Tuesday, February 23, 2016

NATO, Turkey and Saudi Arabia’s Worst Nightmare President Donald Trump




Donald Trump’s decisive win in South Carolina has launched his meteoric vault toward the White House.  In his speech after he was declared the winner of the primary election he took on the military industrial complex with a fervor not seen since President Dwight Eisenhower. 


The beneficiaries of Bush and Obama’s Evil American Empire invading and destroying nations throughout the world have been Turkey and Saudi Arabia.  Along with their NATO allies, America has spent trillions of dollars on the military industrial complex while our roads and bridges fail and jobs have been shipped to third world countries.



The unparalleled destruction of Syria as well as all of the Middle East, Eurasia and Africa will come to an end under President Donald Trump and the world is taking note.  From The Atlantic:


Excerpt:


SPARTANBURG, S.C.—Donald Trump pulled off a big win in South Carolina Saturday night, pulling in about a third of the vote and far outpacing any of his rivals…


Trump ticked off the key elements of his platform—the border wall, a stronger military, winning at trade, and defeating ISIS….   And while he said he’d get the military the equipment it needed, he also promised to kill costly pork projects whose only constituency was in Congress. (While he didn’t use the phrase, it was an unusually direct hit on the military-industrial complex.)



It has been over 15 years since the 9-11 attacks that destroyed the World Trade Center, which allowed the administration of George W. Bush to enact the Project for a New American Century’s New World Order.  


The 9-11 Commission identified Saudi Arabia as the funding source for the attacks, but those 28 pages of the Commission’s report have been sealed by both the Bush and Obama Administrations.  From LaRouchepac:


Excerpt:


On June 2, 2015, at a press conference in Washington, D.C., Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), flanked by former Sen. Bob Graham (D-FL), Reps. Walter Jones (R-NC), Stephen Lynch (D-MA), Thomas Massie (R-KY), and representatives of the 9/11 families, announced that he had introduced S.1471, a bill to declassify the 28 pages from the original Joint Congressional Inquiry into 9/11. The Senate bill is co-sponsored by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY). H.Res.14, a House bill introduced in January by Jones, Lynch, and Massie, called for the release of the 28 pages….


All of the speakers—the Senators, Congressmen, and family representatives—singled out Saudi Arabia as the well-spring of the 9/11 attacks and subsequent jihadist terrorism. They all demanded that President Obama fulfill his promise, made on at least two occasions to the 9/11 families, that he would make the full 28 pages public….


Pressure is building in both Houses of Congress. The Obama Administration's current 'strategy' in the Middle East, and the terrorism deployed from that region, has created a global tinderbox, ready to ignite at any moment.


First in Libya, then in Syria, Obama's support for so-called "moderate rebels," has effectively blown up in the United States' face. Finally, in the summer of 2014, the terrorizing advance of ISIS across Iraq and parts of Syria made it official: the "War on Terror," launched in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the U.S., and our foreign policy since, has been a failure.




Indeed, the so called “War on Terror” has turned into an American led “War of Terror” with America subservient to Saudi Arabia and Turkey and the results have been disastrous.  From Mint Press:


Excerpt:


Turkey Demands Unconditional US Support In Fighting Syrian Kurds


Over the weekend, Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu demanded that the US pledge “unconditional” military support for Turkey in the fight against the Kurdish YPG, a Syrian faction which has been the primary US ally in fighting ISIS.


“The only thing we expect from our US ally is to support Turkey with no ifs or buts,” Davutoglu insisted, reiterating the claim that the YPG was behind last week’s Ankara bombing, despite a Turkish faction, the TAK, claiming it.


Can you imagine Turkey telling President Trump “The only thing we expect from our US ally is to support Turkey with no ifs or buts?”


Turkey has repeatedly demanded the US sever ties with the YPG, and the US has repeatedly rejected those demands. Turkish officials appear to be hoping that the Ankara bombings, and the dubious claims of YPG involvement, will force the US into shifting their policy.


With the US and Turkey both already condemning the Syrian military for its gains against ISIS however, the shift against the YPG would be tantamount to backing ISIS’ territorial claims in northern Syria, and leave the US with literally no allies in the region.


Man, do you believe that crap?  US neocons and Turkey are condemning Syria for protecting their own country.  God, can this shit get any worse, I guess so.  From Sputnik News:


Excerpt:


'One Must Be Blind Not to Realize That Russia is Defending Europe in Syria'


The threat to European interests in the Middle East comes not from Russia, but from Turkey and Saudi Arabia, says French Middle East expert Roland Lombardi. Ankara in particular has a great deal to lose, and in its desperation might try to pull NATO into a reckless military campaign against Russia, the analyst warns….


Lombardi bluntly asked. "One must be either blind or a complete idiot not to notice that, when Russia defends its interests in the Middle East, it is simultaneously defending the interests of Europe, and particularly those of France," the analyst bitingly added….


"Let's not deceive ourselves," the analyst says. "Today, the only threats to the world order are our 'allies' – the Turks and the Saudis; the same people whose double game with some terrorist and jihadist groups has appeared out in the open; the same people who still want to install the Salafists or the Muslim Brotherhood in Damascus and in all the Arab capitals affected by the Arab Spring."


Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's dream of becoming the neo-sultan of a neo-Ottoman empire has been fading before his eyes, Lombardi warns. Facing growing international isolation, Ankara is supported in its Syria policy only by Saudi Arabia. And  here, more and more frustrated, the world is in danger of a Turkey attempting to involve NATO in a war against Russia.




Yep, that’s right.  The only allies the American government has in the war against Syria are Saudi Arabia and Turkey, who have laid a trap for the stupid America in Syria.  America is taking down the entire world along with it.  From GlobalResearch:


Excerpt:


The Syrian Endgame, “A Lost War is Dangerous”. US-NATO, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, “Losers on The Rampage”


How a war is lost is a serious and dangerous business. After Henry Kissinger helped sabotage the 1968 Paris peace talks, for domestic political reasons, the War in Vietnam raged for another seven years. In the end Washington’s loss was more humiliating, and millions more lives were destroyed.


The Geneva process over Syria is in many respects different, because it is a charade. The NATO and Gulf monarchy sponsors pretend to support Syrian ‘opposition’ groups and pretend to fight the same extremist groups they created.


Yet the dangers are very real because the Saudis and Turkey might react unpredictably, faced with the failure of their five year project to carve up Syria. Both countries have threatened to invade Syria, to defend their ‘assets’ from inevitable defeat from the powerful alliance Syria has forged with Russia, Iran, Iraq and the better party of Lebanon.


It should be clear by now that every single anti-government armed group in Syria has been created by Washington and its allies. Several senior US officials have admitted the fact. Regime change has always been the goal. Nevertheless, the charade of a ‘War on ISIS’ goes on, with a compliant western media unwilling to point out that ‘the emperor has no clothes’….


Would Washington allow Erdogan and the Saudis to initiate a major escalation, without US approval? I think not. Obama resisted Saudi and Israeli provocations, when the Iran deal was imminent. Even Bush could not be provoked into a confrontation with Russia, when invited by Georgia’s Mikheil Saakashvili.


For its part, Russia is well prepared for a provocation across the Turkish border. Logic suggests that the losers must lose. But this is a dangerous time.


I think maybe the question isn’t would Washington allow Erdogan and the Saudis to initiate a major escalation, but can Washington control the Frankenstein’s monster they created in Syria.  From Mint Press: 

Excerpt:


US-Backed Rebels Fight One Another In Northern Syria


American armed and trained Syrian rebels are losing ground to American armed and trained Kurdish militants in northern Syria.


The recent Syrian military offensive in Aleppo Province has the US keen to throw even more aid at rebel factions, including some Islamist-leaning groups….


This was done with an eye toward them fighting the Syrian military, and maybe ISIS, but instead they’re locked in a growing battle with the Kurdish YPG, itself the recipient of massive amounts of US weaponry, meaning once again two US-armed factions are in open war in Syria….


US efforts to arm rebel factions initially focused on the Free Syrian Army, but as the group became increasingly irrelevant on the ground, the US began courting other rebel factions they thought were more capable of fighting ISIS, but as they added to the number of factions they were arming in this increasingly complex war, it was inevitable they’d be on both sides of some fights.


Are you wondering where the Pentagon is getting all this money they’re throwing to terrorists to overthrow elected governments like Assad’s in Syria?  From U.S. News:



Excerpt:


Inside the Pentagon’s ‘Slush Fund’


Obama’s inability to eliminate the “OCO” budget leaves war planners awash with unregulated money.


It’s been called war planners’ crack cocaine, a shifty accounting scheme or a habit-forming opiate imbibed government-wide. Barack Obama pledged to eliminate it at the beginning of his presidency, but its potency has only grown stronger since. Now, it accounts for the unregulated spending of $60 billion or more in taxpayer dollars per year, with no end in sight….


Get used to the Overseas Contingency Operations budget.


The OCO was known from 2001 to 2009 as “the supplemental” and is now considered a de facto slush fund. It began as the war budget President George W. Bush needed for the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan without having to go back to Congress…


But another benefit for war planners is that the Pentagon does not have to release details publicly on how specifically this money will be spent….


…this year the proposed budget actually grew by $200 million despite thousands fewer combat troops in Afghanistan and, technically, none in Iraq.


The appropriators put stuff in there that serves their interests. And they move money around like Three-Card Monty.


“Now everybody’s corrupt with regard to OCO.”


The Pentagon's Overseas Slush Fund Is Getting Even Slushier


The president this year released an OCO budget of $58.8 billion, in addition to the $582.7 billion base budget, up from the contingency fund’s $58.6 billion budget last year and a base budget of $580.3 billion.


With $8.5 trillion missing at the Pentagon these neocons like self-proclaimed Zionist, Joe Biden and his cronies at the State Department like Victoria Nuland are gearing up to end the world before we can elect a new President.  From Paul Craig Roberts:


Excerpt:


The Neoconservatives Are Brewing A Wider War In Syria


The neoconservative Obama regime set-up the Syrian government headed by Assad for overthrow. A long propaganda campaign conducted in Washington’s behalf by the Western media portrayed the democratically-elected Assad as a “brutal dictator who uses chemical weapons against his own people….”


With the “red line” drawn, a false flag chemical weapons attack was staged, or an accident occurred, that Washington used to say that Assad, despite the US warning, had crossed the “red line.”


Preparations for an invasion began, but hit two roadblocks. David Cameron, Washington’s puppet prime minister of Great Britain was unable to deliver British support for the invasion as the Parliament voted it down. This left Washington uncovered and vulnerable to the charge of naked aggression, a war crime.


Russian diplomacy threw up the other road block by securing the removal of all chemical weapons from Syria.


Their invasion plan frustrated, the neoconservatives sent the jihadists they had used to overthrow Gaddafi in Libya to overthrow Assad….


In order to protect themselves, Russia, Iran, and Hezbollah have come to the support of Syria.  The Russians are there legally at the invitation of the Syrian government. The US is there illegally. 


Russian air power in support of the Syrian Army has turned the tide against the Islamist State.


The invaders are being driven out. The neoconservatives cannot accept this defeat.


Washington is preparing a Syrian invasion by Turkey and Saudi Arabia, the purpose of which is to split Syria in half with Washington controlling the eastern part with the oil fields…



So Trump’s victory in South Carolina, after dispelling the myth that George W. Bush kept America safe after the 911 attacks, is a harbinger of things to come in this election season.  Trump, like Eisenhower before him understands that America cannot be great again unless the military industrial complex is reigned in.  From Reason:


Excerpt:


Donald Trump Denounces Wasteful Pentagon Spending, Vows Great Defense W/No Additional Spending


At an appearance in New Hampshire, Trump went into full Tea Party Beast Mode, attacking virtually every aspect of government spending, including what President Eisenhower famously vilified as the "military-industrial complex":


On defense, in a race in which all of his Republican rivals favor increasing military spending, Trump promised instead to go after waste and profiteering in the defense industry. "I hear stories, like they're ordering missiles they don't want because of politics, because of special interests," Trump said. "Because the company that makes the missiles is a contributor…"


Trump has at times espoused the idea of letting Russia and other countries "fight ISIS in Syria," with the United States only coming in later once things have calmed down….


There are whole weapons and aircraft systems that are needlessly expensive…  consider the F-35 fighter jet, which exemplifies everything that is wrong…


The jet, which will be obsolete by the time it is actually up and running properly (which may never actually happen), has a price tag of at least $1.5 trillion and will likely need to use really old planes to support it on missions. None of this has stopped the Pentagon from going ahead and ordering 404 of the occasionally airborne boondoggles over the next few years….


Trump railed against pharmaceutical companies. He railed against oil companies. And insurance companies. And defense contractors. And he set himself against a political system that he said allows big-money corporate "bloodsuckers" to control the government with campaign contributions.


"Whether it's the insurance companies, or the drug companies, or the oil companies, it's all the same thing," Trump said. "We're never going to get our country back if we keep doing this."...


So the beneficiaries of Bush and Obama’s Evil American Empire are NATO, Turkey and Saudi Arabia and with every winner there are many losers.  The biggest loser is America, our public schools have been replaced with Charter Islamic Madrassas run with taxpayer money by Turkish terrorist Fethullah Gülen. 


Gülen has funded trips to Turkey for congressional members, who then rewarded Gülen with H1B visas to bring teachers from Turkey to teach in his charter schools in America. 


Other losers are our members of the military who are sent to fight in Turkey and Saudi Arabia’s wars in the Middle East.  When our brave, selfless warriors return they are discarded like garbage by our government and have their benefits slashed through sequestration. 


Our States and Puerto Rico have been bankrupted, our water poisoned, our homes foreclosed on, our medical delivery system turned over to Wall Street and our prisons privatized.  Banks no longer serve our communities and overtly provide money laundering services for terrorists.    


We have seen the return of debtors’ prisons and local police departments are funded by innocent citizens’ property seizures.   The list goes on and on.  But Donald J. Trump doesn’t need the funding of the military industrial complex to become President.  The American people have become servants to the politicians who claim to serve the American people.


President Donald J. Trump is NATO, Saudi Arabia and Turkey’s worst nightmare.  However Trump will destroy the Masters of War in our government and thus America’s 16 year nightmare will finally be over.



By Patricia Baeten

Be kind, share.







Monday, February 15, 2016

The Prophecy: Donald Trump “Bush did not Keep America Safe” Marco Rubio “Thank God Al Gore Wasn’t President on 9-11”


In last Saturday’s debate Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio made the ridiculous statement that George W. Bush has kept America safe.  Rubio went so far as to say “thank God Al Gore wasn’t President on 9-11.”  



That statement demonstrates a lack of knowledge of recent history and shows the degree to which the American people’s brains have atrophied from the 24 hour disinformation and lies that pass for journalism in America.


 To quote Vice President Henry Wallace:


The American fascists are most easily recognized by their deliberate perversion of truth and fact. Their newspapers and propaganda carefully cultivate every fissure of disunity, every crack in the common front against fascism. They use every opportunity to impugn democracy.


They use isolationism as a slogan to conceal their own selfish imperialism. They cultivate hate and distrust of both Britain and Russia. They claim to be super-patriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution. They demand free enterprise, but are the spokesmen for monopoly and vested interest.


Their final objective toward which all their deceit is directed is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjection…


Democracy to crush fascism internally must demonstrate its capacity to "make the trains run on time." It must develop the ability to keep people fully employed and at the same time balance the budget. It must put human beings first and dollars second. It must appeal to reason and decency and not to violence and deceit. We must not tolerate oppressive government or industrial oligarchy in the form of monopolies and cartels…




If the truth be told, had Al Gore had been inaugurated after winning the popular vote in the 2000 election there would not have been a 9-11.  So let us take the punch bowl away from the drunk politicians, get out the black coffee and have a dose of reality and a fact-based evaluation of what lead up to the 9-11 attacks.  From Public Citizen:




Excerpt:


Delay, Dilute and Discard: How the Airline Industry and the FAA Have Stymied Aviation Security Recommendations


Congress will soon enact legislation to improve aviation security. This legislation may allow the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to manage new and existing authority for assuring aviation security. This new Public Citizen report reveals why that would be a bad idea. In recent years, the airline industry and the FAA have combined to stall, scale back and ignore specific security recommendations made by a 1996 presidential commission.


In addition, the airline industry may have forestalled more action on the part of Congress and the White House through its aggressive lobbying and campaign contributions most of which have come in the form of unlimited "soft money" contributions to political party leaders.


Through an extensive investigation of the FAA rulemaking process and a careful examination of the docket for proposed rules Public Citizen’s report exposes the following about the industry s and FAA s roles in delaying, diluting and discarding security improvements:


·        The 1996 presidential commission (created after the TWA 800 crash and known as the Gore Commission after its chairman, then Vice President Al Gore) recommended reasonable, affordable improvements. 


Yet the FAA has spent the last five years converting some of these recommendations into watered-down rules more favorable to the industry…


·        The Gore Commission recommended several measures to improve screening company performance, including a national job grade structure for screeners, meaningful measures to reduce high turnover rates and reward screeners for good performance, and for the airlines to hire screening companies on the basis of performance, not the lowest bid.


But the proposed FAA rule did not require any of these measures and would allow airlines to still hire the lowest bidder, regardless of how abysmal their track record.


·        The Gore Commission called for criminal background and FBI fingerprint checks for all airport screeners and all airport and airline employees with access to secure areas.


The FAA s final rule largely ignored the commission s recommendations by not requiring such checks; it only instituted job history checks for screeners.


These job history checks, the FAA estimated, would lead to criminal background investigations on only 63 of the 16,996 new screeners in 1999.


·        The Gore Commission called for greater scrutiny of checked baggage, including a system to make sure checked bags "matched" passengers onboard.


The industry objected to bag matching and the FAA discarded the Gore proposal as too costly even though the Gore Commission said cost should not be the determining factor in rulemaking. 


Furthermore, an FAA-funded study by a Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) professor showed that bag matching would only cause an average delay of seven minutes on 14 percent of flights and cost 25 cents to 52 cents per passenger.


The airlines often objected to the security recommendations on the basis of cost. One airline even complained about increased photocopying costs.


In 2000, the top nine airlines and their trade association, the Air Transport Association (ATA), spent $16.6 million lobbying the federal government in the year 2000. The same group spent $62.9 million lobbying the federal government from 1997 through 2000, the period when the federal government was trying to convert Gore Commission recommendations to regulations.


Had Congress enacted the Gore Commission’s recommendations, it is possible the 9-11 attacks would have never happened.  Then there was the bipartisan Hart Rudman Commission’s two and a half year study that the Bush Administration rejected.  From Jake Tapper September 12,2001:



Excerpt:


Commission warned Bush


But White House passed on recommendations by a bipartisan, Defense department-ordered commission on domestic terrorism.


By Jake Tapper


Sept. 12, 2001 | WASHINGTON -- They went to great pains not to sound as though they were telling the president "We told you so."


But on Wednesday, two former senators, the bipartisan co-chairs of a Defense Department-chartered commission on national security, spoke with something between frustration and regret about how White House officials failed to embrace any of the recommendations to prevent acts of domestic terrorism delivered earlier this year.


Bush administration officials told former Sens. Gary Hart, D-Colo., and Warren Rudman, R-N.H., that they preferred instead to put aside the recommendations issued in the January report by the U.S. Commission on National Security/21st Century.


Instead, the White House announced in May that it would have Vice President Dick Cheney study the potential problem of domestic terrorism -- which the bipartisan group had already spent two and a half years studying -- while assigning responsibility for dealing with the issue to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, headed by former Bush campaign manager Joe Allbaugh…


Before the White House decided to go in its own direction, Congress seemed to be taking the commission's suggestions seriously, according to Hart and Rudman. "Frankly, the White House shut it down…"


"We predicted it," Hart says of Tuesday's horrific events. "We said Americans will likely die on American soil, possibly in large numbers -- that's a quote (from the commission's Phase One Report) from the fall of 1999…"


The bipartisan 14-member panel was put together in 1998 by then-President Bill Clinton and then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich, R-Ga., to make sweeping strategic recommendations on how the United States could ensure its security in the 21st century.


The commission was supposed to disband after issuing the report Jan. 31, but Hart and the other commission members got a six-month extension to lobby for their recommendations.


Hart says he spent 90 minutes with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and an hour with Secretary of State Colin Powell lobbying for the White House to devote more attention to the imminent dangers of terrorism and their specific, detailed recommendations for a major change in the way the federal government approaches terrorism. He and Rudman briefed National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice on the commission's findings…


On April 3, before the Senate Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on Terrorism and Technology, Hart sounded a call of alarm, saying that an "urgent" need existed for a new national security strategy, with an emphasis on intelligence gathering…


But in May, Bush announced his plan almost as if the Hart-Rudman Commission never existed, as if it hadn't spent millions of dollars, "consulting with experts, visiting 25 countries worldwide…




As for W. Bush keeping America safe don’t forget the August 8th Presidential Daily briefing that Richard Clarke hand delivered to a vacationing George W. Bush at his Crawford “Ranch”.  From History Commons’ Complete 911 Timeline:


Excerpt:


'Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US' PDB:


August 4-30, 2001: Bush Nearly Sets Record for Longest Presidential


President Bush spends most of August 2001 at his Crawford, Texas, ranch, nearly setting a record for the longest presidential vacation.  While it is billed a “working vacation,” news organizations report that Bush is doing “nothing much” aside from his regular daily intelligence briefings…


One such unusually long briefing at the start of his trip is a warning that bin Laden is planning to attack in the US (see August 6, 2001), but Bush spends the rest of that day fishing. By the end of his trip, Bush has spent 42 percent of his presidency at vacation spots or en route


At the time, a poll shows that 55 percent of Americans say Bush is taking too much time off.


Vice President Cheney also spends the entire month in a remote location in Wyoming…


Then there was the August 8 PDB presented to Bush by Richard Clarke.


[I]n the summer of 2001, the government ignored repeated warnings by the CIA, ignored, and didn’t do anything to harden our border security, didn’t do anything to harden airport country, didn’t do anything to engage local law enforcement, didn’t do anything to round up INS and consular offices and say we have to shut this down, and didn’t warn the American people…


The famous presidential daily briefing on August 6, we say in the report that the briefing officers believed that there was a considerable sense of urgency and it was current. So there was a case to be made that wasn’t made…


[T]he memo left little doubt that the hijacked airliners were intended for use as missiles and that intended targets were to be inside the US.” It further states that, “now, as the columnist Joe Conason points out in the current edition of the New York Observer, ‘conspiracy’ begins to take over from ‘incompetence’ as a likely explanation for the failure to heed—and then inform the public about—warnings that might have averted the worst disaster in the nation’s history.”


Yep, the Bush Administration went from incompetency to conspiracy, claiming who could have known that hijacked airliners could be used as missiles.




Bush and Cheney were hell-bent on war in Iraq and would stop at nothing to invade and destroy that country.  Any anti-war voices were immediately silenced, careers were destroyed and bogus inflammatory charges brought against them by the Bush Administration.  With a compliant media, every lie was aired without verification. 


Cheney would leak information to “reporters” like Judith Miller and Bob Novak, who would then publish the lies as investigated facts.  Cheney’s people would then appear on Sunday morning talk shows citing articles in their publications as his source. 


This lead to destroying the career of the deeply under cover CIA agent Valarie Plame, whose husband refuted Cheney’s fabricated claim that Saddam has acquired yellow cake from Niger.  From Executive Intelligence Review:


Excerpt:


Worse Than Watergate


John Dean, Richard Nixon's White House General Counsel, has denounced the Wilson-Plame affair as "worse than Watergate." He is right. Not only did the Novak column, orchestrated from the White House, end Valerie Plame's 20-year career as a CIA "non-official cover" officer. The leak also exposed a longstanding CIA proprietary company, Brewster Jennings & Associates, where Plame worked.


The Boston- and Washington-based front company had, since 1994, been tracking weapons of mass destruction, through a network of agents and correspondents in a such dangerous places as Iran, North Korea, Belarus, Israel, Pakistan, Libya, Serbia and Taiwan.


It is not known whether the CIA or one of the Congressional intelligence oversight panels has done a full damage assessment of the consequences of the Plame leak. But they are no doubt extensive. It is one thing for a spy, like Aldrich Ames, Robert Hanssen, or Jonathan Jay Pollard, to steal secrets jeopardizing the national security of the United States on behalf of a foreign power.


It is another thing altogether, for top officials of the White House to willfully leak the identity of an undercover CIA officer, as an act of revenge or damage control, against a U.S. official who came forward to reveal government chicanery in a matter as serious as the Iraq War.



Plames long CIA career was destroyed by the Bush Administration and it is unknown how many deaths resulted from that.  Then there was the destruction of the career and reputation of former weapons inspector Scott Ritter who also debunked the Bush Administration claims that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.  From Information Clearing House:


Excerpt:


Former UN Weapons Inspector Charges Bush Launched Iraq War to Pursue Agenda of 'Global Hegemony'


Interview with Scott Ritter, former U.S. Marine and U.N. weapons inspector, conducted by Scott Harris: September 15, 2003.


As violence continued to consume U.S.-occupied Iraq, President Bush addressed the nation on Sept. 7 to explain his administration's policies there and request $87 billion for the pacification and reconstruction of both Iraq and Afghanistan….


As he has many times before, the president linked the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks against the U.S. to the toppled regime of Saddam Hussein, despite the lack of any evidence connecting Iraq with the al Qaeda network.


Scott Ritter is a former Marine intelligence officer and U.N. weapons inspector who served in Iraq for seven years before resigning in 1998. In the months before the U.S. invasion, Ritter had publicly challenged the Bush administration's contention that Baghdad's weapons systems posed a grave risk to the U.S and necessitated a war.


Scott Ritter: The president tried to convince the American public that what is happening today circa September 2003 is a direct result of the events of September 11, 2001, as though there is a continuum there, when in fact, the reality is there is no linkage between Saddam Hussein's regime -- the one that we have overthrown -- and those who perpetrated those horrific attacks on the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and the other airplane that was hijacked and crashed in the hills of Pennsylvania.


This is not a war in Iraq that we had to fight, it was very much an elective war, a war that the president elected to fight, and he did so under false pretense. He told the American public that we were threatened by weapons of mass destruction, this threat has yet to materialize.


It appears that his administration exaggerated the case for war and now that we have troops deployed in harm's way, we can't just simply cut and run. So we are in for the fight.


But the fight that's being fought in Iraq is not a fight that would've been fought had we not invaded. If we didn't invade Iraq, there wouldn't be a war against terror in Iraq, because Saddam Hussein's regime, as terrible as it was, was the antithesis of an Islamic fundamentalist anti-American regime….


What you need to do to answer that question is dissect who populates the senior most decision-making hierarchy positions in the Bush administration and what motivates them. What is their stated ideology?


You will find that somewhere around 90 percent of these senior positions are held by people who have an affiliation with the Project for a New American Century, which is a neo-conservative thinktank and their ideology has been stated clearly, several times in writing.


It's global hegemony. It's the United States of America imposing its will, pre-emptively if necessary on the world, where we find our national security to be at risk.


Donald Trump is correct, the Bush Administration lied, and for Republican candidates to perpetuate the lies in a national presidential campaign disqualifies them to hold the highest office in the land.  Bush and Cheney should have been impeached for their lies and brought before an international tribunal.


The 9-11 attacks were predicted that was the prophecy, and the Bush Administration deliberately, knowingly ignored the warnings and allowed the attacks on America to advance their neocon agenda.  And that hegemony agenda has been continued by the Obama Administration with the same people populating the pentagon and State Department that populated Bush’s.


An all the while, the corrupt media empire of Rupert Murdock perpetuates the silencing of anyone that dare say, Bush lied.  Donald Trump has begun the discussion that America has refused to have up until now.  Let’s get it all out there in the open and hold people accountable for the savage world-wide devastation brought by the Project for a New American Century.


No more sounds of silence.


By Patricia Baeten



Friday, February 12, 2016

The Prophecy: Senator Bernie Sanders and Unleashing the Creature from Jekyll Island



The United States has been destroyed by the “elected” representatives in our government who are funded by and serve the interests of the Creature from Jekyll Island, the Federal Reserve Bank.  The people of the world are dying in masses because the American people failed to heed the prophecy of Thomas Jefferson.


“The central bank is an institution of the most deadly hostility existing against the Principles and form of our Constitution. I am an Enemy to all banks discounting bills or notes for anything but Coin. If the American People allow private banks to control the issuance of their currency, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the People of all their Property until their Children will wake up homeless on the continent their Fathers conquered. ”


― Thomas Jefferson


For over 200 years the American people were repeatedly warned what would happen if the Central Banks were unleashed on the people of the world.  But like cockroaches in the night the United States Senate passed Commodity Futures Modernization Act on December 15, 2000, just three days after the United States Supreme Court ordered an end to the recount of the votes in Florida and declared George W. Bush the winner.


The 1999 repeal of the Glass Steagall Act or Gramm-Leach-Bliley which passed the United States Senate with only 8 Senators voting against making it veto proof, was not the sole cause of the global banking meltdown of 2008.  The direct cause of the massive industrial scale fraud perpetrated by Wall Street banks and the Federal Reserve Bank was the Commodity Futures Modernization Act. 


During this Presidential election year many of the accusations hurled at the Clinton’s are factually incorrect and grossly exaggerated.  Senator Bernie Sanders likes to blame President Clinton for signing GLBA into law in 1999 and cites his no vote as a demonstration of his superior judgement.  However, being one of only 8 Senators to vote against GLBA doesn’t take much courage as he knew it will pass anyway.



The real example of the lack of judgement on Senator Sanders’ part was his vote to deregulate derivatives trading where his vote was crucial to the Senate getting Commodities Futures Modernization passed.  Without his vote the bill would never have reached President Clinton’s desk to be signed into law. From Huffington Post:


 Excerpt:



How Congress Rushed a Bill that Helped Bring the Economy to Its Knees


In the waning days of the 106th Congress and the Clinton administration, Congress met in a lame-duck session to complete work on a variety of appropriations bills that were not passed prior to the 2000 election….


The saga of the Commodity Futures Modernization Act begins in 1998. At the time, the economy was booming, stocks soared, and new instruments of trading were found to make more money while evading the oversight of regulatory bodies. Two of those growing instruments were financial derivatives and credit-default swaps


The chairman of the Commodity Futures Trade Commission (CFTC) Brooksley Born issued a first call for her regulatory commission to have power to oversee financial derivatives. While previous legislative attempts had been made earlier, Born's efforts were the most direct and threatening to the financial industry…


In the midst of this debate Long Term Capital Management (LTCM), a major hedge fund employing some of the top economists, collapsed. LTCM was highly over-leveraged and held a big portfolio of swaps. In the end, during the government organized bailout of the company, LTCM recorded a loss of $1.6 billion on swaps alone.


Born felt that an unregulated derivatives market that spawned the LTCM bailout could "pose grave dangers to our economy." In the end, Born lost her battle and, in May 1999, asked to be replaced as CFTC chairman…


Meanwhile in Congress, lawmakers were still up-in-arms over Born's attempts to regulate the financial derivatives market and began working to pass their own set of deregulatory language…


Little attention followed Congress as the contentious 2000 presidential election was stuck in a stalemate as lawyers and khaki-clad protesters fought over the Florida recount to decide whether Gov. George W. Bush or Vice President Al Gore would be the next president.


During a lame-duck December session, while the media was focused on the recounts and court cases, Gramm and Ewing sought to strike a compromise on the Commodity Futures Modernization Act.


The day after the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Gov. Bush, December 14, Ewing introduced a new version of the Commodity Futures Modernization Act. On December 15, with little warning or fanfare--aside from the overshadowed discussions on the floors of Congress--the new, compromise version was included as a rider to the Consolidated Appropriations Act for FY 2001, an 11,000 page omnibus appropriations conference report…


As of June 30, 2008, the global derivatives market had exploded to $530 trillion


Consensus is nearly universal that the failure to regulate financial derivatives trading and the subsequent explosion of credit default swaps, by passing the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, was a mistake.


So Bernie Sanders and the United States Senate, knowing full well the dangers of an unregulated derivatives market after the collapse and bailout of Long Term Capital Management (LTCM), passed the Commodity Futures Modernization Act in a lame duck session. 


Barack Obama and Bernie Sanders claim Hillary Clinton’s war vote as the biggest blunder in history and say her vote disqualifies her from being President for lack of judgement.  Both Sanders and Obama cite their superior judgement, Bernie’s for voting against the authorization and Obama did have to vote, but claims he would have voted no. 


Sanders’ anti-war vote was hardly an act of superior judgement or courage because the vote overwhelmingly passed and would have with or without Sanders support.  After the 9-11 attack that destroyed the World Trade Center, Senator Hillary Clinton, the Junior Senator from New York where the attack took place, was put into an untenable position.


The Bush Administration was hell bent on going to war in Iraq and any voice that sought to repudiate their claims was immediately silenced.   Members of the Bush Administration went on talk radio and cable TV daily and warning a terrified public Saddam had nuclear weapons and was planning an imminent strike in America even bigger than 9-11.


Condoleezza Rice said the “smoking gun” would be a in the form of a mushroom cloud.  Rumsfeld said absence of evidence of nuclear weapons wasn’t evidence of absence. Dick Cheney said not only did Saddam have nuclear weapons, he knew where they were, they were in Tikrit.


C-Span carried 24 hour programming of rightwing groups like the American Enterprise Institute, Cato Institute, Federalist Society, Heritage Foundation, RAND Corporation, etc. claiming an attack on the West Coast was imminent.  Many of their members are in Obama’s State Department today.


It is not my intention to defend Hillary Clinton’s war vote but to put that vote into context.  But Bernie Sanders’ vote to deregulate derivatives trading is still resonating today. From World Socialist Website:



Excerpt:



The looting of US workers’ pensions


Behind the backs of the American people, the Obama administration is carrying out one of the most significant measures of its tenure in office: the gutting of benefits for hundreds of thousands of retired workers covered by multiemployer pension funds. This attack on private-sector pension benefits coincides with an escalating assault on the pensions of public-sector workers.


On Monday in Detroit and Tuesday in Minneapolis, longtime Washington fixer Kenneth Feinberg held the final public hearings before the implementation of plans to slash the pension benefits of 270,000 retired truck drivers, package handlers and other beneficiaries of the Teamsters Central States Pension Fund by between half and 75 percent.


Pensioners will receive ballots to vote on the benefit cuts, which will be counted and totally ignored, as Feinberg, appointed by the administration to serve as the Treasury Department’s “special master” for multiemployer pension funds, rules unilaterally to proceed with the cuts.


As the Obama administration’s special master on executive compensation for banks and other firms that received taxpayer bailouts in 2008-2009, Feinberg rubber-stamped multimillion-dollar bonuses at companies such as the insurance giant American International Group (AIG), which was bailed out by the government to the tune of $185 billion.


The social counterrevolution has been intensified since the financial crisis of 2008-2009. To pay for the bank bailouts, in which the US government handed over some $7 trillion to Wall Street, the Obama administration, with the support and collaboration of the unions, ratcheted up the attack on the living standards of the working class.


First came the 2009 restructuring of the auto industry, in which the pay was slashed for all newly hired workers and the share of “second-tier” workers, earning half the pay of older workers, was expanded from 20 to 40 percent at GM and Chrysler, even as health benefits for retirees were slashed.


In a recent debate Bernie Sanders stated that he wrote the Affordable Care Act and was proud of it. 


In 2010, President Obama signed the Affordable Care Act, which created a mechanism for companies to offload workers from their existing health care plans into low-quality, high-cost private plans sold through exchanges. It introduced a sharp penalty, known as the “Cadillac tax,” on higher-quality health plans.


Next, in a series of deals with congressional Republicans, the White House repeatedly slashed vital social services such as food stamps and unemployment insurance and chipped away at the bedrock social programs Medicare and Social Security.


Then came the 2013-2014 Detroit bankruptcy, in which an unelected emergency manager used the bankruptcy courts, in collaboration with the Obama administration, to set a precedent for slashing constitutionally protected pension benefits of public-sector retirees. This opened up the floodgates for the dismantling of pensions in states throughout the country, including Illinois, California, Pennsylvania and New York.


In late 2014, the Obama administration worked with Congress, major corporations and trade unions to pass the Multiemployer Pension Reform Act, which opened the door to the slashing of the pensions of up to a million retirees, starting with the beneficiaries of the Teamsters Central States Pension Fund…


Yes, all of it is the result of the passage of Commodity Futures Modernization Act and there’s more.  The Flint Michigan water crisis is a direct result of CFMA and it’s spreading across America.  From MSN:




Excerpt:



Lead poisoning strikes another US town


A lead poisoning scandal has struck a second US town, with schools closed in Sebring, Ohio Monday and the water treatment plant operator accused of falsifying reports.


Initial tests found elevated lead levels in 28 homes and one school in the midwestern village of about 4,400 people, Ohio's environmental protection agency said. It is not clear how long lead has been leaking from the town's pipes.


The agency said in a statement it has "reason to suspect that the operator falsified reports" and has asked the federal Environmental Protection Agency's criminal division for help with the investigation….


The Ohio case comes as a special prosecutor was appointed to investigate how the city of Flint, Michigan exposed 100,000 residents to lead poisoning after cutting water treatment costs.


And the Zika virus is heading for America thanks to CFMA.  From Mother Nature Network:



Excerpt:


In foreclosure-ridden Florida, 'zombie' swimming pools add to mosquito woes


A discerning skeeter couldn't ask for a better breeding habitat than an abandoned swimming pool. And unfortunately for post-recession Florida, there's a whole lot of them.


It’s been well-established that summertime’s most irksome creature, the female mosquito, requires stagnant water to lay her eggs. And in Florida, the nation’s leader in both naked real estate and so-called "zombie foreclosures" — that is, forsaken homes left in a state of limbo in which the owner has walked away and the bank has not reclaimed the property — there’s plenty of stagnant water to go around.


In a recent  Florida Today article, these abandoned zombie homes, specifically foreclosed homes with swimming pools that have been transformed into foul, egg-laying havens for biting insects, are linked to an increasingly hellish — and dangerous — mosquito problem in the Sunshine State.


And with thousands upon thousands of neglected swimming pools — or “algae-caked cesspools” as Florida Today calls them — only exacerbating the problem, comes an elevated risk of being infected with mosquito-borne viral diseases including dengue fever and chikungunya.


While the latter tropical disease, a particularly miserable-sounding affliction transmitted by the Asian tiger mosquito, has appeared in Florida before, it has never been contracted inside of the U.S. That is, until earlier this month when not one but two non-travel-related cases of chikungunya were announced by Florida health officials. One case was reported in Miami-Dade County and the other in Palm Beach County.


Sounds lovely — abandoned homes, zombie pools, bloodsucking insects, and debilitating viral diseases!


Will Bernie Sanders be held accountable for his poor judgement in voting to pass the Commodity Futures Modernization Act?  Will Obama and Biden be held accountable for slashing pensions after bailing out Wall Street and authorizing billions of dollars in bonuses for criminal bankers? 


Will Timothy Geithner be held accountable for his role in crashing the economy as Head of the Federal Reserve Bank in New York and then bailing out Wall Street banks as Treasury Secretary?  Wait, what’s this?  From USA Today:




Excerpt:


Ex T-man Geithner cashing in on Wall Street


WASHINGTON – Timothy Geithner is finally cashing in.


After an appropriate stint at a think tank to write his memoir and a quiet transition to Wall Street, President Obama’s first Treasury secretary, who left office in 2013, is now ready to make millions thanks to help from a big bank he used to regulate.


Bloomberg News this week disclosed that Geithner has gotten a line of credit from JPMorgan Chase, the nation’s biggest bank, to invest in a new $12 billion fund at the private equity firm where he works, Warburg Pincus...


Geithner of course was the Treasury secretary who pushed the bailout of the big banks, including JPMorgan, in the wake of the financial crisis, beating off anyone who wanted to discipline the banks or punish their executives with the argument that doing so would further destabilize the financial system…


Geithner also failed to execute the government’s plan for mortgage relief to individuals in order to shelter the banks from losses, one of the reasons Barofsky titled his book Bailout: An Inside Account of How Washington Abandoned Main Street While Rescuing Wall Street…


Vermont's Sen. Bernie Sanders is hammering away at Wall Street influence, telling voters that the banks’ business model is fraud, and putting rival Hillary Clinton under constant pressure to explain her ties to Wall Street, including speaking fees from Goldman Sachs and other institutions.


Will anyone hold Bernie Sanders accountable for his vote to unleash the creature from Jekyll Island?  I doubt it, what they will do is keep beating down on Hillary Clinton to destroy her career and legacy while promoting Bernie Sanders.  After Hillary is marginalized the DNC will claim he is unelectable and the Super Delegates will overturn the will of the voters and pronounce Joe Biden the Democratic Candidate for President.


And what about the rest of us, well we’ll be lucky to get out of this world alive.




By Patricia Baeten