U.S. Media Blackout: Italian Courts Rule Vaccines Cause Autism

U.S. MEDIA BLACKOUT: ITALIAN COURTS RULE VACCINES CAUSE AUTISM

Image Credits: danielpaquet, Flickr

by MARY S. HOLLAND | AGE OF AUTISM | FEBRUARY 10, 2015

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On September 23, 2014, an Italian court in Milan award compensation to a boy for vaccine-induced autism.  (See the Italian document here.)  A childhood vaccine against six childhood diseases caused the boy’s permanent autism and brain damage.  While the Italian press has devoted considerable attention to this decision and its public health implications, the U.S. press has been silent.

Like the U.S., Italy has a national vaccine injury compensation program to give some financial support to those people who are injured by compulsory and recommended vaccinations. The Italian infant plaintiff received three doses of GlaxoSmithKline’s Infanrix Hexa, a hexavalent vaccine administered in the first year of life.  These doses occurred from March to October 2006. The vaccine is to protect children from polio, diphtheria, tetanus, hepatitis B, pertussis and Haemophilus influenza type B.  In addition to these antigens, however, the vaccine then contained thimerosal, the mercury-containing preservative, aluminum, an adjuvant, as well as other toxic ingredients.  The child regressed into autism shortly after receiving the three doses.  When the parents presented their claim for compensation first to the Ministry of Health, as they were required to do, the Ministry rejected it.  Therefore, the family sued the Ministry in a court of general jurisdiction, an option which does not exist in the same form in the U.S.

Based on expert medical testimony, the court concluded that the child more likely than not suffered autism and brain damage because of the neurotoxic mercury, aluminum and his particular susceptibility from a genetic mutation.  The Court also noted that Infanrix Hexa contained thimerosal, now banned in Italy because of its neurotoxicity, “in concentrations greatly exceeding the maximum recommended levels for infants weighing only a few kilograms.”

Presiding Judge Nicola Di Leo considered another piece of damning evidence: a 1271-page confidential GlaxoSmithKline report (now available on the Internet).   This industry document provided ample evidence of adverse events from the vaccine, including five known cases of autism resulting from the vaccine’s administration during its clinical trials (see table at page 626, excerpt below).

As in many other developed countries, government, not industry, compensates families in the event of vaccine injury.  Thus GSK’s apparent lack of concern for the vaccine’s adverse effects is notable and perhaps not surprising.  In the final assessment, the report states that “[t]he benefit/risk profile of Infanrix hexa continues to be favourable,” despite GSK’s acknowledgement that the vaccine causes side effects including “anaemia haemolytic autoimmune,thrombocytopenia, thrombocytopenic purpura, autoimmune thrombocytopenia, idiopathic thrombocytopenic purpura, haemolytic anemia, cyanosis, injection site nodule, abcess and injection site abscess, Kawasaki’s disease, important neurological events (including encephalitis and encephalopathy), Henoch-Schonlein purpura, petechiae, purpura, haematochezia, allergic reactions (including anaphylactic and anaphylactoid reactions),” and death (see page 9).

The Milan decision is sober, informed and well-reasoned. The Ministry of Health has stated that it has appealed the Court’s decision, but that appeal will likely take several years, and its outcome is uncertain.

Rimini: 2012

Two years earlier, on May 23, 2012, Judge Lucio Ardigo of an Italian court in Rimini presided over a similar judgment, finding that a different vaccine, the Measles-Mumps-Rubella vaccine  (MMR), had caused a child’s autism.  (See: Italian MMR Remini decision 2012)As in the Milan case, the Ministry of Health’s compensation program had denied compensation to the family, yet after a presentation of medical evidence, a court granted compensation.  There, too, the Italian press covered the story; the U.S. press did not.

In that case, a 15-month old boy received his MMR vaccine on March 26, 2004.  He then immediately developed bowel and eating problems and received an autism diagnosis with cognitive delay within a year.  The court found that the boy had “been damaged by irreversible complications due to vaccination (with trivalent MMR).”  The decision flew in the face of the conventional mainstream medical wisdom that an MMR-autism link has been “debunked.”

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Both these Italian court decisions break new ground in the roiling debate over vaccines and autism.  These courts, like all courts, are intended to function as impartial, unbiased decision makers.  The courts’ decisions are striking because they not only find a vaccine-autism causal link, but they also overrule the decisions of Italy’s Ministry of Health.  And taken together, the court decisions found that both the MMR and a hexavalent thimerosal- and aluminum-containing vaccine can trigger autism.

These court decisions flatly contradict the decisions from the so-called U.S. vaccine court, the Court of Federal Claim’s Vaccine Injury Compensation Program.  There, from 2007 to 2010,  in the Omnibus Autism Proceeding, three decision makers, called Special Masters, found that vaccines did not cause autism in any of the six test cases, and one Special Master even went so far as to compare the theory of vaccine-induced autism to Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland.  The Italian court decisions contrast starkly with these U.S. cases based on similar claims.

How do we reconcile the difference between the U.S. and Italian decisions in similar cases?  What’s different about Italy?  Well, there may be many differences, but a critical one is that in the U.S., if someone loses in the government vaccine injury compensation program, she cannot sue the government in civil court; she can sue only the manufacturer.  In the U.S., her family would have to shoulder legal fees in a David and Goliath mismatch, pitting a global pharmaceutical behemoth against a family likely already suffering financially from serious health costs.

Furthermore, since 2011, the U.S. Supreme Court has foreclosed potential cases and class action lawsuits to contest unreasonably dangerous vaccine designs, such as the use of thimerosal as a preservative or the simultaneous administration of multiple live viruses, such as the MMR.  Since the Supreme Court’s 2011Bruesewitz v. Wyeth decision, no court in the U.S. can entertain vaccine design defect claims, the most likely legal actions to aggregate plaintiffs in similar circumstances against large, pharmaceutical defendants.

Unlike American victims of vaccine injury, the Italian plaintiffs didn’t have to sue GSK; they sued the Ministry of Health.  In both the Milan and Rimini decisions, the plaintiffs won compensation based on findings that vaccines caused autism.  One might say that these cases achieved nothing more than a small payout for injured children.  But arguably the families, lawyers and medical experts behind these cases achieved far more.  They took the issue of vaccine-induced autism to impartial courts, and they got clear a clear judicial answer based on the evidence: vaccines cause autism.

Are court decisions science?  Of course not.  There is a desperate need for more science on autism and the role that vaccines play, flimsy industry, medical and government retorts to the contrary notwithstanding.  But in the current absence of the necessary science on vaccines and autism, decisions of impartial judicial tribunals, based on extensive evidence and testimony, may be some of the best sources of information and insight we have.

Mary S. Holland is a Research Scholar at the NYU School of Law and chairs the advisory board of the non-profit organization Health Choice.

Revealed: Measles Facts They Don’t Want You to See

REVEALED: MEASLES FACTS THEY DON’T WANT YOU TO SEE

Outbreaks have occurred among vaccinated populations

by DAVID KNIGHT | INFOWARS.COM | FEBRUARY 10, 2015

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Can a measles outbreak START with a twice vaccinated person?

If a person develops measles from an MMR vaccine, can it be transmitted to others?

The pharmaceutical industry, and the media it owns, pretend those aren’t possible and scapegoat the unvaccinated as the threat.

But little known outbreaks tell us otherwise.

Whistleblowers in the industry reveal there is a deliberate effort to overstate the effectiveness of the vaccines, while the safety risks are downplayed.

Are the pharmaceutical industry, the media and the government telling you the truth about risk percentages or are they only concerned about profits?

VIDEO: Former CIA Analyst Ray McGovern Being Arrested and Assaulted by NYPD

VIDEO: Former CIA Analyst Ray McGovern Being Arrested and Assaulted by NYPD

• Police State

By: Derrick Broze Feb 10, 2015

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A newly released video shows former CIA analyst Ray McGovern being arrested and assaulted by the New York Police Department.

The video was filmed in October 2014 and shows McGovern, now an antiwar activist,  attempting to attend a New York City event where former CIA director David Petraeus was speaking. McGovern, 75, had a ticket to attend the event but was arrested before he could enter.

At the time McGovern told RT, “I was warned as soon as I got to the ticket-taker, ‘Ray, you’re not welcome here.” McGovern showed up at the event with his arm in a sling, and a black eye from a previous injury. He said the injuries were made worse by the actions of the NYPD. In the video he can be heard screaming in agony. He would be charged with resisting arrest.

In recent years McGovern has become a powerful, vocal critic of the constant state of war launched by both the Bush and Obama administrations. In an interview with RT, the former CIA analyst said he wanted to ask Patraeus questions regarding his policies during his time as General during the Iraq war.

Elected and Above the Law: Bill “Would Exempt Lawmakers from Prosecution of Nearly Any Crimes”"

 

Mac Slavo
Activist Post
This one is just too rich. The arrogance and absurdity is over the top.
Granted, most of the political class is already de facto above the law to begin with.
But now, a lawmaker in Oklahoma has introduced a bill to officially give most lawmakers, judges, appointees and holders of high office immunity from prosecution.
The bill proposes to strip away the ability of a local level prosecutor, such as a district attorney, from being able to bring charges against anyone holding a government position. The text reads:

The jurisdiction of a prosecution against a principal in the commission of a public offense, when such principal is a state elected official, state legislator, district court judicial officer, appellate judicial officer or an appointee of a state board or state commission at the time of the commission of the offense, is within the sole and exclusive prosecutorial authority of the Attorney General of Oklahoma. Such an action must be filed in the county of residence of the state officer.

Under the legislation, only an Attorney General would be able to bring charges against such a person, who would effectively live in a separate class of citizens who are above the law. So long as they are in office, any “public offense” would not be considered a punishable crime.
As Counter Current News reported, this has at least one local prosecutor up in arms over the abuse of power:

“It’s a big deal to me. I’m upset and concerned,” Oklahoma County District Attorney David Prater explained. “This bill creates a different class of citizens that would be protected from the normal prosecution process.”

“I am suspicious … that is what this is really about,” Prater added.

The only justification offered for this outrageous and odious piece of “legislation” (for how can one make a law exempting one’s self and peers from the law?) is to combat ‘politically-motivated’ “malicious prosecution,” as in the case of former Texas Governor Rick Perry, who is being prosecuted for abuse-of-power (or how the irony twists round-and-round in this case).
So, to prevent abuse-of-power in frivolously prosecuting elected or appointed officials for alleged abuse-of-power, these officials should have immunity from the law to begin with?
And corruption already runs rampant in the halls of Congress, both on the state and federal level.
If Oklahoma adopted this law, it would likely only be a matter of time before other states do so as well. Washington would be on this yesterday, if possible.
This would absolutely cement the culture of corruption in politics, giving carte blanche for all sorts of behavior and all manner of deals involving conflicts of interest. The politicians could do almost anything – and so long as they tow the party line (of the two-headed, single party system), they would operate under total immunity.
But as for everyone else, not so much, of course.
The little people will continue to get the squeeze, facing prosecution and significant financial penalties for even petty crimes and misdemeanors, as well as imposed mandatory insurance policies, increased taxes and much more, generally laid upon these taxpayers by appointed and elected officials doing favors for their corporate lobbyist partners-in-crime.
That’s why the U.S. has the largest prison population in the world, with more than 2 million people behind bars.
That’s why the U.S. has a guilty-until-proven-innocent system in place, with more than 72 government-sanctioned non-criminal reasons to suspect some of being a potential terrorist.
That’s why the U.S. operates under a nightmare scenario where civil asset forfeit seizure “laws” have been used to steal people’s homes and property, even when they have not been charged with a crime.
This is how the other side lives.
While it is true that there are plenty of ‘bad guys’ committing some awfully heinous crimes, it is also true that there are far too many laws – in a country that was once founded on freedom, but is now swallowed up in bureaucracy – resulting in prisons filled with offenders who’ve committed non-violent crimes, victimless crimes and even petty and sometimes bizarre offenses.
And there are plenty of corrupt officials enforcing this system, but many of the judges and LEOs don’t even agree with the laws they are enforcing and sentences they are handing out (some of which are mandatory under statute).
Those same judges and LEOs would be powerless to arrest the politicians who made these laws – even if it were clear that laws were broken and abuses occurred. Even if they wanted to, not that I’m holding my breath.
Enter the trump card – an entire deck of get-out-of-jail-free cards.
What do you think about that?
You can read more from Mac Slavo at his site SHTFplan.com, where this first appeared.

Elected and Above the Law: Bill ''Would Exempt Lawmakers from Prosecution of Nearly Any Crimes''
Activist
Mon, 09 Feb 2015 23:29:00 GMT

Greece’s port in a storm: anger as Syriza stops China extending hold on Piraeus

Beijing-run side of harbour is thriving but new government has pulled plug on plans for more foreign buyouts

Piraeus port, just outside Athens, which is partly run by Cosco, a Chinese state-owned company. Photograph: Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

Helena Smith in Perama Monday 9 February 201511.05 EST

Day and night, the Chinese-run piers of the Piraeus container terminal are a hive of activity. Lorries come and go while forklift trucks zoom around and colossal cranes heave giant containers from ship to shore.

Five years after its arrival in the Mediterranean, China’s global shipping carrier, Cosco, takes immense pride in the efficiency with which affairs are conducted on these piers. Business activity has tripled since the state-owned conglomerate acquired the port for €500m (£373m), the biggest foreign investment in Greece in modern times.

But any plans by Beijing to extend its commercial reach have been rudely interrupted by the ascent to power of Syriza, the radical leftists upending conventional orthodoxies in Greece.

On its maiden day in office, the new government announced that a privatisation programme launched to trim the country’s staggering €320bn debt load was in effect null and void. Plans to sell off further port assets – repair docks as well as car, passenger and cruise ship terminals that Cosco had been bidding for – have been scrapped.

“It’s a pity,” sighed Tassos Vamvakidis, the terminal’s commercial manager, rolling a red anti-stress ball across his spotlessly tidy desk. “I think Piraeus deserves a better future. Cosco had big plans to invest in dry docks and other infrastructure. A lot of people were very upset. Foreign investors definitely did not see this with a good eye.”

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A man walks between containers at the port of Piraeus, near Athens.Photograph: Aris Messinis/AFP/Getty Images

He was right. Within hours of the news filtering back to Beijing, Chinese officials were voicing concern and the local media were blasting Alexis Tsipras. Greece’s new leader, they cried, was like the mythological figure Phaeton who, when given the reins of the sun chariot for a day, lost control and, almost destroyed the earth. Subsequent attempts at smoothing ruffled feathers – with assurances that Cosco’s concession would be “respected” – have done little to placate the Chinese.

The activity at the Chinese part of the terminal in Perama is a world away from the slow motion on the other side of the port. There state employees protected by labour rules and given higher wages – the result of years of unbending trade unionism – have seen work decline precipitously.

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If China had its way, it would have bought a majority stake in this side of the harbour, snapped up the nation’s state-run railway network and purchased the port of Thessaloniki. No other country, it says, represents a better foothold into Europe than Greece.

Powerful unions have long been blamed for Greece’s lack of competitiveness. For critics, the tempest now blowing off Piraeus’s shores offers a snapshot into the inability of Athens to slay the monster that has obstructed economic growth. Syriza has been widely accused of pandering to unions deeply opposed to enforcing changes that would roll back workers’ rights.

Many believe Cosco’s high-energy regime is what is needed nationwide if Greeks are to emerge from their worst recession on record and break free of the demands of international creditors keeping the country afloat.

But that is not how workers see it in the shipyards out of Cosco’s control.

“We’d have had no rights,” said Vassilis Savvas. “And Greece would have had no rights. We are not going to do what the previous government wanted. Sell off our land, like that, for nothing.”

From his fibreglass cabin opposite a rickety hut that is the local meeting place for communist unionists, Savvas controls the traffic in and out of the publicly owned shipyards at Perama. Here visitors are greeted not by a fountain – the centrepiece of the Cosco-run port – but a pack of snarling dogs, ripped flags and buildings daubed with slogans such as “they won’t oppress us” and “hang all fascists”.

Savvas, who has handled security at the port for 36 years, accepted the landscape was bleak. “At the most we get about 10 ships in these days, when before there would be over 80 at any given time,” he said, taking in the scrawl in his handwritten logbook. “Right now most are in for small repairs, propellers that sort of thing. Anything bigger and they go to Turkey where it’s cheaper.”

A large man with blue-framed spectacles, a nicotine-stained moustache and a round pleasant face, the 54-year-old remained animated until talk turned to Cosco. All his life he had voted for the left. Syriza’s victory in elections 10 days ago was, he said, the jolt Greece and Europe needed.

“I haven’t laboured all these years to be hired for hunger wages,” he said. “At Cosco they bring people in on subcontracts, make them work for a pittance and then send them packing. As it is, I can hardly make ends meet on a salary of €940 [£705] a month. And I’m lucky. Go! Go into Perama to see the truth, to see for yourself.”

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The Chinese premier, Li Keqiang, looks at a shipping routes map at the port of Piraeus, where Chinese shipping giant Cosco controls two of the three container terminals, on a visit last year.Photograph: Lousia Gouliamaki/AFP/Getty Images

Two roads cut through Perama: Irinis (peace) and Demokratias (democracy). The former, covered with graffiti in praise of the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party, lies at the bottom of the hills around which Perama ascends. The latter, splattered with hammers and sickles, runs close to the shores of the Saronic Gulf.

No place has mirrored Greece’s great economic crisis more than this. More than 70% of people in the suburb are unemployed, the victims of lost jobs at the shipyards; one in three families survive on food handouts and nearly all are uninsured, with no access to hospital care.

The wreckage wrought by five years of austerity is everywhere, but is most apparent on Perama’s upper slopes, overlooking the docks, where locals live in hastily built breeze-block dwellings, often without heat or electricity.

“I have seen a lot of things in my life,” said Vangelio Makris, 80, poking her head out of her sitting room window. “And I can say, honestly, that politics destroyed us. The love of power, the love of money, destroyed us.”

Down the hill, Rebecca Tzanetea and Amalia Polatou are medical specialists who volunteer at the polyclinic set up by Doctors of the World in Perama. Both drive in from central Athens, a journey from “one world to another”. At 50, Tzanetea, who has spent several stints working in Africa, has been shocked by what she has seen. “We’re offering relief,” she said, “but we’re not offering a solution. These are people who were never well-off. Perama was always poor. But before the crisis they could at least cope. Now they have lost everything.”

At least 60 patients – migrants and Greeks – come to the clinic every day. Some drop by to get hand-me-downs and other donations. But with poverty have come escalating levels of physical illness along with anxiety and depression. “Their needs are enormous,” said Polatou, a child psychologist. “A lot of the children are suffering from anxiety – but that they, and their parents, are even able to survive in such horrible conditions says a lot about the love of life.”

For a long time patients would discuss the shipyards. But what has struck the volunteers of late is that they no longer want to talk about them, or anything much that defined their lives before. “I’ve been struck by it,” said Katerina Kantziki, a midwife who has helped run the clinic since it opened at the beginning of the crisis in 2010. “Nobody wants to express an opinion. They just want to survive.”

That is not the case lower down the hill where black-clad followers of Golden Dawn do nothing but discuss policy when they meet at the party’s local branch. Barely five years ago the neo-fascist group picked up 83 votes; now it is going strong with polling rates of above 9%, the second biggest party after Syriza in the area. Increasingly, Perama is being seen as a bellwether of what could ensue if Syriza fails.

“If Greeks are disappointed again there will be only one place for them to turn,” said Alekos Papathanasiou, a long-time Perama resident who makes ends meet driving a taxi. “I hear it all the time,” he smiled. “Golden Dawn has not gone away. It is waiting to win the hearts of Greeks and there are a lot of people out there who, next time round, would be willing to embrace them.”

© 2015 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

CHURCH ASKS FOLLOWERS TO SUBMIT TO GOVERNMENT, CALL 911 ON SUSPICIOUS NEIGHBORS

"I pledge to call 911 if I see someone suspicious in my neighborhood"

by MIKAEL THALEN | INFOWARS.COM | FEBRUARY 9, 2015

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A church hosting a law enforcement appreciation sermon asked its followers to pledge their allegiance to government this weekend, arguing that all state authorities throughout history have been ordained by God.

According to an anonymous visitor of the Gold Creek Community Church in Mill Creek, Washington, who provided exclusive photos to Infowars, attendees were ordered to submit to the state without question.

“They had police worship today and last week was military worship where they played clips of American Sniper…” the source said. “They were telling people to basically worship government and worship police no matter what. No mention of police brutality, no mention of the stingray systems grabbing our data here in the Seattle area.”

The church’s pastor, Dan Kellog, who is also reportedly a police chaplain, used the Romans 13 bible verse to justify his position. As noted by Infowars Paul Joseph Watson, Romans 13 has long been used by authoritarian regimes to force compliance.

“Romans 13 has routinely been cited by tyrants throughout history in an attempt to prevent Christians from opposing their rule, indeed, it was Hitler’s favorite bible verse,” Watson wrote. “Religious groups such as the Catholics in 1930’s Germany also used the verse as an excuse not to rise up against the Nazis when they were still a minority political party.”

Near the end of the sermon, members of the congregation were asked to raise their right hands and make a pledge, which included the promise to call 911 on “suspicious” neighbors.

“I pledge to call 911 if I see someone suspicious in my neighborhood,” the pledge stated.

While working with law enforcement to create a safer community is a noble cause, the sermon made no mention of the duty of Americans to oppose and protest unconstitutional legislation and dictates.

The sermon’s content is eerily similar to a 2009 document passed out to churchgoers in Ohio that told Christians to support President Obama due to his status as “God’s minister.”

Since at least 2006, the Department of Homeland Security has used Romans 13 under a FEMA program to train pastors to become literal secret police. Pastors are tasked with teaching their congregations to submit to every government action including forced relocation under martial law.

During the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, pastors were used to quell dissent as police and military carried out unconstitutional gun confiscation.

‘Mainstream media orchestrate appetite for war’ – editor Oliver Tickell

Submitted by IWB, on February 9th, 2015

Afshin Rattansi goes underground on media misrepresentation of the situation in Ukraine. Oliver Tickell, editor of The Ecologist magazine, warns mainstream media are beating the ‘drums of war’ by portraying an inaccurate picture of Russia as the aggressor, and are part of the international security machine that enables war to happen. Artist Antony Micallef looks at the ‘narcissism and voyeurism’ underlying selfies, and what they can tell us about the world we live in. Ebola cures and a war weary NATO hit the headlines. And Prince Charles visits Jordan, a country accused of censorship and torture by Human Rights Watch.

Read more at http://investmentwatchblog.com/mainstream-media-orchestrate-appetite-for-war-editor-oliver-tickell/#kIgqxe2gYZLVKgTv.99

ALAN GREENSPAN: “GREECE WILL LEAVE THE EUROZONE” AND “THERE IS NO WAY THAT I CAN CONCEIVE OF THE EURO CONTINUING”

 

Anti-Europe, anti-austerity, anti-Merkel political parties stormi to the forefront

by ZERO HEDGE | FEBRUARY 9, 2015

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Every two weeks or so on average, we ask ourselves: why do central bankers only tell the truth after they have quit their post (rhetorically, of course). The last time it was the BOE’s former head Mervyn King, who said that “more monetary stimulus will not help the world economy return to strong growth.” This took place long after the BOE, under his watch, unleashed its own QE back in the early days of the great financial crisis. Another example: back in November, the Fed’s own former head, the person who single-handedly unleashed the great moderation and led to the current terminal financial state where the global economy bounces from one bubble to another even bigger bubble or else everything implodes, Alan Greenspan said “Gold Is Currency; No Fiat Currency, Including the Dollar, Can Match It.”

It was another statement by the maestro that has caught the world’s attention, this time opining on Greece, when he told BBC Radio’s the World This Weekend that “Greece will leave the Eurozone. I don’t see that it helps Greece to be in the Euro, and I certainly don’t see that it helps the rest of the Eurozone. It’s just a matter of time before everyone recognizes that parting is the best strategy.… At this stage I don’t see any people who are willing to put up the funds for Greece… All the cards are being held by the members of the Eurozone.” Naturally, this is just what anyone with a functioning frontal lobe (which immediatley excludes all tenured economists) would have said 5 years ago.

And it wasn’t just Greece that the Maestro decided to throw under the revisionist history bus: he took a stabe at the Eurozone itself. “The problem is that there there is no way that I can conceive of the euro of continuing, unless and until all of the members of eurozone become politically integrated – actually even just fiscally integrated won’t do it.”

“Take a look at the Maastricht treaty. There is no indication of any conceivable way of unwinding the Euro and that was done purposefully but that’ doesn’t mean that the markets won’t pull them apart and indeed I would suspect that what’s allowing the big surge to go on, or will go on, in ECB expansion is what Draghi said originally when he came up with the so-called OMT, which meant lending to anybody for any occasion. If that doesn’t work: if numbers start to borrow under the OMT facility and something goes wrong, what happens then? And if you’re talking about a crisis – that is a crisis. Greece leaving the Eurozone is miniscule compared to that as an issue.”

His conclusion: “short of a political Union, I find it very difficult to foresee the Euro holding together in its current form. It probably could get a union of Germany, Austria, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Finland for example. But not south Europe.”

With anti-Europe, anti-austerity, anti-Merkel political parties storming to the forefront in most peripheral European nations, Greenspan is right for once.

Which is not to say he said anything that these pages haven’t covered extensively in the past. Recall this exchange at the April 2013 ECB meeting:

Scott Solano, DPA: Mr Draghi, I’ve got a couple of question from the viewers at Zero Hedge, and one of them goes like this: say the situation in Greece or Spain deteriorates even further, and they want to or are forced to step out of the Eurozone, is there a plan in place so that the markets don’t basically collapse? Is there some kind of structural system, structural safety net, especially in the area of derivatives? And the second questions is: you spoke earlier about the Emergency Liquidity Assistance, and what would have happened to the ELA in Cyprus, the approximately €10 billion, if the country had decided to leave the Eurozone?

Mario Draghi, ECB: Well you really are asking questions that are so hypothetical that I don’t have an answer to them. Well, I may have a partial answer. These questions are formulated by people who vastly underestimate what the Euro means for the Europeans, for the Euro area. They vastly underestimate the amount of political capital that has been invested in the Euro. And so they keep on asking questions like: “If the Euro breaks down, and if a country leaves the Euro, it’s not like a sliding door. It’s a very important thing. It’s a project in the European Union. That’s why you have a very hard time asking people like me “what would happened if.” No Plan B.

They don’t need your consent, They don’t need stinking badges, they don’t need the law! Your liberties are GONE!!!

LAWSUIT: COPS PUT BAG ON WOMAN’S HEAD, STRAP HER TO CHAIR AND CHOKE HER TO DRAW BLOOD FOR DUI TEST

"Officers used choke hold pressure points on her neck, until her body went limp"

by STEVE WATSON | INFOWARS.COM | FEBRUARY 9, 2015
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A woman is suing a host of parties after it emerged that cops in Austin, Texas, forcably took her blood for a DUI test, in a scene that sounds more like something that would occur at a Guantanamo Bay prison camp.
Caroline Callaway was arrested by a police officer after she refused to take a breath test during a routine traffic stop. Ms Callaway was taken directly to the Travis County jail where the shocking events unfolded.
Callaway’s attorney told reporters with Courthouse News that despite only “passive and verbal resistance” she was taken “to a small padded room, where she was surrounded by officers and strapped into ‘the chair,’ with her legs, wrists and shoulders restrained.”
Callaway, who had informed the police that she suffers from anxiety disorder and uses medications for the ailment, then “began to involuntarily tremble from anxiety and fear.” This prompted the cops to put a bag, known as a “Tranzport Hood,” over her head to deprive the senses, in some backwards notion that this would have a calming effect.
All the hood did was cause Callaway to panic further as she could not see what was happening and had further difficulty breathing.
A contracted nurse was on hand to perform the blood draw, but according to the complaint, “the needle popped out because of Ms. Callaway’s shaking and blood spewed onto one of the officers.”
“(D)efendants continued the abuse determined to take Ms. Callaway’s blood. In order to stop Ms. Callaway from trembling, one of the officers used choke hold pressure points on her neck, until her body went limp.” the complaint further notes.
“Defendant Ramsey-Graham stabbed Ms. Callaway again while Ms. Callaway was limp.” It continues. “When the officer released her neck, Ms. Callaway gasped for air. She could not see because there was a bag over her head, but she felt the weight of a boot in the crook of her arm, which, along with the rest of her body, was still tied to the chair.”
Injuries sustained by Callaway during the ordeal included nerve damage and severe bruising, most prominently on her neck as a result of the choking at the hands of the cops. She says that she is also suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.
Callaway was charged with DWI based on the blood test results, but the lawsuit outlines that the results are liekly innaccurate owing to the circumstances.
She is suing the city of Austin, Travis County, Austin police officers, county sheriff’s officers, Pro-touch Nurses and one of its employees, on teh grounds of unlawful search and seizure, excessive force, assault and battery, negligence and medical malpractice.
Callaway is seeking punitive damages for emotional injuries, pain and suffering, embarrassment, humiliation, indignity, medical bills, lost wages and legal fees.
Callaway says she is pursuing the case in order to “change a government policy here and nationwide for the betterment of all citizens.”
As Infowars has previously noted, breathalyzer tests have been proven to be inaccurate in a high percentage of cases, with many factors rendering the results “little more than scientific guesswork”. Further research has shown that police officers often influence the results of breathalyzer tests, resulting in inaccurately high readings. Drivers are well within their rights to refuse to engage in such tests. Blood tests can also produce false high readings of alcohol levels if they are not conducted quickly and properly.
This information is important, many argue, because it means that enforced tests could provide police with self-incriminating evidence.
In previous examples of police conducting the practice, horror stories have emerged of Americans being forcibly restrained and having their blood extracted.
The following footage filmed in 2013 in Georgia shows cops strapping down citizens to gurneys, before using a needle to forcibly draw blood as the victim screams, “WHAT COUNTRY IS THIS?”
Even those who show no resistance whatsoever are forcibly restrained and have their heads pressed down by an officer using his elbow.
“We all are American citizens and you guys have me strapped to a table like I’m in Guantanamo f***ing Bay,” complains another victim of the blood draw.
Attorneys have argued that the forced blood draws are an unreasonable search, and constitute a violation of the Fourth Amendment.
Georgia and Orgeon are two of numerous states that enforce the federally sponsored ‘no refusal’ checkpoints. In 2005, the Supreme Court ruled that it is not unconstitutional to hold down Americans and forcefully withdraw blood. A January 2013 ruling affirmed that a warrant must be obtained for the process, although police could dispense with the warrant requirement in an “emergency”.
In some states, decades old implied consent law, which allowed drivers to say no to blood or urine tests, has been overturned to allow the process to take place in so called ‘no-refusal’ blood-draw checkpoints.
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Steve Watson is a London based writer and editor for Alex Jones’ Infowars.com, and Prisonplanet.com. He has a Masters Degree in International Relations from the School of Politics at The University of Nottingham, and a Bachelor Of Arts Degree in Literature and Creative Writing from Nottingham Trent University.

Reinforcing Narcissism and ‘American Sniper’ Jingoism

 

from Julius Sequerra

Contributor, ZenGardner.com

by Brandon Martinez

Thirty-two million dollars.

That’s the obscene amount of money North American moviegoers spent this past Super Bowl weekend to see the new film ‘American Sniper.’

According to The Inquisitir website, the Clint Eastwood movie “is now the highest grossing war movie of all time at the domestic box office, surpassing Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan.”

The Iraq war blockbuster has earned over $300 million since its release in November 2014.

Movie-Goers Heading to Marquee Cinemas to See Record-Breaking “American Sniper”

If these numbers tell us anything, they speak to the seemingly irreversible degeneration of intelligent or critical thought among the populations of the United States and Canada, where American Sniper has made the brunt of its profits. The fact that millions of people paid money to have their heads filled with American war propaganda highlights a deep-seated dysfunction within society that is cause for concern.

As many critics have observed, the film’s protagonist Chris Kyle, the US Army’s “deadliest sniper” in history, is uncritically portrayed as a ‘war hero’ and great bearer of good fortune for those ‘freedom-yearning’ Iraqis who ‘welcomed’ American soldiers into their country with ‘open arms,’ as US propaganda tells us. Only they didn’t ­ – the Iraqis bitterly resisted the American occupation every step of the way, and rightly sought to expel the invaders upon sight.

The opening action sequence of the film shows Kyle take aim at an Iraqi woman and her son who, apparently in a state of desperation after US ‘shock and awe’ bombardment decimated their city, intend to lob a grenade at occupying US forces approaching them. Kyle shoots and kills the mother and son, to great cheers from audiences across the US. “Oorah,” chant ignorant and trigger-happy Americans who salivate over violent depictions of this nature. “Way to get dem Ayrab teeerrorists,” shout an assorted brew of Fox News blowhards and Republican knuckleheads.

In a recent video posted on YouTube, freedom activist and Iraq war veteran Adam Kokesh documents the mind-blowing ignorance of American moviegoers who watched American Sniper. Kokesh deconstructs the staggering cognitive dissonance of several unfortunate interviewees as they exited the theater, asking them tough questions about the dubious morality of Chris Kyle’s actions as a sniper whose army had invaded another country based upon false pretenses.

OOPS! NO WMDs ?

Many of the interview subjects parroted the rather pathetic jingoistic platitude that Kyle was a hero because he fought in Iraq to “defend his homeland.” Besides the essentially cowardly nature of a sniper who picks off targets from afar, Kyle was in no way, shape or form ‘defending his homeland.’ As Kokesh calmly explains to them in the video, Kyle was a quintessential invader of someone else’s homeland – Iraq. Kokesh further notes that the Iraqi mother and son ‘villains’ that Kyle shoots down in the opening action sequence of American Sniper were in fact the heroic defenders of their homeland from an aggressive, destructive foreign occupant. American jingoists have turned the truth abruptly on its head.

Another common fallacy echoed by American Sniper enthusiasts is that the Iraq war was fought for some ‘grand and noble cause’ of ‘delivering Iraqis from the shackles of a dictator.’ Hussein was indeed a tyrant, one the Americans were quite happy to work with and assist in his gaseous onslaught against Iran in 1980. Throughout the 70s and 80s, Hussein was Washington’s cat’s paw in the region, and as such received generous gifts of weaponry from his patrons in the White House. So in reality, the ‘removing a tyrant’ pretext, which seems to be a fallback position since the ‘WMD’ mythology was exposed as a cruel hoax, doesn’t logically pan-out considering US support of said dictator decades earlier. America has absolutely no moral high ground to condemn the actions of a despot, let alone seek to remove one from power on a two-faced moralist premise whilst propping up other ‘friendly’ autocrats across the Middle East, Africa, Asia and Latin America.

Even under Saddam’s dictatorship, Iraq was a much more stable and prosperous country than it is now after the ‘great liberation,’ the results of which has been nothing but misery and despair for millions. The only ‘terrorists’ present in Iraq were Washington’s foot soldiers – the US Armed Forces, the US Air Force and the US Marines who besieged the sovereign Arab country with a merciless and bloodthirsty mission to ‘punish’ Hussein and his people for displeasing the self-anointed monarchs of planet earth in the White House.

American Sniper and US doom.

In an op-ed about American Sniper, analyst Finian Cunningham writes that “indulging ‘heroes’ like Chris Kyle, [has] the insidious effect [of glorifying] American war-making.” Cunningham contends that the film“reinforces American narcissism about its ‘exceptionalism’ as a nation that is intrinsically good, superior and which has the prerogative to wage wars wherever it deems necessary for its ‘national interests’ regardless of international law or morality.”

“SHOCK AND AWE” unleashed on Iraq on ‘A PACK OF LIES‘

Indeed, American Sniper seeks to lionize a monstrous war crime, the lethal effects of which are still being felt today by ordinary Iraqis whose lives have been impacted in horrific ways that we in the sheltered West could not even imagine.Chris Kyle and his heinous sharpshooting undertakings in Iraq illustrate a microcosm of the problem of American militarism as well as the malignant mindset that gives rise to professional killers of his caliber who populate the US military.

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Reinforcing Narcissism and ‘American Sniper’ Jingoism
Julius Sequerra
Mon, 09 Feb 2015 16:18:06 GMT