More This & That & Whatever.... The Best Of Intellectual Froglegs

[Ross]

Sheriffs warn of violence
from Mexican cartels
deep into interior of U.S.

By Kelly Riddell
The Washington Times
Wednesday, April 9, 2014

Outmanned and outgunned, local law enforcement officers are alarmed by the drug and human trafficking, prostitution, kidnapping and money laundering that Mexican drug cartels are conducting in the U.S. far from the border.

U.S. sheriffs say that securing the border is a growing concern to law enforcement agencies throughout the country, not just those near the U.S.-Mexico boundary.

"If we fail to secure our borders, then every sheriff in America will become a border sheriff," said Sam Page, sheriff of Rockingham County, N.C. "We're only a two-day drive from the border and have already seen the death and violence that illegal crossings brings into our community."

Sheriff Page, whose county has about 94,000 residents, noted that a Mexican cartel set up one of its drug warehouses about a mile from his home.

"These men are coming into our county with more firepower than I have," he said Wednesday. "I'm literally outgunned."

The sheriff in North Carolina was one of several from across the country attending Hold Their Feet to the Fire, an annual two-day radio confab in Washington organized by the Federation for American Immigration Reform.

Rusty Fleming, a spokesman for the Hudspeth County Sheriff's Office in Texas, is on the front lines of the border battle and said the U.S. side is losing.

"These cartels are so sophisticated. They're getting affluent white teenagers to help them encrypt their software; they do digital money-laundering, can hack into government databases and actively recruit our agents to keep one step ahead. The rest of America is just now getting a taste of what we've been dealing with for years," Mr. Fleming said.

He estimates that cartels have infiltrated more than 3,000 U.S. cities and are recruiting local gangs, former prisoners and teenagers to do their dirty work.

"There's no doubt they're spreading themselves very rapidly and very deep into our U.S. interior," said Mr. Fleming, who directed the documentary "Drug Wars" and has testified before Congress about the drug trade.

Sheriff Page said Rockingham County has jailed 194 illegal immigrants on criminal charges since 2010. Of those arrested, 10 were released and later rearrested. Six were deported only to re-enter the country, re-establish themselves in his neighborhood and get rearrested.

North Carolina has the second-busiest drug trafficking route in the South, after the region around Atlanta.

"We can't have open borders," Sheriff Page said. "We need to track who's coming in and out of our country. If we don't know who's here, how are we going to protect ourselves?"

Law enforcement officers in Frederick County, Md., are experiencing firsthand the proliferation of cartels.

"It's a huge problem for our public safety and a growing problem in our jurisdiction," Frederick County Sheriff Chuck Jenkins said. "The federal government can't take care of this problem alone. Every state and law enforcement officer needs to be able to enforce immigration laws to be effective."

About 9 percent of Frederick County arrests involve illegal immigrants, according to the sheriff's office.

Since entering into an agreement with U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement in early 2008, the Frederick County Sheriff's Office has detained 1,250 illegal immigrants, 50 of whom have had connections to Mexican drug cartels and organized crime, Sheriff Jenkins said.

"The success of the program is not in the numbers; it's who is actually getting arrested," the sheriff said. "Do I want Mexican gang members on the streets of Frederick County? Hell no."

He noted that the county recently deported to Colombia a convicted pedophile who was in the U.S. illegally.

"This program works, but there's such a political fallout from using it, many county sheriffs won't," Sheriff Jenkins said.

He cited criticism from groups opposed to the federal mobilization of local law enforcement officers in immigration enforcement.

Pablo Alvarado, executive director of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, said such programs waste federal money and are discriminatory.

"The idea of deputizing local sheriffs as front-line immigration reformers is a catastrophic mistake," said Chris Newman, the network's general counsel. "It distracts attention, chills people from reporting crime, encourages racial profiling and leads to the unconstitutional arrest and detainment of illegal immigrants."

Local law enforcers expressed frustration over the politicized nature of the immigration debate and said they are only trying to make their jurisdictions safer. Knowing who is in their jurisdictions illegally is a good start, they said.

Sheriff Page said that tracking expired visas, using biometrics at points of entry along the border, and further empowering ICE and local law enforcement would help tremendously. The House Judiciary Committee is considering such measures in immigration reform bills.

Mr. Fleming, who has been dealing with border issues for years, says more stringent measures are needed.

"There is a very, very big opposition to calling these organizations what they really are: narcoterrorists," he said. "When you label them as a narcoterrorists, we can pursue and target them under the Patriot Act. This is one of the major things that we need to do because of the level of sophistication they have. We have a saying on the border: 'If it gets by us today, it's going to be your problem tomorrow.'"

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/apr/9/sheriffs-warn-of-violence-from-mexican-cartels-dee/?page=all#pagebreak

[Warph]

The Paranoid Party

Written by Daniel Greenfield
Sunday, April 13, 2014

The Democrat may no longer believe in God, the Constitution or even motherhood and apple pie, but he devoutly believes with all the faith of a 9/11 Truther in the impermeability of steel and of a Neo-Nazi in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion that somewhere out there Republicans are sitting in a sealed room and plotting to bring back the 50s.


And if not the 50s, then at least the early 60s.

The left accuses the right of being deeply paranoid. Meanwhile the left is convinced that every Republican sneeze is a racial putdown of America's first black president since Bill Clinton.

Forget about looking for Communists under every bed. The proper progressive never lies down with his or her partner of choice and their government mandated birth control from the Catholic institution with no choice in the matter without first checking their privilege and checking for conservative bigotry.

Sometimes, somewhere in Kentucky or Alaska, a minor Republican functionary forwards an email depicting ObamaCare as the work of a voodoo witch doctor and the first lefty to discover it dines out on that triumphant accomplishment for a year before writing a book about it. The rest of the time, the McCarthyists of the left have to work hard to unpack the subtext of the overlay of the puzzle box of a random remark.

When Mitch McConnell complained that Obama plays too much golf, MSNBC's chief late night lunatic, Lawrence O'Donnell, barked that "Well, we know exactly what he's trying to do there. He is trying to align to Tiger Woods and surely, the lifestyle of Tiger Woods with Barack Obama."

The famously Calibnasian Woods didn't actually identify as black, but that was probably because of the way Republican racism stigmatizes black people. Will the right-wing bigotry never stop?

After its collapse under Reagan, the reinvented Democratic Party runs entirely on outdated conspiracy theories about Republican bigotry. It complains that Republicans secretly believe that they're a secret Communist conspiracy to destroy America, while their entire platform is an accusation that the Republican Party is a secret conspiracy to enslave black people. 

Or as the famous admirer of articulate, bright and clean-looking African-Americans, Joe Biden said,  "He is going to put y'all back in chains."

The chains would be redundant considering that he and his boss have run up the national debt to $17.6 trillion or a post-racial slavery of $55,234 by every American, regardless of race or creed, owed to China, Japan, Brazil and the Muslim world. And it's easier to accuse Mitt Romney of wanting to bring back the 1850s (when Mormons were persecuted) than to have an honest discussion about the chains of debt already there.

The Democratic Party now runs on racial paranoia, on class paranoia, on gender paranoia; on an endless McCarthyism in which the Republican Party is savaged as a phantom Nazi cult dedicated to serving Southern racists, the Koch Brothers and Israel.

The sanest liberal of the 21st century makes the looniest member of the Birch Society in the 60s seem positively grounded in reality. Conspiracy theories aren't a fringe element in the Democratic Party now; they're the entire ticket.

The War on Women, the constant claims of racism (according to ex-MSNBC'er Martin Bashir IRS was the new "N Word") and the invocation of class warfare by wealthy residents of entirely white bedroom communities is a litany of conspiracy theories. The frenzied search for new IRS and Tiger Woods "dog whistles" that prove the Republicans really are out to bring back the 50s is the psychological breakdown of an entire political party taking refuge in political paranoia.

The progressives are reactionaries who can't run on their record and can't even run on the record of their political opponents. So instead they run on the imaginary record of their political opponents derived from reading their minds, unpacking their subtext and then reading a few tea leaves.

The bible of the left's conspiracy theory is a Lee Atwater interview from 1981 in which he described politics becoming post-racial. Since conspiracy theorists can always locate that one frame that proves that the plane heading for the World Trade Center was a hologram and the magic bullet that shot JFK was really fired by Jackie Kennedy, they carefully excerpted a part of the interview to make it look like Atwater was saying the exact opposite of what he was saying.

Based on that out of context quote, the left built its pyramid of racial paranoia, its obsession with a Republican "Southern Strategy" to prove that the real racists weren't the Democrats who fought for segregation, but the Republicans who fought against it, and its claim that since then the Republicans who fought segregation (but were secretly segregationists), unlike Democrats like Al Gore's father who fought for segregation (but was secretly against it), have hidden their racism even more deeply by calling for small government and lower taxes, which, if you own a special Noam Chomsky decoder ring, really means Supermegaracism.

The Atwater revelation, treated in progressive circles the way that a Rabbi admitting that the Jews really do run the world from a moldy Brooklyn basement would be by a Neo-Nazi group, became the basis for justifying a reverse Atwater.

If Republicans are covertly disguising their racism in low taxes and small government, anyone who believes in low taxes and small government is probably a racist. And since Republicans hide their racism in innocuous policies, any conservative policy must be another racist Trojan horse.

Everything is a conspiracy. Everyone is a conspirator. If a Republican supports X, it must be racist. If he says Y, it must be racist.

Understand that and you understand why MSNBC's cast of lunatics insist that IRS is the new N Word and that the Republican Party keeps mentioning Obama's golf game to suggest to its base of racist voters that he's really off having affairs with a string of blonde women.

Progressive racial paranoia makes perfect sense if you assume that your opponents are part of a conspiracy whose defining feature is a paranoid projection of your own racism.

That's why you can't win an argument with a conspiracy theorist. He already knows that you're going to deny everything because you're in on it. Every argument is deeper proof that you're a 749th degree racist Freemason who faked the moon landing while shooting JFK. (Sure the dates don't match up, that's what they want you to think.)

The racial Atwaterization of the Democratic Party, its Northeastern Strategy, is typical of conspiracy theorists, whether it's the Muslim Brotherhood's front groups or the LaRouche zombies, who engage in byzantine conspiracies and vicious underhanded attacks that are justified by their own worldview in which a vast conspiracy is being waged against them.

Think of Hillary Clinton invoking a "vast right wing conspiracy" in public while justifying her husband's adultery as being caused by Republican attacks in private, targeting women who complained about her husband's sexual harassment in private, while claiming to be a role model for women in public.

That gap between ideals and actions, ends and means, is typical of the conspiracy theorist who projects every evil onto a single enemy, an Emmanuel Goldstein or Dick Cheney, and acts out every horrifying power fantasy in order to destroy him without ever acknowledging that he has become the thing he hates the most. He has become, not Dick Cheney, but Dick Cheney as he envisions him, an abuser of the Constitution who uses the IRS as a political weapon, invades countries unilaterally and destroys political enemies with lies, smears and innuendo.

The Dick Cheney of the left's paranoid imagination sits in the White House. His abuses are justified by the paranoid belief in a vast right wing conspiracy of Dick Cheneys.

To the conspiracy theorist, law is only a tool of the conspiracy. There is no such thing as compromise, only the supreme entitlement of grievance. Anything you can do to your enemies is fair because they already did it to you... and worse.

Political paranoids are totalitarians... and totalitarians are political paranoids. The modern Democratic Party has become both. Its paranoid totalitarianism runs on conspiracy theories that justify its politics of personal destruction and its abuses of power. It has accepted the left's classic formula of the conservative political opposition as a reactionary force that is the source of all evils in society.

If the Republican Party and the conservative opposition embody racism so thoroughly and covertly that there is nothing non-racist about them, then there is nothing left to do but to destroy them. Having reduced the right to a total evil with no redeeming qualities, destroying them seems downright benevolent.

If the right really is totally racist, if even their most benevolent programs and policies conceal a hidden racist agenda, then there's nothing else to do but to destroy them.

There's no way to leave behind racism, except through the destruction of the Republican Party.

Ordinarily intelligent adults would have trouble taking paranoid ravings seriously. Or so you would think. But it's surprising how sensible even the looniest conspiracy theory can seem if you dress it up in a tuxedo and take it out for a night on Fifth Avenue.

9/11 Truthers, moon landing hoaxers and Holocaust deniers can sound polished and sensible even with low budgets. The JFK conspiracy theories have convinced millions because they were given unofficial support by a liberal establishment obsessed with redirecting blame away from the Communist who killed him and at the "right-wing culture of hate", not to mention the Cuban mob and everyone who was the exact opposite of the radical Socialist ideology that actually pulled the trigger.

Imagine how polished 9/11 Truthers, moon landing hoaxers or Holocaust deniers could seem if they had the resources of the New York Times, CNN, Disney, Harvard and Random House at their disposal. Paranoid conspiracy theories only seem cheap and shoddy if they're the refuge of a handful of mouth-breathers. Put them in the New York Times and on the teleprompter of every talking head in a ten thousand dollar suit, turn them into college courses and box office blockbuster movies and they begin to seem exclusive and intellectual.

Like treason, conspiracy theories never prosper. When they do prosper, no one calls them conspiracy theories anymore. Instead they are the pantless emperor, the big lie and the derangement of an entitled elite using lies and conspiracy theories to justify its abuses of power.

Totalitarian governments in Russia and Germany maintained a ruthless grip on power by circulating conspiracy theories so ridiculous that no intelligent adult should have believed in them. But that abstract optimism in human reason doesn't hold up to 5 minutes of MSNBC. It's entirely possible to be wealthy, well-educated and a MENSA member while believing poisonously stupid and malicious things that a child could disprove in 5 minutes.

It's not because they're stupid. Like Agent Mulder, they want to believe. They need to believe.

If the Democratic Party isn't the progressive force standing against Republican bigotry, then what is it? An alliance of urban technocrats, corrupt community organizers and corporations? A Socialism Lite party that is despised by most European Socialists for its backwardness? A machine for printing money and moving it around to its special interests?

The average MSNBC viewer, New York Times reader and progressive suburbanite is not interested in a close look at his political movement or its track record. Instead of giving him something to believe in, his party's media outlets give him someone to hate. His political identity is shaped not by what he stands for, teachers' unions, unsustainable debt and an incoherent foreign policy of platitudes, but by his resistance to the Tea Party hordes who want to put black people back in chains, put women back in the kitchen and put homophobes back in the CEO's office at the Mozilla Foundation.

The politics of paranoid hatred is the crutch of mental cripples who protect the source of their dysfunction by projecting it onto phantom enemies. It's Hillary Clinton with her unfaithful husband, her list of enemies and her conviction that the Republicans made him cheat on her multiplied a million times over. It's the frenzied MSNBC talking head who sees the N Word everywhere because it's inside him. It's an Attorney General who pursues racial grudges without ever admitting it while calling the country "a nation of cowards" on race.

The Democratic Party is broken. It's broken spiritually, mentally and morally. But that doesn't mean that it's defeated. It's often the dysfunctional and the deranged who temporarily succeed because they are driven by their own demons. The completely unfit are often the most determined to disprove what the voices in their heads are telling them. And they are exceptionally talented at convincing other people of the lies that they tell themselves.

The great tragedies of the last two centuries were brought about by men and women like these, obsessed, maniacal, filled with churning hatreds and fears, commanding crowds, spreading lies, manufacturing ridiculous philosophies out of thin air and spreading them like an infection on the wind.

The Democratic Party has been contaminated by the madness of the left through its alliance with the left. Its one night stand has developed into a syphilitic infection and it's slowly going insane. You can see the derangement in Nancy Pelosi, staggering through aimless rhetoric, or Harry Reid, burning with inchoate anger, telling increasingly implausible lies, doing anything to hang on to power.

One of America's two major parties has become deranged and the entire country is paying the price.

[...]

I find myself completely dumbfounded at the attitudes of many left leaning Americans. I have spent a great deal of time trying to appeal to the abilities of liberals to reason and apply logic. Many of you already know what I am about to say, but there is no reasoning with these people. For some reason that alludes most of us. They simply refuse to see how their support of growing government power is creating a "new fascism;" they are supporting policies that are oppressing the very people they claim to care about, and yet they have this remarkable ability to deflect the responsibility for this onto the rest of us.

In the case of the Nevada ranch and the Bureau of Land Management, the left is foolish for not seeing the fact that this tyrannical government power will remain, even when people they don't agree with are in the White House. At least I can stand here and proclaim that I am against this usurpation of power even in the event that it is applied against those I disagree with. I believe in God first and foremost, and the Constitution; therefore, I believe all people have the right to live free from this type of government abuse. Sadly, this is something I cannot say the left agrees with. They seem to be trying to create this world where they have the absolute right to force compliance into their worldview; which they seem to believe is morally superior.

I believe the one definitive issue explaining the difference between liberals and patriots is religion. (I said patriots instead of conservative because if we were to go by actual definition, liberals would be the conservatives and vice versa.) I'm not speaking about actual religion so much, but spirituality, a belief in God. The Judeo-Christian God, not Allah. It seems that atheism is a growing movement in this country, and there are, in fact, a lot of people who despise Christianity on the left. They have no clue that they are being used as pawns by communist forces, but I digress.

Looking at it from this perspective it is easy to understand why the left needs the government to continue growing and expanding its power. They believe in nothing higher than man, so, therefore, they look to man to solve their problems. There is a void in their souls, and when they hear the empty promises of those taking advantage of this void, with false tales of equality and utopia, they fall for it. They refuse to see the errors in their ways because they fear true freedom, and that is freedom of the heart and mind. They are afraid to admit that the system that they have come to depend upon is turning into the monster it is because they can't exist without it. They literally need others to tell them what to think and how to behave; they need the state to reinforce their false ideology to prevent feelings of inadequacy and insecurity. They need the state to legitimize their immorality by making it the new morality through political correctness and indoctrination. Finally, they can't stand that others have a differing view.

When faced with the fact that the government is getting out of control, those on the left are forced into a box where they either choose to stand for what is right, or continue to support what is wrong. Many times they choose the latter, and will continue to make excuses for such usurpation's of power and corruption because they are completely enslaved to the system. They have let the politics of envy infect their hearts and have grown resentment, a resentment steadily nurtured by those appealing to their weaker natures mind you, that burns their souls because someone has earned more in life than they have. They have let those with an agenda define their lives, by the way, they define equality.

We were born equally in a state of nature, with the "equal rights" to pursue life, liberty and property. We were born in this world with the rights to equal opportunity and the rights to pursue that which makes us happy. The left has fallen for the communist lie that they can make us all totally equal, and they fell for this because they have allowed greed and hatred to infiltrate their hearts. They fall for this for the same reason they fall for everything else, they stand for nothing.

America, if there is one lesson to be learned from this episode at the Bundy Ranch it is that the nation is far more divided along deep ideological lines than many realized. As noted before, there are many that believe the government is in the right, and they have commented on how those protesting their actions should be "taken out." The Clark County Commissioner, a public official for crying out loud, even said that those protesting better make funeral arrangements. He said people from Utah were a bunch of inbred's; how humane of him. Despite this obvious lack of value for all life, the left will continue on as if those protesting the federal government are the terrorists because we are willing to draw a real red line in the sand, one that will not be so easily erasable.

While they continue with their vitriolic comments that spew hatred for those that oppose their worldview, they will continue to project that hatred onto us and accuse those that actually value their rights to their opinions as being the violent radicals. In fact, the events of this past weekend have ensured that any reaction we have to federal overreach from this point on will be viewed from this perspective by all on the left. I would argue, and I'm putting on a tinfoil hat now, that the whole operation was a "psyop" designed exclusively to demonize the anticipated opposition.

You didn't think they would let a crisis like that go to waste, did you?    

[Warph]

Two More Victims Of The Retail Apocalypse: Family Dollar And Coldwater Creek

By Michael Snyder, on April 17th, 2014

Did you know that Family Dollar is closing 370 stores? When I learned of this, I was quite stunned. I knew that retailers that serve the middle class were really struggling right now, but I had no idea that things had gotten so bad for low end stores like Family Dollar. In the post-2008 era, dollar stores had generally been one of the few bright spots in the retail industry. As millions of Americans fell out of the middle class, they were looking to stretch their family budgets as far as possible, and dollar stores helped them do that. It would be great if we could say that the reason why Family Dollar is doing so poorly is because average Americans have more money now and have resumed shopping at retailers that target the middle class, but that is not happening. Rather, as you will see later in this article, things just continue to get even worse for Americans at the low end of the income scale.

I was also surprised to learn that Coldwater Creek is closing all of their stores... http://www.coldwatercreek.com/

Women's clothing retailer Coldwater Creek Inc. on Friday filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy after failing to find a buyer said it plans to close its stores by early summer.

Coldwater Creek joins other retailers to seek protection from creditors in recent months as consumers keep a lid on spending.

The company said it plans to wind down its operations over the coming months and begin going-out-of-business sales in early May, before the traditionally busy Mother's Day weekend.

Coldwater Creek, which has 365 stores and employs about 6,000 people, has five stores in Maryland.

I remember browsing through a Coldwater Creek with my wife and mother-in-law just last year. At the time, my mother-in-law was excited about getting one of their catalogs. But now Coldwater Creek is going out of business, and all that will be left of that store is a big, ugly, empty space.

Of course the fact that a couple of major retailers are closing stores is nothing new. This kind of thing happens year after year.

But what we are witnessing right now is really quite startling. So many retailers are closing so many stores that it is being called a "retail apocalypse". In a previous article entitled "This Is What Employment In America Really Looks Like...", I detailed how major U.S. retailers have already announced the closing of thousands of stores so far this year.  If the economy really was "getting better", this should not be happening.

So why are so many stores closing?

Well, the truth is that it is because the middle class is dying. With each passing day, more Americans lose their place in the middle class and fall into poverty. The following is an excerpt from the story of one man that this has happened to. His recent piece in the Huffington Post was entitled "Next Friday, I'll Be Living In My Car"...
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/04/08/vincent-oviedo-working-poor_n_5112085.html?ncid=txtlnkusaolp00000592

For the past 13 years, I've mostly been doing facility management in several locations across the state. After the position turned into more of a sales role, they laid me off. Since then, I've been looking to find any type of work. I've applied for food stamps, and I'm waiting for that. I'm mostly eating soup from a food pantry.

I've been on several interviews -- second, third, fourth interviews -- and just haven't been able to land a job for whatever reason. I definitely have the qualifications and the experience. Last week, I had a job offer that I thought was secure, and we were talking my work schedule. They decided to call me back and go with an assistant rather than a manager.

For a number of applications, I've dumbed down my resume. I don't even go with a resume sometimes, just because I don't want them to know that I'm educated and have a master's degree. It shoots me in the foot. They don't want me because they don't think I'm going to stay. I don't blame them. I was making six figures at $60-70 an hour. Now, I'm looking for a $10 an hour job.

There are millions upon millions of Americans that can identify with what that man is going through.

Once upon a time, they were living comfortable middle class lifestyles, but now they will take any jobs that they can get.

Just today I came across a statistic that shows the massive shift that is happening in this country. A decade ago, the number of women working outnumbered the number of women on food stamps by more than a 2 to 1 margin. But now the number of women on food stamps actually exceeds the number of women that have jobs.

Wow.

How could things have changed so rapidly over the course of just one decade?

And sadly, things continue to go downhill. Every day in America, more good jobs are being sent out of the country or are being replaced by technology. I really like how James Altucher described this trend the other day...

Technology, outsourcing, a growing temp staffing industry, productivity efficiencies, have all replaced the middle class.

The working class. Most jobs that existed 20 years ago aren't needed now. Maybe they never were needed. The entire first decade of this century was spent with CEOs in their Park Avenue clubs crying through their cigars, "how are we going to fire all this dead weight?". 2008 finally gave them the chance. "It was the economy!" they said. The country has been out of a recession since 2009. Four years now. But the jobs have not come back. I asked many of these CEOs: did you just use that as an excuse to fire people, and they would wink and say, "let's just leave it at that."

I'm on the board of directors of a temp staffing company with one billion dollars in revenues. I can see it happening across every sector of the economy. Everyone is getting fired.
Everyone is toilet paper now.

Flush.

There is so little loyalty in corporate America these days. If you work for a major corporation, you could literally lose your job at any moment. And you can be sure that there is someone above you that is trying to figure out a way to accomplish the tasks that you currently perform much more cheaply and much more efficiently.

Most big corporations don't care if you are personally successful or if you are able to take care of your family. What they want is to get as much out of you as possible for as little money as possible.

This is a big reason why 62 percent of all Americans make $20 or less an hour at this point.

The quality of our jobs is going down, but the cost of living just keeps going up. Just look at what is happening to food prices. For a detailed examination of this, please see my previous article entitled "Why Meat Prices Are Going To Continue Soaring For The Foreseeable Future".

As the middle class slowly dies, less people are able to afford to buy homes. Mortgage originations at major U.S. banks have fallen to a record low, and the percentage of Americans that live in "high-poverty neighborhoods" is rising rapidly...

An estimated 12.4 million Americans live in economically devastated neighborhoods, according to American Community Survey data collected from 2008 to 2012. That's an 11 percent jump from the previous survey, conducted from 2007 to 2011. Even more startling, it's a 72 percent increase in the population of high-poverty neighborhoods since the 2000 Census.

If nothing is done about the long-term trends that are slowly strangling the middle class to death, all of this will just be the beginning.

We will see millions more Americans lose their jobs, millions more Americans lose their homes and millions more Americans living in poverty.

The United States is being fundamentally transformed, and very few people are doing much of anything to stand in the way of this transformation. Decades of incredibly foolish decisions are starting to catch up with us, and unless something dramatic is done right away, all of these problems will soon get much, much worse.

[Warph]

Very interesting article.... interesting... and scary as hell, like:

2016 Republican Presidential Hopefuls & Their Advisors

http://freedomoutpost.com/2014/04/2016-republican-presidential-hopefuls-advisors/

By Kelleigh Nelson April 12, 2014

"It is when people forget God that tyrants forge their chains." -- Patrick Henry

"Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But then I repeat myself." -- Mark Twain

"What this country needs are more unemployed politicians."-- Edward Langley, Artist (1928-1995)


From Yahoo, comes an article entitled, 'The Brain Trusts Behind the 2016 GOP Hopefuls.' The Republican presidential hopefuls are getting help from advisors on how to answer a wide range of questions on domestic and foreign policies. When I saw who these folks had as advisors, there is nary a one I could vote for in good conscience.

It's a typical list, Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, Chris Christie, Marco Rubio, Scott Walker, Paul Ryan, and Bobby Jindal.

Three of these candidates should immediately be eliminated, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, and Bobby Jindal. The term "natural born citizen" was well defined at the time the Constitution was written. The definition was given clearly in The Law of Nations by Emerich D. Vattel, a book that was sent to Franklin during the drafting of the Constitution. The founders specifically made the distinction from a regular citizen to insure that our presidency would not be co-opted by someone with foreign interests at heart (like the POTUS we now have). In order to be a natural born citizen, one must be born of two citizen parents and Cruz, Rubio, and Jindal clearly do not qualify, regardless of where they were born. If this requirement can be so easily ignored, everything is up for grabs, and our Congress has allowed Obama to be president despite his father being a Kenyan citizen when Obama was born. Thus, the precedent has been set.

Article 2 of the constitution, which says, "no person except a natural born citizen ... shall be eligible to the Office of President." The above writings of Vattel, along with others, verify what is meant by Article 2, Section 1 of the Constitution.

Rafael Edward "Ted" Cruz was born December, 1970 in Calgary, Alberta, Canada to an Irish-Italian mother who was born and raised in Wilmington, Delaware, and to Rafael Cruz, who was born in Matanzas, Cuba, in 1939. His father fled Cuba at the age of 18, and became a US Citizen in 2005. Accordingly, Cruz is ineligible for US president or vice president. See Publius Huldah's important article on this subject.

Marco Rubio was born in 1971 at Cedars of Lebanon Hospital, but his Cuban parents didn't become citizens until 1975.

Bobby Jindal was born five months after his mother and father immigrated to America from India. Neither of his parents were naturalized citizens when he was born. Nevertheless, we'll look at who they have as advisors.


Senator Rand Paul

At the top of his list of advisors and counselors is none other than Bill Gates, Microsoft co-founder and so-called philanthropist. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation was strongly criticized by "international charities, farmers' groups and academics" as a result of a $25 million grant it had given to "GM [genetically modified] research to develop vitamin and protein-enriched seeds for the world's poor." Bill Gates loves GMO's.

The Foundation also funds the pro-Constitutional Convention American Legislative Exchange Council, (ALEC) who has a large corporate membership, along with 2,500 of 7,500 the state legislators. Together they write bills for state and federal passage.

Gates has bankrolled the push to privatize, voucherize, charterize, and generally dismantle free and universal public education in America". Between 2011 and 2012, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation donated between $1 million and $5 million to the horrid, Teach for America, and they have poured more than $20 million into communist core.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has spent millions, and plans on spending billions on contraception and population control, much of which is done through his vaccination programs. Watch the video at this site.

The Gates Foundation is referred to as conservative philanthropy. However, given the key role played by liberal philanthropy, most notably the Rockefeller Foundation, in promoting the initial Green Revolution, it is noteworthy that many important people at the Gates Foundation are directly connected to the Rockefeller philanthropies: Tachi Yamada is a former trustee of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund; the two chairs for the Gates Foundations advisory panels for their U.S. program and their global development program both serve as Rockefeller Foundation trustees (these are Ann Fudge and Rajat Gupta respectively); while Henry Cisneros, a former Rockefeller Foundation trustee sits on the Gates Foundations U.S. programs advisory panel.

Next on the list is Peter Thiel, PayPal cofounder and libertarian donor. Thiel was once speech writer for Bill Bennett, former education secretary under Reagan. William J. Bennett was United States Secretary of Education under President Ronald Reagan, co-directed Empower America -- which merged with Citizens for a Sound Economy in 2004 to form Freedom Works -- and co-founded the for-profit online education company K12, Inc. Bennett was also Director of National Drug Control Policy under President George Herbert Walker Bush. Thiel also donates to the neo-conservative Club for Growth.

Richard Burt, former Reagan era Ambassador to Germany. Council on Foreign Relations member.

Lorne Craner, former Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor in the George W. Bush administration. Council on Foreign Relations member.


Senator Ted Cruz

Stephen Moore, chief economist at the Heritage Foundation and former Wall Street Journal (owned by CFR member Rupert Murdoch and Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal who owns 7%) editorial writer who champions tax cuts is Senator Cruz' main advisor. This comes as no surprise. I've written about Heritage many times, most recently in a three part article on Ted Cruz and his close friendship with Heritage Founder and first president, Paul Weyrich. Link Stephen Moore is also the founder of Club for Growth, (CFG) who funded and supported Ted Cruz for Texas Senator.

Moore has been paid to promote policies for the Koch funded Americans for Prosperity, owned by David Koch, who is a member of the globalist Aspen Institute. Please see my 2011 article on AFP. Aspen Institute's former director was none other than Maurice Strong, of UN Agenda 21 fame. Moore is also an American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) "scholar" as of 2011. On August 4th, 2011, he spoke at a Shell Oil-sponsored plenary session of the 38th Annual ALEC Meeting in New Orleans, Louisiana, along with fellow ALEC "scholar" Arthur B. Laffer. ALEC is a corporate bill mill. It is not just a lobby or a front group; it is much more powerful than that. Through ALEC, corporations hand state legislators their wish lists to benefit their bottom line. Corporations fund almost all of ALEC's operations. ALEC has lobbied for a Constitutional Convention for decades. Club for Growth's leadership council reads like a who's who of the neo-con right. Moore has recently returned to the Heritage Foundation as chief economist. He also served as committee staff to pro-amnesty former Rep. Dick Armey, original founder and co-chair of FreedomWorks. In December of 2004, then CFG President, Steve Moore, left his position after accusations that he, and/or members of his new organization, the Free Enterprise Fund, had taken CFG's donor and mailing lists. Though there were threats of legal action, nothing came of the accusations.

Former defense secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, Council on Foreign Relations member, known for his controversial decisions during the Iraq war, has been courted by several potential candidates and plans to meet with Senator Cruz. Cruz has hired former Rumsfeld aide, Victoria Coates, as his national security advisor. Victoria Coates writes for Council for National Policy member Erick Erickson's Red State as well as the Weekly Standard. Old line neo-conservative bureaucrats are Cruz's advisors.


New Jersey Governor Chris Christie

As if all the other putzes weren't bad enough, this one takes the cake, and I would guess this is the type of person the RNC will run against Hillary Clinton. Does anyone really like this guy? He seems hell bent on including Islamists in every part of his administration. Just look at the radicals he's appointed to his security forum. The Clarion Project has written extensively about Christie's propensity to hire radical Islamists.

Guess who is on his advisory list....former Secretary of State and Council on Foreign Relations member, Condoleezza Rice. She's in good company with Council for National Policy member, Richard V. Allen at the Hoover Institution at Stanford. Remember Allen, while at Heritage Foundation, drafted NAFTA resulting in the destruction of manufacturing jobs in America. Another at Hoover Institution is Council for National Policy member, Edwin Meese, former Reagan administration Attorney General, who is now on the board of Heritage Foundation and paid half a million per year.

Christie's second advisor is Richard N. Haass, President of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), a position he has held since July 2003. Haass also has been Vice President and Director of Foreign Policy Studies at The Brookings Institution, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a Lecturer in Public Policy at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government, and a research associate at the International Institute for Strategic Studies. A Rhodes Scholar, Haass holds a B.A. from Oberlin College [1973] and both the Master and Doctor of Philosophy degrees from Oxford University [1975; 1982]. Remember, the Brookings Institution is funded by the Rockefeller Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

The third Council on Foreign Relations member of Christie's advisory team is Robert E. Grady, venture capitalist and former White House associate budget director. Grady is currently a Managing Director at Cheyenne Capital, a $500 million private equity fund. For the decade prior to joining Cheyenne Capital, he was a prominent partner at the Carlyle Group. Currently, he is managing director at Cheyenne Capital, Chairman of the State of New Jersey Council of Economic Advisors for Governor Christie, and Chairman of New Jersey's State Investment Council, which oversees the state's $72 billion pension fund. Grady also serves as a director of multiple public and private companies.

And finally, the coup de gras, Henry Kissinger! That infamous Soviet Agent is going to help advise Chris Christie on how to get elected to the White House!

Same old, same old, isn't it?! All of the advisors to these three presidential hopefuls are tried and true bureaucrats from the neo-conservative, corporate fascist, phony Republican right. Sadly, it does not appear we'll have an opportunity to vote for a true old-right Constitutional conservative this time around either.

In Part 2 of this article, we'll look at the advisors for Marco Rubio, Scott Walker, Paul Ryan, and Bobby Jindal.


Part 2
http://freedomoutpost.com/2014/04/2016-republican-presidential-hopefuls-advisors-2/

"The two enemies of the people are criminals and government, so let us tie the second down with the chains of the Constitution so the second will not become the legalized version of the first." -- Thomas Jefferson

"A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear. The traitor is the plague." -- MARCUS TILLIUS CICERO

The phony rightwing cabal is such a huge spider web that it's impossible to write about all the connections in the allowed space for an article. The leftist alliances and deviousness of these wolves in sheep's clothing is truly mind boggling. I've written about them many times, so I hope the readers of this article have read my previous articles and can fully connect the dots.

In part 1 of this article, we covered Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, and Chris Christie. Now let's take a look at Marco Rubio, Scott Walker, Paul Ryan, and Bobby Jindal. Link

Marco Rubio

As mentioned in Part 1 of this article, Rubio is constitutionally ineligible for the position of President or Vice President. However, since Barack Hussein Obama has set the precedent for being elected when only one parent was an American citizen, we now will face three more challengers whose parents were not both American citizens when they were born.

Adviser, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, who is the former director of the Congressional Budget Office and economic policy advisor to Senator John McCain's 2008 presidential campaign is at the top of Rubio's list. He is now president of the American Action Forum. Not bad enough that Eakin was tied to leftist Republican, John McCain, but on the board of his American Action Forum is none other than Jeb Bush, who has reformed and destroyed the education in Florida, and who loves Communist Core.

Jamie Fly, a Rubio aide, and former advisor to President George W. Bush's administration, and former executive director of the Foreign Policy Initiative. FPI's Board of Directors consists of Editor of The Weekly Standard, Bilderberger
William Kristol, Brookings Institution, (funded by the Ford Foundation, the Gates Foundation, and Rockefeller Foundations, Sen. Dianne Feinstein and her husband Richard C. Blum, Bank of America, ExxonMobil, Pew Charitable Trusts, the MacArthur Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation, and the governments of the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, Qatar, the Republic of China and the District of Columbia, Senior Fellow Robert Kagan, (CFR) former Undersecretary of Defense for Policy
Eric S. Edelman and Dan Senor.

Arthur C. Brooks, president of the American Enterprise Institute, is extremely involved in Agenda 21 and wrote a book about happiness entitled, Gross National Happiness, a statement you'll hear quoted often by proponents of Agenda 21. As well, the AEI has strong ties to the pro-Constitutional Convention American Legislative Exchange Council and former Trotskyite, Irving Kristol worked for AEI. Remember Kristol made the statement, "I regard myself as lucky to have been a young Trotskyite, and I have not a single bitter memory." Irving is the father of Bilderberger, Bill Kristol.

Stephen Moore, chief economist at the Heritage Foundation and former Wall Street Journal editorial writer was discussed in Part 1 as an advisor for Ted Cruz and is also the founder of the neo-conservative, Club for Growth.


Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker

At the top of the adviser list is John B. Taylor, a Stanford University Hoover Institution scholar, a former member of Economic Advisers, and economics adviser to several GOP presidential candidates, along with fellow Hoover Institute research fellow, Lanhee Chen, former chief policy adviser to presidential nominee Mitt Romney. Taylor and Chen are in good company with Council on Foreign Relations members, Condoleezza Rice, George Schultz, and Council for National Policy members, Edwin Meese and Richard V. Allen.

Meese and his cronies were also involved in the theft of the Inslaw/Promis software (do you all remember this and the death of Danny Casalero?) that enabled the Justice Dept. to track criminal prosecutions, and had their intel buddies, put a trap door in the software and then gave it to Intelligence Divisions of various Governments so the Bushes could monitor everyone. It also monitors all of us, and today there's an even greater software program out there..but that's another story.

As for Richard V. Allen, the idea of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) originated with Heritage Fellow Richard Allen and has long been advocated by Heritage policy analysts.... The idea of creating a North American free trade zone from the Yukon to the Yucatan was first proposed by Heritage Distinguished Fellow Richard Allen in the late 1970s, refined by then Presidential candidate Ronald Reagan, and further developed in a major 1986 Heritage Foundation study, and passed into law by Clinton.

Mark Thiessen, a Washington Post columnist, former speechwriter to President George W. Bush, and Donald Rumsfeld, and prominent foreign policy hawk. He worked for Council on Foreign Relations member, Vin Weber , at the Empower America think tank, which was a right-wing think tank established in 1993. In July 2004, it merged with Citizens for a Sound Economy, to form a new group called FreedomWorks. Vin Weber is also co-director of the globalist Aspen Institute's Domestic Strategy Group.


Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin

William J. Bennett, political pundit, former Secretary of Education under Reagan, and former director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy. Upon leaving government office, Bennett became a "distinguished fellow" at the neo-conservative Heritage Foundation, co-founded Empower America, and established himself as a self-proclaimed expert on morality with his authorship of The Book of Virtues. Empower America was loaded with Council on Foreign Relations members, Vin Weber, William Cohen, and Jeanne Kirkpatrick, the latter who was also Trilateral Commission member and UN Ambassador. Bennett is no friend of American education. Remember, he was Secretary of Education when Charlotte Iserbyt was Senior Policy Advisor and exposed the 1985 and then 1988 Soviet/US education exchange agreements which brought in behavioral conditioning of our children a la Skinner/Pavlov.

William A. Schambra, director of the Hudson Institute's Bradley Center for Philanthropy and Civic Renewal. Schambra was director of programs at the Bradley Foundation in Milwaukee. Before joining Bradley in 1992, Schambra served as a senior advisor and chief speechwriter for Attorney General Edwin Meese III, Director of the Office of Personnel Management Constance Horner, and Secretary of Health and Human Services Louis Sullivan. He was also Director of Social Policy Programs for the American Enterprise Institute, and Co Director of AEI's "A Decade of Study of the Constitution."

Funding to the Hudson Institute is through the Walton Family Foundation, who supports charter schools, and the pro-Constitutional Convention, American Legislative Exchange Council. The Koch Family Foundations, which includes, David and Charles Koch of Americans for Prosperity. David Koch is on the board of the Rockefeller University and is a member of the globalist Aspen Institute. Koch's are also connected to the American Legislative Exchange Council and all of the State Policy Networks, which are "mini Heritage Foundations" at the state level since the early 1990s.

The Hudson Institute is also funded by pro-abort Richard Mellon Scaife, who funds both sides of the aisle and who sits on the board of Heritage Foundation. Scaife is heir of the Carnegie-Mellon fortune and is a strong supporter of tax funding for Planned Parenthood and abortion at any stage. He has funded Heritage Foundation to the tune of $16M, and has given more than 200 million to various groups and causes, including the American Spectator, the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research (closely tied to ALEC and Irving Kristol worked with them), the Cato Institute, Third waver Newt Gingrich's GOPAC, the Con-Con pushing National Taxpayer's Union, Weyrich's Free Congress Foundation, the Hoover Institute (Richard Allen, John Chubb, Chester Finn, Henry Kissinger), and dozens of others.


Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal

Again, as mentioned in part 1 of this article, Bobby Jindal is ineligible to hold the office of President or Vice President. Neither of his parents were naturalized citizens when Bobby was born in America.

Jim DeMint is now president of the Heritage Foundation and was the former S.C. senator. He is barred by ethics law from discussing politics with federal legislators so soon after leaving office, however, meeting with state governors is allowed.

DeMint is a member of Doug Coe's secretive and powerful religious group in D.C., "The Family," or "The Foundation." Here is a very informative article:
Link-Part 1. - http://www.exminister.org/Madsen-Christian-mafia-first.html
Link-Part 2. - http://www.exminister.org/Madsen-Christian-mafia-second.html

Their members are allegedly believers, and include politicians from the right and the left, including Hillary Clinton (Link)....
http://prorevnews.blogspot.com/2013/04/great-moments-with-hllary-clinton.html

...who was quite close to Doug Coe. Jeff Sharlet's book, The Family, exposes the political and religious leanings of this very secretive and powerful group. Yet, he only infiltrated at the lowest level.

As the new President of Heritage Foundation, DeMint will continue to promote charters, leading to the elimination of school boards, and resulting in unelected councils, or taxation without representation. He'll also continue to urge states through the State Policy Networks (SPC's), which are mini Heritages in every state, to adopt vouchers and choice. Any private, religious, or homeschooled child who accepts one penny of tax money from the government, will receive every regulation and requirement of the government schools. Thus, the private, religious and homeschoolers will be eliminated.

Remember, former Heritage president, Ed Feulner, along with radical World Government advocate, Walter Hoffman of the World Federalist Association, participated on the 16 member U.S. Commission on Improving the Effectiveness of the United Nations. Working with the US Information Agency, Feulner also participated in facilitating the infamous 1985 US-Soviet Education Technology and Cultural Exchange Agreement. Jim DeMint will continue Heritage's agenda.

Another advisor is William Kristol, a Bilderberger...

(Click below to enlarge Bilderberger Map)

http://cdn.freedomoutpost.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/bilderberg.jpg

...is editor of The Weekly Standard, and an American neoconservative
political analyst and commentator. Kristol is associated with a number of prominent conservative think tanks. In 1997, he co-founded the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) with Robert Kagan. Kagan is a fellow at the liberal Brookings Institute, and he is a member of the Council for National Policy. Remember, the Brookings Institution is funded by the Rockefeller Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation of New York. Kagan is married to long-time career diplomat, Victoria Nuland, who is currently serving as Assistant Secretary of European and Eurasian Affairs in the Barack Obama administration.

Kristol is a member of the board of trustees for the free-market Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, a member of the Policy Advisory Board for the Ethics and Public Policy Center, and a director of the Foreign Policy Initiative. He is also one of the three board members of Keep America Safe, a think tank co-founded by Liz Cheney and Debra Burlingame.


Conclusion

Where is there any difference in the parties? There really is none when both sides are very chummy with the shadow government elite of the Council on Foreign Relations and the rightwing arm with the same agenda. So, what are we to do.

1. Pray without ceasing, and read God's Word daily to keep the knowledge of God in your heart. Do not spend all your time with political evils.

2. Vet all incoming political challengers, research them to the point of knowing every organization they've ever been with, allegiances and associations they have, and what their full beliefs are, and this includes the social and cultural aspects, i.e., abortion, euthanasia, etc.

3. When you find good Constitutional Conservative challengers, put your money where your mouth is, and fund them. If we don't, who will?

4. Again, pray without ceasing for a Nineveh, otherwise the Republic is lost.

[Warph]

George Will: Obamacare 'Doomed' Under Constitution's Origination Clause
Saturday, 03 May 2014 02:59 PM

By Sandy Fitzgerald

Two years ago, when the Supreme Court declared Obamacare's penalty to be a tax, it "doomed" the healthcare reform act as an "unconstitutional violation of the origination clause," columnist George Will says.

This Thursday, the Washington, D.C., Court of Appeals, the nation's second-most important court, will hear arguments on whether the Affordable Care Act adheres to the Constitution's "origination clause,"  which declares that "all bills for raising revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives; but the Senate may propose or concur with amendments as on other bills," Will writes in his column in The Washington Post Saturday.

Will points out that the Democrat-controlled Senate passed Obamacare on a party-line vote "without a Democratic vote to spare, after a series of unsavory transactions that purchased the assent of several shrewdly extortionate Democrats.

Thursday's arguments, said Will, will show that the act was "indisputably a revenue measure" that did not originate in the House, which later passed the House on yet another party-line vote.

The appeals case was filed by Iowa artist and small-business owner Matt Sissell, who is being represented by the Pacific Legal Foundation, a group that litigates for limited government.

Sissell does not have and does not want health insurance, saying he'd rather invest in his business, and object to paying a penalty for rejecting service under the Obamacare "shared responsibility payment" mandate.

But in June 2012, Will writes, the Supreme Court said the penalty is actually a tax, and mild enough that people can choose to pay it rather than buy insurance.

"It is collected by the IRS, and the proceeds go to the Treasury for the general operations of the federal government, not to fund a particular program," said Will. "This surely makes the ACA a revenue measure."

The Senate was able to pass the bill, said Will, by calling it an amendment to a tax credit bill passed in 2009 for members of the armed forces and federal employees who were first-time home buyers, but had nothing to do with health care.

"Two months later the Senate 'amended' this bill by obliterating it," said Will.

It then "renamed it and completely erased its contents, replacing them with the ACA's contents."

But case law says that for the Senate to amend a House-passed revenue bill, the amendment must be "germane to the subject matter" of that bill.

"The Senate's shell game — gutting and replacing the House bill — created the ACA from scratch," said Will. "The ACA obviously flunks the germaneness test, without which the House's constitutional power of originating revenue bills would be nullified."

And while there are two kinds of bills that do now fit under the origination clause, Will said, the Obamacare tax is not enforcement penalty and does not raise revenue to support only one government program, both requirements under the clause, and do not fit the criteria.

Obamacare defenders say its tax is "not quite a tax" because it is not for raising revenue, but "the origination clause, a judicially enforceable limit on the taxing power, would be effectively erased from the Constitution if any tax with any regulatory — behavior-changing — purpose or effect were exempt from the clause," insists Will.

[Warph]

17 Facts To Show To Anyone That Believes That The U.S. Economy Is Just Fine

By Michael Snyder, on April 29th, 2014

http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/17-facts-to-show-to-anyone-that-believes-that-the-u-s-economy-is-just-fine

No, the economy is most definitely not "recovering."  

Despite what you may hear from the politicians and from the mainstream media, the truth is that the U.S. economy is in far worse shape than it was prior to the last recession.  In fact, we are still pretty much where we were at when the last recession finally ended.  When the financial crisis of 2008 struck, it took us down to a much lower level economically.  Thankfully, things have at least stabilized at this much lower level.  For example, the percentage of working age Americans that are employed has stayed remarkably flat for the past four years.  We should be grateful that things have not continued to get even worse.  It is almost as if someone has hit the "pause button" on the U.S. economy.  But things are definitely not getting better, and there are a whole host of signs that this bubble of false stability will soon come to an end and that our economic decline will accelerate once again. 

The following are 17 facts to show to anyone that believes that the U.S. economy is just fine...

#1 The homeownership rate in the United States has dropped to the lowest level in 19 years.

#2 Consumer spending for durable goods has dropped by 3.23 percent since November.  This is a clear sign that an economic slowdown is ahead.

#3 Major retailers are closing stores at the fastest pace that we have seen since the collapse of Lehman Brothers.

#4 According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 20 percent of all families in the United States do not have a single member that is employed.  That means that one out of every five families in the entire country is completely unemployed.

#5 There are 1.3 million fewer jobs in the U.S. economy than when the last recession began in December 2007.  Meanwhile, our population has continued to grow steadily since that time.

#6 According to a new report from the National Employment Law Project, the quality of the jobs that have been "created" since the end of the last recession does not match the quality of the jobs lost during the last recession...

•Lower-wage industries constituted 22 percent of recession losses, but 44 percent of recovery growth.
•Mid-wage industries constituted 37 percent of recession losses, but only 26 percent of recovery growth.
•Higher-wage industries constituted 41 percent of recession losses, and 30 percent of recovery growth.
#7 After adjusting for inflation, men who work full-time in America today make less money than men who worked full-time in America 40 years ago.

#8 It is hard to believe, but 62 percent of all Americans make $20 or less an hour at this point.

#9 Nine of the top ten occupations in the U.S. pay an average wage of less than $35,000 a year.

#10 The middle class in Canada now makes more money than the middle class in the United States does.

#11 According to one recent study, 40 percent of all Americans could not come up with $2000 right now even if there was a major emergency.

#12 Less than one out of every four Americans has enough money put away to cover six months of expenses if there was a job loss or major emergency.

#13 An astounding 56 percent of all Americans have subprime credit in 2014.

#14 As I wrote about the other day, there are now 49 million Americans that are dealing with food insecurity.

#15 Ten years ago, the number of women in the U.S. that had jobs outnumbered the number of women in the U.S. on food stamps by more than a 2 to 1 margin.  But now the number of women in the U.S. on food stamps actually exceeds the number of women that have jobs.

#16 69 percent of the federal budget is spent either on entitlements or on welfare programs.

#17 The number of Americans receiving benefits from the federal government each month exceeds the number of full-time workers in the private sector by more than 60 million.

Taken individually, those numbers are quite remarkable.

Taken collectively, they are absolutely breathtaking.

Yes, things have been improving for the wealthy for the last several years.  The stock market has soared to new record highs and real estate prices in the Hamptons have skyrocketed to unprecedented heights.

But that is not the real economy.  In the real economy, the middle class is being squeezed out of existence.  The quality of our jobs is declining and prices just keep rising.  This reality was reflected quite well in a comment that one of my readers left on one of my recent articles...

It is getting worse each passing month. The food bank I help out, has barely squeaked by the last 3 months. Donors are having to pull back, to take care of their own families. Wages down, prices up, simple math tells you we can not hold out much longer. Things are going up so fast, you have to adopt a new way of thinking. Example I just had to put new tires on my truck. Normally I would have tried to get by to next winter. But with the way prices are moving, I decide to get them while I could still afford them. It is the same way with food. I see nothing that will stop the upward trend for quite a while. So if you have a little money, and the space, buy it while you can afford it. And never forget, there will be some people worse off than you. Help them if you can.

And the false stock bubble that the wealthy are enjoying right now will not last that much longer.  It is an artificial bubble that has been pumped up by unprecedented money printing by the Federal Reserve, and like all bubbles that the Fed creates, it will eventually burst.

None of the long-term trends that are systematically destroying our economy have been addressed, and none of our major economic problems have been fixed.  In fact, as I showed in this recent article, we are actually in far worse shape than we were just prior to the last major financial crisis: http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/we-are-in-far-worse-shape-than-we-were-just-prior-to-the-last-great-financial-crisis

Let us hope that this current bubble of false stability lasts for as long as possible.

That is what I am hoping for.

But let us not be deceived into thinking that it is permanent.

It will soon burst, and then the real pain will begin.

[Warph]

Kicking Cats & Killing Babies

We live in a highly moral society. And we know this is true because our guardians of public morality, our politicians, professors and professional entertainers remind us of this at every possible occasion. Just like the guardians of public morality in Iran, China and Pakistan assure their people that they are the very best and most moral people in the world.

Once upon a time we used to have benchmarks for that sort of thing. We were the best people in the world because we would be willing to die to defend those who disagree with us. We were the best people in the world because we cured Polio. We were the best people in the world because we tolerated religious dissent. We were the best people in the world because we embraced knowledge. We were the best people in the world because we wouldn't let any government push us around.

Now we don't have benchmarks anymore. Certainly not those benchmarks. We would be willing to die to silence those who disagree with us. We don't cure anything, we provide research grants to studies on the rates of alcoholism among Lesbians. We criminalize religious dissent. We mock knowledge and we urge government to take over every aspect of our lives.

We know that we are good people because we are trying to be post-racial. We know that we are good people because we let the people who claim to be good people tell us what to do. We know that we are being good people when we worry about racism, the environment, hunger abroad, income inequality at home and a thousand other things.

Mainly we know we're being good people when we get outraged at the things that the media wants us to be outraged by. We know we're good people when we can drag a bad person out of his home and lynch him in the strange virtual space occupied by the convergence of the internet and the media. Somehow only membership in an affirmative action post-racial lynch mob reassures us of our morals.

That and the occasional viral outrage.

In a Brooklyn housing project, Andre Robinson, a typical denizen, was caught kicking a cat. Robinson had a string of previous offenses, including a knife point robbery, but that didn't outrage anyone. Viral videos of the Knockout Game being played were ignored or denounced as a racist hoax. Andre's video was mild by the standards of World Star Hip Hop which is crammed full of videos chronicling violence against human beings.

If Andre Robinson had been taped kicking a man, no one would have thought about it twice. But he was filmed kicking a cat. And "the internet", a term which sites specializing in viral videos use refractively to refer to themselves, sprang into action to track him down. And track him down they did. Robinson will probably serve more time for kicking a cat, which is okay, than he did for his knife point robbery. Because we are a moral society. We are the best people in the world.

Around the same time another viral video was making its rounds. Emily Letts, a personable abortion counselor, filmed her abortion to show a "positive abortion story."

That strange long lost America of a century ago, whose people really might have been the best people in the world, would have considered Emily a much worse monster than Andre. But that society sometimes seems to have vanished as far into the past as Ancient Rome. It hasn't really, but it has been banished thoroughly from our public spaces. Its brand of morality no longer informs us. Instead it is passed down precariously through families and communities as a local form of dissent.


What are we to make of a society where kicking a cat is the worst imaginable crime (except possibly expressing negative sentiments toward black people in a private conversation) while killing a baby is a form of empowerment? A century ago they would have thought us monsters. Today we think that they were the monsters. At least that's what our guardians of public morality insist on telling us.

Today we burn dead babies for heat and send out SWAT teams after cat kickers. In 1914, they would have ignored the cat and they had no SWAT teams, but they would have made every effort to save an endangered child.

Perhaps they were monsters. Or perhaps we are. 

Public morals reflect the shape of a society. Today more households have pets than children. So it's only natural that many value pets more than children. Morality follows emotional attachments. Love has become the ultimate arbiter of public morality today. And that has its consequences in more ways than one. Our morality is love, not family.

In 1940, 43 percent of all households had children. By 1960, that number was up to 44 percent. Today it's around 20 percent.Meanwhile 63 percent of all households have a pet. 40 percent own cats. Or as some like to put it, the cats own them. There are more cats in America than children.

I like cats and I am not writing this to begin a debate on abortion. Debates over morality are often driven by an emotional conviction that our choices and compromises are correct. And that those of other people are wrong. I will speak to something simpler instead. Survival.

Societies that place a low value on human life can survive as long as they have high birth rates. If they have low birth rates and use household pets and pornography as substitutes for the biological reproductive instinct... they have no future. They will not survive. They will die alone and the civilization that succeeds them will have many children, few pets and will kick their surviving cats.

That isn't a matter of debate.

A society that cannot survive is not moral or amoral. It is irrelevant. To its own people however it is inherently immoral. No virtue of a society can be worth its destruction because that will also destroy the virtue in question. A society that chooses extinction can never be moral, because the thing that it chooses to die for will not carry on its morals. That's a simple matter of everyday evolution.

Suicidal peoples are replaced by non-suicidal peoples. The latter may not be moral, but they have survival strategies that work for them. We no longer have a survival strategy. Instead we have become an amoral society obsessed with a public morality based on political correctness. Our morality bends easily to outrage. It bends only reluctantly to tradition.

Opportunistic empathy is everywhere. We constantly feel sharp jabs of viral pity and outrage. Enduring group empathy however is fading. Our families and communities are becoming fragmented. Too many of us are angry and confused... and both of those emotions are easy enough to exploit by the masters of media manipulation who use confusion to distract and emotion to control.

The process is slow. It's slow enough that we only notice something is wrong when it's shoved in our faces. The contrast between Andre Robinson and Emily Lett may be one such moment.

Or it may not be. Your mileage may vary.

America isn't doomed, but it is troubled. It is not on a survival path. It is on a path to social destruction and national destruction. If we can't agree on morality, we ought to at least be able to agree on survival.

A moral society survives. A society that does not is immoral. Survival is the most elementary premise of morality for the same reason that having children is the most elementary premise of a society. It is the thing you do if you want your virtues to survive. A society that does not wish to survive is inherently immoral by its own admission.

That is how the new progressives see their society. They define its morality through its will to suicide. It is a moral martyrdom that defines survival as immoral. And that makes it a cult of death.

...Dan Greenfield

[Warph]

   
#BringBackOurGirls: did it really happen?

by Eugene Ohu | 9 May 2014 |

#BringBackOurGirls is a hashtag retweeted almost one million times since 353 girls were supposedly kidnapped from a girls secondary school in northern Nigeria on April 15. I say "supposedly" because there have been more questions than answers, including doubts about whether a kidnap actually took place, and the identity of the victims, which till now remain an object of speculation.

The story goes that on April 15, hundreds of gunmen attacked the Government Girls Secondary School in Chibok, a town in the northern state of Borno in Nigeria. They abducted more than 300 girls, taking along some food, shot the school guards, and set the school on fire before disappearing into thin air. Nobody knows where the girls are, nobody knows who kidnapped them (although a supposed Boko Haram kingpin came on YouTube to claim credit), and nobody knows the names of the abducted girls.

Some of the other questions being asked are: Why did the school, which had been closed due to security fears, suddenly decide to reopen against advice in order to conduct state exams? Was there complicity from the school principal, teachers and state government? Otherwise, why were the daughters of the principal, the teachers and the Chief Security Officer of the state government, who are also students in that school, not kidnapped? Were their parents complicit in the kidnap, or did they receive advance warning?

Until my voice goes hoarse, I will not stop repeating my sing-song that politics is the reason behind these attacks. Politics is the reason behind Boko Haram (the terrorist group whose name means 'Western Education is Evil' – never mind that the products of Western education, including the Internet and social media is the primary medium they use for information. They must have received some Western education to be able to do this).

The more recent insult to our collective Nigerian intelligence was the decision of the federal government to set up a committee to investigate the remote and proximate causes of the kidnap and to help find the girls. It is insulting because it begs the question of what the security agencies were set up to do, and whether a bureaucratic process is the solution to a criminal act.

As I said, one of the most intriguing features of this crisis is the lack of information about anything.

A part of me wonders whether anybody was really kidnapped. Do not call me insensitive. But like readers in the US or UK, even we Nigerians must have faith in third party reports if we do not live in Borno State. Shortly after the reported incident, news was released by the police that they had freed all the kidnapped girls. They had to retract this when they were contradicted by people who knew better on social media.

Since then there have been claims and counter claims. Why does nobody have photographs of the kidnapped girls? Some photos have appeared in the press, but they were obtained second, third or fourth hand, and all captions use the word "allegedly". If the girls were in school to do an examination conducted by the West African Examinations Council (WAEC), a regional examinations body, why has this body not released photographs in its possession which all examinations candidate are obliged to provide?

Forty-three girls are said to have escaped from the bushes where they are being kept. Understandably and following the trend of this story their identity became a mystery. Who are the escaped ones? One or two names leaked out but even the authenticity of those could not be confirmed. Several hours ago, photos were published of several girls, supposedly the escaped ones, being addressed by the wife of a state governor. Those who spoke to the press could barely speak English. Many of us wondered if these were actually secondary school students.

Now the whole world is falling over themselves to promote the hashtag #BringBackOurGirls, one of the latest being Michelle Obama who shared a tweet with a photograph of hers holding up a banner with the hashtag. Others are renowned musicians, actors and actresses, all famous people joining the rallying cry in support of freedom for the kidnapped Nigerian girls. Governments are not left out. The US has promised to lend personnel and intelligence support for the search. The governments of UK and China have also promised to help.

I find it interesting to read many Western media accusing themselves and their compatriots of not showing enough concern for the plight of the girls. It's all very touching but I cannot resist a sense of bemusement. How different is this from the daily realities in Africa we have always tried to get the world to pay attention to without success? Does it need to take a politically correct concept (gay rights, the plight of girls and women – all fitting the news mould of a numbed Western conscience) to get their attention?

Some good will come from all this though. Apart from the release of the girls (I pray God they are found soon, if indeed they were kidnapped), world attention will hopefully expose the truth behind most of the violence in Nigeria – politics. Boko Haram may march under the banner of religion but its ultimate motive is politics. There are politicians using religion as marching song. The Nigerian president himself once admitted that 'Boko Haram' is inside his government. Whether that was a metaphor I cannot tell, but by turning the world attention to Nigeria, to the missing girls and to Boko Haram, and by allowing external help, intelligence or personnel, the truth will come out.

...Eugene Ohu is a free lance journalist in Lagos, Nigeria.

Read the comments:
http://www.mercatornet.com/harambee/view/14042

[Ross]

[Warph]

De-Dollarization:
Russia Is On The Verge Of Dealing A Massive Blow To The Petrodollar

By Michael Snyder, on May 13th, 2014

http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/de-dollarization-russia-is-on-the-verge-of-dealing-a-massive-blow-to-the-petrodollar

Is the petrodollar monopoly about to be shattered?  When U.S. politicians started slapping economic sanctions on Russia, they probably never even imagined that there might be serious consequences for the United States.  But now the Russian media is reporting that the Russian Ministry of Finance is getting ready to pull the trigger on a "de-dollarization" plan.  For decades, virtually all oil and natural gas around the world has been bought and sold for U.S. dollars.  As I will explain below, this has been a massive advantage for the U.S. economy.  In recent years, there have been rumblings by nations such as Russia and China about the need to change to a new system, but nobody has really had a big reason to upset the status quo.  However, that has now changed.  The struggle over Ukraine has caused Russia to completely reevaluate the financial relationship that it has with the United States.  If it starts trading a lot of oil and natural gas for currencies other than the U.S. dollar, that will be a massive blow for the petrodollar, and it could end up dramatically changing the global economic landscape.

The fact that the Russian government has held a meeting to discuss "getting rid of the US dollar in Russian export operations" should be front page news on every mainstream news website in the United States.  That is how big this is.  But instead, we have heard nothing from the big mainstream news networks about this so far.  Instead, we have only heard about this from Russian news sources such as the Voice of Russia...

Russian press reports that the country's Ministry of Finance is ready to greenlight a plan to radically increase the role of the Russian ruble in export operations while reducing the share of dollar-denominated transactions. Governmental sources believe that the Russian banking sector is "ready to handle the increased number of ruble-denominated transactions".

According to the Prime news agency, on April 24th the government organized a special meeting dedicated to finding a solution for getting rid of the US dollar in Russian export operations. Top level experts from the energy sector, banks and governmental agencies were summoned and a number of measures were proposed as a response for American sanctions against Russia.

The "de-dollarization meeting" was chaired by First Deputy Prime Minister of the Russian Federation Igor Shuvalov, proving that Moscow is very serious in its intention to stop using the dollar.

So will Russia go through with this?

After all, this wouldn't just be a slap in the face.  This would essentially be like slamming an economic fist into our nose.

You see, Russia is not just a small player when it comes to trading oil and natural gas.  The truth is that Russia is the largest exporter of natural gas and the second largest exporter of oil in the world.

If Russia starts asking for payment in currencies other than the U.S. dollar, that will essentially end the monopoly of the petrodollar.

In order to do this, Russia will need trading partners willing to go along.  In the article quoted above, the Voice of Russia listed Iran and China as two nations that would potentially be willing to make the switch...

Of course, the success of Moscow's campaign to switch its trading to rubles or other regional currencies will depend on the willingness of its trading partners to get rid of the dollar. Sources cited by Politonline.ru mentioned two countries who would be willing to support Russia: Iran and China. Given that Vladimir Putin will visit Beijing on May 20, it can be speculated that the gas and oil contracts that are going to be signed between Russia and China will be denominated in rubles and yuan, not dollars.

And the reality of the matter is that China has seemed ready to move away from the U.S. dollar for quite some time.  In a previous article, I included a quote from a French news source that discussed how China's official news agency has even called for a "new international reserve currency... to replace the dominant US dollar"...

For decades the US has benefited to the tune of trillions of dollars-worth of free credit from the greenback's role as the default global reserve unit.

But as the global economy trembled before the prospect of a US default last month, only averted when Washington reached a deal to raise its debt ceiling, China's official Xinhua news agency called for a "de-Americanised" world.

It also urged the creation of a "new international reserve currency... to replace the dominant US dollar".

For much more on what China is thinking, please see my previous article entitled "9 Signs That China Is Making A Move Against The U.S. Dollar".
http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/9-signs-that-china-is-making-a-move-against-the-u-s-dollar

So why is the petrodollar so important?
Well, it creates a tremendous amount of demand for the U.S. dollar all over the globe.  Since everyone has needed it to trade with one another, that has created an endless global appetite for the currency.  That has kept the value of the dollar artificially high, and it has enabled us to import trillions of dollars of super cheap products from other countries.  If other nations stopped using the dollar to trade with one another, the value of the dollar would plummet dramatically and we would have to pay much, much more for the trinkets that we buy at the dollar store and Wal-Mart.

In addition, since the U.S. dollar is essentially the de facto global currency, this has also increased demand for our debt.  Major exporting nations such as China and Saudi Arabia end up with giant piles of our dollars.  Instead of just letting them sit there and do nothing, those nations often reinvest their dollars into securities that can rapidly be changed back into dollars if needed.  One of the most popular ways to do this has been to invest those dollars in U.S. Treasuries.  This has driven down interest rates on U.S. debt over the years and has enabled the U.S. government to borrow trillions upon trillions of dollars for next to nothing.

But if the rest of the world starts moving away from the U.S. dollar, all of this could change.

In order for our current standard of living to continue, it is absolutely imperative that everyone else around the globe continues to use our currency.

So if Russia really does pull the trigger on a "de-dollarization" strategy, that would be huge - especially if the rest of the planet started following their lead.

The U.S. economy is already teetering on the brink of another major downturn, and there are a whole host of indications that big trouble is on the horizon.  For much more on this, please see the article that I posted on Monday entitled "If Economic Cycle Theorists Are Correct, 2015 To 2020 Will Be Pure Hell For The United States".
http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/if-economic-cycle-theorists-are-correct-2015-to-2020-will-be-pure-hell-for-the-united-states

Just about the last thing that we need right now is for our petrodollar monopoly to be threatened.

It would be nice if things would calm down in Ukraine and the relationship between the United States and Russia could go back to normal.

Sadly, that does not appear likely any time soon.

In fact, the Ukrainian government has already admitted that "we are essentially at war", and on Tuesday six Ukrainian soldiers were killed and eight were wounded in a convoy attack in eastern Ukraine.

The regions in eastern Ukraine that have just declared independence have given the government in Kiev until Wednesday to pull their forces out of eastern Ukraine or else face war.

If a full blown civil war does erupt in Ukraine, it is going to take this crisis to a completely new level.

Unfortunately, most Americans are incredibly apathetic at this point and know very little about what is going on.

But in the end, this could have dramatic implications for all of us.