TiLTNews Network: Earth Watch - Freedom is defined by the ability of citizens to live without government interference, not by safety. It is easy to clamor for government security when terrible things happen; but liberty is given true meaning when we support it without exception, and we will be safer for it ~ Dr. Ron Paul
Friday, January 30, 2015
ADMIRALS, GENERALS: PENTAGON TAPES INDICT HILLARY
New revelations back damning conclusion of Benghazi commission
Published: 1 day agoimage: http://www.wnd.com/files/2012/01/Jerome-R.-Corsi_avatar-96x96.jpg
image: http://www.wnd.com/files/2014/07/obamahillary.png
Hillary Clinton and President Obama discuss the Libya crisis at White House press conference in 2012
NEW YORK – Recordings of top Pentagon officials in 2011 strongly criticizing Hillary Clinton for leading a State Department “march to war” against Libyan dictator Muammar Gadhafi in 2011 and for working with the Muslim Brotherhood confirm the conclusions of the Citizens’ Commission on Benghazi, according to members who spoke to WND.
CCB members said the recordings revealed by the Washington Times provide additional evidence to support the group’s interim report concluding the Obama administration “changed sides” in Libya, rejecting an effort by Gadhafi to abdicate and choosing instead to arm al-Qaida-affiliated militia seeking to forcibly oust the dictator.
Last week, WND reported retired Adm. James Lyons’ conclusion the Obama administration could have ousted Gadhafi peacefully by accepting a deal brokered in March 2011 by retired Rear Adm. Chuck Kubic with AFRICOM in Germany.
“The release of the Pentagon secret tapes by the Washington Times today validates the CCB interim report that the Libyan war was totally unnecessary, since it now has been validated that Gadhafi was willing to abdicate and that he had no intention of causing a humanitarian crisis, as promoted by Hillary’s State Department,” said Lyons, a former four-star admiral who served as the commander in chief of the U.S. Pacific and a founding member of the CCB.
The CCB – comprised of 17 retired admirals and generals; former intelligence agents; active anti-terrorist experts; media specialists; and former congressmen – has been conducting its own investigation and working behind the scenes for the past year-and-a-half to ensure Congress uncovers the truth of what happened in Benghazi and holds people accountable.
“It is long past time that the Obama administration and especially his then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton come clean about why they were so determined to turn on Gadhafi – our ally in the war against al-Qaida – and instead chose to arm and support al-Qaida militias fighting to overthrow him,” said Clare Lopez, a former career operations officer with the CIA and currently vice president for research at the Washington-based Center for Security Policy.
Lopez said it’s “critical to note that Gadhafi was actively engaged with Department of Defense officials to arrange discussions about his possible abdication and exile when that promising development was squashed by the Obama White House.”
“The Citizens’ Commission on Benghazi has been asking ‘Why?’ for well over a year now,” she said. “It is time the American people and the families of those who fought and gave their lives at Benghazi in September 2012 were told why those brave Americans had to die at all, much less die alone with no effort made to save them.”
Retired Army Maj. Gen. Paul E. Vallely, another CCB founding member, told WND in an email that the Washington Times disclosure puts additional pressure on Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., to subpoena Clinton and other key Obama administration officials to testify soon in public before the House Select Committee on Benghazi.
“Delays by Gowdy are unnecessary at this time,” Vallely insisted. “Gowdy can press forward now as he does have sufficient intelligence and documents to call all witnesses and issue subpoenas as necessary.”
“Additional delays will only give the obstructionists in the Obama White House, the State Department and the Democrats in Congress time to thwart the efforts of the select committee,” Vallely said. “Gowdy needs to call immediately former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, former Obama administration CIA Director General David Petraeus and former director of both the CIA and the Department of Defense Leon Panetta, as well as General Dempsey, the current chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.”
Retired Air Force Gen. Thomas McInerney, also a founding member of the CCB, was equally disturbed over the content of the Pentagon recordings revealed by the Washington Times.
“It becomes obvious these Pentagon tapes reveal a starting point by the Obama administration to start switching sides by taking down Gadhafi when all informed analysts knew that Benghazi was the incubator for radical Islam in sending suicide bombers to Iraq to kill American troops,” McInerney said.
“Why the administration wanted to do this is bewildering, but the evidence continues to grow,” McInerney added, citing as evidence President Obama’s enthusiastic support for former President Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood in his country, as well as the Obama administration determination to exchange five Muslim “high value targets” from Guantanamo for U.S. Army soldier Bowe Bergdahl, who was held captive by Taliban-affiliated radicals in Afghanistan after he allegedly deserted his unit.
The disclosure of the Pentagon recordings also prompted CCB members to comment on the influence of the Muslim Brotherhood on the Obama administration.
“The war in Libya was a manufactured war produced in part by the influence the Muslim Brotherhood exerted on Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, with the Muslim Brotherhood penetrating her office through the influence of Huma Abedin, Clinton’s longtime deputy chief of staff, who transferred to the State Department to serve as Clinton’s aide,” Lopez added.
WND has reported extensively Abedin’s family origins in the Muslim Brotherhood and her work for a dozen years as an assistant editor for the Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs for the Institute for Muslim Minority Affairs. The organization was founded by her late father and directed by her mother with the full backing of the Muslim World League, an Islamic organization in the Saudi holy city of Mecca founded by Muslim Brotherhood leaders.
“Remember that Huma Abedin’s family’s Saudi ‘godfather’ is Abdullah Omar Nasseef, the founder of Rabita Trust, an al-Qaida funding institution that was shut down after 9/11. These were the connections advising our secretary of state – it’s called an influence operation,” Lopez said.
Lopez said that also during that time, among the closest advisers to John Brennan, now head of the CIA, and Dennis McDonough, currently White House chief of staff, when they were on the National Security Council was the son of the Sudanese grand mufti, Imam Mohamed Magid, the president of the Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated Islamic Society of North America, ISNA.
ISNA was listed by the Department of Justice as an unindicted co-conspirator in the 2008 Holy Land Foundation trial, which convicted the organization and its leaders of funding the terrorist organization Hamas, Lopez noted.
Magid, imam at All Dulles Area Muslim Society, near Washington, D.C., is a member of the board of advisers to the Department of Homeland Security’s Countering Violent Extremism working group.
Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2015/01/admirals-generals-pentagon-tapes-indict-hillary/#8DB0SfyUGPhjTcUF.99
Thursday, January 29, 2015
Measles Police State: Parents who do not vaccinate their children should go to jail
Measles Police State: ''Parents who do not vaccinate their children should go to jail''Mac Slavo
Activist Post
Never mind the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness and other basic freedoms that uphold parents’ rights to make decisions about the health care their children receive.
Never mind the evidence that vaccines aren’t as effective as their makers have promised.
Shutter to think, according to the Office of Medical and Scientific Justice, “the theory of ‘herd immunity’ is failing or was flawed to begin with” while a 2014 Council on Foreign Relations report found:
“the most highly vaccinated populations are also those with the greatest number of outbreaks for those same infectious diseases. This was especially the case for measles, mumps, rubella, polio and pertussis outbreaks,” with the U.S. Canada and rest of the Western world leading the list.Never mind all that.
For many, the measles outbreak at Disneyland is the proof that this matter should no longer be a choice.
Already, an unvaccinated Pasadena woman has been forcibly quarantined after her sister contracted measles.
But it is going further.
USA Today columnist Alex Berezow boldly proclaimed:
Parents who do not vaccinate their children should go to jail.Tell that to the parents of Keira Driscoll, a five year old who died from very strain of the flu that she was vaccinated against just three days after receiving an immunization.
Anti-vaxxers often claim the right not to put “poison” in their children’s bodies.
That is ludicrous. A mountain of data has demonstrated that vaccines are safe and effective. Insisting otherwise is akin to believing that the moon landing was faked.
Or the 15,000 families that have had little other recourse than to file claims in the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program after serious injury or death to their child since the program was created in 1988.The benefits of vaccination have been systematically oversold for one obvious reason – to drive sales with public health mandates and a huge booster of fear – for the profit of Big Pharma.
And this push has not been harmless, it has put many people at risk and devastated families – all because margins of known risk from the vaccines have been accepted as a minor casualty in the effort for the “greater good.”
Berezow argues:Measles is perhaps the most infectious human disease. Virus particles can remain in the air for up to two hours after an infected person leaves. And measles is not a minor infection. The World Health Organization (WHO) reports that before widespread vaccination began in 1980, 2.6 million people a year died from measles. About 400 people a day still do.So, there you have it: people who create walking time bombs are terrorists; terrorists should be arrested; parents who don’t vaccinate should be arrested for weaponizing their children. Great.
Put simply, no person has the right to threaten the safety of his community. Like drunken drivers, the unvaccinated pose an imminent danger to others. They pose a lethal threat to the most vulnerable: the immunocompromised, such as HIV or cancer patients, and infants who have yet to receive their vaccines.
Anti-vaccine parents are turning their children into little walking time bombs. They ought to be charged for endangering their children and others.
However, this propagandist fails to point out, or perhaps even comprehend, that the real reason behind these deaths, though still quite tragic, is compromised immune systems – not the disease itself. The vast majority of these deaths occur in populations who live without basic conditions of clean water, sanitation and sufficient levels of essential vitamins in their diet.
Like the flu, it tends to kill those who already have weakened or underdeveloped defenses against illness.Measles poses relatively little risk to a healthy child. Pediatrician Dr. Jay Gordon told CBS News:
“This measles outbreak does not pose a great risk to a healthy child,” said Dr. Gordon. “And quite frankly I don’t think it poses any risk to a healthy child.”Mortality from Childhood Diseases Was Declining Before the Vaccine Arrived
“Not meningitis, not the plague, not Ebola, they’d get measles. Measles is almost an always a benign childhood illness."
Overall, studies have shown that rising standards of living have done the most to decrease mortality from infectious disease – not vaccines.
The following chart shows that while the measles vaccine, first introduced in 1963, dramatically decreased the number of measles cases, the number of deaths from measles was already in a downward spiral, thanks to general advances in reducing childhood mortality, in part due to social focus on improving nutrition and hygiene.
Deaths from measles declined from around 10 per 100,000 people in 1912 to around 0.25 per 100,000 in the 1960s. While the introduction of the vaccine did reduce the deaths to near zero, the trend was headed there anyway.
Click to enlarge.
Prior to vaccinations, the vast majority of children who contracted measles in the United States caught the disease, endured it, built up their own bodily defenses, and recovered, often after spreading it to other children who also endured it much in the way children spread chickenpox to one another, often intentionally.
Today there are vaccines for these diseases and more, with plans to roll out vaccines for every conceivable disease under the sun or in the known galaxy. Many parents, doctors and advocates have argued there are now simply too many vaccinations on the schedule for most children to handle, increasing the risk of side effects. Some 30 rounds of vaccines (plus an annual flu shot) are recommended by the CDC in a child’s first six years of life.
Side Effects of Vaccines Outweigh the Dangers of the Disease?But as the number of cases as well as deaths shrunk, the admitted risk of side effects from the vaccines themselves have overshadowed the risk of the disease.
Hence, many parents have opted out of them, based on a mix of supporting data, precautionary apprehension and, of course, word-of-mouth rumors.
After all, it was the MMR shot – the vaccination for measles mumps and rubella that started the whole “anti-vax” affair – prompting significant numbers of parents to opt out of vaccines for their children en masse, and inadvertently triggering panic in the powers-that-be.
Undoubtedly the Disneyland measles outbreak is being used by the media not only to demonize parents who choose not to vaccinate, but to shame and intimidate them as well.
The media will no doubt point out the many well meaning parents who believed the “rumors” about the MMR vaccine jab being linked with autism – stirred up by the research of Dr. Wakefield, who was accused of fraud and stripped of his medical license.
But the media will probably NOT be pointing out the revelations of the CDC whistleblower who just admitted that the massive study conducted by the CDC to especially to counter the alleged link between MMR and autism was itself fraudulent, and fudged the data to hide increases in autism risk tied to certain statistical populations. Lawsuits have since been filed.
Few have heard the leaked audio of the same CDC whistleblower discussing research linking “tics” linked to mercury in vaccines, noting that he would personally NEVER give his own pregnant wife a flu shot (which contains mercury as the preservative thimerosal). Doctors, however, recommend that pregnant women receive the shot.
But for the masses, those are just background issues most will never even be aware of.
The drumbeat is mounting for a new push to legitimize vaccinations, and recoup the profits that have been lost to falling vaccination rates and, as usual, by scaring up an issue.
God help us. Society is made up of sheep.
You can read more from Mac Slavo at his site SHTFplan.com, where this first appeared.
Activist
Thu, 29 Jan 2015 16:34:00 GMT
Birds of a Feather: John McCain Defends Henry Kissinger
Brandon Turbeville
Activist Post
It has been said that birds of a feather flock together, and proof of that statement can be seen in the fact that terrorist sympathizer John McCain was recently forced to act as Knight in Shining Armor for famed mass murderer Henry Kissinger as the latter was attempting to give yet another speech to the Senate Armed Services Committee.
Kissinger’s arrival, as well as the beginning of his speech, was interrupted by protesters from Code Pink, who attempted to list off the crimes of Henry Kissinger but were unable to continue their presentation for the requisite number of days it would take to do so due to the fact that Capitol Hill police were called in to remove them.
McCain, always a friend to those who have committed or are doing their best to commit atrocities on a mass scale, erupted in typical angry fashion screaming at protesters, “You know, you're going to have to shut up, or I'm going to have you arrested.” As the protesters were being removed, McCain also screamed, “Get out of here you low-life scum.”
McCain went on to apologize to Kissinger by stating that “Dr. Kissinger, I hope on behalf of all of the members of this committee on both sides of the aisle -- in fact, from all of my colleagues, I'd like to apologize for allowing such disgraceful behavior towards a man who served his country with the greatest distinction. I apologize profusely.”
Many Americans, particularly Vietnam veterans, however, may indeed remember “such disgraceful behavior towards a man who served his country with the greatest distinction” taking place in the Capitol on a number of occasions.
Indeed, the performance of John McCain standing in front of Congress and arguing against any further investigation or revelation of whether or not American POWs were still being held in Vietnam, would certainly count as one such instance.
One other such instance might be his incessant grandstanding in support of al-Qaeda and ISIS, known to the mainstream media as “moderate rebels,” freedom fighters, and the like.
Yet, while McCain’s support of the Vietnam war, Iraq War, Syrian War, Libyan war, and virtually every war that was ever waged and those that ever will be waged upon the face of the earth, has resulted in the death of millions of people, McCain found himself in the presence of one of the true kings of killing in Henry Kissinger.Indeed, Kissinger is one of the true living figures whose feet most psychopathic killers the world over still long to kneel at.
Kissinger’s direction of the Chilean coup, Vietnam war, Cambodian and Laotian tragedies, and his famous National Security Study Memorandum 200: Implications of Worldwide Population Growth for U.S. Security and Overseas Interests (NSSM200) has earned him a special place amongst the world’s most effective mass murders, although admittedly not the most widely known.
It is thus not surprising that McCain would come to the aid of Kissinger so readily. In fact, it is not surprising that, after all these years and all these crimes against humanity, that Kissinger would be addressing such an important Congressional committee. Nor is it surprising that this committee boasts yet another criminal, terrorist supporter, insidious color revolution operative, and traitor like John McCain.
The only surprising aspect of the whole affair was that the protesters were allowed to stay for as long as they did.
Or was the most surprising aspect that there were protesters to begin with?
Recently from Brandon Turbeville:Brandon Turbeville is an author out of Florence, South Carolina. He has a Bachelor's Degree from Francis Marion University and is the author of six books, Codex Alimentarius -- The End of Health Freedom, 7 Real Conspiracies, Five Sense Solutions and Dispatches From a Dissident, volume 1 and volume 2, and The Road to Damascus: The Anglo-American Assault on Syria. Turbeville has published over 300 articles dealing on a wide variety of subjects including health, economics, government corruption, and civil liberties. Brandon Turbeville's podcast Truth on The Tracks can be found every Monday night 9 pm EST at UCYTV. He is available for radio and TV interviews. Please contact activistpost (at) gmail.com.
- Dumbed-Down America, Propaganda and Weaponized Social Media with Brandon Turbeville
- Israel Launches Artillery Strikes Into Syria, Downs Syrian Jet
- 'American Sniper': Lies and Propaganda to Divide a Nation
Birds of a Feather: John McCain Defends Henry Kissinger
Admin
Thu, 29 Jan 2015 23:27:00 GMT
The FBI’s plan to collect everyone’s DNA just got a huge boost from congress
Submitted by sosadmin on Tue, 01/27/2015 - 17:46
In 2011, 1 in 25 Americans was arrested. In a few years, if the FBI has its way, the federal government will possess the DNA of all of those people and more. Under the radar of most lawmakers and journalists, the Bureau—with private industry and congress’ help—is pushing the most massive expansion of biometric state surveillance since the invention of the fingerprint.
Late last year, the FBI cut the ribbon on its one billion dollar biometrics database, called Next Generation Identification. Since NGI’s official launch, state and local law enforcement officials have been encouraged to submit face prints, fingerprints, retina scans, photos of tattoos and scars, and DNA collected from people nationwide to the FBI’s central database. Those state and local officials can also search against the FBI’s biometrics store, if they want to identify someone. With NGI in full operation, the scary future of Minority Report infamy takes a giant leap forward into the world of non-fiction.
The FBI has big goals when it comes to biometric databases, but they can’t achieve them without the active buy-in and assistance of state and local police. That’s part of the reason why Department of Justice and Homeland Security grant programs have paid for state and local police nationwide to purchase biometric capturing and processing technologies. Ask your local police department about their electronic fingerprint readers, for example, and you’re likely to hear that they were purchased with federal funds. Those devices make it easy for police and sheriffs nationwide to submit fingerprints to the FBI—rapidly, from the field, and with very little effort on behalf of departments.
The same is about to be true with DNA, thanks to funds congress has made available specifically for state and local law enforcement to purchase rapid DNA processing machines. The 2015 omnibus budget includes this provision: “$117,000,000 is for a DNA analysis and capacity enhancement program and for other local, State, and Federal forensic activities.” These funds will presumably help the FBI achieve goals it laid out in August 2014, as relayed here by Nextgov—one of the few news outlets to cover the FBI’s DNA collection plans:
Various FBI divisions "are collaborating to develop and implement foundational efforts to streamline and automate law enforcement's DNA collection processes" including at arrest, booking and conviction, according to an Aug. 19 notice about the industry briefing. The ongoing groundwork is expected to facilitate the "integration of Rapid DNA Analysis into the FBI's Combined DNA Index (CODIS) and Next Generation Identification (NGI) systems from the booking environment.”
Current law requires state and local police to send collected DNA to an accredited lab before it is shipped off to the feds. But the FBI wants a “legislative tweak” to enable police to skip that step, and send DNA from arrestees directly to the federal CODIS database. If the feds succeed in changing the law, we’re in trouble: corporations and congress are already laying the groundwork for the logistic implementation of a nationwide DNA dragnet.
A cursory internet search reveals that General Electric, one of the manufacturers of rapid DNA testing machines, is already working with police to assist them in getting federal grants to purchase their technology. GE Healthcare is “sponsoring” free grant writing and application processing for police departments that want federal funds to buy its DNAscan™ Rapid DNA Analysis System. “Free to any law enforcement agency, this program includes: grant research, application assistance, narrative reviews, and grant alerts,” the GE websiteadvertises. “The consultative nature of our service will result in grant applications intelligently tailored to grant program requirements; greatly improving the chance your department will ultimately be funded.”
The FBI and General Electric are likely very pleased by congress’ decision to allocate $117 million for DNA processing technologies grants for state and local cops. But should we be?
A terrible Supreme Court ruling in Maryland v King says to the contrary: we should be very, very alarmed. As Justice Scalia noted in his dissent, “Make no mistake about it: because of today’s decision, your DNA can be taken and entered into a national database if you are ever arrested, rightly or wrongly, and for whatever reason.”
That grim prognosis has now received a massive stimulus in the form of millions of dollars in grant funds for police to purchase the technology that will make such a program not just viable, but inevitable. Unless we stop it.
If you’re concerned about your state and local police obtaining federal funds to purchase a rapid DNA testing machine, and thereby facilitating FBI DNA collection from tens of millions of people nationwide, get in touch with your city or town government. Tell your elected officials you don’t want police using these machines to obtain DNA from people convicted of no crime. Tell them you know who will be most severely impacted by this incoming surveillance dragnet: black and Latino people, undocumented immigrants, the poor, and political dissidents.
It’s not enough just to talk about these problems. We must act—and the local level is where we as ordinary people have the most power to have a real impact.Demand that your local lawmakers provide genuine oversight of police technology acquisitions when those tools will be used to enable things like a nationwide DNA database. To our local authorities the money might seem “free” because it comes from federal grants, but the damage done to civil liberties and personal freedoms is dangerously costly. Don’t wait until the police already have the grant in hand to raise concerns about this issue. By then it may be too late.
IRAQ WAR REDUX: HILLARY CLINTON MANUFACTURED “STUPID FACTS” THAT LED TO THE INVASION OF LIBYA
Former Sec. of State responsible for the death of 30,000 Libyans
by KURT NIMMO | INFOWARS.COM | JANUARY 29, 2015
Hillary Clinton, as Secretary of State, created false pretenses for the invasion of Libya in much the same way neocons used fabricated intelligence as an excuse to launch a war against Iraq during the Bush era. Listen here:
http://player.ooyala.com/iframe.html#pbid=7d6243b6b5f74a6fb09a179d33842db2&ec=o1cXgxczopsoTCxZ0i-MF3G6knBYf4eK&docUrl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.infowars.com%2Firaq-war-redux-hillary-clinton-manufactured-stupid-facts-that-led-to-the-invasion-of-libya%2F Libya in much the same way neocons used fabricated intelligence as an excuse to launch a war against Iraq during the Bush era.
On Wednesday, the Washington Times reported the discovery of tapes recovered from Libya revealing Clinton had “developed tunnel vision and led the U.S. into an unnecessary war without adequately weighing the intelligence community’s concerns.”
An intermediary dispatched by the Joint Chiefs of Staff told Col. Moammar Gaddafi’s son Clinton and the State Department had produced “stupid, stupid facts” that were sent to Congress in the lead-up to the NATO invasion of the north African nation.
Clinton argued the Gaddafi regime would engage in genocide and produce a humanitarian crisis in response to an Arab Spring uprising in Libya.
The so-called Arab Spring was aborderless color revolution-esque effort launched by the International Republican Institute, the National Democratic Institute, Freedom House and the National Endowment for Democracy to reformulate the political landscape in the Middle East, beginning in Egypt.
“It was like the WMDs in Iraq. It was based on a false report,” Gadhafi’s son and heir apparent, Seif Gaddafi, said in a May 2011 phone call to then Democrat Rep. Dennis J. Kucinich.
“Libyan airplanes bombing demonstrators, Libyan airplanes bombing districts in Tripoli, Libyan army killed thousands, etc., etc., and now the whole world found there is no single evidence that such things happened in Libya.”
In fact, the humanitarian crisis in Libya developed following the invasion, not before. According to the United Nations, approximately 750,000 refugees were forced to leave the country after the NED and State Department instigated “rebellion” against Gaddafi broke out. At least 30,000 people died during the manufactured war.
The supposed rebels were comprised primarily of al-Qaeda terrorists who were purposely armed and supported by the CIA.
“And now you have NATO supporting them with ships, with airplanes, helicopters, arms, training, communication,” Seif Gaddafi told U.S. officials. “We ask the American government send a fact-finding mission to Libya. I want you to see everything with your own eyes.”
The Libyan war designed by the Clinton State Department and initiated by NATO and the United Nations served the usual clients — the military-industrial complex, the financial class and big oil.
“Wall Street, the Anglo-American oil giants, the US-EU weapons producers would be the unspoken beneficiaries of a US-NATO led military campaign directed against Libya. Libyan oil is a bonanza for the Anglo-American oil giants,” writes Michel Chossudovsky.
“Libya has the largest oil reserves in Africa. The objective of US-NATO interference is strategic: it consists in outright theft, in stealing the nation’s oil wealth under the disguise of a humanitarian intervention. This military operation is intent upon establishing US hegemony in North Africa, a region historically dominated by France and to lesser extent by Italy and Spain.”
Hillary Clinton: Neocon Choice for President
Despite Hillary Clinton’s age, her medical issues and largely glossed over criminal behavior, she will likely become the next president of the United States.
She is the preferred candidate of the neocon faction of the ruling elite and is more “hawkish” than her putative opponents, Jeb Bush or Mitt Romney.
Robert Kagan, an influential neocon, and Max Boot, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, believe Clinton “was a principled voice for a strong stand on controversial issues, whether supporting the Afghan surge or the intervention in Libya.”
“It’s easy to imagine Mrs. Clinton’s making room for the neocons in her administration,” Jacob Heilbrunnwrote for The New York Times in July. “No one could charge her with being weak on national security with the likes of Robert Kagan on board.”
Influential Democrats across the board support Clinton’s presidential bid and corporate media polls show Americans support Clinton over her rivals by a wide margin (57% of those polled oppose Bush and 60% are against Romney).
Of course, it is basically irrelevant who occupies the White House come 2016. The financial class and its political operatives in the Democrat and Republican parties will make certain the next president continues the policies attributed to the prior president who, naturally, continued the foreign policy directives of his predecessor.
'Two Percent Inflation' and The Fed's Current Mandate
written by ron paul
wednesday january 28, 2015
Over the last 100 years the Fed has had many mandates and policy changes in its pursuit of becoming the chief central economic planner for the United States. Not only has it pursued this utopian dream of planning the US economy and financing every boondoggle conceivable in the welfare/warfare state, it has become the manipulator of the premier world reserve currency.
As Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke explained to me, the once profoundly successful world currency – gold – was no longer money. This meant that he believed, and the world has accepted, the fiat dollar as the most important currency of the world, and the US has the privilege and responsibility for managing it. He might even believe, along with his Fed colleagues, both past and present, that the fiat dollar will replace gold for millennia to come. I remain unconvinced.
At its inception the Fed got its marching orders: to become the ultimate lender of last resort to banks and business interests. And to do that it needed an “elastic” currency. The supporters of the new central bank in 1913 were well aware that commodity money did not “stretch” enough to satisfy the politician’s appetite for welfare and war spending. A printing press and computer, along with the removal of the gold standard, would eventually provide the tools for a worldwide fiat currency. We’ve been there since 1971 and the results are not good.
Many modifications of policy mandates occurred between 1913 and 1971, and the Fed continues today in a desperate effort to prevent the total unwinding and collapse of a monetary system built on sand. A storm is brewing and when it hits, it will reveal the fragility of the entire world financial system.
The Fed and its friends in the financial industry are frantically hoping their next mandate or strategy for managing the system will continue to bail them out of each new crisis.
The seeds were sown with the passage of the Federal Reserve Act in December 1913. The lender of last resort would target special beneficiaries with its ability to create unlimited credit. It was granted power to channel credit in a special way. Average citizens, struggling with a mortgage or a small business about to go under, were not the Fed’s concern. Commercial, agricultural, and industrial paper was to be bought when the Fed's friends were in trouble and the economy needed to be propped up. At its inception the Fed was given no permission to buy speculative financial debt or U.S. Treasury debt.
It didn’t take long for Congress to amend the Federal Reserve Act to allow the purchase of US debt to finance World War I and subsequently all the many wars to follow. These changes eventually led to trillions of dollars being used in the current crisis to bail out banks and mortgage companies in over their heads with derivative speculations and worthless mortgage-backed securities.
It took a while to go from a gold standard in 1913 to the unbelievable paper bailouts that occurred during the crash of 2008 and 2009.
In 1979 the dual mandate was proposed by Congress to solve the problem of high inflation and high unemployment, which defied the conventional wisdom of the Phillips curve that supported the idea that inflation could be a trade-off for decreasing unemployment. The stagflation of the 1970s was an eye-opener for all the establishment and government economists. None of them had anticipated the serious financial and banking problems in the 1970s that concluded with very high interest rates.
That’s when the Congress instructed the Fed to follow a “dual mandate” to achieve, through monetary manipulation, a policy of “stable prices” and “maximum employment.” The goal was to have Congress wave a wand and presto the problem would be solved, without the Fed giving up power to create money out of thin air that allows it to guarantee a bailout for its Wall Street friends and the financial markets when needed.
The dual mandate was really a triple mandate. The Fed was also instructed to maintain “moderate long-term interest rates.” “Moderate” was not defined. I now have personally witnessed nominal interest rates as high as 21% and rates below 1%. Real interest rates today are actually below zero.
The dual, or the triple mandate, has only compounded the problems we face today. Temporary relief was achieved in the 1980s and confidence in the dollar was restored after Volcker raised interest rates up to 21%, but structural problems remained.
Nevertheless, the stock market crashed in 1987 and the Fed needed more help. President Reagan’s Executive Order 12631 created the President’s Working Group on Financial Markets, also known as the Plunge Protection Team. This Executive Order gave more power to the Federal Reserve, Treasury, Commodity Futures Trading Commission, and the Securities and Exchange Commission to come to the rescue of Wall Street if market declines got out of hand. Though their friends on Wall Street were bailed out in the 2000 and 2008 panics, this new power obviously did not create a sound economy. Secrecy was of the utmost importance to prevent the public from seeing just how this “mandate” operated and exactly who was benefiting.
Since 2008 real economic growth has not returned. From the viewpoint of the central economic planners, wages aren’t going up fast enough, which is like saying the currency is not being debased rapidly enough. That’s the same explanation they give for prices not rising fast enough as measured by the government-rigged Consumer Price Index. In essence it seems like they believe that making the cost of living go up for average people is a solution to the economic crisis. Rather bizarre!
The obsession now is to get price inflation up to at least a 2% level per year. The assumption is that if the Fed can get prices to rise, the economy will rebound. This too is monetary policy nonsense.
If the result of a congressional mandate placed on the Fed for moderate and stable interest rates results in interest rates ranging from 0% to 21%, then believing the Fed can achieve a healthy economy by getting consumer prices to increase by 2% per year is a pie-in-the-sky dream. Money managers CAN’T do it and if they could it would achieve nothing except compounding the errors that have been driving monetary policy for a hundred years.
A mandate for 2% price inflation is not only a goal for the central planners in the United States but for most central bankers worldwide.
It’s interesting to note that the idea of a 2% inflation rate was conceived 25 years ago in New Zealand to curtail double-digit price inflation. The claim was made that since conditions improved in New Zealand after they lowered their inflation rate to 2% that there was something magical about it. And from this they assumed that anything lower than 2% must be a detriment and the inflation rate must be raised. Of course, the only tool central bankers have to achieve this rate is to print money and hope it flows in the direction of raising the particular prices that the Fed wants to raise.
One problem is that although newly created money by central banks does inflate prices, the central planners can’t control which prices will increase or when it will happen. Instead of consumer prices rising, the price inflation may go into other areas, as determined by millions of individuals making their own choices. Today we can find very high prices for stocks, bonds, educational costs, medical care and food, yet the CPI stays under 2%.
The CPI, though the Fed currently wants it to be even higher, is misreported on the low side. The Fed’s real goal is to make sure there is no opposition to the money printing press they need to run at full speed to keep the financial markets afloat. This is for the purpose of propping up in particular stock prices, debt derivatives, and bonds in order to take care of their friends on Wall Street.
This “mandate” that the Fed follows, unlike others, is of their own creation. No questions are asked by the legislators, who are always in need of monetary inflation to paper over the debt run up by welfare/warfare spending. There will be a day when the obsession with the goal of zero interest rates and 2% price inflation will be laughed at by future economic historians. It will be seen as just as silly as John Law’s inflationary scheme in the 18th century for perpetual wealth for France by creating the Mississippi bubble – which ended in disaster. After a mere two years, 1719 to 1720, of runaway inflation Law was forced to leave France in disgrace. The current scenario will not be precisely the same as with this giant bubble but the consequences will very likely be much greater than that which occurred with the bursting of the Mississippi bubble.
The fiat dollar standard is worldwide and nothing similar to this has ever existed before. The Fed and all the world central banks now endorse the monetary principles that motivated John Law in his goal of a new paradigm for French prosperity. His thesis was simple: first increase paper notes in order to increase the money supply in circulation. This he claimed would revitalize the finances of the French government and the French economy. His theory was no more complicated than that.
This is exactly what the Federal Reserve has been attempting to do for the past six years. It has created $4 trillion of new money, and used it to buy government Treasury bills and $1.7 trillion of worthless home mortgages. Real growth and a high standard of living for a large majority of Americans have not occurred, whereas the Wall Street elite have done quite well. This has resulted in aggravating the persistent class warfare that has been going on for quite some time.
The Fed has failed at following its many mandates, whether legislatively directed or spontaneously decided upon by the Fed itself – like the 2% price inflation rate. But in addition, to compound the mischief caused by distorting the much-needed market rate of interest, the Fed is much more involved than just running the printing presses. It regulates and manages the inflation tax. The Fed was the chief architect of the bailouts in 2008. It facilitates the accumulation of government debt, whether it’s to finance wars or the welfare transfer programs directed at both rich and poor. The Fed provides a backstop for the speculative derivatives dealings of the banks considered too big to fail. Together with the FDIC's insurance for bank accounts, these programs generate a huge moral hazard while the Fed obfuscates monetary and economic reality.
The Federal Reserve reports that it has over 300 PhD’s on its payroll. There are hundreds more in the Federal Reserve’s District Banks and many more associated scholars under contract at many universities. The exact cost to get all this wonderful advice is unknown. The Federal Reserve on its website assures the American public that these economists “represent an exceptional diverse range of interest in specific area of expertise.” Of course this is with the exception that gold is of no interest to them in their hundreds and thousands of papers written for the Fed.
This academic effort by subsidized learned professors ensures that our college graduates are well-indoctrinated in the ways of inflation and economic planning. As a consequence too, essentially all members of Congress have learned these same lessons.
Fed policy is a hodgepodge of monetary mismanagement and economic interference in the marketplace. Sadly, little effort is being made to seriously consider real monetary reform, which is what we need. That will only come after a major currency crisis.
I have quite frequently made the point about the error of central banks assuming that they know exactly what interest rates best serve the economy and at what rate price inflation should be. Currently the obsession with a 2% increase in the CPI per year and a zero rate of interest is rather silly.
In spite of all the mandates, flip-flopping on policy, and irrational regulatory exuberance, there’s an overwhelming fear that is shared by all central bankers, on which they dwell day and night. That is the dreaded possibility of DEFLATION.
A major problem is that of defining the terms commonly used. It’s hard to explain a policy dealing with deflation when Keynesians claim a falling average price level – something hard to measure – is deflation, when the Austrian free-market school describes deflation as a decrease in the money supply.
The hysterical fear of deflation is because deflation is equated with the 1930s Great Depression and all central banks now are doing everything conceivable to prevent that from happening again through massive monetary inflation. Though the money supply is rapidly rising and some prices like oil are falling, we are NOT experiencing deflation.
Under today’s conditions, fighting the deflation phantom only prevents the needed correction and liquidation from decades of an inflationary/mal-investment bubble economy.
It is true that even though there is lots of monetary inflation being generated, much of it is not going where the planners would like it to go. Economic growth is stagnant and lots of bubbles are being formed, like in stocks, student debt, oil drilling, and others. Our economic planners don’t realize it but they are having trouble with centrally controlling individual “human action.”
Real economic growth is being hindered by a rational and justified loss of confidence in planning business expansions. This is a consequence of the chaos caused by the Fed’s encouragement of over-taxation, excessive regulations, and diverting wealth away from domestic investments and instead using it in wealth-consuming and dangerous unnecessary wars overseas. Without the Fed monetizing debt, these excesses would not occur.
Lessons yet to be learned:
1. Increasing money and credit by the Fed is not the same as increasing wealth. It in fact does the opposite.
2. More government spending is not equivalent to increasing wealth.
3. Liquidation of debt and correction in wages, salaries, and consumer prices is not the monster that many fear.
4. Corrections, allowed to run their course, are beneficial and should not be prolonged by bailouts with massive monetary inflation.
5. The people spending their own money is far superior to the government spending it for them.
6. Propping up stock and bond prices, the current Fed goal, is not a road to economic recovery.
7. Though bailouts help the insiders and the elite 1%, they hinder the economic recovery.
8. Production and savings should be the source of capital needed for economic growth.
9. Monetary expansion can never substitute for savings but guarantees mal–investment.
10. Market rates of interest are required to provide for the economic calculation necessary for growth and reversing an economic downturn.
11. Wars provide no solution to a recession/depression. Wars only make a country poorer while war profiteers benefit.
12. Bits of paper with ink on them or computer entries are not money – gold is.
13. Higher consumer prices per se have nothing to do with a healthy economy.
14. Lower consumer prices should be expected in a healthy economy as we experienced with computers, TVs, and cell phones.
All this effort by thousands of planners in the Federal Reserve, Congress, and the bureaucracy to achieve a stable financial system and healthy economic growth has failed.
It must be the case that it has all been misdirected. And just maybe a free market and a limited government philosophy are the answers for sorting it all out without the economic planners setting interest and CPI rate increases.
A simpler solution to achieving a healthy economy would be to concentrate on providing a “SOUND DOLLAR” as the Founders of the country suggested. A gold dollar will always outperform a paper dollar in duration and economic performance while holding government growth in check. This is the only monetary system that protects liberty while enhancing the opportunity for peace and prosperity.
Copyright © 2014 by RonPaul Institute. Permission to reprint in whole or in part is gladly granted, provided full credit and a live link are given.
Wednesday, January 28, 2015
The 19 Ingredients in McDonald’s Fries – Including a Form of Silicone Found in Silly Putty
Along with a petrol-based chemical
BY MIKE BARRETT
POSTED ON JANUARY 27, 2015
Ever wonder what makes up highly popular fast food, such as McDonald’s chicken nuggets or french fries? If the fast food giants recently launched ‘transparency campaign’ tells us anything, it’s that the public is increasingly demanding truth and change. But what McDonald’s ‘truth campaign’ isn’t telling us is that much of its food is lathered in questionable, health-compromising ingredients.
In the most recent transparency video from McDonald’s, Grant Imahara explains that there are 19 ingredients in America’s favorite fries, one of which is polydimethylsiloxane, which is used in the production of silly putty. This seemingly ‘essential’ french fry-Silly Putty ingredient has been making headlines, and I can tell you that it won’t be the last headline you see.
During his ‘investigation,’ he found that dimethylpolysiloxane is used in the making of McDonald’s fries along with a petrol-based chemical called tertiary butylhydroquinone (TBHQ). While anyone might immediately suspect that these ingredients may pose a hazard (and you wouldn’t be wrong), Grant reassures viewers that these are both safe additives used for perfectly good reasons.
You can view the video below to see McDoanld’s segment on how its french fries are made, taking a tour through a McDonald’s factory.
Dimethylpolysiloxane is added for safety reasons to prevent cooking oil from foaming, while tertiary butylhydroquinone (TBHQ) is applied as a food preservative. Can’t have fries that don’t last a few years, right?
Here are some of the questions and answers McDonald’s uses in an attempt to sway public opinion. Unfortunately, it doesn’t touch on the issues that are leading to a loss in profits for the mega-corp.
Of course finding such ingredients in the fast food giant’s french fries isn’t so surprising – much of McDonald’s’ food is tainted in more than one way. For example, containing over 70 ingredients, the McDonald’s sought after McRib is full of surprises — including ‘restructured meat’ technology that includes traditionally-discarded animal parts brought together to create a rib-like substance. It also contains a little-known flour-bleaching agent known as azodicarbonamide.
What do you think? Are these the reasons why McDonald’s is facing recent public rejection? It seems the fast food giant is attempting to make some changes, though maybe not fast enough.
About Mike Barrett:
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THIS CHART TELLS A STORY… AMERICA’S MIDDLE CLASS THRIVED AFTER WWII AND DIED UNDER OBAMA
The Davos World Economic Summit has long been a parade for the insider agenda
by MAC SLAVO | SHTFPLAN.COM | JANUARY 28, 2015
The Davos World Economic Summit has long been a parade for the insider agenda, putting the power players’ plans for the world’s economies on display as a preview to their playing out for the rest of the year.
But so far, the 2015 elite retreat in the Swiss Alps has proven to be full of apprehension, and even horror… with many of its own members expressing regret at the world they have built.
The Guardian reported:
The billionaires and corporate oligarchs meeting in Davos this week are getting worried about inequality… even the architects of the crisis-ridden international economic order are starting to see the dangers. It’s not just the maverick hedge-funder George Soros, who likes to describe himself as a class traitor. Paul Polman, Unilever chief executive, frets about the “capitalist threat to capitalism”. Christine Lagarde, the IMF managing director, fears capitalism might indeed carry Marx’s “seeds of its own destruction” and warns that something needs to be done.
The scale of the crisis has been laid out for them by the charity Oxfam. Just 80 individuals now have the same net wealth as 3.5 billion people – half the entire global population. Last year, the best-off 1% owned 48% of the world’s wealth, up from 44% five years ago. On current trends, the richest 1% will have pocketed more than the other 99% put together next year. The 0.1% have been doing even better, quadrupling their share of US income since the 1980s.
These billionaires are not concerned with a fair or truly equitable world, of course. But they may well be concerned about having pushed the system beyond the brink, and triggering global collapse or unrest as a result of things gone way too far.
On top of a bloated super-surveillance police state that is still expanding in the age of Big Data and continuing terrorism, it is a “wealth grab on a grotesque scale” that has stood out the most in 2015.
In 2015, it has become obvious that inequality has become just plain cynical, unsettling and, perhaps, downright revolutionary… and even the insulated, egocentric billionaires have taken notice.
Meanwhile, the Telegraph compiled a set of compelling reasons to think the world has fallen back into crisis, with a global economic meltdown perhaps looming overhead.
Charts compiled from 2014 data showed gloomy numbers in everything from stunted growth, mounting deflation, collapsing oil prices (and with it a collapsing Russian economy), conspicuously low central bank interest rates, mounting debt in Europe and the UK, new waves of the Euro-crises in Greece, Italy and Spain, and shortcomings in previous forecasts for growth by the IMF.
In short… well, things are not looking so great.
Along with the other factors mentioned above, this chart, published by the London Telegraph, shows what has happened to Americans as they struggled to tread water and keep afloat after 2008. For the United States, there have been some signs of improvement, but mostly for those already on top. And the general decline in the global rankings of economic freedom and civil liberties does not complement the widening inequality, either.
It illustrates the dramatic shift from the post World War II years of economic expansion to where we stand now…
As Neil Irwin reported for the NY Times:
Who benefits from rising incomes in an expansion has changed drastically over the last 60 years. Pavlina R. Tcherneva, an economist at Bard College, created a chart that vividly shows how.
Back in the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s, most of the income gains experienced during expansions — the periods from the trough of one recession until the onset of another — accrued to most of the people. That is to say, the bottom 90 percent of earners captured at least a majority of the rise in income.
With each expansion in sequence, however, the bottom 90 percent captured a smaller share of income gains and the top 10 percent captured more.
Post-WWII and the Burgeoning Middle Class
It’s not that things were ever perfect, but… here’s a glimpse into how most Americans – the “average” American in the middle or lower class was doing, overall, half a century or so ago. With a strong manufacturing and industrial sector, many had the opportunity for a good paying job, a home and some semblance of upward mobility. Not all was rosy, but by the numbers, things were on an even enough keel.
In short, the chart begins in 1949, when the income growth for most Americans outweighed that of the top 10% by a factor of four to one.
The trend gradually declined, moving from 80% of income growth in the bottom 90% in 1949-1953 to just 55% in the years 1975-79.
During those years, most Americans steadily enjoyed relatively high wages and general prosperity.
Energy Crisis and Stagflation of the 1970s
The 1970s represented a turning point, however, with several stages of the oil crisis hitting in 1973 and 1979. Foreign policy led to OPEC hiking energy prices; Americans in turn saw rationing and a rise in the cost of living; middle class wealth and job opportunity took a dive.
The beginning of deindustrialization meant that, more and more, Americans weren’t producing actual goods; manufacturing was in decline, and many good jobs were soon shipped over seas.
Meanwhile, wealth on a global stage flowed through the petrodollar, which was, in turn, recycled on Wall Street, making speculators and banking houses – not good and production – the center of the economic universe.
Deregulation and Unfettered Speculation in the 1980s and 1990s
Thus, the increases in income as wealth changed dramatically in the following decades, starting in the year 1982 and continuing to 2000 and the end of the century.
During the presidencies of Republicans Ronald Reagan and George Bush and Democrat Bill Clinton, income growth patterns flipped from their post-war patterns, with the top 10% suddenly outpacing everyone nearly 3-to-1, and regular folks seeing a noticeable decrease in their earnings.
In short, the middle class in decline. And things were getting even worse for those at the bottom.
The deregulation atmosphere of the 80s represented a complete upheaval of the post-war middle class boom.
As Wall Street’s predatory capitalism became the law of the land, a full 80% of income growth went to those at the top, while middle and lower class wealth suddenly staggered to a 29% share.
The 90s continued this trend, with income growth for the bottom 90% dropping to 27%.
This fast-paced era of “free market” (crony) capitalism – as defined and enhanced by Wall Street – only set the stage for what was to come, however.
The Walls Come Down: End of Glass Steagall and Rise of Derivatives Intro 21st Century
For those looking back after the 2008 financial collapse, these are the years in which the Glass Steagall Act, which had separated commercial and investment banking since the 1930s, was repealed with the handiwork of Clinton’s Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin and Larry Summers, Rubin’s deputy and successor.
Meanwhile, since the mid-90s, the derivatives market was opened up for big business, despite the warnings of such regulators as Brooksley Born, then head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC).
Under these important developments, the cynical years of the George W. Bush presidency – initiated by a Supreme Court decision, and not by the electoral process – became even worse.
Income growth for most people ground to a halt, with the total income growth for the lower and middle classes reaching only 2% (meaning most had no meaningful rise in income at all).
Meanwhile, income growth for the top 10% soared to 98% of all increases. America’s richest took it straight to the bank, in an era of massive speculation during a huge housing bubble that would soon come crashing down.
Much has been said about the 2008 financial crisis, but the “too big to fail” banks were signposts for an opportunistic class of Americans who had profited by their own rules when opportunity was dwindling for most people.
After the brink, when taxpayers bailed out the banks, things became even worse for average Americans who found themselves in the so-called “bottom 90%.”
During the Obama years, when many Americans perceived America’s first black president as redistributing vast amounts of wealth to the lower classes, income dropped sharply, with negative growth for 90% of Americans for the first time since World War II.
There was no such leveling out, but a sharpening of the growing disparity nationwide. Obama is a corporatist, not a socialist.
During the period since 2009, when most Americans saw an average drop of 16% in income, the top 10% increased their wealth by a mind-boggling 116%. Their earnings more than doubled, while the average population struggled with less and less. Things reached a point of total us vs. them…
The Occupy Wall Street crowd called it the 1%, but it is much worse than that. The issue is a tiny, tiny few (numbering only a few thousand) who now effectively own it all.
They make the rules, they break the rules, and, well, they just rule. Period.
Could the picture be any clearer?
This video shows how America’s perception of the wealth gap underplays the reality, and compounds the problems, and further reveals that in reality, the bottom 40% in the United States have, well, next to nothing to show for themselves in terms of economic wealth:
As for the Middle Class – currently dead, in limbo or alternately M.I.A., columnist Harold Meyerson argues:
The extinction of a large and vibrant American middle class isn’t ordained by the laws of either economics or physics. Many of the impediments to creating anew a broadly prosperous America are ultimately political creations that are susceptible to political remedy. Amassing the power to secure those remedies will require an extraordinary, sustained, and heroic political mobilization. Americans will have to transform their anxiety into indignation and direct that indignation to the task of reclaiming their stake in the nation’s future.
Perhaps that means the Middle Class could be once again revived, if ever sanity reentered the picture, if the bums were kicked out and those guilty of outright treason in the financial and political arenas were finally rounded up and held accountable.
But don’t hold your breath… just hold onto what you’ve got, if you can.
Obamacare program costs $50,000 in taxpayer money for every American who gets health insurance, says bombshell budget report
- Stunning figure comes from Congressional Budget Office report that revised cost estimates for the next 10 years
- Government will spend $1.993 TRILLION over a decade and take in $643 BILLION in new taxes, penalties and fees related to Obamacare
- The $1.35 trillion net cost will result in 'between 24 million and 27 million' fewer Americans being uninsured – a $50,000 price tag per person at best
- The law will still leave 'between 29 million and 31 million' nonelderly Americans without medical insurance
- Numbers assume Obamacare insurance exchange enrollment will double between now and 2025
By DAVID MARTOSKO, US POLITICAL EDITOR FOR DAILYMAIL.COM
PUBLISHED: 16:38 EST, 26 January 2015 | UPDATED: 18:32 EST, 26 January 2015
It will cost the federal government – taxpayers, that is – $50,000 for every person who gets health insurance under the Obamacare law, the Congressional Budget Office revealed on Monday.
The number comes from figures buried in a 15-page section of the nonpartisan organization's new ten-year budget outlook.
The best-case scenario described by the CBO would result in 'between 24 million and 27 million' fewer Americans being uninsured in 2025, compared to the year before the Affordable Care Act took effect.
Pulling that off will cost Uncle Sam about $1.35 trillion – or $50,000 per head.
SCROLL DOWN TO READ THE REPORT
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THE $2 TRILLION DOLLAR MAN: President Barack Obama was in India on Monday when the Congressional Budget Office reported the federal government's gross costs for a decade of Obamacare will be $1.993 trillion
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PROMISES: Obama pledged in 2009 during a speech before a joint session of Congress that his health insurance proposal would cost $900 billion over ten years – a far cry short of current numbers
The numbers are daunting: It will take $1.993 trillion, a number that looks like $1,993,000,000,000, to provide insurance subsidies to poor and middle-class Americans, and to pay for a massive expansion of Medicaid and CHIP (Children's Health Insurance Program) costs.
Offsetting that massive outlay will be $643 billion in new taxes, penalties and fees related to the Obamacare law.
That revenue includes quickly escalating penalties – or 'taxes,' as the U.S. Supreme Court described them – on people who resist Washington's command to buy medical insurance.
It also includes income from a controversial medical device tax, which some Republicans predict will be eliminated in the next two years.
If they're right, Obamacare's per-person cost would be even higher.
President Barack Obama pledged to members of Congress in 2009, as his signature insurance overhaul law was being hotly debated, that 'the plan I'm proposing will cost around $900 billion over 10 years.'
It would be a significant discount if the White House could return to that number today.
Obama in '09: Obamacare won't add one dime to deficit PRICEY: The federal government will spend $50,000 for each person recruited to buy insurance or neroll in free Medicaid through the Obamacare exchanges In that same speech, Obama claimed that there were 'more than 30 million American citizens who cannot get coverage.' $900 billion spent on those people would equate to no more than $30,000 each – less than two-thirds of what the CBO now says the program will cost when the dust settles. The CBO and the Joint Committee on Taxation, a group of members from both houses of Congress, prepared Monday's report on the overall direction of the federal budget. They estimated that 'the net costs of the coverage provisions of the ACA [Affordable Care Act] will rise sharply as the effects of the act phase in from 2015 through 2017.' Those costs will 'rise steadily through 2022' before leveling off for three years, the groups' economists determined. But even at that point, the Obamacare program will cost the governemnt 'about $145 billion' each year. That number doesn't include the insurance premiums and out-of-pocket health care costs paid by Americans – only the government's role in implementing the law and paying for its guarantees. And the law will still leave 'between 29 million and 31 million' nonelderly Americans without medical insurance, says the CBO. 
Exclusive: Spending- why 'red' states shoulder the deepest cuts under Tyrant Obama | Reuters
BY ANDY SULLIVAN
WASHINGTON Wed Jan 28, 2015 10:26am EST
Red states see the deepest cuts under Obama
Jan 28 (Reuters) - As Washington has tightened its belt in recent years, the budget cuts have sliced most deeply in states where President Obama is unpopular, according to an analysis of federal spending by Reuters.
Between the 2009 and 2013 fiscal years, funding for a wide swath of discretionary grant programs, from Head Start preschool education to anti drug initiatives, fell by an average of 40 percent in Republican-leaning states like Texas and Mississippi.
By contrast, funding to Democratic-leaning states such as California and politically competitive swing states like Ohio dropped by 25 percent.
Though Congress sets overall spending levels, the Obama administration determines where much of that money ends up. Lawmakers also have curtailed their ability to direct money to their home states when they adopted a ban on spending in 2011 known as "earmarks."
That has given administration officials more power to steer money to places that might return the favor with votes, said John Hudak, an expert on federal spending at the centrist Brookings Institution who worked with Reuters on the analysis.
"In the context of the Obama administration, swing states and blue states are doing better than red states," said Hudak, who uncovered similar spending patterns by previous presidents in his book "Presidential Pork."
"I would suggest these numbers would tell us there is politicization going on," he said.
For the analysis, Reuters divided the U.S. into three categories: Republican-leaning "red" states where Obama got less than 45 percent of the vote in the 2012 election; competitive "purple" states where he won between 45 percent and 55 percent of the vote; and Democratic-leaning "blue" states where he won more than 55 percent of the vote.
Red, purple and blue states have all shouldered steep spending cuts after a 2011 budget deal, the analysis found. But those cuts have not been doled out evenly.
Discretionary grant funding to red states like Mississippi fell by 40 percent to $15 billion between fiscal 2009 and fiscal 2013, the most recent year for which reliable figures are available. Purple states like Ohio and North Carolina saw a smaller drop of 27 percent, to $19.8 billion, and blue states saw a yet-smaller drop of 22.5 percent, to $27.6 billion. (The tally does not include disaster aid handed out after Hurricane Sandy, which went largely to blue states like New Jersey.)
The disparity doesn't show up in payments like Medicaid that are distributed through pre-set formulas. It also does not appear in Obama's 2009 recession-fighting Recovery Act. It only shows up in federal aid that is most directly controlled by the administration: "project grants," which are doled out on a competitive basis by career civil servants and political appointees.
Of course, many factors other than politics come into play. Some states aren't good at writing grant proposals - researchers at the University of Nevada Las Vegas, for example, found that poor planning has hurt that state's ability to compete for federal dollars. A governor from an oil-producing state may be less inclined to pursue green-energy grants.
But the disparity can't be fully explained by these factors. At Reuters' request, Hudak ran a statistical analysis of spending over this period, controlling for differences in population,economy, percentage of elderly residents, miles of federal highway and the number of research universities and hospitals.
Red states still came up short. After 2011, the average red state got 15 percent fewer grants and 1.3 percent fewer grant dollars than the average swing state. That comes out to roughly 500 grants and $15 million for an average-sized red state like Tennessee - enough to pay for 115 additional police officers or upgrade a rural airport to handle larger planes.
PLAYING POLITICS
Veterans of both Democratic and Republican administrations say privately that politics often come into play with such grants. Money to help upgrade a train depot may not boost a president's approval rating in a state where he is deeply unpopular, but it might make a difference in a competitive state like Colorado.
This approach isn't unique to Obama. Under presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, Hudak found that purple states got about 7.3 percent more grants and 5.7 percent more grant dollars than states that were firmly in one camp.
The Obama administration did not explain why Republican-leaning states have borne the steepest budget cuts, and several Democratic lawmakers declined to comment.
"The administration supports allocating federal grants based on objecting criteria that will help protect taxpayer dollars and ensure that lawmakers are responsible and accountable to the American people," the White House Office of Management and Budget said in a statement to Reuters.
Project grants, which totaled $74 billion in the fiscal year ending September 2013, help pay for everything from homeless assistance to agricultural research. But they are also a good publicity tool for a president looking to show voters how he's making a difference in their communities.
As Obama ran for re-election in 2012, administration officials traveled to battleground states to announce good news: $45 million for a manufacturing research center in Ohio; $8.2 million for a tech incubator in Gainesville, Florida; $18 million to extend a rail system in Charlotte, North Carolina. Each generated favorable coverage in local news outlets.
Those announcements were less common in states where Obama had no hope of winning over his Republican rival Mitt Romney.
Ohio, a key battleground state, won 10,232 grants in the fiscal year that ended in September 2012, just before the election - an increase of 21 percent over fiscal 2009. Ruby-red Texas saw the number of grants it was awarded over that period drop by 37 percent, to 10,775, according to Reuters figures.
In dollar terms, according to Reuters data, the difference was just as dramatic. Grant money for Texas dropped 43 percent, to $4.0 billion, over that time period. Dollars to Ohio declined 16.5 percent, to $2.0 billion.
EARMARK NOSTALGIA
The big problem for lawmakers? They lost their ability to influence the flow of that money. Before the earmark ban, states with elected officials who oversee spending on the Senate Appropriations Committee got about 7.6 percent more grant dollars than other states, Hudak found. After the 2011 earmark ban, evidence of clout disappeared.
Republican Representative John Culberson used to insert earmarks into spending bills to steer medical research and other projects to his Houston-area district. Since the ban took effect, he says he's had trouble getting the administration to pay for border control, harbor dredging and even send aid to mop up after a chemical plant explosion.
"The Obama administration approaches the federal government the same way the Chicago machine politicians approach the Chicago public treasury: it's to be used for their own benefit," he said.
Some Republicans worry they've handed too much control to the administration. But Congress, under the watch of Republican House Speaker John Boehner, isn't likely to lift the earmark ban any time soon.
"Speaker Boehner is proud of the reforms we have put in place," spokesman Michael Steel said, "and believes more should be done to ensure that Washington makes responsible decisions about taxpayers' money."
(Reporting by Andy Sullivan)
Tuesday, January 27, 2015
UK GOVERNMENT ANNOUNCES PLAN TO REMOTELY CONTROL VEHICLES
http://www.infowars.com/uk-government-announces-plan-to-remotely-control-vehicles/
State to seize control of cars via wi-fi sensors to reduce "traffic congestion" & global warming
by PAUL JOSEPH WATSON | JANUARY 27, 2015
The UK government today announced a plan to remotely control vehicles on roads using wi-fi technology in order to reduce traffic and offset global warming, the latest manifestation of the ‘Internet of Things’ that will stir up concern amongst privacy advocates.
A report released today by Ofcom, the government-controlled body which regulates communications in the United Kingdom, lays out a blueprint that could be realized in as soon as 10 years where cars would communicate with each other to “reduce congestion”.
The proposals are being billed by some media outlets as a means of solving traffic jams and taking the stress out of finding a parking space, while also serving to reduce “greenhouse gases” and offset global warming.
However, buried in the report is a detail that will horrify many libertarians and privacy advocates. The state plans to achieve this new high-tech solution by fitting sensors in all cars that would wirelessly send information to a “central traffic control system”. The control system would then react by imposing remote speed limits on each vehicle, a “shockwave effect” which would cause each one to brake and accelerate in unison.
In other words, in the name of reducing traffic and helping the environment, the government could at any time seize control of your vehicle against your will.
Such a system would also obviously empower the government to keep a flawless and permanent database of the precise travel details of every single driver in the country, which would likely be utilized for criminal investigations.
“M2M sensors in cars and on the roads monitor the build up of congestion and wirelessly send this information to a central traffic control system, which automatically impose variable speed limits that smooth the flow of traffic,” states Ofcom. “This system could also communicate directly with cars, directing them along diverted routes to avoid the congestion and even managing their speed.”
“M2M sensors could also be attached to the mechanical parts of a car, such as ABS wheel rotation sensors to measure speed. This information could be wirelessly communicated to nearby cars, which have onboard computers that process and react to this information.”
Image: Ofcom
Car manufacturer Nissan is also developing a similar system to be implemented in Japan.
The blueprint was revealed at the same time it emerged that the U.S. Justice Department had built a national database for real-time tracking of vehicles, “a secret domestic intelligence-gathering program that scans and stores hundreds of millions of records about motorists,” reports the Wall Street Journal.
The proposal serves to underscore the privacy and civil liberties threat posed by so-called “smart technology” and the ‘Internet of Things’.
In a 2012 Wired Magazine interview, former CIA director David Petraeus hailed the advent of every device being connected to the Internet as a transformational boon for “clandestine tradecraft”.
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Paul Joseph Watson is the editor at large of Infowars.com and Prison Planet.com.