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World Affairs Brief Jan 26, 2007
World Affairs Brief January 26, 2007. Copyright Joel Skousen. Partial quotations
with attribution permitted. Cite source as Joel Skousen's World Affairs Brief (http://www.worldaffairsbrief.com).
"The great enemy of
clear language is insincerity. Political language is
designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable."
- George Orwell
EXCERPTS:
BUSH: PRESIDENT AND PANDERER-IN-CHIEF
The presidential speech
writers' audacity, mendacity, and shamelessness never ceases to amaze me.
Each year the boldness of the
president's lies to the American people in his State of the Union address grow
more outrageous. Hitler's
propagandists had little in their arsenal of the "Big Lie" to match the
sophistication of today's White House speech writers - and Congress is complicit
in their spineless and
adoring willingness to stand and applaud on cue.
The media is also complicit by never bringing the president nor any of his
yesmen to account for these grand deceptions. When is the last time you heard
someone in an interview with the president or the vice president say:
"How can you keep telling the public with a straight face that you are
'not leaving problems to future Generations?' The deficit keeps building for
future generations, and you have the audacity to say you've cut this year's
deficit in half while concealing the fact that you didn't count the $400 billion
you took from the SS fund and the $100+ billion you spent on Iraq, which was off
budget. ... How do you justify that kind of deception?
Or, "How can you say, 'Together, we can restrain the spending appetite of
the federal government, and balance the federal budget. ... What we need to do
is impose spending discipline in Washington, D.C.' when you show no spending
discipline at all? In fact, you propose in this address many more billions in
new spending."
You didn't hear the Democrats attack the president on this hypocrisy either
because they use the same lies and fiscal claims to responsibility. The official
Democratic response by newly elected Senator James Webb did attack the
president's claim that "unemployment is low, inflation is low, and wages are
rising."
James Webb: "When I graduated from college, the average corporate CEO made
20 times what the average worker did; today, it's nearly 400 times. In other
words, it takes the average worker more than a year to make the money that his
or her boss makes in one day. Wages and salaries for our workers are at all-time
lows as a percentage of national wealth, even though the productivity of
American workers is the highest in the world. Medical costs have skyrocketed.
College tuition rates are off the charts. Our manufacturing base is being
dismantled and sent overseas. Good American jobs are being sent along with
them."
But as William Arkin of the LA Times wrote about Webb's response, "The
national security cognoscenti agreed it was going to be Sen. James Webb's
Democratic response that would be most interesting. Would the maverick read the
official script of the Party or let it rip? Script it is!
"In his nine minute response to the president's State of the Union last
night, Sen. James Webb (D-VA) accused Bush of taking the country to war
'recklessly,' lamenting that the American people had endured 'a mismanaged war
for nearly four years.' It's the boilerplate criticism any Democrat could have
delivered. From former Marine Webb, from former Republican, from former
Secretary of the Navy, with a son serving as a Marine in country, I wanted to
hear an analysis, and a different program. What I heard was Webb rejecting the
idea of a 'precipitous withdrawal,' embracing instead the Iraq Study Group
softballs of 'strong regionally-based diplomacy, a policy that takes our
soldiers off the streets of Iraq's cities, and a formula that will in short
order allow our combat forces to leave Iraq.' That's it? That's the instead,
instead of a 'precipitous withdrawal'? Remove our soldiers from the streets and
look to Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Iran, and Syria to solve a problem that is
American and Iraqi?
"If Webb wants to take American soldiers out of the fight then he might as well
support a precipitous withdrawal: I don't get it. I say that as someone who
thinks the 'surge' is theater to buy time from Congress and the American people,
a cynical move that promises more than it can deliver and places Americans in
harm's way with little prospect of turning the tide. If Webb represents what the
Congressional leadership thinks then indeed the president has been successful in
backing the country into a corner to get 'one more chance' to win."
And that is precisely what the game is about - plead for more time to "let this
thing work" and meanwhile the Bush administration is preparing more troops and
military equipment for the inevitable attack on Iran.
That is the great evil
in all this deception:
taking advantage of American patriotism and gullibility to sucker the country
into even more wars of intervention - in the phony name of democracy and
fighting "extremism." When Bush says his foremost task is to
"guard America against all evil," he covertly seeks to divert public
attention from the real evil that lurks inside the bowels of his own globalist
administration -- the
obsession with creating a NWO through created conflict and war.
HEALTH CARE:
The Bush speech writers pandered to the Social Security and Medicare and
Medicaid constituents, saying these are "commitments of conscience - and
so it is our duty to keep them permanently sound."
These are federal entitlements,
not commitments of conscience! If
they were the latter, welfare would be voluntary. There would be no mandatory
federal redistribution of our hard earned money and people would be free to make
charitable contributions according to conscience.
That means using free choice to
decide individually who is worthy of your money
instead of some federal bureaucrat following permissive and uniform guidelines.
When it comes to health care, Bush claims the government has an obligation to
care for the elderly, the disabled, and poor children.
That's pure Socialism in theory,
but his implementation is a type of Fabian Socialism - private ownership (of
sorts) with onerous federal control.
So when he says, "For all other Americans, private health insurance is the
best way to meet their needs," he is talking about
Fabian Socialist control of
medicine that will continue to increase.
Watch out for the last part of his proposal: "My second proposal is to
help the states that are coming up with innovative ways to cover the uninsured"
like California's new mandatory health coverage requirement. "States that
make basic private health insurance available to all their citizens should
receive federal funds to help them provide this coverage to the poor and the
sick." Once you give states the lure of receiving federal funds for
every person who gets state health insurance, you induce the states to keep
increasing the pressure on health coverage until it becomes mandatory for
everyone.
Bush continues to claim that everyone wants health insurance.
This is true for those who don't
know how dangerous the establishment medical system is to their health.
Health Insurance is insidious in that it only pays for treatments authorized by
establishment medicine --
not the more effective natural
cures. Those of us who
realize the great threat drug side affects have on our health and pocketbook,
never take them.
We rely on good nutrition to stay healthy and herbs and vitamins to get back on
track when we do have minor problems.
More universal health insurance only decreases people's resistance to high
medical costs. The less people have to pay out of pocket, the less
consequences
they feel for their bad eating and living habits, which lead to most medical
problems today.
[There are severe
consequences for the lack of conscience that
surrenders self-care responsibility to disease care profiteers. -CR]
Those of us who don't have insurance have the maximum motivation to stay
healthy - and prevention works if you do your homework and find out what
works in the natural health field. I must admit, however, that this learning
task is not made any easier by the inroads the "Big Pharmaceuticals" are making
into the "natural market" and the way "Big Agriculture" is perverting the
meaning of "organically grown." Even big natural health corporations can't
resist the evil of claiming that you need to "supplement" every essential
nutrient the body needs. That just isn't true,
if you eat good organically
grown food and limit the quantity of food you eat so you don't wear out your
glands so early in life.
Overeating is probably the number one cause of America's health problems,
followed by too much sugar, and their chemical substitutes (which are even
worse).
PENSIONS:
Bush says "we are failing in that duty" and that includes both him
and every member of Congress who continues to let him get away with stealing the
Social Security (SS) revenues each year and replacing them with worthless
federal IOUs. Bush is also responsible for proposing the "totalization"
agreement with Mexico giving illegal aliens access to SS both here and in
Mexico.
He's only partly right when he says "this failure will one day leave our
children with three bad options: huge tax increases, huge deficits, or huge and
immediate cuts in benefits." You can bet no one has the courage to dump
this ponzi scheme outright and let people take care of their own pensions. No
one has the courage to cut benefits either, so that leaves tax increases and/or
more deficits. I think there will be both. SS tax increases are inevitable
since the government will never stop stealing from each year's SS revenues.
EDUCATION:
He pandered to the education lobby by misrepresenting the No Child Left Behind
Act as if it is "preserving local control, raising standards in public
schools, and holding those schools accountable for results."
Nothing could be further from
the truth. It is another unfunded mandate that pushes schools to teach the test
rather than real education.
Because of it, students are NOT "performing better in reading and math,
with minority students closing the achievement gap."
In fact, dozens of states have threatened to opt out of the program because it
is wreaking havoc in school financing. Bush will make things even worse
"by giving families with children stuck in failing schools the right to choose
something better." I'd be all in favor of choice if he meant allowing
them to take their tax moneys and invest in private schools. But that's not what
he has in mind. The White House wants to throw more billions at charter public
schools - which are an improvement - where parents take part in running special
tax funded schools with powers to select some of their own curriculums. But this
will turn hundreds more "failing schools" into ghetto schools with
a declining enrollment (hence, declining state revenue sharing).
Charter schools are ultimately created only to keep parents in the public system
who otherwise would flee to private schools or home schooling.
The PTB want to dampen the
outright rebellion brewing against the real problem: the monopoly public schools
have on tax funding of education.
Take that away and replace all
schools with user fee funding and the education crisis will solve itself --
including the school prayer issue. People will take their money where they can
buy the education values they desire.
ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION:
As usual, the really
egregious lying was
reserved for Bush's claim to be in favor of "keeping our borders secure."
He vowed, "To secure our border, we are doubling the size of the Border
Patrol - and funding new infrastructure and technology." Notice that he
didn't mention a fence. He and his Democratic allies are going to quietly
de-fund the fence proposals passed last year only to dampen the rebellion
brewing against our open borders.
"Yet even with all these steps, we cannot fully secure the border unless
we take pressure off the border - and that requires a temporary worker program."
Really? And how will a temp worker program do that? Obviously, there isn't a big
enough temp worker program to accommodate even a fraction of those that want to
come across. The rest will still attempt to cross illegally.
Then comes the biggest
whopper - outright hypocrisy of the highest order.
Bush says, "As a result, they won't have to try to sneak in - and that
will leave border agents free to chase down drug smugglers." Is that why
your administration send out orders to prosecute those two border patrol agents
who shot at and wounded a fleeing drug smuggler? Is that why you hunted down the
drug smuggler in Mexico and promised him immunity from prosecution if he came
back and testified against the two agents? Is that why your justice system gave
the agents eleven-year jail sentences and why you have refused to pardon them?
One of these poor agents
has been put into solitary confinement just to make sure the rest of the Border
Patrol gets the message loud and clear about what happens to them if they really
try to enforce the law on illegals and drug smugglers.
On workplace enforcement, Bush had another trick up his sleeve: "We will
... give employers the tools to verify the legal status of their workers - so
there is no excuse left for violating the law." As Greg Palast wrote,
"In case you missed that one, the president is talking about creating a
federal citizen profile database.
There's a problem with that
idea. It's against the law. The law in question is the United States
Constitution. The Founding
Fathers thought the government had no right to keep track on a citizen unless
there is evidence they have committed, or planned to commit, a crime. But the
Founding Fathers didn't imagine there were millions and billions of dollars to
be made by private contractors ready to perform this KGB operation for the
Department of Homeland Security, tracking each and every one of us to keep tabs
on our 'status.' These work databases will tie into 'voter verification'
databases required by the Help America Vote Act. And these will tie to the
databases on citizenship and so on.
"Will Big Brother abuse these snoop lists? The biggest purveyor of such hit
lists is Choice Point, Inc. -
those characters who, before the
2000 election, helped Jeb Bush purge innocent voters as 'felons' from Florida
voter rolls."
ENERGY:
The president continues to play up to the ethanol fraud: "We must continue
investing in new methods of producing ethanol - using everything from wood
chips, to grasses, to agricultural wastes. We have made a lot of progress,
thanks to good policies in Washington and the strong response of the market."
Good policies? There
is no response of the market because it isn't free to choose.
Ethanol is MANDATED by
the feds, and it does not save fuel.
Numerous studies show that ethanol consumes more oil to produce than it saves -
so it is a net loss, except to the major insider agro-businesses like ADM, which
have a near lock on this production. Besides, ethanol lessens a car's fuel
mileage, and has created more gasoline shortages because of federal blended
fuels requirements.
To top it all, Bush throws in the idea of "doubling the Strategic
Petroleum Reserve." This alone would negate any savings from the
president's goal of reducing gasoline usage by 20 percent. Greg Palast adds:
"Bush will double the Reserve, which will require buying three-quarters of a
billion barrels of oil.
This is a nice $40 billion
pay-out to Big Oil from the US Treasury. ... The $40 billion in loot the oilmen
will get from us taxpayers for doubling the Reserve is nothing compared to the
boost in the worldwide price of crude caused by this massive, mad purchase.
While the Congressional audience didn't even bother polite applause for the
reserve purchase plan, there's no doubt they were whooping it up in Saudi
Arabia."
[See the excellent Greg Palast article at http://www.ichblog.eu/content/view/95/2/ ]
BUILDING THE CASE FOR TERRORISM - AGAIN:
The President spent an inordinate amount of time rehashing the old mantra of
terrorism. Is he prepping
the nation for a new attack?
Bush started out with a litany of old false claims: "We stopped an
al-Qaeda plot to fly a hijacked airplane into the tallest building on the West
Coast. We broke up a Southeast Asian terrorist cell grooming operatives for
attacks inside the United States. We uncovered an al-Qaeda cell developing
anthrax to be used in attacks against America. And just last August, British
authorities uncovered a plot to blow up passenger planes bound for America over
the Atlantic Ocean." All of these claims have two things in common, as I
have mentioned in prior briefs:
(1) There was no actual threat
and no explosives made or purchased. (2) All these young Muslim radicals were
recruited, supplied, and induced to plan these events by paid government
informants/agents.
Paul Watson tells more details on the trumped up West Coast terror plot:
"Another [gov. agent] described the claims as
'worthless intel that was
discarded long ago.' A New
York Times story cited 'several counterterrorism officials' as saying that
'the plot never
progressed past the planning stages. ... To take that and make it into a
disrupted plot is just ludicrous,'
said one senior FBI official. The New York Daily News cited another senior
counterterrorism official who said:
'There was no definitive plot. It never materialized or got past the thought
stage.' The Washington Post
also dismissed the alleged plot as nothing more than talk, noting that no actual
attack plan had been thwarted. The LA attack plot arose from the same
discredited informant who said that Washington and New York financial
institutions were being targeted, which led the White House to
raise the terror alert right as
the 2004 election campaign was beginning."
I have also detailed on two occasions in the WAB the British "liquid bomb" plot
that led to the idiotic
banning of all liquids in carry-on baggage.
It too was never developed and the participants were induced to act by a paid
British informant. All of this led the most senior deputy British prosecutor,
Lucy Bannerman, to say this week: "There is no 'war on terror' on the
streets of Britain. Those responsible for atrocities like the July 7 bombings in
London were not 'soldiers' in a war, but 'deluded, narcissistic inadequates' who
should be dealt with by the criminal justice system." All of the British
prosecutors are also aware that even the July 7 bombers had
high level accomplices from
secret services.
MANTRA OF ENDLESS WAR:
Bush produced a scripted listing of all the traditional excuses the PTB have
used to justify an
"endless war on terror."
Naturally, all of these justify Bush keeping his status of Commander-in-Chief,
which in turn, justifies
near dictatorial powers in the presidency:
(1) "The evil that inspired and rejoiced in 9/11 is still at work in the
world. And so long as that is the case, America is still a nation at war."
Since evil never goes
away, neither will this trumped up war.
(2) "By killing and terrorizing Americans, they want to force our country
to retreat from the world and abandon the cause of liberty. They would then be
free to impose their will and spread their totalitarian ideology."
Naturally, if the
terrorists want us to stop intervening, we should never stop!
(3) "What every terrorist fears most is human freedom - societies where
men and women make their own choices, answer to their own conscience, and live
by their hopes instead of their resentments."
Utter rubbish. No terrorist
(other than those reading CIA scripts) have said or meant any such thing.
(4) "Shia extremists [broadening the term from terrorist to the more ample
"extremists"] who are just as hostile to America, and are also determined to
dominate the Middle East. Many are known to take direction from the regime in
Iran. ... They want to kill Americans, ... kill democracy in the Middle East,
... and gain the weapons to kill on an even more horrific scale."
These remarks are specifically
meant to set up the public for the next high profile terror attack, which no
doubt will have "links to Iran."
(5) Blaming work of US/British agent provocateurs on "extremists": "In
Iraq, al-Qaeda and other Sunni extremists blew up one of the most sacred places
in Shia Islam - the Golden Mosque of Samarra. This atrocity, directed at a
Muslim house of prayer, was designed to provoke retaliation from Iraqi Shia -
and it succeeded."
Yes, the dark side's
provocations succeeded. Iraqi elite security forces kept the police and all
onlookers around the Mosque from interfering or entering the Mosque for four
hours while pillars were undermined and explosive charges were set by experts.
(6) Appealing to American "don't accept defeat" values: "We
can't leave our promises unkept, our friends abandoned, and our own security at
risk. ... So let us find our resolve, and turn events toward victory."
[This appeals to the psychology of guilt in the fearful “little man” who wants
to courageously support Big Brother’s high sounding words of security. It uses
the fear of failure to shame the public and Congress into sinking more money and
American lives into the quagmire of Iraq. –CR]
(7) He stalls: "We need more time for it (the Surge) to work."
(8) False hope of an eventual withdrawal: "Our commitment is not open
ended." We'll see.
(9) Appealing to God and justice: "Yet we can go forward with confidence -
because the State of our Union is strong. ... Our cause in the world is right.
... God bless America."
God's toleration for His name being used to cover for lies and
government deceptions will surely have its limits.
I wouldn't want to be in the
shoes of those who keep using His name for evil purposes.
Yes, Bush is as he claims:
"The Uniter - not the Divider." He has succeeded in uniting the whole
world against us!
US WAR PLANS AGAINST
IRAN'S MILITARY AND INFRASTRUCTURE
According to a former US intel analyst, the US is planning more than just a
surgical strike on Iran's nuclear facilities. Wayne White told Reuters,
"'We're not talking about just surgical strikes against an array of targets
inside Iran. We're talking about clearing a path to the targets by taking out
much of the Iranian Air Force, Kilo submarines, anti-ship missiles that could
target commerce or U.S. warships in the Gulf, and maybe even Iran's ballistic
missile capability.' White said further, 'I'm much more worried
about the consequences of a U.S. or Israeli attack against Iran's nuclear
infrastructure,' which would prompt vigorous Iranian retaliation, he said, than
civil war in Iraq, which could be confined to that country."
I am more and more convinced, due to vehement US denials of any plans to attack
Iran, that Israel will
make the first strike and the US will come in only in "support" of
Israel. After weeks of
mixed signals in Israel on the subject, PM Olmert left open the military option
more clearly this week than ever before:
As Anne Penketh (UK Independent) in Tel Aviv said, "The Israeli Prime
Minister, Ehud Olmert, dramatically raised the stakes in the international
showdown with Iran last night, with a clear warning that his country was
prepared to use military force to prevent Tehran from obtaining a nuclear
weapon."
ATTORNEY GENERAL
GONZALES DENIES RIGHT OF HABEAS CORPUS
Thomas R. Eddlem describes the shocking confrontation between the Attorney
General and Senators when he testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee on
January 18.
Gonzales: "The fact that the Constitution - again, there is no express
grant of habeas [corpus] in the Constitution. There is a prohibition against
taking it away. But it's never been the case, and I'm not a Supreme - "
Sen. Arlen Specter: "Now, wait a minute. Wait a minute. The Constitution
says you can't take it away, except in the case of rebellion or invasion.
Doesn't that mean you have the right of habeas corpus, unless there is an
invasion or rebellion?"
Gonzales: "I meant by that comment, the Constitution doesn't say, 'Every
individual in the United States or every citizen is hereby granted or assured
the right to habeas.' It doesn't say that. It simply says the right of habeas
corpus shall not be suspended except by… "
Specter: "You may be treading on your interdiction and violating common
sense, Mr. Attorney General."
That's all that Sen. Specter could muster,
being a co-conspirator with the
PTB on the cover-up of the JFK assassination.
Clearly, Gonzales
is flat wrong. The Constitution does say, "The right
of habeas Corpus shall not be suspended ... ."
This duplicity of the Attorney General shows where this
administration is headed.
RIGGING OF THE OHIO
RECOUNT
The major media spiked this story even though it was reported on the wires of
the AP: " Two election workers were convicted Wednesday of rigging a recount of
the 2004 presidential election to avoid a more thorough review in Ohio's most
populous county. Jacqueline Maiden, elections coordinator of the Cuyahoga County
Elections Board, and ballot manager Kathleen Dreamer each were convicted of a
felony count of negligent misconduct of an elections employee ... [for]
reviewing preselected ballots before a public recount on Dec. 16, 2004. They
worked behind closed doors for three days to pick ballots they knew would not
cause discrepancies when checked by hand, prosecutors said."
Of course, the larger story is
this: these manipulations were necessary to make sure the recount did not point
the finger at how computerized voting machines were used in Ohio to manipulate
the vote.
[END]
~~~~~~~~~
Notable Quotables:
"A propaganda campaign, using Israeli agents and their neocon auxiliaries
and sympathizers, who stampeded us into war in Iraq,
is being prepared to stampede us
into war on Iran."
- Noted author and former presidential candidate Pat Buchanan
"Our government has
kept us in a perpetual state of fear
- kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor
-
with the cry of grave national emergency.
Always there has been some terrible evil at home
or some monstrous foreign power
that was going to gobble us up
if we did not blindly rally behind it ."
- General Douglas MacArthur, 1957
"Once a government
is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition,
it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive
measures,
until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens
and
creates a country where everyone lives in fear".
- Harry S. Truman
"Once a government resorts to terror against its own population to get what it wants,
it must keep using terror against its own population to get what it wants.
A government that terrorizes its own people can never stop.
If such a government ever lets the fear subside
and rational thought return to the populace,
that government is
finished."
-
Michael Rivero
"Your enemy is not
surrounding your country.
Your enemy is ruling your country."
-- George W. Bush
[to Sadaam’s Iraq? Or the U.S.?]
"I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one:
'O Lord, make my enemies ridiculous.' And God granted it."
- Voltaire
"Darkness cannot
drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate
cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. Hate multiplies hate,
violence multiplies violence, and toughness multiplies toughness, in
a descending spiral of destruction. The chain reaction of evil must
be broken, or we shall be plunged into the dark abyss of annihilation."
- Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
"As nightfall does not come all at once, neither does oppression.
In both instances,
there is a twilight. And it is in such twilight
that we all must be aware of change in the air - however slight -
lest we become
unwitting victims of the darkness.”
- William O. Douglas, 1939 -
1975
US Supreme Court Justice
"Mankind must put an end to war,
or war will put an
end to mankind"
- John F. Kennedy, assassinated for challenging
the military-industrial money powers