Heavy foot of government

by Richard W. Rahn, Washington Times
Costs pile up without anyone reading the fine print

How old were you before you realized your actions could result in unintended consequences? Men create democratic governments to protect life, liberty and property. Yet much of what modern government does daily has the largely unintended consequence of endangering and/or reducing life, liberty and property.

Taxes reduce liberty and often erode the value of property. Most regulations reduce liberty and some erode property values and even endanger life. We now spend much of our lives trying to figure out how to reduce our tax burdens and to comply with never-ending government regulations and forms.

In mid-July of each year, several thousand economic libertarians meet in libertine Las Vegas as part of the annual FreedomFest.

They come to discuss how they can keep the foot of government light by removing ever-growing government restrictions on their liberty, and how they can personally protect their property (savings and investments). Speakers range from chief executive officers, such as Steve Forbes of Forbes magazine and John Mackey of Whole Foods; media economic gurus, such as Larry Kudlow of CNBC and Steve Moore and John Fund of the Wall Street Journal; to think tank leaders, well-known economists, tax lawyers, and investment advisers.

Most of those who enter government, either as elected politicians or bureaucrats, do not start out to deliberately erode basic freedoms and property rights, but all too many in the political class act like children -- irresponsibly and thoughtlessly.

It has been widely reported that not one of the several hundred members of Congress who voted for the "stimulus package" or the "cap-and-trade bill" (each piece of legislation containing more than 1,000 pages) actually read, let alone understood, what was in these bills.

The stimulus bill is objectively not working as promised by the advocates because, as many correctly warned, it is not possible for either individuals or governments to spend themselves into prosperity, nor will the political forces allow tax revenues to be spent wisely and effectively. Look at the accompanying table, which shows the Obama officials' unemployment projections (with and without the stimulus bill), as well as the actual unemployment numbers. It is ironic that, if those in the Obama administration had not put forth the stimulus bill, the economy, by their own projections, would probably have been better off.

The environmental cap-and-trade bill that has passed the House, but not yet the Senate, will greatly increase every American's energy costs but will have such a minor effect on the climate that it could not possibly pass any reasonable cost-benefit test. The unintended consequence is to make every American poorer with fewer job opportunities -- and, as we know, poorer countries invariably do more damage to the environment than rich countries (e.g., Switzerland versus India).

The latest bit of silliness is the new effort to "stabilize oil prices." Prime Minister Gordon Brown of Britain and President Nicolas Sarkozy of France, writing in the Journal, demand that governments "supervise" oil prices.

The new head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, Gary Gensler, appointed by President Obama, says the commission will act to reduce "oil price speculation." These efforts are cheered on by economic know-nothings in the media.

Every beginning economics student should know that prices allocate scarce resources and motivate future production. If governments try to control prices, oil companies and investors will invest less in new production, thus reducing future supply, which will lead to higher prices in the future. Speculators are necessary to allow producers to shift part of the risk of their investments.

In responding to critics of oil speculation, Donald J. Boudreaux, chairman of the Economics Department at George Mason University, noted that the critics presume "that all speculators speculate long and that doing so is a sure thing. Neither presumption is valid. It's just as easy to speculate short as it is to speculate long. And if speculation were as risklessly profitable as [the critics] presume it to be, then high gasoline prices would pose no problem because everyone would be raking in the riches by speculating in oil markets." Furthermore, the Obama administration is busy canceling leases on areas opened for oil exploration by the Bush administration. The unintended consequence is that America will be more dependent on foreign oil and prices will be higher for American consumers.

Democratic Sens. Carl Levin of Michigan, Byron L. Dorgan of North Dakota and Max Baucus of Montana have made a series of legislative proposals to restrict and make it more costly for Americans to move businesses and financial assets out of the United States, and make it more costly for foreign institutions to invest here.

These proposals will have the obvious consequence of driving needed foreign investment out, and the unintended consequence of spurring U.S. companies to domicile and move operations (and jobs) elsewhere and making it more difficult for Americans outside the United States to get needed foreign bank accounts.

If these senators were actually the public servants they claim to be, they would do serious cost-benefit analyses before proposing daffy ideas that will be very costly to their fellow Americans in terms of economic growth, jobs and liberty.

Events like FreedomFest are important because they help citizens understand their liberties are being eroded and that eternal vigilance (and action) is required to preserve what we have and develop realistic programs to roll back the forces of both intentional and unintentional government oppression.

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The On-Again, Off-Again Green Economy

What It Really Is and Where (and When) It Really Thrives

The terms “green economy” and “green jobs” have become catch phrases. For socialists (aka “progressives”), the terms are rallying points for all things that are anti-capitalism and pro-government. For conservatives (aka “neo-cons”), the terms are spat out as illustrations of the evils of liberal government run amok. For capitalists (aka “libertarian” or “fiscal conservatives”), these phrases are both rallying points and an Axis of Evil.

Few political terms can be used as examples of how illustrative of paradigm differences (and similarities) between supposedly disparate groups can be. When the Republicans were in power, they worked hard to control the way some markets and businesses could operate and now that Democrats are in power, we’re seeing the same trend, just with different targets.

Capitalists, meanwhile, continue to do what they’ve always done: adapt to change, work around government’s obstacles, and keep building up the American economy. In spite of what the Republicans and Democrats do to stop them.

Of course, those in either of the other two camps will immediately have things to say to point out the fallacy they’ll see in that last paragraph. Republicans, after all, are “pro business!” Democrats aren’t against business, just against evil corporate capitalist control.

While these two sound bytes might be enough to placate most believers in either of those paradigms, they are not the truth, nor are they really even close. They’re actually illustrative of the falseness of both points of view. The socialists refuse to admit that capitalists are what made our country great enough to provide them with enough security to be able to espouse their point of view. Neo-cons refuse to admit that “conservatism” was originally a reference to fiscal policy of “hands off” and a social policy of “stay out of it.”

As the blame game between the two sides continues, the real core of the problem remains unattended to by anyone but the capitalists. The question of the when and where for “green jobs” and a “green economy,” both of which are blanket phrases with little meaning, is left virtually unattended by both sides of the argument, except in lip service.

Before delving into the question of how green jobs will emerge with a green economy, we must first define what we mean by this phrase and also look at the history of it, specifically in the U.S.

Defining Green Jobs and a Green Economy
Loosely told, these two things refer to aspects of the same overall theme. While the term “green” is usually used to signify something natural, renewable, or otherwise minimally harming to nature and the earth, the other two words, “jobs” and “economy” refer to parts of that as they apply to humans.

Most of the time, these terms are applied to energy production, use, and storage. Almost always in that order. Throughout known human history, the production, use and storage of energy has been the focus of most of man’s endeavors. Whether it be growing or husbanding food sources, building and maintaining facilities to control our environment, or moving from one location to another—energy is the key.

Today, that means the production of electricity and the movement of transportation vehicles almost exclusively. In all aspects of human activity today, these two things impact our use of energy more than any other. We need energy to move our vehicles, produce and transport our foods, heat and cool our houses and buildings, and so forth.

So our definition of green jobs and economy boils down to two things: transportation and production of electricity. Most of us are fully aware how closely intertwined these two things are. Green jobs will be those jobs which are in the sectors of transportation and energy production while the green economy will be that aspect of our economy (it’s majority) that is based on those two endeavors as well.

A History of the Green Economy
Rather than delve into the far history of human endeavor, we’ll stick with the modern look at the green economy we’ve defined. Even at that, we’ll be taking a limited overview with an extremely broad account of how that economy has progressed in recent times.

At the turn of the century, as the 19th century drew to a close, the new energy economy was really heating up (so to speak). All manner of energy sources were being discovered, harnessed, and exploited as we pushed ahead with the Industrial Revolution that would define our modern existence even a full century later.

Electricity, petroleum, combustible gases, and much more were tried and refined. New materials, new chemicals, whole new sciences, and an Age of Innovation were transforming the human lifestyle from one of hard labor and difficult conditions to one of relative ease. With these changes to humans’ physical environments came an expansion of the intellectual ones, as comfort allowed for mental exploration.

This, in turn, lead to more innovation and more discoveries in what appeared to be an endless cycle. That cycle continues today, though not at the same breakneck speed that it did then. As is often the case in human history, bursts of innovation eventually lead to backlashes of anti-innovators, afraid of the new technology.

As is also often the case, those who stood to make or lose wealth based on those innovations were quick to back or oppose them. This phenomenon also continues today.

By the late 1970s, Americans had embraced most technology and were looking forward to new ones. The petroleum industry had blossomed into a huge economic force throughout the world, especially in both North America and the Middle East.

Easily predicted from hindsight, of course, we can see that as soon as the demand for oil had raised its price sufficiently (thanks largely to political, rather than economic changes), the economy that was so dependent on it (ours) began to falter. Dubbed the “Oil Crunch,” this meant that Americans had to make a choice: stay on petroleum or move towards other sources of energy.

The choice was largely left to America’s political leaders. This was unfortunate, as the market (consumers) and the capitalists who worked with the market’s forces to supply what is demanded would have been better-suited to choose. Politics mean shady dealings and back room handshakes, which meant that those who were politically connected (petroleum) made the decisions for us.

Read the rest at this link.

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Millenials as the new statists

by Gene Healy

Next month, as the class of 2013 moves into the dorms, Wisconsin's Beloit College will release its annual "Mindset List." The list is that much-forwarded email that always makes you feel old--the one that includes horrifying factoids like, "for today's college freshmen, GPS navigation systems have always been available," and, "there has always been Pearl Jam."

More horrifying still, soon they'll all be able to vote.

The generation born from the late 1970s to the early '90s has been called "Gen Y," "GenNext," and "the Millennials." Its name is Legion. But whatever name they go by, and despite their image as web-savvy individualists, when it comes to politics, young voters are as collectivist as they come.

In May, the Center for American Progress released a lengthy survey of polling data on Millennials, concluding that they're a "Progressive Generation," eager to increase federal power.

CAP is the leading Democratic think tank, so it has a vested interest in that conclusion. But they're on to something. In the last election, 18-to-29 year-olds went for Barack Obama by a 34-point margin.

The CAP report shows that Gen Y is substantially more likely to support universal health care, labor unions, and education spending than older voters. And other surveys support CAP's "Progressive Generation" thesis.

In 2008, the nonpartisan National Election Study asked Americans whether "the free market" or "a strong government" would better handle "today's complex economic problems." By a margin of 78 to 22 percent, Millennials opted for "strong government."

Kids today are a credulous bunch. The 2007 Pew Political Values survey revealed "a generation gap in cynicism." Where 62 percent of Americans overall view the federal government as wasteful and inefficient, just 42 percent of young people agree.
No wonder, then, that GenNext responds to President Obama's call for "public service," roughly translated as "a federal paycheck."

Here, they differ dramatically from their skeptical "Generation X" predecessors. A 1999 survey asked Gen X college seniors to name their ideal employers; they "filled the entire list with for-profit businesses like Microsoft and Cisco." What a difference a generation makes. In the same poll today, Gen Y prefers the State Department, Teach for America, and the Peace Corps. That's a problem for a country built on the entrepreneurial spirit.

What lessons can the GOP, nominally the party of limited government, learn from all this?

First, by staking so much of their electoral success on "social issues" voters, Republicans have lashed themselves to a sinking demographic. At 16 percent of voters currently, Millennials will grow to nearly 40 percent of the electorate by 2020--and they couldn't care less about the "culture wars."

Young voters are twice as likely as older ones to support gay marriage. Former Vice President Dick Cheney, of all people, has the sensible political position here: Conservatives ought to give up on marriage amendments, letting the issue get sorted out on "a state-by-state basis."

Second, given the rising strength of younger voters, beating the war drum isn't the way forward for the GOP: "Millennials have generally been the age group most hostile to the war in Iraq," CAP reports, and they're less likely than their elders to embrace a militarized war on terror.

Republicans can compromise on these issues without violating any principle that's essential to conservatism. But Millennials' romantic view of federal activism presents a more serious challenge to small-government conservatives. Luckily, this may be a problem that will work itself out on its own.

David Brooks, every liberal's favorite conservative, argues that the old Reagan-Goldwater antigovernment spirit made sense once, but today it's an anachronism. When this generation was but a gleam in its parents' eyes, Brooks points out, tax rates were 70 percent, inflation was rampant, and "the capitalist world was headed to a Swedish welfare model."

Oddly enough, that sounds like the world young voters will be facing very soon, as the Baby Boomers retire, and our wealth-destroying Social Security system forces every two Millennials to carry one aging hippie on their backs.

The rising generation is about to get a hard lesson in the costs of activist government. Before long, they may start to see the wisdom in Reagan's aphorism that "government is not the solution to our problems: government is the problem."

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Obama Health Care Flow Chart: Do Not Pass Go, Do Not Collect $200

by Allison Bricker, the Smoking Argus Daily

The “opposition” party in the House, i.e. the Republicans, have unveiled a flow chart illustrating the potential tangled bureaucratic red-tape mess that awaits Americans should President Obama’s plan to nationalize health care become law.

Quite frankly, anyone who supports such a system is nothing less than a thief. A thief too chicken-shit to steal directly from our family so thus they employ government thugs to conduct their thievery and call it “taxation”. Why should our family’s health be secondary to someone who chose to abuse drugs, alcohol, eat low quality fast food, not wear a seat-belt, smoke, ride a motorcycle without a helmet, or any of the utter litany of other personal decisions which have a specific effect on an individual’s health?

Are we supposed to feel guilty for any of the above who chose to make poor decisions related to their own health? Is our family somehow responsible for a complete stranger in some other state, county, town, etcetera who after eating a lifetime of fast food has developed diabetes and also needs Viagra to combat their erectile dysfunction?

Does our own children’s health care take a back seat to a the millions of high risk behavior young adults who end up mangled after some extreme sporting event?

Yet those who seek government health care keep whining, how dare we be so selfish as to desire to ensure the health of our our own family first. According to them we should remain quiet as these irresponsible, dependent, wards of the nanny state force their way into our private bank accounts with the help of pull peddling government bureaucrats.

If anyone is operating under the fantasy that a trip to the government health care clinic will somehow be fundamentally different from a trip to the Department of Motor vehicles or any other bloated alphabet soup bureaucracy, perhaps they should stop by a VA hospital or ask the veterans how great Uncle Sam is as “Doctor in Chief”.

Honestly, this really is not a difficult proposition to understand. Just ask yourself what happens when a radio station offers free gas giveaways or any other highly prized “freebie”. The result of course, lines around the block and many of those who were not in line first end up receiving no benefit at all, thus leaving them with a net loss in gasoline due to the time wasted idling.

The same rules of supply and demand apply to health care, which is thus why one result of government run health care are people waiting unacceptable times for time sensitive health services such as dentistry, cancer therapies, et al.

Moreover, please do not misconstrue my disdain for government managed health care as a philosophy of turning a blind eye to those in need. Once, when the economy was humming along, my income reflected such, and we had a sizable savings, our family helped several long time friends with rent, food, and basic necessities some for close to a year.

We enjoyed having the opportunity to help those who we personally knew and were invested in their well being. Additionally, it also made it possible for us to withdraw those resources when in one particular instance, our friend ended up squandering our help by refusing to look for a job and instead chose to endlessly play video games for close to seven months.

However, now things are different. Our life savings exhausted after needing to retain an attorney in order to secure justice from the courts during a three-year legal battle, and with a substantial reduction in my income from an overall decline in business at my employer, we now find ourselves the recipients of some charity from a close personal family friend who is not independently wealthy.

This is how we as Americans help each other. Americans are not stingy, we the People help one another, ’tis an example repeated continuously from one coast to the other. Family helping family, neighbors helping neighbors, friends helping friends, strangers helping strangers.

What we do not do is steal from each other, or ask government to do so for us, and pretend our needs somehow outweigh those of the other person or group, thereby justifying the theft.

Perhaps I am alone in my vision of America or the “more perfect Union”. Nevertheless the America to which my allegience lies is an America who does not torture, does not wage aggressive interventionist wars, spies on her own people, or pretends to redefine the word theft as health care.

Nor shall I ever claim citizenship to the Neo-America which attempts to justify the aforementioned. To that bastardized amalgamation, I shall forever remain a vocal enemy of the state.

Don’t tread on us.

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Video: Fed Independence or Fed Secrecy?

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Swearing In

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Former Insider Shatters Credibility of Military Commissions

by Andy Worthington

On Wednesday, I reported how Retired Rear Admiral John D. Hutson, the former Judge Advocate General of the US Navy from 1997 to 2000, had delivered compelling testimony to a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on “legal issues regarding military commissions and the trial of detainees for violations of the law of war,” explaining why the only valid forum for trials of suspected terrorists at Guantánamo Bay is the U.S. federal court system.

The lucidity and directness of Hutson’s testimony was in marked contrast to the amendments to the existing Military Commission system -- and terrifying asides about the use of “preventive detention” -- that were proposed by Jeh Johnson, the Defense Department’s General Counsel, and David Kris, the Assistant Attorney General in the Justice Department’s National Security Division, in response to legislation already prepared by the Committee, which, it seems, will be presented to the Senate in the imminent future, even though it still allows (subject to certain restrictions) the use of information -- I hesitate to use the word “evidence” -- obtained through coercion, and other information that is nothing more than hearsay.

The day after Hutson delivered his testimony, the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties Subcommittee of the House Committee on the Judiciary held a hearing on “Legal Issues Surrounding the Military Commissions System,” in which Lt. Col. Darrel Vandeveld of the US Reserves, a former prosecutor in the Military Commissions, delivered what should, I believe, be the final word on the unsuitability of Military Commissions as a valid trial system (PDF).

Vandeveld, who served in Bosnia, Africa, Iraq and Afghanistan before volunteering for Guantánamo, and who has been decorated on several occasions, sent shockwaves through the Commission system under the Bush administration, when he spectacularly resigned last September, declaring, “I am highly concerned, to the point that I believe I can no longer serve as a prosecutor at the Commissions, about the slipshod, uncertain ‘procedure’ for affording defense counsel discovery.” He added that the “incomplete or unreliable” discovery process “deprive[s] the accused of basic due process and subject[s] the well-intentioned prosecutor to claims of ethical misconduct.”

The particular trigger for the dissatisfaction that led him to tell the Committee about “the mistaken proposals to revise and revive the irretrievably flawed military commissions at Guantánamo Bay,” and that turned him from, as he described it, a “true believer to someone who felt truly deceived,” was the incompetence and obstruction he encountered as he tried to build a case against Mohamed Jawad, an Afghan prisoner accused of throwing a grenade that injured two US soldiers and an Afghan translator in December 2002, and it was this journey to the “dark side” that he reprised for the Committee on Wednesday to such devastating effect.

Lt. Col. Vandeveld explains how he became opposed to the Military Commissions

Telling the Committee that he had not always been “skeptical about the capacity of military commissions to deliver justice,” Vandeveld admitted that, at the beginning of his assignment at Guantánamo, when Jawad “told the court that he was only 16 at the time of his arrest, and that he had been subjected to horrible abuse, I accused him of exaggerating and ridiculed his story as ‘idiotic.’” He added, “I did not believe that he was a juvenile, and I railed against Jawad’s military defense attorney, whom I suspected of being a terrorist sympathizer.”

Vandeveld explained that, initially, the case against Jawad “seemed uncomplicated,” because he had “confessed to his role in the attack on a videotape recorded by U.S. personnel,” and, as a result, the case “seemed likely to produce a quick, clean conviction, and an unmarred early victory for the prosecution, vindicating the concept” of the Commissions.

As he “delved deeper into Jawad’s case file,” however, he “soon discovered a number of disturbing anomalies,” and explained that when he “attempted to bring these anomalies to the attention of my supervisors, they were harshly dismissive of my concerns and actually, on some unspoken level, began to question my loyalty, even though my combat experience exceeded both theirs combined.” He continued:

I began to realize that the problems with Jawad’s case were symptomatic of the military commissions regime as a whole. Indeed, if any case was likely to be free of such anomalies, it should have been that of Mr. Jawad, whose alleged crime was as straightforward as any on the prosecutor’s docket. Instead, gathering the evidence against Mr. Jawad was like looking into Pandora’s Box: I uncovered a confession obtained through torture, two suicide attempts by the accused, abusive interrogations, the withholding of exculpatory evidence from the defense, judicial incompetence, and ugly attempts to cover up the failures of an irretrievably broken system.

Evidence from U.S. Army criminal investigators showed that Jawad had been hooded, slapped repeatedly across the face and then thrown down at least one flight of stairs while in U.S. custody in Afghanistan. Detainee records show that once at Guantánamo, he was subjected to a sleep deprivation regime, known as the “frequent flier program,” during which he was moved to different cells 112 times over a 14-day period -- an average of once every two and a half hours -- and that he had tried to commit suicide by banging his head repeatedly against a wall. Evidence from a bone scan showed that he was, in fact, a juvenile when he was initially taken into U.S. custody. Field reports, and examinations by U.S. personnel in the hours after Jawad had been apprehended, indicated that he had been recruited by terrorists who drugged him and lied to him, and that he probably hadn’t committed the crime for which he was being charged. In fact, the military had obtained confessions from at least two other individuals for the same crime.

As a result, Vandeveld explained, he “came to realize that Mr. Jawad had probably been telling the truth to the court from the very beginning,” but when his subsequent attempts to secure a plea bargain that would allow Jawad to be repatriated fell on deaf ears, he made the “enormously painful decision to ask to be reassigned from the Commissions.” As he explained, “I simply could not in good conscience continue to work for an ad-hoc, hastily created apparatus -- as opposed to the military itself -- whose evident resort to expediency and ethical compromise were so contrary to my own and to those the Army has enshrined and preached since I enlisted so many years ago.”

Lt. Col. Vandeveld condemns the Commissions

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Turn in your Neighbor for $1000

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Empire of Bases

by Chalmers Johnson, NYT

The U.S. “Empire of Bases” — at $102 billion a year already the world's costliest military enterprise — just got a good deal more expensive.

As a start, on May 27, we learned that the State Department will build a new “embassy” in Islamabad, Pakistan, which at $736 million will be the second priciest ever constructed — only $4 million less, before cost overruns, than the Vatican City-sized one the Bush administration put up in Baghdad.

Whatever the costs turn out to be, they will not be included in the already bloated U.S. military budget, even though none of these structures is designed to be a true embassy — a place, that is, where local people come for visas and American officials represent the commercial and diplomatic interests of their country.

Instead these so-called embassies are actually walled compounds, akin to medieval fortresses, where American spies, soldiers, intelligence officials and diplomats try to keep an eye on hostile populations in a region at war. One can predict with certainty that they will house a large contingent of Marines and include roof-top helicopter pads for quick getaways.

While it may be comforting for State Department employees working in dangerous places to know that they have some physical protection, it must also be obvious to them, as well as the people in the countries where they serve, that they will now be visibly part of an in-your-face American imperial presence.

We Americans shouldn’t be surprised when militants attacking the U.S. find one of our base-like embassies, however heavily guarded, an easier target than a large military base.

And what is being done about those military bases anyway — now close to 800 of them dotted across the globe in other people’s countries? Even as Congress and the Obama administration wrangle over the cost of bank bailouts, a new health plan, pollution controls and other much needed domestic expenditures, no one suggests that closing some of these unpopular, expensive imperial enclaves might be a good way to save some money.

Instead, they are evidently about to become even more expensive. On June 23, we learned that Kyrgyzstan, the former Central Asian Soviet Republic that back in February 2009 announced it was going to kick the U.S. military out of Manas Air Base (used since 2001 as a staging area for the Afghan war), has been persuaded to let us stay.

But here’s the catch: In return for doing us that favor, the annual rent Washington pays for use of the base will more than triple from $17.4 million to $60 million, with millions more to go into promised improvements in airport facilities and other financial sweeteners.

I suspect this development will not go unnoticed in other countries where Americans are also unpopular occupiers. For example, the Ecuadorians have told us to leave Manta Air Base by November. They could probably use a spot more money.

And what about the Japanese who for more than 57 years have been paying big bucks to host American bases on their soil? Recently, they reached a deal with Washington to move some American Marines from bases on Okinawa to the U.S. territory of Guam. In the process, however, they were forced to shell out not only for the cost of the Marines’ removal, but also to build new facilities on Guam for their arrival.

Is it possible that they will now take a cue from the government of Kyrgyzstan and just tell the Americans to get out and pay for it themselves? Or might they at least stop funding the same American military personnel who make life miserable for whoever lives near the 38 U.S. bases on Okinawa.

In fact, I have a suggestion for other countries that are getting a bit weary of the American military presence on their soil: Cash in now, before it’s too late. Either up the ante or tell the Americans to go home. I encourage this behavior because I’m convinced that the U.S. Empire of Bases will soon enough bankrupt our country.

This is, of course, something that has occurred to the Chinese and other financiers of the American national debt. Only they’re cashing in quietly in order not to tank the dollar while they’re still holding onto such a bundle of them. Make no mistake, though: Whether we’re being bled rapidly or slowly, we are bleeding; and hanging onto our military empire will ultimately spell the end of the United States as we know it.

Count on this: Future generations of Americans traveling abroad decades from now won't find the landscape dotted with near-billion-dollar “embassies.”

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ObamaCare Yay Or Nay? The Truth About Canada!

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Codex Alimentarius

This is part one of a 5-part series on the Codex Alimentarius, a UN initiative to create planet-wide "food laws" that will make for much more pharmaceutical and GMO-friendly trade rules. Well worth the time to watch the series.

This is part one of the playlist, which should automatically kick over to part 2-5. If not, click here to go to the playlist page on YouTube.

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TSA: Tyrannical, Silly Agency

by Becky Akers

Whatever your definition of tyranny, the Transportation Security Administration probably met it last April when it harassed Steve Bierfeldt, the Campaign for Liberty's Director of Development. Steve was catching a flight home after C4L's conference in St. Louis with $4700 in proceeds when federal screeners "detained" him for carrying too much cash. They interrogated Steve, yelling and cursing at him, forcing him to justify his affairs to their satisfaction as though he were a slave rather than a taxpayer footing their salaries.

Steve coolly and courageously withstood their intimidation. He also recorded the encounter on his cell phone -- evidence of abuse that even a bureaucracy as fond of denial and deception as the TSA can't dispute. That evidence and Steve's heroism made national headlines.

Steve is now suing the agency with help from the American Civil Liberties Union. Larry Schwartztol, an attorney there, explained: "Mr. Bierfeldt's experience represents a troubling pattern of TSA attempting to transform its valid but limited search authority into a license to invade people's privacy in a manner that would never be accepted outside the airport context."

True -- but why are such invasions accepted inside the airport context? And just how "valid" is the TSA's "limited search authority"? After all, screeners search every passenger boarding a commercial flight in the US without the slightest suspicion that any of them plans to commit a crime, let alone that he already has. Doesn't the Constitution prohibit precisely that?

"The right of the people," says its Fourth Amendment, "to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated. . . "

That command is so clear even politicians can understand it. The Amendment recognizes no limits to our freedom from unreasonable searches, not even in national emergencies or airports. Nor may government act as if potential victims of terrorism are terrorists themselves and abuse them accordingly.

The Amendment continues, ". . . and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized." The Founding Fathers simply assumed and then implied that no search will ever happen without a warrant. And no warrant happens without suspicion so strong it's "probable" that the subject committed a crime. Claiming he could commit one, as is the TSA's habit, doesn't fly. Warrants must also specify the search's who and what and why. This eliminates the fishing expeditions so beloved by the TSA, which "detains" people not only for weapons and too much cash but for illegal drugs, immigration papers of the wrong color, fake ID, and other belongings irrelevant to terrorism. It also makes the agency's harassment of two million passengers each day logistically impossible: cops and courts can't file that many warrants, let alone pretend to suspect that many individuals.

The Fourth isn't the Constitution's only salvo against the TSA. It also prohibits the agency's mere existence. Nowhere among the Federal powers it delegates are "delaying, pestering, and occasionally even killing passengers." The Ninth and Tenth Amendments reserve such mayhem to the states and the people.

Yet in aviation's case, as in so many others, the Constitution is a waste of good parchment for all the homage government pays it. Leviathan's authority over aviation is nigh absolute and has been for decades. For that we can thank judicial decisions and an accident of history.

Modern judges seem to measure their professional skill by how ingeniously they circumvent the Constitution. And so they invented an "interest" for the State in "safe" aviation. Where that interest comes from is anyone's guess -- certainly not from the Creator Who endows on us our inalienable rights. Meanwhile, the Constitution never concerns itself with or even mentions governmental interests. But that doesn't faze the judiciary. It has repeatedly conjured interests from thin air when the Constitution prohibits the Feds from doing as they please. For instance, in the 1870's, the Supreme Court found that the government had an "interest" in controlling immigration though the Constitution never empowers it to interfere with people's movements. Likewise with "safe aviation."

Courts have also cooked up a monstrosity called "administrative search" that annuls the Fourth Amendment. When a government official sticks "administrative" before the word "search," he magically frees himself from the Fourth Amendment's restrictions and requirements because he's no longer conducting a real search. Try that on the next cop who stops you for speeding: tell him you were only "administratively" speeding. "Administrative searches" legalize such Constitutional assaults as health inspectors raiding restaurants without warrants and building inspectors trespassing on construction sites.

These judicial hijinks collided with the Progressive Era to produce the gulag that is today's airport. Like automobiles, aeroplanes got off the ground around the turn of the twentieth century, when politicians and intellectuals were convincing Americans who had formerly distrusted government that it was in fact their best friend. Newfangled flivvers and Fokkers were playthings of the wealthy at first, with other folks greeting the contraptions skeptically or even fearfully. And so enthusiasts encouraged the State's interest in their hobbies: not only were people learning to equate government's regulation with safety, but subsidies and grants salved regulation's sting. Millionaires might own cars, but where could they drive them? There were few paved roads in 1900. Ditto for planes and the infrastructure they require. Rich, politically connected pilots and drivers wanted everyone paying for that infrastructure, not just themselves and their cronies. The Constitution's inconvenient enumeration of powers was small change compared to the dollars involved here.

Within a few decades, the Feds controlled most aspects of aviation. They owned outright such operations as control towers while regulating things like the design of aircraft so heavily they might as well have nationalized the factories. When hijacking planes as a political stunt became popular in the 1960's, most Americans expected the Federal Aviation Administration to subsume aviation's security, too. It gladly obliged, publishing myriad rules that governed everything from the metal detectors it began requiring in airports to a flight crew's response when hijacked (sit tight and comply with the criminals' demands -- cooperation that contributed to the success 19 terrorists enjoyed on 9/11).

The FAA emphasized its liability for passengers' safety in April 2001 when it described its "mission" in "A Commitment to Security": "FAA provides a safe, secure, and efficient global aerospace system that contributes to national security and the promotion of US aerospace safety." It also provided minute and extremely detailed orders to airport screeners. These employees were still private, if by "private" we mean that a company rather than the Feds issued their paychecks. But such companies prior to 9/11 were little more than personnel agencies: they supplied the staff for airport checkpoints, but the FAA dictated in detail everything that staff did, down to the wanding of passengers who set off metal detectors. Blaming "private" screeners for 9/11 is like blaming a secretary for the boss's nasty letter.

Yet that's exactly what politicians did after terrorists easily penetrated the FAA's "safe, secure, and efficient global aerospace system." Most of the Democrats who condemned "private" screening had long hoped to nationalize airport searching and add tens of thousands of members to the American Federation of Government Employees, one of the nation's largest labor unions. Most of the Republicans excoriating "private" airport security were trying to deflect attention from the Bush Administration's failure to prevent 9/11 despite ample warnings. Between them, they capitalized on the day's tragedies to foist yet another bureaucracy on us.

That makes the TSA a political rather than a practical response to terrorism. And it shows in its slapstick "security." For 35 years, the Feds have operated on the assumption that disarmed passengers are safe passengers -- but absolutely no research substantiates this. In fact, both research and common sense tell us that it's just the opposite on the ground, so why would it be different at 35,000 feet? It's the same for checkpoints: presuming that disarmed passengers are a good thing, no one has tested the TSA's methods for finding weapons. There may be less expensive, more efficient ways to secure planes, but no one knows because Congress unilaterally slapped a security system on aviation (with the industry's enthusiastic cooperation: when taxpayers fork over $7 billion annually for the TSA, airlines don't have to).

To this toxic brew you can add employees who are as incompetent as they are surly. TSA screeners are tested frequently on their job skills, whether by the TSA and its parent bureaucracy, the Department of Homeland Security, or the Government Accountability Office or even by the occasional college student. Typically, screeners who never miss your bottle of Chardonnay or Chanel fail to find 65%, 75%, even 90% of the weapons undercover investigators smuggle past them. And they fail this overwhelmingly even though they cheat! Turns out a bureaucrat in the TSA's headquarters was alerting "Federal Security Directors" at airports so that they could inform screeners what the undercover agents looked like and what tricks they'd pull.

Screeners' scores plunged further, to 0%, when a guy completely unaffiliated with the Feds whose plans couldn't be leaked ran his own tests. Nathaniel Heatwole was a 20-year-old college student in 2003 when he spirited packages containing box-cutters, matches, bleach, molding clay, and a note aboard six planes. Nat then emailed the TSA and told them what he'd done; he considered himself a civic-minded hero who'd helped the country by showing the TSA its vulnerabilities. He must have been pretty disillusioned when the TSA ignored him. In fact, his packages would still be aboard all those flights -- except that the airline's maintenance crews found them and snitched to the Feds.

Nat had made an utter fool of the TSA, so the government charged him with a felony. That could have put him in prison for a decade. It eventually settled for fining him $500, putting him on probation for two years, and requiring him to perform 100 hours of community service. Revealing the TSA for a total sham apparently doesn't count as "community service."

But we ought not allow the TSA's failures to obscure its successes. It's a champ at making work: it enables 50,000 screeners, let alone the layers of management that abound in any bureaucracy, to leech off our taxes. And it enormously enriches the corporations that manufacture its gizmos and accessories: its newest toys, millimeter-wave machines that peer through clothing so that passengers appear naked on screeners' monitors, cost $170,000 each -- and the TSA plans to install these pornographic scanners at all 2800 checkpoints nationwide. No wonder corporate America and its media love the TSA.

But the agency's greatest success lies in training formerly free Americans to cringe and kowtow to their rulers. And that endangers us far more gravely than any terrorist.

Copyright © 2009 Campaign for Liberty

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How To Brainwash A Nation

This is an awesome interview with a KGB agent who defected to the U.S., where he found the mind control techniques of disinformation in the USSR were alive and well here as well.

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"It's a Trick, We Always Use It." (calling people "anti-Semitic")

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Mandatory Swine Flu Vaccinations This Fall?

by Paul Joseph Watson

Swine flu fearmongering is increasing in its intensity the closer we get to fall, which is the timeframe earmarked for the production and potential mandatory distribution of vaccines which may not even properly fight the virus.
Despite the fact that swine flu has killed far fewer people globally than the common flu virus since it was first discovered in April, media scare stories about H1N1 “epidemics” are becoming more and more frequent.
A death toll in Britain of 14, every one of whom had underlying health problems to begin with, has prompted fearmongering headlines despite the fact that the 1999-2000 seasonal flu outbreak affected more people. Add to this the fact that doctors are treating swathes of ordinary flu sufferers as swine flu cases and the exaggerated paranoia is plain to see.
Reuters reports today that the World Health Organization will “issue guidance about the need for a H1N1 influenza jab” during a press conference later today or on Monday. Meanwhile, the U.S. government has put states on notice that swine flu vaccinations will begin in October.
“Swine flu may have faded from the headlines but it’s still sickening people here and abroad and is certain to worsen when influenza-friendly fall temperatures arrive. The federal government called together health and education officials from every state to check their preparations for the likely prospect of vaccinations and determine how they’ll handle flu-riddled schools,” reports USA Today.
Preparations are clearly being geared towards a mass rollout of the swine flu vaccine, in other words, a mandatory distribution. Time Magazine has been dutifully preparing Americans to accept this premise, reporting on April 28th that a mass vaccination program is being readied to combat swine flu while also urging Americans to “trust that the government is working for the greater good” and to not resist draconian measures.
The question is, what will happen to the millions of people around the world who will reject the notion that the government can order someone to stick a needle in your arm by force?

Read the rest here.

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A New Stimulus? Washington Never Learns

by Sheldon Richman

In Washington, the rule is: If a little poison doesn’t cure the patient, give him more.

This rule is being applied not only to health care, where massive doses of government intervention are being prescribed to treat the toxicity of past government intervention. It’s also being used in the attempt to end the recession.

When Barack Obama took power he told the American people that an “economic stimulus” bill was indispensable to fixing the economy. Sensible economists warned against it, but no politician wants to be perceived as doing nothing. So logic and well-reasoned economic theory were once again tossed out in favor of massive government spending: close to $500 billion for state and local governments and special interests. But even on its own terms, the “stimulus” was no such thing. Most of the spending was far off into the future. The government says that only $60 billion of $499 billion has been allocated in the five months since Obama signed the bill. It’s hard to believe, but there is a limit to how fast federal, state, and local governments can spend money.

That raises the question: how stimulating can stimulus be? The answer is: not much. The politicians promised it would reduce unemployment, but the jobless rate continues to rise, standing now at 9.5 percent.

The lack of improvement is so acute that even Vice President Joe Biden says the administration underestimated how bad the economy was and congressional leaders are talking about a second stimulus package.

Again, on its own terms, this is just silly. If the bureaucrats can’t spend half a trillion quickly enough to goose the economy, what’s the point of giving them more money?

Of course, we can only take the stimulus logic on its own terms for the sake of argument. The stimulus logic is wrong, so things are worse than described.

Even if the government could have spent the half trillion in the first 24 hours, it wouldn’t have fixed the economy. That’s because the problem isn’t inadequate spending. The problem is the distortions in the economy that the government caused through pervasive intervention. Thus more intervention through spending will only make things worse.

First, let’s look at what’s wrong with the stimulus logic. Government has no money that it hasn’t first lifted one way or another out of the private sector. It creates nothing of value. The federal budget is deep in the red, so to increase spending the Treasury has to borrow the money. But borrowed money obviously is already in the economy, and the lenders would have been willing to lend it to finance productive private ventures had the government not borrowed it instead. There can be no net stimulus if government is simply reallocating capital.

Moreover, government reallocation is not merely a neutral substitution of its projects for private ones. Government doesn’t have to make a profit or risk going out of business. So its spending is not driven by the need to satisfy consumers who are free to spend their money as they like. In contrast, entrepreneurs invest capital with an eye to satisfying what consumers see as their most important demands.

Government spending is dictated by the political agenda, while private investment is shaped by consumer welfare and efficiency considerations.

Bottom line: government adds nothing, but rather takes resources that already exist and devotes them to inferior purposes.

That is only the beginning of trouble. The government’s debt will sooner or later be covered by the Federal Reserve’s expansionary monetary policies. While the Fed can create money, it can’t create real resources. So the new money will bid up the prices of all kinds of goods and shift purchasing power from the mass of people a favored few. That is as much a tax as one collected by the Internal Revenue Service. The inflation will further distort the structure of the economy and pave the road to the next downturn and next round of unemployment.

The “stimulus” isn’t working because it can’t work. A new “stimulus” is therefore idiotic. Freeing the economy is the only path to sustainable prosperity.

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Still Stupid in America

by John Stossel

For my TV show on the effect of a government monopoly on K-12 education, we gave kids in Belgium the same international test we gave to kids at a top New Jersey high school. The Belgian kids cleaned the NJ kids’ clocks. Pockets of charter competition have begun to compete with the monopoly, but we clearly have a long way to go.

Immigrants seeking to become U.S. citizens have to pass a test. It’s not that hard a test. 92.4% of new immigrants pass on first try. The test includes simple questions like “Who was the first President?” and “How many justices are on the Supreme Court?”

But a new Goldwater Institute study finds that only 3.5% of surveyed public high school students could answer enough questions correctly to pass the citizenship test.

USA Today profiled the Goldwater study and suggested:

Why not make the 100-question citizenship test part of the high school curriculum, and passage a graduation requirement?

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Are There Really 47 Million Americans Who Can’t Afford Health Insurance?

by Dom Armentano

An editorial in the July-August 2009 AARP Bulletin repeats the same bromide heard almost nightly on the MSM news: That there are currently 47 million Americans without health insurance. The AARP editorial goes on to argue that this situation is disgraceful; that all Americans should have "affordable health care choices"; and that in terms of reform, "the time to act is now."

The sad tale of the 47 million uninsured is, perhaps, the most emotionally persuasive argument put forth for national health care reform. But is the alleged number of uninsured reasonably accurate? Or is it, instead, a purposely misleading statistic designed to advance a specific reform agenda?

The 47 million uninsured number is generated by an annual U.S. Census Bureau report. However, that report also states that the 47 million uninsured includes roughly 10 million illegal aliens without health insurance. Thus, if we subtract out the illegals, the number of uninsured American citizens without health insurance declines by more than 20%...to roughly 37 million.

But is it accurate to assume that even 37 million Americans cannot afford health insurance? Absolutely NOT. Even Hillary Clinton during her presidential campaign once admitted that 25% of the uninsured could afford health insurance but chose not to purchase it. The Census Bureau reports that there are roughly 17 million people who make more than $50,000 per year and who, for whatever reason, decide not to carry health insurance.

In short, with two reasonable adjustments, the number of Americans who cannot afford health insurance has been reduced from 47 million to approximately 20 million.

But is the 20 million figure itself reasonably accurate? Probably not. Individuals moving between jobs lose their (employer provided) health insurance and when they do the Census Bureau counts them as "uninsured." Technically true. Yet during normal times, roughly half of these individuals will have re-acquired (in about 4 months) health insurance coverage with a new employer.

Finally, there are millions of adult Americans and children who have (nearly free) access to medical care benefits through Medicaid and other government programs who don't really need the direct cost of "insurance" and who don’t carry any.

Thus, with reasonable adjustments, there are in fact less than 10 million individuals who are so-called "chronically uninsured." (The Kaiser Family Foundation says the number could be as low as 8 million). These are individuals who have been unemployed for over 2 years and/or people from households that are too poor to afford non-employer health insurance premiums and who, for whatever reason, have limited access to taxpayer-supported health services.

So let’s grant that there are between 8 to 10 million Americans (total population: 307 million) who cannot afford health insurance and that this situation may require a marginal public policy adjustment. (Most states mandate expensive benefit coverage; curtailing those mandates would lower the cost of health insurance.) But whether that situation requires some massive, Washington D.C. health care reform – with new regulations and mandates on health care providers, insurance companies, and drug manufacturers – is entirely problematic.

Politicians and interest groups, eager to remake your medical world over to their liking, would do well to respect the Hippocratic oath administered to physicians: “First, do no harm.”

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Congressional Roulette - a New Constitutional Amendment Proposal

I don't know how to write this up all flowery and fit it into amendment terms, but here's the idea I have for a new Constitutional amendment: Congressional Roulette.

In the House of Representatives, each morning at the call to order, the Speaker of the House has three revolvers laid out on the desk in front of him/her. Each of those pistols has three bullets in it and three empty chambers.

When Representatives stand to introduce a bill to the House, they must first stand before the Speaker to play a game of Congressional Roulette. The chamber is spun, the gun pointed at the Rep's head, and the trigger pulled. If the hammer falls on an empty chamber, the Rep may then propose the new law. If not, there will be a short recess as a cleaning crew comes in to gather the remains for burial.

On the flip side of the coin, if a Representative proposes the rescinding of an existing law on the books, that Rep gets a free ride, no Roulette.

When one pistol runs out of live ammunition, it is retired and the next is used, in sequence.

The same rules would apply to the Senate, except the number of pistols would be reduced to two.

In both cases, if at any time the guns all run empty before the day is through, the day is automatically called as over and business is adjourned.

Vacant seats will be filled yearly, at regular election intervals (as needed), but no sooner. So a district whose Representative finds him or herself dead is SOL until the next election. Same in the Senate.

I feel that this law will give proper perspective to the jackasses in Washington and perhaps curb their enthusiasm for their lawmaking powers. I'm open to suggestions as to how to implement this for proposed amendments to legislation as well.

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Michael Moore Gets It Wrong

by John Stossel

Michael Moore has been working on another documentary. This time, he’s taking on capitalism:

"The wealthy, at some point, decided they didn't have enough wealth. They wanted more -- a lot more. So they systematically set about to fleece the American people out of their hard-earned money."

How ridiculous is that? The wealthy, and everyone else, almost always decide that they don’t have enough wealth. People ask their bosses for raises. We invest in stocks hoping for bigger returns than Treasury Bonds bring. “Greed” is a constant. The beauty of free markets, when government doesn’t meddle in them, is that they turn this greed into a phenomenal force for good. The way to win big money is to serve your customers well. Profit-seeking entrepreneurs have given us better products, shorter work days, extended lives, and more opportunities to write the script of our own life.

On Thursday, Moore announced the title of the movie: Capitalism: A Love Story.

It’s a title I might have picked to make a point opposite of what I assume Moore has in mind.

Moore also fails to understand is that it was not “capitalism” run amok that caused today’s financial problems. In reality, it was a combination of ill-conceived government policies and an overzealous Federal Reserve artificially lowering interest rates to fuel a bubble in the housing market. Then it was government that took money from taxpayers and forced banks to accept it.

Moore ought to understand that, because he makes a good point when he says his movie will be about "the biggest robbery in the history of this country - the massive transfer of U.S. taxpayer money to private financial institutions."

That is indeed robbery. It sure doesn’t sound like capitalism.

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GAG THE INTERNET!

AN OBAMA OFFICIAL'S FRIGHTENING BOOK ABOUT CURBING FREE SPEECH ONLINE

When it comes to the First Amendment, Team Obama believes in Global Chilling.

Cass Sunstein, a Harvard Law professor who has been appointed to a shadowy post that will grant him powers that are merely mind-boggling, explicitly supports using the courts to impose a "chilling effect" on speech that might hurt someone's feelings. He thinks that the bloggers have been rampaging out of control and that new laws need to be written to corral them.

Advance copies of Sunstein's new book, "On Rumors: How Falsehoods Spread, Why We Believe Them, What Can Be Done," have gone out to reviewers ahead of its September publication date, but considering the prominence with which Sunstein is about to be endowed, his worrying views are fair game now. Sunstein is President Obama's choice to head the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. It's the bland titles that should scare you the most.

"Although obscure," reported the Wall Street Journal, "the post wields outsize power. It oversees regulations throughout the government, from the Environmental Protection Agency to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Obama aides have said the job will be crucial as the new administration overhauls financial-services regulations, attempts to pass universal health care and tries to forge a new approach to controlling emissions of greenhouse gases."

Sunstein was appointed, no doubt, off the success of "Nudge," his previous book, which suggests that government ought to gently force people to be better human beings.

Czar is too mild a world for what Sunstein is about to become. How about "regulator in chief"? How about "lawgiver"? He is Obama's Obama.

In "On Rumors," Sunstein reviews how views get cemented in one camp even when people are presented with persuasive evidence to the contrary. He worries that we are headed for a future in which "people's beliefs are a product of social networks working as echo chambers in which false rumors spread like wildfire." That future, though, is already here, according to Sunstein. "We hardly need to imagine a world, however, in which people and institutions are being harmed by the rapid spread of damaging falsehoods via the Internet," he writes. "We live in that world. What might be done to reduce the harm?"

Sunstein questions the current libel standard - which requires proving "actual malice" against those who write about public figures, including celebrities. Mere "negligence" isn't libelous, but Sunstein wonders, "Is it so important to provide breathing space for damaging falsehoods about entertainers?" Celeb rags, get ready to hire more lawyers.

Sunstein also believes that - whether you're a blogger, The New York Times or a Web hosting service - you should be held responsible even for what your commenters say. Currently you're immune under section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. "Reasonable people," he says, "might object that this is not the right rule," though he admits that imposing liability for commenters on service providers would be "a considerable burden."

But who cares about a burden when insults are being bandied about? "A 'chilling effect' on those who would spread destructive falsehoods can be an excellent idea," he says.

"As we have seen," Sunstein writes, having shown us no such thing, "falsehoods can undermine democracy itself." What Sunstein means by that sentence is pretty clear: He doesn't like so-called false rumors about his longtime University of Chicago friend and colleague, Barack Obama.

Read the rest here.

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Tax It, Government Remodeling, and a Second Stimulus

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Children and Pregnant Women Targeted in U.S. Swine Flu Mass Vaccination Program

by: Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews

The U.S. government is about to unleash a sweeping new vaccination program that claims to protect people from swine flu. The vaccines, which are of course completely useless against any mutated strain of the H1N1 influenza virus, are nevertheless quite useful at suppressing the immune function of those who receive them. Well-designed medical studies conducted over the years have consistently shown that the people who catch the flu (influenza) with the greatest frequency are precisely those who get the most flu shots.

To those who know anything about the immune system, vaccines and influenza, it may seem shocking to learn that the U.S. influenza vaccine program will first target those with the weakest immune systems to begin with: Toddlers as young as six months old, pregnant women and adults with degenerative disease. This is precisely what Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius announced today. (http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/artic...)


Why is the swine flu vaccine targeting those least likely to need it?

It's all quite fascinating from a public health point of view, of course, especially since the U.S. government already announced the swine flu was "mild" and that it only really attacked those with healthy immune systems, not weak immune systems. So why is the first wave of vaccines now targeting the very children and adults who are least likely to be impacted by swine flu infections in the first place?

The answer, of course, is that swine flu vaccines have nothing to do with public health and everything to do with generating billions of dollars in profits for Big Pharma. For the drug companies to rake in all this money manufacturing vaccines, they obviously have to give the shots to somebody -- just to create the illusion that something productive might be going on in order to justify the government expenditures. It's a lot like war budgets: You gotta drop bombs on somebody in order to justify making new ones.

So the vaccines are dropping little viral bombs on precisely those citizens least able to fend for themselves: Children, pregnant women, senile seniors and adults suffering from chronic disease... these are the new "targets" of the U.S. government's mass vaccination program.

Note that they have deliberately avoided targeting the people most capable of speaking out and saying no to dangerous vaccines: Healthy young couples and middle-aged individuals who aren't victims of modern medicine.

Baxter inserts live flu viruses into vaccine materials

Meanwhile, the pharmaceutical factories are churning out huge doses of the swine flu vaccine: 100 million doses will reportedly be available for injection into victims by mid-October.

Curiously, one of the companies being contracted to manufacture this vaccine is Baxter International, the very same company that was caught late last year inserting live influenza viruses into vaccine materials distributed to 18 countries. Apparently, this company has already perfected the techniques for infecting vaccines with live viruses, and now the U.S. government has contracted with Baxter to help manufacture hundreds of millions of doses of swine flu vaccines to be injected into infants, pregnant women and chronically diseased adults.

For the more conspiratorially-minded thinkers out there, it's not difficult to put the pieces of this puzzle together: This fall's mass "vaccination" program might actually be a mass inoculation program designed to expose the population to a new wave of live viruses, thereby furthering the spread of swine flu in order to accomplish a number of nefarious aims such as global population reduction and a windfall of new profits for Big Pharma.

But wait, the skeptics ask: Modern medicine would never intentionally harm people for profit, would they?

Harming people for profit

Think again: Harming people for profit is, in fact, the foundation of modern medicine's business model. How else do you explain drug companies buying off generic drug manufacturers in order to prevent lower-priced drugs from entering the market and destroying their monopoly profits? How do you explain all the false positives from "free" cancer screening programs that are really only designed to recruit patients into unnecessary medical procedures? How do you explain sweeping Medicare and Medicaid fraud perpetrated by clinics and doctors, the price fixing by drug companies who defraud states out of billions of dollars each year, the adulterated clinical trials that are distorted to produce false results, the use of third-world children as human guinea pigs for drug trials, the dumping of antibiotics into rivers by pharmaceutical factories... need I go on?

Big Pharma is an industry steeped in corruption, fraud and criminal behavior. Injecting a hundred million people with a live influenza virus is no big deal to these people, as long as it earns them a profit. In the pharmaceutical industry, ethics never get in the way of making another few billion dollars.

Natural remedies for swine flu

It's already obvious to regular NaturalNews readers that receiving a swine flu vaccine injection is perhaps the single dumbest medical act in which any person could engage. I wish I could bring you interviews from those doctors and nurses in Mexico City who received various vaccine injections during the early days of the swine flu outbreak, but they're already dead, having expired within days of receiving the shots.

The real solution for beating swine flu, of course, is to strengthen your defenses with Mother Nature's medicine. I've published a free online report revealing the five most powerful anti-viral remedies and nutritional supplements available today. It's a really solid report, and we've received an enormous amount of positive feedback on it. Read the full report at no charge right here: http://www.naturalnews.com/RR-FiveB...

Many contagious disease experts are predicting that swine flu could reignite this fall, sweeping through the world's population and killing millions. They may be right: The fall and winter months are precisely those months in which most first-world populations are chronically deficient in vitamin D due to lack of sunlight exposure. This is why influenza historically strikes in the winter -- because that's when people have no vitamin D and are immunologically vulnerable.

Even then, it seems that the natural spread of H1N1 isn't enough -- the U.S. government appears determined to accelerate the spread by injecting influenza viral fragments (and perhaps even live viruses) into one-third or even one-half of the U.S. population.

I can tell you this with great confidence: If a new wave of swine flu begins killing people, those who die first will almost certainly be those who received the Swine Flu vaccinations. A few months later, it will likely be announced that Baxter (or some other company) "accidentally" inserted live viruses into the vaccines, and fifty million people (or more) were "accidentally" exposed to live H1N1.

Oops.

Just another Big Government / Big Pharma snafu.

Blanket immunity for drug companies and their deadly vaccines

Note, carefully, that federal law already grants drug companies complete immunity from any liability for the damage caused by their vaccines. This blanket immunity is already in place, and it means that drug companies could literally inject people with almost any chemical or virus and then disclaim any responsibility from the inevitable resulting deaths.

The U.S. government has, in this way, set the stage for a massive medical catastrophe whereby drug companies get paid billions of dollars to manufacture vaccines that "accidentally" kill people, and then they get away with the whole thing through existing legal immunity laws.

And since there are no repercussions for harming or killing patients, what's the incentive for drug companies to exercise any quality control over the manufacture of these vaccines in the first place?

There is no incentive. These vaccine manufacturing drug companies get paid the same amount of money whether patients live or die. As long as people are being injected, Big Pharma is making big bucks. If people happen to die in the process, well, that's their own problem.

To conclude this article, let me republish a few words from a March, 2009 article that documents the Baxter snafu that resulted in the contamination of vaccine materials with live avian flu viruses:

From: http://www.naturalnews.com/025760.html

Deerfield, Illinois-based pharmaceutical company Baxter International Inc. has just been caught shipping live avian flu viruses mixed with vaccine material to medical distributors in 18 countries. The "mistake" (if you can call it that, see below...) was discovered by the National Microbiology Laboratory in Canada. The World Health Organization was alerted and panic spread throughout the vaccine community as health experts asked the obvious question: How could this have happened?

The shocking answer is that this couldn't have been an accident. Why? Because Baxter International adheres to something called BSL3 (Biosafety Level 3) - a set of laboratory safety protocols that prevent the cross-contamination of materials.

As explained on Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosaf...):

"Laboratory personnel have specific training in handling pathogenic and potentially lethal agents, and are supervised by competent scientists who are experienced in working with these agents. This is considered a neutral or warm zone. All procedures involving the manipulation of infectious materials are conducted within biological safety cabinets or other physical containment devices, or by personnel wearing appropriate personal protective clothing and equipment. The laboratory has special engineering and design features."

Under the BSL3 code of conduct, it is impossible for live avian flu viruses to contaminate production vaccine materials that are shipped out to vendors around the world.

This leaves only two possibilities that explain these events:

Possibility #1: Baxter isn't following BSL3 safety guidelines or is so sloppy in following them that it can make monumental mistakes that threaten the safety of the entire human race. And if that's the case, then why are we injecting our children with vaccines made from Baxter's materials?

Possibility #2: A rogue employee (or an evil plot from the top management) is present at Baxter, whereby live avian flu viruses were intentionally placed into the vaccine materials in the hope that such materials might be injected into humans and set off a global bird flu pandemic.

U.S. government chooses Baxter to make more vaccines

Now, don't you find it more than a bit curious that the U.S. government selected this particular company to manufacture swine flu vaccines? Of all the companies available to manufacture vaccines, why would the U.S. government choose the one company that accidentally inserted live avian flu viruses into vaccine materials, in direct violation of its own BSL3 safety guidelines?

The likely answer, of course, is because the U.S. government wants this company to insert live viruses into the vaccines. And now they've proven they can do it.

That's the conspiracy theory of it, anyway. Whether you believe it or not is up to you. But only a sucker would agree to be jabbed in the arm with a needle containing an immune-suppressing liquid made by a company that has already been caught inserting live avian flu viruses into its globally-distributed vaccine materials. If the U.S. government had any sense at all, it would exclude Baxter from its list of possible vaccine manufacturers due to the company's frightening lack of quality control standards.

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Even USA Today Has to Admit That Obama’s Stimulus Ain’t Working

by Aaron Turpen

For two days in a row, July 7 and 8, USA Today ran articles detailing where the so-called stimulus money from Obama’s big plan to save the American economy have been going. For those of us who aren’t believers in the Obama Change message, this information is nothing new and is entirely expected.

On July 7, Matt Kelley writes:
“Under pressure to spend stimulus money quickly, many states are using the federal funds for short-term projects and to fill budget gaps rather than spending on long-term improvements, according to a report by congressional investigators.”

The report that Mr. Kelley refers to is the Government Accountability Office’s report to the House oversight hearing. The report highlights several acts of mismanagement and shows the reason that government can’t be expected to do anything well, especially when they do it quickly.

So far, a little more than half of the $49 billion stimulus aimed for the states has already been doled out. The results are abysmally short-sighted and wasteful. In other words, government as usual.

This doesn’t dissuade some Senators like Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) from calling for even more stimulus money, though. He wants the government to double down on their bet and pour another half billion or more into the economy in hopes that this inflationary action will save us all. Or at least send some more pork to Rhode Island, if nothing else. Constituents love that. Right?

Then on July 8, Brad Heath came out with another look at the billions in stimulus being thrown around and concluded with something else obvious to anyone who’s ever watched Washington for more than an election season.

His article’s title says it all: “Billions in aid go to areas that backed Obama in ‘08″

In other words, cronyism is alive and well under Obama’s Change. So far, about $17 billion in “local aid packages” have been delivered. Where to? Yep, all the areas that always get the most federal aid and funding: Democratic strongholds.

Of course, the White House denies that any politics or favoritism is at play here.

That’s not what the numbers say, though. According to USA Today’s analysis, the counties that supported Obama in 2008 have reaped the rewards in 2009. They’ve received nearly twice as much money per person as those counties that voted for Republican John McCain. This includes money for everything from military bases to public housing and college tuitions.

Of course, others in Washington are quick to produce reasoning that also says that there’s no favoritism going on.

Regardless, it’s pretty obvious to all of us who sit on the sidelines and shake our heads, knowing that Republicans and Democrats are both politicians and pretty much do the same things. No matter who’s in power, the People are always the ones to pay the price and lose their freedoms.

As I’ve said before, it’s not a matter of whether the Republican or the Democrat will be taking your money and freedom. It’s just a question of how they’ll justify doing it.

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