of the past century. Soros and Turner are GHC funders. And, of course, GHC is tightly interwoven with Clinton's CGI and Obama's GHI.
The Malthusian fanatics of the Good Club and their fellow billionaire population-control elitists may claim to want "independence" from government, but what they really want is independence from public scrutiny, accountability, and oversight, while at the same time enjoying public financing and government implementation of their programs. The "new money" elitists — Gates, Buffet, Turner, Soros, et al. — have learned from the "old money" activists at the Rockefeller Foundation, Ford Foundation, and Carnegie foundations, that the best strategy is to get some programs going, promote them as great humanitarian efforts, build up a constituency behind them, and get them adopted as official policy. This results in greatly expanded programs funded by the taxpayers.
And precisely because the Gates-Rockefeller-Soros-Clinton-Obama "global health" agenda is being implemented under the authority of the United States government and paid for by the American taxpayers, Congress must be held accountable. Members of Congress must be forced by public pressure — for fiscal, moral, and constitutional reasons — to investigate and expose this public-private "global cabal," which does indeed pose a very real danger of becoming an "alternative world government." Proper investigation and exposure would result in a cut-off taxpayer funding to GHI projects, especially the most egregious, such as UNFPA which not only continues to support and fund the forced abortion and infanticide of China's brutal One-Child Program, but also engages in forced sterilization, coercion, bribery, and eugenics throughout the developing world.
(See here, here, here, and here.)
And UNFPA is not alone. Assisting it in these illegal and immoral actions are other U.S. and international agencies funded by the U.S. taxpayers: USAID, UNICEF, UNDP, WHO, IMF, the World Bank, etc.
The administration's Global Health Initiative, the new global ObamaCare, is in reality a major effort to launch a new wave of planetary eugenics and population control under the guise of mitigating human suffering and poverty, promoting "global health," and saving the environment.
Related articles:
ObamaCare Goes Global, Hillary Clinton Announces
The New Jacobin Elite
Written by William F. Jasper
Tuesday, 19 January 2010 09:48
As reported here on January 16 ("ObamaCare Goes Global, Hillary Clinton Announces") Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's recent celebration of the 15th Anniversary of the United Nations International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) portends a major ramping up of coercive population-control efforts worldwide, especially those aimed at the developing countries.
According to Secretary Clinton, President Obama's Global Health Initiative will be "the centerpiece" of his foreign policy, and even though America is drowning in debt and the U.S. economy is floundering, he has committed $63 billion to his global ObamaCare initiative.
Here are Hillary Clinton's words:
In addition to new funding, we've launched a new program that will be the centerpiece of our foreign policy, the Global Health Initiative, which commits us to spending $63 billion over six years to improve global health by investing in efforts to reduce maternal and child mortality, [and] prevent millions of unintended pregnancies.
This was not the administration's first announcement of the Global Health Initiative (GHI); President Obama issued a statement and fact sheet on the program on May 5, 2009.
What the Clinton and Obama statements do not mention is that the Obama Global Health Initiative is not an Obama initiative at all, but merely his continuation and expansion of the UN's global population control program, which is a priority concern for some of the world's wealthiest elites who want to see the planet's human population drastically reduced. The real initiators of Obama's GHI are Bill Gates, George Soros, Ted Turner, Oprah Winfrey, David Rockefeller, the World Economic Forum, the Clinton Global Initiative, the United Nations Foundation, and the International Planned Parenthood Federation.
The Gates connection to the GHI is so extensive that it is probably not an exaggeration to say the Obama Global Health Initiative represents the successful transfer of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation's global health policies into official U.S. policy, with the costs also being transferred to the U.S. taxpayers. At the conclusion of her January 8 remarks on the ICPD and GHI, Secretary Clinton introduced Dr. Rajiv Shah, the new Administrator of USAID, the State Department agency that administers U.S. foreign aid programs and that will oversee the GHI. Dr. Shah had just been sworn in to his new post the previous week, on December 31. And who is Dr. Shah? According to his USAID biography, immediately prior to joining the Obama administration, Shah worked for seven years for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, serving as a director of the Foundation's Global Health Program and its Global Development Program. Prior to that he was the healthcare policy advisor on the Gore 2000 presidential campaign. And before that he served as a policy aide in the British Parliament and worked at the World Health Organization.
The other person introduced by Hillary Clinton at the ICPD anniversary celebration was Maria Otero, the new Under Secretary of State for Global Affairs. Prior to accepting that post, Otero was president and CEO of Accion International, and before that worked at the Centre for Development and Population Activities (CEDPA). Both ACCION and CEDPA are favored funding projects of the Gates Foundation, as well as the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, two of the leading promoters of aggressive population control for the Third World.
The Secret "Good Club"
On May 24 of last year, the Times of London reported in an online article that a secret meeting of the world's leading billionaires had struck on a plan for curtailing world population. Entitled "Billionaire club in bid to curb overpopulation," it told of a gathering in Manhattan that included Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, David Rockefeller, Oprah Winfrey, and others. (The New American reported on it here.)
The British have a phrase that mockingly describes the kind of important and self-important people we are often directed to admire: "the Great and the Good." This clearly was a meeting of just such an elite. In fact, according to the Times, the gathering was "described as the Good Club by one insider." We will leave it to the reader to decide if the moniker fits.
The Times reported:
SOME of America's leading billionaires have met secretly to consider how their wealth could be used to slow the growth of the world's population and speed up improvements in health and education.
The philanthropists who attended a summit convened on the initiative of Bill Gates, the Microsoft co-founder, discussed joining forces to overcome political and religious obstacles to change.
Described as the Good Club by one insider it included David Rockefeller Jr, the patriarch of America's wealthiest dynasty, Warren Buffett and George Soros, the financiers, Michael Bloomberg, the mayor of New York, and the media moguls Ted Turner and Oprah Winfrey.
The covert palaver took place, revealed the Times story, "at the home of Sir Paul Nurse, a British Nobel Prize biochemist and president of the private Rockefeller University."
To what purpose? Patricia Stonesifer, former chief executive of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, attended the Rockefeller summit. She told the Times the billionaires met to "discuss how to increase giving." But, apparently, they were not simply interested in coordinating their own giving; they want to draft you and me into financially supporting their pet programs as well.
The Times reports that, according to an attendee, "a consensus emerged that they would back a strategy in which population growth would be tackled as a potentially disastrous environmental, social and industrial threat."
"This is something so nightmarish that everyone in this group agreed it needs big-brain answers," said the guest. "They need to be independent of government agencies, which are unable to head off the disaster we all see looming." Bill Gates, it seems, exerted a major influence on their decision. "Taking their cue from Gates they agreed that overpopulation was a priority," reported the Times.
"Global Cabal," "Alternative World Government"?
"Why all the secrecy?" the Times asked. Stacy Palmer, editor of the Chronicle of Philanthropy, told the Times the furtiveness might be "because they don't want to be seen as a global cabal." To which the contemporary "Duh," seems the only appropriate response. An attendee reportedly gave the Times this explanation: "They wanted to speak rich to rich without worrying anything they said would end up in the newspapers, painting them as an alternative world government." Ditto, double "Duhs."
But, are those descriptions — global cabal and alternative world government — unreasonable depictions of what the "Good Club" billionaires are up to? As private citizens, they should be free to shower their billions on whatever charities they deem worthy. But, clearly, in this particular area (and in others as well), they have hi-jacked our government to fund and implement their agenda. According to their anonymous apologist quoted by the Times, they meet secretly because "they need to be independent of government agencies." All well and good — if they truly were "independent of government agencies." But just the opposite is true; they are completely intertwined with government agencies, and with the UN agencies that are also intertwined with and funded by our government agencies.
The so-called Good Club elite that convened at Sir Paul Nurse's domicile — Rockefeller, Soros, Gates, Turner, Winfrey, Bloomberg—- are a top subset of a larger circle of key movers and shakers who do indeed call the shots on global political and economic affairs. And many of them are indeed pushing to transform their various global agendas into eventual formal world government. President Obama's Global Health Initiative is virtually indistinguishable from the identically named GHI launched by the World Economic Forum (WEF) in 2002. Of course, most of the Good Club members are regulars at the WEF annual gatherings of the rich and super-rich in Davos, Switzerland (or other WEF ultra-posh venues), where the Lear and Gulfstream jet sets meet to tell the middle classes and working-class poor how much they need to sacrifice to fund the Davos group's latest "compassion" projects. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is a "Strategic Partner" for the WEF's GHI.
Fanatic Malthusian Elites
Tightly entwined with the WEF and GHI is the Clinton Global Initiative, a massive project of the William J. Clinton Foundation. Launched by former President Bill Clinton in 2005, the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) has already amassed an astounding $57 billion in commitments from corporations, foundations, and individuals. Listed as "Notable Members" of the Clinton Global Initiative are, among others, Bill Gates, George Soros, and Judith Rodin, president of the Rockefeller Foundation. Oprah Winfrey, Ted Turner, and Michael Bloomberg have been participants in CGI events and donors to CGI causes. And one of the major causes that CGI has targeted is "global health," with a particular focus on the same issues of women, reproductive health, and over-population that his wife, Secretary Hillary Clinton, and her boss, President Obama, have chosen to target with their GHI. Just a few months ago, in September 2009, President Obama was introduced by Bill Clinton as a headline speaker at the Clinton Global Initiative gala in Manhattan. In his remarks at the CGI event, President Obama emphasized the "comprehensive global health strategy" of his foreign-aid program.
If we go over to the Global Health Council (GHC), a major advocacy group for GHI, we find that it is heavily funded by the Gates Foundation and has a large representation of Gates' folks directing it. The GHC's board of directors includes Julio Frenk and William Foege, both fellows at the Gates Foundation, and Valerie Nkamgang Bemo, a senior program officer of the Foundation. Director George F. Brown is a former director of the Rockefeller Foundation and former vice president of the Population Council, one of the principal founts of Rockefeller-financed population control propaganda for most of the past century. Soros and Turner are GHC funders. And, of course, GHC is tightly interwoven with Clinton's CGI and Obama's GHI.
The Malthusian fanatics of the Good Club and their fellow billionaire population-control elitists may claim to want "independence" from government, but what they really want is independence from public scrutiny, accountability, and oversight, while at the same time enjoying public financing and government implementation of their programs. The "new money" elitists — Gates, Buffet, Turner, Soros, et al. — have learned from the "old money" activists at the Rockefeller Foundation, Ford Foundation, and Carnegie foundations, that the best strategy is to get some programs going, promote them as great humanitarian efforts, build up a constituency behind them, and get them adopted as official policy. This results in greatly expanded programs funded by the taxpayers.
And precisely because the Gates-Rockefeller-Soros-Clinton-Obama "global health" agenda is being implemented under the authority of the United States government and paid for by the American taxpayers, Congress must be held accountable. Members of Congress must be forced by public pressure — for fiscal, moral, and constitutional reasons — to investigate and expose this public-private "global cabal," which does indeed pose a very real danger of becoming an "alternative world government." Proper investigation and exposure would result in a cut-off taxpayer funding to GHI projects, especially the most egregious, such as UNFPA which not only continues to support and fund the forced abortion and infanticide of China's brutal One-Child Program, but also engages in forced sterilization, coercion, bribery, and eugenics throughout the developing world.
(See here, here, here, and here.)
And UNFPA is not alone. Assisting it in these illegal and immoral actions are other U.S. and international agencies funded by the U.S. taxpayers: USAID, UNICEF, UNDP, WHO, IMF, the World Bank, etc.
The administration's Global Health Initiative, the new global ObamaCare, is in reality a major effort to launch a new wave of planetary eugenics and population control under the guise of mitigating human suffering and poverty, promoting "global health," and saving the environment.
Related articles:
ObamaCare Goes Global, Hillary Clinton Announces
The New Jacobin Elite
Some swine flu vaccines may raise heart risk
Some swine flu vaccines may raise heart risk
Some swine flu vaccines may raise heart risk
31/01/2010 18:13:00 admin
http://www.foodconsumer.org/newsite/Non-food/Drug/some_swine_flu_vaccines_may_raise_heart_risk_3101101214.html
One article authored by researchers at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz in Germany warns that use of adjuvanted swine flu vaccine may raise cardiovascular disease.
Bhakdi S and colleagues in the Nov 2009 issue of Medical microbiology and immunology noted that European countries use swine flu vaccine with either MF59 or AS03 adjuvant.
MF59 adjuvant developed by Chiron Corp is a sub-micron oil-in-water emulsion of a squalene, polyoxyethylene sorbitan monooleate (TweenTM 80) and sorbitan trioleate.
AS03 is the trade name for a squalene-based immunologic adjuvant used in various vaccine products by GlaxoSmithKline, wikipedia reports.
The authors said evidence from animal studies and clinical data indicate that stimulation of the immune system may accelerate atherogenesis raising the risk for the cardiovascular events like heart attack and stroke.
Application of adjuvanted flu vaccines to individuals at risk can be particularly damaging as it may aggravate the course of underlying atherosclerotic vessel disease.
Bhakdi pointed that deregulated immune mechanisms could result in other widespread diseases and the current safety vaccine safety trials have not specifically taken these possible side effects into account.
The authors suggested it is prudent to establish careful survey systems to monitor the possible incidents from massive inoculation of adjuvanted vaccines or to reserve swine flu with adjuvants only for emergency use.
The U.S. only approved use of non-adjuvanted swine flu vaccines in the United States, according to the Food and Drug Administration.
By Jimmy Downs
Some swine flu vaccines may raise heart risk
31/01/2010 18:13:00 admin
http://www.foodconsumer.org/newsite/Non-food/Drug/some_swine_flu_vaccines_may_raise_heart_risk_3101101214.html
One article authored by researchers at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz in Germany warns that use of adjuvanted swine flu vaccine may raise cardiovascular disease.
Bhakdi S and colleagues in the Nov 2009 issue of Medical microbiology and immunology noted that European countries use swine flu vaccine with either MF59 or AS03 adjuvant.
MF59 adjuvant developed by Chiron Corp is a sub-micron oil-in-water emulsion of a squalene, polyoxyethylene sorbitan monooleate (TweenTM 80) and sorbitan trioleate.
AS03 is the trade name for a squalene-based immunologic adjuvant used in various vaccine products by GlaxoSmithKline, wikipedia reports.
The authors said evidence from animal studies and clinical data indicate that stimulation of the immune system may accelerate atherogenesis raising the risk for the cardiovascular events like heart attack and stroke.
Application of adjuvanted flu vaccines to individuals at risk can be particularly damaging as it may aggravate the course of underlying atherosclerotic vessel disease.
Bhakdi pointed that deregulated immune mechanisms could result in other widespread diseases and the current safety vaccine safety trials have not specifically taken these possible side effects into account.
The authors suggested it is prudent to establish careful survey systems to monitor the possible incidents from massive inoculation of adjuvanted vaccines or to reserve swine flu with adjuvants only for emergency use.
The U.S. only approved use of non-adjuvanted swine flu vaccines in the United States, according to the Food and Drug Administration.
By Jimmy Downs
An Ode To Entrepreneurs - A Swan Song
An Ode To Entrepreneurs - A Swan Song
By J. Speer-Williams
1-31-10
Like swans of legend, American entrepreneurs sing their final, beautiful song before they pass away.
When everyone who is employed works for the state or federal government, we'll all likely be as impoverished as the citizens of the old Soviet Union. Remember the Soviets standing in long lines, with falling snow, to buy what they could from a dwindling short supply of consumer goods, goods they could barely afford, like two left boots of the wrong size?
Having too many people working for the government is the antithesis of prosperity. And it's estimated that for every "green" job the government creates, they'll eliminate 2.2 jobs from the real world of private enterprise, at a cost of about $700,000 apiece.
Government employees can do but three thing: Stop things, imprison people, or bomb civilizations into rubble. They create little of a positive nature.
Entrepreneurs start and finish things, things that build an affluent and viable middle-class society, something the world has seen very little of.
The small businesses and family farms that made America the envy of the world, were largely a dynamic, rugged, bright, hard-working lot of entrepreneurs, who fought for the common hope of us all: the American Dream. It was a dream of owning outright your own home, farm, vehicles, with one bread winner, and a wife/mother who ran her household, taught her children the important things of life, send her children to college, and generally ensured her little ones would enjoy a better life than hers, which was far better that what Americans are suffering through, today.
Entrepreneurs organized, operated, and assumed the risks inherit in commercial ventures, something the average government employee could never do.
It was not government employees, or corporate bureaucrats, who made America great and the envy of the world; it was our vibrant entrepreneurial-class, that made us what we once were.
Not everyone possesses the spirit, drive, attitude, and qualities of a successful entrepreneur; and so we must value them, as it is from them that come the fruits of their ingenuity and labors, we all enjoy, and from which spring an affluent middle-class.
American entrepreneurs were thinkers, doers, competitors, innovators, who fueled economic growth, created jobs, and made a better, smarter world for us all. Entrepreneurs changed our beliefs about what was possible, with their lofty visions, and their will to obtain those dreams.
Entrepreneurs often risked their life's savings, and the little they could borrow, to try untried ideas; but never did they asked for government bailouts when they failed.
Nor never did our entrepreneurs ship our millions of jobs overseas, virtually condemning billions of foreigners to low-wage slavery, and our own nation to a no-wage slavery, controlled by trillionarie, investment bankers.
Entrepreneurs have long been the heredity nemesis of the International Monetary/Banking Cartel; and in America, when we had some patriotic lawmakers, bureaucrats, and judges, hundreds of thousands of American entrepreneurs and family farmers exacted a sort of retributive justice from the Cartel, by far out-producing the Cartel's mega-corporations, something the Cartel countered, not with increased production, but with something far more sinister: Espionage!
The money-changers, whose ancestors were driven out of the Jerusalem Temple by Jesus, with a whip fashioned from fibers, slowly gained control of "our" intelligence services (sic), by which they gained control of all three branches of our federal government, the Executive, Legislative, and Judicial, with fixed elections, bribes, blackmail, and assassinations.
Once in command of our entire federal government, the Cartel set out on their complete pillage and plunder of our middle-class and its entrepreneurs, with federal regulations, directives, laws, and taxes, all meant to eliminate all small business and family farms. The Cartel has succeeded with espionage, when they could have never succeeded with honest production.
In the globalist, One-World Order agenda there must be no affluent nation, that can feed itself, independent of the global market, and centralized world governance, with the reins of power held by the International Monetary/Banking Cartel.
The American Dream, however, came true for many of us, and that's a legacy we can and must pass on to our friends, children, grandchildren, and all future generations. It's proud heritage, we must keep alive. For it was possible once, and can be againThe American Dream.
J. Speer-Williams
By J. Speer-Williams
1-31-10
Like swans of legend, American entrepreneurs sing their final, beautiful song before they pass away.
When everyone who is employed works for the state or federal government, we'll all likely be as impoverished as the citizens of the old Soviet Union. Remember the Soviets standing in long lines, with falling snow, to buy what they could from a dwindling short supply of consumer goods, goods they could barely afford, like two left boots of the wrong size?
Having too many people working for the government is the antithesis of prosperity. And it's estimated that for every "green" job the government creates, they'll eliminate 2.2 jobs from the real world of private enterprise, at a cost of about $700,000 apiece.
Government employees can do but three thing: Stop things, imprison people, or bomb civilizations into rubble. They create little of a positive nature.
Entrepreneurs start and finish things, things that build an affluent and viable middle-class society, something the world has seen very little of.
The small businesses and family farms that made America the envy of the world, were largely a dynamic, rugged, bright, hard-working lot of entrepreneurs, who fought for the common hope of us all: the American Dream. It was a dream of owning outright your own home, farm, vehicles, with one bread winner, and a wife/mother who ran her household, taught her children the important things of life, send her children to college, and generally ensured her little ones would enjoy a better life than hers, which was far better that what Americans are suffering through, today.
Entrepreneurs organized, operated, and assumed the risks inherit in commercial ventures, something the average government employee could never do.
It was not government employees, or corporate bureaucrats, who made America great and the envy of the world; it was our vibrant entrepreneurial-class, that made us what we once were.
Not everyone possesses the spirit, drive, attitude, and qualities of a successful entrepreneur; and so we must value them, as it is from them that come the fruits of their ingenuity and labors, we all enjoy, and from which spring an affluent middle-class.
American entrepreneurs were thinkers, doers, competitors, innovators, who fueled economic growth, created jobs, and made a better, smarter world for us all. Entrepreneurs changed our beliefs about what was possible, with their lofty visions, and their will to obtain those dreams.
Entrepreneurs often risked their life's savings, and the little they could borrow, to try untried ideas; but never did they asked for government bailouts when they failed.
Nor never did our entrepreneurs ship our millions of jobs overseas, virtually condemning billions of foreigners to low-wage slavery, and our own nation to a no-wage slavery, controlled by trillionarie, investment bankers.
Entrepreneurs have long been the heredity nemesis of the International Monetary/Banking Cartel; and in America, when we had some patriotic lawmakers, bureaucrats, and judges, hundreds of thousands of American entrepreneurs and family farmers exacted a sort of retributive justice from the Cartel, by far out-producing the Cartel's mega-corporations, something the Cartel countered, not with increased production, but with something far more sinister: Espionage!
The money-changers, whose ancestors were driven out of the Jerusalem Temple by Jesus, with a whip fashioned from fibers, slowly gained control of "our" intelligence services (sic), by which they gained control of all three branches of our federal government, the Executive, Legislative, and Judicial, with fixed elections, bribes, blackmail, and assassinations.
Once in command of our entire federal government, the Cartel set out on their complete pillage and plunder of our middle-class and its entrepreneurs, with federal regulations, directives, laws, and taxes, all meant to eliminate all small business and family farms. The Cartel has succeeded with espionage, when they could have never succeeded with honest production.
In the globalist, One-World Order agenda there must be no affluent nation, that can feed itself, independent of the global market, and centralized world governance, with the reins of power held by the International Monetary/Banking Cartel.
The American Dream, however, came true for many of us, and that's a legacy we can and must pass on to our friends, children, grandchildren, and all future generations. It's proud heritage, we must keep alive. For it was possible once, and can be againThe American Dream.
J. Speer-Williams
Murdoch Tabloids Strike Dr. Wakefield To Market Deadly Vaccinations
Murdoch Tabloids Strike Dr. Wakefield
To Market Deadly Vaccinations
By Dr. Leonard Horowitz
1-31-10
The PharmaMedia, led by Rupert Murdoch's tabloids, are making Dr. Andrew Wakefield a BigPharma patsy in their desperate effort to bandage the public's hemorrhaging confidence in vaccinations.
Rupert Murdoch's family and business partners are heavily invested in BigPharma, and are losing billions of dollars annually due to growing distrust of media propaganda and widespread aversion to vaccinations.
Murdoch's media, the most powerful in the world, claimed in their TimesOnline, that the public's rejection of MMR vaccinations was caused by Dr. Wakefield's publication inThe Lancet in which he and his co-authors evidenced links to autistic children from the mercury-laden shots.
Quite to the contrary, like the deadly H1N1 vaccine marketed for the 2009 "manufactured pandemic," there were hundreds of medical doctors and scientists who sparked worldwide concern over the MMR vaccine and others containing neurotoxic mercury.
According to BigPharma investigators, all vaccines function as though they were biochemical weapons of mass destruction; ideal for profitable depopulation.
Allegedly, Dr. Wakefield's ordeal with a kangaroo medical court is a blow to the heart of the anti-vaccination movement. In fact, it is just adding heat to the firestorm of condemnation focused on the revolving doors between BigPharma and the agents and agencies advancing propaganda and vaccination policies.
"The Lancet said it should not have published the study," the Associated Press reported, and that Wakefield's links to litigation against the manufacturers of the MMR vaccine were a "fatal conflict of interest."
"The most 'fatal conflict of interest' is Murdoch's private equity investments in the drug companies and vaccine makers that make people sick from side effects caused by their unsafe and largely ineffective products," reports Dr. Leonard Horowitz, Editor-in-Chief of Medical Veritas(Medical Truth) journal on whose advisory board Dr. Wakefield has honorably served for years.
Few people know that Rupert Murdoch serves as a director of the Associated Press, News Corporation, FOX News, Time Warner, and many more mainstream media companies including the TimesOnline that broke this story.
Propaganda is used to control people's minds, and vaccinations are used to contaminate people's bodies with agents that produce deadly debilitating diseases that are said to require medical management.
Controlling diseases and people this way, including the vast majority of autoimmune diseases and cancer patients, is obviously most profitable for the world's leading drug makers; especially Merck & Co., and GlaxoSmithKlein (GSK). James Murdoch, heir apparent to Rupert's fortune, oversees GSK's board of directors, according to the company's website.
Rupert's partners in pushing propaganda and public intoxications through vaccinations for global depopulation, include Thomas H. Glocer, director of Reuter's News Service and Merck & Co. Murdoch and Glocer are also partners in the David Rockefeller founded, Royal Family of England chartered, Partnership For New York City (PFNYC)--the world's most powerful drug ring and biotechnology consortium.
"Dr. Wakefield's crucifixion is a desperate well-orchestrated effort to restore faith in risky vaccinations that the majority of people worldwide no longer trust," said Dr. Horowitz.
"In its ruling, the disciplinary panel concluded that Wakefield acted dishonestly and was misleading in the way he described his study," the Murdoch-directed AP reported. Wakefield's medical jurists said he should have disclosed his expert witness fees paid by lawyers acting for parents whose children had been killed or damaged from vaccines.
"How's that for the pot calling the kettle black?" Dr. Horowitz asked Steve Gilmour on the BBC Affiliated Talk Radio Europe, referencing Murdoch's dishonesty and failure to disclose the financial reasons his newspapers persecute Dr. Wakefield. "Such yellow press exclusively benefits the Rockefeller-directed PharmaMedia." (Click here to listen to this interview on You Tube.)
In "Pharmaganda: A Study of Conflicting Interests," Dr. Horowitz, and Murdoch News Corporation defector and investigative journalist Sherri Kane, co-authored an expose on the PharmaMedia and their monopolization of medical education and public persuasion.
Horowitz and Kane investigatedDavid Rockefeller's leadership and partners in the PFNYC in which Rupert Murdoch serves as Co-Chair.
These authors concluded that the PharmaMedia's persecution of Dr. Wakefield further evidences a "hostile takeover" of science, medicine, and common sense.
This "conspiracy reality" is adequately detailed in the current issue of Medical Veritas(freely available online until February 15, 2009.)
The other PFNYC Co-chair is Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman-Sachs who also directs ABC-Disney and AstroZeneca--a company that joined Merck & Co., and GlaxoSmithKlein, in producing H1N1 vaccines for world consumption.
"After the H1N1 vaccine fraud was exposed, more than half of the medical doctors worldwide, and more than sixty-percent of nurses in the UK and America, refused to take or give these deadly shots," Dr. Horowitz explained. "The billions of dollars of unsafe and generally-ineffective vaccines stockpiled by governments are now a major liability, not only financially, but in terms of reliability of the vaccine industry and information sourcing from David Rockefeller's malfeasant officials in the World Health Organization (WHO). After their 'shortage marketing' efforts failed, they began using every possible ploy to use up these deadly vaccines."
The PharmaMedia has published nothing about the EU Parliament Council's investigation of the WHO conspiring with the vaccine industry following the scientific fraud and public fright orchestrated by these suspects, Dr. Horowitz notes. He charges those aiding and abetting BigPharma, secreting this urgent information, with administering "iatrogenocide"--medical mass murder.
"Wakefield probably gave youngsters five pounds each at his son's birthday party as a gift for helping to advance legitimate vaccine science with parental permissions," Dr. Horowitz concluded. "It is pathetic this kindness is being used against him as an alleged ethics violation...."
"Dr. Wakefield is only guilty of joining hundreds of other scientists proving what common sense tells any reasonable person--injecting people with toxic chemicals and heavy metals, including mercury, in these biochemical weapons, called 'vaccinations,' is risky and often deadly."
NOTE TO JOURNALISTS
The PharmaMedia has declared war against common sense and honest doctors. Dr. Leonard Horowitz, like Dr. Andrew Wakefield, was just targeted by SHOWTIME's producers of "Penn&Teller's Bullshit!" to be discredited for his endorsement of OxySilver - a natural alternative to risky vaccinations and deadly antibiotics. Dr. Horowitz and Ms. Kane organized a "counter sting" that will soon be made into a documentary titled, "PharmaWhores: The SHOWTIME Sting of Penn & Teller". Stay tuned to Dr. Horowitz's YouTube channel for movie trailer broadcasting soon. Watch for the launch of PharmaWhores.com
Dr. Horowitz's official website is DrLenHorowitz.com. He is the author of sixteen books including three American best-sellers, Emerging Viruses: AIDS & Ebola--Nature, Accident or Intentional?, Healing Codes for the Biological Apocalypse, and "Healing Celebrations: Miraculous Recoveries Through Ancient Scripture, Natural Medicine and Modern Science."
There is a courtesy copy of Medical Veritas, available free for online review for only 3 more weeks: CLICK HERE for Dr. Horowitz's commentary and link to "PHARMAGANDA: A Study of Conflicting Interests."
After February 15, 2010, there will be a $35 charge for accessing the Medical Veritasissue via pdf download, with individual articles in this issue available for separate purchase at $15 per download, including Dr. Harold Buttram's important article on the future of human DNA corrupted by the mutagenic viral injections accompanying childhood vaccinations.
Please help alert medical doctors about this report, and this free limited time access. Medical doctors and patients must be informed that their intelligence has been tainted by pharmaceutical special interests. This publication contains urgent life-saving knowledge.
Tetrahedron, LLC
Health Science Communication for People Around the World
Contact - Art Thompson 949-715-2217
Info@healthyworldorganization.com
217 Cedar St., Suite #326, Sandpoint, ID 83864
208-265-8065
tetra@tetrahedron.org
http://www.tetrahedron.org
To Market Deadly Vaccinations
By Dr. Leonard Horowitz
1-31-10
The PharmaMedia, led by Rupert Murdoch's tabloids, are making Dr. Andrew Wakefield a BigPharma patsy in their desperate effort to bandage the public's hemorrhaging confidence in vaccinations.
Rupert Murdoch's family and business partners are heavily invested in BigPharma, and are losing billions of dollars annually due to growing distrust of media propaganda and widespread aversion to vaccinations.
Murdoch's media, the most powerful in the world, claimed in their TimesOnline, that the public's rejection of MMR vaccinations was caused by Dr. Wakefield's publication inThe Lancet in which he and his co-authors evidenced links to autistic children from the mercury-laden shots.
Quite to the contrary, like the deadly H1N1 vaccine marketed for the 2009 "manufactured pandemic," there were hundreds of medical doctors and scientists who sparked worldwide concern over the MMR vaccine and others containing neurotoxic mercury.
According to BigPharma investigators, all vaccines function as though they were biochemical weapons of mass destruction; ideal for profitable depopulation.
Allegedly, Dr. Wakefield's ordeal with a kangaroo medical court is a blow to the heart of the anti-vaccination movement. In fact, it is just adding heat to the firestorm of condemnation focused on the revolving doors between BigPharma and the agents and agencies advancing propaganda and vaccination policies.
"The Lancet said it should not have published the study," the Associated Press reported, and that Wakefield's links to litigation against the manufacturers of the MMR vaccine were a "fatal conflict of interest."
"The most 'fatal conflict of interest' is Murdoch's private equity investments in the drug companies and vaccine makers that make people sick from side effects caused by their unsafe and largely ineffective products," reports Dr. Leonard Horowitz, Editor-in-Chief of Medical Veritas(Medical Truth) journal on whose advisory board Dr. Wakefield has honorably served for years.
Few people know that Rupert Murdoch serves as a director of the Associated Press, News Corporation, FOX News, Time Warner, and many more mainstream media companies including the TimesOnline that broke this story.
Propaganda is used to control people's minds, and vaccinations are used to contaminate people's bodies with agents that produce deadly debilitating diseases that are said to require medical management.
Controlling diseases and people this way, including the vast majority of autoimmune diseases and cancer patients, is obviously most profitable for the world's leading drug makers; especially Merck & Co., and GlaxoSmithKlein (GSK). James Murdoch, heir apparent to Rupert's fortune, oversees GSK's board of directors, according to the company's website.
Rupert's partners in pushing propaganda and public intoxications through vaccinations for global depopulation, include Thomas H. Glocer, director of Reuter's News Service and Merck & Co. Murdoch and Glocer are also partners in the David Rockefeller founded, Royal Family of England chartered, Partnership For New York City (PFNYC)--the world's most powerful drug ring and biotechnology consortium.
"Dr. Wakefield's crucifixion is a desperate well-orchestrated effort to restore faith in risky vaccinations that the majority of people worldwide no longer trust," said Dr. Horowitz.
"In its ruling, the disciplinary panel concluded that Wakefield acted dishonestly and was misleading in the way he described his study," the Murdoch-directed AP reported. Wakefield's medical jurists said he should have disclosed his expert witness fees paid by lawyers acting for parents whose children had been killed or damaged from vaccines.
"How's that for the pot calling the kettle black?" Dr. Horowitz asked Steve Gilmour on the BBC Affiliated Talk Radio Europe, referencing Murdoch's dishonesty and failure to disclose the financial reasons his newspapers persecute Dr. Wakefield. "Such yellow press exclusively benefits the Rockefeller-directed PharmaMedia." (Click here to listen to this interview on You Tube.)
In "Pharmaganda: A Study of Conflicting Interests," Dr. Horowitz, and Murdoch News Corporation defector and investigative journalist Sherri Kane, co-authored an expose on the PharmaMedia and their monopolization of medical education and public persuasion.
Horowitz and Kane investigatedDavid Rockefeller's leadership and partners in the PFNYC in which Rupert Murdoch serves as Co-Chair.
These authors concluded that the PharmaMedia's persecution of Dr. Wakefield further evidences a "hostile takeover" of science, medicine, and common sense.
This "conspiracy reality" is adequately detailed in the current issue of Medical Veritas(freely available online until February 15, 2009.)
The other PFNYC Co-chair is Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman-Sachs who also directs ABC-Disney and AstroZeneca--a company that joined Merck & Co., and GlaxoSmithKlein, in producing H1N1 vaccines for world consumption.
"After the H1N1 vaccine fraud was exposed, more than half of the medical doctors worldwide, and more than sixty-percent of nurses in the UK and America, refused to take or give these deadly shots," Dr. Horowitz explained. "The billions of dollars of unsafe and generally-ineffective vaccines stockpiled by governments are now a major liability, not only financially, but in terms of reliability of the vaccine industry and information sourcing from David Rockefeller's malfeasant officials in the World Health Organization (WHO). After their 'shortage marketing' efforts failed, they began using every possible ploy to use up these deadly vaccines."
The PharmaMedia has published nothing about the EU Parliament Council's investigation of the WHO conspiring with the vaccine industry following the scientific fraud and public fright orchestrated by these suspects, Dr. Horowitz notes. He charges those aiding and abetting BigPharma, secreting this urgent information, with administering "iatrogenocide"--medical mass murder.
"Wakefield probably gave youngsters five pounds each at his son's birthday party as a gift for helping to advance legitimate vaccine science with parental permissions," Dr. Horowitz concluded. "It is pathetic this kindness is being used against him as an alleged ethics violation...."
"Dr. Wakefield is only guilty of joining hundreds of other scientists proving what common sense tells any reasonable person--injecting people with toxic chemicals and heavy metals, including mercury, in these biochemical weapons, called 'vaccinations,' is risky and often deadly."
NOTE TO JOURNALISTS
The PharmaMedia has declared war against common sense and honest doctors. Dr. Leonard Horowitz, like Dr. Andrew Wakefield, was just targeted by SHOWTIME's producers of "Penn&Teller's Bullshit!" to be discredited for his endorsement of OxySilver - a natural alternative to risky vaccinations and deadly antibiotics. Dr. Horowitz and Ms. Kane organized a "counter sting" that will soon be made into a documentary titled, "PharmaWhores: The SHOWTIME Sting of Penn & Teller". Stay tuned to Dr. Horowitz's YouTube channel for movie trailer broadcasting soon. Watch for the launch of PharmaWhores.com
Dr. Horowitz's official website is DrLenHorowitz.com. He is the author of sixteen books including three American best-sellers, Emerging Viruses: AIDS & Ebola--Nature, Accident or Intentional?, Healing Codes for the Biological Apocalypse, and "Healing Celebrations: Miraculous Recoveries Through Ancient Scripture, Natural Medicine and Modern Science."
There is a courtesy copy of Medical Veritas, available free for online review for only 3 more weeks: CLICK HERE for Dr. Horowitz's commentary and link to "PHARMAGANDA: A Study of Conflicting Interests."
After February 15, 2010, there will be a $35 charge for accessing the Medical Veritasissue via pdf download, with individual articles in this issue available for separate purchase at $15 per download, including Dr. Harold Buttram's important article on the future of human DNA corrupted by the mutagenic viral injections accompanying childhood vaccinations.
Please help alert medical doctors about this report, and this free limited time access. Medical doctors and patients must be informed that their intelligence has been tainted by pharmaceutical special interests. This publication contains urgent life-saving knowledge.
Tetrahedron, LLC
Health Science Communication for People Around the World
Contact - Art Thompson 949-715-2217
Info@healthyworldorganization.com
217 Cedar St., Suite #326, Sandpoint, ID 83864
208-265-8065
tetra@tetrahedron.org
http://www.tetrahedron.org
Americans arrested taking children out of Haiti
Americans arrested taking children out of Haiti
PORT-AU-PRINCE – Haitian police have arrested 10 U.S. citizens caught trying to take 33 children out of the earthquake-stricken country in a suspected illicit adoption scheme, authorities said on Saturday.
The five men and five women were in custody in the capital, Port-au-Prince after their arrests on Friday night. There are fears that traffickers could try to exploit the chaos and turmoil following Haiti’s January 12 earthquake quake to engage in illegal adoptions.
One of the suspects, who says she is leader of an Idaho-based charity called New Life Children’s Refuge, denied they had done anything wrong.
The suspects were detained at Malpasse, Haiti’s main border crossing with the Dominican Republic, after Haitian police conducted a routine search of their vehicle.
Authorities said the Americans had no documents to prove they had cleared the adoption of the 33 children — aged 2 months to 12 years — through any embassy and no papers showing they were made orphans by the quake in the impoverished Caribbean country.
“This is totally illegal,” said Yves Cristalin, Haiti’s social affairs minister. “No children can leave Haiti without proper authorization and these people did not have that authorization.”
U.S. authorities could not be reached for immediate comment on the arrests.
But Laura Sillsby from the Idaho group told Reuters from a jail cell at Haiti’s Judicial Police headquarters, “We had permission from the Dominican Republic government to bring the children to an orphanage that we have there.”
“We have a Baptist minister here (in Port-au-Prince) whose orphanage totally collapsed and he asked us to take the children to the orphanage in the Dominican Republic,” Sillsby added.
“I was going to come back here to do the paperwork,” Sillsby said. “They accuse us of children trafficking. This is something I would never do. We were not trying to do something wrong.”
In addition to outright trafficking in children, authorities have voiced fears since the quake that legitimate aid groups may have flown earthquake orphans out of the country for adoption before efforts to find their parents had been exhausted.
As a result, the Haitian government halted many types of adoptions earlier this month.
There are no reliable estimates of the number of parentless and lost children at risk in Haiti’s quake-shattered capital.
(Editing by Peter Cooney)
PORT-AU-PRINCE – Haitian police have arrested 10 U.S. citizens caught trying to take 33 children out of the earthquake-stricken country in a suspected illicit adoption scheme, authorities said on Saturday.
The five men and five women were in custody in the capital, Port-au-Prince after their arrests on Friday night. There are fears that traffickers could try to exploit the chaos and turmoil following Haiti’s January 12 earthquake quake to engage in illegal adoptions.
One of the suspects, who says she is leader of an Idaho-based charity called New Life Children’s Refuge, denied they had done anything wrong.
The suspects were detained at Malpasse, Haiti’s main border crossing with the Dominican Republic, after Haitian police conducted a routine search of their vehicle.
Authorities said the Americans had no documents to prove they had cleared the adoption of the 33 children — aged 2 months to 12 years — through any embassy and no papers showing they were made orphans by the quake in the impoverished Caribbean country.
“This is totally illegal,” said Yves Cristalin, Haiti’s social affairs minister. “No children can leave Haiti without proper authorization and these people did not have that authorization.”
U.S. authorities could not be reached for immediate comment on the arrests.
But Laura Sillsby from the Idaho group told Reuters from a jail cell at Haiti’s Judicial Police headquarters, “We had permission from the Dominican Republic government to bring the children to an orphanage that we have there.”
“We have a Baptist minister here (in Port-au-Prince) whose orphanage totally collapsed and he asked us to take the children to the orphanage in the Dominican Republic,” Sillsby added.
“I was going to come back here to do the paperwork,” Sillsby said. “They accuse us of children trafficking. This is something I would never do. We were not trying to do something wrong.”
In addition to outright trafficking in children, authorities have voiced fears since the quake that legitimate aid groups may have flown earthquake orphans out of the country for adoption before efforts to find their parents had been exhausted.
As a result, the Haitian government halted many types of adoptions earlier this month.
There are no reliable estimates of the number of parentless and lost children at risk in Haiti’s quake-shattered capital.
(Editing by Peter Cooney)
UN climate change panel based claims on student dissertation and magazine article
UN climate change panel based claims on student dissertation and magazine article
The United Nations' expert panel on climate change based claims about ice disappearing from the world's mountain tops on a student's dissertation and an article in a mountaineering magazine.
By Richard Gray, Science Correspondent and Rebecca Lefort
Published: 9:00PM GMT 30 Jan 2010
Comments 110 | Comment on this article
Officials were forced earlier this month to retract inaccurate claims in the IPCC's report about the melting of Himalayan glaciers Photo: GETTY The revelation will cause fresh embarrassment for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which had to issue a humiliating apology earlier this month over inaccurate statements about global warming.
The IPCC's remit is to provide an authoritative assessment of scientific evidence on climate change.
Related Articles
World's most powerful climate scientist writes racy novel
Water vapour is a major cause of global warming and cooling find scientists
Call for climate change 'honesty'
United Nations defends climate change evidence
IPCC: climate change scientists are 'only human'
Second blunder by UN climate science panel In its most recent report, it stated that observed reductions in mountain ice in the Andes, Alps and Africa was being caused by global warming, citing two papers as the source of the information.
However, it can be revealed that one of the sources quoted was a feature article published in a popular magazine for climbers which was based on anecdotal evidence from mountaineers about the changes they were witnessing on the mountainsides around them.
The other was a dissertation written by a geography student, studying for the equivalent of a master's degree, at the University of Berne in Switzerland that quoted interviews with mountain guides in the Alps.
The revelations, uncovered by The Sunday Telegraph, have raised fresh questions about the quality of the information contained in the report, which was published in 2007.
It comes after officials for the panel were forced earlier this month to retract inaccurate claims in the IPCC's report about the melting of Himalayan glaciers.
Sceptics have seized upon the mistakes to cast doubt over the validity of the IPCC and have called for the panel to be disbanded.
This week scientists from around the world leapt to the defence of the IPCC, insisting that despite the errors, which they describe as minor, the majority of the science presented in the IPCC report is sound and its conclusions are unaffected.
But some researchers have expressed exasperation at the IPCC's use of unsubstantiated claims and sources outside of the scientific literature.
Professor Richard Tol, one of the report's authors who is based at the Economic and Social Research Institute in Dublin, Ireland, said: "These are essentially a collection of anecdotes.
"Why did they do this? It is quite astounding. Although there have probably been no policy decisions made on the basis of this, it is illustrative of how sloppy Working Group Two (the panel of experts within the IPCC responsible for drawing up this section of the report) has been.
"There is no way current climbers and mountain guides can give anecdotal evidence back to the 1900s, so what they claim is complete nonsense."
The IPCC report, which is published every six years, is used by government's worldwide to inform policy decisions that affect billions of people.
The claims about disappearing mountain ice were contained within a table entitled "Selected observed effects due to changes in the cryosphere produced by warming".
It states that reductions in mountain ice have been observed from the loss of ice climbs in the Andes, Alps and in Africa between 1900 and 2000.
The report also states that the section is intended to "assess studies that have been published since the TAR (Third Assessment Report) of observed changes and their effects".
But neither the dissertation or the magazine article cited as sources for this information were ever subject to the rigorous scientific review process that research published in scientific journals must undergo.
The magazine article, which was written by Mark Bowen, a climber and author of two books on climate change, appeared in Climbing magazine in 2002. It quoted anecdotal evidence from climbers of retreating glaciers and the loss of ice from climbs since the 1970s.
Mr Bowen said: "I am surprised that they have cited an article from a climbing magazine, but there is no reason why anecdotal evidence from climbers should be disregarded as they are spending a great deal of time in places that other people rarely go and so notice the changes."
The dissertation paper, written by professional mountain guide and climate change campaigner Dario-Andri Schworer while he was studying for a geography degree, quotes observations from interviews with around 80 mountain guides in the Bernina region of the Swiss Alps.
Experts claim that loss of ice climbs are a poor indicator of a reduction in mountain ice as climbers can knock ice down and damage ice falls with their axes and crampons.
The IPCC has faced growing criticism over the sources it used in its last report after it emerged the panel had used unsubstantiated figures on glacial melting in the Himalayas that were contained within a World Wildlife Fund (WWF) report.
It can be revealed that the IPCC report made use of 16 non-peer reviewed WWF reports.
One claim, which stated that coral reefs near mangrove forests contained up to 25 times more fish numbers than those without mangroves nearby, quoted a feature article on the WWF website.
In fact the data contained within the WWF article originated from a paper published in 2004 in the respected journal Nature.
In another example a WWF paper on forest fires was used to illustrate the impact of reduced rainfall in the Amazon rainforest, but the data was from another Nature paper published in 1999.
When The Sunday Telegraph contacted the lead scientists behind the two papers in Nature, they expressed surprise that their research was not cited directly but said the IPCC had accurately represented their work.
The chair of the IPCC Rajendra Pachauri has faced mounting pressure and calls for his resignation amid the growing controversy over the error on glacier melting and use of unreliable sources of information.
A survey of 400 authors and contributors to the IPCC report showed, however, that the majority still support Mr Pachauri and the panel's vice chairs. They also insisted the overall findings of the report are robust despite the minor errors.
But many expressed concern at the use of non-peer reviewed information in the reports and called for a tightening of the guidelines on how information can be used.
The Met Office, which has seven researchers who contributed to the report including Professor Martin Parry who was co-chair of the working group responsible for the part of the report that contained the glacier errors, said: "The IPCC should continue to ensure that its review process is as robust and transparent as possible, that it draws only from the peer-reviewed literature, and that uncertainties in the science and projections are clearly expressed."
Roger Sedjo, a senior research fellow at the US research organisation Resources for the Future who also contributed to the IPCC's latest report, added: "The IPCC is, unfortunately, a highly political organisation with most of the secretariat bordering on climate advocacy.
"It needs to develop a more balanced and indeed scientifically sceptical behaviour pattern. The organisation tend to select the most negative studies ignoring more positive alternatives."
The IPCC failed to respond to questions about the inclusion of unreliable sources in its report but it has insisted over the past week that despite minor errors, the findings of the report are still robust and consistent with the underlying science.
The United Nations' expert panel on climate change based claims about ice disappearing from the world's mountain tops on a student's dissertation and an article in a mountaineering magazine.
By Richard Gray, Science Correspondent and Rebecca Lefort
Published: 9:00PM GMT 30 Jan 2010
Comments 110 | Comment on this article
Officials were forced earlier this month to retract inaccurate claims in the IPCC's report about the melting of Himalayan glaciers Photo: GETTY The revelation will cause fresh embarrassment for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which had to issue a humiliating apology earlier this month over inaccurate statements about global warming.
The IPCC's remit is to provide an authoritative assessment of scientific evidence on climate change.
Related Articles
World's most powerful climate scientist writes racy novel
Water vapour is a major cause of global warming and cooling find scientists
Call for climate change 'honesty'
United Nations defends climate change evidence
IPCC: climate change scientists are 'only human'
Second blunder by UN climate science panel In its most recent report, it stated that observed reductions in mountain ice in the Andes, Alps and Africa was being caused by global warming, citing two papers as the source of the information.
However, it can be revealed that one of the sources quoted was a feature article published in a popular magazine for climbers which was based on anecdotal evidence from mountaineers about the changes they were witnessing on the mountainsides around them.
The other was a dissertation written by a geography student, studying for the equivalent of a master's degree, at the University of Berne in Switzerland that quoted interviews with mountain guides in the Alps.
The revelations, uncovered by The Sunday Telegraph, have raised fresh questions about the quality of the information contained in the report, which was published in 2007.
It comes after officials for the panel were forced earlier this month to retract inaccurate claims in the IPCC's report about the melting of Himalayan glaciers.
Sceptics have seized upon the mistakes to cast doubt over the validity of the IPCC and have called for the panel to be disbanded.
This week scientists from around the world leapt to the defence of the IPCC, insisting that despite the errors, which they describe as minor, the majority of the science presented in the IPCC report is sound and its conclusions are unaffected.
But some researchers have expressed exasperation at the IPCC's use of unsubstantiated claims and sources outside of the scientific literature.
Professor Richard Tol, one of the report's authors who is based at the Economic and Social Research Institute in Dublin, Ireland, said: "These are essentially a collection of anecdotes.
"Why did they do this? It is quite astounding. Although there have probably been no policy decisions made on the basis of this, it is illustrative of how sloppy Working Group Two (the panel of experts within the IPCC responsible for drawing up this section of the report) has been.
"There is no way current climbers and mountain guides can give anecdotal evidence back to the 1900s, so what they claim is complete nonsense."
The IPCC report, which is published every six years, is used by government's worldwide to inform policy decisions that affect billions of people.
The claims about disappearing mountain ice were contained within a table entitled "Selected observed effects due to changes in the cryosphere produced by warming".
It states that reductions in mountain ice have been observed from the loss of ice climbs in the Andes, Alps and in Africa between 1900 and 2000.
The report also states that the section is intended to "assess studies that have been published since the TAR (Third Assessment Report) of observed changes and their effects".
But neither the dissertation or the magazine article cited as sources for this information were ever subject to the rigorous scientific review process that research published in scientific journals must undergo.
The magazine article, which was written by Mark Bowen, a climber and author of two books on climate change, appeared in Climbing magazine in 2002. It quoted anecdotal evidence from climbers of retreating glaciers and the loss of ice from climbs since the 1970s.
Mr Bowen said: "I am surprised that they have cited an article from a climbing magazine, but there is no reason why anecdotal evidence from climbers should be disregarded as they are spending a great deal of time in places that other people rarely go and so notice the changes."
The dissertation paper, written by professional mountain guide and climate change campaigner Dario-Andri Schworer while he was studying for a geography degree, quotes observations from interviews with around 80 mountain guides in the Bernina region of the Swiss Alps.
Experts claim that loss of ice climbs are a poor indicator of a reduction in mountain ice as climbers can knock ice down and damage ice falls with their axes and crampons.
The IPCC has faced growing criticism over the sources it used in its last report after it emerged the panel had used unsubstantiated figures on glacial melting in the Himalayas that were contained within a World Wildlife Fund (WWF) report.
It can be revealed that the IPCC report made use of 16 non-peer reviewed WWF reports.
One claim, which stated that coral reefs near mangrove forests contained up to 25 times more fish numbers than those without mangroves nearby, quoted a feature article on the WWF website.
In fact the data contained within the WWF article originated from a paper published in 2004 in the respected journal Nature.
In another example a WWF paper on forest fires was used to illustrate the impact of reduced rainfall in the Amazon rainforest, but the data was from another Nature paper published in 1999.
When The Sunday Telegraph contacted the lead scientists behind the two papers in Nature, they expressed surprise that their research was not cited directly but said the IPCC had accurately represented their work.
The chair of the IPCC Rajendra Pachauri has faced mounting pressure and calls for his resignation amid the growing controversy over the error on glacier melting and use of unreliable sources of information.
A survey of 400 authors and contributors to the IPCC report showed, however, that the majority still support Mr Pachauri and the panel's vice chairs. They also insisted the overall findings of the report are robust despite the minor errors.
But many expressed concern at the use of non-peer reviewed information in the reports and called for a tightening of the guidelines on how information can be used.
The Met Office, which has seven researchers who contributed to the report including Professor Martin Parry who was co-chair of the working group responsible for the part of the report that contained the glacier errors, said: "The IPCC should continue to ensure that its review process is as robust and transparent as possible, that it draws only from the peer-reviewed literature, and that uncertainties in the science and projections are clearly expressed."
Roger Sedjo, a senior research fellow at the US research organisation Resources for the Future who also contributed to the IPCC's latest report, added: "The IPCC is, unfortunately, a highly political organisation with most of the secretariat bordering on climate advocacy.
"It needs to develop a more balanced and indeed scientifically sceptical behaviour pattern. The organisation tend to select the most negative studies ignoring more positive alternatives."
The IPCC failed to respond to questions about the inclusion of unreliable sources in its report but it has insisted over the past week that despite minor errors, the findings of the report are still robust and consistent with the underlying science.
Saturday, January 30, 2010
Men: Your Biological Clocks are Ticking
A place to learn about natural family planning
Men: Your Biological Clocks are Ticking!
by Whitney Rhodes on January 30, 2010
For many years, it was tacitly assumed that while women have a “Sell By” date when it comes to fertility, men become fertile at puberty and remain so until a ripe old age.
Actually, although there is some truth in that myth, to the extent that males do not have a hormonal menopause as women do; the fact is that fertility in men does begin to decline after a certain age.
Men don’t completely stop being fertile at any age.
However, older fathers are prone to problems that younger fathers usually don’t experience.
What are Some of the Problems Experienced by Older Fathers?
A study that was conducted recently at the University of California, Berkeley, on a test group of men aged 22 to 80 showed that the sperm of older men are fewer in number with less mobility, as well as being less able to move in a straight line.
This research also showed an increased risk of achondroplasia, a genetic mutation that produces a kind of dwarfism.
Nor was this the only risk.
Older fathers were shown to have an increased risk of siring children with autism, or who were mentally retarded, or have behavioral problems with conditions such as schizophrenia.
Downs Syndrome, although associated with older mothers, doesn’t seem so far to be one of the risks of older fathers, but testing is still in progress.
It is believed that many times, male fertility problems caused by age and/or a medical condition might be mistaken as a potency issue, and mistakenly treated with a prescription for Viagra or a similar medication.
Investigating male infertility, and research of male sperm is gaining much new ground these days, as specialists recognize that infertility is not any more likely to rest with the female half of a couple than the male.
Today, more than ever, men and women alike are waiting longer to start families. This has given rise to an increasing frequency of fertility problems encountered with older parents.
So, although men are never completely infertile due to age, research has shown that the quality and quantity of sperm decrease with age.
Men: Your Biological Clocks are Ticking!
by Whitney Rhodes on January 30, 2010
For many years, it was tacitly assumed that while women have a “Sell By” date when it comes to fertility, men become fertile at puberty and remain so until a ripe old age.
Actually, although there is some truth in that myth, to the extent that males do not have a hormonal menopause as women do; the fact is that fertility in men does begin to decline after a certain age.
Men don’t completely stop being fertile at any age.
However, older fathers are prone to problems that younger fathers usually don’t experience.
What are Some of the Problems Experienced by Older Fathers?
A study that was conducted recently at the University of California, Berkeley, on a test group of men aged 22 to 80 showed that the sperm of older men are fewer in number with less mobility, as well as being less able to move in a straight line.
This research also showed an increased risk of achondroplasia, a genetic mutation that produces a kind of dwarfism.
Nor was this the only risk.
Older fathers were shown to have an increased risk of siring children with autism, or who were mentally retarded, or have behavioral problems with conditions such as schizophrenia.
Downs Syndrome, although associated with older mothers, doesn’t seem so far to be one of the risks of older fathers, but testing is still in progress.
It is believed that many times, male fertility problems caused by age and/or a medical condition might be mistaken as a potency issue, and mistakenly treated with a prescription for Viagra or a similar medication.
Investigating male infertility, and research of male sperm is gaining much new ground these days, as specialists recognize that infertility is not any more likely to rest with the female half of a couple than the male.
Today, more than ever, men and women alike are waiting longer to start families. This has given rise to an increasing frequency of fertility problems encountered with older parents.
So, although men are never completely infertile due to age, research has shown that the quality and quantity of sperm decrease with age.
Cap And Trade Scam To Be Enforced At State Level
Cap And Trade Scam To Be Enforced At State Level
Individuals and businesses in Austin and a plethora of other states to be taxed for emissions of life-giving gas carbon dioxide
Paul Joseph Watson & Alex Jones
Prison Planet.com
Friday, January 29, 2010
Globalists intent on ushering in a zero-growth post-industrial society are bypassing the federal government’s stuttering efforts to implement the cap and trade scam and going directly to the states in an effort to impose their control freak tax on the very life-giving gas that we all exhale – carbon dioxide.
Even as the foundation of the argument that human emissions of CO2 cause global warming crumbles and collapses amidst scandal after scandal, energy companies and state authorities are still pushing ahead with sinister plans to mandate that individuals and businesses get government allowances and permits to emit carbon dioxide.
KLBJ radio reports that Austin Energy, which powers the city, presented to the Austin City Council “Austin Energy’s Carbon Reduction Plan,” which goes even further than the federal cap and trade bill in calling for CO2 emissions to be reduced by 20% by 2025.
The fact that energy companies are behind this again disproves the flawed notion that oil and electricity companies oppose the global warming movement, when in fact they are its major adherents. The climate change scam is a goldmine for them because effectively licensing CO2 emissions only drives up utility prices – the costs are passed on to the consumer and their profits soar.
Austin Energy head Roger Duncan told the Austin City Council that the program would cost around $2.6 billion, but since the cost such initiatives is routinely underestimated, expect a final figure that is significantly higher. He admitted that the plan would cause energy prices to rise.
This will of course result in much higher energy bills for the general public because they will be forced to buy permits from the government to emit the deadly life-giving gas carbon dioxide.
The program will also include a Energy Conservation Audit and Disclosure Ordinance, which will empower environmental goons to perform energy audits on every house over ten years old when it is put up for sale. The new enforcement would also require “an energy audit/rating for all non-industrial commercial buildings with 5,000 square feet or more and multifamily properties with five or more units, aged 10 years or older.”
(ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW)
A similar system was introduced in 2007 in the UK amidst widespread derision and loathing. Known as Home Information Packs, shortly after they were introduced the British property market crashed as sellers refused to pay the fee, which was mandatory for all home sales. The system has since become notorious as nothing more than an odious new tax.
The implementation of so-called “green economies” in other countries has devastated economies and cost millions of jobs. As the Seattle Times reported back in June, Spain’s staggering unemployment rate of over 18 per cent was partly down to massive job losses as a result of attempts to replace existing industry with wind farms and other forms of alternative energy.
In a so-called “green economy,” “Each new job entails the loss of 2.2 other jobs that are either lost or not created in other industries because of the political allocation — sub-optimum in terms of economic efficiency — of capital,” states the report.
Despite the fact that the carbon trading market, along with “smart meter” programs, have been exposed as slush fund scams owned by the very globalists fearmongering about man-made climate change – namely Al Gore and Maurice Strong – designed to line the pockets of habitual con men who have been caught over and over again lying about the evidence behind global warming, states are now adopting their own version of the scheme so that the trick can be played on an unsuspecting public who still think that cap and trade hasn’t been implemented.
In reality, as Bloomberg News reports, “State government actions are likely to dominate the emerging U.S. carbon market in 2010,” with programs set to expand. “A group of Northeastern states already has a carbon market and two more regional programs in the Midwest and West plan to follow suit,” states the article.
As we have highlighted in the past, the ultimate goal is to reduce carbon emissions by at least 80 per cent by 2050, a move that would inflict a new Great Depression, cost millions of jobs, and sink America to near third world status.
The agenda to cut carbon emissions by 80 per cent is a huge leap towards the ultimate goal, expressed by the Carnegie Institute in 2008 and afforded sober credibility by the corporate media – a complete reduction down to zero carbon emissions, which would return mankind to the agrarian age and completely reverse hundreds of years of technological progress.
This is the ultimate tax on life and a dream come true for control freaks and globalist organizations like the Bilderberg Group and the Club of Rome who have openly pushed for a “post-industrial zero-growth society” where our standards of living are drastically reduced.
As internationally bestselling author and Bilderberg expert Daniel Estulin writes in his book The Bilderberg Group, “In a post-industrial period, zero growth will be necessary to destroy vestiges of general prosperity. When there is prosperity, there is progress. Prosperity and progress make it impossible to implement repression, and you need repression if you hope to divide society into owners and slaves. The end of prosperity will bring an end to the production of nuclear-generated electric power (as well as coal-fired plants – ed) and all industrialization (except for the computer and service industries.) The remaining Canadian and American industries would be exported to poor countries such as Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Nicaragua, where slave labor is cheap. One of the principal objectives for NAFTA will then be realized.”
Individuals and businesses in Austin and a plethora of other states to be taxed for emissions of life-giving gas carbon dioxide
Paul Joseph Watson & Alex Jones
Prison Planet.com
Friday, January 29, 2010
Globalists intent on ushering in a zero-growth post-industrial society are bypassing the federal government’s stuttering efforts to implement the cap and trade scam and going directly to the states in an effort to impose their control freak tax on the very life-giving gas that we all exhale – carbon dioxide.
Even as the foundation of the argument that human emissions of CO2 cause global warming crumbles and collapses amidst scandal after scandal, energy companies and state authorities are still pushing ahead with sinister plans to mandate that individuals and businesses get government allowances and permits to emit carbon dioxide.
KLBJ radio reports that Austin Energy, which powers the city, presented to the Austin City Council “Austin Energy’s Carbon Reduction Plan,” which goes even further than the federal cap and trade bill in calling for CO2 emissions to be reduced by 20% by 2025.
The fact that energy companies are behind this again disproves the flawed notion that oil and electricity companies oppose the global warming movement, when in fact they are its major adherents. The climate change scam is a goldmine for them because effectively licensing CO2 emissions only drives up utility prices – the costs are passed on to the consumer and their profits soar.
Austin Energy head Roger Duncan told the Austin City Council that the program would cost around $2.6 billion, but since the cost such initiatives is routinely underestimated, expect a final figure that is significantly higher. He admitted that the plan would cause energy prices to rise.
This will of course result in much higher energy bills for the general public because they will be forced to buy permits from the government to emit the deadly life-giving gas carbon dioxide.
The program will also include a Energy Conservation Audit and Disclosure Ordinance, which will empower environmental goons to perform energy audits on every house over ten years old when it is put up for sale. The new enforcement would also require “an energy audit/rating for all non-industrial commercial buildings with 5,000 square feet or more and multifamily properties with five or more units, aged 10 years or older.”
(ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW)
A similar system was introduced in 2007 in the UK amidst widespread derision and loathing. Known as Home Information Packs, shortly after they were introduced the British property market crashed as sellers refused to pay the fee, which was mandatory for all home sales. The system has since become notorious as nothing more than an odious new tax.
The implementation of so-called “green economies” in other countries has devastated economies and cost millions of jobs. As the Seattle Times reported back in June, Spain’s staggering unemployment rate of over 18 per cent was partly down to massive job losses as a result of attempts to replace existing industry with wind farms and other forms of alternative energy.
In a so-called “green economy,” “Each new job entails the loss of 2.2 other jobs that are either lost or not created in other industries because of the political allocation — sub-optimum in terms of economic efficiency — of capital,” states the report.
Despite the fact that the carbon trading market, along with “smart meter” programs, have been exposed as slush fund scams owned by the very globalists fearmongering about man-made climate change – namely Al Gore and Maurice Strong – designed to line the pockets of habitual con men who have been caught over and over again lying about the evidence behind global warming, states are now adopting their own version of the scheme so that the trick can be played on an unsuspecting public who still think that cap and trade hasn’t been implemented.
In reality, as Bloomberg News reports, “State government actions are likely to dominate the emerging U.S. carbon market in 2010,” with programs set to expand. “A group of Northeastern states already has a carbon market and two more regional programs in the Midwest and West plan to follow suit,” states the article.
As we have highlighted in the past, the ultimate goal is to reduce carbon emissions by at least 80 per cent by 2050, a move that would inflict a new Great Depression, cost millions of jobs, and sink America to near third world status.
The agenda to cut carbon emissions by 80 per cent is a huge leap towards the ultimate goal, expressed by the Carnegie Institute in 2008 and afforded sober credibility by the corporate media – a complete reduction down to zero carbon emissions, which would return mankind to the agrarian age and completely reverse hundreds of years of technological progress.
This is the ultimate tax on life and a dream come true for control freaks and globalist organizations like the Bilderberg Group and the Club of Rome who have openly pushed for a “post-industrial zero-growth society” where our standards of living are drastically reduced.
As internationally bestselling author and Bilderberg expert Daniel Estulin writes in his book The Bilderberg Group, “In a post-industrial period, zero growth will be necessary to destroy vestiges of general prosperity. When there is prosperity, there is progress. Prosperity and progress make it impossible to implement repression, and you need repression if you hope to divide society into owners and slaves. The end of prosperity will bring an end to the production of nuclear-generated electric power (as well as coal-fired plants – ed) and all industrialization (except for the computer and service industries.) The remaining Canadian and American industries would be exported to poor countries such as Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Nicaragua, where slave labor is cheap. One of the principal objectives for NAFTA will then be realized.”
Obama Puts Social Security on the Chopping Block
Obama Puts Social Security on the Chopping Block!
January 30, 2010 by ppjg
A NATION BEGUILED.COM
“Notice at the end, the point made about how, thus far, Social Security has been running a SURPLUS! They don’t mention anything about that.”
__________________________________________
By James Ridgeway
Hope for lasting liberal change was washed away on Tuesday—not just with the loss of the Democrats’ super-majority in the Senate, but with a closed-door deal that would lead to cuts in bedrock liberal programs such as Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. While Massachusetts voters were casting their ballots to install Republican Scott Brown in Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat, President Obama was hammering out an agreement with Democratic leaders to support a commission on the deficit with the power to propose reductions to entitlement programs. This proposal represents a capitulation to conservatives in both parties, and leaves liberals surrendering not only on health care, but on the core achievements of the New Deal and the Great Society.
Under the agreement, President Obama would issue an executive order to create an 18-member panel that would be granted broad authority to propose changes in the tax code and in the massive federal entitlement programs — including Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security — that threaten to drive the nation’s debt to levels not seen since World War II.
The accord comes a week before Obama is scheduled to deliver his first State of the Union address to a nation increasingly concerned about his stewardship of the economy and the federal budget. After a year in which he advocated spending hundreds of billions of dollars on a huge economic stimulus package and a far-reaching overhaul of the health-care system, Obama has pledged to redouble his effort to rein in record budget deficits even as he has come under withering Republican attack.
The commission would deliver its recommendations after this fall’s congressional elections, postponing potentially painful decisions about the nation’s fiscal future until after Democrats face the voters. But if the commission approves a deficit-reduction plan, Congress would have to act on it quickly under the agreement, forged late Tuesday in a meeting with Vice President Biden, White House budget director Peter R. Orszag, and Democratic lawmakers led by Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (Nev.), House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer (Md.).
Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad (D-N.D.), who has long advocated creation of an independent budget panel, called the agreement an “understanding in concept” that holds the promise of at last addressing the nation’s most wrenching budget problems.
“This goes to the question of the country’s credibility with managing its own finances. This is essential for the nation,” Conrad said.
The commission is likely to form the centerpiece of Democrats’ efforts to reduce projected budget deficits, which have soared into record territory in the aftermath of the worst recession in a generation. Government spending to bail out the troubled financial sector and to stimulate economic activity have combined with sagging tax collections to push last year’s budget deficit to a record $1.4 trillion. The budget gap is projected to be just as large this year and to hover close to $1 trillion a year for much of the next decade.
The deal is based on a rickety interpretation of the country’s basic laws governing taxation. Normally, any change in taxes must be passed first by the House, with legislation wending its way through the Ways and Means Committee up to the floor. But the proposed arrangement shortcuts—indeed appears to bypass—this procedure. The appointed commission is to make a recommendation on the budget after the November midterm elections. That recommendation will then go straight to the floor of both houses for an up or down binding vote. There are no congressional hearings and no opportunity for members of the House to weigh in on the proposals. To rub salt in the wound, this plan was largely crafted not by members of the House, but by vice president and former Delaware senator Joe Biden along with two senators: Kent Conrad, the North Dakota Democrat once considered heir to the Great Plains progressive tradition, and Republican Judd Gregg from New Hampshire.
The National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare, which has been fighting the proposed commission, recently sent a letter to Congress disputing the entire premise of efforts to slash Social Security:
We appreciate the concerns of legislators who are looking for a means of reducing the federal deficit and slowing the growth in the debt. However, we have significant concerns about any process—including the Conrad-Gregg Commission—that would disenfranchise American voters and subject Social Security beneficiaries to harmful cuts in benefits. As supporters of Social Security, we are surprised to see the federal deficit and the federal debt cited as the reason a commission needs to be established to make cuts in Social Security. The truth is that neither the $1.4 trillion deficit nor the nearly $12 trillion debt has anything to do with Social Security benefits.
For nearly three decades, Social Security has taken in more revenue each year than it has paid out in benefits. These excess funds have been invested in special issue U.S. government securities. Thus, Social Security has effectively been loaning its excess funds to the federal government to spend on other programs. Rather than increasing the federal deficit, Social Security’s annual surpluses have actually been covering up the true size of the deficit in the general fund.
Distributed Free by:
Contact: James P. Harvey
January 30, 2010 by ppjg
A NATION BEGUILED.COM
“Notice at the end, the point made about how, thus far, Social Security has been running a SURPLUS! They don’t mention anything about that.”
__________________________________________
By James Ridgeway
Hope for lasting liberal change was washed away on Tuesday—not just with the loss of the Democrats’ super-majority in the Senate, but with a closed-door deal that would lead to cuts in bedrock liberal programs such as Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. While Massachusetts voters were casting their ballots to install Republican Scott Brown in Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat, President Obama was hammering out an agreement with Democratic leaders to support a commission on the deficit with the power to propose reductions to entitlement programs. This proposal represents a capitulation to conservatives in both parties, and leaves liberals surrendering not only on health care, but on the core achievements of the New Deal and the Great Society.
Under the agreement, President Obama would issue an executive order to create an 18-member panel that would be granted broad authority to propose changes in the tax code and in the massive federal entitlement programs — including Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security — that threaten to drive the nation’s debt to levels not seen since World War II.
The accord comes a week before Obama is scheduled to deliver his first State of the Union address to a nation increasingly concerned about his stewardship of the economy and the federal budget. After a year in which he advocated spending hundreds of billions of dollars on a huge economic stimulus package and a far-reaching overhaul of the health-care system, Obama has pledged to redouble his effort to rein in record budget deficits even as he has come under withering Republican attack.
The commission would deliver its recommendations after this fall’s congressional elections, postponing potentially painful decisions about the nation’s fiscal future until after Democrats face the voters. But if the commission approves a deficit-reduction plan, Congress would have to act on it quickly under the agreement, forged late Tuesday in a meeting with Vice President Biden, White House budget director Peter R. Orszag, and Democratic lawmakers led by Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (Nev.), House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer (Md.).
Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad (D-N.D.), who has long advocated creation of an independent budget panel, called the agreement an “understanding in concept” that holds the promise of at last addressing the nation’s most wrenching budget problems.
“This goes to the question of the country’s credibility with managing its own finances. This is essential for the nation,” Conrad said.
The commission is likely to form the centerpiece of Democrats’ efforts to reduce projected budget deficits, which have soared into record territory in the aftermath of the worst recession in a generation. Government spending to bail out the troubled financial sector and to stimulate economic activity have combined with sagging tax collections to push last year’s budget deficit to a record $1.4 trillion. The budget gap is projected to be just as large this year and to hover close to $1 trillion a year for much of the next decade.
The deal is based on a rickety interpretation of the country’s basic laws governing taxation. Normally, any change in taxes must be passed first by the House, with legislation wending its way through the Ways and Means Committee up to the floor. But the proposed arrangement shortcuts—indeed appears to bypass—this procedure. The appointed commission is to make a recommendation on the budget after the November midterm elections. That recommendation will then go straight to the floor of both houses for an up or down binding vote. There are no congressional hearings and no opportunity for members of the House to weigh in on the proposals. To rub salt in the wound, this plan was largely crafted not by members of the House, but by vice president and former Delaware senator Joe Biden along with two senators: Kent Conrad, the North Dakota Democrat once considered heir to the Great Plains progressive tradition, and Republican Judd Gregg from New Hampshire.
The National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare, which has been fighting the proposed commission, recently sent a letter to Congress disputing the entire premise of efforts to slash Social Security:
We appreciate the concerns of legislators who are looking for a means of reducing the federal deficit and slowing the growth in the debt. However, we have significant concerns about any process—including the Conrad-Gregg Commission—that would disenfranchise American voters and subject Social Security beneficiaries to harmful cuts in benefits. As supporters of Social Security, we are surprised to see the federal deficit and the federal debt cited as the reason a commission needs to be established to make cuts in Social Security. The truth is that neither the $1.4 trillion deficit nor the nearly $12 trillion debt has anything to do with Social Security benefits.
For nearly three decades, Social Security has taken in more revenue each year than it has paid out in benefits. These excess funds have been invested in special issue U.S. government securities. Thus, Social Security has effectively been loaning its excess funds to the federal government to spend on other programs. Rather than increasing the federal deficit, Social Security’s annual surpluses have actually been covering up the true size of the deficit in the general fund.
Distributed Free by:
Contact: James P. Harvey
30 MILLION PRODUCTIVE JOBS TO REBUILD US INFRASTRUCTURE, INDUSTRY AND AGRICULTURE: THE PROGRAM TO END THE ECONOMIC DEPRESSION
by Webster G. Tarpley, www.tarpley.net
November 14, 2009
by Webster G. Tarpley, www.tarpley.net
November 14, 2009
.Obama Budget Will Assume Revenue From Climate Law
.Obama Budget Will Assume Revenue From Climate Law
Fri Jan 29, 1:50 pm ET
President Obama's fiscal 2011 budget will project hundreds of billions of dollars in new federal revenue from a proposed comprehensive cap-and-trade climate law, according to Democratic aides -- despite dimming prospects for enacting such legislation this year.
Including cap-and-trade revenue in the new budget underscores Obama's commitment to press ahead with climate legislation, which passed in the House last year but stalled in the Senate. The president reiterated his insistence that Congress address global warming in his State of the Union address.
In the fiscal 2010 budget, the White House projected raising $646 billion in federal revenue over a decade through the sale of emissions allowances to polluters. Under the plan, emissions would be capped and polluters would need to hold government-issued allowances to release carbon dioxide and other gases that contribute to global warming. The allowances could then be bought and sold in the marketplace.
That budget would have used about two-thirds of the revenue to fund payroll tax breaks through the administration's "Making Work Pay" program. About $15 billion annually, for a total of $150 billion over a decade, would have been reserved for alternative energy research and development.
Senate aides say they expect the fiscal 2011 budget to make different recommendations for spending any revenue from a climate law.
But North Dakota Democrat Byron L. Dorgan, chairman of the Senate Energy-Water Appropriations Subcommittee, said any proposal to spend cap-and-trade revenue is probably dead on arrival.
"If there's an anticipation of cap-and-trade revenues, I think that anticipation probably is not going to result in success because my best estimate is that we're not likely to do a cap-and-trade bill this year," Dorgan said.
Senate Foreign Relations Chairman John Kerry, D-Mass., who is leading efforts to write a bipartisan climate bill, said he objects to using cap-and-trade revenue for the "Making Work Pay" program and would rather see it go more directly toward easing the burden of any utility price increases on consumers and industry.
Fri Jan 29, 1:50 pm ET
President Obama's fiscal 2011 budget will project hundreds of billions of dollars in new federal revenue from a proposed comprehensive cap-and-trade climate law, according to Democratic aides -- despite dimming prospects for enacting such legislation this year.
Including cap-and-trade revenue in the new budget underscores Obama's commitment to press ahead with climate legislation, which passed in the House last year but stalled in the Senate. The president reiterated his insistence that Congress address global warming in his State of the Union address.
In the fiscal 2010 budget, the White House projected raising $646 billion in federal revenue over a decade through the sale of emissions allowances to polluters. Under the plan, emissions would be capped and polluters would need to hold government-issued allowances to release carbon dioxide and other gases that contribute to global warming. The allowances could then be bought and sold in the marketplace.
That budget would have used about two-thirds of the revenue to fund payroll tax breaks through the administration's "Making Work Pay" program. About $15 billion annually, for a total of $150 billion over a decade, would have been reserved for alternative energy research and development.
Senate aides say they expect the fiscal 2011 budget to make different recommendations for spending any revenue from a climate law.
But North Dakota Democrat Byron L. Dorgan, chairman of the Senate Energy-Water Appropriations Subcommittee, said any proposal to spend cap-and-trade revenue is probably dead on arrival.
"If there's an anticipation of cap-and-trade revenues, I think that anticipation probably is not going to result in success because my best estimate is that we're not likely to do a cap-and-trade bill this year," Dorgan said.
Senate Foreign Relations Chairman John Kerry, D-Mass., who is leading efforts to write a bipartisan climate bill, said he objects to using cap-and-trade revenue for the "Making Work Pay" program and would rather see it go more directly toward easing the burden of any utility price increases on consumers and industry.
Council snoopers question five-year-olds on home lifeBy Sophie Borland
Council snoopers question five-year-olds on home lifeBy Sophie Borland
Last updated at 1:03 AM on 30th January 2010
Comments (123) Add to My Stories They're watching: The eating and television habits of children are being monitored by councils
Children as young as five are being told to fill in Big Brother-style forms which let councils snoop on intimate details about their home lives.
The questions - which have been attacked as exploitative - ask about junk food, television habits, family time and even whether the youngsters 'like themselves'.
Results are stored on a database, allowing families deemed to be 'at risk' to be referred to social services or doctors.
Children are asked to colour in answers to questions such as how much fruit they eat each day compared to crisps and fizzy drinks.
Hundreds of the 'lifestyle' quizzes, which are backed by the Department of Health, have been handed out in an attempt to build a picture of the health and wellbeing of individual households.
But privacy campaigners last night condemned the forms. Alex Deane, of Big Brother Watch, described it as 'an unbelievable intrusion into private life'.
He said: 'The state doesn't bring up children, parents do. There is an important distinction between teaching and nannying - or even bullying - and this steps way over the mark.'
The lifestyle quizzes were piloted in Erewash, Derbyshire, where children filled in the forms at 'healthy living' after-school clubs, to which parents are invited. Although the survey was not compulsory, pupils were strongly encouraged to fill it in.
More...Children as young as five to learn about minority faiths
The forms will now be sent out to 200 schools across the county and other councils are monitoring the scheme closely.
Daniella Yeo, of Erewash council, said the after-school clubs were very popular and that the questions followed guidelines set by NICE, the NHS's regulatory body.
She added: 'They will help us target families at risk of obesity. We can then encourage parents to attend sessions with social services or GPs.'
Other questions for five-year-olds include whether they eat breakfast, how much water they drink and how they get to school.
They are also asked 'how much to do like yourself?' - and told to tick a thumbs-up or thumbs- down sign that matches how they feel.
Seven-year-olds are being given an even more detailed quiz in which they say exactly how many hours they spend with their family, watching television and playing computer games.
Civil liberties campaigner Josie Appleton, of the Manifesto Club, said: 'Councils and schools should concentrate on providing everyone with a good education.
'But they should keep their noses out of children's lunchboxes and away from the family dinner table.'
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1247226/Now-council-snoopers-question-year-olds-home-life.html#ixzz0e8ZTTrwG
Last updated at 1:03 AM on 30th January 2010
Comments (123) Add to My Stories They're watching: The eating and television habits of children are being monitored by councils
Children as young as five are being told to fill in Big Brother-style forms which let councils snoop on intimate details about their home lives.
The questions - which have been attacked as exploitative - ask about junk food, television habits, family time and even whether the youngsters 'like themselves'.
Results are stored on a database, allowing families deemed to be 'at risk' to be referred to social services or doctors.
Children are asked to colour in answers to questions such as how much fruit they eat each day compared to crisps and fizzy drinks.
Hundreds of the 'lifestyle' quizzes, which are backed by the Department of Health, have been handed out in an attempt to build a picture of the health and wellbeing of individual households.
But privacy campaigners last night condemned the forms. Alex Deane, of Big Brother Watch, described it as 'an unbelievable intrusion into private life'.
He said: 'The state doesn't bring up children, parents do. There is an important distinction between teaching and nannying - or even bullying - and this steps way over the mark.'
The lifestyle quizzes were piloted in Erewash, Derbyshire, where children filled in the forms at 'healthy living' after-school clubs, to which parents are invited. Although the survey was not compulsory, pupils were strongly encouraged to fill it in.
More...Children as young as five to learn about minority faiths
The forms will now be sent out to 200 schools across the county and other councils are monitoring the scheme closely.
Daniella Yeo, of Erewash council, said the after-school clubs were very popular and that the questions followed guidelines set by NICE, the NHS's regulatory body.
She added: 'They will help us target families at risk of obesity. We can then encourage parents to attend sessions with social services or GPs.'
Other questions for five-year-olds include whether they eat breakfast, how much water they drink and how they get to school.
They are also asked 'how much to do like yourself?' - and told to tick a thumbs-up or thumbs- down sign that matches how they feel.
Seven-year-olds are being given an even more detailed quiz in which they say exactly how many hours they spend with their family, watching television and playing computer games.
Civil liberties campaigner Josie Appleton, of the Manifesto Club, said: 'Councils and schools should concentrate on providing everyone with a good education.
'But they should keep their noses out of children's lunchboxes and away from the family dinner table.'
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1247226/Now-council-snoopers-question-year-olds-home-life.html#ixzz0e8ZTTrwG
The Fateful Geological Prize Called Haiti By F. William Engdahl
The Fateful Geological Prize Called Haiti
By F. William Engdahl
Author of Full Spectrum Dominance:
Totalitarian Democracy in the New World Order
1-30-10
A former US President becomes UN Special Envoy to earthquake-stricken Haiti. A born-again neo-conservative US business wheeler-dealer preacher claims Haitians are condemned for making a literal 'pact with the Devil.' Venezuelan, Nicaraguan, Bolivian, French and Swiss rescue organizations accuse the US military of refusing landing rights to planes bearing necessary medicines and urgently needed potable water to the millions of Haitians stricken, injured and homeless.
Behind the smoke, rubble and unending drama of human tragedy in the hapless Caribbean country, a drama is in full play for control of what geophysicists believe may be one of the world's richest zones for hydrocarbons-oil and gas outside the Middle East, possibly orders of magnitude greater than that of nearby Venezuela.
Haiti, and the larger island of Hispaniola of which it is a part, has the geological fate that it straddles one of the world's most active geological zones, where the deepwater plates of three huge structures relentlessly rub against one another-the intersection of the North American, South American and Caribbean tectonic plates. Below the ocean and the waters of the Caribbean, these plates consist of an oceanic crust some 3 to 6 miles thick, floating atop an adjacent mantle. Haiti also lies at the edge of the region known as the Bermuda Triangle, a vast area in the Caribbean subject to bizarre and unexplained disturbances.
This vast mass of underwater plates are in constant motion, rubbing against each other along lines analogous to cracks in a broken porcelain vase that has been reglued. The earth's tectonic plates typically move at a rate 50 to 100 mm annually in relation to one another, and are the origin of earthquakes and of volcanoes. The regions of convergence of such plates are also areas where vast volumes of oil and gas can be pushed upwards from the Earth's mantle. The geophysics surrounding the convergence of the three plates that run more or less directly beneath Port-au-Prince make the region prone to earthquakes such as the one that struck Haiti with devastating ferocity on January 12.
A relevant Texas geological project
Leaving aside the relevant question of how well in advance the Pentagon and US scientists knew the quake was about to occur, and what Pentagon plans were being laid before January 12, another issue emerges around the events in Haiti that might help explain the bizarre behavior to date of the major 'rescue' players-the United States, France and Canada. Aside from being prone to violent earthquakes, Haiti also happens to lie in a zone that, due to the unusual geographical intersection of its three tectonic plates, might well be straddling one of the world's largest unexplored zones of oil and gas, as well as of valuable rare strategic minerals.
The vast oil reserves of the Persian Gulf and of the region from the Red Sea into the Gulf of Aden are at a similar convergence zone of large tectonic plates, as are such oil-rich zones as Indonesia and the waters off the coast of California. In short, in terms of the physics of the earth, precisely such intersections of tectonic masses as run directly beneath Haiti have a remarkable tendency to be the sites of vast treasures of minerals, as well as oil and gas, throughout the world.
Notably, in 2005, a year after the Bush-Cheney Administration de facto deposed the democratically elected President of Haiti, Jean-Baptiste Aristide, a team of geologists from the Institute for Geophysics at the University of Texas began an ambitious and thorough two-phase mapping of all geological data of the Caribbean Basins. The project is due to be completed in 2011. Directed by Dr. Paul Mann, it is called "Caribbean Basins, Tectonics and Hydrocarbons." It is all about determining as precisely as possible the relation between tectonic plates in the Caribbean and the potential for hydrocarbons-oil and gas.
Notably, the sponsors of the multi-million dollar research project under Mann are the world's largest oil companies, including Chevron, ExxonMobil, the Anglo-Dutch Shell and BHP Billiton. Curiously enough, the project is the first comprehensive geological mapping of a region that, one would have thought, would have been a priority decades ago for the US oil majors. Given the immense, existing oil production off Mexico, Louisiana, and the entire Caribbean, as well as its proximity to the United States not to mention the US focus on its own energy security it is surprising that the region had not been mapped earlier. Now it emerges that major oil companies were at least generally aware of the huge oil potential of the region long ago, but apparently decided to keep it quiet.
Cuba's Super-giant find
Evidence that the US Administration may well have more in mind for Haiti than the improvement of the lot of the devastated Haitian people can be found in nearby waters off Cuba, directly across from Port-au-Prince. In October 2008 a consortium of oil companies led by Spain's Repsol, together with Cuba's state oil company, Cubapetroleo, announced discovery of one of the world's largest oilfields in the deep water off Cuba. It is what oil geologists call a 'Super-giant' field. Estimates are that the Cuban field contains as much as 20 billion barrels of oil, making it the twelfth Super-giant oilfield discovered since 1996. The discovery also likely makes Cuba a new high-priority target for Pentagon destabilization and other nasty operations.
No doubt to the dismay of Washington, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev flew to Havana one month after the Cuban giant oil find to sign an agreement with acting-President Raul Castro for Russian oil companies to explore and develop Cuban oil.
Medvedev's Russia-Cuba oil agreements came only a week after the visit of Chinese President Hu Jintao to meet the recuperating Fidel Castro and his brother Raul. The Chinese President signed an agreement to modernize Cuban ports and discussed Chinese purchase of Cuban raw materials. No doubt the mammoth new Cuban oil discovery was high on the Chinese agenda with Cuba. On November 5, 2008, just prior to the Chinese President's trip to Cuba and other Latin American countries, the Chinese government issued their first ever policy paper on the future of China's relations with Latin America and Caribbean nations, elevating these bilateral relations to a new level of strategic importance.
'
The Cuba Super-giant oil find also leaves the advocates of 'Peak Oil' theory with more egg on the face. Shortly before the Bush-Blair decision to invade and occupy Iraq, a theory made the rounds of cyberspace, that sometime after 2010, the world would reach an absolute "peak" in world oil production, initiating a period of decline with drastic social and economic implications. Its prominent spokesmen, including retired oil geologist Colin Campbell and Texas oil banker Matt Simmons, claimed that there had not been a single new Super-giant oil discovery since 1976, or thereabouts, and that new fields found over the past two decades had been "tiny" compared with the earlier giant discoveries in Saudi Arabia, Prudhoe Bay, Daquing in China and elsewhere.
It is critical to note that, more than half a century ago, a group of Russian and Ukrainian geophysicists, working in state secrecy, confirmed that hydrocarbons originated deep in the earth's mantle under conditions similar to a giant burning cauldron at extreme temperature and pressure. They demonstrated that, contrary to US and accepted Western 'mainstream' geology, hydrocarbons were not the result of dead dinosaur detritus concentrated and compressed and somehow transformed into oil and gas millions of years ago, nor of algae or other biological material.
The Russian and Ukrainian geophysicists then proved that the oil or gas produced in the earth's mantle was pushed upwards along faults or cracks in the earth as close to the surface as pressures permitted. The process was analogous to the production of molten lava in volcanoes. It means that the ability to find oil is limited, relatively speaking, only by the ability to identify deep fissures and complex geological activity conducive to bringing the oil out from deep in the earth. It seems that the waters of the Caribbean, especially those off Cuba and its neighbor Haiti, are just such a region of concentrated hydrocarbons (oil and gas) that have found their way upwards close to the surface, perhaps in a magnitude comparable to a new Saudi Arabia.
Haiti, a new Saudi Arabia?
The remarkable geography of Haiti and Cuba and the discovery of world-class oil reserves in the waters off Cuba lend credence to anecdotal accounts of major oil discoveries in several parts of Haitian territory. It also could explain why two Bush Presidents and now special UN Haiti Envoy Bill Clinton have made Haiti such a priority. As well, it could explain why Washington and its NGO's moved so quickly to remove-- twice-- the democratically elected President Aristide, whose economic program for Haiti included, among other items, proposals for developing Haitian natural resources for the benefit of the Haitian people.
In March 2004, some months before the University of Texas and American Big Oil launched their ambitious mapping of the hydrocarbon potentials of the Caribbean, a Haitian writer, Dr. Georges Michel, published online an article titled 'Oil in Haiti.' In it, Michel wrote,
.[I]t has been no secret that deep in the earthy bowels of the two states that share the island of Haiti and the surrounding waters that there are significant, still untapped deposits of oil. One knows not why they are still untapped. Since the early twentieth century, the physical and political map of the island of Haiti, erected in 1908 by Messrs. Alexander Poujol and Henry Thomasset, reported a major oil reservoir in Haiti near the source of the Rio Todo El Mondo, Tributary Right Artibonite River, better known today as the River Thomonde.
According to a June 2008 article by Roberson Alphonse in the Haitian paper, Le Nouvelliste en Haiti, "The signs, (indicators), justifying the explorations of oil (black gold) in Haiti are encouraging. In the middle of the oil shock, some 4 companies want official licenses from the Haitian State to drill for oil."
At the time, oil prices were climbing above $140 a barrel -- on manipulations by various Wall Street banks. Alphonse's article quoted Dieusuel Anglade, the Haitian State Director of the Office of Mining and Energy, telling the Haitian press: "We've received four requests for oil exploration permitsWe have had encouraging indicators to justify the pursuit of the exploration of black gold (oil), which had stopped in 1979."
Alphonse reported the findings from a 1979 geological study in Haiti of 11 exploratory oil wells drilled at the Plaine du Cul-de-sac on the Plateau Central and at L'ile de La Gonaive: "Surface (tentative) indicators for oil were found at the Southern peninsula and on the North coast, explained the engineer Anglade, who strongly believes in the immediate commercial viability of these explorations."
Journalist Alphonse cites an August 16, 1979 memo by Haitian attorney Francois Lamothe, in which he noted that "five big wells were drilled" down to depths of 9000 feet and that a sample that "underwent a physical-chemical analysis in Munich, Germany" had "revealed tracks of oil."
Despite the promising 1979 results in Haiti, Dr. Georges Michel reported that, "the big multinational oil companies operating in Haiti pushed for the discovered deposits not to be exploited." Oil exploration in and offshore Haiti ground to a sudden halt as a result.
Similar if less precise reports claiming that Haitian oil reserves could be vastly larger than those of Venezuela have appeared in Haitian websites. Then in 2010 the financial news site Bloomberg News carried the following:
The Jan. 12 earthquake was on a fault line that passes near potential gas reserves, said Stephen Pierce, a geologist who worked in the region for 30 years for companies that included the former Mobil Corp. The quake may have cracked rock formations along the fault, allowing gas or oil to temporarily seep toward the surface, he said Monday in a telephone interview. 'A geologist, callous as it may seem, tracing that fault zone from Port-au-Prince to the border looking for gas and oil seeps, may find a structure that hasn't been drilled,' said Pierce, exploration manager at Zion Oil & Gas Inc., a Dallas-based company that's drilling in Israel.
In an interview with a Santo Domingo online paper, Leopoldo Espaillat Nanita, former head of the Dominican Petroleum Refinery (REFIDOMSA) stated, "there is a multinational conspiracy to illegally take the mineral resources of the Haitian people." Haiti's minerals include gold, the valuable strategic metal iridium and oil, apparently lots of it.
Aristide's development plans
Marguerite Laurent ('Ezili Dantò'), president of the Haitian Lawyers' Leadership Network (HLLN) who served as attorney for the deposed Aristide, notes that when Aristide was President -- up until his US-backed ouster during the Bush era in 2004 -- he had developed and published in book form his national development plans. These plans included, for the first time, a detailed list of known sites where the resources of Haiti were located. The publication of the plan sparked a national debate over Haitian radio and in the media about the future of the country. Aristide's plan was to implement a public-private partnership to ensure that the development of Haiti's oil, gold and other valuable resources would benefit the national economy and the broader population, and not merely the five Haitian oligarchic families and their US backers, the so-called Chimeres or gangsters.
Since the ouster of Aristide in 2004, Haiti has been an occupied country, with a dubiously-elected President, Rene Preval, a controversial follower of IMF privatization mandates and reportedly tied to the Chimeres or Haitian oligarchs who backed the removal of Aristide. Notably, the US State Department refuses to permit the return of Aristide from South African exile.
Now, in the wake of the devastating earthquake of January 12, the United States military has taken control of Haiti's four airports and presently has some 20,000 troops in the country. Journalists and international aid organizations have accused the US military of being more concerned with imposing military control, which it prefers to call "security," than with bringing urgently needed water, food and medicine from the airport sites to the population.
A US military occupation of Haiti under the guise of earthquake disaster 'relief' would give Washington and private business interests tied to it a geopolitical prize of the first order. Prior to the January 12 quake, the US Embassy in Port-au-Prince was the fifth largest US embassy in the world, comparable to its embassies in such geopolitically strategic places as Berlin and Beijing. With huge new oil finds off Cuba being exploited by Russian companies, with clear indications that Haiti contains similar vast untapped oil as well as gold, copper, uranium and iridium, with Hugo Chavez' Venezuela as a neighbor to the south of Haiti, a return of Aristide or any popular leader committed to developing the resources for the people of Haiti, -- the poorest nation in the Americas -- would constitute a devastating blow to the world's sole Superpower. The fact that in the aftermath of the earthquake, UN Haiti Special Envoy Bill Clinton joined forces with Aristide foe George W. Bush to create something called the Clinton-Bush Haiti Fund ought to give everyone pause.
According to Marguerite Laurent ('Ezili Dantò') of the Haitian Lawyers' Leadership Network, under the guise of emergency relief work, the US, France and Canada are engaged in a balkanization of the island for future mineral control. She reports rumors that Canada wants the North of Haiti where Canadian mining interests are already present. The US wants Port-au-Prince and the island of La Gonaive just offshore an area identified in Aristide's development book as having vast oil resources, and which is bitterly contested by France. She further states that China, with UN veto power over the de facto UN-occupied country, may have something to say against such a US-France-Canada carve up of the vast wealth of the nation.
Endnotes
Paul Mann, Caribbean Basins, Tectonic Plates & Hydrocarbons, Institute for Geophysics, The University of Texas at Austin, accessed in http://www.ig.utexas.edu/research/projects/cbth/.../ProposalCaribbean.pdf
Rory Carroll, Medvedev and Castro meet to rebuild Russia-Cuba relations, London Guardian, November 28, 2008 accessed in http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/nov/28/cuba-russia
Julian Gavaghan, Comrades in arms: When China's President Hu met a frail Fidel Castro, London Daily Mail, November 19, 2008, accessed in http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1087485/Comrades-arms-
When-Chinas-President-Hu-met-frail-Fidel-Castro.html
Peoples' Daily Online, China issues first policy paper on Latin America, Caribbean region, November 5, 2008, accessed in http://english.people.com.cn/90001/90776/90883/6527888.html
Matthew R. Simmons, The World's Giant Oilfields, Simmons & Co. International, Houston, accessed in HYPERLINK http://www.simmonsco-intl.com/files/giantoilfields.pdf
Anton Kolesnikov, et al, Methane-derived hydrocarbons produced under upper-mantle conditions, Nature Geoscience, July 26, 2009.
F. William Engdahl, War and Peak Oil-Confessions of an 'ex' Peak Oil believer, Global Research, September 26, 2007, accessed in http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=6880
Dr. Georges Michel, Oil in Haiti, English translation from French, Pétrole en Haiti, March 27, 2004, accessed in http://www.margueritelaurent.com/pressclips/oil_sites.html#oil_GeorgesMichelEnglish
Roberson Alphonse, Drill, and then pump the oil of Haiti! 4 oil companies request oil drilling permits, translated from the original French, June 27, 2008, accessed in HYPERLINK http://www.bnvillage.co.uk/caribbean-news-village-beta/99691-
drill-then-pump-oil-haiti-4-oil-companies-request-oil-drilling-permits.html
Ibid.
Ibid. The full text indicated that, "five big wells were drilled at Porto Suel (Maissade) of a depth of 9000 feet, at Bebernal, 9000 feet, at Bois-Carradeux (Ouest), at Dumornay, on the road Route Frare and close to the Chemin de Fer of Saint-Marc. A sample, a 'carrot' (oil reservoir) drilled up from the well of Saint-Marc in the Artibonite underwent a physical-chemical analysis in Munich, Germany, at the request of Mr. Broth. 'The result of the analysis was returned on October 11, 1979 and revealed tracks of oil,' confided the engineer, Willy Clemens, who had gone to Germany."
Dr. Georges Michel, op. cit.
Marguerite Laurent, Haiti is full of oil, say Ginette and Daniel Mathurin, Radio Metropole, Jan 28, 2008, accessed in
http://www.margueritelaurent.com/pressclips/oil_sites.html#full_of_oil
Jim Polson, Haiti earthquake may have exposed gas, aiding economy, Bloomberg News, January 26, 2010.
Espaillat Nanita revela en Haiti existen grandes recursos de oro y otros minerals, Espacinsular.org, 17 November, 2009, accessed in http://www.espacinsular.org/spip.php?article8942
The Aristide development plan was contained in the book published in Haiti in 2000, Investir dans l'Human. Livre Blanc de Fanmi Lavalas sous la Direction de Jean-Bertrand Aristide, Port-au-Prince, Imprimerie Henri Deschamps, 2000. It contained detailed maps, tables, graphics, and a national development plan for 2004 "covering agriculture, environment, commerce and industry, the financial sector, infrastructure, education, culture, health, women's issues, and issues in the public sector." In 2004, using NGOs and the UN and a vicious propaganda campaign to vilify Aristide, the Bush administration got rid of the elected President.
Cynthia McKinney, Haiti: An Unwelcome Katrina Redux, Global Research, January 19, 2010, accessed in http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=17063
Marguerite Laurent (Ezili Danto), Did mining and oil drilling trigger the Haiti earthquake?, OpEd News.com, January 23, 2010, accessed in http://www.opednews.com/articles/1/Did-mining-and-oil-drillin-by-Ezili-Danto-100123-329.html
By F. William Engdahl
Author of Full Spectrum Dominance:
Totalitarian Democracy in the New World Order
1-30-10
A former US President becomes UN Special Envoy to earthquake-stricken Haiti. A born-again neo-conservative US business wheeler-dealer preacher claims Haitians are condemned for making a literal 'pact with the Devil.' Venezuelan, Nicaraguan, Bolivian, French and Swiss rescue organizations accuse the US military of refusing landing rights to planes bearing necessary medicines and urgently needed potable water to the millions of Haitians stricken, injured and homeless.
Behind the smoke, rubble and unending drama of human tragedy in the hapless Caribbean country, a drama is in full play for control of what geophysicists believe may be one of the world's richest zones for hydrocarbons-oil and gas outside the Middle East, possibly orders of magnitude greater than that of nearby Venezuela.
Haiti, and the larger island of Hispaniola of which it is a part, has the geological fate that it straddles one of the world's most active geological zones, where the deepwater plates of three huge structures relentlessly rub against one another-the intersection of the North American, South American and Caribbean tectonic plates. Below the ocean and the waters of the Caribbean, these plates consist of an oceanic crust some 3 to 6 miles thick, floating atop an adjacent mantle. Haiti also lies at the edge of the region known as the Bermuda Triangle, a vast area in the Caribbean subject to bizarre and unexplained disturbances.
This vast mass of underwater plates are in constant motion, rubbing against each other along lines analogous to cracks in a broken porcelain vase that has been reglued. The earth's tectonic plates typically move at a rate 50 to 100 mm annually in relation to one another, and are the origin of earthquakes and of volcanoes. The regions of convergence of such plates are also areas where vast volumes of oil and gas can be pushed upwards from the Earth's mantle. The geophysics surrounding the convergence of the three plates that run more or less directly beneath Port-au-Prince make the region prone to earthquakes such as the one that struck Haiti with devastating ferocity on January 12.
A relevant Texas geological project
Leaving aside the relevant question of how well in advance the Pentagon and US scientists knew the quake was about to occur, and what Pentagon plans were being laid before January 12, another issue emerges around the events in Haiti that might help explain the bizarre behavior to date of the major 'rescue' players-the United States, France and Canada. Aside from being prone to violent earthquakes, Haiti also happens to lie in a zone that, due to the unusual geographical intersection of its three tectonic plates, might well be straddling one of the world's largest unexplored zones of oil and gas, as well as of valuable rare strategic minerals.
The vast oil reserves of the Persian Gulf and of the region from the Red Sea into the Gulf of Aden are at a similar convergence zone of large tectonic plates, as are such oil-rich zones as Indonesia and the waters off the coast of California. In short, in terms of the physics of the earth, precisely such intersections of tectonic masses as run directly beneath Haiti have a remarkable tendency to be the sites of vast treasures of minerals, as well as oil and gas, throughout the world.
Notably, in 2005, a year after the Bush-Cheney Administration de facto deposed the democratically elected President of Haiti, Jean-Baptiste Aristide, a team of geologists from the Institute for Geophysics at the University of Texas began an ambitious and thorough two-phase mapping of all geological data of the Caribbean Basins. The project is due to be completed in 2011. Directed by Dr. Paul Mann, it is called "Caribbean Basins, Tectonics and Hydrocarbons." It is all about determining as precisely as possible the relation between tectonic plates in the Caribbean and the potential for hydrocarbons-oil and gas.
Notably, the sponsors of the multi-million dollar research project under Mann are the world's largest oil companies, including Chevron, ExxonMobil, the Anglo-Dutch Shell and BHP Billiton. Curiously enough, the project is the first comprehensive geological mapping of a region that, one would have thought, would have been a priority decades ago for the US oil majors. Given the immense, existing oil production off Mexico, Louisiana, and the entire Caribbean, as well as its proximity to the United States not to mention the US focus on its own energy security it is surprising that the region had not been mapped earlier. Now it emerges that major oil companies were at least generally aware of the huge oil potential of the region long ago, but apparently decided to keep it quiet.
Cuba's Super-giant find
Evidence that the US Administration may well have more in mind for Haiti than the improvement of the lot of the devastated Haitian people can be found in nearby waters off Cuba, directly across from Port-au-Prince. In October 2008 a consortium of oil companies led by Spain's Repsol, together with Cuba's state oil company, Cubapetroleo, announced discovery of one of the world's largest oilfields in the deep water off Cuba. It is what oil geologists call a 'Super-giant' field. Estimates are that the Cuban field contains as much as 20 billion barrels of oil, making it the twelfth Super-giant oilfield discovered since 1996. The discovery also likely makes Cuba a new high-priority target for Pentagon destabilization and other nasty operations.
No doubt to the dismay of Washington, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev flew to Havana one month after the Cuban giant oil find to sign an agreement with acting-President Raul Castro for Russian oil companies to explore and develop Cuban oil.
Medvedev's Russia-Cuba oil agreements came only a week after the visit of Chinese President Hu Jintao to meet the recuperating Fidel Castro and his brother Raul. The Chinese President signed an agreement to modernize Cuban ports and discussed Chinese purchase of Cuban raw materials. No doubt the mammoth new Cuban oil discovery was high on the Chinese agenda with Cuba. On November 5, 2008, just prior to the Chinese President's trip to Cuba and other Latin American countries, the Chinese government issued their first ever policy paper on the future of China's relations with Latin America and Caribbean nations, elevating these bilateral relations to a new level of strategic importance.
'
The Cuba Super-giant oil find also leaves the advocates of 'Peak Oil' theory with more egg on the face. Shortly before the Bush-Blair decision to invade and occupy Iraq, a theory made the rounds of cyberspace, that sometime after 2010, the world would reach an absolute "peak" in world oil production, initiating a period of decline with drastic social and economic implications. Its prominent spokesmen, including retired oil geologist Colin Campbell and Texas oil banker Matt Simmons, claimed that there had not been a single new Super-giant oil discovery since 1976, or thereabouts, and that new fields found over the past two decades had been "tiny" compared with the earlier giant discoveries in Saudi Arabia, Prudhoe Bay, Daquing in China and elsewhere.
It is critical to note that, more than half a century ago, a group of Russian and Ukrainian geophysicists, working in state secrecy, confirmed that hydrocarbons originated deep in the earth's mantle under conditions similar to a giant burning cauldron at extreme temperature and pressure. They demonstrated that, contrary to US and accepted Western 'mainstream' geology, hydrocarbons were not the result of dead dinosaur detritus concentrated and compressed and somehow transformed into oil and gas millions of years ago, nor of algae or other biological material.
The Russian and Ukrainian geophysicists then proved that the oil or gas produced in the earth's mantle was pushed upwards along faults or cracks in the earth as close to the surface as pressures permitted. The process was analogous to the production of molten lava in volcanoes. It means that the ability to find oil is limited, relatively speaking, only by the ability to identify deep fissures and complex geological activity conducive to bringing the oil out from deep in the earth. It seems that the waters of the Caribbean, especially those off Cuba and its neighbor Haiti, are just such a region of concentrated hydrocarbons (oil and gas) that have found their way upwards close to the surface, perhaps in a magnitude comparable to a new Saudi Arabia.
Haiti, a new Saudi Arabia?
The remarkable geography of Haiti and Cuba and the discovery of world-class oil reserves in the waters off Cuba lend credence to anecdotal accounts of major oil discoveries in several parts of Haitian territory. It also could explain why two Bush Presidents and now special UN Haiti Envoy Bill Clinton have made Haiti such a priority. As well, it could explain why Washington and its NGO's moved so quickly to remove-- twice-- the democratically elected President Aristide, whose economic program for Haiti included, among other items, proposals for developing Haitian natural resources for the benefit of the Haitian people.
In March 2004, some months before the University of Texas and American Big Oil launched their ambitious mapping of the hydrocarbon potentials of the Caribbean, a Haitian writer, Dr. Georges Michel, published online an article titled 'Oil in Haiti.' In it, Michel wrote,
.[I]t has been no secret that deep in the earthy bowels of the two states that share the island of Haiti and the surrounding waters that there are significant, still untapped deposits of oil. One knows not why they are still untapped. Since the early twentieth century, the physical and political map of the island of Haiti, erected in 1908 by Messrs. Alexander Poujol and Henry Thomasset, reported a major oil reservoir in Haiti near the source of the Rio Todo El Mondo, Tributary Right Artibonite River, better known today as the River Thomonde.
According to a June 2008 article by Roberson Alphonse in the Haitian paper, Le Nouvelliste en Haiti, "The signs, (indicators), justifying the explorations of oil (black gold) in Haiti are encouraging. In the middle of the oil shock, some 4 companies want official licenses from the Haitian State to drill for oil."
At the time, oil prices were climbing above $140 a barrel -- on manipulations by various Wall Street banks. Alphonse's article quoted Dieusuel Anglade, the Haitian State Director of the Office of Mining and Energy, telling the Haitian press: "We've received four requests for oil exploration permitsWe have had encouraging indicators to justify the pursuit of the exploration of black gold (oil), which had stopped in 1979."
Alphonse reported the findings from a 1979 geological study in Haiti of 11 exploratory oil wells drilled at the Plaine du Cul-de-sac on the Plateau Central and at L'ile de La Gonaive: "Surface (tentative) indicators for oil were found at the Southern peninsula and on the North coast, explained the engineer Anglade, who strongly believes in the immediate commercial viability of these explorations."
Journalist Alphonse cites an August 16, 1979 memo by Haitian attorney Francois Lamothe, in which he noted that "five big wells were drilled" down to depths of 9000 feet and that a sample that "underwent a physical-chemical analysis in Munich, Germany" had "revealed tracks of oil."
Despite the promising 1979 results in Haiti, Dr. Georges Michel reported that, "the big multinational oil companies operating in Haiti pushed for the discovered deposits not to be exploited." Oil exploration in and offshore Haiti ground to a sudden halt as a result.
Similar if less precise reports claiming that Haitian oil reserves could be vastly larger than those of Venezuela have appeared in Haitian websites. Then in 2010 the financial news site Bloomberg News carried the following:
The Jan. 12 earthquake was on a fault line that passes near potential gas reserves, said Stephen Pierce, a geologist who worked in the region for 30 years for companies that included the former Mobil Corp. The quake may have cracked rock formations along the fault, allowing gas or oil to temporarily seep toward the surface, he said Monday in a telephone interview. 'A geologist, callous as it may seem, tracing that fault zone from Port-au-Prince to the border looking for gas and oil seeps, may find a structure that hasn't been drilled,' said Pierce, exploration manager at Zion Oil & Gas Inc., a Dallas-based company that's drilling in Israel.
In an interview with a Santo Domingo online paper, Leopoldo Espaillat Nanita, former head of the Dominican Petroleum Refinery (REFIDOMSA) stated, "there is a multinational conspiracy to illegally take the mineral resources of the Haitian people." Haiti's minerals include gold, the valuable strategic metal iridium and oil, apparently lots of it.
Aristide's development plans
Marguerite Laurent ('Ezili Dantò'), president of the Haitian Lawyers' Leadership Network (HLLN) who served as attorney for the deposed Aristide, notes that when Aristide was President -- up until his US-backed ouster during the Bush era in 2004 -- he had developed and published in book form his national development plans. These plans included, for the first time, a detailed list of known sites where the resources of Haiti were located. The publication of the plan sparked a national debate over Haitian radio and in the media about the future of the country. Aristide's plan was to implement a public-private partnership to ensure that the development of Haiti's oil, gold and other valuable resources would benefit the national economy and the broader population, and not merely the five Haitian oligarchic families and their US backers, the so-called Chimeres or gangsters.
Since the ouster of Aristide in 2004, Haiti has been an occupied country, with a dubiously-elected President, Rene Preval, a controversial follower of IMF privatization mandates and reportedly tied to the Chimeres or Haitian oligarchs who backed the removal of Aristide. Notably, the US State Department refuses to permit the return of Aristide from South African exile.
Now, in the wake of the devastating earthquake of January 12, the United States military has taken control of Haiti's four airports and presently has some 20,000 troops in the country. Journalists and international aid organizations have accused the US military of being more concerned with imposing military control, which it prefers to call "security," than with bringing urgently needed water, food and medicine from the airport sites to the population.
A US military occupation of Haiti under the guise of earthquake disaster 'relief' would give Washington and private business interests tied to it a geopolitical prize of the first order. Prior to the January 12 quake, the US Embassy in Port-au-Prince was the fifth largest US embassy in the world, comparable to its embassies in such geopolitically strategic places as Berlin and Beijing. With huge new oil finds off Cuba being exploited by Russian companies, with clear indications that Haiti contains similar vast untapped oil as well as gold, copper, uranium and iridium, with Hugo Chavez' Venezuela as a neighbor to the south of Haiti, a return of Aristide or any popular leader committed to developing the resources for the people of Haiti, -- the poorest nation in the Americas -- would constitute a devastating blow to the world's sole Superpower. The fact that in the aftermath of the earthquake, UN Haiti Special Envoy Bill Clinton joined forces with Aristide foe George W. Bush to create something called the Clinton-Bush Haiti Fund ought to give everyone pause.
According to Marguerite Laurent ('Ezili Dantò') of the Haitian Lawyers' Leadership Network, under the guise of emergency relief work, the US, France and Canada are engaged in a balkanization of the island for future mineral control. She reports rumors that Canada wants the North of Haiti where Canadian mining interests are already present. The US wants Port-au-Prince and the island of La Gonaive just offshore an area identified in Aristide's development book as having vast oil resources, and which is bitterly contested by France. She further states that China, with UN veto power over the de facto UN-occupied country, may have something to say against such a US-France-Canada carve up of the vast wealth of the nation.
Endnotes
Paul Mann, Caribbean Basins, Tectonic Plates & Hydrocarbons, Institute for Geophysics, The University of Texas at Austin, accessed in http://www.ig.utexas.edu/research/projects/cbth/.../ProposalCaribbean.pdf
Rory Carroll, Medvedev and Castro meet to rebuild Russia-Cuba relations, London Guardian, November 28, 2008 accessed in http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/nov/28/cuba-russia
Julian Gavaghan, Comrades in arms: When China's President Hu met a frail Fidel Castro, London Daily Mail, November 19, 2008, accessed in http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1087485/Comrades-arms-
When-Chinas-President-Hu-met-frail-Fidel-Castro.html
Peoples' Daily Online, China issues first policy paper on Latin America, Caribbean region, November 5, 2008, accessed in http://english.people.com.cn/90001/90776/90883/6527888.html
Matthew R. Simmons, The World's Giant Oilfields, Simmons & Co. International, Houston, accessed in HYPERLINK http://www.simmonsco-intl.com/files/giantoilfields.pdf
Anton Kolesnikov, et al, Methane-derived hydrocarbons produced under upper-mantle conditions, Nature Geoscience, July 26, 2009.
F. William Engdahl, War and Peak Oil-Confessions of an 'ex' Peak Oil believer, Global Research, September 26, 2007, accessed in http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=6880
Dr. Georges Michel, Oil in Haiti, English translation from French, Pétrole en Haiti, March 27, 2004, accessed in http://www.margueritelaurent.com/pressclips/oil_sites.html#oil_GeorgesMichelEnglish
Roberson Alphonse, Drill, and then pump the oil of Haiti! 4 oil companies request oil drilling permits, translated from the original French, June 27, 2008, accessed in HYPERLINK http://www.bnvillage.co.uk/caribbean-news-village-beta/99691-
drill-then-pump-oil-haiti-4-oil-companies-request-oil-drilling-permits.html
Ibid.
Ibid. The full text indicated that, "five big wells were drilled at Porto Suel (Maissade) of a depth of 9000 feet, at Bebernal, 9000 feet, at Bois-Carradeux (Ouest), at Dumornay, on the road Route Frare and close to the Chemin de Fer of Saint-Marc. A sample, a 'carrot' (oil reservoir) drilled up from the well of Saint-Marc in the Artibonite underwent a physical-chemical analysis in Munich, Germany, at the request of Mr. Broth. 'The result of the analysis was returned on October 11, 1979 and revealed tracks of oil,' confided the engineer, Willy Clemens, who had gone to Germany."
Dr. Georges Michel, op. cit.
Marguerite Laurent, Haiti is full of oil, say Ginette and Daniel Mathurin, Radio Metropole, Jan 28, 2008, accessed in
http://www.margueritelaurent.com/pressclips/oil_sites.html#full_of_oil
Jim Polson, Haiti earthquake may have exposed gas, aiding economy, Bloomberg News, January 26, 2010.
Espaillat Nanita revela en Haiti existen grandes recursos de oro y otros minerals, Espacinsular.org, 17 November, 2009, accessed in http://www.espacinsular.org/spip.php?article8942
The Aristide development plan was contained in the book published in Haiti in 2000, Investir dans l'Human. Livre Blanc de Fanmi Lavalas sous la Direction de Jean-Bertrand Aristide, Port-au-Prince, Imprimerie Henri Deschamps, 2000. It contained detailed maps, tables, graphics, and a national development plan for 2004 "covering agriculture, environment, commerce and industry, the financial sector, infrastructure, education, culture, health, women's issues, and issues in the public sector." In 2004, using NGOs and the UN and a vicious propaganda campaign to vilify Aristide, the Bush administration got rid of the elected President.
Cynthia McKinney, Haiti: An Unwelcome Katrina Redux, Global Research, January 19, 2010, accessed in http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=17063
Marguerite Laurent (Ezili Danto), Did mining and oil drilling trigger the Haiti earthquake?, OpEd News.com, January 23, 2010, accessed in http://www.opednews.com/articles/1/Did-mining-and-oil-drillin-by-Ezili-Danto-100123-329.html
Am J Epidemiol. 2010 Jan 1;171(1):27-35. Epub 2009 Nov 25.
Parental occupational exposure to extremely low frequency magnetic fields and childhood cancer: a German case-control study.
Hug K, Grize L, Seidler A, Kaatsch P, Schüz J.
Institute of Social and Preventive Medicine at Swiss Tropical Institute Basel, Steinengraben 49, CH-4051 Basel, Switzerland. kerstin.hug@unibas.ch
Extremely low frequency magnetic fields (ELF-MFs) have been classified as possibly carcinogenic to humans by the International Agency for Research on Cancer. The authors investigated, in a population-based case-control study in Germany, if children whose parents were exposed preconceptionally at work to ELF-MFs had an increased risk of developing cancer. Cases aged 0-14 years were ascertained from the German Childhood Cancer Registry. Controls were selected from local resident registration offices. The parental occupational history was recorded in questionnaires and telephone interviews, and preconceptional magnetic field exposure was estimated according to a job-exposure matrix. The analysis included 2,382 controls and 2,049 cases (846 children with acute leukemia, 159 children with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, 444 children with central nervous system tumors, and 600 children with other solid tumors). Frequency-matched conditional logistic regression models revealed no increased cancer risks in children whose fathers were occupationally exposed to magnetic fields above 0.2 microT. Additionally, there was no evidence for a risk increase at magnetic field levels exceeding 1 microT. Based on much smaller numbers, maternal occupational exposure was also not related to increased cancer risks. In this large case-control study, the risk of childhood cancer was not linked to preconceptional parental ELF-MF exposure.
PMID: 19942577 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]
Parental occupational exposure to extremely low frequency magnetic fields and childhood cancer: a German case-control study.
Hug K, Grize L, Seidler A, Kaatsch P, Schüz J.
Institute of Social and Preventive Medicine at Swiss Tropical Institute Basel, Steinengraben 49, CH-4051 Basel, Switzerland. kerstin.hug@unibas.ch
Extremely low frequency magnetic fields (ELF-MFs) have been classified as possibly carcinogenic to humans by the International Agency for Research on Cancer. The authors investigated, in a population-based case-control study in Germany, if children whose parents were exposed preconceptionally at work to ELF-MFs had an increased risk of developing cancer. Cases aged 0-14 years were ascertained from the German Childhood Cancer Registry. Controls were selected from local resident registration offices. The parental occupational history was recorded in questionnaires and telephone interviews, and preconceptional magnetic field exposure was estimated according to a job-exposure matrix. The analysis included 2,382 controls and 2,049 cases (846 children with acute leukemia, 159 children with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, 444 children with central nervous system tumors, and 600 children with other solid tumors). Frequency-matched conditional logistic regression models revealed no increased cancer risks in children whose fathers were occupationally exposed to magnetic fields above 0.2 microT. Additionally, there was no evidence for a risk increase at magnetic field levels exceeding 1 microT. Based on much smaller numbers, maternal occupational exposure was also not related to increased cancer risks. In this large case-control study, the risk of childhood cancer was not linked to preconceptional parental ELF-MF exposure.
PMID: 19942577 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]
Has Forbes Gone Psychotic or Taken the Blue Pill?
Has Forbes Gone Psychotic or Taken the Blue Pill?
Posted by: Dr. Mercola
January 30 2010 | 12,997 views
Forbes has declared Monsanto “Company of the Year,” calling criticism of the notorious company “vicious” attacks against a company that “has been working to make humanity better fed.”
What’s more, Forbes claims that the attacks come because Monsanto has close to a monopoly in some seed markets, which Forbes argues is because they are making “seeds that are too good.”
You read that right. Apparently, Monsanto’s decades-long attempt to control the seed market -- which has led it lawsuits against small farmers and genetically modified plants that never regerminate, forcing farmers to buy seeds year after year -- is apparently just a result of their being “too good.”
I encourage you all to BOYCOTT Forbes and cancel any subscription you may have.
Sources:
Forbes January 18, 2010
Dr. Mercola's Comments:
Posted by: Dr. Mercola
January 30 2010 | 12,997 views
Forbes has declared Monsanto “Company of the Year,” calling criticism of the notorious company “vicious” attacks against a company that “has been working to make humanity better fed.”
What’s more, Forbes claims that the attacks come because Monsanto has close to a monopoly in some seed markets, which Forbes argues is because they are making “seeds that are too good.”
You read that right. Apparently, Monsanto’s decades-long attempt to control the seed market -- which has led it lawsuits against small farmers and genetically modified plants that never regerminate, forcing farmers to buy seeds year after year -- is apparently just a result of their being “too good.”
I encourage you all to BOYCOTT Forbes and cancel any subscription you may have.
Sources:
Forbes January 18, 2010
Dr. Mercola's Comments:
Fecal Bacteria Found in Nearly Half of Fast Food Soda Fountains
Fecal Bacteria Found in Nearly Half of Fast Food Soda Fountains
Posted by: Dr. Mercola
January 30 2010 | 11,139 views
A recent study has revealed that a full 48 percent of soda fountains at fast food restaurants contain coliform bacteria -- a bacteria that grows in feces. Eleven percent also contained E. Coli.
Other opportunistic pathogenic microorganisms found included Chryseobacterium meningosepticum and of Klebsiella, Staphylococcus, Stenotrophomonas, Candida, and Serratia. Most of the identified bacteria showed resistance to one or more of 11 antibiotics tested.
While there have been few certified outbreaks over in the last ten years related to soda fountains, many incidents of food poisoning go unreported.
Sources:
Treehugger January 7, 2010
Int J Food Micro 2009
Dr. Mercola's Comments:
The reasons to avoid eating at fast food establishments are piling up faster than you can say, “Pour me another Coke-a coli.”
As disgusting as it sounds, bacteria might be the least damaging part of your soft drink. But this malfeasance of hygiene is not the first we’ve heard about in recent years.
It was only a few years ago when twelve year-old middle schooler Jasmine Roberts won the science fair at her school when she discovered that the ice used in the drinks of fast food restaurants had more bacteria than the toilet water.
Then, in 2008, we learned that two of every three restaurant lemon wedges tested were covered in disease-causing bacteria.
Let’s face it. They’re everywhere.
Bacteria are cleverly adaptive, resilient, and prolific. In fact, depending on which source you choose to believe, between 2 and 9 pounds of your body weight is from bacteria, the majority of which is in your intestinal tract. All the bacteria living inside you would fill a half-gallon jug.
In fact, according to Scientific American[i] , your body contains ten times more bacterial cells than human ones. Its author writes:
“You are more bacteria than you are you.”
Ideally, the majority of these bugs are doing you a favor, from producing chemicals that help you harness energy to keeping your immune system strong.
But more recently, scientists have discovered another gift from our single-celled friends: a handful of human genes—the consensus is around 40—appear to be bacterial in origin1.
Your life, and even your identity, is more closely linked to the microbial world than you might have thought.
Staying Safe in the Bacteria Cafeteria
If you are a walking Petri dish, then do you really need to worry about what you’re exposed to?
Well, yes and no.
You CAN get sick, but you are unlikely to if you have a strong immune system. Although there are many ways you might end up with a weakened immune system, the more common contributing factors are:
•Vitamin D deficiency resulting in the production of less antimicrobial peptides
•Eating too much sugar and too many grains, which will seriously impair your immune response.
•Not getting enough sleep
•Insufficient exercise, which will impair lymphatic flow and exchange and also cause your insulin levels to rise and impair your immune system.
•Inadequately managing emotional stressors in your life, which may be the most important variable of all.
•Any combination of the above
You can’t control what other people do hygienically, but you can control what you do. The better you are taking care of yourself in terms of nutrition and sleep and so on, the more resilient you will be and the less you’ll have to worry about those inescapable pathogens around you.
Good hand washing with basic soap and water is a crucial part of staying well, since you are more likely to acquire an infection by shaking someone’s hand than by kissing them.
Taking a high-quality probiotic (good bacteria) also helps you create a robust immune system.
Food Poisoning is Highly Underreported
Mishandled food and beverages, such as lemon wedges that nearly crawl across your plate on their own, are causing 76 million cases of food poisoning each year in the US.
The CDC reports that, of the 76 million food poisoning cases, there are about 325,000 hospitalizations and 5,000 deaths. But these are the most severe and tend to happen to the very old, the very young, and the folks with compromised immune systems[ii] .
It is believed that most food borne infections go undiagnosed and unreported, particularly the milder cases.
If you have food poisoning, your symptoms might range from an upset stomach to diarrhea, fever, vomiting, abdominal cramps and dehydration.
The causes of food poisoning break down as follows:
•55 percent from improper cooking and food storage
•24 percent from poor hygiene
•3 percent from unsafe food sources
Keeping your hands clean while working with food is the most important thing you can do to prevent food poisoning, which is where restaurant workers fall short.
Of course, the fact that now many soda machines are “self-serve” makes them even more vulnerable.
Of the 20 common pathogens causing food poisoning, campylobacter is the leading cause of bacterial food poisoning in the US, responsible for several million cases per year. Most of it is from chicken, since up to 70-90 percent of commercial chickens are infected with this bacteria, according to CDC estimates.
What to do If You Think You Have Food Poisoning
According to the Food Standards Agency, there are three main goals if you find yourself with a food borne illness:
1. Rehydrate yourself. Be sure to drink plenty of water since dehydration can be a serious side effect.
2. Prevent the spread. Wash your hands regularly, especially after using the toilet and before preparing food. Avoid preparing food for others if you are ill.
3. Report it. If you believe your illness was caused by food prepared outside your home, report it to your local environmental health service.
What they don’t add but maybe the most important of all, is to take large doses of a high quality probiotic. You can take ten to twenty nearly every hour as there is no danger on overdosing.
Symptoms from food poisoning could occur within 30 minutes of eating the offensive meal, or could take a couple of days to manifest. The illness is usually limited to a couple of days.
If symptoms last longer or are more severe, you might need to see your physician.
A Coffee that’s the Cat’s Meow
On a lighter note, an article about fecal bacteria in soda fountains just isn’t complete without mentioning a special type of coffee bean that...well, passes through an exotic variety of Asian cats (called a civet) before becoming your cup o’ joe.
If you aren’t squeamish about poo in your beverages, you might want to try out Kopi Luwak[iii], or civet coffee, which is considered the cat’s meow in Indonesia for its particularly robust flavor.
The civet isn’t actually a feline at all but a relative of the mongoose.
The civet eats the very ripest berries, which pass through its digestive tract and are excreted whole. The process reportedly results in a particularly robust flavor due to an enzyme in the cat’s body.
The “enhanced” beans are then roasted in the usual way...if you could call ANYTHING about this usual.
This culinary marvel is offered by only one coffee roaster in the US—Bennett’s Fresh Roast of Fort Myers, Florida—where you can try out a 12-ounce mug of the poo-brew for a meager $20.
According to the Food Poison Journal[iv], the beans are roasted at 600 degrees and then brewed to about 200 degrees, in order to destroy any remaining E. coli or other nasty freeloaders.
Good luck with that.
Most cats live by the creed, “Never eat where you poop.” Apparently some humans missed that memo
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[i] Wenner M. “Humans carry more bacterial cells than human ones” (November 30, 2007) Scientific American http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=strange-but-true-humans-carry-more-bacterial-cells-than-human-ones
[ii] “Prevalence and incidence of food poisoning,” Wrong Diagnosis http://www.wrongdiagnosis.com/f/food_poisoning/prevalence.htm
[iii] Emry D. “Is Kopi Luwak for real?” http://urbanlegends.about.com/od/fooddrink/a/kopi_luak.htm
[iv] Caywood C. “Here kitty, kitty, I need my morning coffee” (September 28, 2009) Food Poison Journal http://www.foodpoisonjournal.com/2009/09/articles/food-poisoning-watch/here-kitty-kitty-i-need-my-morning-coffee/
Related Links:
The Six Common Household Items With the Most Germs
16 Secrets the Restaurant Industry Doesn't Want You to Know
Washing Your Hands Properly Stops the Spread of Contagious Disease
Friday, January 29, 2010
..Prepare Now to Escape Obama’s Retirement Trap
HomeArchivesAbout UsResearch ReportsAuthorsSign Up FREERSSThe Whiskey Bar..Prepare Now to Escape Obama’s Retirement Trap Jan 21st, 2010 | By Ron Holland | Category: Featured, Personal Investing
As the United States moves into a new decade of military overreach abroad and national bankruptcy at home, Washington is in a desperate search for more revenue and a solution to the future financing of the trillions in national debt obligations currently held by foreign central banks and investors. Economists, politicians and smart investors know the dollar’s days as the world reserve currency are numbered as is our ability to finance the national debt.
Although the historical government solution to unsustainable government debt loads has always been the destruction of the debts by currency depreciation and eventual hyperinflation, there is always an intermediate step used to buy more time for the politicians in power. This action, usually sidestepped and downplayed by the establishment historians paid to hide the real facts of history is wealth confiscation. Napoleon had it right when he stated, “History is a state of lies agreed upon.”
The largest source of liquid private wealth remaining in the United States are the $15 trillion in private retirement funds and the ultimate ownership, control and future of these funds have already been compromised and exchanged for the favorable tax treatment of private retirement plans. Congress writes the laws, so they can tax, penalize, hold your funds hostage and although they’d never use the word, “confiscate” your assets at their discretion.
The retirement trap I’m writing about is only a proposal at the present time and since it may well begin in the latter years of the Obama Administration assuming the Democrats can somehow maintain their majorities in Congress, I’m calling it the “Obama Retirement Trap”. But make no mistake, the government need for current revenue and their frenzied search for a short-term fix to fund a backstop of liquidity to buy future government debt obligations when no credible investors will buy them is an unspoken quest of both political parties. The establishments of both political parties will do anything to stay in power and this will include raiding and pillaging your retirement funds.
Washington Proposals for a Mandatory Guaranteed Retirement Annuity
The government is getting ready to use that power and in a remarkably cunning way.
The prototype for their plan was devised in 1991 by Alicia H. Munnell, then Director of Research for the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. She presented the idea in a paper entitled “Current Taxation of Qualified Pension Plans: Has the Time Come?” Later she was promoted to Assistant Treasury Secretary, and along with Robert Reich, Henry Cisneros and Hillary Clinton, she began to plot a raid on retirement funds. One element of the scheme was to create a Mandatory Pension System and fund it with a one-time 15% tax on retirement assets and a recurring 15% tax on retirement plan income.
I warned about this in my 1994 book, “Escape the Pension Trap”. Fortunately, the GOP election victory that same year derailed the Mandatory Pension System.
Guess what? It’s back… and nicely repackaged. It’s back because, due to slumping tax collection, Washington is on a desperate search for a new revenue stream. And this time they don’t want to just tax your retirement assets, they’re out to take them.
Teresa Ghilarducci: The New Architect of the Retirement Plan Wealth Attack
The latest leftist plan first appeared in 2007 at the Economic Policy Institute: Agenda for Shared Prosperity. In 2008, she became the new Director of the Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis at the New School for Social Research. In her book, “When I’m 64: The Plot Against Pensions and the Plan to Save Them”, she hypes her retirement solution for millions who do not have adequate retirement savings and her solution is to confiscate most of the retirement assets of successful Americans.
Here’s her plan…
Each year, the government will put $600 into a Guaranteed Retirement Account for you and every other working person in America. If $600 amounts to more than 5% of your annual compensation (if you earn more than $12,000) you will be required to contribute 5% of your total annual compensation to the GRA. The Feds will promise to pay a 3% “inflation adjusted return” on each GRA, based on the government’s Consumer Price Index. When you retire, you receive a portion of the account each month. Then — get this — when you die, your heirs receive only 50% of what’s in your GRA. The rest goes to Uncle Sam. Remember, this is the good news!
Next…
Following the introduction of Guaranteed Retirement Accounts, the next step will be to cap the tax deduction for annual contributions to existing private retirement plans at 5,000. (Many Americans will support this, given the hostility to the well-publicized Wall Street mega-bonuses and retirement plans.) Next will be a tax on every retirement plan’s income, to provide an immediate flow of revenue to the Feds. Finally, there would be a prohibition on buying any non-U.S. investment for any retirement plan.
What Would Spark This Nationalization?
A plan this radical can’t just be slipped through Congress. It can only ride into law on a first-class national crisis. Have you noticed that somehow the politicians are always able to find one when they need one.
■Loss of Triple-A Status for U.S. Treasury Bonds
The loss of triple-A status for Treasury bonds is the most likely trigger. And according to Steven Hess, Moody’s lead analyst for the U.S., it’s not that far-fetched. He states, “The AAA rating of the U.S. is not guaranteed. So if they don’t get the deficit down in the next 3 to 4 years to a sustainable level, then the rating will be in jeopardy.”
■Terrorist Attack or Military Disaster
A terrorist attack or a military disaster like the collapse of Pakistan or an Israel/Iran conflict and disruption of oil shipments could close American markets just as we saw in 2001. That would create a financial crisis over night.
■Another Economic Meltdown
After years of deficits, the greatest hazard to our economy is a run on the dollar and on Treasury securities by foreign investors. Although America’s foreign creditors don’t want to start a run on Treasury debt — they prefer a slow, orderly retreat — no one intends to be the last to head for the exit. Political or economic pressure in Asia could force Japan or China to take immediate action and dump our debt and knock the prices down to fire-sale levels.
What happens if China decides to cut its losses on U.S. Treasuries and issues a $100 billion sell order? That’s only 10% of their holdings, but it could set off panic selling of dollar-denominated bonds and crush the U.S. stock market like an egg shell. Mortgage rates would spike, which would suck the housing market into another air pocket. The President would probably sign an Executive Order closing the markets until order could be restored.
Any of those events would take place in an atmosphere of deep public worry and fear. That’s when Washington would come to your rescue and guarantee to restore your retirement funds back to a “pre-crash” level. How nice, right? However, in exchange you would need to “voluntarily” move your retirement assets into your new Guaranteed Retirement Account.
For those who don’t sign up for a GRA because they’re not fooled by the carrot, there would be sticks to consider.
1.Additional withdrawal penalties and taxes on their retirement plan.
2.Limitations on permissible investments — nothing that isn’t “in the public interest.”
3.Mandatory minimum holdings for targeted investments, such as Treasury obligations.
Remember, these retirement proposals are just in the discussion stage but progressives are promoting this confiscation agenda to the Obama Administration as a new source of revenue for a bankrupt federal government desperate for additional sources of revenue.
When the next economic or stock market crisis hits, your retirement assets will be at risk from this type confiscation effort regardless of whether the Democrats or Republicans are in control.
The Confiscation Event
At some time during the next decade, a global run on treasury debt and the dollar will also likely take the American stock market down past lows not seen since the financial meltdown crisis in 2008 and 2009. The 50% to 75% stock market pullback during the actual bankruptcy of the Washington debt and paper dollar will send shock waves through retirees and current plan participants as their private retirement plan balances plummet.
At this time, Washington will come to the rescue and guarantee all private retirement plan market values back to pre-crisis levels. The gullible American public will overwhelmingly support this effort by switching their dwindling funds into the Guaranteed Retirement Annuity managed by the government. For the first few years, Washington will probably label those few of us who warn that that Americans have lost their retirement benefits as extremists, Ron Paul paranoids and Tea Party advocates.
Then it will become crystal clear to all Americans that their retirement benefits have been given away for a promise by an evil group of plunderers who have never in their history kept a promise, a guarantee or their word on anything. The greatest theft of wealth in the history of the world will have taken place and only those few who heeded an early warning will still have their retirement benefits and security.
Regards,
Ron Holland
January 21, 2010
Ron Holland
Ron Holland has written three books, two on the Washington threat to the private retirement system, plus over 100 reports and articles and he speaks and serves as a moderator at conferences on a wide variety of financial, political and freedom-related topics. He is a strong proponent of defending American liberties at home and the importance for global investment diversification outside the dollar and U.S. financial markets. Ron Holland works in Zurich and is a co-editor of the Swiss Mountain Vision Newsletter.
View articles by Ron Holland
As the United States moves into a new decade of military overreach abroad and national bankruptcy at home, Washington is in a desperate search for more revenue and a solution to the future financing of the trillions in national debt obligations currently held by foreign central banks and investors. Economists, politicians and smart investors know the dollar’s days as the world reserve currency are numbered as is our ability to finance the national debt.
Although the historical government solution to unsustainable government debt loads has always been the destruction of the debts by currency depreciation and eventual hyperinflation, there is always an intermediate step used to buy more time for the politicians in power. This action, usually sidestepped and downplayed by the establishment historians paid to hide the real facts of history is wealth confiscation. Napoleon had it right when he stated, “History is a state of lies agreed upon.”
The largest source of liquid private wealth remaining in the United States are the $15 trillion in private retirement funds and the ultimate ownership, control and future of these funds have already been compromised and exchanged for the favorable tax treatment of private retirement plans. Congress writes the laws, so they can tax, penalize, hold your funds hostage and although they’d never use the word, “confiscate” your assets at their discretion.
The retirement trap I’m writing about is only a proposal at the present time and since it may well begin in the latter years of the Obama Administration assuming the Democrats can somehow maintain their majorities in Congress, I’m calling it the “Obama Retirement Trap”. But make no mistake, the government need for current revenue and their frenzied search for a short-term fix to fund a backstop of liquidity to buy future government debt obligations when no credible investors will buy them is an unspoken quest of both political parties. The establishments of both political parties will do anything to stay in power and this will include raiding and pillaging your retirement funds.
Washington Proposals for a Mandatory Guaranteed Retirement Annuity
The government is getting ready to use that power and in a remarkably cunning way.
The prototype for their plan was devised in 1991 by Alicia H. Munnell, then Director of Research for the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. She presented the idea in a paper entitled “Current Taxation of Qualified Pension Plans: Has the Time Come?” Later she was promoted to Assistant Treasury Secretary, and along with Robert Reich, Henry Cisneros and Hillary Clinton, she began to plot a raid on retirement funds. One element of the scheme was to create a Mandatory Pension System and fund it with a one-time 15% tax on retirement assets and a recurring 15% tax on retirement plan income.
I warned about this in my 1994 book, “Escape the Pension Trap”. Fortunately, the GOP election victory that same year derailed the Mandatory Pension System.
Guess what? It’s back… and nicely repackaged. It’s back because, due to slumping tax collection, Washington is on a desperate search for a new revenue stream. And this time they don’t want to just tax your retirement assets, they’re out to take them.
Teresa Ghilarducci: The New Architect of the Retirement Plan Wealth Attack
The latest leftist plan first appeared in 2007 at the Economic Policy Institute: Agenda for Shared Prosperity. In 2008, she became the new Director of the Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis at the New School for Social Research. In her book, “When I’m 64: The Plot Against Pensions and the Plan to Save Them”, she hypes her retirement solution for millions who do not have adequate retirement savings and her solution is to confiscate most of the retirement assets of successful Americans.
Here’s her plan…
Each year, the government will put $600 into a Guaranteed Retirement Account for you and every other working person in America. If $600 amounts to more than 5% of your annual compensation (if you earn more than $12,000) you will be required to contribute 5% of your total annual compensation to the GRA. The Feds will promise to pay a 3% “inflation adjusted return” on each GRA, based on the government’s Consumer Price Index. When you retire, you receive a portion of the account each month. Then — get this — when you die, your heirs receive only 50% of what’s in your GRA. The rest goes to Uncle Sam. Remember, this is the good news!
Next…
Following the introduction of Guaranteed Retirement Accounts, the next step will be to cap the tax deduction for annual contributions to existing private retirement plans at 5,000. (Many Americans will support this, given the hostility to the well-publicized Wall Street mega-bonuses and retirement plans.) Next will be a tax on every retirement plan’s income, to provide an immediate flow of revenue to the Feds. Finally, there would be a prohibition on buying any non-U.S. investment for any retirement plan.
What Would Spark This Nationalization?
A plan this radical can’t just be slipped through Congress. It can only ride into law on a first-class national crisis. Have you noticed that somehow the politicians are always able to find one when they need one.
■Loss of Triple-A Status for U.S. Treasury Bonds
The loss of triple-A status for Treasury bonds is the most likely trigger. And according to Steven Hess, Moody’s lead analyst for the U.S., it’s not that far-fetched. He states, “The AAA rating of the U.S. is not guaranteed. So if they don’t get the deficit down in the next 3 to 4 years to a sustainable level, then the rating will be in jeopardy.”
■Terrorist Attack or Military Disaster
A terrorist attack or a military disaster like the collapse of Pakistan or an Israel/Iran conflict and disruption of oil shipments could close American markets just as we saw in 2001. That would create a financial crisis over night.
■Another Economic Meltdown
After years of deficits, the greatest hazard to our economy is a run on the dollar and on Treasury securities by foreign investors. Although America’s foreign creditors don’t want to start a run on Treasury debt — they prefer a slow, orderly retreat — no one intends to be the last to head for the exit. Political or economic pressure in Asia could force Japan or China to take immediate action and dump our debt and knock the prices down to fire-sale levels.
What happens if China decides to cut its losses on U.S. Treasuries and issues a $100 billion sell order? That’s only 10% of their holdings, but it could set off panic selling of dollar-denominated bonds and crush the U.S. stock market like an egg shell. Mortgage rates would spike, which would suck the housing market into another air pocket. The President would probably sign an Executive Order closing the markets until order could be restored.
Any of those events would take place in an atmosphere of deep public worry and fear. That’s when Washington would come to your rescue and guarantee to restore your retirement funds back to a “pre-crash” level. How nice, right? However, in exchange you would need to “voluntarily” move your retirement assets into your new Guaranteed Retirement Account.
For those who don’t sign up for a GRA because they’re not fooled by the carrot, there would be sticks to consider.
1.Additional withdrawal penalties and taxes on their retirement plan.
2.Limitations on permissible investments — nothing that isn’t “in the public interest.”
3.Mandatory minimum holdings for targeted investments, such as Treasury obligations.
Remember, these retirement proposals are just in the discussion stage but progressives are promoting this confiscation agenda to the Obama Administration as a new source of revenue for a bankrupt federal government desperate for additional sources of revenue.
When the next economic or stock market crisis hits, your retirement assets will be at risk from this type confiscation effort regardless of whether the Democrats or Republicans are in control.
The Confiscation Event
At some time during the next decade, a global run on treasury debt and the dollar will also likely take the American stock market down past lows not seen since the financial meltdown crisis in 2008 and 2009. The 50% to 75% stock market pullback during the actual bankruptcy of the Washington debt and paper dollar will send shock waves through retirees and current plan participants as their private retirement plan balances plummet.
At this time, Washington will come to the rescue and guarantee all private retirement plan market values back to pre-crisis levels. The gullible American public will overwhelmingly support this effort by switching their dwindling funds into the Guaranteed Retirement Annuity managed by the government. For the first few years, Washington will probably label those few of us who warn that that Americans have lost their retirement benefits as extremists, Ron Paul paranoids and Tea Party advocates.
Then it will become crystal clear to all Americans that their retirement benefits have been given away for a promise by an evil group of plunderers who have never in their history kept a promise, a guarantee or their word on anything. The greatest theft of wealth in the history of the world will have taken place and only those few who heeded an early warning will still have their retirement benefits and security.
Regards,
Ron Holland
January 21, 2010
Ron Holland
Ron Holland has written three books, two on the Washington threat to the private retirement system, plus over 100 reports and articles and he speaks and serves as a moderator at conferences on a wide variety of financial, political and freedom-related topics. He is a strong proponent of defending American liberties at home and the importance for global investment diversification outside the dollar and U.S. financial markets. Ron Holland works in Zurich and is a co-editor of the Swiss Mountain Vision Newsletter.
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