by Joe Larson
Marxism and Humanism are the predominant philosophies of America's education establishment, yet every day we send the public schools our most precious gift, our children, to be "educated."
Our schools are filled with sex education, political correctness, environmental extremism, global unity, diversity training (pro-gay indoctrination), and "higher-order thinking skills" boldly claiming that, in order to become a higher order thinker, one must first believe absolutely that there are no absolutes!
Our schools are filled with violence, murder, extortion, rape, unwanted pregnancy, drug use, disrespect, and foul language. Test scores have been declining for decades as the numbers of children who cannot read continue to increase.
While the pontificators wonder why this is so, many parents and citizens have figured it out. Although earth worship, paganism and the occult flourish in public schools, the Greatest Story Ever Told, based on the greatest book ever written, the Holy Bible, which tells of the greatest teacher who ever lived, Jesus Christ, is not used or even allowed. The Bible was America's first textbook, but today it is referred to as a collection of fables.
America's educational system began to decline with the introduction of socialism, given impetus by the increasing involvement of the federal government. Lenin said: "Communism is socialism in a hurry." Socialism, therefore, is Communism by gradualism rather than by revolution. The socialist "Fabian Society," forerunner of most socialist groups in America, had as its motto "Make Haste Slowly."
"Democratic socialism" became the battle cry for socializing the United States. The goal was to "permeate and penetrate," then control from within. The socialists' first target was education, and they attacked with deceitful language. There were no badges or socialist labels; followers described themselves as "liberal," "progressive," and even "moderate." Words were the weapon of choice in this new war. By changing the meanings of words, socialists concealed their true purpose.
This massive social engineering was carried out under the banners of "reform" and "social justice." These innovations are in the public interest, Americans were told. They promote true democracy, humanitarianism, and, of course are "for the children." The buzzwords of socialism were and still are "social" and "democracy" (i.e. social science, social studies and socialization of the child).
In the early 1900s, unrest in Europe brought thousands of socialists to America. Many held degrees in psychology, sociology and psychiatry (the behavioral sciences) and a number of them became university professors.
Norman Thomas, a socialist and member of the American Civil Liberties Union, boldly told the world: "The American people will never knowingly adopt socialism, but under the name of liberalism, they will adopt every fragment of the socialist program until one day America will be a socialist nation without ever knowing how it happened."
John Dewey, known as "the father of modern education," was an avowed socialist and the co-author of the "Humanist Manifesto." The U.S. House Committee on Un-American Activities discovered that he belonged to 15 Marxist front organizations. Dewey taught the professors who trained America's teachers. Obsessed with "the group," he said, "You can't make socialists out of individualists. Children who know how to think for themselves spoil the harmony of the collective society, which is coming, where everyone is interdependent."
Author Rosalie Gordon, writing about Dewey's progressive (socialist) education in her book What's Happened To Our Schools, said: "The progressive system has reached all the way down to the lowest grades to prepare the children of America for their role as the collectivists of the future. The group - not the individual child - is the quintessence of progressivism. The child must always be made to feel part of the group. He must indulge in group thinking and group activity."
After visiting the Soviet Union, Dewey wrote six articles on the "wonders" of Soviet education. The School-To-Work program, now in our public schools in all 50 states, is modeled after the Soviet poly-technical system.
In 1936, the National Education Association stated the position from which it has never wavered: "We stand for socializing the individual." The NEA, in its Policy For American Education, opined: "The major problem of education in our times arises out of the fact that we live in a period of fundamental social change. In the new democracy [what happened to our republic?], education must share in the responsibility of giving purpose and direction to social change. The major function of the school is the social orientation of the individual . . . Education must operate according to a well-formulated social policy."
NEA specialist Paul Haubner, tells us, "The schools cannot allow parents to influence the kind of values-education their children receive in school; . that is what is wrong with those who say there is a universal system of values. Our goals are incompatible with theirs. We must change their values."
Chester M. Pierce, M.D., Professor of Education and Psychiatry at Harvard, had this to say: "Every child in America entering school at the age of five is mentally ill because he comes to school with certain allegiances to our Founding Fathers, toward our elected officials, toward his parents, toward a belief in a supernatural being, and toward the sovereignty of this nation as a separate entity. It's up to you as teachers to make all these sick children well - by creating the international child of the future."
Some politicians agree. Former Nebraska state senator Peter Hoagland said: "Fundamentalist parents have no right to indoctrinate their children in their beliefs. We are preparing their children for the year 2000 and life in a global one-world society and those children will not fit in."
In the Humanist Magazine, Jan./Feb 1983, John Dunphy wrote: "The battle for mankind's future must be waged and won in the public school classroom . The classroom must and will become the arena of conflict between the old and the new . the rotting corpse of Christianity and the new faith of humanism."
Bureaucrats, politicians and educators regularly appear on television blaming either parents or lack of funds for the failure of our schools. Their prescription is always the same: more money and more government control. For well over 50 years, American voters have fallen for these fallacies. Victor Gollancz, a famous socialist publisher, explained why he believed that socialism would take over America: "Christians are not exactly bright, so it will be easy for socialism to lead them down the garden path through their ideals of brotherly love and 'social justice.'"
It's time for Christians to stand up for their families and their faith and put God in charge of this nation and its schools. Restoring America is that simple.
Joseph R. Larson is Board Chairman of the pro-family organization Restoring America (www.restoringamerica.org). He is a frequent guest on talk radio and has written articles on China, education and the Constitution for newspapers across the country.
Friday, April 20, 2007
Education charlatans and quacks
by Walter Williams
So many Americans graduate high school and college having learned what to think as opposed to acquiring the tools of critical, independent thinking. Likewise, they have learned little about our nation's history. As such, they fall prey to the rhetoric of political charlatans and quacks. Let's look at a couple of examples.
One of the arguments against international trade is that companies such as Nike and Gap Inc. exploit workers in Third World countries by paying them wages far lower than those that prevail in the U.S. and other developed nations. Are the workers being exploited? It all depends on how you answer the following question: If someone comes along and offers you an opportunity superior to any other that you have, is "exploitation" an appropriate term to describe that offer?
Put more concretely, if a U.S. company pays a Cambodian $3 a day, when his next best opportunity – digging through trash at a nasty dump – yields 75 cents a day, has that company made him worse off or better off? If your answer is "better off," how can "exploitation" be an appropriate term to describe the transaction?
You say, "It's exploitation because the worker should have been paid more." I think George Mason University should pay me more. Is it appropriate to use the term "exploitation" to describe my relationship with George Mason University?
Now let's turn to history. Dr. Condoleezza Rice said, in an October 2003 speech to the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations, "When the Founding Fathers said 'We the People,' they did not mean me. My ancestors were considered three-fifths of a person." Though not Dr. Rice's intention, this common misunderstanding of history is often used to discredit the great men who founded our nation – without telling the whole story.
The Founding Fathers struggled over the issue of slavery. George Washington, James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, John Jay, Patrick Henry and others were highly critical of slavery, describing it as a " lamentable evil," "disease of ignorance," "oppressive dominion" and "an inconsistency not to be excused."
The delegates at the 1787 Philadelphia Constitutional Convention had to negotiate many contentious deal-breaking issues. Slavery was one of those issues. The Southern states made it clear that they wouldn't vote to ratify the Constitution if it abolished slavery or ended the slave trade. Delegates from slave states wanted slaves counted as whole persons for the purposes of determining representation in Congress. That would have given the South greater political power.
Delegate James Wilson offered a compromise whereby slaves would be counted as three-fifths of a person for the purposes of determining the number of representatives a state had in the House of Representatives. The corresponding compromise was to set 1808 as the year to abolish the slave trade.
There's little question that slavery is an abomination and a gross violation of human rights, but the Founders had to decide whether there'd be a Union. Had morality been their sole guide, the Constitution would never have been ratified and a Union would not have been created.
One question we might ask those who condemn the Founders is whether black Americans would be better off or worse off today with the Northern states having gone their way and the Southern states having gone theirs, and as a consequence no U.S. Constitution and no Union.
Americans' ignorance of our history and inability to think critically have provided considerable ammunition for those who want to divide us in pursuit of their agenda. I don't usually buy into conspiracy theories, but it's tempting to think America's charlatans, quacks and demagogues are in cahoots with the teaching establishments at our government schools and colleges to dumb down the nation.
So many Americans graduate high school and college having learned what to think as opposed to acquiring the tools of critical, independent thinking. Likewise, they have learned little about our nation's history. As such, they fall prey to the rhetoric of political charlatans and quacks. Let's look at a couple of examples.
One of the arguments against international trade is that companies such as Nike and Gap Inc. exploit workers in Third World countries by paying them wages far lower than those that prevail in the U.S. and other developed nations. Are the workers being exploited? It all depends on how you answer the following question: If someone comes along and offers you an opportunity superior to any other that you have, is "exploitation" an appropriate term to describe that offer?
Put more concretely, if a U.S. company pays a Cambodian $3 a day, when his next best opportunity – digging through trash at a nasty dump – yields 75 cents a day, has that company made him worse off or better off? If your answer is "better off," how can "exploitation" be an appropriate term to describe the transaction?
You say, "It's exploitation because the worker should have been paid more." I think George Mason University should pay me more. Is it appropriate to use the term "exploitation" to describe my relationship with George Mason University?
Now let's turn to history. Dr. Condoleezza Rice said, in an October 2003 speech to the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations, "When the Founding Fathers said 'We the People,' they did not mean me. My ancestors were considered three-fifths of a person." Though not Dr. Rice's intention, this common misunderstanding of history is often used to discredit the great men who founded our nation – without telling the whole story.
The Founding Fathers struggled over the issue of slavery. George Washington, James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, John Jay, Patrick Henry and others were highly critical of slavery, describing it as a " lamentable evil," "disease of ignorance," "oppressive dominion" and "an inconsistency not to be excused."
The delegates at the 1787 Philadelphia Constitutional Convention had to negotiate many contentious deal-breaking issues. Slavery was one of those issues. The Southern states made it clear that they wouldn't vote to ratify the Constitution if it abolished slavery or ended the slave trade. Delegates from slave states wanted slaves counted as whole persons for the purposes of determining representation in Congress. That would have given the South greater political power.
Delegate James Wilson offered a compromise whereby slaves would be counted as three-fifths of a person for the purposes of determining the number of representatives a state had in the House of Representatives. The corresponding compromise was to set 1808 as the year to abolish the slave trade.
There's little question that slavery is an abomination and a gross violation of human rights, but the Founders had to decide whether there'd be a Union. Had morality been their sole guide, the Constitution would never have been ratified and a Union would not have been created.
One question we might ask those who condemn the Founders is whether black Americans would be better off or worse off today with the Northern states having gone their way and the Southern states having gone theirs, and as a consequence no U.S. Constitution and no Union.
Americans' ignorance of our history and inability to think critically have provided considerable ammunition for those who want to divide us in pursuit of their agenda. I don't usually buy into conspiracy theories, but it's tempting to think America's charlatans, quacks and demagogues are in cahoots with the teaching establishments at our government schools and colleges to dumb down the nation.
Education Matters
By John F. McManus (Interview)
Published: 2000-02-14 06:00
In addition to her work with the U.S. Department of Education during 1981-1982, Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt served overseas with the American Red Cross during the Korean War and with the U.S. Department of State from 1956-63. She is a free-lance writer specializing in education and has seen her work appear in numerous publications including THE NEW AMERICAN. Her new book, The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America, contains a wealth of documentation indicating that the moral and academic crises in public education are not accidental but by design.
Q. How did you get started as an education watchdog?
A. My family returned to the U.S. from the West Indies in 1970. After living outside the country for 15 years, we settled in Maine. When one of my two sons brought home an open-ended questionnaire seeking information about his and our family’s values, I knew something was wrong. Then I saw incredible things going on in the schools: Kids rolling around on the floor; self-concept training; all this fuzzy, mushy, touchy-feely type instruction. I also discovered that our school district was led by a Harvard-trained superintendent who later admitted to me that he considered himself a change agent.
I began complaining to the principal and the school board about several programs, even about the curriculum itself. After two failed attempts to get elected to the school board, I won a position in 1976. I have to laugh now because they counted the votes three times in hopes of finding that I hadn’t triumphed! Soon, a retired public school teacher came to me and asked me to attend an in-service training conference entitled “Innovations in Education.” An ally, she even paid for me to attend. That conference was a real eye-opener, and I have been on my “white horse” ever since.
Q. What did you discover at this conference?
A. All attendees were given a copy of The Change Agent’s Guide to Innovations in Education, the bible for bringing about change in our schools and communities, written by Ronald Havelock of the University of Michigan. We were even taught how to identify resisters and, because this is precisely what I was, they were unknowingly teaching me how to identify myself. Part of the instruction dwelled on techniques to influence community leaders — businessmen, service club members, doctors, and others — to gain their support for the introduction of absolutely disastrous programs. This manual, funded by the U.S. Office of Education (the forerunner of the Department of Education), gave suggestions about how to “sneak in” controversial and “innovative” methods of teaching in such areas as health education, drug and alcohol education, sex education, suicide education, death education, critical thinking education, and other types of “education.”
At this point, it occurred to me that no one ever termed math courses “math education” or reading courses “reading education.” From that day forward, I have been suspicious of any school course that has the word “education” attached to it. But that’s a small point. I’d lived in socialist countries and traveled in Communist countries, and my husband is a European who lived under both the Nazis and the Communists. And here I was being taught at federal expense to identify “resisters” who were opposed to these socialistic dumbing-down proposals.
Q. Did you have any success as a member of the local school board?
A. My efforts succeeded in banning values clarification, putting an end to subjecting the children to survival games, and introducing a mere five minutes of grammar instruction per day, which was all they would allow for such a vitally important subject. Nevertheless, two weeks after I left, everything I’d worked to accomplish was overturned.
Q. How were you able to get yourself into an important position in the U.S. Department of Education?
A. Through the efforts of a good friend in the White House, I was appointed Senior Policy Advisor in the Office of Educational Research and Improvement (OERI) of the U.S. Department of Education (ED). OERI was, and still is, the office out of which the controversial national and international educational restructuring has been funded. I worked in this position for more than a year and was summarily relieved of my duties because I leaked information to the press about an important technology grant which would control the content of curriculum at the local level. My superiors didn’t want details about what they were implementing to become known.
Q. What else were you asked to do while working for OERI?
A. Hundreds of these mind-altering, values-destroying programs were funded out of my office. ED sent a huge catalog entitled “Programs that Work” to every facilitator center in the United States. These programs were then introduced into classrooms everywhere. Of course, what ED urged stood in stark contrast to the desires of virtually all local school boards. I had arrived at the funding and philosophical source of what I had objected to as a local school board member: the death-mentality survival games; “no right/no wrong” values clarification; behavior modification; globalist education; non-absolutist critical thinking. It didn’t take me long to realize that I wasn’t going to be able to stop any of it.
Q. Is this why you compiled your new book, The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America?
A. Yes, I call it a “resister’s book.” It’s a compilation of information from a variety of sources going back over many years. It contains statements and position papers issued by individuals and organizations that are deliberately and maliciously working to achieve behavioral changes in students, which will ultimately alter society in general. These ideas and individuals have virtually taken over the schools of America, which are certainly not providing what is commonly understood as education. They’re dispensing subversive indoctrination.
Q. Can you be more specific in summarizing their overall goal?
A. They seek to destroy absolute values and cast aside the importance of right and wrong that form the basis of any stable and free society. In other words, they want to undo what our nation’s founders established. To achieve this goal, they seek to train our children precisely as animals are trained, through a Pavlovian conditioning process innocuously called outcome-based (performance-based) education. Those who are “trained” instead of being educated receive tangible rewards for their “correct” answers. A distinct result of such programming is fear to take a principled or controversial stand, or at least a disinclination to do so because there is no reward forthcoming. This is how animals are trained. But human beings are possessed of free will, have intellects, souls, and consciences, and are not mere brute animals. For years, the schools have been giving children this non-absolutist trash, and it has ultimately resulted in such horrors as the Columbine massacre.
Q. When you went to Washington at the beginning of the Reagan administration, weren’t you expecting that the Department of Education would be abolished?
A. That’s what we wanted, and that’s what had been promised. Recall that throughout 1980 candidate Reagan had stated his intention to do away with both the Department of Education and the Department of Energy. But, once elected, he appointed Terrell H. Bell as Secretary of Education. Bell had been the Commissioner of Education in the old Office of Education during the Ford Administration. He had actually lobbied Congress for the creation of the new cabinet-level ED during the Carter years. Then, in 1982, a courageous colleague, National Institute of Education (NIE) director Edward Curran, recommended that the NIE, the research and development arm of ED from which most of the destructive programs emanated, be abolished. Bell immediately fired him. Any expectation anyone still had that ED would be abolished disappeared completely.
Q. How did you acquire all of the materials you cite in your book?
A. During the period I served at ED, I saved or copied many of the documents crossing my desk. Eventually expecting to be dismissed, I started storing them in the home of a friend. When the hammer dropped on me, I already had what I needed. Plus, I have acquired many friends throughout the nation who have supplied me with the product of their own valuable research.
Q. After being fired and returning to Maine, what did you do?
A. First, I went on a nationwide speaking tour. I believe I spoke in 40 different states explaining the federal education agenda. I knew that parents were being told that they’re “taking things out of context” when they objected to something going on in the schools. They needed direct quotes from official documents drafted by the subverters themselves. They needed to know that there is a deliberate plan to dumb down their kids and to destroy the nation’s values — a two-pronged plan to destroy this country. My book provides the ammunition necessary to help the growing number of citizens who wish to expose these planners and keep America free. I don’t want any American ever again to be confronted with “That’s your opinion” when they object to the outrages to which their children are being subjected. If they have my book, they can document their “opinions.”
Q. Give me a specific example from your book of the kind of information needed by parents in order to show deliberate design in the effort to remake American education.
A. For a full week during the summer of 1974, members of the Chief State School Officers Institute representing the 50 state educational departments met at a plush resort in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. They were given recommendations by an array of top leaders of the U.S. Office of Education and other invited specialists such as Alvin Toffler and Willard Wirtz. The report coming from this conference, published and funded by the federal Office of Education, states that “technology has created a new relationship between man, his education, his society” — a relationship in which “the home, the church” cannot meet current challenges. Conclusions reached at this conference included the following: “Individuals need more … participation in group decision making”; “problems of the future must be solved based on values and priorities set by groups”; “the states should … provide alternatives to earning the high school diploma”; “Educational credit should be available to students for activities related to their studies in work, volunteer action, community participation, school volunteer programs and other programs contributing to the betterment of the home, school, community and society.” These are precisely the type programs that are now enshrined in virtually all of the nation’s schools.
Q. Did the United Nations set out from its creation to influence the U. S. educational system?
A. In 1946, within a year of the founding of the UN, a Canadian psychiatrist named Brock Chisholm spoke before the organization’s World Health Organization (WHO) on “The Psychiatry of Enduring Peace and Social Progress.” In his talk, he actually recommended “the reinterpretation and eventual eradication of the concept of right and wrong.” By 1948, when Chisholm was serving as the executive director of WHO’s Interim Commission, the journal International Conciliation published his 1946 speech. It contained a glowing preface by his good friend, Communist spy Alger Hiss. Chisholm wanted all teachers retrained in the psychiatric methods. It is from this type of thinking, combined with the pervasive influence of UNESCO, that behavioral science and values clarification programs were created and introduced into America’s schools.
Q. What exactly has UNESCO’s role been in the restructuring of American education?
A. As far back as 1947, under the Truman administration, the President’s Commission on Higher Education issued a report entitled “Higher Education for American Democracy,” which pronounced that education “must be conditioned essentially by policies established by the State Department and by ministries of foreign affairs in other countries.” More specifically, it then stated: “Higher education must play a very important part in carrying out in this country the program developed by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization.... The United States Office of Education must be prepared to work effectively with the State Department and with the UNESCO.” What began in 1947 has continued and grown ever since.
Q. Obviously, the takeover of American education began a long time ago.
A. Yes, and I have numerous citations in my book showing the planned subversion from as far back as the late 1800s and the early part of the 20th century. For instance, in 1934, the American Historical Association published Conclusions and Recommendations for the Social Studies, a book funded with a large grant from the Carnegie Corporation. British socialist Harold Laski enthusiastically endorsed this report as follows: “At bottom, and stripped of its carefully neutral phrases, the report is an educational program for a Socialist America.” And he was absolutely correct because this book calls for changing the United States from free enterprise to a planned economy.
Q. Does your book supply any information about the 1985 United States-Soviet Union Educational Agreements?
A. Indeed it does and I expect that some of what I have included will surprise those who place “conservatism” and conservative heroes above adherence to the U.S. Constitution. These incredible agreements opening the door to the introduction of Soviet-style education into America’s schools were signed by U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz and Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze. Then, Edwin Feulner, who today leads the Washington-based Heritage Foundation but who was then the presidentially appointed chairman of the Commission on Public Diplomacy of the U.S. Information Agency, urged speedy acceptance of recommendations contained in the agreements.
Q. You have a very negative opinion of the widely publicized and increasingly popular voucher system. Why don’t you like vouchers?
A. Very simply, vouchers are a mechanism to gain control over private schooling, and eventually even over homeschooling. If vouchers are used by parents to pay for education outside the government schools, then the issuer of the voucher (the government) will step in to certify that the alternative form of education meets government standards.
In my book, I cite the work of a savvy Texan named Billy Lyon who showed that many educators and politicians use the term “choice” as a substitute for “vouchers.” What they really seek is control. For instance, Lyon pointed to Albert Shanker, the late American Federation of Teachers leader, who stated: “It may be that we can’t get the big changes we need without choice.” President George Bush announced, “Choice is the one reform that drives all others.” And former U.S. Secretary of Education Lauro Cavasos expressed his desire “to use the power of choice to help restructure American education.” When these people employ the word “choice,” they mean “vouchers,” the back-door approach to gaining control.
Q. What is your overall answer to the problems you have uncovered?
A. Prior to 1930, the United States had the finest education system in the world. We should be very proud of that fact. And we could easily return to that preeminent position, but doing so has to be based on a realization that federal money not only isn’t the answer, it’s the root cause of declining test scores and all the other problems we have discussed. Federal money has been used for behavior modification, not for academics. It has been used for values clarification, not to strengthen biblically-based morality. And it is being used to “dumb down” America’s children, not educate them as their grandparents were educated.
The first step that must be taken is to abolish the Department of Education. Once that’s accomplished, we will see the collapse of all the state education departments that get as much as 70 percent of their operating budget from ED.
Published: 2000-02-14 06:00
In addition to her work with the U.S. Department of Education during 1981-1982, Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt served overseas with the American Red Cross during the Korean War and with the U.S. Department of State from 1956-63. She is a free-lance writer specializing in education and has seen her work appear in numerous publications including THE NEW AMERICAN. Her new book, The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America, contains a wealth of documentation indicating that the moral and academic crises in public education are not accidental but by design.
Q. How did you get started as an education watchdog?
A. My family returned to the U.S. from the West Indies in 1970. After living outside the country for 15 years, we settled in Maine. When one of my two sons brought home an open-ended questionnaire seeking information about his and our family’s values, I knew something was wrong. Then I saw incredible things going on in the schools: Kids rolling around on the floor; self-concept training; all this fuzzy, mushy, touchy-feely type instruction. I also discovered that our school district was led by a Harvard-trained superintendent who later admitted to me that he considered himself a change agent.
I began complaining to the principal and the school board about several programs, even about the curriculum itself. After two failed attempts to get elected to the school board, I won a position in 1976. I have to laugh now because they counted the votes three times in hopes of finding that I hadn’t triumphed! Soon, a retired public school teacher came to me and asked me to attend an in-service training conference entitled “Innovations in Education.” An ally, she even paid for me to attend. That conference was a real eye-opener, and I have been on my “white horse” ever since.
Q. What did you discover at this conference?
A. All attendees were given a copy of The Change Agent’s Guide to Innovations in Education, the bible for bringing about change in our schools and communities, written by Ronald Havelock of the University of Michigan. We were even taught how to identify resisters and, because this is precisely what I was, they were unknowingly teaching me how to identify myself. Part of the instruction dwelled on techniques to influence community leaders — businessmen, service club members, doctors, and others — to gain their support for the introduction of absolutely disastrous programs. This manual, funded by the U.S. Office of Education (the forerunner of the Department of Education), gave suggestions about how to “sneak in” controversial and “innovative” methods of teaching in such areas as health education, drug and alcohol education, sex education, suicide education, death education, critical thinking education, and other types of “education.”
At this point, it occurred to me that no one ever termed math courses “math education” or reading courses “reading education.” From that day forward, I have been suspicious of any school course that has the word “education” attached to it. But that’s a small point. I’d lived in socialist countries and traveled in Communist countries, and my husband is a European who lived under both the Nazis and the Communists. And here I was being taught at federal expense to identify “resisters” who were opposed to these socialistic dumbing-down proposals.
Q. Did you have any success as a member of the local school board?
A. My efforts succeeded in banning values clarification, putting an end to subjecting the children to survival games, and introducing a mere five minutes of grammar instruction per day, which was all they would allow for such a vitally important subject. Nevertheless, two weeks after I left, everything I’d worked to accomplish was overturned.
Q. How were you able to get yourself into an important position in the U.S. Department of Education?
A. Through the efforts of a good friend in the White House, I was appointed Senior Policy Advisor in the Office of Educational Research and Improvement (OERI) of the U.S. Department of Education (ED). OERI was, and still is, the office out of which the controversial national and international educational restructuring has been funded. I worked in this position for more than a year and was summarily relieved of my duties because I leaked information to the press about an important technology grant which would control the content of curriculum at the local level. My superiors didn’t want details about what they were implementing to become known.
Q. What else were you asked to do while working for OERI?
A. Hundreds of these mind-altering, values-destroying programs were funded out of my office. ED sent a huge catalog entitled “Programs that Work” to every facilitator center in the United States. These programs were then introduced into classrooms everywhere. Of course, what ED urged stood in stark contrast to the desires of virtually all local school boards. I had arrived at the funding and philosophical source of what I had objected to as a local school board member: the death-mentality survival games; “no right/no wrong” values clarification; behavior modification; globalist education; non-absolutist critical thinking. It didn’t take me long to realize that I wasn’t going to be able to stop any of it.
Q. Is this why you compiled your new book, The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America?
A. Yes, I call it a “resister’s book.” It’s a compilation of information from a variety of sources going back over many years. It contains statements and position papers issued by individuals and organizations that are deliberately and maliciously working to achieve behavioral changes in students, which will ultimately alter society in general. These ideas and individuals have virtually taken over the schools of America, which are certainly not providing what is commonly understood as education. They’re dispensing subversive indoctrination.
Q. Can you be more specific in summarizing their overall goal?
A. They seek to destroy absolute values and cast aside the importance of right and wrong that form the basis of any stable and free society. In other words, they want to undo what our nation’s founders established. To achieve this goal, they seek to train our children precisely as animals are trained, through a Pavlovian conditioning process innocuously called outcome-based (performance-based) education. Those who are “trained” instead of being educated receive tangible rewards for their “correct” answers. A distinct result of such programming is fear to take a principled or controversial stand, or at least a disinclination to do so because there is no reward forthcoming. This is how animals are trained. But human beings are possessed of free will, have intellects, souls, and consciences, and are not mere brute animals. For years, the schools have been giving children this non-absolutist trash, and it has ultimately resulted in such horrors as the Columbine massacre.
Q. When you went to Washington at the beginning of the Reagan administration, weren’t you expecting that the Department of Education would be abolished?
A. That’s what we wanted, and that’s what had been promised. Recall that throughout 1980 candidate Reagan had stated his intention to do away with both the Department of Education and the Department of Energy. But, once elected, he appointed Terrell H. Bell as Secretary of Education. Bell had been the Commissioner of Education in the old Office of Education during the Ford Administration. He had actually lobbied Congress for the creation of the new cabinet-level ED during the Carter years. Then, in 1982, a courageous colleague, National Institute of Education (NIE) director Edward Curran, recommended that the NIE, the research and development arm of ED from which most of the destructive programs emanated, be abolished. Bell immediately fired him. Any expectation anyone still had that ED would be abolished disappeared completely.
Q. How did you acquire all of the materials you cite in your book?
A. During the period I served at ED, I saved or copied many of the documents crossing my desk. Eventually expecting to be dismissed, I started storing them in the home of a friend. When the hammer dropped on me, I already had what I needed. Plus, I have acquired many friends throughout the nation who have supplied me with the product of their own valuable research.
Q. After being fired and returning to Maine, what did you do?
A. First, I went on a nationwide speaking tour. I believe I spoke in 40 different states explaining the federal education agenda. I knew that parents were being told that they’re “taking things out of context” when they objected to something going on in the schools. They needed direct quotes from official documents drafted by the subverters themselves. They needed to know that there is a deliberate plan to dumb down their kids and to destroy the nation’s values — a two-pronged plan to destroy this country. My book provides the ammunition necessary to help the growing number of citizens who wish to expose these planners and keep America free. I don’t want any American ever again to be confronted with “That’s your opinion” when they object to the outrages to which their children are being subjected. If they have my book, they can document their “opinions.”
Q. Give me a specific example from your book of the kind of information needed by parents in order to show deliberate design in the effort to remake American education.
A. For a full week during the summer of 1974, members of the Chief State School Officers Institute representing the 50 state educational departments met at a plush resort in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. They were given recommendations by an array of top leaders of the U.S. Office of Education and other invited specialists such as Alvin Toffler and Willard Wirtz. The report coming from this conference, published and funded by the federal Office of Education, states that “technology has created a new relationship between man, his education, his society” — a relationship in which “the home, the church” cannot meet current challenges. Conclusions reached at this conference included the following: “Individuals need more … participation in group decision making”; “problems of the future must be solved based on values and priorities set by groups”; “the states should … provide alternatives to earning the high school diploma”; “Educational credit should be available to students for activities related to their studies in work, volunteer action, community participation, school volunteer programs and other programs contributing to the betterment of the home, school, community and society.” These are precisely the type programs that are now enshrined in virtually all of the nation’s schools.
Q. Did the United Nations set out from its creation to influence the U. S. educational system?
A. In 1946, within a year of the founding of the UN, a Canadian psychiatrist named Brock Chisholm spoke before the organization’s World Health Organization (WHO) on “The Psychiatry of Enduring Peace and Social Progress.” In his talk, he actually recommended “the reinterpretation and eventual eradication of the concept of right and wrong.” By 1948, when Chisholm was serving as the executive director of WHO’s Interim Commission, the journal International Conciliation published his 1946 speech. It contained a glowing preface by his good friend, Communist spy Alger Hiss. Chisholm wanted all teachers retrained in the psychiatric methods. It is from this type of thinking, combined with the pervasive influence of UNESCO, that behavioral science and values clarification programs were created and introduced into America’s schools.
Q. What exactly has UNESCO’s role been in the restructuring of American education?
A. As far back as 1947, under the Truman administration, the President’s Commission on Higher Education issued a report entitled “Higher Education for American Democracy,” which pronounced that education “must be conditioned essentially by policies established by the State Department and by ministries of foreign affairs in other countries.” More specifically, it then stated: “Higher education must play a very important part in carrying out in this country the program developed by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization.... The United States Office of Education must be prepared to work effectively with the State Department and with the UNESCO.” What began in 1947 has continued and grown ever since.
Q. Obviously, the takeover of American education began a long time ago.
A. Yes, and I have numerous citations in my book showing the planned subversion from as far back as the late 1800s and the early part of the 20th century. For instance, in 1934, the American Historical Association published Conclusions and Recommendations for the Social Studies, a book funded with a large grant from the Carnegie Corporation. British socialist Harold Laski enthusiastically endorsed this report as follows: “At bottom, and stripped of its carefully neutral phrases, the report is an educational program for a Socialist America.” And he was absolutely correct because this book calls for changing the United States from free enterprise to a planned economy.
Q. Does your book supply any information about the 1985 United States-Soviet Union Educational Agreements?
A. Indeed it does and I expect that some of what I have included will surprise those who place “conservatism” and conservative heroes above adherence to the U.S. Constitution. These incredible agreements opening the door to the introduction of Soviet-style education into America’s schools were signed by U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz and Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze. Then, Edwin Feulner, who today leads the Washington-based Heritage Foundation but who was then the presidentially appointed chairman of the Commission on Public Diplomacy of the U.S. Information Agency, urged speedy acceptance of recommendations contained in the agreements.
Q. You have a very negative opinion of the widely publicized and increasingly popular voucher system. Why don’t you like vouchers?
A. Very simply, vouchers are a mechanism to gain control over private schooling, and eventually even over homeschooling. If vouchers are used by parents to pay for education outside the government schools, then the issuer of the voucher (the government) will step in to certify that the alternative form of education meets government standards.
In my book, I cite the work of a savvy Texan named Billy Lyon who showed that many educators and politicians use the term “choice” as a substitute for “vouchers.” What they really seek is control. For instance, Lyon pointed to Albert Shanker, the late American Federation of Teachers leader, who stated: “It may be that we can’t get the big changes we need without choice.” President George Bush announced, “Choice is the one reform that drives all others.” And former U.S. Secretary of Education Lauro Cavasos expressed his desire “to use the power of choice to help restructure American education.” When these people employ the word “choice,” they mean “vouchers,” the back-door approach to gaining control.
Q. What is your overall answer to the problems you have uncovered?
A. Prior to 1930, the United States had the finest education system in the world. We should be very proud of that fact. And we could easily return to that preeminent position, but doing so has to be based on a realization that federal money not only isn’t the answer, it’s the root cause of declining test scores and all the other problems we have discussed. Federal money has been used for behavior modification, not for academics. It has been used for values clarification, not to strengthen biblically-based morality. And it is being used to “dumb down” America’s children, not educate them as their grandparents were educated.
The first step that must be taken is to abolish the Department of Education. Once that’s accomplished, we will see the collapse of all the state education departments that get as much as 70 percent of their operating budget from ED.
Rudy Giuliani, NO Fiscal Conservative
by George Marlin
When Steve Forbes was seeking the Republican presidential nomination in 1996, then Mayor Rudy Giuliani ridiculed his proposal to scrap the federal income tax code and replace it with a simple flat-tax. Giuliani called Forbes plan a "mistake" and said if implemented "would really be a disaster."
Despite these smears, Steve Forbes now believes Rudy embraces the flat-tax concept and endorsed him for president claiming he "will inspire the next generation of the Reagan Revolution."
Republican presidential hopeful Rudy Giuliani speaks during his campaign stop at Valley High School, Tuesday, April 3, 2007, in West Des Moines, Iowa. (AP Photo/Nirmalendu Majumdar)
Apparently Forbes forgot that when running for mayor, Rudy Giuliani showcased his liberal credentials and boasted he would "rekindle the Rockefeller, Javits Lefkowitz tradition" of the Republican Party and "produce the kind of change New York City saw with Fiorella LaGuardia and with John Lindsay."
Here's a sampling of the change the Rockefeller-Lindsay brand of Republican liberalism gave New York: During Governor Rockefeller's 14-year tenure, he brought New York State to the verge of bankruptcy. When Rocky entered office, his first budget was $2 billion, when he left office his last budget was $8.7 billion. Thanks to 18 tax increases he signed into law, New Yorkers were the most heavily taxed citizens in the nation and their state had the highest public debt in the nation. Viewing the mess he inherited from Rockefeller, Democratic Governor Hugh Carey said: "I've seen delicatessens in bankruptcy in better shape than the State of New York."
The Upper East Side Republican-liberal social engineer mayor, John Lindsay, financed New York City's big government agenda with creative fiscal gimmicks including phantom revenues, capitalization of expenses, short-term debt rollovers, false revenue estimates and excessive long-term borrowing. And Lindsay increased nuisance taxes, water rates, sewer taxes, commercial rent tax and instituted the city personal income, general corporation and unincorporated business taxes.
Mayor Lindsay's reckless fiscal policies were directly responsible for the City's 1975 default on debt.
Following in their footsteps, Mayor Giuliani declared that pledging no new tax increases is "political pandering." He also said "when I ran for mayor both times, I was asked very, very often to do the following: Pledge that you will never raise taxes. I refused to do that. Pledge that you will lower taxes. I refused to do that."
When Giuliani endorsed liberal icon Mario Cuomo for governor in 1994, he called the Republican-Conservative George Pataki's 25 percent state income tax cut (cloned from the Forbes-inspired New Jersey income tax cut) "irresponsible" and a "shell game that would hurt everyone in the state."
Forbes points to Rudy's fiscal management of New York City as proof of his conservatism. "Giuliani," he claims, "turned an inherited deficit [$2.3 billion] into a multimillion dollar surplus." It's true that during Giuliani's first term when times were tough, he contained costs and made some tax cuts. But what Forbes failed to point out is that in Rudy's second term, when the economy was booming, he abandoned fiscal restraint and became a big-spending liberal. City budget expenditures jumped 25 percent – twice the inflation rate – and Giuliani left his successor a projected operating deficit of $4.5 billion and New York's citizens with the highest tax burden in any major municipality in America.
Rudy Giuliani, a legatee of Nelson Rockefeller and John Lindsay, fails on every fiscal and cultural issue that are dear to conservatives. And one can only hope that Steve Forbes and his friends will learn before it's too late that life-long liberal Rudy Giuliani is employing conservative rhetoric merely to patronize them.
George J. Marlin is an author, former Conservative Party nominee for mayor of the City of New York, former two term Executive Director and CEO of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.
When Steve Forbes was seeking the Republican presidential nomination in 1996, then Mayor Rudy Giuliani ridiculed his proposal to scrap the federal income tax code and replace it with a simple flat-tax. Giuliani called Forbes plan a "mistake" and said if implemented "would really be a disaster."
Despite these smears, Steve Forbes now believes Rudy embraces the flat-tax concept and endorsed him for president claiming he "will inspire the next generation of the Reagan Revolution."
Republican presidential hopeful Rudy Giuliani speaks during his campaign stop at Valley High School, Tuesday, April 3, 2007, in West Des Moines, Iowa. (AP Photo/Nirmalendu Majumdar)
Apparently Forbes forgot that when running for mayor, Rudy Giuliani showcased his liberal credentials and boasted he would "rekindle the Rockefeller, Javits Lefkowitz tradition" of the Republican Party and "produce the kind of change New York City saw with Fiorella LaGuardia and with John Lindsay."
Here's a sampling of the change the Rockefeller-Lindsay brand of Republican liberalism gave New York: During Governor Rockefeller's 14-year tenure, he brought New York State to the verge of bankruptcy. When Rocky entered office, his first budget was $2 billion, when he left office his last budget was $8.7 billion. Thanks to 18 tax increases he signed into law, New Yorkers were the most heavily taxed citizens in the nation and their state had the highest public debt in the nation. Viewing the mess he inherited from Rockefeller, Democratic Governor Hugh Carey said: "I've seen delicatessens in bankruptcy in better shape than the State of New York."
The Upper East Side Republican-liberal social engineer mayor, John Lindsay, financed New York City's big government agenda with creative fiscal gimmicks including phantom revenues, capitalization of expenses, short-term debt rollovers, false revenue estimates and excessive long-term borrowing. And Lindsay increased nuisance taxes, water rates, sewer taxes, commercial rent tax and instituted the city personal income, general corporation and unincorporated business taxes.
Mayor Lindsay's reckless fiscal policies were directly responsible for the City's 1975 default on debt.
Following in their footsteps, Mayor Giuliani declared that pledging no new tax increases is "political pandering." He also said "when I ran for mayor both times, I was asked very, very often to do the following: Pledge that you will never raise taxes. I refused to do that. Pledge that you will lower taxes. I refused to do that."
When Giuliani endorsed liberal icon Mario Cuomo for governor in 1994, he called the Republican-Conservative George Pataki's 25 percent state income tax cut (cloned from the Forbes-inspired New Jersey income tax cut) "irresponsible" and a "shell game that would hurt everyone in the state."
Forbes points to Rudy's fiscal management of New York City as proof of his conservatism. "Giuliani," he claims, "turned an inherited deficit [$2.3 billion] into a multimillion dollar surplus." It's true that during Giuliani's first term when times were tough, he contained costs and made some tax cuts. But what Forbes failed to point out is that in Rudy's second term, when the economy was booming, he abandoned fiscal restraint and became a big-spending liberal. City budget expenditures jumped 25 percent – twice the inflation rate – and Giuliani left his successor a projected operating deficit of $4.5 billion and New York's citizens with the highest tax burden in any major municipality in America.
Rudy Giuliani, a legatee of Nelson Rockefeller and John Lindsay, fails on every fiscal and cultural issue that are dear to conservatives. And one can only hope that Steve Forbes and his friends will learn before it's too late that life-long liberal Rudy Giuliani is employing conservative rhetoric merely to patronize them.
George J. Marlin is an author, former Conservative Party nominee for mayor of the City of New York, former two term Executive Director and CEO of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.
Tuesday, April 03, 2007
Russia poses Cold War-scale intel threat: official
by David Morgan
(note by Jeffrey Robbins, And you thought they were an ally? Note the hedge at the end of the article by speaker...why shouldn't we consider them potential immediate threat in large scope of operating through agent countries they supply?)
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Russian efforts to obtain secrets on U.S. political and military decision-making have reached levels not seen since the Cold War, the top U.S. counterintelligence official said on Thursday.
Joel Brenner, the Bush administration's National Counterintelligence Executive, said a new intensive assault by Moscow is intent on gaining insights into "the upper echelon of U.S. decision-making" rather than stealing secrets about sensitive U.S. technology.
"The Russians are back to Cold War levels in their efforts against the United States," he said in a speech to the American Bar Association.
Brenner, whose job is to oversee counterintelligence strategy and policy for U.S. intelligence czar Mike McConnell, did not provide details about suspected Russian intelligence operations in the United States. Sensitive counterintelligence activities are classified.
But he said Moscow appears less interested in U.S. commercial and military technology than other countries including China, which U.S. officials have described as the greatest counterintelligence threat facing the United States.
Brenner's remarks come at a time when Russian officials including President Vladimir Putin have become more openly confrontational about U.S. policy such as Washington's plan to deploy a missile defense system in Eastern Europe.
Putin, himself a former KGB official, accused the United States of trying to dominate the world in a February speech.
U.S. officials and independent analysts view Russia as a country determined to return to great power status it enjoyed during the Cold War, largely through its oil wealth and the reconstitution of its military and intelligence capabilities.
McConnell also warned the Senate last month that Russia was taking a step backward in its democratic progress and could be heading for a controlled succession to Putin. Moscow responded by describing his remarks as "outdated assumptions."
The U.S. government has suffered several embarrassing security breaches at the hands of Russian and Soviet intelligence moles, including former CIA case officer Aldrich Ames and former FBI agent Robert Hanssen.
Brenner said Ames provided the Soviets with enough information about U.S. officials to "decapitate" America's leadership in the event of war.
But Moscow intelligence does not now appear interested in posing a physical threat to American leaders. "It's not a strike threat they're after. I don't want to give that impression," Brenner said.
(note by Jeffrey Robbins, And you thought they were an ally? Note the hedge at the end of the article by speaker...why shouldn't we consider them potential immediate threat in large scope of operating through agent countries they supply?)
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Russian efforts to obtain secrets on U.S. political and military decision-making have reached levels not seen since the Cold War, the top U.S. counterintelligence official said on Thursday.
Joel Brenner, the Bush administration's National Counterintelligence Executive, said a new intensive assault by Moscow is intent on gaining insights into "the upper echelon of U.S. decision-making" rather than stealing secrets about sensitive U.S. technology.
"The Russians are back to Cold War levels in their efforts against the United States," he said in a speech to the American Bar Association.
Brenner, whose job is to oversee counterintelligence strategy and policy for U.S. intelligence czar Mike McConnell, did not provide details about suspected Russian intelligence operations in the United States. Sensitive counterintelligence activities are classified.
But he said Moscow appears less interested in U.S. commercial and military technology than other countries including China, which U.S. officials have described as the greatest counterintelligence threat facing the United States.
Brenner's remarks come at a time when Russian officials including President Vladimir Putin have become more openly confrontational about U.S. policy such as Washington's plan to deploy a missile defense system in Eastern Europe.
Putin, himself a former KGB official, accused the United States of trying to dominate the world in a February speech.
U.S. officials and independent analysts view Russia as a country determined to return to great power status it enjoyed during the Cold War, largely through its oil wealth and the reconstitution of its military and intelligence capabilities.
McConnell also warned the Senate last month that Russia was taking a step backward in its democratic progress and could be heading for a controlled succession to Putin. Moscow responded by describing his remarks as "outdated assumptions."
The U.S. government has suffered several embarrassing security breaches at the hands of Russian and Soviet intelligence moles, including former CIA case officer Aldrich Ames and former FBI agent Robert Hanssen.
Brenner said Ames provided the Soviets with enough information about U.S. officials to "decapitate" America's leadership in the event of war.
But Moscow intelligence does not now appear interested in posing a physical threat to American leaders. "It's not a strike threat they're after. I don't want to give that impression," Brenner said.
Kissinger Presidency
by Robert Dallek
(note by Jeffrey Robbins: I would encourage you to use hyperlink to read all four pages of the article, an interesting look into the likely power of Cabinets in relation to Presidential post itself. Below is paste of page 1 only...)
Battered by Watergate in 1973, President Nixon was losing his epic power struggle with Henry Kissinger. Then the Middle East exploded. In an excerpt from his new book, using freshly opened archives, the author describes how the secretary of state took control.
by Robert Dallek May 2007
Excerpted from Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power, by Robert Dallek, to be published this month by HarperCollins Publishers; © 2007 by the author.
Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, 1972. Rauchwetter/dba/Landov. Enlarge this photo.
Henry Kissinger never wanted the 20,000 pages of his telephone transcripts made public—not while he was alive, at any rate. And for good reason. It was Kissinger's practice while he served as Richard M. Nixon's national-security adviser and, later, as his secretary of state to have assistants listen in on dead-key extensions and make verbatim transcripts. The result is a record of conversations and decision-making rivaled only by the Nixon tapes—and a real-time rendering of events often at variance with official portrayals. It is ironic: Nixon and Kissinger presided over an administration that was unsurpassed (until the current one) in its secrecy, and yet produced the richest trove of presidential records in history, making the Nixon White House more transparent in retrospect than any before or since.
During the past four years I have sifted through much of the Nixon administration's recently opened archives: all of those Kissinger telephone transcripts, for instance, along with the unpublished portions of the diaries of Nixon's first chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman; hundreds of hours of newly available Nixon tapes; and the national-security records (which total close to a million pages) that include Kissinger's private office files and the previously unread papers of Alexander M. Haig Jr., who was Kissinger's deputy at the National Security Council and then took Haldeman's place as chief of staff. Put it all together and an intimate picture emerges of the complex relationship between Nixon and Kissinger, men who were allies but also rivals—paranoid and insecure, deceitful and manipulative, ruthless and strangely vulnerable.
Nixon is dead, but Henry Kissinger remains very much a man in public life. In recent years, President George W. Bush has consulted him for advice on the Iraq war, which Kissinger has supported. Since 2001, Kissinger has, according to Bob Woodward's State of Denial, met with the president every other month, and with Vice President Dick Cheney every month, and he has advised President Bush that "victory … is the only meaningful exit strategy" for Iraq. So it is a good moment to visit the newly available documents and transcripts for the fresh detail they provide. They show Kissinger at moments of high drama—for instance, during the Yom Kippur War, when he made decisions of utmost gravity while keeping Nixon at arm's length. They show a man whose growing power derived from Nixon's deepening incapacity. And they reveal Kissinger's troubling personality and methods across a broad front.
The Prima Donna. Nixon did not anticipate the extent to which Kissinger, whom he barely knew when he appointed him national-security adviser, in 1969, would be envious and high-strung—a maintenance project of the first order. Nixon had a running conversation with Haldeman about "the K problem," as Haldeman noted in his diaries. Nixon complained in one taped conversation with the chief of staff: "Henry's personality problem is just too goddamn difficult for us to deal [with].… Goddamn it, Bob, he's psychopathic about trying to screw [Secretary of State William] Rogers." Haldeman feared that if Kissinger "wins the battle with Rogers" he might not be "livable with afterwards." Nixon agreed that he would "be a dictator." "Did you know that Henry worries every time I talk on the phone with anybody?" he told Haldeman and domestic counselor John Ehrlichman in another taped conversation. "His feeling is that he must be present every time I see anybody important."
Vietnam. Using language that has a painfully contemporary echo, Kissinger and Nixon very quickly came to private conclusions about Vietnam that they never revealed publicly and denied entertaining. "In Saigon the tendency is to fight the war to victory," Nixon told Kissinger, according to the transcript of a 1969 phone conversation. "But you and I know it won't happen—it is impossible." Even so, according to Haldeman's unpublished diaries, Nixon later urged that Democratic critics making this same point should be labeled "the party of surrender." When someone told Kissinger that Nixon could not be re-elected, because of Vietnam, he disputed it and added, according to a memo of a conversation, that "anytime we want to get out of Vietnam we can," and that "we will get out of Vietnam before the [1972] election." Nixon wanted to plan the removal of all U.S. troops by the end of 1971, but Kissinger cautioned that, if North Vietnam then de-stabilized Saigon during the following year, events could have an adverse effect on the president's campaign. According to Haldeman's diaries, Kissinger advocated a pullout in the fall of 1972, "so that if any bad results follow they will be too late to affect the election." He apparently had nothing to say about the American lives that would be lost by deliberately prolonging the war. Just before a peace treaty was signed, Kissinger in a phone conversation advised Nixon against stating that this was a "lasting peace or guaranteed peace because this thing is almost certain to blow up sooner or later."
The Pentagon Papers. Kissinger was deeply unsettled by the revelation, in June of 1971, that the Pentagon's secret history of the Vietnam War had been given to The New York Times by a former adviser to Kissinger on Vietnam, Daniel Ellsberg. Would Kissinger be tarred by association? When he saw Nixon, according to a taped conversation, Kissinger said of Ellsberg, "That son-of-a-bitch. I know him well. He is completely nuts.… He always seemed a little bit unbalanced." As for The New York Times, Nixon and Kissinger were determined to come down hard. "Goddamn newspapers—they're a bunch of sluts," Nixon said. In another taped conversation, two weeks later, he said, "I don't give a goddamn about repression, do you?" "No," Kissinger replied.
Mental Health. Nixon confided to Haldeman, according to the unpublished diaries, that he was "quite shocked" at how Kissinger had "ranted and raved" at Alexander Haig during a 1971 phone conversation, telling Haig that he "had handled everything wrong," and calling U.N. ambassador George H. W. Bush "an idiot." Nixon believed that something more serious was going on, and it is known that he once mused to Ehrlichman that Kissinger might need psychiatric help. The subject of Kissinger's stability came up again in 1972. Having read The Will to Live, by Dr. Arnold Hutschnecker, his former psychotherapist, Nixon recommended it to Haldeman as providing a road map to what Nixon, according to Haldeman's unpublished diary notes, called "K's suicidal complex." Haldeman went on: "He also wants to be sure I make extensive memoranda about K's mental processes and so on, for his file."
(note by Jeffrey Robbins: I would encourage you to use hyperlink to read all four pages of the article, an interesting look into the likely power of Cabinets in relation to Presidential post itself. Below is paste of page 1 only...)
Battered by Watergate in 1973, President Nixon was losing his epic power struggle with Henry Kissinger. Then the Middle East exploded. In an excerpt from his new book, using freshly opened archives, the author describes how the secretary of state took control.
by Robert Dallek May 2007
Excerpted from Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power, by Robert Dallek, to be published this month by HarperCollins Publishers; © 2007 by the author.
Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, 1972. Rauchwetter/dba/Landov. Enlarge this photo.
Henry Kissinger never wanted the 20,000 pages of his telephone transcripts made public—not while he was alive, at any rate. And for good reason. It was Kissinger's practice while he served as Richard M. Nixon's national-security adviser and, later, as his secretary of state to have assistants listen in on dead-key extensions and make verbatim transcripts. The result is a record of conversations and decision-making rivaled only by the Nixon tapes—and a real-time rendering of events often at variance with official portrayals. It is ironic: Nixon and Kissinger presided over an administration that was unsurpassed (until the current one) in its secrecy, and yet produced the richest trove of presidential records in history, making the Nixon White House more transparent in retrospect than any before or since.
During the past four years I have sifted through much of the Nixon administration's recently opened archives: all of those Kissinger telephone transcripts, for instance, along with the unpublished portions of the diaries of Nixon's first chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman; hundreds of hours of newly available Nixon tapes; and the national-security records (which total close to a million pages) that include Kissinger's private office files and the previously unread papers of Alexander M. Haig Jr., who was Kissinger's deputy at the National Security Council and then took Haldeman's place as chief of staff. Put it all together and an intimate picture emerges of the complex relationship between Nixon and Kissinger, men who were allies but also rivals—paranoid and insecure, deceitful and manipulative, ruthless and strangely vulnerable.
Nixon is dead, but Henry Kissinger remains very much a man in public life. In recent years, President George W. Bush has consulted him for advice on the Iraq war, which Kissinger has supported. Since 2001, Kissinger has, according to Bob Woodward's State of Denial, met with the president every other month, and with Vice President Dick Cheney every month, and he has advised President Bush that "victory … is the only meaningful exit strategy" for Iraq. So it is a good moment to visit the newly available documents and transcripts for the fresh detail they provide. They show Kissinger at moments of high drama—for instance, during the Yom Kippur War, when he made decisions of utmost gravity while keeping Nixon at arm's length. They show a man whose growing power derived from Nixon's deepening incapacity. And they reveal Kissinger's troubling personality and methods across a broad front.
The Prima Donna. Nixon did not anticipate the extent to which Kissinger, whom he barely knew when he appointed him national-security adviser, in 1969, would be envious and high-strung—a maintenance project of the first order. Nixon had a running conversation with Haldeman about "the K problem," as Haldeman noted in his diaries. Nixon complained in one taped conversation with the chief of staff: "Henry's personality problem is just too goddamn difficult for us to deal [with].… Goddamn it, Bob, he's psychopathic about trying to screw [Secretary of State William] Rogers." Haldeman feared that if Kissinger "wins the battle with Rogers" he might not be "livable with afterwards." Nixon agreed that he would "be a dictator." "Did you know that Henry worries every time I talk on the phone with anybody?" he told Haldeman and domestic counselor John Ehrlichman in another taped conversation. "His feeling is that he must be present every time I see anybody important."
Vietnam. Using language that has a painfully contemporary echo, Kissinger and Nixon very quickly came to private conclusions about Vietnam that they never revealed publicly and denied entertaining. "In Saigon the tendency is to fight the war to victory," Nixon told Kissinger, according to the transcript of a 1969 phone conversation. "But you and I know it won't happen—it is impossible." Even so, according to Haldeman's unpublished diaries, Nixon later urged that Democratic critics making this same point should be labeled "the party of surrender." When someone told Kissinger that Nixon could not be re-elected, because of Vietnam, he disputed it and added, according to a memo of a conversation, that "anytime we want to get out of Vietnam we can," and that "we will get out of Vietnam before the [1972] election." Nixon wanted to plan the removal of all U.S. troops by the end of 1971, but Kissinger cautioned that, if North Vietnam then de-stabilized Saigon during the following year, events could have an adverse effect on the president's campaign. According to Haldeman's diaries, Kissinger advocated a pullout in the fall of 1972, "so that if any bad results follow they will be too late to affect the election." He apparently had nothing to say about the American lives that would be lost by deliberately prolonging the war. Just before a peace treaty was signed, Kissinger in a phone conversation advised Nixon against stating that this was a "lasting peace or guaranteed peace because this thing is almost certain to blow up sooner or later."
The Pentagon Papers. Kissinger was deeply unsettled by the revelation, in June of 1971, that the Pentagon's secret history of the Vietnam War had been given to The New York Times by a former adviser to Kissinger on Vietnam, Daniel Ellsberg. Would Kissinger be tarred by association? When he saw Nixon, according to a taped conversation, Kissinger said of Ellsberg, "That son-of-a-bitch. I know him well. He is completely nuts.… He always seemed a little bit unbalanced." As for The New York Times, Nixon and Kissinger were determined to come down hard. "Goddamn newspapers—they're a bunch of sluts," Nixon said. In another taped conversation, two weeks later, he said, "I don't give a goddamn about repression, do you?" "No," Kissinger replied.
Mental Health. Nixon confided to Haldeman, according to the unpublished diaries, that he was "quite shocked" at how Kissinger had "ranted and raved" at Alexander Haig during a 1971 phone conversation, telling Haig that he "had handled everything wrong," and calling U.N. ambassador George H. W. Bush "an idiot." Nixon believed that something more serious was going on, and it is known that he once mused to Ehrlichman that Kissinger might need psychiatric help. The subject of Kissinger's stability came up again in 1972. Having read The Will to Live, by Dr. Arnold Hutschnecker, his former psychotherapist, Nixon recommended it to Haldeman as providing a road map to what Nixon, according to Haldeman's unpublished diary notes, called "K's suicidal complex." Haldeman went on: "He also wants to be sure I make extensive memoranda about K's mental processes and so on, for his file."
Friday, March 16, 2007
How The Tax System Works: The Looters
(note: I "stole" this from an email forwarded to me, there was no attribution.)
Just in case you are not completely clear on this issue, the following might help. Let's put tax cuts in terms everyone can understand. Suppose that every day, ten men go out for beer and the bill for all ten comes to $100. If they paid their bill the way we pay our taxes, it would go something like this:
The first four men (the poorest) would pay nothing.
The fifth would pay $1.
The sixth would pay $3.
The seventh would pay $7.
The eighth would pay $12.
The ninth would pay $18.
The tenth man (the richest) would pay $59.
So, that's what they decided to do: The ten men drank in the bar every day and seemed quite happy with the arrangement, until on day, the owner threw them a curve. "Since you are all such good customers," he said, "I'm going to reduce the cost of your daily beer by $20."Drinks for the ten now cost just $80. The group still wanted to pay their bill the way we pay our taxes so the first four men were unaffected. They would still drink for free. What about the other six men, those paying the tab? How could they divide the $20 windfall so that everyone would get his 'fair share?' They realized that $20 divided by six is $3.33. But if they subtracted that from everybody's share, then the fifth man and the sixth man would each end up being paid to drink his beer. So, the bar owner suggested that it would be fair to reduce each man's bill by roughly the same amount, and he proceeded to work out the amounts each should pay:
The fifth man, like the first four, now paid nothing (100% savings).
The sixth now paid $2 instead of $3 (33%savings).
The seventh now pay $5 instead of $7 (28%savings).
The eighth now paid $9 instead of $12 (25% savings).
The ninth now paid $14 instead of $18 (22% savings).
The tenth now paid $49 instead of $59 (16% savings).
Each of the six was better off than before. And the first four continued to drink for free. But once outside the restaurant, the men began to compare their savings. "I only got a dollar out of the $20,"declared the sixth man. He pointed to the tenth man," but he got $10!" "Yeah, that's right," exclaimed the fifth man. "I only saved a dollar, too. It's unfair that he got ten times more than I!" "That's true!!" shouted the seventh man. "Why should he get $10 back when I got only two? The wealthy get all the breaks!" "Wait a minute," yelled the first four men in unison. "We didn't get anything at all. The system exploits the poor!" The nine men surrounded the tenth and beat him up. The next night the tenth man didn't show up for drinks, so the nine sat down and had beers without him. But when it came time to pay the bill, they discovered something important. They didn't have enough money between all of them for even half of the bill! And that, boys and girls, journalists and college professors, is how our tax system works. The people who pay the highest taxes get the most benefit from a tax reduction. Tax them too much, attack them for being wealthy, and they just may not show up anymore.
Just in case you are not completely clear on this issue, the following might help. Let's put tax cuts in terms everyone can understand. Suppose that every day, ten men go out for beer and the bill for all ten comes to $100. If they paid their bill the way we pay our taxes, it would go something like this:
The first four men (the poorest) would pay nothing.
The fifth would pay $1.
The sixth would pay $3.
The seventh would pay $7.
The eighth would pay $12.
The ninth would pay $18.
The tenth man (the richest) would pay $59.
So, that's what they decided to do: The ten men drank in the bar every day and seemed quite happy with the arrangement, until on day, the owner threw them a curve. "Since you are all such good customers," he said, "I'm going to reduce the cost of your daily beer by $20."Drinks for the ten now cost just $80. The group still wanted to pay their bill the way we pay our taxes so the first four men were unaffected. They would still drink for free. What about the other six men, those paying the tab? How could they divide the $20 windfall so that everyone would get his 'fair share?' They realized that $20 divided by six is $3.33. But if they subtracted that from everybody's share, then the fifth man and the sixth man would each end up being paid to drink his beer. So, the bar owner suggested that it would be fair to reduce each man's bill by roughly the same amount, and he proceeded to work out the amounts each should pay:
The fifth man, like the first four, now paid nothing (100% savings).
The sixth now paid $2 instead of $3 (33%savings).
The seventh now pay $5 instead of $7 (28%savings).
The eighth now paid $9 instead of $12 (25% savings).
The ninth now paid $14 instead of $18 (22% savings).
The tenth now paid $49 instead of $59 (16% savings).
Each of the six was better off than before. And the first four continued to drink for free. But once outside the restaurant, the men began to compare their savings. "I only got a dollar out of the $20,"declared the sixth man. He pointed to the tenth man," but he got $10!" "Yeah, that's right," exclaimed the fifth man. "I only saved a dollar, too. It's unfair that he got ten times more than I!" "That's true!!" shouted the seventh man. "Why should he get $10 back when I got only two? The wealthy get all the breaks!" "Wait a minute," yelled the first four men in unison. "We didn't get anything at all. The system exploits the poor!" The nine men surrounded the tenth and beat him up. The next night the tenth man didn't show up for drinks, so the nine sat down and had beers without him. But when it came time to pay the bill, they discovered something important. They didn't have enough money between all of them for even half of the bill! And that, boys and girls, journalists and college professors, is how our tax system works. The people who pay the highest taxes get the most benefit from a tax reduction. Tax them too much, attack them for being wealthy, and they just may not show up anymore.
Friday, March 09, 2007
Justice Dept.: FBI Misused Patriot Act
by Lara Jakes Jordan
The FBI improperly and, in some cases, illegally used the USA Patriot Act to secretly obtain personal information about people in the United States, a Justice Department audit concluded Friday.
And for three years the FBI has underreported to Congress how often it forced businesses to turn over the customer data, the audit found.
FBI agents sometimes demanded the data without proper authorization, according to the 126-page audit by Justice Department Inspector General Glenn A. Fine. At other times, the audit found, the FBI improperly obtained telephone records in non-emergency circumstances.
The audit blames agent error and shoddy record-keeping for the bulk of the problems and did not find any indication of criminal misconduct.
Still, "we believe the improper or illegal uses we found involve serious misuses of national security letter authorities," the audit concludes.
At issue are the security letters, a power outlined in the Patriot Act that the Bush administration pushed through Congress after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks. The letters, or administrative subpoenas, are used in suspected terrorism and espionage cases. They allow the FBI to require telephone companies, Internet service providers, banks, credit bureaus and other businesses to produce highly personal records about their customers or subscribers _ without a judge's approval.
About three-fourths of the national security letters were issued for counterterror cases, and the other fourth for spy investigations.
FBI Director Robert S. Mueller called Fine's audit "a fair and objective review of the FBI's use of a proven and useful investigative tool."
The finding "of deficiencies in our processes is unacceptable," Mueller said in a statement.
"We strive to exercise our authorities consistent with the privacy protections and civil liberties that we are sworn to uphold," Mueller said. "Anything less will not be tolerated. While we've already taken some steps to address these shortcomings, I am ordering additional corrective measures to be taken immediately."
Fine's annual review is required by Congress, over the objections of the Bush administration.
The audit released Friday found that the number of national security letters issued by the FBI skyrocketed in the years after the Patriot Act became law.
In 2000, for example, the FBI issued an estimated 8,500 letters. By however, that number jumped to 39,000. It rose again the next year, to about 56,000 letters in 2004, and dropped to approximately 47,000 in 2005.
Over the entire three-year period, the audit found the FBI issued 143,074 national security letters requesting customer data from businesses.
The FBI vastly underreported the numbers. In 2005, the FBI told Congress that its agents in 2003 and 2004 had delivered only 9,254 national security letters seeking e-mail, telephone or financial information on 3,501 U.S. citizens and legal residents over the previous two years.
Additionally, the audit found, the FBI identified 26 possible violations in its use of the national security letters, including failing to get proper authorization, making improper requests under the law and unauthorized collection of telephone or Internet e-mail records.
Of the violations, 22 were caused by FBI errors, while the other four were the result of mistakes made by the firms that received the letters.
The FBI also used so-called "exigent letters," signed by officials at FBI headquarters who were not authorized to sign national security letters, to obtain information. In at least 700 cases, these exigent letters were sent to three telephone companies to get toll billing records and subscriber information.
"In many cases, there was no pending investigation associated with the request at the time the exigent letters were sent," the audit concluded.
The letters inaccurately said the FBI had requested subpoenas for the information requested _ "when, in fact, it had not," the audit found.
Senators outraged over the conclusions signaled they would provide tougher oversight of the FBI _ and perhaps limit its power.
"The report indicates abuse of the authority" Congress gave the FBI, said Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt. "You cannot have people act as free agents on something where they're going to be delving into your privacy."
The committee's top Republican, Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter, said the FBI appears to have "badly misused national security letters." The senator said, "This is, regrettably, part of an ongoing process where the federal authorities are not really sensitive to privacy and go far beyond what we have authorized."
Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., another member on the panel that oversees the FBI, said the report "proves that 'trust us' doesn't cut it."
Justice spokeswoman Tasia Scolinos said Attorney General Alberto Gonzales "commends the work of the inspector general in uncovering serious problems in the FBI's use of NSLs."
The American Civil Liberties Union said the audit proves Congress must amend the Patriot Act to require judicial approval anytime the FBI wants access to sensitive personal information. "The Attorney General and the FBI are part of the problem and they cannot be trusted to be part of the solution," said Anthony D. Romero, the ACLU's executive director.
The FBI improperly and, in some cases, illegally used the USA Patriot Act to secretly obtain personal information about people in the United States, a Justice Department audit concluded Friday.
And for three years the FBI has underreported to Congress how often it forced businesses to turn over the customer data, the audit found.
FBI agents sometimes demanded the data without proper authorization, according to the 126-page audit by Justice Department Inspector General Glenn A. Fine. At other times, the audit found, the FBI improperly obtained telephone records in non-emergency circumstances.
The audit blames agent error and shoddy record-keeping for the bulk of the problems and did not find any indication of criminal misconduct.
Still, "we believe the improper or illegal uses we found involve serious misuses of national security letter authorities," the audit concludes.
At issue are the security letters, a power outlined in the Patriot Act that the Bush administration pushed through Congress after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks. The letters, or administrative subpoenas, are used in suspected terrorism and espionage cases. They allow the FBI to require telephone companies, Internet service providers, banks, credit bureaus and other businesses to produce highly personal records about their customers or subscribers _ without a judge's approval.
About three-fourths of the national security letters were issued for counterterror cases, and the other fourth for spy investigations.
FBI Director Robert S. Mueller called Fine's audit "a fair and objective review of the FBI's use of a proven and useful investigative tool."
The finding "of deficiencies in our processes is unacceptable," Mueller said in a statement.
"We strive to exercise our authorities consistent with the privacy protections and civil liberties that we are sworn to uphold," Mueller said. "Anything less will not be tolerated. While we've already taken some steps to address these shortcomings, I am ordering additional corrective measures to be taken immediately."
Fine's annual review is required by Congress, over the objections of the Bush administration.
The audit released Friday found that the number of national security letters issued by the FBI skyrocketed in the years after the Patriot Act became law.
In 2000, for example, the FBI issued an estimated 8,500 letters. By however, that number jumped to 39,000. It rose again the next year, to about 56,000 letters in 2004, and dropped to approximately 47,000 in 2005.
Over the entire three-year period, the audit found the FBI issued 143,074 national security letters requesting customer data from businesses.
The FBI vastly underreported the numbers. In 2005, the FBI told Congress that its agents in 2003 and 2004 had delivered only 9,254 national security letters seeking e-mail, telephone or financial information on 3,501 U.S. citizens and legal residents over the previous two years.
Additionally, the audit found, the FBI identified 26 possible violations in its use of the national security letters, including failing to get proper authorization, making improper requests under the law and unauthorized collection of telephone or Internet e-mail records.
Of the violations, 22 were caused by FBI errors, while the other four were the result of mistakes made by the firms that received the letters.
The FBI also used so-called "exigent letters," signed by officials at FBI headquarters who were not authorized to sign national security letters, to obtain information. In at least 700 cases, these exigent letters were sent to three telephone companies to get toll billing records and subscriber information.
"In many cases, there was no pending investigation associated with the request at the time the exigent letters were sent," the audit concluded.
The letters inaccurately said the FBI had requested subpoenas for the information requested _ "when, in fact, it had not," the audit found.
Senators outraged over the conclusions signaled they would provide tougher oversight of the FBI _ and perhaps limit its power.
"The report indicates abuse of the authority" Congress gave the FBI, said Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt. "You cannot have people act as free agents on something where they're going to be delving into your privacy."
The committee's top Republican, Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter, said the FBI appears to have "badly misused national security letters." The senator said, "This is, regrettably, part of an ongoing process where the federal authorities are not really sensitive to privacy and go far beyond what we have authorized."
Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., another member on the panel that oversees the FBI, said the report "proves that 'trust us' doesn't cut it."
Justice spokeswoman Tasia Scolinos said Attorney General Alberto Gonzales "commends the work of the inspector general in uncovering serious problems in the FBI's use of NSLs."
The American Civil Liberties Union said the audit proves Congress must amend the Patriot Act to require judicial approval anytime the FBI wants access to sensitive personal information. "The Attorney General and the FBI are part of the problem and they cannot be trusted to be part of the solution," said Anthony D. Romero, the ACLU's executive director.
Thursday, March 08, 2007
FDR's legacy: Tyranny
by Ellis Washington
The American Republic will endure, until politicians realize they can bribe the people with their own money. – Alexis de Tocqueville
I didn't earn it, I don't deserve it, but if the government misses one of my payments, I'll raise hell! – Grandpa Simpson (from the TV show "The Simpsons")
On Feb. 5, 2007, President George W. Bush submitted a budget for Congress to consider passing. It contained $2.9 trillion dollars in spending, not including $235 billion in additional military spending for the war in Iraq for 2007 and 2008. Regrettably, what you don't hear from Democrats or Republicans is that the overwhelming majority of that spending is against the original intent of the framers of the Constitution, yet it exists and is growing exponentially in the face of a multi-trillion dollar U.S. deficit largely being financed by, of all nations, China. What if China calls in our several trillion dollars in U.S. debt they presently hold? Bye bye, USA.
The origins of what is ubiquitously referred to as "Big Government" dates back 75 years to the first of four terms of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1933-45). FDR's legacy essentially rests on replacing God with Big Government to fulfill human needs. The church, philosophy, Jewish, Christian and other religious organizations became secondary and increasingly irrelevant in the face of this unprecedented leviathan government expansion. FDR and his socialist bureaucrats would never again rely on the religion-based charity or the church to help the people in need. The State, proud and lifted up, had ascended Parnassus as the new god of the latest, dynamic, Progressive Era and would provide all needs for everyone. FDR's legacy was his comprehensive and utter demoralization of America's can-do spirit called the "New Deal."
(Column continues below)
adsonar_placementId=1270202;adsonar_pid=663759;adsonar_ps=1451068;adsonar_zw=300;adsonar_zh=250;adsonar_jv="ads.adsonar.com";
The Great Depression of October 1929 was a godsend for Roosevelt. America's dire economic conditions, including 25 percent unemployment (up from 4 percent) and the collapse of manufacturing output by one-third, sent prices falling everywhere – making the burden of the repayment of debts almost impossible. Heavy industry, mining, lumbering and agriculture all felt its impact. These very grave economic circumstances gave FDR the perfect pretext for fundamentally changing America from a democratic-republican form of government to a socialist state. He wasted no time. Within the first 100 days of taking office, he and his advisers quickly formulated a series of leviathan programs, and between 1933 and 1937 – with the goal of relief, recovery and reform of the United States economy – the U.S. moved slowly out of its economic malaise during the Great Depression (at least that was the rhetoric from the propaganda press).
Scottish historian Sir Alex Fraser Tyler long ago predicted a man like FDR seizing power:
A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largess from the public treasury. From that time on the majority always votes for the candidate promising the most benefits from the public treasury, with the results that a democracy always collapse over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship.
The three Rs of FDR's New Deal programs were direct relief, economic recovery and financial reform. Relief was the immediate effort to help the one-third of the population that was hardest hit by the depression. Reform was based on the supposition that the depression was caused by the inherent instability of the market and that government intrusion was necessary to justify, correct and stabilize the economy, and to balance the interests of farmers, business and labor. Recovery would be a series of program initiatives that in theory pull the U.S. completely out of the Great Depression.
By 1934, the Supreme Court starting ruling against of FDR's New Deal programs as unconstitutional. In his second term, Roosevelt, flush from his 1936 landside presidential victory, was outraged and was convinced he had a mandate from the people to continue and expand his New Deal programs. This conflict between the Court and the Executive branches of government lead to FDR's court-packing bill in 1937. Although the bill failed, the Supreme Court, fearing FDR's attempt to neutralize them, began declaring his New Deal laws constitutional.
By 1942, the Supreme Court had virtually stopped its conservative "judicial activism" of striking down congressional laws passed by New Dealers. Through an unconstitutional expansion of Article I, Section 8, the Supreme Court, in cases like Wickard v. Filburn, ruled that the Commerce Clause applied to virtually any regulation allowing the necessary expansion of federal power to make the New Deal "constitutional." The fix was in, and in subsequent decades, as the federal government grew in power over the people, their constitutionally enumerated freedoms became a dead letter (i.e., Ninth and 10th Amendments, Commerce Clause protection, etc.).
Historian Clarence B. Carson captured the intoxicating optimism of the 1930s regarding government's comprehensive and exalted role to solve all the problems that have plagued mankind since ancient times, saying:
At this remove in time from the early days of the New Deal, it is difficult to recapture, even in imagination, the heady enthusiasm among a goodly number of intellectuals for a government-planned economy ... as General Hugh Johnson put it, from "the murderous doctrine of savage and wolfish individualism, looking to dog-eat-dog and devil take the hindmost."
Mr. Carson's rather dour assessment of free-market capitalism pre-FDR is exactly what made America the greatest nation in the history of humanity – each individual, limited only by his ability and imagination, had the freedom to pursue in Jefferson's words – "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness" by God's power, not government's encroachment on We the People's inalienable rights.
What is FDR's legacy to America? In a word, tyranny. C.S. Lewis put it is thusly:
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their consciences.
FDR taught American to forsake to three things that made her great – free-market capitalism, its Judeo-Christian traditions and rugged American individualism. How? By pitting church against state, sacred against secular, men against women, race against race, rich against poor, creed against creed, Jew against Gentile, liberals against conservatives, class against class, the haves against the have nots. What is the result of this state of affairs in modern times? – Thou shalt covet thy neighbor's ass.
The American Republic will endure, until politicians realize they can bribe the people with their own money. – Alexis de Tocqueville
I didn't earn it, I don't deserve it, but if the government misses one of my payments, I'll raise hell! – Grandpa Simpson (from the TV show "The Simpsons")
On Feb. 5, 2007, President George W. Bush submitted a budget for Congress to consider passing. It contained $2.9 trillion dollars in spending, not including $235 billion in additional military spending for the war in Iraq for 2007 and 2008. Regrettably, what you don't hear from Democrats or Republicans is that the overwhelming majority of that spending is against the original intent of the framers of the Constitution, yet it exists and is growing exponentially in the face of a multi-trillion dollar U.S. deficit largely being financed by, of all nations, China. What if China calls in our several trillion dollars in U.S. debt they presently hold? Bye bye, USA.
The origins of what is ubiquitously referred to as "Big Government" dates back 75 years to the first of four terms of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1933-45). FDR's legacy essentially rests on replacing God with Big Government to fulfill human needs. The church, philosophy, Jewish, Christian and other religious organizations became secondary and increasingly irrelevant in the face of this unprecedented leviathan government expansion. FDR and his socialist bureaucrats would never again rely on the religion-based charity or the church to help the people in need. The State, proud and lifted up, had ascended Parnassus as the new god of the latest, dynamic, Progressive Era and would provide all needs for everyone. FDR's legacy was his comprehensive and utter demoralization of America's can-do spirit called the "New Deal."
(Column continues below)
adsonar_placementId=1270202;adsonar_pid=663759;adsonar_ps=1451068;adsonar_zw=300;adsonar_zh=250;adsonar_jv="ads.adsonar.com";
The Great Depression of October 1929 was a godsend for Roosevelt. America's dire economic conditions, including 25 percent unemployment (up from 4 percent) and the collapse of manufacturing output by one-third, sent prices falling everywhere – making the burden of the repayment of debts almost impossible. Heavy industry, mining, lumbering and agriculture all felt its impact. These very grave economic circumstances gave FDR the perfect pretext for fundamentally changing America from a democratic-republican form of government to a socialist state. He wasted no time. Within the first 100 days of taking office, he and his advisers quickly formulated a series of leviathan programs, and between 1933 and 1937 – with the goal of relief, recovery and reform of the United States economy – the U.S. moved slowly out of its economic malaise during the Great Depression (at least that was the rhetoric from the propaganda press).
Scottish historian Sir Alex Fraser Tyler long ago predicted a man like FDR seizing power:
A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largess from the public treasury. From that time on the majority always votes for the candidate promising the most benefits from the public treasury, with the results that a democracy always collapse over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship.
The three Rs of FDR's New Deal programs were direct relief, economic recovery and financial reform. Relief was the immediate effort to help the one-third of the population that was hardest hit by the depression. Reform was based on the supposition that the depression was caused by the inherent instability of the market and that government intrusion was necessary to justify, correct and stabilize the economy, and to balance the interests of farmers, business and labor. Recovery would be a series of program initiatives that in theory pull the U.S. completely out of the Great Depression.
By 1934, the Supreme Court starting ruling against of FDR's New Deal programs as unconstitutional. In his second term, Roosevelt, flush from his 1936 landside presidential victory, was outraged and was convinced he had a mandate from the people to continue and expand his New Deal programs. This conflict between the Court and the Executive branches of government lead to FDR's court-packing bill in 1937. Although the bill failed, the Supreme Court, fearing FDR's attempt to neutralize them, began declaring his New Deal laws constitutional.
By 1942, the Supreme Court had virtually stopped its conservative "judicial activism" of striking down congressional laws passed by New Dealers. Through an unconstitutional expansion of Article I, Section 8, the Supreme Court, in cases like Wickard v. Filburn, ruled that the Commerce Clause applied to virtually any regulation allowing the necessary expansion of federal power to make the New Deal "constitutional." The fix was in, and in subsequent decades, as the federal government grew in power over the people, their constitutionally enumerated freedoms became a dead letter (i.e., Ninth and 10th Amendments, Commerce Clause protection, etc.).
Historian Clarence B. Carson captured the intoxicating optimism of the 1930s regarding government's comprehensive and exalted role to solve all the problems that have plagued mankind since ancient times, saying:
At this remove in time from the early days of the New Deal, it is difficult to recapture, even in imagination, the heady enthusiasm among a goodly number of intellectuals for a government-planned economy ... as General Hugh Johnson put it, from "the murderous doctrine of savage and wolfish individualism, looking to dog-eat-dog and devil take the hindmost."
Mr. Carson's rather dour assessment of free-market capitalism pre-FDR is exactly what made America the greatest nation in the history of humanity – each individual, limited only by his ability and imagination, had the freedom to pursue in Jefferson's words – "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness" by God's power, not government's encroachment on We the People's inalienable rights.
What is FDR's legacy to America? In a word, tyranny. C.S. Lewis put it is thusly:
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their consciences.
FDR taught American to forsake to three things that made her great – free-market capitalism, its Judeo-Christian traditions and rugged American individualism. How? By pitting church against state, sacred against secular, men against women, race against race, rich against poor, creed against creed, Jew against Gentile, liberals against conservatives, class against class, the haves against the have nots. What is the result of this state of affairs in modern times? – Thou shalt covet thy neighbor's ass.
Dead Russian reporter was investigating arms sales to Iran, Syria
posted at breitbart.com
A Russian reporter who died after falling out of a window was investigating sales of weapons by Russia to Syria and Iran, his newspaper Kommersant said Tuesday.
Ivan Safronov had told his newspaper that he had "received information" about the sale of Sukhoi-34 fighter jets to Syria and S-300 anti-aircraft missiles to Iran via Belarus.
The business daily said the arms were being sold "via Belarus to avoid the west accusing Russia of arming rogue states". Safronov, a former colonel, specialised in writing about the army and space.
Russian prosecutors on Monday opened an investigation into the "incitement to suicide" of Safronov.
But his newspaper has dismissed claims that he committed suicide, while Russian journalists union the SJR said Tuesday it might conduct its own inquiry.
"From what we know already it is clear it was not suicide," the union's Secretary General Igor Yakovenko told Moscow Echo radio.
"The chances that it was a murder linked to the exercise of his profession are very high," he added.
Kommersant said Safronov had called from a major Middle East arms fair in Abu Dhabi in late February to say that he had "irrefutable confirmation" of the sales.
On his return to Moscow he had spoken to his colleagues of the "signature by Russia and Syria of contracts for the Pantsir CI anti-aircraft system, Mig-29 fighter jets and Iskander tactical missiles," it said.
However, he told his colleagues he could not write the story immediately because he had been warned about the risk of an international scandal and an inquiry by the FSB security service for divulging secrets.
He did not say that this amounted to pressure.
In May 2006 the British defence magazine Jane's had reported a contract had been signed for the sale of S-300 SP missiles from Russia to Belarus, with the aim of selling arms indirectly to Iran.
At the time the Russian defence ministry had said that Belarus would not sell S-300 missiles to Iran.
According to Kommersant, two young students last week heard the noise of a falling body, saw Safronov lying on the snow and called an ambulance, which refused to come as it had "no time to go picking up every drunkard".
The two girls said they heard no sounds of a struggle and saw no-one leaving the apartment house after the fall.
A Russian reporter who died after falling out of a window was investigating sales of weapons by Russia to Syria and Iran, his newspaper Kommersant said Tuesday.
Ivan Safronov had told his newspaper that he had "received information" about the sale of Sukhoi-34 fighter jets to Syria and S-300 anti-aircraft missiles to Iran via Belarus.
The business daily said the arms were being sold "via Belarus to avoid the west accusing Russia of arming rogue states". Safronov, a former colonel, specialised in writing about the army and space.
Russian prosecutors on Monday opened an investigation into the "incitement to suicide" of Safronov.
But his newspaper has dismissed claims that he committed suicide, while Russian journalists union the SJR said Tuesday it might conduct its own inquiry.
"From what we know already it is clear it was not suicide," the union's Secretary General Igor Yakovenko told Moscow Echo radio.
"The chances that it was a murder linked to the exercise of his profession are very high," he added.
Kommersant said Safronov had called from a major Middle East arms fair in Abu Dhabi in late February to say that he had "irrefutable confirmation" of the sales.
On his return to Moscow he had spoken to his colleagues of the "signature by Russia and Syria of contracts for the Pantsir CI anti-aircraft system, Mig-29 fighter jets and Iskander tactical missiles," it said.
However, he told his colleagues he could not write the story immediately because he had been warned about the risk of an international scandal and an inquiry by the FSB security service for divulging secrets.
He did not say that this amounted to pressure.
In May 2006 the British defence magazine Jane's had reported a contract had been signed for the sale of S-300 SP missiles from Russia to Belarus, with the aim of selling arms indirectly to Iran.
At the time the Russian defence ministry had said that Belarus would not sell S-300 missiles to Iran.
According to Kommersant, two young students last week heard the noise of a falling body, saw Safronov lying on the snow and called an ambulance, which refused to come as it had "no time to go picking up every drunkard".
The two girls said they heard no sounds of a struggle and saw no-one leaving the apartment house after the fall.
Tuesday, March 06, 2007
The Deniers -- The National Post's series on scientists who buck the conventional wisdom on climate science
by Lawrence Solomon at The National Post (Canada)
This link (click on article title) will bring you to a whole series on the "Deniers."
This link (click on article title) will bring you to a whole series on the "Deniers."
Global warming labeled a 'scam'
posted by Washington Times
(Note by Jeffrey Robbins: The irony of the last line is amusing too...)
LONDON -- With a packet of claims that are almost certain to defy conventional wisdom, a television documentary to be aired in Britain this week condemns man-made global warming as a myth that has become "the biggest scam of modern times." The program titled "The Great Global Warming Scandal" and set for screening by TV Channel 4 on Thursday dismisses claims that high levels of greenhouse gases generated by human activity causes climate change. Instead, the program suggests that the sun itself is the real culprit. The documentary, directed by filmmaker Martin Durkin, is at odds with scientific opinion as outlined in a United Nations report in February, which blames mankind for global warming. In his program, Mr. Durkin rejects the concept of man-made climate change, calling it "a lie ... the biggest scam of modern times." The truth, he says, is that global warming "is a multibillion-dollar worldwide industry, created by fanatically anti-industrial environmentalists, supported by scientists peddling scare stories to chase funding, and propped up by compliant politicians and the media." Channel 4 says that the program features "an impressive roll-call of experts," including nine professors, who are experts in climatology, oceanography, meteorology, biogeography and paleoclimatology. It also says the experts come from prestigious institutions such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the Pasteur Institute in Paris, the Danish National Space Center and universities and other schools in London, Ottawa, Jerusalem, Alabama, Virginia and Winnipeg, Canada. "It's very rare that a film changes history," says Martin Durkin, "but I think this is a turning point, and in five years the idea that the greenhouse effect is the main reason behind global warming will be seen as total bunk," he says. His program collides sharply with the premise outlined in former Vice President Al Gore's Oscar-winning documentary, "An Inconvenient Truth," which presents a bleak picture of how a buildup in greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide affects the global climate, with potentially disastrous consequences. "Al Gore might have won an Oscar," says Mr. Durkin, in a preview of the documentary, "but the film is very misleading, and he has got the relationship between [carbon dioxide] and climate change the wrong way around." One of the filmmaker's experts, paleontologist professor Ian Clark of the University of Ottawa, says that global warming could be caused by increased activity on the sun, such as massive eruptions, and that ice-core samples from Antarctica show that, in fact, warmer periods in Earth's history have come about 800 years before rises in carbon dioxide levels. Mr. Clark's findings appear to contradict the work of other scientists, who have used similar ice-core samples to illustrate that raised levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere have accompanied the various global warming periods.
"The fact is that [carbon dioxide] has no proven link to global temperatures," says Mr. Durkin. "Solar activity is far more likely to be the culprit." Scientists in the Channel 4 documentary cite what they claim is another discrepancy involving conventional research, saying that most of the recent global warming occurred before 1940, after which temperatures around the world fell for four decades. Mr. Durkin's skeptical specialists view this as a flaw in the official view, because the worldwide economic boom that followed the end of World War II produced more carbon dioxide, and therefore should have meant a rise in global temperatures -- something he says did not happen. "The Great Global Warming Swindle" also questions an assertion by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's report, published last month, that it was backed by some 2,500 of the world's leading scientists. Another of Mr. Durkin's professors, Paul Reiter of Paris' Pasteur Institute, an expert in malaria, calls the U.N. report a "sham" because, he says, it included the names of scientists -- including his own -- who disagreed with the report and who resigned from the panel. "That is how they make it seem that all the top scientists are agreed," he says. "It's not true." Mr. Reiter says his name was removed only after he threatened legal action against the panel. The report itself, he adds, was finalized by government appointees. Yet another expert in the Durkin documentary, Philip Stott, professor emeritus of biogeography at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, is more circumspect. "The [climate] system is too complex to say exactly what the effect of cutting back on [carbon dioxide] production would be or, indeed, of continuing to produce [carbon dioxide]." "The greenhouse effect theory worried me from the start," Mr. Stott says, "because you can't say that just one factor can have this effect." "At the moment, there is almost a McCarthyism movement in science where the greenhouse effect is like a puritanical religion, and this is dangerous," he says.
(Note by Jeffrey Robbins: The irony of the last line is amusing too...)
LONDON -- With a packet of claims that are almost certain to defy conventional wisdom, a television documentary to be aired in Britain this week condemns man-made global warming as a myth that has become "the biggest scam of modern times." The program titled "The Great Global Warming Scandal" and set for screening by TV Channel 4 on Thursday dismisses claims that high levels of greenhouse gases generated by human activity causes climate change. Instead, the program suggests that the sun itself is the real culprit. The documentary, directed by filmmaker Martin Durkin, is at odds with scientific opinion as outlined in a United Nations report in February, which blames mankind for global warming. In his program, Mr. Durkin rejects the concept of man-made climate change, calling it "a lie ... the biggest scam of modern times." The truth, he says, is that global warming "is a multibillion-dollar worldwide industry, created by fanatically anti-industrial environmentalists, supported by scientists peddling scare stories to chase funding, and propped up by compliant politicians and the media." Channel 4 says that the program features "an impressive roll-call of experts," including nine professors, who are experts in climatology, oceanography, meteorology, biogeography and paleoclimatology. It also says the experts come from prestigious institutions such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the Pasteur Institute in Paris, the Danish National Space Center and universities and other schools in London, Ottawa, Jerusalem, Alabama, Virginia and Winnipeg, Canada. "It's very rare that a film changes history," says Martin Durkin, "but I think this is a turning point, and in five years the idea that the greenhouse effect is the main reason behind global warming will be seen as total bunk," he says. His program collides sharply with the premise outlined in former Vice President Al Gore's Oscar-winning documentary, "An Inconvenient Truth," which presents a bleak picture of how a buildup in greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide affects the global climate, with potentially disastrous consequences. "Al Gore might have won an Oscar," says Mr. Durkin, in a preview of the documentary, "but the film is very misleading, and he has got the relationship between [carbon dioxide] and climate change the wrong way around." One of the filmmaker's experts, paleontologist professor Ian Clark of the University of Ottawa, says that global warming could be caused by increased activity on the sun, such as massive eruptions, and that ice-core samples from Antarctica show that, in fact, warmer periods in Earth's history have come about 800 years before rises in carbon dioxide levels. Mr. Clark's findings appear to contradict the work of other scientists, who have used similar ice-core samples to illustrate that raised levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere have accompanied the various global warming periods.
"The fact is that [carbon dioxide] has no proven link to global temperatures," says Mr. Durkin. "Solar activity is far more likely to be the culprit." Scientists in the Channel 4 documentary cite what they claim is another discrepancy involving conventional research, saying that most of the recent global warming occurred before 1940, after which temperatures around the world fell for four decades. Mr. Durkin's skeptical specialists view this as a flaw in the official view, because the worldwide economic boom that followed the end of World War II produced more carbon dioxide, and therefore should have meant a rise in global temperatures -- something he says did not happen. "The Great Global Warming Swindle" also questions an assertion by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's report, published last month, that it was backed by some 2,500 of the world's leading scientists. Another of Mr. Durkin's professors, Paul Reiter of Paris' Pasteur Institute, an expert in malaria, calls the U.N. report a "sham" because, he says, it included the names of scientists -- including his own -- who disagreed with the report and who resigned from the panel. "That is how they make it seem that all the top scientists are agreed," he says. "It's not true." Mr. Reiter says his name was removed only after he threatened legal action against the panel. The report itself, he adds, was finalized by government appointees. Yet another expert in the Durkin documentary, Philip Stott, professor emeritus of biogeography at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, is more circumspect. "The [climate] system is too complex to say exactly what the effect of cutting back on [carbon dioxide] production would be or, indeed, of continuing to produce [carbon dioxide]." "The greenhouse effect theory worried me from the start," Mr. Stott says, "because you can't say that just one factor can have this effect." "At the moment, there is almost a McCarthyism movement in science where the greenhouse effect is like a puritanical religion, and this is dangerous," he says.
Monday, March 05, 2007
THE NORTH AMERICAN 'SOVIET' UNION
by Charlotte Iserbyt
There is one common thread running through all articles and speeches by elected officials, well-known writers, and commentators in opposition to the merging of the United States into a political and economic regional arrangement known as the North American Union. To my knowledge, not one of them has chosen to use the “C” word (communism) when warning Americans of the dangers of this unconstitutional merger about to be foisted upon us without proper hearings in Congress. Excellent speeches and articles are being given and written warning us of all sorts of bad things related to this merger, including the fact that we will lose our sovereignty, but we are not being told that all these bad things are necessary for the full implementation of The North American Soviet Union (communistic/regional system). Isn’t the “C” word the one and only word which might shock Americans out of their state of conditioned apathy, thereby bringing about citizen activism which might result in killing this “regional” monster?
Morris Zeitlin, a communist writer for the Communist Party’s Daily World said in an article entitled “Planning is Socialism’s Trademark,” November 8, 1975: “We (USA) have no regional government and no comprehensive regional planning to speak of. Regional government and planning remain concepts our urban scholars and planners have long advocated in vain…In socialist countries, metropolitan regions enjoy metropolitan regional government and comprehensive planning. The economic and functional efficiencies and the social benefits that comprehensive national, regional and city planning make possible in socialist society explain the Soviet Union’s enormous and rapid economic social progress…”
Of interest regarding Zeitlin’s comment about “the Soviet Union’s enormous and rapid economic social progress…” is the following admission made by former President Gorbachev at the 2005 National School Board Association conference that “half the world’s population and two-thirds of Russia’s lives in poverty.”
The United States Government, at all levels, has since 1975 accepted wholeheartedly Zeitlin’s advice, to the extent that our country is, believe it or not, almost 100 percent socialist in its political, economic, social and environmental (sustainable development) policies. For documentation please read “Walks Like a Duck, Talks Like a Duck.”
The regionalization (consolidation) of the world is quite similar to the three-stage plan outlined by Stalin at the 1936 Communist International. At that meeting, the official program proclaimed:
“Dictatorship can be established only by a victory of socialism in different countries or groups of countries, after which there would be federal unions of the various groupings of these socialist countries, and the third stage would be an amalgamation of these regional federal unions into a world union of socialist nations.” (Ed note: The third stage is taking place right now as we in the United States of America become part of a federal union, the North American Union, which will in the near future become part of a world union of socialist nations.)
Former President of the Soviet Union Gorbachev on March 23, 2000, in London, referred to the European Union (EU) as "the New European Soviet.” If he refers to the EU in that way, it only stands to reason that he would refer to the North American Union (NAU) as the “New American Soviet,” since the NAU is modeled on the EU. Gorbachev also said in his speech to the Soviet Central Committee on November 2, 1987, published by Novosti Press Agency Publishing House:
“We are moving toward a new world, the world of communism. We shall never turn off that road.”
How is it possible that if American citizens or United States officials involved in putting us under the North American Union were aware of Gorbachev’s statements, they would not be very concerned regarding our nation becoming part of a communist world? Have we forgotten the many hundreds of millions of innocent people tortured, starved, murdered and incarcerated by communist regimes around the world? Authorities say “over 20 million people suffered in purges under Vladimir Lenin and Josef Stalin -- and that more than 10 million died before Stalin's death in 1953. Some put the number even higher.” [Read]
Do we really believe the communists have changed or gone away?
United States government officials, elected and unelected, with enormous financial assistance from the tax-exempt foundations, have for many years been working to implement unconstitutional regional planning at the local, state, national and international level, all of this required for full implementation of a One World Socialist Government. For the 3000-page transcript of 1953 Congressional (Reece and Cox Committee) Hearings to Investigate the Tax-Exempt Foundations and for superb research on the history of regional government, go to americandeception.com and type the following into its search engine: Reece Committee, Don Bell Reports, Maureen Heaton, the Mantooth Report, and The Emerging North American Union.
One very important government official in the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations, Under Secretary of State George W. Ball, spelled out very clearly what the Insiders were planning for our nation in The New York Times, 1/24/88: “…If we could internationalize by using the United Nations in conjunction with the Soviet Union, because we now no longer have to fear in most cases a Soviet veto, then we could begin to transform the shape of the world and might get the UN back doing something useful. …Sooner or later we’re going to have to face restructuring our institutions so that they’re not confined merely to the nation states. Start first on a regional, and ultimately you can move to a world, basis.” (emphasis added).
Has our education system so successfully conditioned and dumbed down Americans that they no longer are able to apply logic to the above quotes? Are they no longer capable of transferring that knowledge, processing it into new knowledge and conclusions which might help them understand and oppose the present destruction of our Constitutional Republic?
Since all regional groupings being set up around the world are based on the communistic Free Trade “redistribute the wealth” philosophy, why is it that the adjective “Communist” is never used when discussing GATT, NAFTA, CAFTA and the NAU? Those patriotic writers could at least describe those agreements as “Communism LITE,” couldn’t they?
For those Americans who recall the days of elected officials, not unelected, appointed task forces and “councils” (soviets, according to most dictionaries), running our towns, schools, counties, states, nation and world, recognizing this change in our form of government should not be too difficult.
However, for those younger Americans denied an education in American history and government due to the activities of the tax-exempt foundations, especially the Rockefeller, Ford, and Carnegie Foundations, the loss of elected officials through regionalism does not seem to bother them. Go to americandeception.com and type into search engine “Kenny Hignite” and you will see a most astonishing six-page 1954 “Test on the United States Constitution” on which Hignite received a grade of 99 – “Excellent!” There is absolutely no way that Kenny Hignite, now 66 years old, having received such an excellent education on the U.S. Constitution in a public school in Central California in 1954, would not be questioning the present deliberate destruction of our representative form of government through the implementation of communistic regional government!
Those Americans under fifty years old, and too often those over 50 years old (!), will ask you “What’s wrong with members of the community or faceless state bureaucrats being appointed to assist our elected officials in their work which has become increasingly complicated?” The simple answer is “If you don’t approve of what those unelected officials are doing, you can’t get rid of them at the polls.”
Uneducated Americans will also ask you:
“What’s wrong with consolidation of school districts, services, the merging of individual school and town budgets to “save taxpayers money?” (Ed note: In Maine our Senate Education Committee is about to approve Governor Baldacci’s proposal to slash school districts by proposing 26 regional school units statewide with 26 superintendents, compared to the existing 152 superintendents and 290 school units!);
“What’s wrong with merging 16 towns under one county council as was recently proposed in Cumberland County, Maine, thereby eliminating representative government?”;
“What’s wrong with getting rid of local school boards and having our schools run by city Mayors, or contracting education out to private organizations connected with the corporations?”;
“What possible objection could you have to public school morals and values education even if those programs are forbidden to teach ‘absolute’ morals and values based on the Ten Commandments?”;
“What’s wrong with publicly-funded charter schools which have no elected school boards?”;
“What’s wrong with Cuban-style school-to-work job training replacing a K-12 liberal arts curriculum? Even if my child can’t read, I sure want him/her to be able to get a job.”;
“What’s wrong with public/private partnerships?”
“What’s wrong with the federal government mandating mental health screening for my child?”;
“What’s wrong with members of the community assisting the local police in monitoring citizen activities and/or the police handing out awards to citizens who do good deeds, as is the case with the Community-Oriented Policing System (COPS) in Maine?”;
“What’s wrong with putting the UN’s lifelong learning agenda, all community services (birth through death), under the umbrella of the school district? (Go to americandeception.com and type “Feld” into search engine for a remarkable research paper on the history of Community Education)
“What’s wrong with a National I.D. card reportedly designed by two Russian ex-KGB Chiefs?”;
“What’s wrong with students being required to perform community service in order to graduate?”;
“What’s wrong with federal funding of religious organizations (faith-based initiative)?”;
“What’s wrong with federally-funded school choice proposals?”;
“What’s wrong with dropping borders between states?” as is in the offing.
And, the subject of this article: “What’s wrong with regional government?” And many more “What’s Wrong With?” questions from good Americans who have, over many years, through no fault of their own, been deliberately dumbed down and didn’t receive the public education which required the likes of Kenny Hignite to know their Constitution and form of government.
How many Americans realize that almost all the programs mentioned in the above “What’s Wrong With” section have already been implemented in our schools, communities, and states and that they are based on communist/socialist collectivist philosophy? The planners are waiting only for the full implementation of the North American Union (final nail in coffin) which will allow them to write and approve, as was done in Europe, the North American Union’s Constitution (Communist Manifesto) which will include all the above “What’s Wrong With?” programs. That will be the infamous day when the U.S. Constitution is formally relegated to history’s trash bin. And, as with the EU Constitution, or the Communist Manifesto, the practice of Christianity will be outlawed… a thing of the past. All religions will be considered equal and inevitably superior to Christianity. Go to americandeception.com and type into search engine “Religion and Governance” an important position paper by Harlan Cleveland, notorious supporter of global government, long-time member of the internationalist Aspen Institute, and first U.S. Ambassador to the Common Market (1960), and Marc Luycx, a Belgian change agent bureaucrat. This paper was prepared by the Foreward Study Group of the European Commission and was undoubtedly used by those drafting the EU Constitution. It will give you a picture of the non-role of Christianity in world region constitutions.
Our elected officials in Congress, who have sworn to uphold the Constitution, should not be immune to multi-million dollar lawsuits for injuries sustained by the citizens of this country. Is not the loss of our freedoms due to elected officials’ malpractice (lying to us in regard to putting us under the communistic regional North American Union and not holding hearings on the subject) even more important than the death of one patient due to a doctor’s malpractice, the scalding of a woman who spilled her “too-hot” coffee at a McDonald’s takeout, or the death from cancer of a woman who smoked too many cigarettes? How can we ignore the fact that 651,008 Americans have died in battle to protect and defend the constitutional freedoms which will vanish under this new international regional arrangement? Is there really no penalty to be exacted of these highly-paid Congressional traitors other than voting them out of office, which it seems is impossible to do due to both political parties having the same agenda, controlled media, manipulated political conventions, and election fraud?
Americans have been conditioned to NEVER, NEVER, NEVER, since the days of McCarthyism and the phony fall of communism, mention the “C” word. The word must, as George Orwell might have said, be removed from the dictionaries of all languages, especially English. Otherwise, we might wise up and tackle this treason with all our might and brains since we surely don't want our children and grandchildren living under any “ism” form of government, much less “communism.” The Insiders know that “communism” is the one and only word that must be banished from use. They are not concerned over excellent anti-North American Union rantings and ravings as long as the “C” word is NOT used.
The Insiders, most if not all of whom are corporate communists, have no fear of the coming totalitarian system since they have been assured they will be sitting in the catbird seat, having eliminated all economic competition and self-government (elected officials), and will have the world as their playground. The majority of the world’s population, the Insiders’ “human resources”, will be their highly trained and conditioned serfs, lifelong.
One might ask, how can this be? It is a well-known and documented fact that Wall Street funded the Bolshevik Revolution and the corporate communists and our government have been supporting the communist regime in Russia since 1917. Extensive exchange agreements covering political, municipal, cultural, economic, legal, law enforcement, education, science, sports, medicine, etc. have been signed since 1958 between the USSR and the USA, including of special importance the 1985 education agreements signed by Presidents Reagan and Gorbachev which merged our two education systems and caused to be implemented the Soviet polytechnical work force/job quota system and the Pavlovian outcomes-based method of conditioning/training. Go to americandeception.com for full text of “Agreement between U.S.A. and USSR.”
Regionalism is communism no matter how you slice it. The sooner Americans get that unpleasant fact permanently entered into their brains, and process that information into appropriate action, the sooner we will be able to escape what Orwell described so well in his novel 1984:
"If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on the human face--forever...and remember, that is forever."
Forward this article to your friends and to your elected officials at the local, state, and national level. Of equal importance restore the "C" word to your vocabulary and use it often.
© 2007 Charlotte T. Iserbyt - All Rights Reserved
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Charlotte Iserbyt is the consummate whistleblower! Iserbyt served as Senior Policy Advisor in the Office of Educational Research and Improvement (OERI), U.S. Department of Education, during the first Reagan Administration, where she first blew the whistle on a major technology initiative which would control curriculum in America's classrooms. Iserbyt is a former school board director in Camden, Maine and was co-founder and research analyst of Guardians of Education for Maine (GEM) from 1978 to 2000. She has also served in the American Red Cross on Guam and Japan during the Korean War, and in the United States Foreign Service in Belgium and in the Republic of South Africa.
Iserbyt is a speaker and writer, best known for her 1985 booklet Back to Basics Reform or OBE: Skinnerian International Curriculum and her 1989 pamphlet Soviets in the Classroom: America's Latest Education Fad which covered the details of the U.S.-Soviet and Carnegie-Soviet Education Agreements which remain in effect to this day. She is a freelance writer and has had articles published in Human Events, The Washington Times, The Bangor Daily News, and included in the record of Congressional hearings.
There is one common thread running through all articles and speeches by elected officials, well-known writers, and commentators in opposition to the merging of the United States into a political and economic regional arrangement known as the North American Union. To my knowledge, not one of them has chosen to use the “C” word (communism) when warning Americans of the dangers of this unconstitutional merger about to be foisted upon us without proper hearings in Congress. Excellent speeches and articles are being given and written warning us of all sorts of bad things related to this merger, including the fact that we will lose our sovereignty, but we are not being told that all these bad things are necessary for the full implementation of The North American Soviet Union (communistic/regional system). Isn’t the “C” word the one and only word which might shock Americans out of their state of conditioned apathy, thereby bringing about citizen activism which might result in killing this “regional” monster?
Morris Zeitlin, a communist writer for the Communist Party’s Daily World said in an article entitled “Planning is Socialism’s Trademark,” November 8, 1975: “We (USA) have no regional government and no comprehensive regional planning to speak of. Regional government and planning remain concepts our urban scholars and planners have long advocated in vain…In socialist countries, metropolitan regions enjoy metropolitan regional government and comprehensive planning. The economic and functional efficiencies and the social benefits that comprehensive national, regional and city planning make possible in socialist society explain the Soviet Union’s enormous and rapid economic social progress…”
Of interest regarding Zeitlin’s comment about “the Soviet Union’s enormous and rapid economic social progress…” is the following admission made by former President Gorbachev at the 2005 National School Board Association conference that “half the world’s population and two-thirds of Russia’s lives in poverty.”
The United States Government, at all levels, has since 1975 accepted wholeheartedly Zeitlin’s advice, to the extent that our country is, believe it or not, almost 100 percent socialist in its political, economic, social and environmental (sustainable development) policies. For documentation please read “Walks Like a Duck, Talks Like a Duck.”
The regionalization (consolidation) of the world is quite similar to the three-stage plan outlined by Stalin at the 1936 Communist International. At that meeting, the official program proclaimed:
“Dictatorship can be established only by a victory of socialism in different countries or groups of countries, after which there would be federal unions of the various groupings of these socialist countries, and the third stage would be an amalgamation of these regional federal unions into a world union of socialist nations.” (Ed note: The third stage is taking place right now as we in the United States of America become part of a federal union, the North American Union, which will in the near future become part of a world union of socialist nations.)
Former President of the Soviet Union Gorbachev on March 23, 2000, in London, referred to the European Union (EU) as "the New European Soviet.” If he refers to the EU in that way, it only stands to reason that he would refer to the North American Union (NAU) as the “New American Soviet,” since the NAU is modeled on the EU. Gorbachev also said in his speech to the Soviet Central Committee on November 2, 1987, published by Novosti Press Agency Publishing House:
“We are moving toward a new world, the world of communism. We shall never turn off that road.”
How is it possible that if American citizens or United States officials involved in putting us under the North American Union were aware of Gorbachev’s statements, they would not be very concerned regarding our nation becoming part of a communist world? Have we forgotten the many hundreds of millions of innocent people tortured, starved, murdered and incarcerated by communist regimes around the world? Authorities say “over 20 million people suffered in purges under Vladimir Lenin and Josef Stalin -- and that more than 10 million died before Stalin's death in 1953. Some put the number even higher.” [Read]
Do we really believe the communists have changed or gone away?
United States government officials, elected and unelected, with enormous financial assistance from the tax-exempt foundations, have for many years been working to implement unconstitutional regional planning at the local, state, national and international level, all of this required for full implementation of a One World Socialist Government. For the 3000-page transcript of 1953 Congressional (Reece and Cox Committee) Hearings to Investigate the Tax-Exempt Foundations and for superb research on the history of regional government, go to americandeception.com and type the following into its search engine: Reece Committee, Don Bell Reports, Maureen Heaton, the Mantooth Report, and The Emerging North American Union.
One very important government official in the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations, Under Secretary of State George W. Ball, spelled out very clearly what the Insiders were planning for our nation in The New York Times, 1/24/88: “…If we could internationalize by using the United Nations in conjunction with the Soviet Union, because we now no longer have to fear in most cases a Soviet veto, then we could begin to transform the shape of the world and might get the UN back doing something useful. …Sooner or later we’re going to have to face restructuring our institutions so that they’re not confined merely to the nation states. Start first on a regional, and ultimately you can move to a world, basis.” (emphasis added).
Has our education system so successfully conditioned and dumbed down Americans that they no longer are able to apply logic to the above quotes? Are they no longer capable of transferring that knowledge, processing it into new knowledge and conclusions which might help them understand and oppose the present destruction of our Constitutional Republic?
Since all regional groupings being set up around the world are based on the communistic Free Trade “redistribute the wealth” philosophy, why is it that the adjective “Communist” is never used when discussing GATT, NAFTA, CAFTA and the NAU? Those patriotic writers could at least describe those agreements as “Communism LITE,” couldn’t they?
For those Americans who recall the days of elected officials, not unelected, appointed task forces and “councils” (soviets, according to most dictionaries), running our towns, schools, counties, states, nation and world, recognizing this change in our form of government should not be too difficult.
However, for those younger Americans denied an education in American history and government due to the activities of the tax-exempt foundations, especially the Rockefeller, Ford, and Carnegie Foundations, the loss of elected officials through regionalism does not seem to bother them. Go to americandeception.com and type into search engine “Kenny Hignite” and you will see a most astonishing six-page 1954 “Test on the United States Constitution” on which Hignite received a grade of 99 – “Excellent!” There is absolutely no way that Kenny Hignite, now 66 years old, having received such an excellent education on the U.S. Constitution in a public school in Central California in 1954, would not be questioning the present deliberate destruction of our representative form of government through the implementation of communistic regional government!
Those Americans under fifty years old, and too often those over 50 years old (!), will ask you “What’s wrong with members of the community or faceless state bureaucrats being appointed to assist our elected officials in their work which has become increasingly complicated?” The simple answer is “If you don’t approve of what those unelected officials are doing, you can’t get rid of them at the polls.”
Uneducated Americans will also ask you:
“What’s wrong with consolidation of school districts, services, the merging of individual school and town budgets to “save taxpayers money?” (Ed note: In Maine our Senate Education Committee is about to approve Governor Baldacci’s proposal to slash school districts by proposing 26 regional school units statewide with 26 superintendents, compared to the existing 152 superintendents and 290 school units!);
“What’s wrong with merging 16 towns under one county council as was recently proposed in Cumberland County, Maine, thereby eliminating representative government?”;
“What’s wrong with getting rid of local school boards and having our schools run by city Mayors, or contracting education out to private organizations connected with the corporations?”;
“What possible objection could you have to public school morals and values education even if those programs are forbidden to teach ‘absolute’ morals and values based on the Ten Commandments?”;
“What’s wrong with publicly-funded charter schools which have no elected school boards?”;
“What’s wrong with Cuban-style school-to-work job training replacing a K-12 liberal arts curriculum? Even if my child can’t read, I sure want him/her to be able to get a job.”;
“What’s wrong with public/private partnerships?”
“What’s wrong with the federal government mandating mental health screening for my child?”;
“What’s wrong with members of the community assisting the local police in monitoring citizen activities and/or the police handing out awards to citizens who do good deeds, as is the case with the Community-Oriented Policing System (COPS) in Maine?”;
“What’s wrong with putting the UN’s lifelong learning agenda, all community services (birth through death), under the umbrella of the school district? (Go to americandeception.com and type “Feld” into search engine for a remarkable research paper on the history of Community Education)
“What’s wrong with a National I.D. card reportedly designed by two Russian ex-KGB Chiefs?”;
“What’s wrong with students being required to perform community service in order to graduate?”;
“What’s wrong with federal funding of religious organizations (faith-based initiative)?”;
“What’s wrong with federally-funded school choice proposals?”;
“What’s wrong with dropping borders between states?” as is in the offing.
And, the subject of this article: “What’s wrong with regional government?” And many more “What’s Wrong With?” questions from good Americans who have, over many years, through no fault of their own, been deliberately dumbed down and didn’t receive the public education which required the likes of Kenny Hignite to know their Constitution and form of government.
How many Americans realize that almost all the programs mentioned in the above “What’s Wrong With” section have already been implemented in our schools, communities, and states and that they are based on communist/socialist collectivist philosophy? The planners are waiting only for the full implementation of the North American Union (final nail in coffin) which will allow them to write and approve, as was done in Europe, the North American Union’s Constitution (Communist Manifesto) which will include all the above “What’s Wrong With?” programs. That will be the infamous day when the U.S. Constitution is formally relegated to history’s trash bin. And, as with the EU Constitution, or the Communist Manifesto, the practice of Christianity will be outlawed… a thing of the past. All religions will be considered equal and inevitably superior to Christianity. Go to americandeception.com and type into search engine “Religion and Governance” an important position paper by Harlan Cleveland, notorious supporter of global government, long-time member of the internationalist Aspen Institute, and first U.S. Ambassador to the Common Market (1960), and Marc Luycx, a Belgian change agent bureaucrat. This paper was prepared by the Foreward Study Group of the European Commission and was undoubtedly used by those drafting the EU Constitution. It will give you a picture of the non-role of Christianity in world region constitutions.
Our elected officials in Congress, who have sworn to uphold the Constitution, should not be immune to multi-million dollar lawsuits for injuries sustained by the citizens of this country. Is not the loss of our freedoms due to elected officials’ malpractice (lying to us in regard to putting us under the communistic regional North American Union and not holding hearings on the subject) even more important than the death of one patient due to a doctor’s malpractice, the scalding of a woman who spilled her “too-hot” coffee at a McDonald’s takeout, or the death from cancer of a woman who smoked too many cigarettes? How can we ignore the fact that 651,008 Americans have died in battle to protect and defend the constitutional freedoms which will vanish under this new international regional arrangement? Is there really no penalty to be exacted of these highly-paid Congressional traitors other than voting them out of office, which it seems is impossible to do due to both political parties having the same agenda, controlled media, manipulated political conventions, and election fraud?
Americans have been conditioned to NEVER, NEVER, NEVER, since the days of McCarthyism and the phony fall of communism, mention the “C” word. The word must, as George Orwell might have said, be removed from the dictionaries of all languages, especially English. Otherwise, we might wise up and tackle this treason with all our might and brains since we surely don't want our children and grandchildren living under any “ism” form of government, much less “communism.” The Insiders know that “communism” is the one and only word that must be banished from use. They are not concerned over excellent anti-North American Union rantings and ravings as long as the “C” word is NOT used.
The Insiders, most if not all of whom are corporate communists, have no fear of the coming totalitarian system since they have been assured they will be sitting in the catbird seat, having eliminated all economic competition and self-government (elected officials), and will have the world as their playground. The majority of the world’s population, the Insiders’ “human resources”, will be their highly trained and conditioned serfs, lifelong.
One might ask, how can this be? It is a well-known and documented fact that Wall Street funded the Bolshevik Revolution and the corporate communists and our government have been supporting the communist regime in Russia since 1917. Extensive exchange agreements covering political, municipal, cultural, economic, legal, law enforcement, education, science, sports, medicine, etc. have been signed since 1958 between the USSR and the USA, including of special importance the 1985 education agreements signed by Presidents Reagan and Gorbachev which merged our two education systems and caused to be implemented the Soviet polytechnical work force/job quota system and the Pavlovian outcomes-based method of conditioning/training. Go to americandeception.com for full text of “Agreement between U.S.A. and USSR.”
Regionalism is communism no matter how you slice it. The sooner Americans get that unpleasant fact permanently entered into their brains, and process that information into appropriate action, the sooner we will be able to escape what Orwell described so well in his novel 1984:
"If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on the human face--forever...and remember, that is forever."
Forward this article to your friends and to your elected officials at the local, state, and national level. Of equal importance restore the "C" word to your vocabulary and use it often.
© 2007 Charlotte T. Iserbyt - All Rights Reserved
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Charlotte Iserbyt is the consummate whistleblower! Iserbyt served as Senior Policy Advisor in the Office of Educational Research and Improvement (OERI), U.S. Department of Education, during the first Reagan Administration, where she first blew the whistle on a major technology initiative which would control curriculum in America's classrooms. Iserbyt is a former school board director in Camden, Maine and was co-founder and research analyst of Guardians of Education for Maine (GEM) from 1978 to 2000. She has also served in the American Red Cross on Guam and Japan during the Korean War, and in the United States Foreign Service in Belgium and in the Republic of South Africa.
Iserbyt is a speaker and writer, best known for her 1985 booklet Back to Basics Reform or OBE: Skinnerian International Curriculum and her 1989 pamphlet Soviets in the Classroom: America's Latest Education Fad which covered the details of the U.S.-Soviet and Carnegie-Soviet Education Agreements which remain in effect to this day. She is a freelance writer and has had articles published in Human Events, The Washington Times, The Bangor Daily News, and included in the record of Congressional hearings.
Global tax scheme pushed to battle 'climate change'
U.N.-backed scientists warn of doomsday unless greenhouse gas emissions are cut
Posted: February 28, 200710:38 a.m. Eastern
© 2007 WorldNetDaily.com
Harvard Professor John HoldrenWASHINGTON – A panel of 18 scientists from 11 countries reported to the United Nations today that catastrophic climate change is inevitable without a global tax on greenhouse gas emissions – a plan that would impact the U.S. disproportionately to the rest of the world.
John Holdren, the Teresa and John Heinz professor of environmental policy at Harvard University, speaking for the panel said the world must establish a consensus on an acceptable ceiling for temperature rise and find ways to cope with the damage already wrought by climate change. However, these measures will be ineffective in themselves if they are not accompanied by a global tax on greenhouse gas emissions, he added.
"We don't think ultimately society will get it right in terms of the full range and scope of activities needed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions until there is an additional incentive in the form of a price on greenhouse gas emissions, either through a carbon tax or a cap and trade approach," he said.
(Story continues below)
The report was requested by the United Nations and partially funded by the U.N. Foundation. It predicts global warming trends leading to dangerous rising sea levels, increasingly turbulent weather, droughts and weather-related pestilences.
It is the latest of a stream of dire forecasts about climate change. Three weeks ago, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded global warming was real and caused by human activity. Two weeks ago, the board of directors of the American Association for the Advancement of Science issued a statement claiming atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide is higher than it has been for at least 650,000 years.
"Climate change is real," said Holdren today. "It's already happening. It's already causing harm. It's accelerating and we need to do something about it, and we need to do something about it seriously, starting now. Our specific conclusions are that if the world were to go past the point of an increase above pre-industrial temperatures greater than 2 to 2.5 degrees Celsius, we would be in a regime where the danger of intolerable and unmanageable impacts on well-being would rise very rapidly."
U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon is considering calling a summit on climate change later this year.
Posted: February 28, 200710:38 a.m. Eastern
© 2007 WorldNetDaily.com
Harvard Professor John HoldrenWASHINGTON – A panel of 18 scientists from 11 countries reported to the United Nations today that catastrophic climate change is inevitable without a global tax on greenhouse gas emissions – a plan that would impact the U.S. disproportionately to the rest of the world.
John Holdren, the Teresa and John Heinz professor of environmental policy at Harvard University, speaking for the panel said the world must establish a consensus on an acceptable ceiling for temperature rise and find ways to cope with the damage already wrought by climate change. However, these measures will be ineffective in themselves if they are not accompanied by a global tax on greenhouse gas emissions, he added.
"We don't think ultimately society will get it right in terms of the full range and scope of activities needed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions until there is an additional incentive in the form of a price on greenhouse gas emissions, either through a carbon tax or a cap and trade approach," he said.
(Story continues below)
The report was requested by the United Nations and partially funded by the U.N. Foundation. It predicts global warming trends leading to dangerous rising sea levels, increasingly turbulent weather, droughts and weather-related pestilences.
It is the latest of a stream of dire forecasts about climate change. Three weeks ago, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded global warming was real and caused by human activity. Two weeks ago, the board of directors of the American Association for the Advancement of Science issued a statement claiming atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide is higher than it has been for at least 650,000 years.
"Climate change is real," said Holdren today. "It's already happening. It's already causing harm. It's accelerating and we need to do something about it, and we need to do something about it seriously, starting now. Our specific conclusions are that if the world were to go past the point of an increase above pre-industrial temperatures greater than 2 to 2.5 degrees Celsius, we would be in a regime where the danger of intolerable and unmanageable impacts on well-being would rise very rapidly."
U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon is considering calling a summit on climate change later this year.
Hypocrisy in the Middle East
By Hon. Dr. Ron PaulFebruary 26, 2007
Hundreds of thousands of American troops already occupy Afghanistan and Iraq, a number that is rising as the military surge moves forward. The justification, given endlessly since September 11th, is that both support terrorism and thus pose a risk to the United States. Yet when we step back and examine the region as a whole, it’s obvious that these two impoverished countries, neither of which has any real military, pose very little threat to American national security when compared to other Middle Eastern nations. The decision to attack them, while treating some of region’s worst regimes as allies, shows the deadly hypocrisy of our foreign policy in the Middle East. Consider Saudi Arabia, the native home of most of the September 11th hijackers. The Saudis, unlike the Iraqis, have proven connections to al Qaeda. Saudi charities have funneled money to Islamic terrorist groups. Yet the administration insists on calling Saudi Arabia a “good partner in the war on terror.” Why? Because the U.S. has a longstanding relationship with the Saudi royal family, and a long history of commercial interests relating to Saudi oil. So successive administrations continue to treat the Saudis as something they are not: a reliable and honest friend in the Middle East. The same is true of Pakistan, where General Musharaf seized power by force in a 1999 coup. The Clinton administration quickly accepted his new leadership as legitimate, to the dismay of India and many Muslim Pakistanis. Since 9/11, we have showered Pakistan with millions in foreign aid, ostensibly in exchange for Musharaf’s allegiance against al Qaeda. Yet has our new ally rewarded our support? Hardly. The Pakistanis almost certainly have harbored bin Laden in their remote mountains, and show little interest in pursuing him or allowing anyone else to pursue him. Pakistan has signed peace agreements with Taliban leaders, and by some accounts bin Laden is a folk hero to many Pakistanis. Furthermore, more members of al Qaeda probably live within Pakistan than any other country today. North Korea developed its nuclear capability with technology sold to them by the Pakistanis. Yet somehow we remain friends with Pakistan, while Saddam Hussein, who had no connection to bin Laden and no friends in the Islamic fundamentalist world, was made a scapegoat. The tired assertion that America "supports democracy" in the Middle East is increasingly transparent. It was false 50 years ago, when we supported and funded the hated Shah of Iran to prevent nationalization of Iranian oil, and it’s false today when we back an unelected military dictator in Pakistan- just to name two examples. If honest democratic elections were held throughout the Middle East tomorrow, many countries would elect religious fundamentalist leaders hostile to the United States. Cliché or not, the Arab Street really doesn’t like America, so we should stop the charade about democracy and start pursuing a coherent foreign policy that serves America’s long-term interests. A coherent foreign policy is based on the understanding that America is best served by not interfering in the deadly conflicts that define the Middle East. Yes, we need Middle Eastern oil, but we can reduce our need by exploring domestic sources. We should rid ourselves of the notion that we are at the mercy of the oil-producing countries- as the world’s largest oil consumer, their wealth depends on our business. We should stop the endless game of playing faction against faction, and recognize that buying allies doesn’t work. We should curtail the heavy militarization of the area by ending our disastrous foreign aid payments. We should stop propping up dictators and putting band-aids on festering problems. We should understand that our political and military involvement in the region creates far more problems that it solves. All Americans will benefit, both in terms of their safety and their pocketbooks, if we pursue a coherent, neutral foreign policy of non-interventionism, free trade, and self-determination in the Middle East.
Hundreds of thousands of American troops already occupy Afghanistan and Iraq, a number that is rising as the military surge moves forward. The justification, given endlessly since September 11th, is that both support terrorism and thus pose a risk to the United States. Yet when we step back and examine the region as a whole, it’s obvious that these two impoverished countries, neither of which has any real military, pose very little threat to American national security when compared to other Middle Eastern nations. The decision to attack them, while treating some of region’s worst regimes as allies, shows the deadly hypocrisy of our foreign policy in the Middle East. Consider Saudi Arabia, the native home of most of the September 11th hijackers. The Saudis, unlike the Iraqis, have proven connections to al Qaeda. Saudi charities have funneled money to Islamic terrorist groups. Yet the administration insists on calling Saudi Arabia a “good partner in the war on terror.” Why? Because the U.S. has a longstanding relationship with the Saudi royal family, and a long history of commercial interests relating to Saudi oil. So successive administrations continue to treat the Saudis as something they are not: a reliable and honest friend in the Middle East. The same is true of Pakistan, where General Musharaf seized power by force in a 1999 coup. The Clinton administration quickly accepted his new leadership as legitimate, to the dismay of India and many Muslim Pakistanis. Since 9/11, we have showered Pakistan with millions in foreign aid, ostensibly in exchange for Musharaf’s allegiance against al Qaeda. Yet has our new ally rewarded our support? Hardly. The Pakistanis almost certainly have harbored bin Laden in their remote mountains, and show little interest in pursuing him or allowing anyone else to pursue him. Pakistan has signed peace agreements with Taliban leaders, and by some accounts bin Laden is a folk hero to many Pakistanis. Furthermore, more members of al Qaeda probably live within Pakistan than any other country today. North Korea developed its nuclear capability with technology sold to them by the Pakistanis. Yet somehow we remain friends with Pakistan, while Saddam Hussein, who had no connection to bin Laden and no friends in the Islamic fundamentalist world, was made a scapegoat. The tired assertion that America "supports democracy" in the Middle East is increasingly transparent. It was false 50 years ago, when we supported and funded the hated Shah of Iran to prevent nationalization of Iranian oil, and it’s false today when we back an unelected military dictator in Pakistan- just to name two examples. If honest democratic elections were held throughout the Middle East tomorrow, many countries would elect religious fundamentalist leaders hostile to the United States. Cliché or not, the Arab Street really doesn’t like America, so we should stop the charade about democracy and start pursuing a coherent foreign policy that serves America’s long-term interests. A coherent foreign policy is based on the understanding that America is best served by not interfering in the deadly conflicts that define the Middle East. Yes, we need Middle Eastern oil, but we can reduce our need by exploring domestic sources. We should rid ourselves of the notion that we are at the mercy of the oil-producing countries- as the world’s largest oil consumer, their wealth depends on our business. We should stop the endless game of playing faction against faction, and recognize that buying allies doesn’t work. We should curtail the heavy militarization of the area by ending our disastrous foreign aid payments. We should stop propping up dictators and putting band-aids on festering problems. We should understand that our political and military involvement in the region creates far more problems that it solves. All Americans will benefit, both in terms of their safety and their pocketbooks, if we pursue a coherent, neutral foreign policy of non-interventionism, free trade, and self-determination in the Middle East.
Monday, February 26, 2007
Why America's government invites rampant illegal immigration
May 2006 – ALIEN NATION: Secrets of the Invasion – Why America's government invites rampant illegal immigration
It's widely regarded as America's biggest problem: Between 12 and 20 million aliens – including large numbers of criminals, gang members and even terrorists – have entered this nation illegally, with countless more streaming across our scandalously unguarded borders daily.
The issue polarizes the nation, robs citizens of jobs, bleeds taxpayers, threatens America's national security and dangerously balkanizes the country into unassimilated ethnic groups with little loyalty or love for America's founding values. Indeed, the de facto invasion is rapidly transforming America into a totally different country than the one past generations have known and loved.
And yet – most Americans have almost no idea what is really going on, or why it is happening.
While news reports depict demonstrations and debates, and while politicians promise "comprehensive border security programs," no real answers ever seem to emerge.
But there are answers. Truthful answers. Shocking answers.
In its groundbreaking May edition, WND's acclaimed monthly Whistleblower magazine reveals the astounding hidden agendas, plans and people behind America's immigration nightmare.
Titled "ALIEN NATION," the issue is subtitled "SECRETS OF THE INVASION: Why government invites rampant illegal immigration." Indeed, it reveals pivotal secrets very few Americans know. For example:
Did you know that the powerfully influential Council on Foreign Relations – often described as a “shadow government" – issued a comprehensive report last year laying out a five-year plan for the "establishment by 2010 of a North American economic and security community" with a common "outer security perimeter"?
Roughly translated: In the next few years, according to the 59-page report titled "Building a North American Community," the U.S. must be integrated with the socialism, corruption, poverty and population of Mexico and Canada. "Common perimeter" means wide-open U.S. borders between the U.S., Mexico and Canada. As Phyllis Schlafly reveals in this issue of Whistleblower: "This CFR document asserts that President Bush, Mexican President Vicente Fox and Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin 'committed their governments' to this goal when they met at Bush's ranch and at Waco, Texas, on March 23, 2005. The three adopted the 'Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America' and assigned 'working groups' to fill in the details. It was at this same meeting, grandly called the North American Summit, that President Bush pinned the epithet 'vigilantes' on the volunteers guarding our border in Arizona."
The CFR report – important excerpts of which are published in Whistleblower – also suggests North American elitists begin getting together regularly, and presumably secretly, "to buttress North American relationships, along the lines of the Bilderberg or Wehrkunde conferences, organized to support transatlantic relations." The Bilderberg and Wehrkunde conferences are highly secret conclaves of the powerful. For decades, there have been suspicions that such meetings were used for plotting the course of world events and especially the centralization of global decision-making.
Did you know that radical immigrant groups – including the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF), the Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan (MEChA) and the National Council of La Raza (La Raza) – not only share a revolutionary agenda of conquering America's southwest, but they also share common funding sources, notably the Ford and Rockefeller foundations?
''California is going to be a Hispanic state," said Mario Obeldo, former head of MALDEF. "Anyone who does not like it should leave." And MEChA's goal is even more radical: an independent ''Aztlan,'' the collective name this organization gives to the seven states of the U.S. Southwest – Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Texas and Utah. So why would the Rockefeller and Ford foundations support such groups? Joseph Farah tells the story in this issue of Whistleblower.
Why have America's politicians – of both major parties – allowed the illegal alien invasion of this nation to continue for the last 30 years unabated? With al-Qaida and allied terrorists promising to annihilate major U.S. cities with nuclear weapons, with some big-city hospital emergency rooms near closure due to the crush of so many illegals, with the rapid spread throughout the U.S. of MS-13, the super-violent illegal alien gang – with all this and more, why do U.S. officials choose to ignore the laws of the land and the will of the people to pursue, instead, policies of open borders and lax immigration enforcement?
The answers to all this and much more are in Whistleblower's "ALIEN NATION" issue.
Is there hope? Or is America lost to a demographic invasion destined to annihilate its traditional Judeo-Christian culture, and to the ever-growing likelihood that nuclear-armed jihadists will cross our porous borders and wreak unthinkable destruction here?
There most definitely is hope, according to this issue of Whistleblower. Although most politicians of both major political parties have long since abdicated their responsibility for securing America's borders and dealing effectively with the millions already here illegally, there are a few exceptions – most notably Colorado Rep. Tom Tancredo.
May's Whistleblower includes an exclusive sneak preview of Tancredo's forthcoming blockbuster book, "In Mortal Danger: The Battle for America’s Border and Security." In an extended excerpt, Whistleblower presents Tencredo's expert and inspired analysis of exactly how to solve the nation's most vexing problem.
It's widely regarded as America's biggest problem: Between 12 and 20 million aliens – including large numbers of criminals, gang members and even terrorists – have entered this nation illegally, with countless more streaming across our scandalously unguarded borders daily.
The issue polarizes the nation, robs citizens of jobs, bleeds taxpayers, threatens America's national security and dangerously balkanizes the country into unassimilated ethnic groups with little loyalty or love for America's founding values. Indeed, the de facto invasion is rapidly transforming America into a totally different country than the one past generations have known and loved.
And yet – most Americans have almost no idea what is really going on, or why it is happening.
While news reports depict demonstrations and debates, and while politicians promise "comprehensive border security programs," no real answers ever seem to emerge.
But there are answers. Truthful answers. Shocking answers.
In its groundbreaking May edition, WND's acclaimed monthly Whistleblower magazine reveals the astounding hidden agendas, plans and people behind America's immigration nightmare.
Titled "ALIEN NATION," the issue is subtitled "SECRETS OF THE INVASION: Why government invites rampant illegal immigration." Indeed, it reveals pivotal secrets very few Americans know. For example:
Did you know that the powerfully influential Council on Foreign Relations – often described as a “shadow government" – issued a comprehensive report last year laying out a five-year plan for the "establishment by 2010 of a North American economic and security community" with a common "outer security perimeter"?
Roughly translated: In the next few years, according to the 59-page report titled "Building a North American Community," the U.S. must be integrated with the socialism, corruption, poverty and population of Mexico and Canada. "Common perimeter" means wide-open U.S. borders between the U.S., Mexico and Canada. As Phyllis Schlafly reveals in this issue of Whistleblower: "This CFR document asserts that President Bush, Mexican President Vicente Fox and Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin 'committed their governments' to this goal when they met at Bush's ranch and at Waco, Texas, on March 23, 2005. The three adopted the 'Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America' and assigned 'working groups' to fill in the details. It was at this same meeting, grandly called the North American Summit, that President Bush pinned the epithet 'vigilantes' on the volunteers guarding our border in Arizona."
The CFR report – important excerpts of which are published in Whistleblower – also suggests North American elitists begin getting together regularly, and presumably secretly, "to buttress North American relationships, along the lines of the Bilderberg or Wehrkunde conferences, organized to support transatlantic relations." The Bilderberg and Wehrkunde conferences are highly secret conclaves of the powerful. For decades, there have been suspicions that such meetings were used for plotting the course of world events and especially the centralization of global decision-making.
Did you know that radical immigrant groups – including the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF), the Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan (MEChA) and the National Council of La Raza (La Raza) – not only share a revolutionary agenda of conquering America's southwest, but they also share common funding sources, notably the Ford and Rockefeller foundations?
''California is going to be a Hispanic state," said Mario Obeldo, former head of MALDEF. "Anyone who does not like it should leave." And MEChA's goal is even more radical: an independent ''Aztlan,'' the collective name this organization gives to the seven states of the U.S. Southwest – Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Texas and Utah. So why would the Rockefeller and Ford foundations support such groups? Joseph Farah tells the story in this issue of Whistleblower.
Why have America's politicians – of both major parties – allowed the illegal alien invasion of this nation to continue for the last 30 years unabated? With al-Qaida and allied terrorists promising to annihilate major U.S. cities with nuclear weapons, with some big-city hospital emergency rooms near closure due to the crush of so many illegals, with the rapid spread throughout the U.S. of MS-13, the super-violent illegal alien gang – with all this and more, why do U.S. officials choose to ignore the laws of the land and the will of the people to pursue, instead, policies of open borders and lax immigration enforcement?
The answers to all this and much more are in Whistleblower's "ALIEN NATION" issue.
Is there hope? Or is America lost to a demographic invasion destined to annihilate its traditional Judeo-Christian culture, and to the ever-growing likelihood that nuclear-armed jihadists will cross our porous borders and wreak unthinkable destruction here?
There most definitely is hope, according to this issue of Whistleblower. Although most politicians of both major political parties have long since abdicated their responsibility for securing America's borders and dealing effectively with the millions already here illegally, there are a few exceptions – most notably Colorado Rep. Tom Tancredo.
May's Whistleblower includes an exclusive sneak preview of Tancredo's forthcoming blockbuster book, "In Mortal Danger: The Battle for America’s Border and Security." In an extended excerpt, Whistleblower presents Tencredo's expert and inspired analysis of exactly how to solve the nation's most vexing problem.
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