Fuel suppliers demand airlines pay cash in advance

From The TimesMay 26, 2008

Carl Mortished and Amanda Andrews
Airlines are being forced to pay cash in advance for jet fuel as the major oil companies tighten the screws on an industry that is being crushed by an extraordinary surge in the price of crude oil.

Sources within the airline industry indicate that credit is being denied to most of the leading American carriers and the practice is moving to Europe and Asia. So uncertain is the cash solvency of the industry that jet fuel suppliers insist on prepayments into special bank accounts.

A credit controller at a leading European multinational oil company told The Times that the oil industry was moving to jet fuel prepayment. “It’s common in the US and it is moving to Europe. We have been moving to prepayment since Swissair went bust.”

The need to put up money before delivery of fuel is a huge financial burden that has been shifted from the oil companies to the airlines. According to John Armbrust, a US jet fuel consultant, the oil industry had $5 billion (£2.5 billion) of jet fuel credit outstanding to airlines before the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Now they are demanding that airlines leave cash on deposit.

“The airlines can’t afford it. Traditionally, oil companies extended credit for 14 or 21 days and some as long as 30 days. Now, most American airlines are on prepay. South West is one of a few likely to still get credit.”

The extent of the cash squeeze was highlighted last week when American Airlines said that it would charge $15 per bag checked even as it revealed plans to shed 75 aircraft, shrinking the airline’s capacity by 12 per cent.

The price of jet fuel has risen by 60 per cent since January and American Airlines paid $665 million more for fuel in the first quarter of this year than in the same period of 2007.

The credit crunch is likely to worsen and a number of financial institutions will fail, according to research from Atradius, the credit insurance group which conducted a global survey of its customers’ views of the financial outlook. Although Atradius said that companies expect the number of failures to be small, about 65 per cent expect there to be failures.

The group added that direct exposure to sub-prime lending is higher in Europe than in the United States even though the bulk of the sub-prime mortgage defaults are in the US and many of the securities these loans are packaged into would have originated from US-based mortgage companies.

“Some explanation for this may be investments by European companies in US securities offering higher returns and more frequent use of secondary financial markets to securitise receivables by European countries,” it said.

Atradius added that only 12 per cent of companies across the world do not expect an economic slowdown in the next year. In Britain, more than 90 per cent of companies surveyed expect a slowdown, the highest percentage. About one in six companies expects a slowdown of only the national economy; a quarter expect a slowdown of the global economy and half expect a slowdown of both. The expectation of a slowdown is also high in Mexico, the United States, Spain, Italy, France and Belgium and lowest in Sweden and the Netherlands.

Atradius found that larger companies are more likely to have been affected by the credit crisis. Although fewer than 30 per cent of small companies reported an impact, almost half of all large companies (with more than €1 billion annual gross sales) said that they had felt the credit-crisis pinch.

Companies operating within the energy industry have been especially affected, but those in the healthcare and services industries reported a relatively low frequency of impact.

IAEA: No N-weaponization found in Iran

Tue, 27 May 2008


IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei
The IAEA has not detected the use of nuclear material linked to Iran's "alleged studies" of weaponization, the agency's latest report says.

The findings are part of a restricted International Atomic Energy Agency report forwarded to the UN Security Council and to the 35 board members of the agency on Monday, May 26.

“The Agency has been able to continue to verify the non-diversion of declared nuclear material in Iran. Iran has provided the Agency with access to declared nuclear material and has provided the required nuclear material accountancy reports in connection with declared nuclear material and activities,” said the report, a copy of which was obtained by Press TV.

The IAEA holds the view that clarification of the alleged studies "on the green salt project, high explosives testing and missile re-entry vehicle project" is critical "to an assessment of the nature of Iran's past and present nuclear program."

"Iran has agreed to address the alleged studies," it said.

According to the report, Iran's response to a May 9 request by the UN nuclear watchdog to provide "additional clarifications" on the nuclear drive is currently being assessed by the agency.

Director General of the UN nuclear watchdog Mohamed ElBaradei called on Iran to "implement all measures required to build confidence in the peaceful nature of its nuclear program," the report added.

The West has been at loggerheads with Iran over the country's nuclear drive. Washington and its allies accuse Tehran of pursuing nuclear weaponry; claiming that Iran's uranium enrichment program is aimed at producing fuel for a nuclear weapons progmra - such substance could also be used to produce electricity in nuclear power plants.

IAEA's latest report came a week after ElBaradei said that there is no 'concrete evidence' that Iran is developing a nuclear bomb.

"We haven't seen indications or any concrete evidence that Iran is building a nuclear weapon and I've been saying that consistently for the last five years," ElBaradei said speaking at a May 20 session of the World Economic Forum on the Middle East.

The IAEA boss referred to a Dec 3 joint assessment by 16 US spy agencies, which conceded with 'high confidence' that Tehran is not running a nuclear weapons program, and said that the US intelligence report confirmed his agency's assessment on Iran.

McBush

S&P: US home prices tumble a record 14.1 pct in 1Q

By J.W. ELPHINSTONE, AP Business Writer

U.S. home prices dropped at the sharpest rate in two decades during the first quarter, a closely watched index showed Tuesday, a somber indication that the housing slump continues to deepen.

Standard & Poor's/Case-Shiller said its national home price index fell 14.1 percent in the first quarter compared with a year earlier, the lowest since its inception in 1988. The quarterly index covers all nine U.S. Census divisions.

Prices nationwide are at levels not seen since the third quarter of 2004, according to Maureen Maitland, a S&P vice president. However, the index is still up 60 percent versus 2000.

The narrower indices also set record declines in the first quarter. The 20-city index tumbled 14.4 percent, the lowest since that index was started in 2001. The 10-city index plunged 15.3 percent, a record in its 20-year history.

"There are very few silver linings that one can see in the data. Most of the nation appears to remain on a downward path," said David Blitzer, chairman of S&P's index committee.

Nineteen of the 20 metro areas reported annual declines, with 15 of them posting record lows. Six metro areas lost more than 20 percent.

Las Vegas had the worst quarterly performance, falling 25.9 percent, followed by Miami and Phoenix. Only Charlotte, N.C., stayed above water, gaining less than 1 percent over the previous year.

Last week, the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight said home prices fell 3.1 percent in the first quarter, the largest drop in its 17-year history and only the second quarter of price declines recorded.

The OFHEO index is narrower in scope and is calculated using mortgages of $417,000 or less that are bought or backed by Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac. That excludes properties bought with some of the riskier types of home loans.




Copyright © 2008 The Associated Press.

Israel has 150 nuclear weapons: Former U.S. president

Israel has 150 nuclear weapons in its arsenal, according to former U.S. President Jimmy Carter. He made the statement while arguing that the U.S. should talk directly to Iran to persuade it to drop its nuclear ambitions.

Carter cited Israel's nuclear arsenal and those of the U.S., Russia, China, Britain and France as proof that Iran would find it almost impossible to develop weapons and the missiles to deliver them in secret.

Israel has never admitted having nuclear weapons, although the world assumes their existence. Nor do U.S. officials deviate in public from Israel's line.

Meantime, UN nuclear watchdog chief Mohamed ElBaradei is slated to release his latest report on Tehran's uranium enrichment activities. The report is expected to be put before the IAEA Board of Governors' members on Monday.

Spending On Iraq Poorly Tracked

Audit Faults Accounting for $15 Billion in Work

Dang, that $15 billion was around here a few minutes ago.
Tom

By Dana Hedgpeth
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, May 23, 2008; D01



The inspector general for the Defense Department said yesterday that the Pentagon cannot account for almost $15 billion worth of goods and services ranging from trucks, bottled water and mattresses to rocket-propelled grenades and machine guns that were bought from contractors in the Iraq reconstruction effort.

The Pentagon did not have the proper documentation, including receipts, vouchers, signatures, invoices or other paperwork, for $7.8 billion that American and Iraqi contractors were paid for phones, folders, paint, blankets, Nissan trucks, laundry services and other items, according to a 69-page audit released to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

An earlier audit by the inspector general found deficiencies in accounting for $5.2 billion of U.S. payments to buy weapons, trucks, generators and other equipment for Iraq's security forces. In addition, the Defense Department spent $1.8 billion of seized Iraqi assets with "absolutely no accountability," according to Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.), who chairs the oversight committee. The Pentagon also kept poor records on $135 million that it paid to its partners in the multinational military force in Iraq, auditors said.

The Army disagreed with some of the auditors' findings, saying that it is difficult to maintain an adequate paper trail in a war zone and that it has improved its record-keeping and accountability efforts. Robert L. Wilkie, assistant secretary of defense for legislative affairs, declined an invitation to testify before from Waxman's committee.

Of the $7.8 billion in payments detailed in the audit released yesterday, about $1.4 billion did not meet the most minimal requirements for documentation, making it highly possible that waste, fraud or abuse had occurred, according to auditors. In one case, there is a copy of a $5.6 million check from the U.S. Treasury paid to an Iraqi contractor but no documents saying what was purchased. In another, a South Carolina contractor was paid $11 million, according to a voucher, but auditors said they could not tell what goods or services were received.

"Without a receiving report and invoice, we don't know what we paid for," said Mary Ugone, the Defense Department's deputy inspector general for auditing. She said internal controls and paper trails were inadequate and that the Army's "finance personnel were not adequately trained" in overseeing the billions of dollars paid.

Auditors referred more than two dozen vouchers, totaling $35 million, to criminal investigators at the Pentagon.

Waxman said the poorly documented expenditures of seized Iraqi assets included a $320 million cash payment for employing 1,000 people that was handed over to the Iraqi Finance Ministry with "little more than a signature in exchange."

"Investigators looked at 53 payment vouchers and couldn't find even one that adequately explained where the money went," Waxman said.

The money paid to military coalition partners, including Britain, Poland and South Korea, was intended to help local reconstruction and humanitarian projects. Auditors said that none of the files reviewed "contained sufficient supporting documentation to provide reasonable assurance that these funds were used for their intended purpose." In one case, the Defense Department made an $8 million payment to Polish forces with minimal documentation, according to the audit.

An audit report issued in November found that $5.2 billion of U.S. payments to buy weapons, trucks, generators and other equipment to support Iraqi security forces had major deficiencies in how items were accounted for, saying that the Defense Department did not know "what equipment is due in, due out, issued and on hand." The inspector general found that the Defense Department could not account for 12,712 of 13,508 weapons, including assault rifles, machine guns and grenade launchers for Iraqi forces.

"When we turned them over to the Iraqis, they weren't properly accounted for," said Gary Comerford, a spokesman for the Defense Department's inspector general, saying serial numbers were not consistently recorded. "The paper trail is not complete."

The November audit also described how the Pentagon paid $32 million for the construction of an Iraqi military facility in Anbar province that was never built. Defense Department officials told staff members of the oversight committee that "this is embarrassing" because "not a spade of dirt was turned."

A Declaration of Independence From Israel

Posted on Jul 2, 2007
By Chris Hedges

Israel, without the United States, would probably not exist. The country came perilously close to extinction during the October 1973 war when Egypt, trained and backed by the Soviet Union, crossed the Suez and the Syrians poured in over the Golan Heights. Huge American military transport planes came to the rescue. They began landing every half-hour to refit the battered Israeli army, which had lost most of its heavy armor. By the time the war was over, the United States had given Israel $2.2 billion in emergency military aid.

The intervention, which enraged the Arab world, triggered the OPEC oil embargo that for a time wreaked havoc on Western economies. This was perhaps the most dramatic example of the sustained life-support system the United States has provided to the Jewish state.

Israel was born at midnight May 14, 1948. The U.S. recognized the new state 11 minutes later. The two countries have been locked in a deadly embrace ever since.

Washington, at the beginning of the relationship, was able to be a moderating influence. An incensed President Eisenhower demanded and got Israel’s withdrawal after the Israelis occupied Gaza in 1956. During the Six-Day War in 1967, Israeli warplanes bombed the USS Liberty. The ship, flying the U.S. flag and stationed 15 miles off the Israeli coast, was intercepting tactical and strategic communications from both sides. The Israeli strikes killed 34 U.S. sailors and wounded 171. The deliberate attack froze, for a while, Washington’s enthusiasm for Israel. But ruptures like this one proved to be only bumps, soon smoothed out by an increasingly sophisticated and well-financed Israel lobby that set out to merge Israeli and American foreign policy in the Middle East.

Israel has reaped tremendous rewards from this alliance. It has been given more than $140 billion in U.S. direct economic and military assistance. It receives about $3 billion in direct assistance annually, roughly one-fifth of the U.S. foreign aid budget. Although most American foreign aid packages stipulate that related military purchases have to be made in the United States, Israel is allowed to use about 25 percent of the money to subsidize its own growing and profitable defense industry. It is exempt, unlike other nations, from accounting for how it spends the aid money. And funds are routinely siphoned off to build new Jewish settlements, bolster the Israeli occupation in the Palestinian territories and construct the security barrier, which costs an estimated $1 million a mile.

The barrier weaves its way through the West Bank, creating isolated pockets of impoverished Palestinians in ringed ghettos. By the time the barrier is finished it will probably in effect seize up to 40 percent of Palestinian land. This is the largest land grab by Israel since the 1967 war. And although the United States officially opposes settlement expansion and the barrier, it also funds them.

The U.S. has provided Israel with nearly $3 billion to develop weapons systems and given Israel access to some of the most sophisticated items in its own military arsenal, including Blackhawk attack helicopters and F-16 fighter jets. The United States also gives Israel access to intelligence it denies to its NATO allies. And when Israel refused to sign the nuclear nonproliferation treaty, the United States stood by without a word of protest as the Israelis built the region’s first nuclear weapons program.

U.S. foreign policy, especially under the current Bush administration, has become little more than an extension of Israeli foreign policy. The United States since 1982 has vetoed 32 Security Council resolutions critical of Israel, more than the total number of vetoes cast by all the other Security Council members. It refuses to enforce the Security Council resolutions it claims to support. These resolutions call on Israel to withdraw from the occupied territories.

There is now volcanic anger and revulsion by Arabs at this blatant favoritism. Few in the Middle East see any distinction between Israeli and American policies, nor should they. And when the Islamic radicals speak of U.S. support of Israel as a prime reason for their hatred of the United States, we should listen. The consequences of this one-sided relationship are being played out in the disastrous war in Iraq, growing tension with Iran, and the humanitarian and political crisis in Gaza. It is being played out in Lebanon, where Hezbollah is gearing up for another war with Israel, one most Middle East analysts say is inevitable. The U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East is unraveling. And it is doing so because of this special relationship. The eruption of a regional conflict would usher in a nightmare of catastrophic proportions.

There were many in the American foreign policy establishment and State Department who saw this situation coming. The decision to throw our lot in with Israel in the Middle East was not initially a popular one with an array of foreign policy experts, including President Harry Truman’s secretary of state, Gen. George Marshall. They warned there would be a backlash. They knew the cost the United States would pay in the oil-rich region for this decision, which they feared would be one of the greatest strategic blunders of the postwar era. And they were right. The decision has jeopardized American and Israeli security and created the kindling for a regional conflagration.

The alliance, which makes no sense in geopolitical terms, does makes sense when seen through the lens of domestic politics. The Israel lobby has become a potent force in the American political system. No major candidate, Democrat or Republican, dares to challenge it. The lobby successfully purged the State Department of Arab experts who challenged the notion that Israeli and American interests were identical. Backers of Israel have doled out hundreds of millions of dollars to support U.S. political candidates deemed favorable to Israel. They have brutally punished those who strayed, including the first President Bush, who they said was not vigorous enough in his defense of Israeli interests. This was a lesson the next Bush White House did not forget. George W. Bush did not want to be a one-term president like his father.

Israel advocated removing Saddam Hussein from power and currently advocates striking Iran to prevent it from acquiring nuclear weapons. Direct Israeli involvement in American military operations in the Middle East is impossible. It would reignite a war between Arab states and Israel. The United States, which during the Cold War avoided direct military involvement in the region, now does the direct bidding of Israel while Israel watches from the sidelines. During the 1991 Gulf War, Israel was a spectator, just as it is in the war with Iraq.

President Bush, facing dwindling support for the war in Iraq, publicly holds Israel up as a model for what he would like Iraq to become. Imagine how this idea plays out on the Arab street, which views Israel as the Algerians viewed the French colonizers during the war of liberation.

“In Israel,” Bush said recently, “terrorists have taken innocent human life for years in suicide attacks. The difference is that Israel is a functioning democracy and it’s not prevented from carrying out its responsibilities. And that’s a good indicator of success that we’re looking for in Iraq.”

Americans are increasingly isolated and reviled in the world. They remain blissfully ignorant of their own culpability for this isolation. U.S. “spin” paints the rest of the world as unreasonable, but Israel, Americans are assured, will always be on our side.

Israel is reaping economic as well as political rewards from its lock-down apartheid state. In the “gated community” market it has begun to sell systems and techniques that allow the nation to cope with terrorism. Israel, in 2006, exported $3.4 billion in defense products—well over a billion dollars more than it received in American military aid. Israel has grown into the fourth largest arms dealer in the world. Most of this growth has come in the so-called homeland security sector.

“The key products and services,” as Naomi Klein wrote in The Nation, “are hi-tech fences, unmanned drones, biometric IDs, video and audio surveillance gear, air passenger profiling and prisoner interrogation systems—precisely the tools and technologies Israel has used to lock in the occupied territories. And that is why the chaos in Gaza and the rest of the region doesn’t threaten the bottom line in Tel Aviv, and may actually boost it. Israel has learned to turn endless war into a brand asset, pitching its uprooting, occupation and containment of the Palestinian people as a half-century head start in the ‘global war on terror.’ ”

The United States, at least officially, does not support the occupation and calls for a viable Palestinian state. It is a global player, with interests that stretch well beyond the boundaries of the Middle East, and the equation that Israel’s enemies are our enemies is not that simple.

“Terrorism is not a single adversary,” John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt wrote in The London Review of Books, “but a tactic employed by a wide array of political groups. The terrorist organizations that threaten Israel do not threaten the United States, except when it intervenes against them (as in Lebanon in 1982). Moreover, Palestinian terrorism is not random violence directed against Israel or ‘the West’; it is largely a response to Israel’s prolonged campaign to colonize the West Bank and Gaza Strip. More important, saying that Israel and the US are united by a shared terrorist threat has the causal relationship backwards: the US has a terrorism problem in good part because it is so closely allied with Israel, not the other way around.”

Middle Eastern policy is shaped in the United States by those with very close ties to the Israel lobby. Those who attempt to counter the virulent Israeli position, such as former Secretary of State Colin Powell, are ruthlessly slapped down. This alliance was true also during the Clinton administration, with its array of Israel-first Middle East experts, including special Middle East coordinator Dennis Ross and Martin Indyk, the former deputy director of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, AIPAC, one of the most powerful Israel lobbying groups in Washington. But at least people like Indyk and Ross are sane, willing to consider a Palestinian state, however unviable, as long as it is palatable to Israel. The Bush administration turned to the far-right wing of the Israel lobby, those who have not a shred of compassion for the Palestinians or a word of criticism for Israel. These new Middle East experts include Elliott Abrams, John Bolton, Douglas Feith, the disgraced I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz and David Wurmser.

Washington was once willing to stay Israel’s hand. It intervened to thwart some of its most extreme violations of human rights. This administration, however, has signed on for every disastrous Israeli blunder, from building the security barrier in the West Bank, to sealing off Gaza and triggering a humanitarian crisis, to the ruinous invasion and saturation bombing of Lebanon.

The few tepid attempts by the Bush White House to criticize Israeli actions have all ended in hasty and humiliating retreats in the face of Israeli pressure. When the Israel Defense Forces in April 2002 reoccupied the West Bank, President Bush called on then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to “halt the incursions and begin withdrawal.” It never happened. After a week of heavy pressure from the Israel lobby and Israel’s allies in Congress, meaning just about everyone in Congress, the president gave up, calling Sharon “a man of peace.” It was a humiliating moment for the United States, a clear sign of who pulled the strings.

There were several reasons for the war in Iraq. The desire for American control of oil, the belief that Washington could build puppet states in the region, and a real, if misplaced, fear of Saddam Hussein played a part in the current disaster. But it was also strongly shaped by the notion that what is good for Israel is good for the United States. Israel wanted Iraq neutralized. Israeli intelligence, in the lead-up to the war, gave faulty information to the U.S. about Iraq’s alleged arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. And when Baghdad was taken in April 2003, the Israeli government immediately began to push for an attack on Syria. The lust for this attack has waned, in no small part because the Americans don’t have enough troops to hang on in Iraq, much less launch a new occupation.

Israel is currently lobbying the United States to launch aerial strikes on Iran, despite the debacle in Lebanon. Israel’s iron determination to forcibly prevent a nuclear Iran makes it probable that before the end of the Bush administration an attack on Iran will take place. The efforts to halt nuclear development through diplomatic means have failed. It does not matter that Iran poses no threat to the United States. It does not matter that it does not even pose a threat to Israel, which has several hundred nuclear weapons in its arsenal. It matters only that Israel demands total military domination of the Middle East.

The alliance between Israel and the United States has culminated after 50 years in direct U.S. military involvement in the Middle East. This involvement, which is not furthering American interests, is unleashing a geopolitical nightmare. American soldiers and Marines are dying in droves in a useless war. The impotence of the United States in the face of Israeli pressure is complete. The White House and the Congress have become, for perhaps the first time, a direct extension of Israeli interests. There is no longer any debate within the United States. This is evidenced by the obsequious nods to Israel by all the current presidential candidates with the exception of Dennis Kucinich. The political cost for those who challenge Israel is too high.

This means there will be no peaceful resolution of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. It means the incidents of Islamic terrorism against the U.S. and Israel will grow. It means that American power and prestige are on a steep, irreversible decline. And I fear it also means the ultimate end of the Jewish experiment in the Middle East.

The weakening of the United States, economically and militarily, is giving rise to new centers of power. The U.S. economy, mismanaged and drained by the Iraq war, is increasingly dependent on Chinese trade imports and on Chinese holdings of U.S. Treasury securities. China holds dollar reserves worth $825 billion. If Beijing decides to abandon the U.S. bond market, even in part, it would cause a free fall by the dollar. It would lead to the collapse of the $7-trillion U.S. real estate market. There would be a wave of U.S. bank failures and huge unemployment. The growing dependence on China has been accompanied by aggressive work by the Chinese to build alliances with many of the world’s major exporters of oil, such as Iran, Nigeria, Sudan and Venezuela. The Chinese are preparing for the looming worldwide clash over dwindling resources.

The future is ominous. Not only do Israel’s foreign policy objectives not coincide with American interests, they actively hurt them. The growing belligerence in the Middle East, the calls for an attack against Iran, the collapse of the imperial project in Iraq have all given an opening, where there was none before, to America’s rivals. It is not in Israel’s interests to ignite a regional conflict. It is not in ours. But those who have their hands on the wheel seem determined, in the name of freedom and democracy, to keep the American ship of state headed at breakneck speed into the cliffs before us.

Special Comments, G. Bush Shut the Hell Up

Click Here

U.S. shooters feel pinch as ammo costs soar

Mon May 19, 2008 8:12pm EDT
By Tim Gaynor

TOMBSTONE, Ariz (Reuters) - Gunslinger Bob Krueger blasts away at his outlaw rivals at a tourist show in this storied Old West town, although rising ammo costs may force him to choose his shots.

Krueger and his gnarly band of pistoleros are among millions of shooters, hunters and even lawmen across the United States feeling the pinch as sky-high metals prices and demand from wars abroad are driving up the price of bullets.

Ammo prices for many popular guns have more than tripled in the last three years, driven in large part by surging demand for metals in rapidly industrializing China.

As the Asian giant becomes wealthier, millions of tons of copper, lead and zinc, which are also used to make bullets and brass shell-casings, are being snapped up.

Shooters, gun dealers and sheriffs say the impact has been further aggravated by competition for limited ammo stocks with the U.S. military, currently fighting wars on two fronts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"Everybody is feeling it," said Krueger, a Stetson wearing cowboy whose show blasts through hundreds of rounds of blank ammo each week at Six Gun City in Tombstone.

"If things get bad enough, we may all just get one bullet each," he said, to laughter from his grizzled buddies.

HUNTING FOR AMMO

Dealers complain that the cost of rifle ammunition has doubled and even tripled in the past two years, with similar increases for some hand gun ammunition.

Lynn Kartchner, a gun shop owner in nearby Douglas, Arizona, says he now pays $250 for a case of 1,000 rounds of assault rifle ammunition, up from $80 two years ago, while a box of popular 9 mm shells has jumped to $17 from $10.

"Price rises have been accompanied by scarcity for certain kinds of ammo," Kartchner told Reuters in his shop, which is packed with rifles, pistols and shooting paraphernalia.

"There isn't as much variety, and a lot of people snap up whatever they can get their hands on," he added.

Increased costs and competition for ammo is also being born by police forces across the United States, among them the sheriff's department in Cochise County on the Arizona-Mexico border, which faces incursions from armed smugglers and even bandits from south of the line.

Last year the department faced a four-month delay acquiring rifle cartridges and had to dip into ammo reserves, rousing the concern of Sheriff Larry Dever.

"We do face people in this environment down here who are heavily armed, sometimes with higher capacity armaments than we carry," Dever said.

"The last thing we want do is find ourselves in a situation where we are not training sufficiently so that (deputies) can maintain those very important proficiencies," he added.

HOARDING, RELOADING

Demand for metals is tipped to stay strong in China for the next decade.

Cowboy shows and lawmen aside, high ammo prices are being shouldered by millions of target shooters and hunters across the United States, many of them working people on a limited budget.

"If you have three of four children, and they all go out on a hunting trip, the cost of ammo can be a bit of a burden," said Luis Hernandez, a keen deer, bird and varmint hunter from Douglas.

To keep costs low, many hobby shooters are now scouring gun shows, gun shops and the Internet in search of cheap ammunition, which some then buy in bulk and hoard against further price rises.

Others either shoot less, switch to smaller caliber ammunition such as .22 which is cheaper, or are increasingly turning to reloading their old shell cases.

"The main saving is in the brass casing, which is the most expensive part," said Hernandez, who reckons on saving up to $20 on a box of some premium rifle cartridges by reloading.

Other shooters and dealers are holding out hope that ammunition manufacturers will develop cheaper alternatives.

"High cost drives innovation," said Kartchner. "There has been some interest in plastic or aluminum cartridge cases in the past, so I'm hopeful they will come up with something. We'll just have to see."

(Reporting by Tim Gaynor; Additional reporting by Ed Stoddard; Editing by Eddie Evans)

'Tweedle Dumb' and 'Tweedle Dee' walking off in the sunset.....

US-Led Capitalist System Headed for Collapse?

Syed Rashid Husain, Arab News —

Oil prices continue to rise and rise, with no end in sight. Virtually all other commodities seem to be following to be the same suit. Some now say a new economic system is emerging from the ashes of the old and now crumbling financial structure. Failing to meet even the basic needs of the common man, the current economic system is facing its worst crisis and appears in doldrums. It has miserably failed the underprivileged of this world.

Markets appear divorced from the fundamentals. F. William Engdahl strongly says in a recent write up that the oil markets (and other markets too) today are controlled by an elaborate financial market system as well as by the four major Anglo-American oil companies. As much as 60 percent of today’s crude oil price is pure speculation driven by large trader banks and hedge funds. It has nothing to do with the convenient myths of Peak Oil. It has to do with control of oil and its price.

And the end-result is growing deprivation to a large number of people across geographical boundaries!

In the 90’s, with the war in Afghanistan taking its toll, the Soviet empire virtually melted before our eyes under its own weight. The number of deprived, form Moscow to Siberia and Grozny started to grow and grow rapidly. And as the number of have-nots in then USSR rose, the system could not cope with the pressures, and failed to provide even the basic needs to the common man in the streets. And within years the mighty and the powerful USSR was assigned into the annals of history.

Analysts today point to the Afghan war as one of the major causes for the disintegration of the USSR. Many then rejoiced over the demise of the USSR, claiming the capitalist system has won the war — finally. Many in the West, including the Regan Administration claimed supremacy of the capitalist system over the Marxist ideals. The victory of the West was described in terms of ideologies.

Current developments also point to a new emerging reality. The capitalist economy now seem to be failing its underprivileged, the have-nots of the world. With the number of people below the poverty line growing rapidly all over the globe, the common man on the streets today appear more and more desperate today.

In sharp contrast to this grim reality, it is only a few, the haves of the world, controlling the capital, benefiting from the current scenario. The vast majority is now being deprived of two square meals a day too. The old Malthusian theory, which has been lying dormant in the shelves for quite sometime, seem to be back and people have started to look at it closely once again. And this is happening in this 21st century, when the world claims to have taken tremendous strides in the fields of science and technology. What a growth indeed!

The people to benefit out of this imbroglio are the money vendors, the rich of the world. Real estate and property boom has been the engine of growth all around. Conservative economists do not accept investments in real estate as really contributing toward the growth of the economy. Terming it as stagnant investment, these conservative economists continue to claim, growth in the real estate sector does not contribute significantly to the over all GDP of an economy. And secondly it is only the fortunate few who could benefit out of this boom — and at the cost of poor many.

Unable to come up to the expectations of the vast majority of the common man, many seem asking the question today, is the capitalist economy also passing through its last phases? The situation is grim for a vast majority. Global food prices, based on United Nations records, rose 35 percent in the year to the end of January, markedly accelerating an upturn that began, gently at first, in 2002.

Since then, prices have risen 65 percent. In 2007 alone, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization’s world food index, dairy prices rose nearly 80 percent and grain 42 percent. The World Bank estimates that 33 countries around the world face potential political and social unrest because of the acute hike in food and energy prices.

And this has resulted in disastrous social consequences for the billions below the poverty line in the impoverished, underdeveloped world. The scenario is so bleak for the common man on street that the world is witnessing food riots virtually all across the globe. People of the world are hungry in this era of growth and emancipation!

Where are we being led? We are living in a different world with a new era seeming to dawn upon us. In the 21st century, when the world was supposed to be at the click of a mouse, the number of hungry population, those who can’t afford proper food three times a day has increased. It seems, the age of scarcity, of shortages, of rising prices, of food riots, of ration cards, is finally upon us, all around the globe.

What is happening, that with the weakening of the ruling currency of the world, the US dollar, the moneyed class of the world — sans frontiers in this age of freedom and liberty- is moving their capital into commodities — from oil to gold and grains.

This paper transaction, at times termed as speculation, is taking place even without the physical transfer of the goods and is making a mockery of the conservative economic models. And this is contributing to the current imbroglio. Unfortunately only the moneyed class has the capacity to participate and benefit from this entire game — at the cost of the poor.

Religious scholars tell that Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) did not permit transactions in which physical transaction of the goods under question did not take place. And in the current situation, rarely is the physical transaction taking place.

This paper circulation is contributing to this rise of virtually all commodities — oil included. If it continues the same way, it may not be too wrong to point out that like the Marxist ideals, the current era of capitalism may also not last long. It may already be in its final throes, some hence deduce.

If a system cannot meet the basic idea of having some sort of equity within the society, where the have-nots could not have at least three meals a day, then it is bound to fizzle out, proponents of the theory underline.

The war in Afghanistan turned out to be the Achilles heel of the Russian empire and who knows the two concurrent wars, in Iraq and in Afghanistan, is leading the US-led capitalist economic system toward the same fate? Only time has the answer to this trillion dollar question.

America As a Prison Society

According to the Justice Department, 7 million people--or one in every 32 adults--are either incarcerated, on parole or probation or under some other form of state or local supervision. One out of every 100 Americans is now in prison!

In 1970 Congress created the National Commission on Marijuana and Drug Abuse to carry out a study and then propose a new drug law. Its official report favored discouraging the use of marijuana, but recommended de-criminalizing it. The recommendation was denounced in 1973 by President Nixon who proclaimed a national War on Drugs. Congress passed legislation giving the same severe jail time for the milder cannabis as for the sale or possession of cocaine and heroin. This remains the foundation of current drug law.

Thirty-seven million, or one out of every six Americans, regularly use emotion controlling medical drugs. The users are mostly women. The pushers are doctors; the suppliers are pharmaceutical companies; the profits are stupendous. In the U.S. as of 2003 there were more than 125,000 alcohol-related deaths a year, 473,000 die prematurely from tobacco-related illnesses--53,000 of these are nonsmokers--while not a single one of the 31,450,000 marijuana users dies because of their use of this benign plant.



According to the prestigious European medical journal, The Lancet, "The smoking of cannabis, even long-term, is not harmful to health. ... It would be reasonable to judge cannabis as less of a threat ... than alcohol or tobacco."

Source

The focus of the drug war in the United States has shifted significantly over the past two decades from hard drugs to marijuana, which now accounts for nearly half of all drug arrests nationwide, according to an analysis of federal crime statistics released in 2005.

A study of FBI data by a Washington-based think tank, the Sentencing Project, found that the proportion of heroin and cocaine cases plummeted from 55 percent of all drug arrests in 1992 to less than 30 percent 10 years later. During the same period, marijuana arrests rose from 28 percent of the total to 45 percent. Today in fifteen states, for a nonviolent marijuana-related offense, you could be sentenced to life in prison without parole, while the national average sentence for murder is six to eight years.

Enforcing marijuana prohibition costs taxpayers an estimated $10 billion annually and results in the arrest of more than 829,000 individuals per year--far more than the total number of arrestees for all violent crimes combined, including murder, rape, robbery and aggravated assault. Of those charged with marijuana violations, approximately 89 percent, 738,915 Americans were charged with possession only. The remaining 90,710 individuals were charged with "sale/manufacture," a category that includes all cultivation offenses, even those where the marijuana was being grown for personal or medical use. In past years, roughly 30 percent of those arrested were age 19 or younger. More of our population is now behind bars for marijuana offenses than in any other time in our history.

The US Sentencing Commission reports that only 5.5% of all federal crack cocaine defendants and 11% of all federal drug defendants are "high-level" dealers. The rest are low-level operatives and those caught "possessing." In most cases they're from society's least advantaged and poor, and most of them are black. These convenient targets create a ready supply of bodies to fill prison cells as part of the plan to remove the unwanted from the streets and create a new growth industry at the same time.


Private Prison Profits
Revenues in the private prison corporations passed the $1 billion mark in 1998 and is now closing in on $2 billion. Two companies dominate the for-profit incarceration industry—Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) and the GEO Group, formerly known as Wackenhut Corrections. These two companies control 75 percent of the for-profit incarceration market--and make huge donations to Bush and other Cabal lackeys.

Private prison companies remain profitable by supporting political accomplices and supporting strict sentencing laws and tough-on-crime legislation. To maintain profits, corporate-owned prisons need a steady flow of inmates. Mandatory minimum sentences, life terms for “three strikes,” and sentencing juveniles as adults results in growing prison populations and obscene profits.

In 1987, the states collectively spent $10.6 billion of their general funds—their primary pool of discretionary tax dollars—on corrections. In 2007, the states spent more than $44 billion, a 315 percent jump, data from the National Association of State Budget Officers show. Adjusted to 2007 dollars, the increase was 127 percent. Over the same period, adjusted spending on higher education rose just 21 percent.

At the start of 2008, the American penal system held more than 2.3 million adults. China (with 4 times the population of the U.S.) was second, with 1.5 million people behind bars, and Russia was a distant third with 890,000 inmates, according to the latest available figures. Beyond the sheer number of inmates, America also is the global leader in the rate at which it incarcerates its citizenry, outpacing nations like South Africa and Iran. In Germany, 93 people are in prison for every 100,000 adults and children. In the U.S, the rate is roughly eight times that, or 750 per 100,000.




The Cabal's Global Drug Crimes
The current global drug syndicate was brought to its present height of worker destruction by George H. W. Bush when he was defacto president under Reagan and during his term as president. The drug syndicate has mushroomed under both Bill Clinton and Bush II.

On March 30, 1981, President Ronald Reagan was shot and gravely wounded as he was leaving the Washington Hilton Hotel after addressing a labor convention. Reagan was the man who stood in the way of Vice President George W. Bush becoming President. For the remainder of Reagan's term, Bush was the de facto president. The would-be assassin was John W. Hinckley Jr., who had strange ties to the Bush family. Hinckley was found not guilty by reason of insanity on June 21, 1982 and later placed in a minimum security mental facility.

On November 13, 1986, the Reagan administration confirmed a flood of worldwide reports that it indeed had been sending Iran weapons--against both United States law and official policy--for some time. The arms deal was reportedly organized and carried out by a "crisis management" group within the 46-member National Security Council staff. In addition to Robert McFarlane, White House assistant, a prominent member of the team was marine Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, a Vietnam veteran and deputy director for political-military affairs at the Security Council.

After invoking the Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination for seven months, while conniving to get a grant of limited immunity, North finally testified before Senate and House investigating committees in July of 1987.

"I assumed that the President was aware of what I was doing and had, through my superiors, approved," he stated.
North claimed he'd sent five memoranda to President Bush through Admiral John Poindexter, Reagan's national security adviser, requesting permission to divert money from the Iranian arms sales to the contras, a Nicaraguan rebel group.
North's testimony left the impression that the late director of the Central Intelligence Agency, William J. Casey, had masterminded the financing of the contras with profits from the Iranian arms sales. Democrat Senator Daniel Inouye, presiding over the hearings, said that the Iran-contra arms-for-hostages operation was a naked attempt to create a "secret government within our government." The Senate-House investigating committee concluded that "the common ingredients of the Iran and contra policies were secrecy, deception, and disdain for the law. . . . The ultimate responsibility for the events in the Iran-contra affair must rest with the President."

On May 4, 1989, Oliver North was convicted in federal court on three of twelve counts against him. He was fined $150,000 and given a three-year suspended sentence and ordered to perform 1,200 hours of community service. Lackeys of the cabal--like Scooter Libby and Ollie North--caught in criminal acts either spend a few months in a country club prison, receive a suspended sentence, receive an inconsequential fine, or are pardoned by the puppet president.

On September 16, 1991, a federal judge ordered all Iran-contra charges against Oliver North dropped. And on December 24, 1991, President George W. Bush pardoned six officials charged with or convicted of misleading Congress in the investigation of the Iran-Contra affair, including North.


One of those pardoned was former Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger, whose trial might have revealed that Bush was not, contrary to his claim, "out of the loop" on the deal. Weinberger's notes concerning his actions as Defense Secretary under Bush I, demonstrated that Bush was definitely in the loop. Admiral John Poindexter claimed that he conferred directly with Bush about the Iran-Contra scheme. Also, Bush and his assistant Donald Gregg communicated regularly with Felix Rodriguez, the notorious ex-CIA agent at the heart of the Contra Supply operation [See Lawrence Walsh's Firewall, 1997].
The Iran-contra affair was actually a gun-running, drug smuggling operation run out of Mena, Arkansas, under the direction of Vice President Bush. 1 Unless we can overturn a presidential decree by George W. Bush to make all previous presidential and vice presidential papers unavailable except through legal action, the elder George Bush's papers will be unavailable for review to see what criminal action was committed.




"The actions of the Reagan Administration during the Iran-Contra scandal revealed a pattern of conduct and a state of mind among important people in this administration which must be described as an American style of fascism. I would prefer to avoid that term, but it is the only one in the modern political vocabulary that adequately describes the situation."

William Pfaff, Chicago Tribune, March, 1987





During the one-term presidency of George H. W. Bush, lawlessness extended to the point of using military force to protect Bush's criminal behavior. As Director of the CIA, Bush had hired Manuel Noriega to be his man in Panama. When General Noriega threatened to expose Bush's complicity in gun running, drug trafficking, money laundering, and other crimes, 2 a Federal court indicted Noriega on drug smuggling charges on February 5, 1988.
On December 20, 1989, 24,000 U.S. troops attacked Panama to find Noriega and bring him back to the United States for trial. The military invasion operation, code-named "Just Cause," resulted in hundreds of innocent Panamanian civilians being killed.

The best way to understand this atrocity is to view a courageous documentary video on Bush's terrorist attack against a foreign people titled "The Panama Deception," the 1993 Academy Award winner for Best Documentary Feature.

Produced by the Empowerment Project and narrated by Elizabeth Montgomery, the documentary outlines in stark detail how Bush Sr. used the U.S. military to invade a foreign country without the American press, the American Congress, or the American people raising their voice in protest at such an atrocity.

On January 4, 1990, Noriega was charged in a U.S. court in Miami with drug trafficking and sentenced to 40 years. Before 9/11, Noriega was the only war criminal in an American prison.

The Phony Drug War

The demonic cabal is directly involved in the trillion dollar international drug trafficking activity. To understand the so-called war on drugs we must realize that this is a war that is deliberately being lost. Why?
Internationally, "the war on drugs"


Provides a cover for U.S. intervention in and control of other countries

Adds to the military budget

Increases foreign sales of U.S. weaponry

Keeps the price of drugs up and the costs down

Domestically, the "drug war"



Is not about decreasing drug use or drug supply

It:

Incarcerates millions of felons on the basis of mandatory minimum sentencing

Provides profits for the privatized prison companies

Provides funds to U.S. organizations and individuals through drug money-laundering

Covert agencies who use it as a source of black funding


Politicians and bankers who are hired to protect the drug revenues

Politicians who receive drug money campaign contributions

Inflates police spending and revenues (seizing assets)

Increases repression in the inner cities

Masks the attack on civil liberties

The number of people in America using illegal drugs is said to be down appreciably from the high in 1979.
However, the phony "drug war" which the ruling junta has carried out is responsible for little of this decrease, except insofar as they have put millions of Americans in prison on drug charges. Crack cocaine use is down, for example, primarily because people were smart enough to see its devastating effect on crack addicts.


There are two major approaches to mind-altering drugs:


Large-scale incarceration for drug users and military action to stop drug production internationally

Decriminalization and treatment
The American criminal junta takes the first approach because of all the monetary benefits.

Sixty years ago we solved the alcohol prohibition problem. Crime was rampant. Drug gangs battled on our streets. Bootleggers sold their wares everywhere, even to schoolchildren. Police could do nothing. The vast profits of liquor smuggling fueled corruption and violence, and the drug scourge seemed poised to topple America. But on December 5th, 1933, we ended prohibition and made alcohol legal. We could do the same today with heroin, cocaine, marijuana, and other drugs of choice. But the cabal is making too much money from illegal drug trafficking; it doesn't want to stop the phony "war on drugs."

In South America, Coca is as safe as coffee. But it's illegal in the United States so we have cocaine smugglers, dealers, and sellers. Opium is safer than tobacco in the East. Since it's illegal in America we have heroin smugglers who bring in heroin a hundred times more powerful that that used in the East. In our prisons, real criminals are let loose, while pot smokers waste their lives behind bars. So the single largest marketplace for illegal drugs continues to be the United States.

Europe's approach is legalized, regulated markets in soft drugs, making drugs like opiates available to addicts through various treatment programs, and a more humane approach to substance abuse in general. Part of our struggle against the cabal tyranny must be to see that a reasonable drug policy is established and order restored to our neighborhoods destroyed by the "drug war" scam.



The Cabal's South American Connection
A revealing feature of the South American "war on terrorism" is that, unlike the Taliban and al Qaeda, the Bush administration is not destroying the numerous South American drug terrorists. Why? Because the Bush administration and its plutocratic controllers are at the center of the $1.5 trillion per year in U.S. cash transactions that result from the international drug trade. The drug war is a front for pro-multinational military strikes against indigenous peoples.

A drug terrorist, like a Carlos Lehder, a Pablo Escobar, an Amado Fuentes, a Matta Ballesteros or a Hank Rohn, constantly has something like ten billion dollars of useless illegal money that he has to put in a cooperative bank or business venture that will launder it for him. The drug lord is then more than happy to loan the laundered money at five percent interest to underwrite the large corporations and crooked politicians throughout the world.

Wall Street and the cabal depend on the South American drug barons for hundreds of millions of dollars for corporate income and election campaign finances. For every million dollars of increased sales or increased revenues that a company like Enron realized from a buyout, the stock equity of the one per cent who control Wall Street increases twenty to thirty times.

In June, 1999, Colombia's president Andres Pastrana arranged for Richard Grasso, head of the New York Stock Exchange, to meet with Raúl Reyes, the head of FARC finances, in the cocaine-producing DMZ of Colombia. The two were caught in an infamous embrace that saw very little exposure in the media.

Grasso, however, wasn't the only American big-money representative to cozy up to Colombian drug terrorists. Several months after Grasso's visit, two wealthy members of the American Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) captured world headlines by flying to a FARC redoubt in the Colombian jungles to palaver with the terrorists' founder, 70-year-old Manuel Marulanda. After meeting with the communist drug terrorist, James Kimsey, co-founder and chairman emeritus of America Online Inc., and Joseph Robert, head of J.E. Robert Company, a global real estate empire, flew to Bogota to consult with Colombian president Pastrana. On returning to Washington, the CFR representatives said they were convinced that Marulanda and FARC are sincere in their claims of wanting peace and economic reform.

It may seem hard to believe that U.S. banks and corporations would be involved in laundering drug money from South American terrorists. Even the supine media have had to report some of this criminal behavior. A 1983 ABC News "Close up" on drugs and money laundering fingered Citibank, Marine Midland, Chase Manhattan, and most of the 250 banks and branches in Miami. When Ramon Milian Rodriguez, a top accountant and money launderer for the Medellin Cartel, testified before a Senate subcommittee in 1988, he implicated a veritable "Who's Who" in U.S. finance:

Citibank
Citicorp
Bank of America
First National Bank of Boston
"In every instance," said Rodriguez, "the banks knew who they were dealing with...." The evidence indicates that Rodriguez is right; the banks often play dumb, but they know what they're doing.

A 1998 investigation of Citibank by the U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO) revealed that Citibank had secretly transferred between $90 million and $100 million of alleged drug money for a Mexican client, using many creative methods to camouflage the movement of the assets.


The Cabal's War Against Workers
A May, 2008 report on a new prescription drug exposes the hypocrisy and depravity of the cabal's so-called "war on drugs." Several new anti-obesity prescription drugs, including Merck's taranabant and rimonabant-- sold in Europe as Acomplia by Sanofi-Aventis but as-yet-unapproved in the United States--claim to reduce appetite by blocking the brain's cannabinoid receptors. Those are the receptors activated by marijuana, resulting in appetite surges. In a study published in Neuron, Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers found that a cannabinoid receptor antagonist--in layman's terms, a munchies-blocker--stunted the brains of juvenile mice. Which means that the drug most likely disrupts wiring needed for brain development in young people.

So what measures are being taken to make certain that taranabant and rimonabant are branded harmful by national drug testing agencies? Nothing! In fact, both these drugs have been approved for use in adults in Europe and are undergoing tests by the U.S. Federal Drug Agency and will likely soon receive approval for all ages!

Wake up America! A demonic cabal has seized political-economic power in our country. Along with all its other assaults on us, it's throwing millions of workers into privatized, for-profit prisons while running a global drug syndicate to encourage increased numbers of workers to use illegal drugs.



"America is today the leader of a world-wide anti-revolutionary movement in the defence of vested interests. She now stands for what Rome stood for: Rome consistently supported the rich against the poor . . . and since the poor, so far, have always and everywhere been far more numerous than the rich, Rome's policy made for inequality, for injustice, and for the least happiness of the greatest number."

British historian Arnold J. Toynbee

Part Two; Are you Drunk, Stupid or Asleep?

This is very thought provoking and not for the faint of heart. Foul language is used so reader beware.






Every day I take a little stroll through the internet to see if the world has woken up yet. Every day I see that it’s the same world bent out of shape into the contortion of the moment. It reminds me of a man trying to escape back pain by adopting some posture that would be sure to make his back hurt if it didn’t hurt already.


For some the sleep is dreamless and they lay motionless. For many others it is a restless dream that involves twisting and shifting and flailing about, hitting the bodies of other sleepers, all of them caught up in the total subjectivity of their own being. Millions of dreams bouncing off of each other like a runaway pinball machine attended by flashing lights and sound effects with a robot voice over the top announcing the ever changing circumstances that, though they possess an infinite variety of possibilities, are forever confined to the table until they go down through the bottom chute. There’s one way in and one way out and only the one table. No one knows what goes on during the time when the ball is off the table. The ball never says anything about it. It just comes back and starts bouncing off of the bumpers, shooting through the gates and sliding in the aisles.


It’s a real trick to walk through this world going in the opposite direction and managing to sidestep all of the people going the other way who are walking with their eyes closed.


I don’t mean to be critical because, you see, I’m dreaming too. I’m dreaming that I am awake and in a certain way I am but I’m still dreaming. Given that, I think it is the context and quality of our dream that defines us. This is the sort of dream that I wish I was having. I’m glad that someone is having this dream and I’m sad that there are so few. This dreamstuff that envelopes all of us is manipulated by various forces; the forces of industry and enterprise, the forces of religion and politics, the forces of desire to possess and acquire. Some forces are inimical to humankind. They feed on human flesh and they drink blood. They sacrifice children; not just the lives of children but their innocence as well as their hopes and dreams. You could say, “Well, after all, they are only dreams. We are only dreams, what does it matter?” Stick a pin in your hand and tell me how it feels. Maybe the pain is only a dream too.


Why are some of us content to live a life of total self-indulgence and vanity? Why are there so many Paris Hilton clones feeding off of the dream assembly lines? The march of the Ken and Barbie dolls goes on. There is nothing more for them than to be admired in the reflected lenses of their own eyes as they stare into the mirror; to be important and successful and unwilling to trouble their beautiful minds with considerations upon the world in front of us. Others see an opportunity for service in every circumstance. Some desire only to be served. The greater body gravitate from one to the other and depending on how deep is the materialism of the age; upon that depends where the majority of their attention will remain.


Alas Babylon… we could have had so much. We could have done so much but we got lost in a masturbation fantasy and stood hypnotized in a field of Narcissus flowers. When I see the work of a man like Jacque Fresco I am galvanized to be, to try to be, a better person. When I hear about Dean Kamen it makes me want to try harder and do more. Whenever I hear about someone who is making the world a better place, I am inspired. Then I always think, “too few… too few”. I don’t want to complain and scold. I don’t want to rain on the parade of your vain and pointless posturing to stand out as the object of desire among tens of thousands of frogs in sequined jumpsuits sitting on tens of thousands of lily pods in all of the small ponds across the planet.


I look at men like Ron Paul and Jessie Ventura and I think to myself, “Why wouldn’t most Americans want these men in the highest office in the land instead of the sold out whores we have to choose from?" I could criticize Jessie Ventura I suppose. I could criticize anyone if I were so disposed… but behind the brusk and bristling persona I see an honest man. Jessie Ventura cares what he is about. He’s the sort of man who couldn’t live with himself if he were to behave like “Old Yellow Streak 1” or “Old Yellow Streak 2”. I believe that President Jessie Ventura would ‘try’ to do the right thing and that he would seek to know what was true and not casually compromise the truth to fit his will. So he was a professional wrestler; what was Ronald Reagan?


I believe that Ron Paul would ‘try’ to do the right thing. Is he a reptile in disguise? Does he make funny hand signs and belong to secret organizations? Anyone who wants to do away with The Federal Reserve can not be one of the bad guys. Anyone who wants to cut off foreign aid to Israel which adds to all of the holocaust blackmail cash that pours into weapons that are used to murder a population armed with sticks and stones is on the right side of the equation.


But not even Ron Paul will touch the 9/11 question. Maybe he knows better and maybe he will when he can. Jessie Ventura calls it for what it is. He can’t be one of the bad guys. Sooner or later you have to stop thinking that anyone and everyone is a member of the elite. It could hardly be ‘the elite’ in that case.


Ron Paul is still running for president but you wouldn’t know it. Yet… a very large portion of the American public supports him. All you have to do is vote for him. Is that too much to ask? Somebody out there please… bring these two men together into a room. Bring Robert Kennedy Jr. into that room. Bring together some small group of men and women who are at least halfway honest men and women and see what the opportunity to lead will do in terms of the angels of their better nature. Damn it!!! Make it happen.


I’m getting sick and tired of watching an indulgent nation wacking off to porn and stuffing Cheetos into their fat cheeks like retarded Chipmunks. I’m getting sick and tired of having to wake up every day and encounter the same shit for brains treadmill walking hamsters who are marching through the chutes to the killing floor. We could have and achieve so much and you are content with this? You make me want to puke.


Well, there went any lyrical integrity this post might have had…


People, look around you. There are a lot of decent caring people who would gladly share the same dream. You are capable of marching off to die in a corporation war but you aren’t willing to march off and die for the only things that make life worth living in the first place? What? The former has an official imprimatur and the other is a risky proposition? Crossing the street is a risky proposition if you’re not paying attention. Many a dead chipmunk could tell you so.


All I ask is that you wake up enough to see that you are dreaming. Once you can see that you are dreaming you can dream along with Jacque Fresco and Dean Kamen. You can dream along with Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi. Right now you’re sitting by the riverbank in one of those stories at the end of Magister Ludi. I just want you to wake up and realize that you are sitting on the river bank. From that point we can set out upon that river or walk inland toward the shining city on the hill that we never got to build.


What can I or anyone do? I’ve got “Blue Jay Way” playing as loud as my speakers can manage but they can’t even hear it in the next block. You have to wake up. You have to.

Are you Drunk, Stupid or Asleep.. Part 1

This is very thought provoking and not for the faint of heart. Foul language is used so reader beware.








To those for whom this post may seem strange I ask that you just ponder what's here and it will all come clear (one hopes) in Part 2 tomorrow.



When I was younger I had a burning desire to know what was going on. I think that it came in part from a desire to know why I had been born into such difficult circumstances. I know there are some horror stories out there but the entire time I was growing up I never encountered anyone whose story was as brutal as mine, unless you count my brothers.


Part of it came from the instinctive awareness that things were not what they should be. It just didn’t seem to me that life was supposed to be the way it appeared to be. It was impossible to fit in. I thought for a long time that I was crazy and actually institutionalized myself to find out. This was even before the government decided to institutionalize me later on. All I discovered was that the doctors and the staff were crazy and that the patients were just more obvious about it. There was no help for me there so I left.


While I was in this institution I read a magazine article about someone called Dr. Timothy Leary. What the article had to say fascinated me. I’ve never forgotten how I felt while I was reading it. About a year later I was living near Dupont Circle in Washington D.C. with some early prototypes of a new consciousness. I took some Sandoz LSD and I can remember (who could forget?) looking around me and how it dawned on me that I wasn’t crazy at all. The wealth of information that passed to and thru me during this single event would take a long time, if it were even possible, to tell. I saw, clearly and unequivocally that not only was I not crazy but that the world most certainly was. Nothing I have seen since has changed that.


Along with a multitude of supernatural and occult experiences, I came to see that the world was just phenomena that recycled in the process of repeating itself. The people of the world looked to me like toy soldiers that got wound up and marched off until they walked into a wall and fell over and then they made rotating circles on the floor until there was no crank left in the key.


Governments and religions all looked like what they were; experiments and assumptions. The experiments ran from very, very bad ideas to occasional good ideas that wound up in bad hands. In every society there are those who seek power, control and fortune and eventually they control the experiment with money, guns and lawyers. As for religion, it always came out looking the way certain people decided the incomprehensible, inexplicable, unexplainable ought to look. This necessitated a holy book and a priesthood and a great deal of money to be the gas that powered the car and the oil that lubricated the engine. Somebody always had to be in charge and, because it was always impossible to get the man himself to show up in person, somebody had to stand in for him and you can see what happened after that.


There’s only one good government and that’s the one whose purpose is the greatest good for the greatest number of people. The less aware that you are of its presence the better it operates. Sooner or later the people I was talking about before show up and it goes through a variety of stages until it becomes an object of fear and ridicule (that’s where you are now). There’s only one good religion and that’s the one where everyone behaves like the person upon whom it was founded in the first place and which was the reason everyone thought it was such a good idea to begin with. It’s that simple. When it becomes complicated …any of it… it’s always for the same reason, “What’s puzzlin you is the nature of my game.” Whenever something is wrong with any human collective system that usually works (and then stops working, or starts being badly worked) it is always for the same reasons. A certain handful of individuals have gotten together to steal and control everything in sight. That’s where you are now. Fascism is defined as a state where the corporations control the government. That’s where you are now.


Revolutions shouldn’t have to be bloody but they almost always are. Even when you take a guy like Mahatma Gandhi and all that he practiced and all that his followers practiced, it was still a hard road to travel. The same was true of Martin Luther King. You need a revolution. I don’t know what shape it’s going to take but it’s unavoidable unless you want to see what it’s like to be a Palestinian.


It’s a curious thing about America. You should probably watch this video about now. That’s pretty interesting isn’t it? All over the rest of the world people know about Ron Paul and are supporting him. It’s hard to understand how they even heard about him but somehow they did. He’s got websites in most countries that are put up by residents of that country.


Like you, I don’t know what the deal is on Ron Paul. I do know what the deal is on the other people. It’s possible that Obama has some hope of being a square shooter but anyone who feels the need to continuously kiss Israel’s ass in public makes me nervous. Ron Paul doesn’t do that. I can tell you right now that if you all got together and decided that you were going to vote for Jessie Ventura for president with Ron Paul as his running mate that you would have gone a long way toward correcting your situation. I suggest it this way instead of the other way around because Ventura is much more the sort of man that needs to be the front guy while Ron Paul is a specialist who shines in areas that are less understood by the public though certainly as important as anything could be.


The people of America (at this time) remind me of the kids in the back of the bus who always get smacked in the back of the head by the bullies and don’t do anything about it. I know something about bullies and there are very few options to choose from in terms of dealing with them. It might take some work to get yourself into a position to do what you have to do but you have certainly got reason for personal initiative. In terms of a government you are supposed to have LAWS that protect you from bullies both foreign and domestic. You’ll note that it is your laws that are under attack due to an attack by someone. This got blamed on a rag tag assortment of members of a so-called terror group that according to high ranking CIA agents doesn’t even exist. Now, your LAWS are being altered to protect you from a danger that has been orchestrated by elements in your own government with the assistance of a foreign nation that is supposed to be your best friend. That’s what all the evidence says. That’s what the evidence says.


Jesse questions 9/11. He has publicly said so. I can’t imagine how you would want to elect anyone who isn’t willing to cop to this. Jesse Ventura says the right things. Jessie Ventura would be a good president because he wouldn’t want to let himself down, much less you.


I don’t know what’s wrong with you people. Are you that stupid? Are you that drunk or stoned? Are you asleep? What is wrong with you? It’s not suddenly going to get better. The people responsible aren’t going to stop what they’re doing and say to each other, “You know what? This is wrong. Let’s do the right thing.” They’re psychopaths… do the math. This is why you ‘had’ LAWS in the first place. Laws are there to protect you. When laws become selective in application and open to whim and caprice and the interpretation of the law becomes the province of those whose position and livelihood depends on corporations… you’re screwed.


Let’s work on the concept of Six Degrees of Separation. Everyone reading this knows someone who knows someone and someone knows someone who is in a position to make the right thing happen. Everyone talking to everyone will soon find that everyone pretty much agrees that criminals have taken over the government. The only people who don’t agree are part of the operation or too stupid to be part of yours.


This essay is just a portion of the continuous, unavoidable necessity to keep asking the American People to pay attention and tear their asses away from the flesh/plether bonding of their ass to the TV chair.

Welcome to the Age of Homeland Insecurity

by Tom Engelhardt

Kiss American Security Goodbye: 15 Numbers That Add Up to an Age of Insecurity

Once upon a time, I studied the Chinese martial art of Tai Chi – until, that is, I realized I would never locate my "chi." At that point, I threw in the towel and took up Western exercise. Still, the principle behind Tai Chi stayed with me – that you could multiply the force of an act by giving way before the force of others; that a smaller person could use the strength of a bigger one against him.

Now, jump to September 11, 2001 and its aftermath – and you know the Tai Chi version of history from there. Think of it as a grim cosmic joke – that the 9/11 attacks, as apocalyptic as they looked, were anything but. The true disasters followed and the wounds were largely self-inflicted, as the most militarily powerful nation on the planet used its own force to disable itself.

Before that fateful day, the Bush administration had considered terrorism, Osama bin Laden, and al-Qaeda subjects for suckers and wusses. What they were intent on was pouring money into developing an elaborate boondoggle of a missile defense system against future nuclear attacks by rogue states. Those Cold War high frontiersmen (and women) couldn't get enough of the idea of missiling up. That, after all, was where the money and the fun seemed to be. Nuclear was where the big boys – the nation states – played. "Bin Laden determined to strike in U.S.…," the CIA told the President that August. Yawn.

After 9/11, of course, George W. Bush and his top advisors almost instantly launched their crusade against Islam and then their various wars, all under the rubric of the Global War on Terror. (As Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld pungently put the matter that September, "We have a choice – either to change the way we live, which is unacceptable, or to change the way that they live; and we chose the latter.") By then, they were already heading out to "drain the swamp" of evildoers, 60 countries worth of them, if necessary. Meanwhile, they moved quickly to fight the last battle at home, the one just over, by squandering vast sums on an American Maginot Line of security. The porous new Department of Homeland Security, the NSA, the FBI, and other acronymic agencies were to lock down, surveill, and listen in on America. All this to prevent "the next 9/11."

In the process, they would treat bin Laden's scattered al-Qaeda network as if it were the Nazi or Soviet war machine (even comically dubbing his followers "Islamofascists"). In the blinking of an eye, and in the rubble of two enormous buildings in downtown Manhattan, bin Laden and his cronies had morphed from nobodies into supermen, a veritable Legion of Doom. (There was a curious parallel to this transformation in World War II. Before Pearl Harbor, American experts had considered the Japanese – as historian John Dower so vividly documented in his book War Without Mercy – bucktoothed, near-sighted military incompetents whose war planes were barely capable of flight. On December 8, 1941, they suddenly became a race of invincible supermen without, in the American imagination, ever passing through a human incarnation.)

When, in October 2001, Congress passed the Patriot Act, and an Office of Homeland Security (which, in 2002, became a "department") was established, it was welcome to the era of homeland insecurity. From then on, every major building, landmark, amusement park, petting zoo, flea market, popcorn stand, and toll booth anywhere in the country would be touted as a potential target for terrorists and in need of protection. Every police department from Arkansas to Ohio would be in desperate need of anti-terror funding. And why not, when the terrorists loomed so monstrously large, were so apocalyptically capable, and wanted so very badly to destroy our way of life. No wonder that, in the 2006 National Asset Database, compiled by the Department of Homeland Security, the state of Indiana, "with 8,591 potential terrorist targets, had 50 percent more listed sites than New York (5,687) and more than twice as many as California (3,212), ranking the state the most target-rich place in the nation."

In the administration's imagination (and the American one), they were now capable of anything. From their camps in the backlands of Afghanistan (or was it the suburbs of Hamburg?), as well as in the murky global underworld of the arms black market, al-Qaeda's minions were toiling feverishly to lay their hands on the most fiendish of plagues and pestilences – smallpox, botulism, anthrax, you name it. They were preparing to fill suitcases with nuclear weapons for deposit in downtown Manhattan. They were gathering nuclear refuse for dirty bombs. Nothing was too mad or destructive for them. Every faint but strange odor – the sweet smell of maple syrup floating across a city – was a potential bio-attack. And everywhere, even in rural areas, politicians were strapping on their armor and preparing to run imminent-danger, anti-terror campaigns, while urging their constituents to run for cover. Meanwhile, that former Sodom of the New World, New York City, had somehow been transformed into an I-heart-NY T-shirt-and-cap combo.

So, thank you, Osama bin Laden for expediting the Department of Homeland Security, glutting an already bloated Pentagon with even more money, ensuring that all those "expeditionary forces" would sally forth to cause havoc and not find victory in two hopeless wars, enabling the establishment of a vast offshore prison network (and the torture techniques to go with it), and creating a whole new global "security" industry to "thwart terrorists" that was, by 2006, generating $60 billion a year in business and whose domestic wing was devoted to locking down America.

When the history of this era is finally written, based on the Tai Chi Principle, Osama bin Laden and his scattering of followers may be credited for goading the fundamentalist leaders of the United States into using the power in their grasp so – not to put a fine point on it – stupidly and profligately as to send the planet's "sole superpower" into decline. Above all, bin Laden and his crew of fanatics will have ensured one thing: that the real security problems of our age were ignored in Washington until far too late in favor of mad dreams and dark phantoms. In this lies a bleak but epic tale of folly worthy of a great American novelist (wherever she is).

In the meantime, consider the following little list – 15 numbers that offer an indication of just what the Tai Chi Principle meant in action these last years; just where American energies did and did not flow; and, in the end, just how much less safe we are now than we were in January 2001, when George W. Bush entered the Oval Office:

536,000,000,000: the number of dollars the Pentagon is requesting for the 2009 military budget. This represents an increase of almost 70% over the Pentagon's 2001 budget of $316 billion – and that's without factoring in "supplementary" requests to fund the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as the President's Global War on Terror. Add in those soaring sums and military spending has more than doubled in the Bush era. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, since 2001, funding for "defense and related programs... has jumped at an annual average rate of 8%... – four times faster than the average rate of growth for Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid (2%), and 27 times faster than the average rate for growth for domestic discretionary programs (0.3%)."

1,390,000: the number of subprime foreclosures over the next two years, as estimated by Credit Suisse analysts. They also predict that, by the end of 2012, 12.7% of all residential borrowers may be out of their homes as part of a housing crisis that caught the Bush administration totally off-guard.

1,000,000: the number of "missions" or "sorties" the U.S. Air Force proudly claims to have flown in the Global War on Terror since 9/11, more than one-third of them (about 353,000) in what it still likes to call Operation Iraqi Freedom. This is a good measure of where American energies (and oil purchases) have gone these last years.

509,000: the number of names found in 2007 on a "terrorist watch list" compiled by the FBI. No longer, in George Bush's America, is a 10 Most Wanted list adequate. According to ABC News, "U.S. lawmakers and their spouses have been detained because their names were on the watch list" and Saddam Hussein was on the list even when in U.S. custody. By February 2008, according to the American Civil Liberties Union, the names on the same FBI list had ballooned to 900,000.

300,000: the number of American troops who now suffer from major depression or post-traumatic stress, according to a recent RAND study. This represents almost one out of every five soldiers who served in Iraq or Afghanistan. Even more – approximately 320,000 – "report possible brain injuries from explosions or other head wounds." This, RAND reports, represents a barely dealt with "major health crisis." The depression and PTSD alone will, the study reported, "cost the nation as much as $6.2 billion in the two years following deployment."

51,000: the number of post-surge Iraqi prisoners held in American and Iraqi jails at the end of 2007. In that country, the U.S. now runs "perhaps the world's largest extrajudicial internment camp," Camp Bucca, whose holding capacity is, even now, being expanded from 20,000 to 30,000 prisoners. Then there's Camp Cropper, with at least 4,000 prisoners, including "hundreds of juveniles." Many of these prisoners were simply swept up in surge raids and have been held without charges or access to lawyers or courts ever since. Add in prisoners (in unknown numbers) in our sizeable network of prisons in Afghanistan, at Guantanamo, and in our various offshore and borrowed prisons; add in, as well, the widespread mistreatment of prisoners at American hands; and you have the machinery for the manufacture of vast numbers of angry potential enemies, some undoubtedly willing to commit almost any act of revenge. Though there is no way to tabulate the numbers, hundreds of thousands of prisoners have certainly cycled through the Bush administration's various prisons in these last seven years, many emerging embittered. (And don't forget their embittered families.) Think of all this as an enormous dystopian experiment in "social networking," the Facebook from Hell without the Internet.

5,700: the number of trailers in New Orleans – issued by the Federal Emergency Management Agency as temporary housing after Hurricane Katrina – still occupied by people who lost their homes in the storm almost three years ago. Such trailers have also been found to contain toxic levels of formaldehyde fumes. Katrina ("Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job") was but one of many security disasters for the Bush administration.

658: the number of suicide bombings worldwide last year, including 542 in Afghanistan and Iraq, "more than double the number in any of the past 25 years." Of all the suicide bombings in the past quarter century, more than 86% have occurred since 2001, according to U.S. government experts. At least one of those bombers – who died in a recent coordinated wave of suicide bombings in the Iraqi city of Mosul – was a Kuwaiti, Abdallah Salih al-Ajmi, who had spent years locked up in Guantanamo.

511: the number of applicants convicted of felony crimes, including burglary, grand larceny, and aggravated assault, who were accepted into the U.S. Army in 2007, more than double the 249 accepted in 2006. According to the New York Times, between 2006 and 2007, those enrolled with convictions for wrongful possession of drugs (not including marijuana) almost doubled, for burglaries almost tripled, for grand larceny/larceny more than doubled, for robbery more than tripled, for aggravated assault went up by 30%, and for "terroristic threats including bomb threats" doubled (from one to two). Feel more secure yet?

126: the number of dollars it took to buy a barrel of crude oil on the international market this week. Meanwhile, the average price of a gallon of regular gas at the pump in the U.S. hit $3.72, while the price of gas jumped almost 20 cents in Michigan in a week, 36 cents in Utah in a month, and busted the $4 ceiling in Westchester, New York, a rise of 65 cents in the last year. Just after the 9/11 attacks, a barrel of crude oil was still in the $20 range; at the time of the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, it was at about $30. In other words, since 9/11, a barrel of crude has risen more than $100 without the Bush administration taking any serious steps to promote energy conservation, cut down on the U.S. oil "addiction," or develop alternative energy strategies (beyond a dubious program to produce more ethanol).

82: the percentage of Americans who think "things in this country… have gotten pretty seriously off on the wrong track," according to the most recent Washington Post-ABC News poll. This is the gloomiest Americans have been about the "direction" of the country in the last 15 years of such polling.

40: the percentage loss ("on a trade-weighted basis") in the value of the dollar since 2001. The dollar's share of total world foreign exchange reserves has also dropped from 73% to 64% in that same period. According to the Center for American Progress, "By early May 2008, a dollar bought 42.9% fewer euros, 35.7% fewer Canadian dollars, 37.7% fewer British pounds, and 17.3% fewer Japanese yen than in March 2001."

37: the number of countries that have experienced food protests or riots in recent months due to soaring food prices, a global crisis of insecurity that caught the Bush administration completely unprepared. In the last year, the price of wheat has risen by 130%, of rice by 74%, of soya by 87%, and of corn by 31%.

0: the number of terrorist attacks by al-Qaeda or similar groups inside the United States since September 11, 2001.

So consider "the homeland" secure. Mission accomplished.

And if you doubt that, here's one last figure, representative of the ultimate insecurity that, by conscious omission as well as commission, the Bush administration has left a harried future to deal with: That number is 387: Scientists at the Mauna Loa observatory in Hawaii just released new information on carbon dioxide – the major greenhouse gas – in the atmosphere, and it's at a record high of 387 parts per million, "up almost 40% since the industrial revolution and the highest for at least the last 650,000 years." Its rate of increase is on the rise as well. Behind all these figures lurks a potential world of insecurity with which this country has not yet come to grips.

May 16, 2008

Tom Engelhardt [send him mail] who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com, is the co-founder of the American Empire Project. He is the author of several books, including The Last Days of Publishing: A Novel, The End of Victory Culture, and most recently, Mission Unaccomplished (Nation Books), the first collection of Tomdispatch interviews. His blog is The Notion.

Copyright © 2008 Tom Engelhardt

Lies of Aggression

by Paul Craig Roberts


On May 15, the White House Moron, in a war-planning visit to Israel, justified the naked aggression he and Olmert are planning against Iran as the only alternative to "the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history."

But the White House Moron has the roles reversed. It is not Iran that is threatening war. It is Bush. It is not Bush who is appeasing. It is Iran.

Iran has not responded in kind to any of Bush’s warlike moves and provocations. Iran has not sunk a single one of our sitting-duck ships and has not given the Iraqi insurgents any weapons that would easily turn the tide of war against the US.

It is Bush, not Iran, who sounds like Adolf Hitler blustering and threatening. It is Bush’s American Brownshirts, the neocons, who express the view: "what’s the good of nuclear weapons if you can’t use them."

It is the US that is funding assassination teams inside Iran and using taxpayer dollars to fund dissident and violent organizations opposed to the Iranian government. Iran is doing no such thing here.

It is members of the Bush Regime and US generals who continue to lie through their teeth about Iranian support for insurgents, for which they can supply no evidence, and about Iranian nuclear weapons programs, for which the IAEA inspectors can find no sign.

It is the US print and TV media that serves the Bush Regime as propaganda ministry for its lies of aggression.

All the war crimes that are being planned are being planned by Bush and Olmert.

What would George Orwell make of the Bush Regime’s position that anything less than a direct act of naked aggression is appeasement?

The Chicago City Council has passed a resolution "opposing any US attack on Iran and urging the Bush Administration to pursue diplomatic engagement with that nation." But the White House Moron says diplomacy is appeasement. He learned this false equivalence from the neocon Brownshirts whose control over his administration has made America despised throughout the world, with the exception of Israel.

After broadcasting false claims for weeks from US generals and Bush Regime spokespersons that the US has "definite proof" in the form of captured Iranian weapons that Iranians were "responsible for killing American troops," the great free American media went silent when LA Times correspondent Tina Susman reported from Baghdad: "A plan to show some alleged Iranian-supplied explosives to journalists last week in Karbala and then destroy them was cancelled after the United States realized none of them was from Iran."

A people devoid of a media are sitting ducks for tyrannical government, which is what the US has.

What is the difference between Hitler’s concocted excuses for his acts of naked aggression and the Bush Regime’s plan to use a briefing by General Petraeus, with "captured Iranian weapons" as props, as proof of Iranian complicity in US deaths in Iraq as a means to break down public and congressional resistance to an attack on Iran?

Why has the Bush Regime suffered no consequences for this blatant attempt to orchestrate an excuse for another war?

Why have there been no consequences to the Regime for the blatant lies it told in order to attack Iraq?

Why has the Bush Regime suffered no consequences for its violation of US statutory laws against spying without warrants and against torture?

In the US criminal justice system, three strikes and you are out.

For the Bush Regime is there any limit on its lawless behavior?

How many strikes? A dozen? Thirty? Three hundred?

Is there a limit?

May 16, 2008

Paul Craig Roberts [send him mail] a former Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury and former associate editor of the Wall Street Journal, has been reporting shocking cases of prosecutorial abuse for two decades. A new edition of his book, The Tyranny of Good Intentions, co-authored with Lawrence Stratton, a documented account of how Americans lost the protection of law, has just been released by Random House.

Copyright © 2008 Creators Syndicate