newslog 14 Oct 09

2009-10-15

Richard Moore

Essays

Howard Switzer: materialism vs. consciousness
Every culture has its story of the beginning many having similarities.  Ours begins in Garden of Eden, back when we, our most ancient ancestors, were animists living in harmony with nature, in a balance between the spiritual and material worlds.
Richard Cook reviews Greco’s The End of Money
Thomas Greco, in his new book The End of Money and the Future of Civilization (Chelsea Green: 2009) , outlines the increasingly familiar story of how things got so bad, and he tells it as well as anyone has ever done. … More than that, Greco writes about how to change what has gone wrong. His credentials as an engineer, college professor, author, and consultant are impeccable. His book is among the most important written in this decade. It is truly a book that can alter the world and, if taken seriously, give large numbers of people a practical way to survive the gathering catastrophe. 

re/ Fascism & NWO
* Shamus Cooke: U.S. Creeps Closer To A Police State *
But the staggering police presence at the G-20 confirms that the stakes have been raised. Two turning points that deserve special attention — since the mainstream media continues to ignore them — are last years Democratic and Republican National Conventions. In both cases incredible abuses of police powers were witnessed, with the Republican Convention (RNC) showcasing the most extreme cases of state repression. 

Boy Scout Jamboree used by military to indoctrinate kids
The Lt. General of the Wisconsin National Guard gave a speech and compared the Boy Scouts to the U.S. Army. “They showed video on two big screens that were on either side of the stage that showed old and new video of scouts in different activities, marching, and mixed in with those scenes were video scenes of the Army and scenes from World War I and the war in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Tom Burghardt: Big Brother FBI – total data mining
A chilling new report by investigative journalist Ryan Singel provides startling details of how the FBI’s National Security Branch Analysis Center (NSAC) is quietly morphing into the Total Information Awareness (TIA) system of convicted Iran-Contra felon, Admiral John M. Poindexter. 
Paul Craig Roberts: How the Feds frame the innocent
For two decades I have been attempting to make Americans aware that the danger to their liberty comes not from foreign adversaries, terrorists, or criminals, but from prosecutors, who have destroyed law as a shield of the innocent and turned law into a weapon against the innocent. The Tyranny of Good Intentions (the publisher’s title) documents how the legal principles that protect our civil liberties were eroded by prosecutors even before the Bush regime obliterated what remained of the Bill of Rights. 
spreading hate & lies: Walid Shoebat
Walid Shoebat’s words are artful and inflammatory…each phrase seems designed to incite fear of, and therefore hatred for Muslims.  Chosen People Ministries’ local branch inside Scottsdale Bible Church sponsored Shoebat’s appearance, and took up a collection to pay his substantial honorarium. 
Zahir Ebrahim: Why Obama got the Peace Prize
My apologies to the harbingers of ‘change’. Their mantra, and the $2 billion spent creating it, has obviously been very effective. After the “peace maker” moniker, anointment as the “Messiah” really can’t be that far behind. This Machiavellian fabrication of a ‘savior’ was already examined in Mr. Obama – The Post Modern Coup in November 2008.
Ellen Brown: IMF to Play Role of Global Central Bank?
“They’ve issued debt for the first time in history,” said Rickards. “They’re issuing SDRs. The last SDRs came out around 1980 or ’81, $30 billion. Now they’re issuing $300 billion. When I say issuing, it’s printing money; there’s nothing behind these SDRs.” 
Legitimacy of Irish vote challenged (videos)
A Donegal candidate’s disappointing experience with misallocated votes: 
Lack of security at Cork vote-counting center, ballot box mysteriously   
removed: 


re/ World Conquest

John Pilger: Iran’s nuclear threat is a lie
The official jargon for this kind of propaganda is “psy-ops”, the military term for psychological operations. In the Pentagon and Whitehall, it has become a critical component of a diplomatic and military campaign to blockade, isolate and weaken Iran by hyping its “nuclear threat”: a phrase now used incessantly by Barack Obama and Gordon Brown, and parroted by the BBC and other broadcasters as objective news. And it is fake. 
Ramzy Baroud: Iran ‘threat’ diversion from Israeli crimes
The Iran nuclear threat – although theater is a more suitable term – was highlighted repeatedly, first by US President Barack Obama during a UN speech on September 23, then again by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu the next day. The latter came armed with maps and relentlessly provoked Holocaust memories, following the ever so predictable, albeit insensitive and deceptive pattern. 
This charade was meant to distract from the nearly 600 page UN report, prepared by South Africa judge Richard Goldstone and others, dedicated mostly to Israeli war crimes in Gaza.

Robert Scheer: No Al Qaeda in Afghanistan
Every once in a while, a statistic just jumps out at you in a way that makes everything else you hear on a subject seem beside the point, if not downright absurd. That was my reaction to the recent statement of the president’s national security adviser, former Marine Gen. James Jones, concerning the size of the terrorist threat from Afghanistan: 
“The al-Qaida presence is very diminished. The maximum estimate is less than 100 operating in the country, no bases, no ability to launch attacks on either us or our allies.”

In Pakistan, a Deadly Resurgence
Surprise, surprise. The US expands the war to Pakistan, terrorizing in such a way as to arouse overwhelming outrage in the population, and voila!, the people are organizing to fight back. This was all obvious when the drone attacks began. Once again, the mass media explains it all as a cock-up. 
-rkm 

re/ Vaccines & Health Care
Bill Boyarsky: The Missing Health Care Debate
In Congress, the Senate is plodding toward approval of a huge giveaway to the insurance industry. It is considering a proposal requiring almost everyone to buy an insurance policy. But so far, the plan fails to impose any serious regulation on the insurance companies. That’s a blatant gift to an industry that will benefit from the many millions of new policyholders without giving up anything in return.

John Rappoport: NWO & WHO
In Canada, WHO scored a big victory. It falsely pinpointed Toronto as an “epicenter” of the “SARS epidemic,” and it imposed travel advisories, declaring Toronto off-limits for commercial flights. The economic losses for Toronto were disastrous, yet aside from a few noisy protests, nothing was done to stand up to WHO. 
SARS was an instance in which global management worked quite well— 
for the controllers. 
The question is: How far can WHO and other public health agencies go in helping to establish a permanent worldwide political management system for the planet?

ABC Denver: Hospitals Shun H1N1 FluMist Vaccine
Hospitals Shun H1N1 FluMist Vaccine, Wait For Injections 
Concern That Doctors, Nurses Could Spread ‘Live’ Virus 
By Lance Hernandez, 7NEWS Reporter 

Mark Sircus: Swine Flu Madness
Under federal laws adopted post 9/11, the Secretary of HHS can declare a national emergency and order all citizens to be vaccinated. These extreme powers can permit agents of the federal government to   enter private residences to compel those inside to receive vaccinations.

USA & Thimersol: Autism at 1 in 91 Children
Autism Prevalence Now At  1 in 91 Children, 1 in 58 Boys 
SafeMinds Calls For A Ban on Thimerosal from Seasonal and H1N1 Flu Vaccines In Pregnant Women and Young Children

Autism over-diagnosed?
How convenient, that this article comes out simultaneously with the CDC report. Clearly many people who are alarmed by the CDC report will be comforted by this article, and their faith in vaccines will be restored. The article, however, gives no estimate of what percentage of autism diagnoses are in error. Autism may still be growing at an alarming rate, or not, we can’t tell from this article.
-rkm

re/ Economy

The saga of the Buyout Kings
Simmons is one of hundreds of companies swept up by private equity firms in the early part of this decade, during the greatest burst of corporate takeovers the world has ever seen. Many of these deals, cut in good times, left little or no margin for error — let alone for the Great Recession. 
A disproportionate number of the companies that were acquired during that frenzy are now struggling with the enormous debts. More than half the roughly 220 companies that have defaulted on their debt in some form this year were either owned at one time or are still controlled by private equity firms, according to analysts at Standard & Poor’s. Among them are household names like Harrah’s Entertainment and Six Flags, the theme park operator.

Andrew Gavin Marshall: The Economic Recovery is an Illusion
In light of the ever-present and unyieldingly persistent exclamations of ‘an end’ to the recession, a ‘solution’ to the crisis, and a ‘recovery’ of the economy; we must remember that we are being told this by the very same people and institutions which told us, in years past, that there was ‘nothing to worry about,’ that ‘the fundamentals are fine,’ and that there was ‘no danger’ of an economic crisis. 
Dollar reaches breaking point as banks shift reserves
The dollar’s 37 percent share of new reserves fell from about a 63 percent average since 1999. Englander concluded in a report that the trend “accelerated” in the third quarter. He said in an interview that “for the next couple of months, the forces are still in place” for continued diversification. 
America’s currency has been under siege as the Treasury sells a record amount of debt to finance a budget deficit that totaled $1.4 trillion in fiscal 2009 ended Sept. 30.

Jim Willie: Systemic Failure Approaches
It is my contention that the US financial structures broke without any remote potential for repair and revival in the summer of 2007. The symptoms became obvious in the summer of 2008 to the slower observers with visible shock waves bathed in crisis. The reactions from shock waves have come since the autumn months of 2008. The system has broken, but the syndicate in control wishes to keep the music going…
Robert Fisk: demise of the dollar & rise of China
In the most profound financial change in recent Middle East history, Gulf Arabs are planning – along with China, Russia, Japan and France – to end dollar dealings for oil, moving instead to a basket of currencies including the Japanese yen and Chinese yuan, the euro, gold and a new, unified currency planned for nations in the Gulf Co-operation Council, including Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, Kuwait and Qatar. 
Secret meetings have already been held by finance ministers and central bank governors in Russia, China, Japan and Brazil to work on the scheme, which will mean that oil will no longer be priced in dollars. 

Max Keiser: Dollar to be buried way before 2018 (video)

Danny Schechter: The media & the financial crisis
The Project on Excellence on Journalism that examines media trends released a study charging “that the gravest economic crisis since the Great Depression has been covered in the media largely from the top down, told primarily from the perspective of the Obama administration and big business, with coverage reflecting the concerns of institutions more than the lives of everyday Americans.” 
Bob Chapman: Kiss the bear goodbye & buy gold
The bear market rally will soon be over. It rallied 1,300 Dow points that it should have. All the back up data as to why this is in process was included in the last issue. The rally induced many investors to stay long and they did recoup as much as 80% of their losses in some instances. Now it is time to exit and move into gold and silver shares.
Shamus Cooke: no recovery; worker revolt brewing
After the recent unemployment numbers were announced, smug politicians promising economic recovery stuttered a bit. This wasn’t supposed to happen.  Mainstream economists were predicting a smooth upswing in employment, but in September 263,000 more jobs were lost, 62,000 more than August.