Democrats in Denver Should Read the American Monetary Act

By: Richard C. Cook, Market Oracle.

How are things going at the Democratic Party National Convention in Denver this week?

Are they talking about the fact that the Western world is run by an international financial elite headquartered in London, the financial capitals of mainland Europe (such as Frankfurt, Hamburg, Amsterdam, Paris, and Milan), and, of course, New York City?

Are they mentioning at their cocktail parties that the financial elite exert control over the world’s population through the cartels that make up the world’s producing economies and through the civilian and military bureaucracies who work for the governments that kow-tow to them?

Of course they know that the most important cartels are those which control energy resources. And that of these, the commodity of central importance is oil. But is any of this helping them draw conclusions regarding the doubling of oil prices during the last year or about the largest oil company profits in history?

Also, they should be drawing the right conclusions from the fact that every private and pubic enterprise operates on the basis of a money economy, though it would be more accurate to call it a credit economy. This means that whoever controls the issuance of money and credit controls the world. And the world’s monetary systems function on the basis of money and credit being introduced into circulation through loans from the banking system, loans for which interest is charged. So what should that tell them?

In fact, they should be pointing out to each other and their TV viewers that the charging of interest for the use of money is a chain around the neck of everyone on earth. Further, that these cumulative interest charges are built into the price of every product that is manufactured or consumed. And that growth of debt means price increases too.

They should be honest in making it clear that the world is a master-slave society, that the slaves are those who borrow and pay interest, that the masters are those who collect the interest, and that this unjust system has existed in one form or another for thousands of years.

The candidates and delegates are talking about the aspirations of the American people and how everyone should have an opportunity to achieve their dreams. But if the United States were a free nation, they would also be talking about a financial system that destroys people’s dreams.

Unfortunately, the highest rung the candidates and delegates have been able to reach on the ladder of modern-day slavery is the need for more jobs—but they fail to note that jobs are not only the means by which people live, but also the instruments for them to pay the heavy burden of interest the masters of finance require.

What they won’t say is that the world economy is based on usury, something religions used to consider a crime (and which Islam still does). Usury is the charging of interest for the use of money. As the religions backed off from their prohibitions of interest, usury became just excess interest. But that’s not what the word really means.

So what have over two centuries of usury done to the United States?

The best answer ever given to that question was contained in a paper entitled “Revisiting U.S. Public and Private Debt” published in January 2005 by Dr. Bob Blain, Emeritus Professor of Sociology at Southern Illinois University. The paper updated an earlier study by Dr. Blain published for the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in the International Social Science Journal, November, 1987, Paris, pages 577-591.

In his paper, Dr. Blain examined the growth of total public and private debt in the U.S. Total debt includes “the debts of governments (federal, state, and local), corporations, farmers, home mortgages, and consumer, commercial, and financial debts.”

In his analysis, Dr. Blain began with data from the Bureau of Economic Analyses of the United States Department of Commerce which covered the years 1916-1976. After that year the Bureau stopped publishing the data.

The figures showed that from 1916-1976, total U.S. debt grew from $82 billion to $3,800 billion ($3.8 trillion). But most of that growth was during the last 21 years, from 1955-1976, when it began to grow exponentially. Dr. Blain wrote, “The consistency of the pattern suggests that some imperative is at work, something that requires debt to increase.”

Dr. Blain found the answer by researching American history. He wrote: “Then I read G.R. Taylor’s 1950 book, Hamilton and the National Debt, which described the debate over Alexander Hamilton’s plan to fund the new economy with borrowed money.” He continued:

“The most revealing account was a speech by the first congressman from Georgia, James Jackson, on February 9, 1790, in which he predicted that adoption of Hamilton’s funding plan would lead to the explosive growth of debt. Jackson said, ‘Though our present debt be but a few millions, in the course of a single century it may be multiplied to an extent we dare not think of.’” (Annals of Congress, Vol. I, February 1790, pp. 1141-2)

From the very beginning, the U.S. had a monetary system based on borrowing and debt. First came the thousands of state chartered banks that began operating late in the Revolutionary War period and continued in one form or another until today. Then there were the two early central banks: the First Bank of the United States (1791-1811) and the Second Bank of the United States (1816-1836). Today’s national banking system began during the Civil War with the National Banking Acts of 1863-64. Then there is the system we are living under today, the Federal Reserve, chartered by Congress in 1913. Even during the times when the government has sold its debt directly to the public, as with war bonds, savings bonds, and Treasury notes and bills, that too has been money borrowed at interest.

Although there have been times in history when money entered into circulation other than through debt, such as with coinage and the Civil War greenbacks, those were exceptions and today are of little importance.

Dr. Blain estimated that from the time Alexander Hamilton placed the U.S. under a debt-based monetary system until today, the debt has compounded at 5.8 percent annually. The big problem with this system, he said, was “that no money was created to pay interest.” He continued:

“Loans created only the principal. Interest had to be paid out of principal. So payment of interest reduced the money supply and slowed economic activity. Recovery could come only when new loans were taken out at least equal to interest paid.”

Dr. Blain concluded, “As long as the money supply of a nation is created as debt costing interest, debt must grow by compound interest.” From a longer-range view, it’s a system that is constantly collapsing and that must constantly be bailed out.

Dr. Blain next sought to update his figures past the 1976 data from the Bureau of Economic Analyses. Turning to the Federal Reserve’s series on “Total Credit Market Debt Outstanding,” he found remarkably similar indicators.

He found that adding data from the Federal Reserve from 1945 to 2003 showed the “debt explosion” continuing. In 1945 total debt was $463.4 billion. In 2003 it was $44,967.7 billion ($45.0 trillion). When he projected the debt level for 2010, he arrived at a figure of $74.9 trillion. By this time the debt curve was climbing so steeply there would be almost a doubling of the amount of total debt in only nine years.

It might be argued that these figures do not take into account inflation. This is because lending at interest is the cause of inflation. The dollars still have to be repaid with interest. The problem occurs when economic growth, measured by GDP, does not keep up.

Looking at the growth of GDP from 1945 to 2003, the increase was from $223.1 billion to $10,987.9 billion, a factor of 49. But the debt ($463.4 billion vs. $44,967.7 billion) grew by a factor of 97, almost twice the rate of GDP growth. Thus the total debt burden on the economy has doubled from a ratio of 2:1 to more than 4:1 (though it was much less than that during the early days of the nation).

But with continued compound growth of debt and a slow- or no-growth state of the economy as we head into a recession, we are starting to see what Dr. Blain called an “acceleration to meltdown.” He wrote:

“We are buying more and more in the same amount of time. Witness the efforts of people to get rid of their excess through yard sales, storage units, and big trash pickup days, and the massive size of what are euphemistically called landfills. While two billion people in the world lack basics such as clean water, food, and shelter, Americans throw away their microwave ovens, televisions, computers, refrigerators, furniture, and cars. Meanwhile, acceleration is applauded as increasing productivity. It’s like arguing that cancer is good because it grows.”

These are the things the Democrats in Denver should be talking about, instead of going to so many parties. They should be making note that the U.S., to quote economists close to the Federal Reserve, is “functionally bankrupt.”

In fact, the debt this nation owes to the banks, to foreign creditors, and to each other can never be paid off. Further, one big reason for all of our fruitless military endeavors overseas may simply be to escape unpleasant economic realities at home. But this is pointless. Nothing creates more debt than war, as the bankers have always known.

The only solution is to adopt a monetary system that is not based on debt. Dr. Blain makes a couple of specific recommendations: 1) “Stop using percentage rates to calculate charges for the use of money”; and 2) “Congress must supply the economy with a money base that is debt-free and interest-free.”

The second point is a call for a new monetary system, not one based solely on lending by the banks or on government borrowing. One organization that has developed a blueprint for such a system is the American Monetary Institute (AMI), headquartered in Chicago. The director of the AMI is Stephen Zarlenga, author of a massive, groundbreaking work: The Lost Science of Money (AMI, 2002). Zarlenga’s assistant is Jamie Walton, a monetary reformer from New Zealand.

AMI will be holding its fourth annual conference in Chicago on September 25-28. Expected as keynote speaker is Congressman Dennis Kucinich, whose wife Elizabeth once worked as an intern at AMI. Dr. Bob Blain will be a featured speaker.

On the AMI website at http://www.monetary.org is a remarkable document, the American Monetary Act. The product of several years of work by Zarlenga and his network, which now includes a number of local chapters around the country, the American Monetary Act would replace today’s debt-based monetary system with one where the government spends or loans money directly into circulation.

Under the Act, the Federal Reserve would be retained as a national financial clearinghouse but would no longer be a bank of issue. The system would be overseen by a Monetary Control Board within the U.S. Treasury Department. The Act also includes a provision for a citizens’ dividend, similar in some respects to the Alaska Permanent Fund, which would inject desperately needed purchasing power into the economy without additional government debt or taxation.

Also promoting a citizens’ dividend, by the way, is Stephen Shafarman in his important new book, Peaceful, Positive Revolution. (Tendril Press, 2008)

It’s the American Monetary Act the candidates and delegates in Denver should skip one of their parties to read, because it’s the only way any of their hopes for America can ever be realized. Says AMI’s Jamie Walton:

“This is a crucial time. Things are happening. We have got some key media people talking and writing about our kind of reforms. The inertia is starting to yield. Things are starting to roll. The worsening conditions in 2009 will give us a once-in-a-lifetime chance to be heard above the propaganda.”

By Richard C. Cook
http:// www.richardccook.com

Gardasil Meets Measles: A Coincidence?

I had a feeling there was some ulterior motive behind the reporting of the “high” rate of measles outbreak last week.

by Barbara Loe Fisher

www.vaccineawakening.blogspot.com
www.NVIC.org
www.StandUpBeCounted.org
http://www.vran.org/vaccines/hpv/hpv.htm

The bad news about GARDASIL vaccine keeps getting worse and it was only a matter of time before government health officials promoted an “epidemic” to deflect attention from GARDASIL risks and create an excuse to point accusing fingers at parents who decline to give their children one or more of the 16 federally promoted vaccines. They did the same thing in 1985, when publicity about DPT vaccine reactions prompted officials at the CDC and American Academy of Pediatrics to allege there were whooping cough epidemics in eight states due to parents rejecting DPT. Then as now, the cases of disease were divided between vaccinated and unvaccinated children and adults, which is hardly big news.

The government’s dire warnings came late last week after newspaper articles examined the muscle that Merck used to get GARDASIL fast tracked and licensed, followed by an aggressive multi-media advertising and lobbying campaign targeting teenage girls which has already netted the big pharmaceutical company more than $1.5 billion in sales worldwide. The New England Journal of Medicine published an editorial discussed in the Wall Street Journal asking good questions about the evidence for long term protection and cost effectiveness of mass use of GARDASIL vaccine, questions that NVIC first raised in 2007 .
And new concerns are being voiced about whether the vaccine is safe to give to adolescent girls , whose bodies are undergoing hormonal changes, as no studies have been published to evaluate whether there are increased risks for vaccine reactions depending upon when the vaccine is administered during a girl’s monthly hormonal cycle.

Last week, a CDC apparently weary of all the bad publicity about GARDASIL got its taxpayer-funded PR machine in gear and issued a media advisory warning that 131 cases of measles have been reported in the U.S. this year and that half of those cases involved unvaccinated children whose parents homeschooled their children or held religious or philosophical beliefs opposing use of one or more vaccines. National news stories and local news coverage examined the measles outbreaks and allegations of growing parental vaccine refusal.

The New York Times published an editorial and repeated unsubstantiated claims made by the CDC about the numbers of children, who were injured and died from measles in the past, stating that there were 400-500 deaths; 48,000 hospitalizations and 1,000 cases of brain injury out of 3-4 million measles cases every year prior to mass use of measles vaccine. A quick look at MMWR historical charts reveals that the highest number of reported cases of measles in the U.S. since 1945 (and before the measles vaccine was licensed in 1963) was 763,094 cases in 1958. Why don’t CDC officials publicly release the documented cases of hospitalization, injury and death due to measles in that year – or ANY year – instead of demanding blind faith in their version of the facts? (For decades, parents have been waiting for the CDC to document the widely published allegation that there are “36,000 deaths” due to influenza every year in the U.S., a statistic that is promoted to justify new directives that every baby and child through age 18 get annual flu shots.)

The publicizing of 131 cases of measles out of a population of 300 million people in the U.S. and blaming the “outbreak” on 63 cases that occurred in unvaccinated children, whose parents hold religious or conscientious objections to vaccination or homeschool, is a transparent attempt by federal employees to persecute fellow citizens holding religious beliefs, moral convictions, intellectual positions and wellness lifestyles different from their own. Adopting a strategy that “the best defense is a good offense,” CDC officials are whipping up fear of those who do not vaccinate in order to cover up a three decade refusal to scientifically investigate reports of children regressing into autism and other kinds of chronic illness after administration of MMR and other vaccines. They know the truth about vaccine risks is becoming more widely known and are lobbying hard for removal vaccine exemptions they do not control so all Americans will be forced without exception to get every vaccine marketed by industry and mandated by government officials.

The premature licensure and universal use recommendation of GARDASIL is just the latest example of what is wrong with the mass vaccination system. If there is a crisis of confidence in the safety of vaccines, which prompts parents to ask pediatricians more questions and seek alternative health care options for keeping their children well, that crisis of confidence can be laid squarely at the feet of those operating the mass vaccination system for failing to do their job. As Generation Rescue founder J.B. Handley recently commented, “Most parents I know will take measles over autism.

There is a 92 to 100 percent uptake of MMR vaccine and many other federally recommended childhood vaccines among children entering kindergarten in every state. This is one of the highest vaccination rates in the world, especially in such a large population. If the MMR vaccine is so unreliable that a few hundred cases or even a few thousand cases of measles among 300 million people is a cause for panic, then the benefits of MMR vaccine weighed against its risks are far less than industry, government and medical organizations have admitted.

In the 1960’s, when the live virus measles vaccine was licensed, parents were told it would give their babies the same lifelong immunity that having the natural disease confers. By the late 1980’s, it was clear that was not true because measles was occurring in both vaccinated and unvaccinated children. Government officials eventually recommended another dose of measles vaccine (usually given as MMR) for all children even though there were outstanding questions about the multiplication of different genetic strains of measles and how this may affect the vaccine’s ability to prevent measles on an individual and population basis long term.

Today’s young mothers do not have qualitatively superior measles antibodies to transfer to their newborns to protect them in the first year of life as past generations of mothers did because most young mothers giving birth today have been vaccinated and never had measles as children, which confers lifelong immunity. So babies born today are vulnerable to measles from birth instead of from ages 15 months to six years, which is when most children in the past experienced measles by age six and severe complications were rare. For several decades, vaccinologists have been attempting to create a “high titer” EZ measles vaccine that can be given to infants under one year that will override any existing natural maternal antibodies and replace them with vaccine induced antibodies but there have been long-standing questions about EZ measles vaccine safety .

Vaccination does not mimic the natural disease process and offers only temporary immunity, which is why vaccine boosters are frequently given. Every vaccine carries a reaction risk that can be greater for some than others. Measles vaccine, which is part of the combination live virus MMR (measles-mumps- rubella) vaccine can cause brain inflammation and permanent brain damage . There have been more than 46,000 reports of health problems associated with MMR vaccination made to the federal Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS) . However, there is gross underreporting of vaccine- related health problems to VAERS and it is estimated that, for example, fewer than 4 percent of all cases of thrombocytopenia (potentially fatal blood disorder) following MMR vaccination are ever reported to VAERS.

The CDC’s one-size-fits-all, no-exceptions MMR vaccine policies allow almost no contraindications to MMR vaccine use. According to the CDC, a child can be sick at the time of vaccination or recovering from an illness; have a fever; be taking antibiotics; have a history of allergies; or have experienced a seizure or regression after a previous MMR shot and still be eligible for more MMR vaccine. This kind of cavalier disregard for minimizing vaccine risks is one reason why more parents are questioning government vaccine policies.

Parents, whether they do or do not vaccinate their children, should become informed and clearly understand the symptoms and complications of every infectious disease, including measles. Parents who choose to vaccinate should have a 99 to 100 percent guarantee that the vaccine will, indeed protect their child. They should have a similar guarantee that the vaccine will not injure or kill their child.

Like all pharmaceutical products, vaccines should be subject to the law of supply and demand. When people are captive and unable to make informed, voluntary decisions about vaccines that have been rushed to market on greased skids by federal health agencies, where every vaccine reaction is unscientifically labeled a “coincidence,” the first casualty is freedom and the second is the health of innocent children.

Public health officials and pediatricians should explain why 20 percent of America’s highly vaccinated child population suffers with chronic illness and disability rather than blaming parents who refuse to salute smartly and take the risk of watching the child they love become one more victim of vaccine damage.

To report a vaccine reaction to NVIC’s Vaccine Reaction Registry , go to http://www.nvic.org/Report/reaction.htm .

To view vaccine reaction reports, go to the Vaccine VictimMemorial at http://vaccinememorial.org/
__________________________________________

“Ms. Kim and Harvard colleague Sue Goldie concluded that it cost about $43,600 per “quality- adjusted life year” gained, when HPV vaccine is administered to 12-year-old girls. This falls below the $50,000 per quality-adjusted life year threshold that some researchers use as a maximum for cost- effectiveness. Other researchers use a higher maximum benchmark of $100,000 per QALY to gauge cost-effectiveness….. At least one of the factors in the primary Harvard calculations may be a relatively optimistic assumption — that vaccination would produce lifelong immunity. Because the vaccine was only studied for five years and has been on the market for two years, no one knows for certain if its protection is lifelong, or if it wanes over time. The Harvard researchers concluded that the cost per QALY would rise if the vaccine’s effect wanes after 10 years. Merck says the vaccine will offer protection well beyond five years, Dr. Haupt said. The Merck economic model that arrived at the cost per QALY below $50,000 assumed lifelong immunity, he said. Still, the study is likely to fuel skepticism about Gardasil, which has already faced questions surrounding its safety and effectiveness (Merck and the CDC maintain it is safe and effective, with the most common side effect being soreness at site of injection.)” – Peter Loftus, Wall Street Journal (August 21, 2008) http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121928503311259059.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

“Why has there not been any mention of the potentially adverse effects of Merck’s cervical cancer vaccination, Gardasil® in relationship to the timing of the vaccination and where a young woman is in her menstrual cycle? This information is especially critical considering the vaccination is recommended for adolescent girls from the age of nine to young women up to 26-years. Why is it that women are constantly forced into a male medical model which blatantly ignores their menstrual health and administers drugs, surgeries, and vaccinations without any regard to where women are in their hormone cycle?….As the female hormone levels of estrogen and progesterone decrease during the premenstrual phase, the female body begins the process of releasing the uterine lining in the act of menstruation. The decrease in hormones actually affects a woman’s energy levels and her emotions. The immune system becomes more compromised, and that translates to a lowered defense system to fight off invading, foreign toxins….. In her 1977 groundbreaking book, “The Premenstrual Syndrome”, Katharina Dalton noted that drug reactions “…..are common during the premenstruum and may follow administration of antibiotics and inoculations. Confusion may occur as to the real origin of such reactions. In double-blind, clinical trials the placebo drugs are often reported to have side effects such as increased drowsiness, headache, nausea, or increased pain; which may be no more than the usual premenstrual symptoms which have not been meticulously observed and reported.” – Leslie Carol Botha and H. Sandra Chevalier-Batik, Holy Hormones (August 21, 2008)
http://holyhormones.com/about-2/articles-by-leslie/now-hold-on-one-hormonal-minute%E2%80%A6/

“Measles cases in the U.S. are at the highest level in more than a decade, with nearly half of those involving children whose parents rejected vaccination, health officials reported Thursday. Worried doctors are troubled by the trend fueled by unfounded fears that vaccines may cause autism. The number of cases is still small, just 131, but that’s only for the first seven months of the year. There were only 42 cases for all of last year…..The CDC’s review found that a number of cases involved home-schooled children not required to get the vaccines. Others can avoid vaccination by seeking exemptions, such as for religious reasons…..The vaccine is considered highly effective but not perfect; 11 of this year’s cases had at least one dose of the vaccine. Of this year’s total, 122 were unvaccinated or had unknown vaccination status. Some were unvaccinated because the children were under age 1 – too young to get their first measles shot. In 63 of those cases – almost all of them 19 or under – the patient or their parents refused the shots for philosophical or religious reasons, the CDC reported. In Washington state, an outbreak was traced to a church conference, including 16 school-aged children who were not vaccinated. Eleven of those kids were home schooled and not subject to vaccination rules in public schools. It’s unclear why the parents rejected the vaccine. The Illinois outbreak – triggered by a teenager who had traveled to Italy – included 25 home-schooled children, according to the CDC report.” – Mike Stobbe, Associated Press (August 21, 2008)
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080821/ap_on_he_me/med_measles_outbreaks

“He was advanced for his age. He was talking when he was 11 months old,” recalls Edward Delean. The father of 4 says everything changed after his now 9 year old son who has autism was vaccinated against measles, mumps, and rubella or MMR. It was like that was it. He never talked again, he still doesn’t talk. He has about 10 words,” he says, adding, “it really devastated our family. I just destroyed us.” Testimonials like that have led some parents to shun vaccinations altogether. The Centers for Disease Control says measles cases have dramatically increased from 42 cases in all of last year to 131 in just the first seven months of this year because of parents who are rejecting the MMR vaccine for their kids. “It doesn’t serve us well when we have government officials trying to create fear and anxiety” says Barbara Loe Fisher with the National Vaccine Information Center. She says some parents opt out of immunizations for religious or philosophical reasons. Others have said no because their kids have had adverse reactions to the vaccines that are usually given on a set schedule. “Right now we’re seeing a one-size fits all approach to vaccination that doesn’t really recognize that children are different, that children react differently to vaccinations,” she says.” – Nancy Yamada, WUSA9-TV (August 21, 2008)
http://www.wusa9.com/news/health/story.aspx?storyid=75284&catid=28

The Truth Behind the Federal Reserve: How International Bankers Gained Control of America

By Chris Masterjohn.

A Review of the DVD The Money Masters: How International Bankers Gained Control of America

If the American people ever allow private banks to control their currency, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all their prosperity until their children will wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered. — Thomas Jefferson

Did you know that the Federal Reserve, which controls the nation’s money supply, is privately owned? That the congressional bill establishing it was written by the most powerful bankers in the world under highly secretive conditions that one of them openly referred to as a conspiracy several decades later? That the policies of the Federal Reserve are precisely what have run our country into debt and have produced the current financial crisis?

Did you know that the system of privately owned banks beginning in England in 1694 and now dominating the United States and every developed nation have financed most of the world’s wars in the last three hundred years, greatly enabled and extended them by financing both sides, and driven these countries into massive debt, essentially enslaving governments and populations to international banking institutions?

The Money Masters (Google Video; YouTube; purchase DVD) is an excellent two-DVD set that explains how the international bankers came to power and how they took over America.

We cannot even begin to understand how great concentrations of economic and political power have developed in our country, why our farmers are being driven out of the agricultural industry in droves, how the advocates of world government are aiming to subjugate the nutritional supplement industry to the much more concentrated pharmaceutical industry, or why we are approaching a massive financial crisis that threatens to vaporize the average person’s wealth while enriching only the very tip-top figures in the banking industry, unless we understand what real money is and what kind of an unthinkable crime and complete conspiracy the formation of our central bank has been. Money Masters is not flawless — I disagree with some of its solutions and I will explain this below — but it is the best DVD I know of that tells the story.

And this is a story everyone who cares about our country and the world should know.

Here is a brief synopsis of it, with some of my critical comments following.

The Rise of the Bankers

The banking industry evolved out of the gold industry. Goldsmiths would give certificates of ownership to customers so that they could hold on to their gold and keep it safe until needed.

However, eventually the goldsmiths discovered a process we now call “fractional reserve banking.” They realized that at any given time, only a small number of people would come in to retrieve their gold. So they could make a lot more money if they simply issued ownership certificates for gold that didn’t exist.

This, of course, is outright fraud. It is the exact same thing as making counterfeit money — but has nevertheless been the standard of the banking industry ever since.

The goldsmiths also discovered that if they increased the supply of this counterfeit money, they could produce an “economic boom” in which people would engage in much more risky economic projects requiring large loans — in fact, one of these absurd economic projects once included a plan to drain the Red Sea and search for gold the Egyptian army lost as they were chasing the Israelites — but then when they tightened the money supply the economy would shrink, causing a depression, which would allow them to foreclose on land, buildings and other goods purchased by the loans, allowing them to acquire these things at pennies on the dollar.

The Rise of Privately Owned Central Banks

Much of Christian Europe enacted usury laws that greatly hurt economic development by banning the collection of interest on loans. This stopped people from lending, and thus stopped anyone from engaging in economic activity that they couldn’t finance themselves.

In the seventeenth century, however, the kings and queens of England relaxed the prohibition of interest, allowing the banking industry to flourish once again, then tightened them, causing a backlash. The bankers financed a revolution against King Charles, financed many wars, and threw the country into a great depression. The government was so indebted to the bankers that it sold them the right to establish a central bank that would have an exclusive monopoly on the right to produce the nation’s money.

The bankers used this sale as an opportunity to expand on an old trick. Rather than paying the government the full price for the rights to the central bank, they put up only part of the capital, and then printed money out of thin air to “loan” to themselves to put up the rest!

Around the same time, the Rothschild family was coming to power in Germany. Moses Amschel Bauer, a goldsmith, opened a German moneychanging shop whose logo was an eagle against a red shield. From the German for “red shield,” his son, Mayer Amschel Bauer, changed his last name from Bauer to Rothschild.

Rothschild had five sons whom he sent all over Europe to establish centers of banking power. The family quickly learned that loaning to governments was far more profitable than loaning to individuals because the loans were larger and were secured by the government’s power to tax. Moreover, so long as governments are supplied with sufficient finances, they can get involved in extensive wars, which destroy things that need to be rebuilt, and thus consume massive amounts of money. Once the debt is established, the government becomes locked into an endless cycle of using taxes to pay off interest as it goes further and further into debt.

Nathan Mayer Rothschild went to London and financed the wars against Napoleon, multiplying his 20,000 pounds by a factor of 2,500 in just 17 years. The Rothschilds financed American monopolies of railroads and steel, the diamond monopolies of Africa, and much of JP Morgan’s financial exploits in America.

The Rise of Central Banking in America

In the century leading up to the American Revolution, gold and silver were so scarce in America that the colonies printed their own money called “colonial scrip.” When King George asked Ben Franklin how the colonies became so prosperous, Franklin told him it was because they printed their own money and therefore never fell in debt to the bankers.

Once King George heard this, he banned the colonial scrip, causing a massive depression in the colonies. Moreover, England had engaged in four large wars in the century following the establishment of its own privately owned central bank, and was nearly 150 million pounds in debt — leading the king to levy taxes against the colonies. Franklin attributed the American Revolution primarily to the economic disaster resulting from the prohibition of colonial scrip.

To finance the war, the Continental Congress issued a new form of paper money, but produced so much of it that it plunged America even further into economic disaster. By the end of the war, a pair of shoes sold for $5,000!

Fast forward a few years. Alexander Hamilton wanted a robust national debt to align the interests of the wealthy with the government. If the government was in debt to the rich, the rich would support high taxes so it could pay them interest on the loans, and the government would do their bidding since they’d be pulling its purse strings.

After making a false start before the Constitutional Convention of 1787, Hamilton and the wealthy businessman Robert Morris successfully created a privately owned central bank called the First Bank of the United States in 1791. This was just one year after Mayer Amschel Rothschild stated, “Let me issue and control a nation’s money, and I care not who writes its laws.”

This time, the bankers pushed their fraudulent “fractional reserve” scheme to its limits. The government put up 20 percent of the capital for the bank, and the bankers put up the rest. But where did they get the other 80 percent? They took it on loan from the bank!

By lending out four dollars for every one dollar the bank held on reserves, the 20 percent of the capital the government put up suddenly morphed into the 80 percent the bankers were supposed to supply! So the bankers took control of the nation’s money supply without contributing anything except their keen ability to form conspiracies against the public.

After five years, the nation was $8 million in debt and inflation had gone up 70 percent. Thomas Jefferson stated that if he could obtain one constitutional amendment, it would be one that prohibited Congress from borrowing money. As president, Jefferson moved to abolish the central bank, although this was not fully accomplished until Madison’s presidency several years later.

The same scenario repeated itself in 1816, and President Andrew Jackson, who campaigned on the slogan “Jackson and No Bank” abolished it, and was the only president in US history to ever completely pay off the national debt. That’s right, after Jackson’s presidency, we were debt-free!

Prosperity Without a Central Bank

For 77 years, America was without a central bank. Even though the bankers had engaged in many other activities to increase their power — like getting “national bank” charters allowing them to practice fractional reserve lending, banning the use of America’s abundant silver as money to make the common man dependent on the bankers’ gold, deliberately causing economic depression to buy up masses of land at pennies on the dollar — the free market favored the common man, and the bankers’ power diminished over time.

America began building an economy built on savings rather than debt. In 1913, so many small banks had popped up that only 29 percent of banks and only 55 percent of deposits were controlled by the Big Boys that had formed the central banks and “national banks” of old. Corporations were borrowing less and investing savings instead — 70 percent of corporate funding came from profits instead of loans. If things continued the way they were going, America would have been free of the big bankers who always sought to own her.

The Formation of the Federal Reserve

The big bankers had a plan. By restricting the money supply in 1907, they caused an economic panic. JP Morgan saved the day by printing money out of thin air to create an economic “boom,” and many widely revered him as an American hero, including Woodrow Wilson of Princeton University, who later became president.

The heads of the big banks gathered in a secret meeting on Jekyll Island off the coast of Georgia. They were so secretive that they made a pact to only use their first names, so even the servants of the house in which they met would not know who they were.

In an article called “The ‘First Names Club’” appearing in the February 9, 1935 edition of the Saturday Evening Post, Frank Vanderlip, one of the participants, wrote the following:

I was as secretive, indeed as furtive, as any conspirator . . . Discovery, we knew, simply must not happen, or else all our time and effort would be wasted. If it were to be exposed that our particular group had got together and written a banking bill, that bill would have no chance whatever of passage by Congress.

The bill initially failed in Congress, but the bankers financed the presidential campaign of their supporter, Woodrow Wilson, gave the bill a different name, gathered around it a different crowd of congressional supporters, and rammed it through. That bill was eventually signed into law as the Federal Reserve Act.

The income tax amendment was pushed through at the same time in order to produce a means of paying interest on the debt into which the Fed would soon plunge the country, although it would be decades before the “income tax” would come to mean a tax taken out of your paycheck.

How the Fed Works

Usually when the media talks about the Fed, it talks about the Fed adjusting interest rates. But the Fed really controls interest rates by controlling the money supply.

The main way the Fed controls the money supply, as described in The Money Masters, is to purchase government bonds. The decision to purchase bonds is made by the Fed’s Open Market Committee. These bonds can be purchased from the government as it issues new ones, or from banks, corporations, and individuals who hold previously issued bonds. The Fed purchases them with electronic credits that have no existence as physical money, thus increasing the money supply.

These e-credits then count as “reserves” in banks that hold them. Since banks are allowed to lend out over ten dollars for every dollar they hold, this e-money that was created out of thin air multiplies itself by a factor of ten, allowing even more money to be created out of thin air.

There are two other methods of controlling interest rates and the money supply that Money Masters does not discuss. The Fed can raise or lower the “discount rate” at which it lends to other banks and financial institutions, and it can raise or lower the “reserve requirement.” The reserve requirement is the quantity of money that a bank must have on reserve in order to lend a given quantity of money. For example, if the reserve requirement is ten percent, a bank can loan out $10 for every $1 it has on reserve.

In other words, the Fed not only has the right to make money out of thin air, but it also controls the amount of money other banks are allowed to make out of thin air.

Why is this bad? It’s simple: when the money supply goes up, there are more dollars chasing the same amount of goods and services, so the value of the dollar goes down and prices go up. But the prices take time to go up, so the people who get the money first — like the Fed, Congress, and the Fed’s favorite corporations and banks whose bonds it decides to purchase — get the full value of the money. By the time it winds up in our hands, its value has gone down.

So the system is essentially designed to transfer wealth from the common men and women of the country into the hands of the elite corporations and bankers.

Nefarious Activities of the Fed

The story hardly ends there. Money Masters documents a great many nefarious activities in which the Fed and the international bankers who own it have engaged since its inception.

The Fed and the bankers who owned it financed the Bolshevik takeover of Russia, the Nazi takeover of Germany, and all sides of both world wars, making massive profits, and forever plunging these countries into massive debt.

Now, having established central banks in all the major countries, these same bankers have established institutions like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. After taking over the nations of the world, they are now constructing a supra-national governmental and economic system that will transcend national boundaries, giving them absolute power.

It is quite possible, in fact, that these bankers orchestrated a decades-long multi-generational plan to steal the gold of American’s citizens and transfer it into the global central bank, the IMF.

Franklin D. Roosevelt confiscated the nation’s gold during the Great Depression. As he signed the bill, he stated he hadn’t even read it, but the “experts” said it was the best thing for the country.

After the government stole its citizens’ gold, the gold was stored at Fort Knox. Federal law requires the government to audit this gold on a yearly basis, but an audit hasn’t been performed since President Eisenhower ordered one in 1953!

In the early 1970s, Nixon took us off the pseudo-gold standard we were on at the time. Simultaneously, he legalized the possession of gold by Americans, allowing the sale of gold to private citizens, driving the price of it through the roof. In 1982, President Reagan organized the Gold Commission to investigate a possible return to the gold standard. The commission determined that the United States government no longer owned any gold at all — it had all been transferred to the Fed as collateral on the national debt!

Some years before, an aide to Nelson Rockefeller leaked a plan on the part of the Rockefellers and other international bankers to hoist the nation’s gold to the press, but she disappeared the next day and has never been heard from since. Did such a plan exist?

Quite possibly, there has been no audit of the gold at Fort Knox because there is no gold at Fort Knox. That gold, which used to belong to the American people, has probably been sold in tiny amounts at very high prices back to private citizens, but perhaps largely transferred to the IMF.

Fixing the Problem

These bankers and mega-corporations are not all-powerful. They had taken over America twice before, and we had all-American heroes like Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Andrew Jackson who destroyed them.

Today, the situation is different, because the bankers have purchased the major media and set up para-governmental institutions like the Council on Foreign Relations or the more secretive and powerful Bilderberg Group that have a much more powerful grip on the electoral process. Today, a mass movement is required to push for change — but change is still possible.

Money Masters offers a solution, which I partly disagree with but is definitely an excellent first step towards a solution.

The creators of the movie say that we cannot return to a gold standard, because the central banks of the world and the IMF have concentrated most of the gold. Going to a gold standard would put the power right into their hands.

Their solution — which is supported by Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Freedman — is to have the government reclaim its constitutional power to print money. The government should print it’s own debt-free money to pay off the national debt. To avoid inflation, the government should increase the reserve requirement proportionally so that the money supply always stays the same. To this end, they advocate the Monetary Reform Act.

Where I think The Money Masters goes wrong, however, is in advocating a pure fiat paper money system. That is, a system where the government simply declares paper money to have a given amount of value, backed by no hard assets like precious metals.

They point out how well colonial scrip worked, but in reality the paper money system fell apart as soon as the government went to war. In a hard money system, where the value of the money is determined by the inherent value of the metal it is based on, the government could only go to war if it convinced the population to pay the taxes needed to finance it.

With a fiat system, whether to go to war is determined by politicians. With a privately owned central bank, whether to go to war is determined by the bankers who profit from the war. With a hard money system with no central bank, whether to go to war is determined by the people.

The bankers used gold to concentrate their power leading up to the formation of the Fed, but they only did this by ramming legislation through Congress that banned the use of silver, which was easily available to the common men and women of the country.

At the same time, merely going back to the gold standard or even a privately traded gold-based economy will not solve the problem. Most of the world’s gold is, in fact, owned by the central bankers. The nation is in debt $9.5 trillion, but this debt was manufactured by a system put in place by a powerful conspiracy of men who made their wealth by stealing from the populace through deals with the government and fraudulent practices like fractional reserve banking.

In short, going back to precious metal-backed money and doing nothing else would be like banning the slave trade but telling the slaves who are already captured that they need to buy their freedom. The Monetary Reform Act would free the slaves.

The publicly owned paper money system advocated by Money Masters should exist alongside freely traded precious metals and any other type of privately created currency. Fractional reserve banking should be prosecuted as fraud. Taxes should be acceptable in both public fiat money and precious metals.

Eventually, I believe the fiat system would fade out by itself. Businesses and individuals would prefer to hold precious metals because the value would be more stable. The trading of metals would check the government’s ability to print extra money, because the more it did so, the more people would choose to hold money backed by precious metals.

Eventually, people would freely choose to trade in currency with real value; as the demand for the fiat money sank, the government would prefer taxes be paid in hard currency and would phase out its fiat money.

Small banks would sprout up around the country, but banking would not be nearly as lucrative because individual businesses and corporations would finance their projects with savings and profits instead of debt.

The plan of the Money Masters would be forever foiled, and America would forever be free — so long as the populace vigilantly remembered what freedom means.

You can buy The Money Masters here, watch it on YouTube here, or watch it on Google Video here.

The Real Rate of U.S. Inflation Is Now 13%

Source: Richard Daughty a.k.a The Mogambo Guru.

It was when “official government-approved” inflation figures were released that The Mogambo Guru really lost it last week. The official rate of inflation is now a staggering 5.6%. This is Terrible, Terrible News (TTN)…

When you look at what John Williams at shadowstats.com calculates as inflation, according to the time-honored method of actually looking at real prices instead of the “qualified estimates” that are used today, you will see that annual inflation in consumer prices is actually running at over 13%! Some of the worst in American history! We’re freaking doomed!

Anthony Cherniawski of The Practical Investor is not interested in my dour assessment of the situation, and took a look at the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U), which increased a whopping 0.5% (non-seasonally adjusted) in July, which is plenty bad enough for one month, but one’s tongue tries to hide by jumping down one’s throat when one learns that it was not a fluke, and that prices are 5.6% higher than in July 2007! 5.6% annual inflation is the best they can wring from admittedly-doctored statistics? Yikes! I’m screaming my guts out here!

Mr. Cherniawski coolly says that I don’t know the literal half of it, as “The alarming part of this report is the acceleration of inflation in the past 3 months. While the unadjusted rate for the past 12 months was 6.2%, the 3-month annualized rate of increase was 11.9%.” Yikes! We’re freaking doomed!

The report itself noted, without any hint of alarm, that “On a seasonally adjusted basis, the CPI-U advanced 0.8 percent in July, following a 1.1 percent increase in June.” Yow!

Some of the terrifying specifics were that the energy index rose 4%, which accounted for “about half of the overall increase in the all items index.”

The worse news for people who eat food is that “the food index rose 0.9 percent in July after rising 0.8 percent in June. Indexes for five of the six major grocery store food groups rose at least 1.0 percent.” In one freaking month! This is outrageous inflation!

This inflation in food may be why Heraldtribune.com interviewed Vicki Escarra, president and CEO of an outfit called America’s Second Harvest, which is “the nation’s largest food bank network”, and which is a name that they are soon changing to “Feeding America”, which seems oddly apropos, considering that in January, they surveyed their 200 food banks and found that “demand was up 20 percent over last year.” Wow! What an increase!

“We’re seeing more and more people visiting food banks for the first time because they’ve lost their jobs or they’re not getting raises”, she says. Yikes! People are reduced to begging for food because they are not getting raises!

Equally alarming is the news from John Williams at shadowstats.com, who says that real inflation in prices, as measured in a subset of the BLS Consumer Price Indexes, the CPI-W, “jumped to 6.2%”.

What makes the CPI-W inflation subset so interesting is that, as Mr. Williams explains, “The CPI-W is used for making the annual cost-of-living adjustments to Social Security payments” which would indicate that the federal budget line-item for Social Security, already one of the largest categories in the whole bloated federal budget that is already over $3 trillion a year, will be increasing by a theoretical 6.2%, just by virtue of mandated higher payments!

Then, to make it all worse, the Labor Department reported the latest survey of producer prices for July, the Producer Price Index, which went up by a stunning 1.2% for the month, where the only saving grace is that it is less than the 1.8% increase in June!

As Mark Gongloff so pithily explained in his Ahead Of The Tape column of the Wall Street Journal, “While consumers suffer inflation a the bottom of the pricing pipeline, producers feel it at the top”, and that producers will be very keen about passing higher costs along to the consumer as quickly as possible, because “to the extent inflation gets stuck with them, their profits suffer.”

And since everybody knows the ugliness of profits suffering, I will not go into it, as it usually means that I am going to be fired soon, and I don’t want to think about that right now, other than to say that “profits that suffer” is ugly in the best of times, and it will be Much, Much Uglier (MMU) this time, thanks to seemingly-impossible leveraged investment use of every freaking dime, real or imagined, here or in the future.

Okay, I will say one other thing; if you are not buying gold, silver and oil in a fit of terrified self-preservation, to the exclusion of everything else including back-to-school clothes for your stupid kids that make them look like mental defectives and cost a fortune, then you are almost certainly making the biggest mistake of your life.

Well, maybe the second biggest mistake after deciding to have the damned kids. Or maybe the third biggest mistake after deciding to get married in the first damned place and then having the damned kids in the second place, but you get the point.

Humor: The McCain Card

From Dump Mccain.com

Mock him all you’d like…but that POW Card got him an amazing upgrade in the wife department: Younger, healthier & Dirty-Filthy-Sexy Rich with unlimited access to beer and pills.

His old pick up line: “Hey baby, I know some stress positions that will blow your mind”…worked like a charm. As a matter of fact, the DRILL HERE/DRILL NOW slogan was born that night. So, who’s laughing now?…Suckerz.

Just a few games of Naughty Prisoner/Dominatrix Prison Guard later…

Eight Mansions- $100 million dollars
Swanky non-elitist shoes- $500.00
Sympathy date/adultery – Priceless

Don’t hate the player, hate the game…
Better yet, get your own POW Card at any participating McCain Election Center in the Greater Baghdad area.

(No need to ACT NOW!: Supplies are unlimited and this offer may expire in 100 years. Ability to crash 4 multi-million dollar military aircraft due to pilot error will be verified. Valid record of moral leadership and/or decency not required.)

The Real Price of Oil: Dollars, Gold, and the Price of Tea in China

Source: War on You.

Oil, it’s the lifeblood of our society. It’s given us the freedom and wealth we have today. It’s given us automobiles and machinery and greased the wheels of the industrial revolution. It made old Jed a millionaire. But oil’s in trouble, the price is up and everyone thinks they understand it. But what if the price of oil wasn’t really up? What if it were just an illusion?

“The price of oil is skyrocketing, and that means gas prices are up…”
That’s about the limit of what most Americans know and understand about the whole oil situation. But there are more complex issues at work, and they involve more than just Middle East politics and China.

The American Geological Institute (AGI) recently released a report looking at the price of crude oil in relation to the U.S. dollar and the price per ounce of gold. It highlights a fact that probably makes some folks at the Federal Reserve very nervous.

This graph makes it easier to understand:

The bottom purple line is the price of a barrel of crude oil per ounce of gold (if you wanted to use gold to pay for a barrel of oil). As you can see, that line is stable, and has been for the entirety of the graph, which is about 7 years.

The top two lines are the price of oil in relation to currency (blue is the Dollar and the red is the Euro). Those lines show that the cost of oil has been going up in relation to currency only. What this chart makes obvious is that the value of oil has not been increasing in real terms, currency has just been decreasing in value.

To put it another way, if the US Dollar were still based on gold (as it was until Nixon eliminated the Bretton Woods system in 1971), then the price of oil would be just as stable as that purple line in the chart is.

So oil is worth the same, and the US dollar is just worth less. Maybe we need to shift our focus away from war and drilling; and towards a better economic policy at home.

Here is the AGI data report

And here’s the summary from the AGI report:

The steep increase in the price of crude oil in the United States remains a headline issue, along with the falling US dollar. The drop in the dollar has caused concern in oil-producing countries which use it as the economic basis for the commodity, and often their currency. The chart below shows the spot market price of crude oil per barrel (BBL) in US dollars and in euros from 2001 to today. The price of oil has grown faster relative to the dollar than to the euro. Yet, a portion of the rise in oil prices is due to the fall of the value of the dollar. The graph also shows the number of barrels of crude oil per cost of an ounce of gold, demonstrating the parallel growth in commodity pricing.

If the US dollar had remained strong in the global economy, oil might, in theory, be around $65 per barrel. However, oil is priced in dollars, and oil prices continue to rise. The impact of increased oil prices can not be ignored in the US economy, and, in turn, can further weaken the dollar. Resource economics is a complex feedback loop where today’s resource boom is driven by many external factors. This complex system bears watching by all geoscientists.

When the bottom line overrides the Hippocratic oath

Source: Salon.com.

As a naive pediatric resident, I couldn’t believe it when the surgeon called back and said we don’t treat those kinds of patients.

By Rahul K. Parikh, M.D.

Jul. 16, 2008 | I don’t remember many specific patients from my days as a resident. Like all doctors in training, I was overworked, underpaid and chronically fatigued. With that, details become murky.

What I do remember, though, are certain incidents that gave me pause and made me wonder what the hell I had gotten myself into. The kinds of situations that only residents — who are the blunt business end of America’s sloppy healthcare system — can get stuck in.

Take my experiences in a Los Angeles hospital with kids who needed a surgeon. I would be on call, living in scrubs, trying to digest hospital chow. In the dead of the night, my pager would begin squealing, jarring me awake (if I was lucky to sleep in the first place). A number from an outlying hospital would flash on the screen. Stumbling out of bed to the nearest phone, I would learn that a child with, say, an open fracture of his leg needed to be transferred to our hospital since we offered “a higher level of care,” which often meant an orthopedic surgeon who could treat the child.

Indeed, this is what happened one night. With the child on the way, I paged the orthopedic surgeon on call. Surgeons like information given to them concisely and directly. I ran through what I would say: “Sorry to wake you, Doc, but I have a 5-year-old male en route from a community hospital who has an open fracture of his right femur. According to the transferring physician, he will need to have a reduction in the operating room tonight. While we’re waiting for you, we’ll start morphine for pain relief and some Ancef (an antiobiotic) for infection prophylaxis.” Then I waited for the phone to ring.

When the surgeon, a partner in a private Beverly Hills orthopedic group, returned my call, I was naive enough to expect some further questions about the child’s history, requests for some laboratory work or more X-rays, and instructions on how to prep the operating room. Instead, his first question was: “What’s their insurance?”

Medical students and residents are trained to anticipate and prepare for a lot of things. If we’re doing rounds with a senior physician, we try to be prepared for questions about the illnesses of our patients and how to treat them. For those reasons, and for our love of learning, many of us would talk about our patients and read in advance of our rounds, even when we could have been sleeping.

But I was not prepared for this question. I told the surgeon I would call back with the insurance information, which forced me to call the transferring doctor. I can’t remember if the child was underinsured, uninsured or was insured by the state, but it didn’t matter. When I called the surgeon back, he refused to come in. His group didn’t cover “those kinds” of patients.

So there we were — me, my intern, a nurse — somewhere between late at night and early in the morning, alone. A broken child and his parents were on their way in an ambulance. We had promised to provide “a higher level of care,” but the only doctor who could give that care just killed it. What was my plan? I was the doctor, after all. I had no idea.

In the end, all we could do was give the child morphine (a lot of it) and antibiotics, hoping we could keep him comfortable. Still, every time he moved just a little, he howled in pain. We hoped he wouldn’t lose his leg to some flesh-and-bone-eating infection. And so we waited until morning, when we would ask our teaching attendants to delicately negotiate with the surgical group to please come in and take a look.

What did I learn that night? Certainly nothing about the preoperative and postoperative management of children with femur fractures. No, I learned how even in the dead of night, in the presence of a child suffering, the bottom line can override the Hippocratic oath.

Such is our peculiar institution called American healthcare. We have gobs of money, the best technology, plenty of specialists, and spend the most money on healthcare in the world. Despite that, a child gets left out in the cold. Whom do we blame? Some would say the surgeon for refusing to play ball. But practically speaking, would you, whatever your job, work for free? In some cases, you can hold patients accountable for being careless with their health — drinking, smoking, eating too many McNuggets — but you can’t prevent unforeseen things.

This is especially evident in pediatrics where children will suddenly develop epilepsy or leukemia, or have an accident. You can blame insurers for their reimbursement games, the American Medical Association for lobbying to maintain the status quo, lawyers for bringing frivolous lawsuits, or drug makers for blocking international imports to keep prices high. The list goes on and on. But in the end, put it all together and it’s a system, a monstrous medical-pharmaceutical-legal-actuarial-industrial complex that’s leaving a lot of people behind.

There are triumphs to report. But those often refer to the most fortunate. Take the celebrity mother who went into preterm labor at 35 weeks during a transcontinental flight. She was wheeled into a private hospital room (off limits, of course, to residents), where her private doctor and two neonatal ICU specialists were waiting for her. I was called in a couple of days later and found a very large, intimidating dude standing at the door, checking the IDs of everyone who went in and out. He was the celebrity mother’s bodyguard. While the baby was there, his pediatrician, a 90210 doctor type whose signature wasn’t his clinical acumen but his Tommy Bahama shirts, checked the mother twice a day.

But healthcare, unlike caviar and first-class airline tickets, shouldn’t just be for rich patients and their doctors. So enough already. Let’s fix this mess. Get people insured, get incentives aligned, use technology to be more efficient and effective. Stop relying on market forces, stop backing the status quo, give people, rich or poor, access to quality healthcare. It won’t be perfect. There will be challenges, the most important one being that we will have to confront the fact that we’re trying to do unlimited things with limited resources. But we need to level the playing field, not only for the next child with a broken leg, but for the overworked, underappreciated staff of doctors and nurses who commit to taking care of him in the middle of the night.

Pentagon Front Groups Release Laughable Olympics “Terror” Video

Source: Prison Planet.

“Al-Qaeda linked” organization threatens to target Beijing 2008 just as their predecessors did Athens 2004, the 2002 World Cup, the 2006 World Cup, Euro 2008, the local egg and spoon race, etc, etc, etc.

IntelCenter and SITE Intelligence Group, two “terrorism monitoring firms” who routinely obtain so-called Al-Qaeda tapes that usually turn out to be completely fraudulent, yesterday released a video purported to feature members of a Chinese Muslim terror group threatening to attack the Olympics.

“The threat, attributed to the Turkistan Islamic Party (TIP), is contained in a new video which shows a burning Olympics logo and an explosion imposed over a venue to be used for the Beijing Games,” reports Sky News.

“It is believed to be based across the border in Pakistan, where security experts say it has received training from al Qaeda.”

Terrorists who routinely threaten to attack global sporting events have a track record of failing to follow up on their promises.

Euro 2008, held in Switzerland and Austria, was preceded by an “Al-Qaeda” threat to “transform the safest countries in Europe to the hell seen in Iraq or Afghanistan”.

Having personally visited Switzerland last week, Geneva and Montreux didn’t really remind me of Kabul or Baghdad.

In addition, before both soccer World Cup tournaments in 2002 and 2006 we were told that Al-Qaeda were planning to strike. Nothing happened.

The 2004 Olympic Games in Athens Greece was also a target. Nothing happened.

This leads us to question if “terrorists” are really behind the videos at all, because the tapes certainly aren’t doing anything for their street cred.

Judging by the latest video, we are still being led to believe that well-equipped deadly terrorist organizations still can’t afford to obtain a $200 video camera to ensure their audio doesn’t sound like a badly dubbed 80’s B movie.

Watch the clip.

http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=13a_1218125381

The “explosion” described in news reports appears to sound more like a cheap firework when one views the video. It seems as though an impression of an inhumane, divorced from civilization, rugged and barbarous stereotype is being deliberately groomed by the creators of the tapes so as to heighten their mystique and fearmongering quality.

The origin of the video leads right back to our old friends once again, IntelCenter and SITE Intelligence Group.

SITE have resolved to keep things simple this time on the back of this past May’s embarrassment, when they claimed terrorists had put together an elaborate image of Washington DC after a nuclear attack. It turned out that the picture was a screenshot from a video game called Fallout 3.

As we have exhaustively documented, Intelcenter is an offshoot of IDEFENSE, which was staffed by a senior military psy-op intelligence officer Jim Melnick, who has worked directly for Donald Rumsfeld. The organization released the “laughing hijackers” tape and claimed it was an Al-Qaeda video, despite the fact that the footage was obtained by a “security agency” at a 2000 Bin Laden speech.

They were also behind the release of videos of Bin Laden speeches cobbled together from 5-year-old footage and claimed it was a new tape.

IntelCenter was recently caught adding its logo to a tape at the same time as Al-Qaeda’s so-called media arm As-Sahab added its logo, proving the two organizations were one and the same.

The Pakistani based Al-Qaeda group Jundullah, formerly headed by the alleged mastermind of 9/11, an organization which enjoys the funding, support and protection of the CIA, also produces propaganda tapes and literature for As-Sahab and in turn IntelCenter.

All good reasons to treat this latest tape exactly for what it is – crude propaganda designed to coerce people to continue to buy into the fraud of the war on terror and the justification for the only real war taking place, that being waged on our freedom of movement and quickly disappearing liberties.

Cartoon of the day: “The War on Terror’s Underlings”

Source: Truth Dig.

By Mike Luckovich

Drugs.com Lists “Autism” as Known Adverse Reaction to DTaP Vaccine Tripedia

From Adventures in Autism:

In Drugs.com’s “A to Z Drug Facts” section the entry on Diphtheria / Tetanus Toxoids / Acellular Pertussis Vaccine contains the following Central Nervous System Adverse reactions for Sanofi Pasteur’s Tripedia:

“Tripedia
Drowsiness (29%); irritability (25%); anorexia (10%); fussiness (6%); autism, convulsion, encephalopathy, grand mal convulsion, hypotonia, neuropathy, somnolence (postmarketing).”

Hats off to Drugs.com for actually providing informed consent to consumers. To my knowledge they are the first to do it.

HT: Allison Chapman