http://networkedblogs.com/p8649268
“Who Stole My Cheese”: The Lecture
By Tracy R Twyman
I had the honor of being invited to give a talk last week at one of the schools I used to attend: Portland Community College, Sylvania Campus. I talked about economics, the Federal Reserve, and the IMF. Coincidentally, PCC is where I took my first economics course and started writing for the school paper about government cover-ups, including the Federal Reserve scam.
The students are the lecture seemed quite interested. The Q & A lasted for about an hour afterwards. What was amazing to me was how open everyone was to the information. In fact, they already knew quite a lot about some of this stuff, and they were anxious to learn more. Also, everyone seemed to agree that the two party left-right fake paradigm needs to be broken. It was an eye-opening experience, and very encouraging. Anyway, here’s the text of my lecture:
Who Stole My Cheese: A Lecture by Tracy R. Twyman
A few years ago, when I was in-between jobs and reevaluating my career, my grandfather gave me a copy of a self-help book called Who Moved My Cheese. It’s mostly pictures, and just a few words in large type on each page, so I read it in about 30 minutes. I found it absolutely awful. I thought to myself: Grandpa must not know me very well if he thought I would find this inspiring.
The book depicts your life as that of a mouse trapped inside of a maze that’s controlled by scientists from the outside. And these all-powerful scientists decide each day where in the maze to place the cheese that the mice get to eat, and how much. Then the mice have to use their instincts to try to sniff out where the “cheese” has moved to that day. Some of the mice are lazy, slow to change, and complain about having to find new cheese every day. In the course of the story these mice are beaten into submission through starvation until they learn to accept their fate, and begin to hunt for the cheese every day like all of the others.
Amazingly, the term “rat race” is never used throughout this entire book, but that’s clearly what it’s describing.
This book is used frequently in corporate training, especially for Human Resources departments. It’s supposed to teach you that the marketplace is always changing, and thus you have to constantly adapt to where the “cheese” (i.e. the income opportunity) has moved to.
My problems with this book are manifold. First of all, I find it really insulting to be compared to a rodent, controlled by evil overlords who make decisions for me, or to say that I have no control over where I obtain my sustenance. It presupposes that I’m not a creative being capable of making or doing something of value, which I can then trade to others in exchange for the “cheese.” Sometimes someone invents or innovates something, and creates a new income opportunity that didn’t exist before. They make the cheese come to them! That’s what I want to do. That’s what most ambitious people want to do. But these people do not exist in the Who Moved My Cheese rat race universe.
The other thing I found odd about the book is that the question in the title is never really answered. Who did move the cheese anyway? Who are these scientists that control everything? Who appointed them? Did we elect them? Were they chosen by God? Are they mice that have somehow evolved and gotten out of the maze, so that now they control it? Or have the same people always been the scientists, and have the mice always been mice?
Well, throughout my life I have followed alternative media, and read books about things that other people thought were boring or weird. So in my research I, like many others, have found out in general who these scientists are that control the maze we all live in, and how they control it.
Now I know you guys have already learned how the Federal Reserve works, so, just to recap:
In 1913, Congress created a quasi-private entity called the Federal Reserve, controlled by its stockholders, mainly representing the big banks in New York City. This corporation was given a monopoly over the issuance of US currency, in complete contradiction to the US Constitution, which explicitly states that this is not only the right but the duty of Congress. The Federal Reserve is permitted to print money by fiat, out of nothing, and sell it to the US Treasury (on behalf of the US taxpayer) for face value plus interest. They also lend money to private banks to use as reserves. This is paper fiat currency with nothing to back it, but it is cash.
As you’ve already learned, the banks are then permitted to multiply this money many times over by creating checkbook money that is nothing but an electronic bookkeeping entry. The standard practice is to multiply the reserves by 10. So for every dollar in cash reserves loaned to them by the Fed, they can loan out 9 dollars in fictitious checkbook money. These days the ratio is more like 1 to 36. The banks then loan this money, upon interest, out to people, corporations and governments. Banks can then resell these loans to other banks and financial institutions. Insurance companies can profit by selling insurance on the loans against default. And if the loans are defaulted on, the banks can seize the loan recipient’s assets—real assets, not like the fake money that was loaned out in the first place.
This creates a perfect situation for the banks, in which they, in conjunction with the Fed, can cause business cycles that work to their advantage. They collude with the Fed and the government, which they now control, to make easy money available. This inflates the currency and drives up prices, while creating a boom in property and business development. They profit from that. Then they can suddenly tighten the money supply and create a cascade of defaults across the economy, sending people, businesses, and even governments into bankruptcy, which allows them to seize some assets outright and buy up others for pennies on the dollar. Once enough people have been made homeless and unemployed, they can start the process all over again. And the best part is that every dollar that’s used in this process is a debt instrument in itself, borrowed by the American people from the Federal Reserve through the US Treasury.
The Federal Reserve is an enormous ponzi scheme which we all presently have no choice but to participate in. It serves to extract real wealth from the economy and channel it into the hands of a small group of powerful bankers at the expense of everyone else. It creates an artificial scarcity of goods while simultaneously maintaining an artificial abundance of easy credit. The Fed claims to curb inflation, but the dollar has lost over 95% of its value since the Fed took over in 1913. What that really represents is 95% of the real wealth that used to belong to the people of the United States being bilked out of them while they stand holding worthless paper and electronic computer entries that can be taken from them at any time. The value of these units can also be changed arbitrarily at any time. This is the “cheese” that Americans spend their lives chasing.
And as you know, in 1933, after the stock market crash that the Fed and the bankers deliberately caused, the dollar was taken off of the gold standard, so that the bankers could expand the money supply and manipulate the market even more easily. So it’s kind of like the cheese was replaced with Kraft cheese slices, which aren’t really cheese, but just orange-colored congealed oil. As Americans in 1933 handed over their gold coins and certificates in exchange for pure fiat money printed by a private bank, they knew they were getting hosed. But eating Kraft cheese is better than starving, so they took what they could get.
As you may also know, in 1944 the Federal Reserve ponzi scheme was essentially extended to the rest of the world, at the barrel of a gun. Towards the end of WWII, when Europe and much of the world had been beaten into submission through years of combat, poor and desperate, 44 nations sent delegates to Bretton Woods, New Hampshire to create an international monetary policy. The alleged rationale was that if all of these countries had their currencies linked, they couldn’t afford to go to war in the future, because it would be mutually destructive. They ended up deciding to make the US dollar the “reserve currency” of the world. The central banks of other countries would be linked to the dollar, and would hold at least a quarter of their reserves in US dollars. In exchange, the US Treasury was required to redeem these foreign dollar holdings with gold upon request at the fixed price of $35 per ounce.
As you’ve been learning, the International Monetary Fund was created at this meeting. The IMF forces loans upon developing countries, and if they can’t afford to make their interest payments on the IMF loans they’ve already got, the IMF loans them more money to make those payments. In exchange, of course, they demand complete control over the nation’s economy. This, in conjunction with the activities of the World Trade Organization, also created at Bretton Woods, is largely responsible for turning the entire world into a giant slave labor camp that runs for the profit of a handful of banks and corporations. They dictate to all of the member countries what labor costs will be, what sort of exporting and resource development they will do, who will trade with whom and at what price.
If you wonder why all of the jobs and production have been exported overseas, bear in mind that the US as a sovereign nation no longer has any control over its own trade policy. The IMF literally has a mathematical formula that they use to calculate what the optimal level of trade is for each country and for each commodity. They use this to “balance” the values of different currencies. And it has been their stated goal all along to try to “balance” the standard of living throughout the world so as to make currencies easier to control. Now let me give you a hint: they don’t intend to bring other countries up to our standard of living. It’s the other way around. So that is why, no matter who you elect, no matter how many letters you send and phone calls you make to your congressman, he or she will always pursue policies that inflate the dollar, suppress wages and export production. Because we have no control over our monetary policy or our trade policy. Since the dollar is a global currency the Fed considers the effects of their policies on global currency markets before it even thinks about how these policies affect the US economy.
Another thing we clearly have no control over since Bretton Woods is our foreign policy and military policy. The UN was created shortly after Bretton Woods. The intention when creating it was that there would no longer be such a thing as war. Coincidentally, the US Congress hasn’t officially declared war since WWII. Everything we’ve done since then has been an unofficial police action. Guess what? It’s because we can’t declare war. We no longer have the authority to do that if we want to maintain participation in all of these foreign agreements that hamstring us. But your President and your Congress will never admit that to you. They want to maintain the illusion that we are still a sovereign country.
Now several purposes are served by the linkage of all of the world’s currencies through the IMF and the Bank of International Settlements (which is the “central bank of central banks”). You might think it would be easier to just have one global currency, and indeed that has always been a popular idea. It remains so to this day. But, at least for the private banks, it’s actually better to have lots of different currencies all linked because then you can easily manipulate them and profit from currency speculation. Another fun thing to do is to manipulate the gold market. Beyond all of the fiat currency which people all over the world are tricked into using, gold is still valued by the superrich as “real money.” And as you recall, I mentioned that in 1944 the US promised to redeem dollars for foreign banks with gold at $35 per ounce. Regardless of the street value of gold, US gold holdings from Fort Knox were being sent overseas to foreign banks at $35 per ounce. These banks would then sell it on the open market and reap huge profits.
This scheme continued until 1971, when Nixon decided to “close the gold window.” He did this, it is believed, because there was very little left to sell anymore. Fort Knox is tapped. Now the US dollar, the “cheese”, is even more fake than it was before. It’s kind of like Cheese Whiz now. That’s what we all work for. It has no nutritional value. It won’t stop you from starving. But it tastes kind of cheese-like, so we keep working our butts off trying to get some.
At any rate, although we no longer sell gold to foreign banks for $35 per ounce, there are a number of professional gold traders who believe that gold is still being sold from the US Treasury to the IMF for not much more. The latest figure quoted was $42.50 per ounce. This is at a time when gold is at around $900 per ounce on the open market. The Gold Anti-Trust Association is calling for a congressional investigation into this matter. They believe that this is being purposely allowed in order to manipulate the price of gold, to drive it down. They think that the Federal Reserve is doing this in order to keep the US dollar from collapsing. As the currency inflates, the price of gold rises, and eventually the dollar will be worthless, unless the price of gold is artificially suppressed. So this might be what Ben Bernake is talking about when he tells Congress that the Fed is working to keep inflation in check. Because otherwise you would have to admit that inflation is quite high and nothing the Fed is doing serves to lessen it at all. Quite the opposite.
There is one more major aspect of the economy that’s rigged and that’s the stock market. I want to just briefly touch upon this because it’s complicated and boring. I don’t claim to know everything about this stuff, but I think it’s safe to say that this is another part of the maze that’s completely controlled by the evil scientists.
Bloomberg News recently revealed that up to 73% of the trades being made on the stock market every day are done via computer at the behest of large investment banks. Stocks are being bought, and sold just an hour or two later, in what is called high-frequency trading. This means that the value of these stocks can be entirely manipulated by these investment banks, the most significant of which is Goldman Sachs, just by plugging a particular algorithm into their computers. They can push a stock lower by shorting it, or betting against it, and then a couple of hours later buy it up for cheap, then pump it up and sell it again a couple of hours later. The rest of us investors, individuals trying to make investments based on their assessment of the market, don’t stand a chance playing against these bank-controlled computers that literally make and break the market at will.
This is largely what’s going on with the stock market now. Many people actually think that the economy is “coming back” because the stock market is going up. All this means is that trillions of dollars was given to the banks by the Fed, backed by the taxpayers of the US. The banks then invest this money in the stock market and trade it around with each other for their own profit. It doesn’t stay in the market long enough to do any good and it never makes it into the larger economy. Even worse, it’s used to cheat normal Americans out of their ability to profit from their own investments, because the game is rigged. Sure, you might get lucky and make money on the stock market, if you sell at the right time. But bear in mind that you are playing at a casino, and the game is always rigged in favor of the house.
I won’t even begin to get in to some of the fraudulent instruments that are being traded on the stock market. But you know that a lot of the financial mess we are currently dealing with has to do with the derivatives market. Derivatives are fake assets, the value of which depends upon the future value of some other particular asset. But these derivatives are being sold like they in themselves were assets, and now the alleged value of the derivatives floating around the system is many hundreds of times higher than the assets they are based on. In fact, it is many hundred times higher than the combined domestic product of every country on Earth. This means that if they were to all crash all at once, there wouldn’t be enough value on Earth to cover the losses. What you must understand, though, is that even though the banks can’t possibly steal enough wealth from the people of the world in order to cover the losses of all their bad investments, they’re sure as Hell gonna try. If they can’t get it from you now, that’s OK. They’ll be happy to take you, and all of your descendents, as slaves in perpetuity.
This is why the scientists feel justified in keeping us trapped like lab rats inside the maze. But I don’t know about you. I don’t feel like playing along when I know the game is rigged. What’s the point of spending your life looking for the cheese when you know that someone else is controlling the dispensation of the cheese? Furthermore, what’s the point of arguing about things like taxes and welfare and universal healthcare? How can we possibly make an accurate decision about how to regulate the economy, how much government intervention there should be, when most of the real value in the economy is being stolen from us? How much poverty and unemployment would there be if this scam wasn’t going on? Who knows? I don’t know. But I’m not going to go along with a massive tax and spend program that promises to rectify the situation when the government itself is being controlled by the thieves.
The problem is that we have all been tricked into believing that we are nothing but mice trapped in a maze, that these evil scientists control our lives, and that they even have a right to do so! Some people actually think that this is the “natural order”! And so we have all given the power to create reality itself over to a handful of evil scientists, whom we allow to control the maze that we live in, to decide for us how much and what kind of food we will eat, and what we will have to do to get it. The word “reality” is related to “real”, which is the word for royalty in European languages. Because within his realm, the king defined reality for his subjects. That is what we continue to allow, even after feudalism and monarchy has ended.
But the fact is that, at least in the United States, we are all kings, according to the US Constitution. Literally, it says that we are all “sovereigns.” That means that the power of the United States is derived from its sovereign citizens. We chose to lend our power to the state governments, and they in turn delegate certain powers to the Federal government. That’s how it’s supposed to work. We rule. They serve at our pleasure. They are supposed to serve us, the sovereign individuals, not the interests of gigantic, largely offshore private corporations.
The entire purpose of government is to protect the inherent rights of its citizens, not to bestow them, and certainly not to infringe upon them. Adam Smith, the original spokesman for laissez-faire free market economics, believed that a market without government interference would naturally distribute resources in an equitable manner. But even he openly warned that monopolies and trusts, especially those sanctioned by the government, would prevent the so-called “invisible hand” of the marketplace from doing its job properly. He emphatically agreed that one of the few legitimate roles of government is to prevent this sort of thing from happening.
Government is supposed to protect us from fraud and corruption. That’s one of its few truly constitutional roles. But instead, the federal government is participating in ponzi schemes and protection rackets at the behest of the private corporations that now control it. They have used us, the citizens, as collateral to make business agreements, with the presupposition that we are not sovereigns, but slaves owned by the oligarchy.
Now, the Declaration of Independence says something quite different. It says:
“…to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it…”
But how far have we gotten from this concept? When some of my friends hear me talk about auditing the Federal Reserve, abolishing the IRS, pulling out of the IMF and the WTO and NAFTA, reinstating a sound monetary system, electing independent candidates, cracking down on monopolies and trusts, you know what they say? Oh, it will never happen. Why bother? Vote for the Democrat. He’s the lesser of two evils.
And you know what I say? You’re still voting for evil! How lame and pathetic is it for us sovereign citizens, who not only have the law on our side, but also our numbers in overwhelming majority, to just give up? To just consent to let the oligarchs keep us trapped inside of a maze where they steal our cheese from us every single day, and make us struggle to survive on the crumbs that they leave for us? Come on people! At some point, you have to ask yourself: Are you a man, or a mouse?
Now I want to rewrite this stupid rat race story so that it has a happy ending. In my version of Who Moved My Cheese, the mice all make an agreement to work together. Some of them stand on top of the others, with their consent, and get boosted up, until they manage to climb over the wall of the maze and into the outside world. And then as they explore the outside world, they see a kitchen and a dining room filled with food of all various sorts. Meat and eggs and potatoes and gravy and salad, and whatever else you can imagine, anything you could possibly want. This is the food that the scientists eat. This is what they’ve been keeping from the mice all along.
And then these brave scout mice make it into the bathroom. And they climb up onto the counter around the sink, and they look into the mirror. And for the first time they realize who they truly are. They realize that it was all an illusion. They’re not pathetic, pea-brained little lab mice. They’re human, and they deserve to live as free men! Then the mice go back to the maze and help all the other mice break free. And they all live happily ever after. The end.
Showing posts with label NAFTA. Show all posts
Showing posts with label NAFTA. Show all posts
Friday, August 14, 2009
Wednesday, May 6, 2009
Flu Pandemic Hype
http://www.prisonplanet.com/flu-pandemic-hype-another-pretext-for-world-government.html
Flu Pandemic Hype: Another Pretext for World Government
Kurt Nimmo
Prison Planet.com
Monday, April 27, 2009
During the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP) Summit in Montebello, Canada in 2005, the “three amigos” (Bush, Harper and Calderon) released “North American Plan for Avian and Pandemic Influenza,” described as a “collaborative North American approach that recognizes that controlling the spread of avian influenza or a novel strain of human influenza, with minimal economic disruption, is in the best interest of all three countries.” The plan outlines how “Canada, Mexico and the United States intend to work together to prepare for and manage avian and pandemic influenza.”
Ban Ki-moon said the Mexican flu outbreak is the “first test” of the “pandemic preparedness work undertaken by the international community over the past three years.”
It was hardly a coincidence that at the same time the U.S. Northern Command, or NORTHCOM, created a webpage dedicated to avian flu and subsequently ran exercises in preparation for the possible use of U.S. military forces in a continental domestic emergency involving avian flu or pandemic influenza.
In 2006, NORTHCOM held an international exercise with more than 40 international, federal, and state agencies “designed to provoke discussion and determine what governmental actions, including military support, would be necessary in the event of an influenza pandemic in the United States.” In addition, NORTHCOM participated in a nationwide Joint Chiefs of Staff-directed exercise code-named Exercise Ardent Sentry 06 to rehearse cooperation between Department of Defense and local, state, federal agencies, and the Canadian government.
In 2005, then president Bush shifted U.S. policy on avian flu and pandemic influenza and placed the U.S. under international guidelines. “The policy shift was formalized Sept. 14, 2005, when Bush announced a new International Partnership on Avian and Pandemic Influenza to a High-Level Plenary Meeting of the U.N. General Assembly, in New York,” Jerome Corsi wrote in September, 2007. “The new International Partnership on Avian and Pandemic Influenza was designed to supersede an earlier November 2005 Homeland Security report that called for a U.S. national strategy that would be coordinated by the Departments of Homeland Security, Health and Agriculture.”
In other words, any U.S. response to an avian flu pandemic would be directed under WHO, WTO, U.N. and NAFTA directives. Congress and U.S. agencies would be cut out of the picture. “The U.N.-WHO-WTO-NAFTA plan advanced by SPP features a prominent role for the U.N. system influenza coordinator as a central international director in the case of a North American avian flu or pandemic influenza outbreak,” Corsi adds.
Dr. David Nabarro, WHO executive director of sustainable development and health environments, was appointed the first U.N. system influenza coordinator. In 2005, Nabarro said during a press conference that his number one priority was to prepare for the H5N1 virus, known as the avian flu. Nabarro played into the global fear that an epidemic was inevitable.
“I’m not, at the moment at liberty to give you a prediction on numbers, but I just want to stress, that, let’s say, the range of deaths could be anything from 5 to 150 million,” said Nabarro. On March 8, 2006, during a U.N. press conference Nabarro predicted an outbreak of the H5N1 virus would “reach the Americas within the next six to 12 months.”
On Monday, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon stoked the fear of a global flu pandemic. He said the Mexican flu outbreak is the “first test” of the “pandemic preparedness work undertaken by the international community over the past three years.” Ban Ki-moon said if “we are indeed facing a pandemic, we need to demonstrate global solidarity. In our interconnected world, no nation can deal with threats of such dimension on its own.”
For Ki-moon and the global elite, “global solidarity” in “our interconnected world” translates into yet another push for world government. Ki-moon’s dire warning falls on the heels of the G20 summit where plans were announced for implementing the creation of a new global currency to replace the U.S. dollar’s role as the world reserve currency. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and others repeatedly called for “global governance” and a “New World Order.”
The current flu pandemic hype serves as punctuation mark between the G20 held in London and the upcoming one to be held in Italy in June. “The G20 summit has agreed to try to kick start stalled Doha trade liberalization talks at the next G8 meeting,” Reuters reported on April 2. So-called “trade liberalization” is code for the neoliberal plan to “privatize” public and private industries around the world, impose “flexibilization” of labor markets (create massive unemployment), “deregulate” consumer and financial markets, and foster foreign buyouts, layoffs, wage cuts, transient employment, higher prices, and potentially destabilizing capital flows.
As noted by the Eagle Forum in October, 2007, the SPP’s North American Plan for Avian and Pandemic Influenza “is not only about combating a flu epidemic but is far-reaching in seeking control over U.S. citizens and public policy during an epidemic.” The Plan would give authority to international bureaucrats “beyond the health sector to include a coordinated approach to critical infrastructure protection,” including “border and transportation issues.”
On April 26, Infowars covered the Department of Defense’s “Implementation Plan for Pandemic Influenza” that proposes nothing less than the militarization of health care, military augmentation of civilian law enforcement, and the mass vaccination of the population as directed by the government.
Ki-moon, the United Nations, and the globalists, with the participation of the globalist-dominated corporate media and the ruling elite in Mexico, are hyping the flu outbreak as a possible pandemic in order to sell us their scheme for world government.
It is an ongoing process.
Flu Pandemic Hype: Another Pretext for World Government
Kurt Nimmo
Prison Planet.com
Monday, April 27, 2009
During the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP) Summit in Montebello, Canada in 2005, the “three amigos” (Bush, Harper and Calderon) released “North American Plan for Avian and Pandemic Influenza,” described as a “collaborative North American approach that recognizes that controlling the spread of avian influenza or a novel strain of human influenza, with minimal economic disruption, is in the best interest of all three countries.” The plan outlines how “Canada, Mexico and the United States intend to work together to prepare for and manage avian and pandemic influenza.”
Ban Ki-moon said the Mexican flu outbreak is the “first test” of the “pandemic preparedness work undertaken by the international community over the past three years.”
It was hardly a coincidence that at the same time the U.S. Northern Command, or NORTHCOM, created a webpage dedicated to avian flu and subsequently ran exercises in preparation for the possible use of U.S. military forces in a continental domestic emergency involving avian flu or pandemic influenza.
In 2006, NORTHCOM held an international exercise with more than 40 international, federal, and state agencies “designed to provoke discussion and determine what governmental actions, including military support, would be necessary in the event of an influenza pandemic in the United States.” In addition, NORTHCOM participated in a nationwide Joint Chiefs of Staff-directed exercise code-named Exercise Ardent Sentry 06 to rehearse cooperation between Department of Defense and local, state, federal agencies, and the Canadian government.
In 2005, then president Bush shifted U.S. policy on avian flu and pandemic influenza and placed the U.S. under international guidelines. “The policy shift was formalized Sept. 14, 2005, when Bush announced a new International Partnership on Avian and Pandemic Influenza to a High-Level Plenary Meeting of the U.N. General Assembly, in New York,” Jerome Corsi wrote in September, 2007. “The new International Partnership on Avian and Pandemic Influenza was designed to supersede an earlier November 2005 Homeland Security report that called for a U.S. national strategy that would be coordinated by the Departments of Homeland Security, Health and Agriculture.”
In other words, any U.S. response to an avian flu pandemic would be directed under WHO, WTO, U.N. and NAFTA directives. Congress and U.S. agencies would be cut out of the picture. “The U.N.-WHO-WTO-NAFTA plan advanced by SPP features a prominent role for the U.N. system influenza coordinator as a central international director in the case of a North American avian flu or pandemic influenza outbreak,” Corsi adds.
Dr. David Nabarro, WHO executive director of sustainable development and health environments, was appointed the first U.N. system influenza coordinator. In 2005, Nabarro said during a press conference that his number one priority was to prepare for the H5N1 virus, known as the avian flu. Nabarro played into the global fear that an epidemic was inevitable.
“I’m not, at the moment at liberty to give you a prediction on numbers, but I just want to stress, that, let’s say, the range of deaths could be anything from 5 to 150 million,” said Nabarro. On March 8, 2006, during a U.N. press conference Nabarro predicted an outbreak of the H5N1 virus would “reach the Americas within the next six to 12 months.”
On Monday, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon stoked the fear of a global flu pandemic. He said the Mexican flu outbreak is the “first test” of the “pandemic preparedness work undertaken by the international community over the past three years.” Ban Ki-moon said if “we are indeed facing a pandemic, we need to demonstrate global solidarity. In our interconnected world, no nation can deal with threats of such dimension on its own.”
For Ki-moon and the global elite, “global solidarity” in “our interconnected world” translates into yet another push for world government. Ki-moon’s dire warning falls on the heels of the G20 summit where plans were announced for implementing the creation of a new global currency to replace the U.S. dollar’s role as the world reserve currency. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and others repeatedly called for “global governance” and a “New World Order.”
The current flu pandemic hype serves as punctuation mark between the G20 held in London and the upcoming one to be held in Italy in June. “The G20 summit has agreed to try to kick start stalled Doha trade liberalization talks at the next G8 meeting,” Reuters reported on April 2. So-called “trade liberalization” is code for the neoliberal plan to “privatize” public and private industries around the world, impose “flexibilization” of labor markets (create massive unemployment), “deregulate” consumer and financial markets, and foster foreign buyouts, layoffs, wage cuts, transient employment, higher prices, and potentially destabilizing capital flows.
As noted by the Eagle Forum in October, 2007, the SPP’s North American Plan for Avian and Pandemic Influenza “is not only about combating a flu epidemic but is far-reaching in seeking control over U.S. citizens and public policy during an epidemic.” The Plan would give authority to international bureaucrats “beyond the health sector to include a coordinated approach to critical infrastructure protection,” including “border and transportation issues.”
On April 26, Infowars covered the Department of Defense’s “Implementation Plan for Pandemic Influenza” that proposes nothing less than the militarization of health care, military augmentation of civilian law enforcement, and the mass vaccination of the population as directed by the government.
Ki-moon, the United Nations, and the globalists, with the participation of the globalist-dominated corporate media and the ruling elite in Mexico, are hyping the flu outbreak as a possible pandemic in order to sell us their scheme for world government.
It is an ongoing process.
Friday, May 9, 2008
Stop blaming workers--the bosses made this mess
From the January 2008 issue of "The Hightower Lowdown":
Stop blaming workers--the bosses made this mess
http://www.hightowerlowdown.org/node/1510
Immigrants come here because globalization took their jobs back there
THE WAILING IN OUR COUNTRY ABOUT the "invasion of immigrants" has been long and loud. As one complainant put it, "Few of their children in the country learn English...The signs in our streets have inscriptions in both languages...Unless the stream of the importation could be turned they will soon so outnumber us that all the advantages we have will not be able to preserve our language, and even our government will become precarious."
That's not some diatribe from one of today's Republican presidential candidates. It's the anxious cry of none other than Ben Franklin, deploring the wave of Germans pouring into the colony of Pennsylvania in the 1750s. Thus, anti-immigrant eruptions are older than the U.S. itself, and they've flared up periodically throughout our history, targeting the Irish, French, Italians, Chinese, and others. Even George W's current project to wall off our border is not a new bit of nuttiness--around the time of the nation's founding, John Jay, who later became the first chief justice of the Supreme Court, proposed "a wall of brass around the country for the exclusion of Catholics."
Luckily for the development and enrichment of our country, these past public frenzies ultimately failed to exclude the teeming masses, and those uproars now appear through the telescope of time to have been some combination of ridiculous panic, political demagoguery, and xenophobic ugliness. Still, this does not mean that the public's anxiety and simmering anger about today's massive influx of Mexicans coming illegally across our 2,000-mile shared border is illegitimate. However, most of what the politicians and pundits are saying about it is illegitimate.
Wedge issue
There is way too much xenophobia, racism, and demagoguery at play around illegal immigration, but such crude sentiments are not what is bringing this problem to a national political boil. Polls show--as do conversations at any Chat & Chew Cafe in the country--that there is a deep and genuine alarm about the issue among the nonxenophobic, nonracist American majority. In particular, workaday families are fearful about what an endless flow of low-wage workers portends for their economic future--and they're not getting good answers from Republicans, Democrats, corporate leaders, or the media.
For the GOP candidates in this year's presidential run, the contest is coming down to who can be the most nativist knucklehead. They accuse each other of not wanting to punish immigrant children enough, of not being absolutists on "English-only" proposals, of having coddled illegal entrants in the past with amnesty proposals and sanctuaries, and of not being hawkish enough on sealing off and militarizing the border.
The leader of the anti-immigrant Republican pack is Tom Tancredo, a Colorado Congress critter who based his ill-fated presidential campaign on immigrant bashing. This goober is so nasty he'd scare small children. His website screeched that immigrants are "pushing drugs, raping kids, destroying lives," and his campaign slogan is a sledgehammer demand: "Deport those who don't belong. Make sure they never come back." As for illegal immigrants, Tom thinks that the term "illegal" is too soft, preferring to demonize immigrants as "aliens." Tancredo doesn't merely rant, he foams at the mouth, maniacally warning about waves of Mexican terrorists who are "coming to kill me and you and your children." Accused of trying to turn America into a gated community, he exulted, "You bet!"
At least he's taken a position, even if it's un-American and loopy. Democratic leaders, on the other hand, have mostly tried to do a squishy shuffle, wanting to beef up law enforcement against illegal immigrants while also mouthing soothing words about the good work ethic of our friends south of the border and offering a bureaucratic rigmarole to allow some of the younger ones to gain permanent residency in our country. Worse, such corporate Democrats as Rep. Rahm Emanuel urge the party's candidates either to adopt the Republican's punitive message or simply to try ducking the issue.
Which brings us to the wall, both figuratively and literally. The fact that we are resorting to the construction of an enormous fence between two friendly nations admits to an abject failure by policymakers, who are so bereft of ideas, honesty, courage, and morality that all they can do is to try walling off the problem.
We've had experience here in Texas with the futility of tall border fences. Molly Ivins reported a beer-induced incident that took place in 1983. Walling off Mexico had been proposed back then by the Reaganauts, and a test fence had been built way down in the Big Bend outpost of Terlingua. This little town also happened to be the site of a renowned chili cook-off that Molly helped judge, and it attracted a big crowd of impish, beer-drinking chiliheads.
There stood the barrier, 17 feet tall and topped with barbwire. It didn't take many beers before the first-ever "Terlingua Memorial Over, Under, or Through the Mexican Fence Climbing Contest" was cooked up. Winning time: 30 seconds.
Yet here come the border sealers again. Bush & Company (including Democrats who have allowed the funding) are putting up an initial $1.2 billion to start building this version of the wall, which is projected to cost up to $60billion over the next 25 years to build and maintain. It's a monster wall--two or three 40-foot-high rows of reinforced fencing that take a swath of land 150 feet wide and stretch for 700 miles.
The Mexican government and people are insulted and appalled by the wall; ranchers, mayors, and families living on either side of the border hate it; environmentalists are aghast at its destructive impact on the ecology of the area. Still, it's being built. Indeed, a 2005 federal act contained a little-noticed section authorizing Bush's Homeland Security czar to suspend any laws that stand in the way of building the wall. Current czar Michael Chertoff has already used this unprecedented authority to waive 19 statutes, including the Endangered Species, Clean Water, and National Historic Preservation Acts.
All this for something that will not work. As Gov. Janet Napolitano of Arizona put it,"Show me a 50-foot wall and I'll show you a 51-foot ladder." People have literally been dying to cross into the U.S., and it's not possible to build a wall tall enough to stop them. They will keep coming.
Why?
The question that policymakers have not faced honestly is this one: Why do these immigrants come? The answer is not that they are pulled by our jobs and government benefits, but that they are pushed by the abject poverty that their families face in Mexico. That might seem like a mere semantic difference, but it's huge if you're trying to develop a policy to stop the human flood across our border.
Although you never hear it mentioned in debates on the issue, you might start with this reality: Most Mexican people really would prefer to live in their own country. Can we all say, duh? Pedro Martin, who has seen most of the young men and women in his small village depart for El Norte, put it this way: "Up north, even though they pay more, you're not necessarily living as well. You feel out of place. Here you can walk around the whole town and it's comfortable. Life is easier."
Their family, language, culture, identity, and happiness is Mexican -- yet sheer economic survival requires so many of them to abandon the place they love.
Again, why? Because in the last 15 years, Mexico's longstanding system of sustaining its huge population of poor citizens (including small self-sufficient farms, jobs in state-owned industries, and subsidies for such essentials as tortillas) has been scuttled at the insistence of U.S. banks, corporations, government officials, and "free market" ideologues. In the name of "modernizing" the Mexican economy, such giants as Citigroup, Wal-Mart, Tyson Foods, and GE--in cahoots with the plutocrats and oligarchs of Mexico--have laid waste to that country's grassroots economy, destroying the already-meager livelihoods of millions.
The 1994 imposition of NAFTA was particularly devastating. Just as Bill Clinton and the corporate elites did here, Mexico's ruling elites touted NAFTA there as a magic elixir that would generate growth, create jobs, raise wages, and eliminate the surge of Mexican migrants into the U.S. They were horribly wrong:
Economic growth in Mexico has been anemic since '94, and the benefits of any growth have gone overwhelmingly to the wealthiest families.
Since NAFTA, Mexico has created less than a third of the millions of decent jobs it needs.
Average factory wages in Mexico have dropped by more than 5% under NAFTA.
Unemployment has jumped, and unskilled workers are paid only $5 a day.
U.S. agribusiness corporations have more than doubled their shipment of subsidized crops into Mexico, busting the price that indigenous farmers got for their production and displacing some 2 million peasant farmers from their land.
Huge agribusiness operations, many owned by U.S. investors, now control Mexican agricultural production and pay farmworkers under $2 an hour.
Since NAFTA passed, there has been a flood of business bankruptcies and takeovers in Mexico as predatory U.S. chains have moved in. U.S. corporations now control 40% of the country's formal jobs, with Wal-Mart reigning as the #1 employer.
19 million more Mexicans live in poverty today than when NAFTA was passed.
So, here's the deal: Thanks to Mexico's newly corporatized economy, wage earners there get poverty pay of $5a day (about $1,600 a year), while a few hundred miles north, they might draw that much in an hour. What would you do?
The wrong debate
In our national imbroglio over Mexican immigration (yes, some illegal migrants come from elsewhere, but more than three-fourths are from Mexico), our "leaders" have set us up to look down at impoverished working people forced to leave their homeland and risk death in order to help their families escape poverty.
Instead of coming down on them, why not start looking up--up at the executive suites on both sides of the border. Up is where the power is. The moneyed elites in those suites are the profiteering few who have rigged all of our trade and labor policies to knock down workers, farmers, and small businesses--not merely in Mexico, but in our country as well.
In the U.S., the middle class feels imperiled because...well, because it is imperiled. Politicians, economists, and the richly paid pundits keep telling us that the American economy is robust and that people's financial pessimism and anxieties are irrational. At the kitchen table level, however, folks know the difference between chicken salad and chicken manure. Yes, these are boom times for the luxury class, but the middle class is imploding. In a recent letter to the editor, a working stiff in California put it this way:
"We've replaced steaks with corn flakes; we can't afford to get sick; our kids can't afford health insurance; we hope that our 10-year-old van keeps running because we can't afford a new one; our kids can't buy a home because housing prices are exorbitant; our purchasing power continually regresses; and worst of all, the poverty and near-poverty classes are growing."
It's this economic fragility that anti-immigrant forces play on. But even if there were no illegal workers in our country--none--the fragility would remain, for poor Mexican laborers are not the ones who:
Downsized and offshored our middle-class jobs;
Perverted our bankruptcy laws to let corporations abrogate their union contracts;
Stopped enforcement of America's wage and hour laws;
Perverted the National Labor Relations Board into an anti-worker tool for corporations;
Illegally reclassified millions of employees as "independent contractors," leaving them with no benefits or labor rights;
Subverted the right of workers to organize;
Turned a blind eye to the re-emergence in America of sweatshops and child labor in everything from the clothing industry to Wal-Mart;
Made good health care a luxury item;
Let rich campaign donors take over both political parties;
Passed by hook and crook a continuing series of global-trade scams to enrich the few and knock down the many.
Powerless immigrants didn't do these things to us. The richest, most-powerful, best-connected corporate interests did them. Judy Ancel, director of the Institute for Labor Studies at the University of Missouri, offers this example of Iowa Beef Processors (IBP), the largest meatpacker in the U.S., now owned by the multibillion-dollar conglomerate Tyson Foods:
Until the late 1970s, meatpacking was a high-wage industry, with highly skilled workers in charge. Factories were in union cities, union contracts provided good wages and benefits, and unions set professional standards for everything from worker training to safety conditions. Then IBP's executives transformed this beneficial model into today's profiteering system. The factories moved to nonunion cities and rural areas, and lower-skilled workers were hired to do repetitive cuts on speeded-up assembly lines. With Reagan as president, meat-industry lobbyists were able to emasculate labor laws and unions lost their influence over the workplace, which became much less rewarding and more dangerous. IBP began intensive recruiting of Mexican workers (legal or not) to do what had become very nasty work. In only 20years, meatpacking wages dropped by roughly half, the union was ousted, and the rate of workplace injury became one of the highest of any industry (more than a fourth of meatpacking workers now suffer "accidents").
The fix
Immigration reform cannot be separated from labor and trade reform. We can't fix the former without dealing with the other two. We must stop the exploitative NAFTAfication of such aspiring economies as Mexico and instead develop genuine grassroots investment policies that give people there an ability to remain in their homeland. Then we must enforce our own labor laws--from wage and hour rules to the NLRB--so as to empower American workers to enforce their own rights.
Eliminating the need to migrate from Mexico and rebuilding the middle-class ladder here is an "immigration policy" that will work. But it requires us to go right at the corporate kleptocracy that now owns Washington and controls the debate.
We must challenge Democrats, especially, to broaden the debate and to recognize that they must choose sides--to be for workers or for more trade imperialism. Right now, the Democratic leadership is siding with imperialism and exacerbating the economic causes of Latino migration. For example, just last month, Speaker Nancy Pelosi engineered a vote to extend NAFTA to Peru--a corporate favor that could be called the Tom-Rahm Bipartisan Axis of Immigration Stupidity, for it drew enthusiastic support from both Tom Tancredo and Rahm Emanuel.
America's immigration problem is not down on the border, it's in Washington and on Wall Street.
Stop blaming workers--the bosses made this mess
http://www.hightowerlowdown.org/node/1510
Immigrants come here because globalization took their jobs back there
THE WAILING IN OUR COUNTRY ABOUT the "invasion of immigrants" has been long and loud. As one complainant put it, "Few of their children in the country learn English...The signs in our streets have inscriptions in both languages...Unless the stream of the importation could be turned they will soon so outnumber us that all the advantages we have will not be able to preserve our language, and even our government will become precarious."
That's not some diatribe from one of today's Republican presidential candidates. It's the anxious cry of none other than Ben Franklin, deploring the wave of Germans pouring into the colony of Pennsylvania in the 1750s. Thus, anti-immigrant eruptions are older than the U.S. itself, and they've flared up periodically throughout our history, targeting the Irish, French, Italians, Chinese, and others. Even George W's current project to wall off our border is not a new bit of nuttiness--around the time of the nation's founding, John Jay, who later became the first chief justice of the Supreme Court, proposed "a wall of brass around the country for the exclusion of Catholics."
Luckily for the development and enrichment of our country, these past public frenzies ultimately failed to exclude the teeming masses, and those uproars now appear through the telescope of time to have been some combination of ridiculous panic, political demagoguery, and xenophobic ugliness. Still, this does not mean that the public's anxiety and simmering anger about today's massive influx of Mexicans coming illegally across our 2,000-mile shared border is illegitimate. However, most of what the politicians and pundits are saying about it is illegitimate.
Wedge issue
There is way too much xenophobia, racism, and demagoguery at play around illegal immigration, but such crude sentiments are not what is bringing this problem to a national political boil. Polls show--as do conversations at any Chat & Chew Cafe in the country--that there is a deep and genuine alarm about the issue among the nonxenophobic, nonracist American majority. In particular, workaday families are fearful about what an endless flow of low-wage workers portends for their economic future--and they're not getting good answers from Republicans, Democrats, corporate leaders, or the media.
For the GOP candidates in this year's presidential run, the contest is coming down to who can be the most nativist knucklehead. They accuse each other of not wanting to punish immigrant children enough, of not being absolutists on "English-only" proposals, of having coddled illegal entrants in the past with amnesty proposals and sanctuaries, and of not being hawkish enough on sealing off and militarizing the border.
The leader of the anti-immigrant Republican pack is Tom Tancredo, a Colorado Congress critter who based his ill-fated presidential campaign on immigrant bashing. This goober is so nasty he'd scare small children. His website screeched that immigrants are "pushing drugs, raping kids, destroying lives," and his campaign slogan is a sledgehammer demand: "Deport those who don't belong. Make sure they never come back." As for illegal immigrants, Tom thinks that the term "illegal" is too soft, preferring to demonize immigrants as "aliens." Tancredo doesn't merely rant, he foams at the mouth, maniacally warning about waves of Mexican terrorists who are "coming to kill me and you and your children." Accused of trying to turn America into a gated community, he exulted, "You bet!"
At least he's taken a position, even if it's un-American and loopy. Democratic leaders, on the other hand, have mostly tried to do a squishy shuffle, wanting to beef up law enforcement against illegal immigrants while also mouthing soothing words about the good work ethic of our friends south of the border and offering a bureaucratic rigmarole to allow some of the younger ones to gain permanent residency in our country. Worse, such corporate Democrats as Rep. Rahm Emanuel urge the party's candidates either to adopt the Republican's punitive message or simply to try ducking the issue.
Which brings us to the wall, both figuratively and literally. The fact that we are resorting to the construction of an enormous fence between two friendly nations admits to an abject failure by policymakers, who are so bereft of ideas, honesty, courage, and morality that all they can do is to try walling off the problem.
We've had experience here in Texas with the futility of tall border fences. Molly Ivins reported a beer-induced incident that took place in 1983. Walling off Mexico had been proposed back then by the Reaganauts, and a test fence had been built way down in the Big Bend outpost of Terlingua. This little town also happened to be the site of a renowned chili cook-off that Molly helped judge, and it attracted a big crowd of impish, beer-drinking chiliheads.
There stood the barrier, 17 feet tall and topped with barbwire. It didn't take many beers before the first-ever "Terlingua Memorial Over, Under, or Through the Mexican Fence Climbing Contest" was cooked up. Winning time: 30 seconds.
Yet here come the border sealers again. Bush & Company (including Democrats who have allowed the funding) are putting up an initial $1.2 billion to start building this version of the wall, which is projected to cost up to $60billion over the next 25 years to build and maintain. It's a monster wall--two or three 40-foot-high rows of reinforced fencing that take a swath of land 150 feet wide and stretch for 700 miles.
The Mexican government and people are insulted and appalled by the wall; ranchers, mayors, and families living on either side of the border hate it; environmentalists are aghast at its destructive impact on the ecology of the area. Still, it's being built. Indeed, a 2005 federal act contained a little-noticed section authorizing Bush's Homeland Security czar to suspend any laws that stand in the way of building the wall. Current czar Michael Chertoff has already used this unprecedented authority to waive 19 statutes, including the Endangered Species, Clean Water, and National Historic Preservation Acts.
All this for something that will not work. As Gov. Janet Napolitano of Arizona put it,"Show me a 50-foot wall and I'll show you a 51-foot ladder." People have literally been dying to cross into the U.S., and it's not possible to build a wall tall enough to stop them. They will keep coming.
Why?
The question that policymakers have not faced honestly is this one: Why do these immigrants come? The answer is not that they are pulled by our jobs and government benefits, but that they are pushed by the abject poverty that their families face in Mexico. That might seem like a mere semantic difference, but it's huge if you're trying to develop a policy to stop the human flood across our border.
Although you never hear it mentioned in debates on the issue, you might start with this reality: Most Mexican people really would prefer to live in their own country. Can we all say, duh? Pedro Martin, who has seen most of the young men and women in his small village depart for El Norte, put it this way: "Up north, even though they pay more, you're not necessarily living as well. You feel out of place. Here you can walk around the whole town and it's comfortable. Life is easier."
Their family, language, culture, identity, and happiness is Mexican -- yet sheer economic survival requires so many of them to abandon the place they love.
Again, why? Because in the last 15 years, Mexico's longstanding system of sustaining its huge population of poor citizens (including small self-sufficient farms, jobs in state-owned industries, and subsidies for such essentials as tortillas) has been scuttled at the insistence of U.S. banks, corporations, government officials, and "free market" ideologues. In the name of "modernizing" the Mexican economy, such giants as Citigroup, Wal-Mart, Tyson Foods, and GE--in cahoots with the plutocrats and oligarchs of Mexico--have laid waste to that country's grassroots economy, destroying the already-meager livelihoods of millions.
The 1994 imposition of NAFTA was particularly devastating. Just as Bill Clinton and the corporate elites did here, Mexico's ruling elites touted NAFTA there as a magic elixir that would generate growth, create jobs, raise wages, and eliminate the surge of Mexican migrants into the U.S. They were horribly wrong:
Economic growth in Mexico has been anemic since '94, and the benefits of any growth have gone overwhelmingly to the wealthiest families.
Since NAFTA, Mexico has created less than a third of the millions of decent jobs it needs.
Average factory wages in Mexico have dropped by more than 5% under NAFTA.
Unemployment has jumped, and unskilled workers are paid only $5 a day.
U.S. agribusiness corporations have more than doubled their shipment of subsidized crops into Mexico, busting the price that indigenous farmers got for their production and displacing some 2 million peasant farmers from their land.
Huge agribusiness operations, many owned by U.S. investors, now control Mexican agricultural production and pay farmworkers under $2 an hour.
Since NAFTA passed, there has been a flood of business bankruptcies and takeovers in Mexico as predatory U.S. chains have moved in. U.S. corporations now control 40% of the country's formal jobs, with Wal-Mart reigning as the #1 employer.
19 million more Mexicans live in poverty today than when NAFTA was passed.
So, here's the deal: Thanks to Mexico's newly corporatized economy, wage earners there get poverty pay of $5a day (about $1,600 a year), while a few hundred miles north, they might draw that much in an hour. What would you do?
The wrong debate
In our national imbroglio over Mexican immigration (yes, some illegal migrants come from elsewhere, but more than three-fourths are from Mexico), our "leaders" have set us up to look down at impoverished working people forced to leave their homeland and risk death in order to help their families escape poverty.
Instead of coming down on them, why not start looking up--up at the executive suites on both sides of the border. Up is where the power is. The moneyed elites in those suites are the profiteering few who have rigged all of our trade and labor policies to knock down workers, farmers, and small businesses--not merely in Mexico, but in our country as well.
In the U.S., the middle class feels imperiled because...well, because it is imperiled. Politicians, economists, and the richly paid pundits keep telling us that the American economy is robust and that people's financial pessimism and anxieties are irrational. At the kitchen table level, however, folks know the difference between chicken salad and chicken manure. Yes, these are boom times for the luxury class, but the middle class is imploding. In a recent letter to the editor, a working stiff in California put it this way:
"We've replaced steaks with corn flakes; we can't afford to get sick; our kids can't afford health insurance; we hope that our 10-year-old van keeps running because we can't afford a new one; our kids can't buy a home because housing prices are exorbitant; our purchasing power continually regresses; and worst of all, the poverty and near-poverty classes are growing."
It's this economic fragility that anti-immigrant forces play on. But even if there were no illegal workers in our country--none--the fragility would remain, for poor Mexican laborers are not the ones who:
Downsized and offshored our middle-class jobs;
Perverted our bankruptcy laws to let corporations abrogate their union contracts;
Stopped enforcement of America's wage and hour laws;
Perverted the National Labor Relations Board into an anti-worker tool for corporations;
Illegally reclassified millions of employees as "independent contractors," leaving them with no benefits or labor rights;
Subverted the right of workers to organize;
Turned a blind eye to the re-emergence in America of sweatshops and child labor in everything from the clothing industry to Wal-Mart;
Made good health care a luxury item;
Let rich campaign donors take over both political parties;
Passed by hook and crook a continuing series of global-trade scams to enrich the few and knock down the many.
Powerless immigrants didn't do these things to us. The richest, most-powerful, best-connected corporate interests did them. Judy Ancel, director of the Institute for Labor Studies at the University of Missouri, offers this example of Iowa Beef Processors (IBP), the largest meatpacker in the U.S., now owned by the multibillion-dollar conglomerate Tyson Foods:
Until the late 1970s, meatpacking was a high-wage industry, with highly skilled workers in charge. Factories were in union cities, union contracts provided good wages and benefits, and unions set professional standards for everything from worker training to safety conditions. Then IBP's executives transformed this beneficial model into today's profiteering system. The factories moved to nonunion cities and rural areas, and lower-skilled workers were hired to do repetitive cuts on speeded-up assembly lines. With Reagan as president, meat-industry lobbyists were able to emasculate labor laws and unions lost their influence over the workplace, which became much less rewarding and more dangerous. IBP began intensive recruiting of Mexican workers (legal or not) to do what had become very nasty work. In only 20years, meatpacking wages dropped by roughly half, the union was ousted, and the rate of workplace injury became one of the highest of any industry (more than a fourth of meatpacking workers now suffer "accidents").
The fix
Immigration reform cannot be separated from labor and trade reform. We can't fix the former without dealing with the other two. We must stop the exploitative NAFTAfication of such aspiring economies as Mexico and instead develop genuine grassroots investment policies that give people there an ability to remain in their homeland. Then we must enforce our own labor laws--from wage and hour rules to the NLRB--so as to empower American workers to enforce their own rights.
Eliminating the need to migrate from Mexico and rebuilding the middle-class ladder here is an "immigration policy" that will work. But it requires us to go right at the corporate kleptocracy that now owns Washington and controls the debate.
We must challenge Democrats, especially, to broaden the debate and to recognize that they must choose sides--to be for workers or for more trade imperialism. Right now, the Democratic leadership is siding with imperialism and exacerbating the economic causes of Latino migration. For example, just last month, Speaker Nancy Pelosi engineered a vote to extend NAFTA to Peru--a corporate favor that could be called the Tom-Rahm Bipartisan Axis of Immigration Stupidity, for it drew enthusiastic support from both Tom Tancredo and Rahm Emanuel.
America's immigration problem is not down on the border, it's in Washington and on Wall Street.
Monday, April 28, 2008
Crisis In Food Prices - Is it Genocide?
http://www.rense.com/general81/crisis.htm
Crisis In Food Prices Threatens Worldwide Starvation - Is it Genocide?
By Richard C. Cook
4-24-8
Rising worldwide food prices are resulting in shortages, riots and protests, promises by governments to expand food aid, expressions of concern by international bodies like the World Bank, and stress on household budgets even in developed countries like the U.S. Did this just "happen" or is there a plan?
Plenty of commentators think they have it figured out and blame such factors as greater demand for high-end protein menus by the increasingly upscale populations of China and India , weather factors relating to global warming such as drought in Australia , and the diversion of animal feed crops such as corn and soybeans to ethanol production. L.H. Teslik of the Council on Foreign Relations speaks of "bubbling inflation and rising oil prices."
There is also the question of whether a role is being played by commodity speculation. The idea is that faced with the global financial crisis and the collapse of mortgage-based securities, investors are flocking to resource-based tangibles as a hedge against recession and the decline of the U.S. dollar. Hence gold is at record levels with oil keeping the same pace. How else to explain, for instance, the doubling of the price of rice in Asian markets in less than two months? Standard Chartered Bank food commodities analyst Abah Ofon says, "Fund money flowing into agriculture has boosted prices. It's fashionable. This is the year of agricultural commodities."
But the idea that speculation is at fault is disputed by no less than New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, one of the world's leading monetary economists, who writes:
"My problem with the speculative stories is that they all depend on something that holds production - or at least potential production - off the market. The key point is that the spot price equalizes the demand and supply of a commodity; speculation can drive up the futures price, but the spot price will only follow if the higher futures prices somehow reduce the quantity available for final consumers. The usual channel for this is an increase in inventories, as investors hoard the stuff in expectation of a higher price down the road. If this doesn't happen - if the spot price doesn't follow the futures price - then futures will presumably come down, as it turns out that buying futures produces losses."
Solid data in this area is hard to come by. Probably the chief common denominator among commentators, especially those advocating a supply and demand or global warming perspective, is that they have so little solid information. Thus it is refreshing to find a study that contains meaningful statistics such as one appearing on the Executive Intelligence Report website entitled, "To Defeat Famine: Kill the WTO" by Marcia Merry Baker. One particularly telling item is that after global food supplies were boosted through the Green Revolution and related programs lasting into the 1970s, more recently, world food production has actually declined.
Baker writes, "World per-capita output of grains of all kinds (rice, wheat, corn, and others) has been falling for twenty years. Whereas in 1986 it was 338 kilograms per person, it went down to 303 by 2006. This decline in no way has been made up for by increasing amounts of other staple foodstuffs-tubers, legumes, or oil crops, which likewise are in insufficient supply."
Further, "In twelve of the last twenty years, less grain has been produced than utilized that year (for all purposes-direct human consumption, livestock feed, industrial and energy uses, and reserves). Accordingly, the amount of carryover stocks of grain from year to year has been declining to extreme danger levels. The diversion of food crops into biofuels is the nail in the coffin. The latest estimate is that worldwide stockpiles of cereal crops of all kinds are expected to fall to a twenty-five-year low of 405 million tons in 2008. That is down twenty-one million tons, or five percent, from their already reduced level in 2007."
Further, an increasing proportion of food crops is being produced by large multinational corporations whose power and reach has ballooned under the World Trade Organization and spin-offs like NAFTA even as small family-run farms have lost the protection of parity pricing and been priced out of business. But the data suggest that a) the output of agribusiness has failed to match the older, more diversified systems of farming; and b) as nations lose their ability to feed themselves, agricultural pricing becomes more subject to monopolization.
The loss of agricultural self-sufficiency has been exacerbated in much of the developing world by International Monetary Fund lending policies. Under the " Washington consensus," entire nations have been forced to give up agricultural self-sufficiency and convert farmland to export commodities while displaced rural populations migrate to the slums of large cities such as Lagos , Nigeria . Today those populations are the ones most grievously threatened with starvation.
Then what is really going on?
First of all, let's get rid of the idea that we are seeing "impersonal market forces" at work. "Supply and demand" is not a "law"-it's a policy. If a seller has an article in demand it's a matter of choice whether he charges a premium when he offers it for sale. If he's a decent, honest soul, maybe he won't necessarily charge all the market will bear, particularly if the item is a necessity of life, such as food. Or maybe there will be a responsible public authority around that will prohibit price gouging or else subsidize the purchaser, as often happens in credit markets. Of course public spirited action like this is itself a declining commodity in a world afflicted with the kind of market fundamentalism and rampant privatization that has been the rage since the 1980s Reagan Revolution.
Second, let's ask the question which any competent investigator should pose when starting out on the trail of a possible crime: "Who benefits?" Indeed we may be speaking of a crime on the scale of genocide if the events in question are a) avoidable; in which case the crime is one of negligent homicide; or b) planned, where we obviously have a conspiracy among the contributing parties.
Those who benefit are obviously the ones who finance agricultural operations, those who are charging monopoly prices for the commodities in demand, the various middlemen who bring the products to market after they leave the farm, and the owners or mortgagees of the land, retail space, and other assets required to conduct the production/consumption cycle.
In other words, it's the financial elite of the world who have gained complete control of the most basic necessity of life. This includes not only the international financiers who provide capitalization, including the leveraging of trading in commodity futures up to the 97 percent level, but even organized crime groups which the U.S. Department of Justice says have penetrated world materials markets.
And is all this part of a long-term strategy by international finance to starve much of the world's population in order to seize their land, control their natural resources, and enslave the rest who fear a similar fate? Already millions of people are losing their homes to housing inflation and foreclosure. Is actual or threatened physical starvation the next part of the scenario?
And where are the governmental authorities whose job it is to protect the public welfare both at the national and international levels? These authorities long ago allowed a situation to develop, including in developed nations like the U.S., where people in localities no longer have the simple ability to feed themselves, even in emergencies. And not one of the candidates remaining in the U.S. presidential election-John McCain, Hillary Clinton, nor Barack Obama-has addressed the food pricing issue. Indeed, all three are part of a government that has gone so far as to exclude much of the rising cost of food from measurements of inflation, an innovation that took place on Bill Clinton's watch.
It is now April. Already food has run out in some parts of the world. In a few months winter will come, at least in the Northern Hemisphere. What will happen then? Are you certain food will be on your table?
And suppose you wanted to make a contribution to your own well-being and to that of your family and community by going into farming. In most parts of North America you can look around and see plenty of underutilized land.
But could you do it? Could you buy or lease land and pay taxes on it after the galloping inflation of the real estate bubble? Could you get bank loans for equipment and operating expenses under today's constrained credit conditions? Could you afford fuel for your equipment when petroleum costs over $115 a barrel? Is water readily available from developed supplies and is electricity available at regulated prices? Could you purchase anything other than genetically-modified seed? Would local supermarkets buy your produce when your prices are undercut by massive corporate distributorships importing food from abroad? Does the system even exist in your home town for marketing of local farm products?
And does anyone in power even care?
Well, whether they do or not, "We the People" should care. One of the worst aspects of the consumer society is the separation between the individual and the products of the earth we utilize. We always assume that whatever we need will be there so long as we have money in our bank account or the ability to charge on a credit card and pay later.
Such assumptions are losing their validity. Back in the 1960s people who were starting to understand these things began a modest "back to the land" movement. Today it is time to start one again. Except this time we need to do it right by demanding government policies that support it. This means low-cost credit, price supports, affordable utilities, favorable tax policies, and decisions by government and businesses to "buy local." Food production cannot safely be left in the hands of agribusiness and international finance capitalism any longer.
Richard C. Cook is a former U.S. federal government analyst, whose career included service with the U.S. Civil Service Commission, the Food and Drug Administration, the Carter White House, NASA, and the U.S. Treasury Department. His articles on economics, politics, and space policy have appeared on numerous websites. His book on monetary reform entitled We Hold These Truths: The Promise of Monetary Reform is in preparation. He is also the author of Challenger Revealed: An Insider's Account of How the Reagan Administration Caused the Greatest Tragedy of the Space Age, called by one reviewer, "the most important spaceflight book of the last twenty years." His website is at:
http://www.richardccook.com.
Crisis In Food Prices Threatens Worldwide Starvation - Is it Genocide?
By Richard C. Cook
4-24-8
Rising worldwide food prices are resulting in shortages, riots and protests, promises by governments to expand food aid, expressions of concern by international bodies like the World Bank, and stress on household budgets even in developed countries like the U.S. Did this just "happen" or is there a plan?
Plenty of commentators think they have it figured out and blame such factors as greater demand for high-end protein menus by the increasingly upscale populations of China and India , weather factors relating to global warming such as drought in Australia , and the diversion of animal feed crops such as corn and soybeans to ethanol production. L.H. Teslik of the Council on Foreign Relations speaks of "bubbling inflation and rising oil prices."
There is also the question of whether a role is being played by commodity speculation. The idea is that faced with the global financial crisis and the collapse of mortgage-based securities, investors are flocking to resource-based tangibles as a hedge against recession and the decline of the U.S. dollar. Hence gold is at record levels with oil keeping the same pace. How else to explain, for instance, the doubling of the price of rice in Asian markets in less than two months? Standard Chartered Bank food commodities analyst Abah Ofon says, "Fund money flowing into agriculture has boosted prices. It's fashionable. This is the year of agricultural commodities."
But the idea that speculation is at fault is disputed by no less than New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, one of the world's leading monetary economists, who writes:
"My problem with the speculative stories is that they all depend on something that holds production - or at least potential production - off the market. The key point is that the spot price equalizes the demand and supply of a commodity; speculation can drive up the futures price, but the spot price will only follow if the higher futures prices somehow reduce the quantity available for final consumers. The usual channel for this is an increase in inventories, as investors hoard the stuff in expectation of a higher price down the road. If this doesn't happen - if the spot price doesn't follow the futures price - then futures will presumably come down, as it turns out that buying futures produces losses."
Solid data in this area is hard to come by. Probably the chief common denominator among commentators, especially those advocating a supply and demand or global warming perspective, is that they have so little solid information. Thus it is refreshing to find a study that contains meaningful statistics such as one appearing on the Executive Intelligence Report website entitled, "To Defeat Famine: Kill the WTO" by Marcia Merry Baker. One particularly telling item is that after global food supplies were boosted through the Green Revolution and related programs lasting into the 1970s, more recently, world food production has actually declined.
Baker writes, "World per-capita output of grains of all kinds (rice, wheat, corn, and others) has been falling for twenty years. Whereas in 1986 it was 338 kilograms per person, it went down to 303 by 2006. This decline in no way has been made up for by increasing amounts of other staple foodstuffs-tubers, legumes, or oil crops, which likewise are in insufficient supply."
Further, "In twelve of the last twenty years, less grain has been produced than utilized that year (for all purposes-direct human consumption, livestock feed, industrial and energy uses, and reserves). Accordingly, the amount of carryover stocks of grain from year to year has been declining to extreme danger levels. The diversion of food crops into biofuels is the nail in the coffin. The latest estimate is that worldwide stockpiles of cereal crops of all kinds are expected to fall to a twenty-five-year low of 405 million tons in 2008. That is down twenty-one million tons, or five percent, from their already reduced level in 2007."
Further, an increasing proportion of food crops is being produced by large multinational corporations whose power and reach has ballooned under the World Trade Organization and spin-offs like NAFTA even as small family-run farms have lost the protection of parity pricing and been priced out of business. But the data suggest that a) the output of agribusiness has failed to match the older, more diversified systems of farming; and b) as nations lose their ability to feed themselves, agricultural pricing becomes more subject to monopolization.
The loss of agricultural self-sufficiency has been exacerbated in much of the developing world by International Monetary Fund lending policies. Under the " Washington consensus," entire nations have been forced to give up agricultural self-sufficiency and convert farmland to export commodities while displaced rural populations migrate to the slums of large cities such as Lagos , Nigeria . Today those populations are the ones most grievously threatened with starvation.
Then what is really going on?
First of all, let's get rid of the idea that we are seeing "impersonal market forces" at work. "Supply and demand" is not a "law"-it's a policy. If a seller has an article in demand it's a matter of choice whether he charges a premium when he offers it for sale. If he's a decent, honest soul, maybe he won't necessarily charge all the market will bear, particularly if the item is a necessity of life, such as food. Or maybe there will be a responsible public authority around that will prohibit price gouging or else subsidize the purchaser, as often happens in credit markets. Of course public spirited action like this is itself a declining commodity in a world afflicted with the kind of market fundamentalism and rampant privatization that has been the rage since the 1980s Reagan Revolution.
Second, let's ask the question which any competent investigator should pose when starting out on the trail of a possible crime: "Who benefits?" Indeed we may be speaking of a crime on the scale of genocide if the events in question are a) avoidable; in which case the crime is one of negligent homicide; or b) planned, where we obviously have a conspiracy among the contributing parties.
Those who benefit are obviously the ones who finance agricultural operations, those who are charging monopoly prices for the commodities in demand, the various middlemen who bring the products to market after they leave the farm, and the owners or mortgagees of the land, retail space, and other assets required to conduct the production/consumption cycle.
In other words, it's the financial elite of the world who have gained complete control of the most basic necessity of life. This includes not only the international financiers who provide capitalization, including the leveraging of trading in commodity futures up to the 97 percent level, but even organized crime groups which the U.S. Department of Justice says have penetrated world materials markets.
And is all this part of a long-term strategy by international finance to starve much of the world's population in order to seize their land, control their natural resources, and enslave the rest who fear a similar fate? Already millions of people are losing their homes to housing inflation and foreclosure. Is actual or threatened physical starvation the next part of the scenario?
And where are the governmental authorities whose job it is to protect the public welfare both at the national and international levels? These authorities long ago allowed a situation to develop, including in developed nations like the U.S., where people in localities no longer have the simple ability to feed themselves, even in emergencies. And not one of the candidates remaining in the U.S. presidential election-John McCain, Hillary Clinton, nor Barack Obama-has addressed the food pricing issue. Indeed, all three are part of a government that has gone so far as to exclude much of the rising cost of food from measurements of inflation, an innovation that took place on Bill Clinton's watch.
It is now April. Already food has run out in some parts of the world. In a few months winter will come, at least in the Northern Hemisphere. What will happen then? Are you certain food will be on your table?
And suppose you wanted to make a contribution to your own well-being and to that of your family and community by going into farming. In most parts of North America you can look around and see plenty of underutilized land.
But could you do it? Could you buy or lease land and pay taxes on it after the galloping inflation of the real estate bubble? Could you get bank loans for equipment and operating expenses under today's constrained credit conditions? Could you afford fuel for your equipment when petroleum costs over $115 a barrel? Is water readily available from developed supplies and is electricity available at regulated prices? Could you purchase anything other than genetically-modified seed? Would local supermarkets buy your produce when your prices are undercut by massive corporate distributorships importing food from abroad? Does the system even exist in your home town for marketing of local farm products?
And does anyone in power even care?
Well, whether they do or not, "We the People" should care. One of the worst aspects of the consumer society is the separation between the individual and the products of the earth we utilize. We always assume that whatever we need will be there so long as we have money in our bank account or the ability to charge on a credit card and pay later.
Such assumptions are losing their validity. Back in the 1960s people who were starting to understand these things began a modest "back to the land" movement. Today it is time to start one again. Except this time we need to do it right by demanding government policies that support it. This means low-cost credit, price supports, affordable utilities, favorable tax policies, and decisions by government and businesses to "buy local." Food production cannot safely be left in the hands of agribusiness and international finance capitalism any longer.
Richard C. Cook is a former U.S. federal government analyst, whose career included service with the U.S. Civil Service Commission, the Food and Drug Administration, the Carter White House, NASA, and the U.S. Treasury Department. His articles on economics, politics, and space policy have appeared on numerous websites. His book on monetary reform entitled We Hold These Truths: The Promise of Monetary Reform is in preparation. He is also the author of Challenger Revealed: An Insider's Account of How the Reagan Administration Caused the Greatest Tragedy of the Space Age, called by one reviewer, "the most important spaceflight book of the last twenty years." His website is at:
http://www.richardccook.com.
Friday, March 28, 2008
GOD DAMN AMERICA
GOD DAMN AMERICA – ESPECIALLY PENNSYLVANIA
By Greg Palast
Sunday, March 23, 2008, Forest City, PA ]
The kids were snoozing so I drove along the back roads skirting the Lackawanna River on a dawn hunt for black coffee and a newspaper.
I think even Norman Rockwell would have found this place too sticky sweet, too postcard: the weathered barns, the fallow fields perfectly snow-frosted; red, white and blue flags already up on the clapboard farmhouses and the white-washed church in the valley already full for Easter prayers.
At a gas station, I scored the paper and coffee, spilled some on the front page – the closest thing I’ve got to a religious ritual – then parked in front of a row of insanely pretty salt-box houses shining like mad teeth on the river bank.
One was missing a pick-up in the driveway; its screen door was left half-open, and there was a letter taped to the window. The Sheriff’s Notice of eviction. Another foreclosure.
God damn America.
I know that’s what Obama’s spiritual guide would say.
But why? It seems likes He’s already done a pretty good job of damning these United States.
And He seems to have really taken it out on this corner of Pennsylvania.
The gargantuan Bethlehem steel works have dwindled to a few robot-operated mills controlled from Mumbai, India. The only remainders of nearby Carbondale’s mining industry are in display cases at the ageing Coal Inn. But you could still get out by selling your home to ski tourists from New York – until this year when mortgage markets turned cancerous.
That leaves Forest City’s one industry, lumbering – which we can kiss goodbye since a recent ruling by the NAFTA board which allows the import of cheap Canadian wood.
Some local kid has made the paper having been thrown, helmet first, into the volcano called Iraq. The Scranton Times-Tribune, two pages after the photo of a priest blessing a bowl of who knows what, noted that three soldiers killed in yesterday’s bombing are, “pushing the death toll in the five-year conflict to nearly 4,000” – which is true if you don’t count Iraqi dead. But Someone must be counting them. (From way up in heaven, I wonder if we look like a nation of Christians – or an empire of Romans.)
Phil Ochs, before he killed himself, wrote,
“This is a land full of power and glory,
Beauty that words cannot recall.
But her power shall rest on the strength of her freedom.
Her glory shall rest on us all.”
Whatever.
It’s a difficult place to be an atheist, in this America, surfeited as it is on every vista with signs of His overwhelming grace and His exasperated wrath. It’s as if the Lord Himself is just as confused and frustrated and disappointed as the rest of us by blessings so abused.
There’s one consolation. He has apparently granted Pennsylvanians the privilege, come April 22, of choosing which Democrat will lose in November.
Which may not mean much to Sandy Ryder on whom the spirit of Easter has landed like a ton of bricks. Sandy, says the flyer tacked up at the Bingham diner, was, “Recently diagnosed with Inflammatory Breast Cancer.” She’s a “Single mother of two – Tony and Brandon – and Grandmother of one – Jason.”
And there they were in a photocopied portrait, the earnest elder son and little Jason to her right, the young slacker (Tony? Brandon?) slouched to her left. The town’s hawking a benefit for Sandy, $10 at the door, “including Food and Beverage” and a “Chinese auction.”
(I’ll bet Al Qaeda could pick up some recruits here – if Osama would offer health insurance.)
Whatever. This is, after all, Holy Week, which marks the anniversary of the grounding of the Exxon Valdez, the day the giant oil corporation soaked 1,200 miles of Alaska’s coast with crude sludge. March 24 marks 19 years since the grounding and 19 years since Exxon’s promise to compensate the ruined fishermen. You should watch the 19-year-old video-tape of Exxon’s man in Alaska. I especially like the part where he tells the fishermen, “You have had some good luck – and you don’t realize it."
I know some of the fishermen on the TV footage, like the Anderson family, Eyak Natives. I can tell you, the Eyak don’t feel so lucky, still waiting for the Supreme Court to act on Exxon’s latest stall on payment. They’ve seen plenty of Sheriff’s Notices these past 19 years.
So Happy Easter.
George Bush tells us he’s, “feeling just fine.” And we should be glad for him, I suppose.
Bush ends his most belligerent speeches by saying, “God bless America.”
So, why hasn’t He?
Maybe you can tell us, Mr. President: Why hasn’t He?
***************
Greg Palast is the author of the NY Times best-selling books Armed Madhouse and Best Democracy Money Can Buy. Read his reports at www.GregPalast.com
By Greg Palast
Sunday, March 23, 2008, Forest City, PA ]
The kids were snoozing so I drove along the back roads skirting the Lackawanna River on a dawn hunt for black coffee and a newspaper.
I think even Norman Rockwell would have found this place too sticky sweet, too postcard: the weathered barns, the fallow fields perfectly snow-frosted; red, white and blue flags already up on the clapboard farmhouses and the white-washed church in the valley already full for Easter prayers.
At a gas station, I scored the paper and coffee, spilled some on the front page – the closest thing I’ve got to a religious ritual – then parked in front of a row of insanely pretty salt-box houses shining like mad teeth on the river bank.
One was missing a pick-up in the driveway; its screen door was left half-open, and there was a letter taped to the window. The Sheriff’s Notice of eviction. Another foreclosure.
God damn America.
I know that’s what Obama’s spiritual guide would say.
But why? It seems likes He’s already done a pretty good job of damning these United States.
And He seems to have really taken it out on this corner of Pennsylvania.
The gargantuan Bethlehem steel works have dwindled to a few robot-operated mills controlled from Mumbai, India. The only remainders of nearby Carbondale’s mining industry are in display cases at the ageing Coal Inn. But you could still get out by selling your home to ski tourists from New York – until this year when mortgage markets turned cancerous.
That leaves Forest City’s one industry, lumbering – which we can kiss goodbye since a recent ruling by the NAFTA board which allows the import of cheap Canadian wood.
Some local kid has made the paper having been thrown, helmet first, into the volcano called Iraq. The Scranton Times-Tribune, two pages after the photo of a priest blessing a bowl of who knows what, noted that three soldiers killed in yesterday’s bombing are, “pushing the death toll in the five-year conflict to nearly 4,000” – which is true if you don’t count Iraqi dead. But Someone must be counting them. (From way up in heaven, I wonder if we look like a nation of Christians – or an empire of Romans.)
Phil Ochs, before he killed himself, wrote,
“This is a land full of power and glory,
Beauty that words cannot recall.
But her power shall rest on the strength of her freedom.
Her glory shall rest on us all.”
Whatever.
It’s a difficult place to be an atheist, in this America, surfeited as it is on every vista with signs of His overwhelming grace and His exasperated wrath. It’s as if the Lord Himself is just as confused and frustrated and disappointed as the rest of us by blessings so abused.
There’s one consolation. He has apparently granted Pennsylvanians the privilege, come April 22, of choosing which Democrat will lose in November.
Which may not mean much to Sandy Ryder on whom the spirit of Easter has landed like a ton of bricks. Sandy, says the flyer tacked up at the Bingham diner, was, “Recently diagnosed with Inflammatory Breast Cancer.” She’s a “Single mother of two – Tony and Brandon – and Grandmother of one – Jason.”
And there they were in a photocopied portrait, the earnest elder son and little Jason to her right, the young slacker (Tony? Brandon?) slouched to her left. The town’s hawking a benefit for Sandy, $10 at the door, “including Food and Beverage” and a “Chinese auction.”
(I’ll bet Al Qaeda could pick up some recruits here – if Osama would offer health insurance.)
Whatever. This is, after all, Holy Week, which marks the anniversary of the grounding of the Exxon Valdez, the day the giant oil corporation soaked 1,200 miles of Alaska’s coast with crude sludge. March 24 marks 19 years since the grounding and 19 years since Exxon’s promise to compensate the ruined fishermen. You should watch the 19-year-old video-tape of Exxon’s man in Alaska. I especially like the part where he tells the fishermen, “You have had some good luck – and you don’t realize it."
I know some of the fishermen on the TV footage, like the Anderson family, Eyak Natives. I can tell you, the Eyak don’t feel so lucky, still waiting for the Supreme Court to act on Exxon’s latest stall on payment. They’ve seen plenty of Sheriff’s Notices these past 19 years.
So Happy Easter.
George Bush tells us he’s, “feeling just fine.” And we should be glad for him, I suppose.
Bush ends his most belligerent speeches by saying, “God bless America.”
So, why hasn’t He?
Maybe you can tell us, Mr. President: Why hasn’t He?
***************
Greg Palast is the author of the NY Times best-selling books Armed Madhouse and Best Democracy Money Can Buy. Read his reports at www.GregPalast.com
Tuesday, October 16, 2007
Fox Admits Plan For Single NAFTA Currency
http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/october2007/091007_fox_admits.htm
Vicente Fox Admits Plan For Single NAFTA Currency
Former Mexican president wants North American Union based on EU
Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet
Tuesday, October 9, 2007
Mexico's former president, Vicente Fox, made an astounding admission last night on CNN's Larry King Live when he acknowledged the plan for a NAFTA single currency, a "euro-dollar" as King labeled it.
Fox also vowed to help unite the Americas beyond a trade agreement, following what he described as "a new vision, like we are trying to do with NAFTA".
The comments follow Fox's appearance on The Daily Show in which he advocated the creation of a North American Union based on the model of the European Union.
TRANSCRIPT FROM CNN.com.
KING: E-mail from Mrs. Gonzalez in Elizabeth, New Jersey. "Mr. Fox, I would like to know how you feel about the possibility of having a Latin America united with one currency?"
FOX: Long term, very long term. What we propose together, President Bush and myself, it's ALCA, which is a trade union for all of the Americas. And everything was running fluently until Hugo Chavez came. He decided to isolate himself. He decided to combat the idea and destroy the idea...
KING: It's going to be like the euro dollar, you mean?
FOX: Well, that would be long, long term. I think the processes to go, first step into is trading agreement. And then further on, a new vision, like we are trying to do with NAFTA.
Vicente Fox Admits Plan For Single NAFTA Currency
Former Mexican president wants North American Union based on EU
Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet
Tuesday, October 9, 2007
Mexico's former president, Vicente Fox, made an astounding admission last night on CNN's Larry King Live when he acknowledged the plan for a NAFTA single currency, a "euro-dollar" as King labeled it.
Fox also vowed to help unite the Americas beyond a trade agreement, following what he described as "a new vision, like we are trying to do with NAFTA".
The comments follow Fox's appearance on The Daily Show in which he advocated the creation of a North American Union based on the model of the European Union.
TRANSCRIPT FROM CNN.com.
KING: E-mail from Mrs. Gonzalez in Elizabeth, New Jersey. "Mr. Fox, I would like to know how you feel about the possibility of having a Latin America united with one currency?"
FOX: Long term, very long term. What we propose together, President Bush and myself, it's ALCA, which is a trade union for all of the Americas. And everything was running fluently until Hugo Chavez came. He decided to isolate himself. He decided to combat the idea and destroy the idea...
KING: It's going to be like the euro dollar, you mean?
FOX: Well, that would be long, long term. I think the processes to go, first step into is trading agreement. And then further on, a new vision, like we are trying to do with NAFTA.
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