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Obama’s “casual fascism.”
Interesting essay from Dan Collins at Conservativecommune.com, and he’s just about right.
Private industry has been informed that they are now under the power of the state. The government can compel industry to do it’s will pretty much without restriction now. “Private enterprise” in this country is being destroyed. (Though it can be revived with lots of hard work.)
It is not just government doing the compelling. The corporations are entwined in a vulgar tango of cronyism with the state. Where the state compels, industry compels elsewhere. Yin and yang, but the distinctions between the 2 camps are increasingly ill-defined.
View full post on AgainstCronyCapitalism.org
American • President Obama’s Dragnet
President Obama’s Dragnet
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD
Published: June 6, 2013
Within hours of the disclosure that federal authorities routinely collect data on phone calls Americans make, regardless of whether they have any bearing on a counterterrorism investigation, the Obama administration issued the same platitude it has offered every time President Obama has been caught overreaching in the use of his powers: Terrorists are a real menace and you should just trust us to deal with them because we have internal mechanisms (that we are not going to tell you about) to make sure we do not violate your rights.
Those reassurances have never been persuasive — whether on secret warrants to scoop up a news agency’s phone records or secret orders to kill an American suspected of terrorism — especially coming from a president who once promised transparency and accountability.
The administration has now lost all credibility on this issue. Mr. Obama is proving the truism that the executive branch will use any power it is given and very likely abuse it. That is one reason we have long argued that the Patriot Act, enacted in the heat of fear after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks by members of Congress who mostly had not even read it, was reckless in its assignment of unnecessary and overbroad surveillance powers.
Based on an article in The Guardian published Wednesday night, we now know that the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the National Security Agency used the Patriot Act to obtain a secret warrant to compel Verizon’s business services division to turn over data on every single call that went through its system. We know that this particular order was a routine extension of surveillance that has been going on for years, and it seems very likely that it extends beyond Verizon’s business division. There is every reason to believe the federal government has been collecting every bit of information about every American’s phone calls except the words actually exchanged in those calls.
Articles in The Washington Post and The Guardian described a process by which the N.S.A. is also able to capture Internet communications directly from the servers of nine leading American companies. The articles raised questions about whether the N.S.A. separated foreign communications from domestic ones.
A senior administration official quoted in The Times online Thursday afternoon about the Verizon order offered the lame observation that the information does not include the name of any caller, as though there would be the slightest difficulty in matching numbers to names. He said the information “has been a critical tool in protecting the nation from terrorist threats,” because it allows the government “to discover whether known or suspected terrorists have been in contact with other persons who may be engaged in terrorist activities, particularly people located inside the United States.”
•
That is a vital goal, but how is it served by collecting everyone’s call data? The government can easily collect phone records (including the actual content of those calls) on “known or suspected terrorists” without logging every call made. In fact, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was expanded in 2008 for that very purpose.
Essentially, the administration is saying that without any individual suspicion of wrongdoing, the government is allowed to know whom Americans are calling every time they make a phone call, for how long they talk and from where.
This sort of tracking can reveal a lot of personal and intimate information about an individual. To casually permit this surveillance — with the American public having no idea that the executive branch is now exercising this power — fundamentally shifts power between the individual and the state, and it repudiates constitutional principles governing search, seizure and privacy.
The defense of this practice offered by Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, who as chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee is supposed to be preventing this sort of overreaching, was absurd. She said on Thursday that the authorities need this information in case someone might become a terrorist in the future. Senator Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, the vice chairman of the committee, said the surveillance has “proved meritorious, because we have gathered significant information on bad guys and only on bad guys over the years.”
But what assurance do we have of that, especially since Ms. Feinstein went on to say that she actually did not know how the data being collected was used?
The senior administration official quoted in The Times said the executive branch internally reviews surveillance programs to ensure that they “comply with the Constitution and laws of the United States and appropriately protect privacy and civil liberties.”
That’s no longer good enough. Mr. Obama clearly had no intention of revealing this eavesdropping, just as he would not have acknowledged the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen, had it not been reported in the press. Even then, it took him more than a year and a half to acknowledge the killing, and he is still keeping secret the protocol by which he makes such decisions.
•
We are not questioning the legality under the Patriot Act of the court order disclosed by The Guardian. But we strongly object to using that power in this manner. It is the very sort of thing against which Mr. Obama once railed, when he said in 2007 that the surveillance policy of the George W. Bush administration “puts forward a false choice between the liberties we cherish and the security we provide.”
Two Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee, Ron Wyden of Oregon and Mark Udall of Colorado, have raised warnings about the government’s overbroad interpretation of its surveillance powers. “We believe most Americans would be stunned to learn the details of how these secret court opinions have interpreted Section 215 of the Patriot Act,” they wrote last year in a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. “As we see it, there is now a significant gap between what most Americans think the law allows and what the government secretly claims the law allows. This is a problem, because it is impossible to have an informed public debate about what the law should say when the public doesn’t know what its government thinks the law says.”
On Thursday, Representative Jim Sensenbrenner, Republican of Wisconsin, who introduced the Patriot Act in 2001, said that the National Security Agency overstepped its bounds by obtaining a secret order to collect phone log records from millions of Americans.
“As the author of the Patriot Act, I am extremely troubled by the F.B.I.’s interpretation of this legislation,” he said in a statement. “While I believe the Patriot Act appropriately balanced national security concerns and civil rights, I have always worried about potential abuses.” He added: “Seizing phone records of millions of innocent people is excessive and un-American.”
Stunning use of the act shows, once again, why it needs to be sharply curtailed if not repealed.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/07/opini … .html?_r=0
Statistics: Posted by yoda — Thu Jun 06, 2013 7:50 pm
View full post on opinions.caduceusx.com
War and Conflict • Obama’s Years of Collaboration with Terror Supporters
Islamic infiltration into the government of the United States
Obama’s Years of Collaboration with Terror Supporters
By Arnold Ahlert
Wednesday, June 5, 2013
As the Obama administration seeks to move beyond a welter of scandals, a new report by investigative journalist Patrick Poole reveals that the frenzy isn’t quite over yet. On top of the IRS’s targeting of conservatives, the DOJ’s seizure of reporters’ phone records and the coverup surrounding the murder of four Americans in Benghazi, the White House’s years-long collaboration with supporters of terrorism is finally getting the scrutiny it deserves.
Poole’s comprehensive GLORIA Center article, “Blind to Terror: The U.S. Government’s Disastrous Muslim Outreach Efforts and the Impact on U.S. Policy,” details the Obama administration’s extensive relationship with accomplices to terrorism and how these associations have shaped administration policy—and endangered the American public in the process. As Middle East expert Barry Rubin commented on the report, “[Y]ou may think that you know this story—but it is far more extensive than has ever before been revealed.”
The primary question at the heart of Poole’s report is simple:
Why has the U.S. government called certain Islamic groups supporters of terror in federal court, and then turned around and called these same organizations ‘moderates’ and embraced them as outreach partners?
Many of the individuals under active federal investigation for terrorist activities were simultaneously meeting with government officials to help formulate U.S. policy during the last three administrations. Under the Obama administration, these same Islamist organizations and their leaders have influenced vital policy measures, including a purge of counter-terrorism training that makes it virtually impossible for law enforcement officials “to connect the dots.”
For example, Poole cites the failure of the FBI to carry out an investigation of Tamerlan Tsarnaev prior to the Boston Marathon bombings, despite Russian warnings. He attributes a portion of that failure to
a full scale campaign of political correctness waged inside the bureau and throughout the U.S. government under the Obama administration against any attempt to link jihadi terrorism with anything remotely connected to Islam of any variety.
This regime of “political correctness” (to put it charitably) is no doubt a function of the Obama administration’s choice of Muslim “outreach partners,” which is rife with individuals like Shaykh Kifah Mustapha. The National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) extended an invitation to Mustapha to tour its top-secret facility in September 2010, as part of the FBI’s civilian training program, despite the fact that he was named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation trial. That trial represents the largest terrorist financing case in history. During the trial, an FBI agent testified that Mustapha undertook fundraising efforts for Hamas, glorified the terrorist group, and encouraged the slaughter of Jews. Furthermore, the visit also followed Mustapha’s previous removal as a chaplain for the Illinois State Police, due to media reports of his terrorist activities.
The same reckless discounting of radicalism and terror ties can be found at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), where Janet Napolitano appointed Mohamed Elibiary to her Homeland Security Advisory Council in October 2010, despite his honoring Iranian Ayatollah Khomeini at a 2004 conference, and his open support for Islamist godfather Sayyid Qutb. In 2010, Mohamed Majid, president of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), was sitting a few feet from Obama at the annual White House Iftar dinner in August, commemorating the Muslim celebration of Ramadan. ISNA was also cited as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation case, along with the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and the North American Islamic Trust (NAIT).
The terrorist connections of Muslim aid programs and their financiers have also been scrupulously ignored. The Obama administration continues to fund the Sunni Ittehad Council to combat Pakistani extremism, despite rallies it held celebrating the assassination of a Pakistani governor opposed to the nation’s use of blasphemy laws to punish religious minorities.
Poole also cites the disturbing number of “leaders of American Islamic organizations that partner with the U.S. government” who transition into officials for Muslim Brotherhood fronts. Louay Safi is one such individual. Safi, a former top advisor at the Pentagon, appeared at a 2011 press conference in Istanbul as one the leaders of the Syrian National Council, which seeks to topple Syrian President Bashar Assad and is associated with the Brotherhood. That appearance occurred only weeks after Safi met with top White House officials. Safi was yet another unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land case. According to Poole, Safi’s status at the Pentagon became an issue following the Fort Hood atrocity, “when 13 members of Congress sent a letter to Defense Secretary Gates complaining that not only was Safi endorsing Muslim chaplains for the Defense Department on behalf of ISNA [a Muslim Brotherhood front], but also teaching classes on the ‘Theology of Islam’ to troops departing for Afghanistan at Fort Hood and Fort Bliss under a subcontract with the Naval Postgraduate School.”
Five other men made a similar transformation. Ghassan Hitto, a Dallas businessman, former director of CAIR’s Texas branch, and a recent board member of the Muslim American Society that the FBI has identified as a North American “arm” of the Muslim Brotherhood, has become “the provision premier of the Syrian resistance.”
Muthanna al-Hanooti is a former CAIR director and a former federal prisoner convicted for doing business with Iraq as part of a plea deal that stemmed from a far more serious indictment accusing him of attempting to influence Congress on behalf of Hussein’s Iraqi Intelligence Service (ISI). He is now regional director for the Detroit chapter of the Muslim Legal Fund of America.
Mahmoud Hussein is the current secretary general of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, recruited while studying at the University of Iowa. He was once president of a now defunct subsidiary of ISNA know as the Muslim Arab Youth Association (MAYA), which sponsored several conferences featuring terrorists affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood.
Ishaq Farhan, a longtime board member of the Washington-based International Institute for Islamic Thought (IIIT) now heads the the Islamic Action Front, the Muslim Brotherhood’s political arm in Jordan.
Ahmed Yousef was the director of the United Association for Studies and Research (UASR), identified as early as 1993 as Hamas’s “political command” in America. According to the terror group’s charter, they consider themselves a “wing” of the Muslim Brotherhood in Palestine. Yousef, who fled the U.S. in 2005 on terror-realted charges, is currently a spokesman for Hamas in Gaza, and a senior political adviser to their terrorist leader, Ismail Haniyeh.
Poole notes that, because so many of the Islamic outreach partners affiliated with the government turned out to be fronts for the Muslim Brotherhood, the government is making “extraordinary efforts” to ignore that reality. This self-orchestrated denial has led to an incredible policy implemented by the Obama administration, one that was formulated as a result of the FBI’s continued relationship with CAIR, despite its aforementioned status as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land case.
It began with the purge of hundreds of documents and presentations from counterterrorism manuals, leading to the creation of the FBI’s “Touchstone Document.” That document finally codified the Obama administration’s increasingly despicable approach to terror. It articulates a new policy that ought to enrage every American, even as it will undoubtedly endanger us all (emphasis added):
Training must clearly distinguish between constitutionally protected statements and activities designed to achieve political, social, or other objectives, and violent extremism, which is characterized by the use, threatened use, or advocacy of use of force or violence (when directed at and likely to incite imminent lawless activity) in violation of federal law to further a movement’s social or political ideologies. This distinction includes recognition of the corresponding principle that mere association with organizations that demonstrate both legitimate (advocacy) and illicit (violent extremism) objectives should not automatically result in a determination that the associated individual is acting in furtherance of the organization’s illicit objective(s).
In other words, if a terrorist group performs any “advocacy” function, such as building a school or a day care center, the FBI cannot “jump to conclusions” about individuals associated with the group, even if it is also perpetrating mass murder. Thus, as Poole notes, the terror support of this administration’s Muslim outreach partners “is absolved with a rhetorical sleight-of-hand.”
The result? “This is why Mohamed Majid, who just a few years before was treated as a pariah by the Attorney General of the United States after federal prosecutors named his organization as a front for the Muslim Brotherhood and a supporter of terrorism in the largest terrorism financing trial in American history, can just a few short years later not only be rehabilitated, but can regularly be found—much as al-Qa’ida fundraiser Abdul Rahman al-Amoudi who preceded him‚Äìa frequent visitor to the White House,” writes Poole.
Poole then goes on to reveal a parade of “rehabilitated” terrorists and their organizations that have been, and will continue to be, welcomed into the country by the Obama administration. These include people like Hani Nour Eldin, a known member of the U.S.-designated terrorist group Egyptian al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya, who visited the White House in 2012 to demand the release of “Blind Sheikh” Omar Abdel Rahman. Rahman was convicted for his role in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. Sudanese war criminal Nafie Ali Nafie, the architect of two genocides in that nation, also got the red carpet treatment, receiving an invitation to the State Department as part of a Sudanese delegation.
Poole further reveals that such monstrous accommodation begets an even more insidious downside. “No sooner had the White House’s new outreach policy been announced, when it became clear that one of the policy outcomes of this relationship was the administration’s enforcement of a blacklist of subject matter experts deemed ‘enemies’ by their Muslim partners,” he writes. Coupled with the “Islamophobic” purge of law enforcement training manuals, the Obama administration began fully embracing this Alice in Wonderland approach to terror, best described as one that allows enemies of the United States to help us decide who our enemies are—and who they aren’t.
Poole uses a quote by Andrew McCarthy, who prosecuted the Blind Sheikh, to encapsulate the insidiousness of this policy. “I marched into the courtroom every day for nine months and proved that there was an undeniable nexus between Islamic doctrine and terrorism committed by Muslims…And when I demonstrated the straight-line, undeniable logic of the evidence—that scripture informed the Blind Sheikh’s directives; that those directives informed his terrorist subordinates; and that those subordinates then committed atrocities—the government gave me the Justice Department’s highest award,” McCarthy writes. “Today, I’d be ostracized. No longer is the government content to be willfully blind. Today, it is defiantly, coercively, extortionately blind.”
It is far worse than that. When five members of Congress led by the retiring Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) attempted to ascertain the level of Islamic infiltration into the government of the United States, members of both political parties, along with the media, excoriated their efforts to protect the American public. Their ire was further stoked by the group’s inquiry into Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin’s family, despite the reality that her mother, brother and deceased father are/were members of the Muslim Brotherhood and its affiliate organization, the Muslim Sisterhood. Ironically, given the parameters of the Touchstone Document, it would now likely be irrelevant if Huma Abedin herself belonged to either branch of the organization.
Yet as this extensive investigation by Poole reveals, Bachmann, et al., have not only been vindicated, they may have underestimated the problem. It remains to be seen if Congress, already up to its necks in administration scandals, will be willing to take this one on as well. As the atrocity in Boston indicates, American lives literally depend on it.
Comments
Arnold was an op-ed columist with the NY Post for eight years, currently writing for JewishWorldReview.com and FrontPageMag.com. Arnold can be reached at: atahlert@comcast.net
http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/55684
Statistics: Posted by yoda — Wed Jun 05, 2013 6:15 am
View full post on opinions.caduceusx.com
American • Obama’s Super Secret Treaty Which Will Push The Deindustria
Obama’s Super Secret Treaty Which Will Push The Deindustrialization Of America Into Overdrive
By Michael, on June 3rd, 2013
Did you know that Barack Obama has been secretly negotiating the most important trade agreement since the formation of the World Trade Organization? Did you know that this agreement will impose very strict Internet copyright rules, ban all "Buy American" laws, give Wall Street banks much more freedom to trade risky derivatives and force even more domestic manufacturing offshore? If you have not heard about this treaty, don’t feel bad. Obama has refused to even give Congress a copy of the draft agreement and he has banned members of Congress from attending the negotiations. The plan is to keep this treaty secret until the very last minute and then to railroad it through Congress and have it signed into law by October. The treaty is known as "the Trans-Pacific Partnership", and the nations that are reported to be involved in the development of this treaty include the United States, Canada, Japan, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand, Chile, Peru, Brunei, Singapore, Vietnam and Malaysia. Opponents of this treaty refer to it as "the NAFTA of the Pacific", and if it is enacted it will push the deindustrialization of America into overdrive.
The "one world" economic agenda that Barack Obama has been pushing is absolutely killing the U.S. economy. As you will see later in this article, we are losing jobs and businesses at an astounding pace. And each new "free trade" agreement makes things even worse.
For example, just check out the impact that the recent free trade agreement that Obama negotiated with South Korea is having on us…
A 10 percent decline of U.S. exports to Korea
The U.S. trade deficit with Korea has climbed 37 percent
U.S. auto industry has been crippled
Loss of U.S. control where international trade, banking and finance is concerned
A projected 159,000 jobs will be lost
Wait a second – I though that "free trade" agreements were actually supposed to increase exports.
So why have they declined by 10 percent?
Did someone make a really bad deal?
And of course we have all seen the economic devastation that NAFTA has wrought.
When NAFTA was pushed through Congress in 1993, the United States actually had a trade surplus with Mexico of 1.6 billion dollars. By 2010, we had a trade deficit with Mexico of 61.6 billion dollars.
And "free trade" with China has turned out to be a complete and total nightmare as well.
Back in 1985, our trade deficit with China was approximately 6 million dollars (million with a little "m") for the entire year.
In 2012, our trade deficit with China was 315 billion dollars. That was the largest trade deficit that one nation has had with another nation in the history of the world.
But instead of learning from the mistakes of the past, Barack Obama is pressing for more "free trade" agreements.
The New York Times is calling the Trans-Pacific Partnership "the most significant international commercial agreement since the creation of the World Trade Organization in 1995". It is reportedly going to include a whole host of provisions which would never be able to get through Congress on their own. Even though this treaty will affect all of our daily lives, the Obama administration is keeping this treaty a total secret. In fact, Obama won’t even show it to Congress even though members of Congress have asked repeatedly to see it…
The agreement, under negotiation since 2008, would set new rules for everything from food safety and financial markets to medicine prices and Internet freedom. It would include at least 12 of the countries bordering the Pacific and be open for more to join. President Obama has said he wants to sign it by October.
Although Congress has exclusive constitutional authority to set the terms of trade, so far the executive branch has managed to resist repeated requests by members of Congress to see the text of the draft agreement and has denied requests from members to attend negotiations as observers — reversing past practice.
While the agreement could rewrite broad sections of nontrade policies affecting Americans’ daily lives, the administration also has rejected demands by outside groups that the nearly complete text be publicly released.
So exactly who in the world does this guy think that he is? Why won’t Obama let us know exactly what is in this treaty?
Fortunately, there have been a few leaks. One thing that we have discovered is that this new treaty would reportedly ban all "Buy American laws".
That certainly would not be popular if it got out.
And do you remember SOPA?
The American people wanted nothing to do with the very strict Internet copyright provisions of SOPA and loudly expressed their displeasure to members of Congress.
Unfortunately, now the provisions of SOPA are back. It is being reported that most of the provisions of SOPA have been quietly inserted into this treaty. If this treaty is enacted, those provisions will become law and the American people will not be able to do anything about it.
And according to the New York Times, there are all sorts of other disturbing things that have been slipped into the treaty…
And yet another leak revealed that the deal would include even more expansive incentives to relocate domestic manufacturing offshore than were included in Nafta — a deal that drained millions of manufacturing jobs from the American economy.
The agreement would also be a boon for Wall Street and its campaign to water down regulations put in place after the 2008 financial crisis. Among other things, it would practically forbid bans on risky financial products, including the toxic derivatives that helped cause the crisis in the first place.
Are you starting to understand why the Obama administration is keeping this treaty such a secret?
If the details of this treaty were revealed to the American people right now, it would create such an uproar that Congress would never approve this treaty.
So please share this article with as many people as you can. We have got to get the American people educated about this.
Enough damage has already been done to the U.S. economy by "free trade" agreements. Just consider the following statistics…
-The United States has lost more than 56,000 manufacturing facilities since 2001.
-Back in the year 2000, there were more than 17 million Americans working in manufacturing. Now there are less than 12 million.
-There are less Americans working in manufacturing today than there was in 1950 even though the population of the country has more than doubled since then.
-According to the Economic Policy Institute, America is losing half a million jobs to China every single year.
-According to Professor Alan Blinder of Princeton University, 40 million more U.S. jobs could be sent offshore over the next two decades if current trends continue.
-Today, corporate profits as a percentage of U.S. GDP are at an all-time high, but wages as a percentage of U.S. GDP are near an all-time low.
-Without enough good jobs, more Americans are becoming dependent on the government. If you can believe it, the number of Americans on food stamps has gone from about 17 million in the year 2000 to more than 47 million today.
-Overall, the United States has run a trade deficit of more than 8 trillion dollars with the rest of the world since 1975.
And things continue to get even worse. The Institute for Supply Management manufacturing index declined to 49.0 in May. Any reading below 50 indicates contraction.
That was the lowest reading that we have seen since June 2009. Just like most of the rest of the world, we are rapidly heading toward another major economic downturn.
And if you want a perfect visual example of what deindustrialization is doing to America, just look at the city of Detroit.
It was once one of the greatest manufacturing cities in the history of the world, but now it is a rotting, decaying, festering hellhole.
According to the New York Times, there are now approximately 70,000 abandoned buildings in Detroit, and at this point the city is so broke that there is talk that the female giraffe at the Detroit Zoo could be sold off to help pay the bills.
For much more on how deindustrialization is ripping the guts out of the U.S. economy, please see the following articles…
1) "55 Reasons Why You Should Buy Products That Are Made In America"
2) "40 Ways That China Is Beating America"
3) "Show This To Anyone That Believes That ‘Things Are Getting Better’ In America"
4) "10 Amazing Charts That Demonstrate The Slow, Agonizing Death Of The American Worker"
5) "22 Stats That Show How The Emerging One World Economy Is Absolutely Killing American Workers"
What Barack Obama is trying to do is a mind blowing mistake.
The "one world" economic agenda that he is pursuing is destroying the American worker and the American middle class.
U.S. workers are being thrown into a global labor pool with workers on the other side of the planet that live in countries where it is legal to pay slave labor wages.
Do you want to directly compete with a worker on the other side of the globe that is doing your job for a dollar an hour with no benefits?
If not, you need to stand up and make your voice be heard.
There is no way in the world that American workers should have to compete for jobs with workers making slave labor wages in communist China.
What we desperately need are some red-blooded economic patriots to arise and to tell both political parties that we do not want this "one world" economic agenda.
http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/arch … -overdrive
Statistics: Posted by yoda — Mon Jun 03, 2013 3:58 pm
View full post on opinions.caduceusx.com
Obama’s Super Secret Treaty Which Will Push The Deindustrialization Of America Into Overdrive
Did you know that Barack Obama has been secretly negotiating the most important trade agreement since the formation of the World Trade Organization? Did you know that this agreement will impose very strict Internet copyright rules, ban all “Buy American” laws, give Wall Street banks much more freedom to trade risky derivatives and force even more domestic manufacturing offshore? If you have not heard about this treaty, don’t feel bad. Obama has refused to even give Congress a copy of the draft agreement and he has banned members of Congress from attending the negotiations. The plan is to keep this treaty secret until the very last minute and then to railroad it through Congress and have it signed into law by October. The treaty is known as “the Trans-Pacific Partnership”, and the nations that are reported to be involved in the development of this treaty include the United States, Canada, Japan, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand, Chile, Peru, Brunei, Singapore, Vietnam and Malaysia. Opponents of this treaty refer to it as “the NAFTA of the Pacific”, and if it is enacted it will push the deindustrialization of America into overdrive.
The “one world” economic agenda that Barack Obama has been pushing is absolutely killing the U.S. economy. As you will see later in this article, we are losing jobs and businesses at an astounding pace. And each new “free trade” agreement makes things even worse.
For example, just check out the impact that the recent free trade agreement that Obama negotiated with South Korea is having on us…
- A 10 percent decline of U.S. exports to Korea
- The U.S. trade deficit with Korea has climbed 37 percent
- U.S. auto industry has been crippled
- Loss of U.S. control where international trade, banking and finance is concerned
- A projected 159,000 jobs will be lost
Wait a second – I though that “free trade” agreements were actually supposed to increase exports.
So why have they declined by 10 percent?
Did someone make a really bad deal?
And of course we have all seen the economic devastation that NAFTA has wrought.
When NAFTA was pushed through Congress in 1993, the United States actually had a trade surplus with Mexico of 1.6 billion dollars. By 2010, we had a trade deficit with Mexico of 61.6 billion dollars.
And “free trade” with China has turned out to be a complete and total nightmare as well.
Back in 1985, our trade deficit with China was approximately 6 million dollars (million with a little “m”) for the entire year.
In 2012, our trade deficit with China was 315 billion dollars. That was the largest trade deficit that one nation has had with another nation in the history of the world.
But instead of learning from the mistakes of the past, Barack Obama is pressing for more “free trade” agreements.
The New York Times is calling the Trans-Pacific Partnership “the most significant international commercial agreement since the creation of the World Trade Organization in 1995“. It is reportedly going to include a whole host of provisions which would never be able to get through Congress on their own. Even though this treaty will affect all of our daily lives, the Obama administration is keeping this treaty a total secret. In fact, Obama won’t even show it to Congress even though members of Congress have asked repeatedly to see it…
The agreement, under negotiation since 2008, would set new rules for everything from food safety and financial markets to medicine prices and Internet freedom. It would include at least 12 of the countries bordering the Pacific and be open for more to join. President Obama has said he wants to sign it by October.
Although Congress has exclusive constitutional authority to set the terms of trade, so far the executive branch has managed to resist repeated requests by members of Congress to see the text of the draft agreement and has denied requests from members to attend negotiations as observers — reversing past practice.
While the agreement could rewrite broad sections of nontrade policies affecting Americans’ daily lives, the administration also has rejected demands by outside groups that the nearly complete text be publicly released.
So exactly who in the world does this guy think that he is? Why won’t Obama let us know exactly what is in this treaty?
Fortunately, there have been a few leaks. One thing that we have discovered is that this new treaty would reportedly ban all “Buy American laws“.
That certainly would not be popular if it got out.
And do you remember SOPA?
The American people wanted nothing to do with the very strict Internet copyright provisions of SOPA and loudly expressed their displeasure to members of Congress.
Unfortunately, now the provisions of SOPA are back. It is being reported that most of the provisions of SOPA have been quietly inserted into this treaty. If this treaty is enacted, those provisions will become law and the American people will not be able to do anything about it.
And according to the New York Times, there are all sorts of other disturbing things that have been slipped into the treaty…
And yet another leak revealed that the deal would include even more expansive incentives to relocate domestic manufacturing offshore than were included in Nafta — a deal that drained millions of manufacturing jobs from the American economy.
The agreement would also be a boon for Wall Street and its campaign to water down regulations put in place after the 2008 financial crisis. Among other things, it would practically forbid bans on risky financial products, including the toxic derivatives that helped cause the crisis in the first place.
Are you starting to understand why the Obama administration is keeping this treaty such a secret?
If the details of this treaty were revealed to the American people right now, it would create such an uproar that Congress would never approve this treaty.
So please share this article with as many people as you can. We have got to get the American people educated about this.
Enough damage has already been done to the U.S. economy by “free trade” agreements. Just consider the following statistics…
-The United States has lost more than 56,000 manufacturing facilities since 2001.
-Back in the year 2000, there were more than 17 million Americans working in manufacturing. Now there are less than 12 million.
-There are less Americans working in manufacturing today than there was in 1950 even though the population of the country has more than doubled since then.
-According to the Economic Policy Institute, America is losing half a million jobs to China every single year.
-According to Professor Alan Blinder of Princeton University, 40 million more U.S. jobs could be sent offshore over the next two decades if current trends continue.
-Today, corporate profits as a percentage of U.S. GDP are at an all-time high, but wages as a percentage of U.S. GDP are near an all-time low.
-Without enough good jobs, more Americans are becoming dependent on the government. If you can believe it, the number of Americans on food stamps has gone from about 17 million in the year 2000 to more than 47 million today.
-Overall, the United States has run a trade deficit of more than 8 trillion dollars with the rest of the world since 1975.
And things continue to get even worse. The Institute for Supply Management manufacturing index declined to 49.0 in May. Any reading below 50 indicates contraction.
That was the lowest reading that we have seen since June 2009. Just like most of the rest of the world, we are rapidly heading toward another major economic downturn.
And if you want a perfect visual example of what deindustrialization is doing to America, just look at the city of Detroit.
It was once one of the greatest manufacturing cities in the history of the world, but now it is a rotting, decaying, festering hellhole.
According to the New York Times, there are now approximately 70,000 abandoned buildings in Detroit, and at this point the city is so broke that there is talk that the female giraffe at the Detroit Zoo could be sold off to help pay the bills.
For much more on how deindustrialization is ripping the guts out of the U.S. economy, please see the following articles…
1) “55 Reasons Why You Should Buy Products That Are Made In America“
2) “40 Ways That China Is Beating America“
3) “Show This To Anyone That Believes That ‘Things Are Getting Better’ In America“
4) “10 Amazing Charts That Demonstrate The Slow, Agonizing Death Of The American Worker“
5) “22 Stats That Show How The Emerging One World Economy Is Absolutely Killing American Workers“
What Barack Obama is trying to do is a mind blowing mistake.
The “one world” economic agenda that he is pursuing is destroying the American worker and the American middle class.
U.S. workers are being thrown into a global labor pool with workers on the other side of the planet that live in countries where it is legal to pay slave labor wages.
Do you want to directly compete with a worker on the other side of the globe that is doing your job for a dollar an hour with no benefits?
If not, you need to stand up and make your voice be heard.
There is no way in the world that American workers should have to compete for jobs with workers making slave labor wages in communist China.
What we desperately need are some red-blooded economic patriots to arise and to tell both political parties that we do not want this “one world” economic agenda.
So what do you think?
Will the American people wake up, or will our economy continue to lose thousands of businesses and millions of jobs?
Please feel free to post a comment with your thoughts below…
View full post on The Economic Collapse
War and Conflict • Obama’s Iraq Surrender
A complete–and bloody–realignment of the entire Middle East is occurring
Obama’s Iraq Surrender
By Arnold Ahlert
Friday, May 31, 2013
After almost a century of existence, the borders that form the modern Mideast nation states appear to be on the verge of disintegration. Part of the driving force behind this meltdown, as observers are beginning to acknowledge, is of course the intractable sectarian war in Syria. But a far bigger part of the picture is the accelerating destabilization of Iraq.
The breakdown of Iraq, with its far-reaching regional ramifications, is attributable in no small part to President Obama’s abandonment of the U.S.‘s mission in the country, a betrayal committed in total defiance of the military establishment’s recommendations, which squandered the hard-won victory handed down by President Bush. As predicted, our precipitous withdrawal has left the once pacified nation riven with sectarian strife, primarily among Sunni and Shia Muslims and the Kurds. As the region descends, the consequences of Obama’s folly are only becoming more obvious: a nation that once stood a chance at being a source of stability in the region is instead rapidly becoming its maelstrom.
In 1916, Sir Mark Sykes of Britain and Georges Picot of France signed a secret agreement, with Russia’s approval, to dissolve the Ottoman Empire. The Sykes-Picot agreement was concerned with creating Middle East spheres of influence for France and Great Britain following their victory in WWl. The League of Nations facilitated the mandates over the territory captured by both nations. France got Syria and Lebanon, and Britain got Iraq. The agreement also separated the British mandatory Palestine, known by its Arab residents prior to WWI as “Surya al-Janubiyya” (Southern Syria), from the French mandatory of Syria to the north. For its approval of the deal, Russia received territory that eventually became Turkey.
Thus, the artificial borders of five countries were established. In the ensuing years, two critical realities were also realized: in Syria, the Alawite minority, the sect to which current president Bashar Assad belongs, was granted power over the Sunni majority. In Iraq, the Sunni minority was empowered at the expense of the Shi’ite majority. In other words, borders created to satisfy European sensibilities largely ignored the realities of historic ethnic, tribal and sectarian divisions. these divisions were exacerbated by the rise of dictators, tyrants and Arab monarchs who maintained power after the French and British withdrew in the middle of last century.
It is those divisions that are now asserting themselves.
The current flashpoint involves the 370 mile border separating Iraq from Syria. The civil war on the Syrian side has drawn everyone in the region into the conflict. On the Shi’ite side, troops from Iran and their Lebanese-based proxy, Hezbollah, have aligned themselves with Bashar Assad. Troops from Saudi Arabia and Qatar are fighting on the side of the rebels, along with elements of al Qaeda. Turkey also has Sunni allies in Syria, but their main ambition appears to be separating Kurdish elements from both Syria and Iraq, because they have made peace with the Kurdish rebels within their own borders, and are seeking to expand their regional influence as a result.
Then there is Russia. They have proposed a “peace” conference scheduled for June 15-16 in Geneva, Switzerland, as an attempt to end the two years of fighting in Syria. Yet their motives are profoundly transparent, as evidenced by the reality that they have reportedly shipped anti-aircraft S-300 rockets to Assad. This move preempts any effort by Western nations to establish a “no-fly” zone over Syrian airspace (an idea the Obama administrated toyed with, but never followed through on), thereby tipping the balance of power in Assad’s favor. Yet more importantly, it establishes that Russia’s position at the peace conference will be an effort to dictate post-war terms, with the intention of keeping Assad in power. Since rebel forces consider this completely antithetical to their ambitions, the fighting will undoubtedly continue.
The most likely outcome of that fighting is a stalemate leading to the breakup of Syria into three mini-states, respectively controlled by Kurds, Sunnis and Alawites. Since most of the Alawites live in the coastal corridor that includes Damascus, even this seemingly chaotic scenario accrues to Russian interests. They maintain an influence in the region, and they will still have their naval base in Tartous.
On the Iraqi side of the border, the developments are even more ominous. Despite being largely ignored by the American media, the disintegration of Iraq is continuing rapidly. The deaths of 700 Iraqis killed in sectarian violence throughout the country in April represents the largest number of casualties in the last five years. In the northern part of Iraq, the province of Iraqi Kurdistan has, for all intents and purposes, dissolved its ties with the Shia-dominated government of Nouri al-Maliki in Baghdad. They are in the process of cutting autonomous deals with international oil companies, and next September a new pipeline will carry oil from Kurdistan to Turkey linking them to their Kurdish brethren in that region. In the process they have ignored U.S. opposition to any oil exports “without the appropriate approval of the Iraqi federal government.”
Iraqi Sunnis, who held a vise-like grip on power during the days of Saddam Hussein, have little incentive to remain united with the current government either. In late April, after Iraqi Security Forces (ISF) opened fire on Sunni protesters in Hawija, Kirkuk, killing 20 and wounding over 100, Sunni tribal militia began mobilizing against the government. Several clashes between the ISF and the militias have taken place, with thousands of tribe members in Kirkuk and Salah ad-Din vowing to seek revenge. Other clashes have broken out in the Anbar provice cities of Ramadi and Fallujah as well. In Mosul, protesters demanded a withdrawal of government forces.
Furthermore, the efforts of Sunni leaders to maintain ties to the Maliki government have undermined their credibly with their constituents, who see them as sellouts to a regime that has consistently ignored the concerns of Sunnis. Many Sunnis are convinced that Maliki is intent on establishing a “Shi’ite crescent” in conjunction with Iran. The Sunni counterweight to that reality is their alliance with Sunni rebels in Syria. That effectively obliterates the Syrian-Iraqi border, and establishes the possibility that they will precipitate a civil war with Maliki to realize a separate state comprised of Sunnis from both nations.
In a column for the Washington Post, former Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker explains that the battle in Hawija represented a critical turning point in the effort to keep Iraq united. Yet far more importantly, he inadvertently reveals the fecklessness of President Obama’s politically motivated and premature withdrawal of American troops from the country. “Al-Qaeda in Iraq has already begun to reestablish itself in areas that Iraqi and U.S. forces cleared at enormous cost over the past five years,” he writes.
And Jabhat al-Nusra, al-Qaeda in Iraq’s front group in Syria, is attempting to hijack the secular resistance to Syrian President Bashar al Assad. These developments threaten not only to unravel the gains made since 2007, but also to energize the forces of violent extremism in the heart of the Arab world, already burning in Syria.
Crocker further notes the current Sunni-Shi’ite confrontation is reminiscent of the one which occurred in 2006 that precipitated the troop surge so vehemently opposed by Obama and the Left. Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) declared that the war in Iraq was “lost” before the troops even arrived in country. Yet Crocker notes that, as a result of the hard-won security established by those troops, “Sunni and Shiite leaders opted to resolve their differences through accommodation rather than through violence.” He believes the current impasse can be resolved by “a sustained, high-level diplomatic effort.” Yet absent the presence of U.S. troops to add weight to that diplomatic effort, such a prescription appears hopeless.
On Friday, October 21, 2011, President Obama, in a statement similar to the one he made last week regarding the war on terror in general, “declared” that the war in Iraq was over. “I can report that, as promised, the rest of our troops in Iraq will come home by the end of the year,” Obama said. “After nearly nine years, America’s war in Iraq will be over.” In doing so, he ignored the advice of military commanders who insisted a minimum of 20,000 troops should be left behind to ensure the stability that America’s fighting forces fought and died to establish. Thus, Obama has made a mockery of our soldiers’ sacrifices and snatched defeat from the jaws of victory—all so he could placate his leftist base.
The tragic consequences of that decision are unfolding at a rapid pace. A complete—and bloody—realignment of the entire Middle East is occurring, none of which accrues to America’s interests. In the Middle East, the U.S. has traded possible stability for almost certain chaos. As for our new role in shaping events there, it is best described by NY Post columnist Benny Avni. “What are America’s interests in any of this?” he writes. “Doesn’t matter. By opting to sit out, we’ve basically forfeited any say in the outcome.”
http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/55585
Statistics: Posted by yoda — Fri May 31, 2013 1:36 pm
View full post on opinions.caduceusx.com
An Even Bigger Scandal: Why Are IRS Audits Being Used To Punish Obama’s Political Enemies?
Is it right for Barack Obama to use IRS audits to punish his political enemies? As crazy as that sounds, there is a mounting body of evidence that indicates that this is actually happening. And if this can be proven, it is a much, much larger scandal than the IRS giving “extra scrutiny” to the applications of conservative non-profit groups. Let me be clear – if Barack Obama has been using IRS audits to punish his political enemies, that is an impeachable offense. Of all of the other scandals that are out there right now, this is the one that could actually bring down the presidency of Barack Obama. That is how serious this is. As you will read about below, there is a huge amount of circumstantial evidence that political enemies of Barack Obama have been singled out for IRS audits. We need to find out who initiated these audits. Whether you are a Republican, a Democrat or an Independent, this kind of abuse of government power should sicken and horrify you. If it can be proven that Barack Obama has been using IRS audits to attack his enemies, every single U.S. citizen should be calling for him to resign. This is something that is beyond politics – this is a direct threat to the very integrity of our system.
The recent revelation that the IRS has been specifically targeting patriot groups and Tea Party organizations for “extra scrutiny” has opened up the floodgates. In recent days, a large number of highly respected people have come forward claiming that they were the subject of IRS audits that were politically motivated.
For example, Larry Conners, a respected local news anchor at KMOV Channel 4 in St. Louis, Missouri says that he was hit with an IRS audit almost immediately after he conducted an interview with Barack Obama in April 2012…
Shortly after I did my April 2012 interview with President Obama, my wife, friends and some viewers suggested that I might need to watch out for the IRS.
I don’t accept “conspiracy theories”, but I do know that almost immediately after the interview, the IRS started hammering me.
At the time, I dismissed the “co-incidence”, but now, I have concerns … after revelations about the IRS targeting various groups and their members.
Originally, the IRS apologized for red-flagging conservative groups and their members if they had “Tea Party” or “patriot” in their name.
Today, there are allegations that the IRS focused on various groups and/or individuals questioning or criticizing government spending, taxes, debt or how the government is run … any involved in limiting/expanding government, educating on the constitution and bill of rights, or social economic reform/movement.
In that April 2012 interview, I questioned President Obama on several topics: the Buffet Rule, his public remarks about the Supreme Court before the ruling on the Affordable Care Act. I also asked why he wasn’t doing more to help Sen. Claire McCaskill who at that time was expected to lose. The Obama interview caught fire and got wide-spread attention because I questioned his spending.
I said some viewers expressed concern, saying they think he’s “out of touch” because of his personal and family trips in the midst of our economic crisis.
The President’s face clearly showed his anger; afterwards, his staff which had been so polite … suddenly went cold.
That’s to be expected, and I can deal with that just as I did with President George H. Bush’s staff when he didn’t like my questions.
Journalistic integrity is of the utmost importance to me. My job is to ask the hard questions, because I believe viewers have a right to be well-informed. I cannot and will not promote anyone’s agenda – political or otherwise – at the expense of the reporting the truth.
What I don’t like to even consider … is that because of the Obama interview … the IRS put a target on me.
Can I prove it? At this time, no.
But it is a fact that since that April 2012 interview … the IRS has been pressuring me.
Reverend Franklin Graham, the son of Reverend Billy Graham, recently wrote a letter to Barack Obama claiming that the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association and Samaritan’s Purse were both hit with IRS audits very shortly after they ran full-page ads supporting North Carolina’s Marriage amendment. In fact, both organizations were notified about the audits on the same day. The following is from a recent article posted on redstate.com…
The man known as America’s pastor was among those targeted by the Internal Revenue Service after the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association ran newspaper advertisements promoting traditional marriage and biblical values.
“I am bringing this to your attention because I believe that someone in the Administration was targeting and attempting to intimidate us,” wrote Franklin Graham in a letter to President Obama. “This is morally wrong and unethical – indeed some would call it ‘un-American.’”
Graham is president of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association as well as the international charity Samaritan’s Purse. Both organizations received word of audits on the same day – not long after they ran full –page ads supporting North Carolina’s Marriage amendment.
The ads encouraged voters to “cast our ballots for candidates who base their decisions on biblical principles and support the nation of Israel.”
The ad concluded with the words, “Vote for biblical values this November 6, and pray with me (Billy Graham) that America will remain one nation under God.”
Graham said on Sept. 6, 2012 they received notification that the IRS would audit their taxes.
“In light of what the IRS admitted to on Friday, May 10, 2013, and subsequent revelations from other sources, I do not believe that the IRS audit of our two organizations last year is a coincidence – or justifiable,” Graham wrote.
You can find a full copy of Franklin Graham’s letter to Barack Obama right here.
The Blaze is reporting on another example of this phenomenon. A respected Catholic professor that had written things critical of the Obama administration was hit with an IRS audit that she believes was politically motivated…
On Wednesday, Dr. Anne Hendershott, a devout Catholic and a noted sociologist, professor and author, exclusively told The Blaze that she believes she may have been one of the IRS’s targets.
According to Hendershott, the IRS audited her in 2010 and demanded to know who was paying her and “what their politics were.”
It all started with a phone call she received at her home in May of that year — a call during which Hendershott was told she would be audited. A letter that followed on May 19, 2010 solidified the IRS’s request to meet her in person two months later in July.
Unfortunately, these are not just isolated incidents. In fact, attorney Cleta Mitchell recently told Newsmax that she has seen a systematic pattern of politically motivated IRS harassment that only began once Barack Obama entered the White House…
In the case of one such client, she and her family subsequently became targets for audits to their personal and business tax returns, and were even visited by three different government agencies. She also knows of other groups who had surprise visits from the FBI after they applied for IRS status.
Mitchell said she doesn’t believe the president or the White House was uninvolved in the IRS activities, as the administration has claimed.
“I’ve thought for some time that this is politically motivated and that’s the reason it was happening. And, as I said, I’ve been doing this for more than 20 years and I’ve never seen anything like this until 2009, 2010. And the only thing that changed was we had a different administration,” she said.
There are some that have been trying to bring awareness to these politically motivated audits for quite some time. One of these individuals is a former classmate of Obama’s named Wayne Allyn Root…
“I feel like a million bucks. I feel absolutely vindicated. I knew this was going on,” Wayne Allyn Root told WND.
Root, the Libertarian Party vice-presidential candidate in 2008 who has claimed Obama was strangely unknown to him and his fellow Columbia University classmates, recounted his story to WND last October of becoming the target of unusual audits, beginning in January 2011, despite a “spotless” 30-year tax record.
He charged in October that the order to audit him came from Obama himself, and he is even more convinced now.
“I believe this is not rogue agents, who would be risking their pension and careers,” he said.
In October, Root said the order to audit him “must have come from the highest levels of government.”
“Obama is using the power of the IRS and other government agencies to punish his political opposition and intimidate and silence his critics,” Root charged at the time.
In that same article, a number of other examples of this phenomenon were cited…
Last year, billionaire Frank VanderSloot became the target of investigations by both the IRS and the Labor Department after he gave $1 million to a super PAC that supported Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney. The GOP’s biggest donor, Las Vegas casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, said a federal criminal investigation into his company’s business practices was politically motivated. Another casino giant, Steve Wynn, also has been investigated.
This week, Root has received many emails from people who identify as conservative and believe the IRS has been harassing them for political reasons.
What happened to businessman Frank VanderSloot is particularly noteworthy. The following is from an article that Rob Bluey authored last year…
On April 20, President Obama’s campaign named VanderSloot to the first presidential “enemies list” since the Nixon era. Eight private citizens were singled out for their donations to Romney. They committed no crimes, sought no attention, and yet they became the subject of Obama’s scorn.
VanderSloot is now facing persecution from the federal government. Kimberly Strassel reveals in The Wall Street Journal that two federal agencies — the Internal Revenue Service and Labor Department — both launched investigations of VanderSloot after his name appeared on Obama’s enemies list.
No matter what you think of Obama’s politics, shouldn’t we all be deeply alarmed that he has an “enemies list”?
With each passing day, the similarities between Barack Obama and Richard Nixon become more glaring.
And Obama has even joked about sending the IRS after people that he does not like. When Obama found out that he was not going to be receiving an honorary doctorate from Arizona State University, he made the following statement…
“President [Michael] Crowe and the Board of Regents will soon learn all about being audited by the IRS.”
The IRS is not supposed to be used as a weapon, and the White House is not allowed to use information gathered by the IRS for political gain either. But apparently last year someone at the IRS was leaking tax information to someone within the Obama campaign. The following is from a recent article by Matt K. Lewis…
A little over a year ago, I reported that, ”It is likely that someone at the Internal Revenue Service illegally leaked confidential donor information showing a contribution from Mitt Romney’s political action committee to the National Organization for Marriage, says the group.”
Now — on the heels of news the IRS’s apology for having targeted conservative groups — NOM is renewing their demand that the Internal Revenue Service reveal the identity of the people responsible.
“There is little question that one or more employees at the IRS stole our confidential tax return and leaked it to our political enemies, in violation of federal law,” said NOM’s president Brian Brow, in a prepared statement. “The only questions are who did it, and whether there was any knowledge or coordination between people in the White House, the Obama reelection campaign and the Human Rights Campaign. We and the American people deserve answers.”
The IRS has been doing all sorts of things that they should not be doing. They are a rogue agency that is completely out of control.
In fact, one new lawsuit alleges that the IRS stole the health records of approximately 10 million Americans…
The Internal Revenue Service is now facing a class action lawsuit over allegations that it improperly accessed and stole the health records of some 10 million Americans, including medical records of all California state judges.
According to a report by Courthousenews.com, an unnamed HIPAA-covered entity in California is suing the IRS, alleging that some 60 million medical records from 10 million patients were stolen by 15 IRS agents. The personal health information seized on March 11, 2011, included psychological counseling, gynecological counseling, sexual/drug treatment and other medical treatment data. “This is an action involving the corruption and abuse of power by several Internal Revenue Service agents,” the complaint reads. “No search warrant authorized the seizure of these records; no subpoena authorized the seizure of these records; none of the 10,000,000 Americans were under any kind of known criminal or civil investigation and their medical records had no relevance whatsoever to the IRS search. IT personnel at the scene, a HIPPA facility warning on the building and the IT portion of the searched premises, and the company executives each warned the IRS agents of these privileged records,” it continued.
And guess what?
The IRS is going to be the primary government agency in charge of implementing Obamacare.
Will we soon see the IRS use health information to attack the political enemies of the man or woman sitting in the White House?
Unfortunately, thanks to new “Big Brother” technology that the IRS has been implementing, pretty soon there will be very little about us that the IRS does not know. The following is from a recent article by Richard Satran of U.S. News & World Report…
Consumers are already familiar with Internet “cookies” that track their movements and send them targeted ads that follow them to different websites. The IRS has brought in private industry experts to employ similar digital tracking—but with the added advantage of access to Social Security numbers, health records, credit card transactions and many other privileged forms of information that marketers don’t see.
“Private industry would be envious if they knew what our models are,” boasted Dean Silverman, the agency’s high-tech top gun who heads a group recruited from the private sector to update the IRS, in a comment reported in trade publications.
So what is the IRS going to do with all of this information?
Well, the following are just a few of the things that they have already said that they plan to do with it…
• Charting and analyzing social media such as Facebook
• Targeting audits by matching tax filings to social media or electronic payments
• Tracking individual Internet addresses and emailing patterns
• Sorting data in 32,000 categories of metadata and 1 million unique “attributes”
• Machine learning across “neural” networks
• Statistical and agent-based modeling
• Relationship analysis based on Social Security numbers and other personal identifiers
So are you alarmed by all of this?
You should be.
As I discussed in my previous article entitled “100 Years Old And Still Killing Us: America Was Much Better Off Before The Income Tax“, Congress should close the doors of the IRS and throw away the key. It is a deeply, deeply corrupt government agency that has gotten wildly out of control.
After what you have just read above, is there anyone out there that would disagree with me?
View full post on The Economic Collapse
American • The Taxman Cometh—For Obama’s Enemies
Pro-Israel groups, Patriot groups, Tea Party groups, Koch Brothers
The Taxman Cometh—For Obama’s Enemies
By Arnold Ahlert
Monday, May 13, 2013
On Friday, an Obama administration with an already appalling track record of scandals added an equally egregious revelation to the list. The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) apologized for what they characterized as an “inappropriate” targeting of tax-exempt conservative organizations, whose names included “Tea Party” or “Patriot,” during the 2012 election campaign. Adding to severity of the debacle, the Washington Post reported Friday that the IRS division head “had no plans to release the information publicly, despite the confirmed wrongdoing.”
Unfortunately for the IRS, Lois Lerner, who heads the IRS division that oversees tax-exempt groups, offered up an unsolicited confession of the malfeasance during a Friday tax conference hosted by the American Bar Association. While calling it “wrong and “inappropriate,” Lerner contended that the conservative organizations singled out for additional scrutiny were not the victims of bias. “That’s not how we go about selecting cases for further review,” she insisted. That statement stands in stark contrast to the reality that while a total of 300 groups were singled out for extra scrutiny by employees of the IRS tax-exempt unit’s main office in Cincinnati, approximately 75 were conservative organizations.
During the election, many conservative groups had complained that the IRS was subjecting them to unwarranted harassment that included sending them lengthy and intrusive questionnaire forms that sought information about individual members’ political activities, their postings on socials websites, and details about their families, much of which violates IRS policy.
According to Ms. Lerner, the unscrupulous activity was carried out by “low level” employees who unilaterally decided to create a separate category of “Patriot” and “Tea Party” organizations seeking 501(c)(4) tax exempt status. Processing the applications of organizations relegated to that category were then inordinately delayed. Ms. Lerner attempted to blame the delay on the large increase of applications for tax exempt status that had been occurring since 2008. Ironically, that is nothing more than an admission of the continuing lack of preparedness in Lerner’s IRS division.
The aforementioned questionnaires were sent out, demanding a standard of information that was seldom, if ever, applied to other groups. Under penalty of perjury, the IRS demanded to know, not only whether political candidates participated in public forums conducted by the groups, but the nature of the issues they discussed. They demanded copies of literature distributed at public forums, as well as that published by the groups on their websites. If an organization collected dues, the IRS demanded to know how much, as well as the names of all donors and recipients of grants, a violation of IRS policy. They further insisted on obtaining information, not just about every member of an organization, but their family members as well, including those who had merely considered running for office.
Following Lerner’s disclosure, the IRS released a self-serving statement noting that mistakes were made, “but they were in no way due to any political or partisan rationale.” The agency then attempted to obfuscate what Lerner had revealed. “It is important to recognize that all centralized applications received the same, even-handed treatment, and the majority of cases centralized were not based on a specific name. In addition, new procedures also were implemented last year to ensure that these mistakes won’t be made in the future.”
IRS officials knew agents were targeting conservative groups for extra scrutiny as early as 2011
Last year? The Associated Press obtained a draft of an inspector general’s (IG) report that revealed senior IRS officials knew agents were targeting conservative groups for extra scrutiny as early as 2011. The report revealed that, in addition to groups with the words “Tea Party” or “patriot” in their names, those with the words “9/12 Project” were also included. The 9/12 Project is a group established by conservative radio and TV host Glenn Beck. Lerner was informed of what was going on in a meeting that took place on June 29, 2011. She told the agents to “immediately” change their criteria for flagging tax exempt groups.
Late Sunday it was revealed that even more groups were targeted. According to the Washington Post, the same report noted that IRS officials also gave added scrutiny to nonprofit groups that were critical of the government, as well as those that educated Americans about the U.S. Constitution. And the Jewish Press revealed that pro-Israel groups “whose positions were potentially inconsistent with the administration’s” also received additional attention. An IRS agent told the staunchly pro-Israel group Z STREET that because it was “connected to Israel,” it received more scrutiny and that other Israel-related organizations were assigned to “a special unit in the D.C. office to determine whether the organization’s activities contradict the Administration’s public policies.”
This watchdog report contradicts testimony given by IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman to a House Ways and Means subcommittee on March 22, 2012. “There’s absolutely no targeting,” Shulman said at the time.
If the IRS’s Friday admission that mistakes were made was intended as an effort to put the controversy to rest, it was a dismal failure. “We reject a simple apology that does nothing to alleviate the danger of this happening again,” said Jenny Beth Martin, a leader of Tea Party Patriots, the largest Tea Party organization in the nation. She further demanded an apology from the president, and a full-blown investigation. Tea Party Express spokesman Levi Russell, who characterized the agency’s behavior as “completely outrageous,” said he would be “very surprised if a class-action lawsuit wasn’t in the works here.”
Republican leaders in the Senate and House piled on as well. “I call on the White House to conduct a transparent, government-wide review aimed at assuring the American people that these thuggish practices are not underway at the IRS or elsewhere in the administration against anyone, regardless of their political views,” said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY). “An apology won’t put this issue to rest.”
House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) promised a congressional investigation, even as he demanded to know how the White House would hold those responsible accountable for their actions. “The admission by the Obama administration that the Internal Revenue Service targeted political opponents echoes some of the most shameful abuses of government power in 20th century American history,” he said. Boehner also wondered aloud if such abuses were limited to the IRS. “Have other federal agencies used government powers to attack Americans for partisan reasons?” he asked.
Rep. Darryl Issa (R-CA), chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, believes the pending report by the Inspector General (IG) regarding the investigation he and regulatory subcommittee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) demanded last June prompted the IRS to come clean. On Friday, it was announced the IG’s report would be released this week. Issa promised he would “aggressively follow up on the IG report and hold responsible officials accountable for this political retaliation.”
White House spokesman Jay Carney attempted to put some distance between the White House and the IRS, noting that while the agency is part of the Treasury Department it “is an independent enforcement agency.” What Carney failed to acknowledge is that the Treasury Department and the IRS are part of the executive branch of the federal government. Furthermore, he deflected questions about whether the White House itself would conduct an investigation, and said he didn’t know when the president became aware of the abuse. “What we know about this is of concern and we certainly find the actions taken, as reported, to be inappropriate. And we would fully expect the investigation to be thorough and for corrections to be made in a case like this,” he said.
Latest example of IRS abuse conducted by the Obama administration
Unfortunately, this case may only be the latest example of IRS abuse conducted by the Obama administration. On Aug. 27, 2010, an “anonymous senior administration official,” subsequently revealed to be Austan Goolsbee, gave an on-the-record background briefing to reporters, singling out Koch Industries for condemnation. In the course of that briefing, he implied that the business was cheating on its taxes. “So in this country we have partnerships, we have S corps, we have LLCs, we have a series of entities that do not pay corporate income tax,” said Goolsbee. “Some of which are really giant firms, you know Koch Industries is a multibillion dollar business,” he added.
Mark Holden, senior vice president and general counsel of Koch Industries, wondered how the White House managed to procure that information from the IRS.
Investors Business Daily reminds Americans that in 1971, a memo by Nixon White House counsel John Dean described how “we can use the available federal machinery to screw our political enemies,” even as he warned that “a low visibility of the project is imperative.” National Review’s Kevin Williams further illuminates the serious nature of these revelations, noting that the “abuse of IRS resources…were cited in the second article of impeachment against Richard Nixon.”
Obama administration has another burgeoning scandal on its hands
In other words, the Obama administration has another burgeoning scandal on its hands. Yet if one couples the administration’s penchant for political calculation with a media determined to protect Obama and company at all costs, another scandal may be exactly what is needed right now. At the precise moment when the Benghazi atrocity is reaching critical mass, the public is forced to pay attention to yet another seeming abuse of power. As one scandal piles on top of another, including the green energy scandal, and the Fast and Furious gun running scandal, the White House intel leaks, the Benghazi coverup and now an abusive IRS—all of which have engendered stonewalling from the White House, as well as ongoing investigations—a pattern emerges. At this point, however, one can only hope the public has not reached “information overload” and is not tuning events out on account of so much malfeasance occurring in such rapid succession.
One can rest assured, the Obama administration is counting on this public uninterestedness. Obviously, such cynical calculations would have to be based on an almost unprecedented level of contempt for the public by the administration and its media water-carriers. There is little doubt that both the administration and the left-wing media establishment are more than up to the task.
http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/55147
Statistics: Posted by yoda — Mon May 13, 2013 6:13 am
View full post on opinions.caduceusx.com
American • The Taxman Cometh—For Obama’s Enemies
Pro-Israel groups, Patriot groups, Tea Party groups, Koch Brothers
The Taxman Cometh—For Obama’s Enemies
By Arnold Ahlert
Monday, May 13, 2013
On Friday, an Obama administration with an already appalling track record of scandals added an equally egregious revelation to the list. The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) apologized for what they characterized as an “inappropriate” targeting of tax-exempt conservative organizations, whose names included “Tea Party” or “Patriot,” during the 2012 election campaign. Adding to severity of the debacle, the Washington Post reported Friday that the IRS division head “had no plans to release the information publicly, despite the confirmed wrongdoing.”
Unfortunately for the IRS, Lois Lerner, who heads the IRS division that oversees tax-exempt groups, offered up an unsolicited confession of the malfeasance during a Friday tax conference hosted by the American Bar Association. While calling it “wrong and “inappropriate,” Lerner contended that the conservative organizations singled out for additional scrutiny were not the victims of bias. “That’s not how we go about selecting cases for further review,” she insisted. That statement stands in stark contrast to the reality that while a total of 300 groups were singled out for extra scrutiny by employees of the IRS tax-exempt unit’s main office in Cincinnati, approximately 75 were conservative organizations.
During the election, many conservative groups had complained that the IRS was subjecting them to unwarranted harassment that included sending them lengthy and intrusive questionnaire forms that sought information about individual members’ political activities, their postings on socials websites, and details about their families, much of which violates IRS policy.
According to Ms. Lerner, the unscrupulous activity was carried out by “low level” employees who unilaterally decided to create a separate category of “Patriot” and “Tea Party” organizations seeking 501(c)(4) tax exempt status. Processing the applications of organizations relegated to that category were then inordinately delayed. Ms. Lerner attempted to blame the delay on the large increase of applications for tax exempt status that had been occurring since 2008. Ironically, that is nothing more than an admission of the continuing lack of preparedness in Lerner’s IRS division.
The aforementioned questionnaires were sent out, demanding a standard of information that was seldom, if ever, applied to other groups. Under penalty of perjury, the IRS demanded to know, not only whether political candidates participated in public forums conducted by the groups, but the nature of the issues they discussed. They demanded copies of literature distributed at public forums, as well as that published by the groups on their websites. If an organization collected dues, the IRS demanded to know how much, as well as the names of all donors and recipients of grants, a violation of IRS policy. They further insisted on obtaining information, not just about every member of an organization, but their family members as well, including those who had merely considered running for office.
Following Lerner’s disclosure, the IRS released a self-serving statement noting that mistakes were made, “but they were in no way due to any political or partisan rationale.” The agency then attempted to obfuscate what Lerner had revealed. “It is important to recognize that all centralized applications received the same, even-handed treatment, and the majority of cases centralized were not based on a specific name. In addition, new procedures also were implemented last year to ensure that these mistakes won’t be made in the future.”
IRS officials knew agents were targeting conservative groups for extra scrutiny as early as 2011
Last year? The Associated Press obtained a draft of an inspector general’s (IG) report that revealed senior IRS officials knew agents were targeting conservative groups for extra scrutiny as early as 2011. The report revealed that, in addition to groups with the words “Tea Party” or “patriot” in their names, those with the words “9/12 Project” were also included. The 9/12 Project is a group established by conservative radio and TV host Glenn Beck. Lerner was informed of what was going on in a meeting that took place on June 29, 2011. She told the agents to “immediately” change their criteria for flagging tax exempt groups.
Late Sunday it was revealed that even more groups were targeted. According to the Washington Post, the same report noted that IRS officials also gave added scrutiny to nonprofit groups that were critical of the government, as well as those that educated Americans about the U.S. Constitution. And the Jewish Press revealed that pro-Israel groups “whose positions were potentially inconsistent with the administration’s” also received additional attention. An IRS agent told the staunchly pro-Israel group Z STREET that because it was “connected to Israel,” it received more scrutiny and that other Israel-related organizations were assigned to “a special unit in the D.C. office to determine whether the organization’s activities contradict the Administration’s public policies.”
This watchdog report contradicts testimony given by IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman to a House Ways and Means subcommittee on March 22, 2012. “There’s absolutely no targeting,” Shulman said at the time.
If the IRS’s Friday admission that mistakes were made was intended as an effort to put the controversy to rest, it was a dismal failure. “We reject a simple apology that does nothing to alleviate the danger of this happening again,” said Jenny Beth Martin, a leader of Tea Party Patriots, the largest Tea Party organization in the nation. She further demanded an apology from the president, and a full-blown investigation. Tea Party Express spokesman Levi Russell, who characterized the agency’s behavior as “completely outrageous,” said he would be “very surprised if a class-action lawsuit wasn’t in the works here.”
Republican leaders in the Senate and House piled on as well. “I call on the White House to conduct a transparent, government-wide review aimed at assuring the American people that these thuggish practices are not underway at the IRS or elsewhere in the administration against anyone, regardless of their political views,” said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY). “An apology won’t put this issue to rest.”
House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) promised a congressional investigation, even as he demanded to know how the White House would hold those responsible accountable for their actions. “The admission by the Obama administration that the Internal Revenue Service targeted political opponents echoes some of the most shameful abuses of government power in 20th century American history,” he said. Boehner also wondered aloud if such abuses were limited to the IRS. “Have other federal agencies used government powers to attack Americans for partisan reasons?” he asked.
Rep. Darryl Issa (R-CA), chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, believes the pending report by the Inspector General (IG) regarding the investigation he and regulatory subcommittee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) demanded last June prompted the IRS to come clean. On Friday, it was announced the IG’s report would be released this week. Issa promised he would “aggressively follow up on the IG report and hold responsible officials accountable for this political retaliation.”
White House spokesman Jay Carney attempted to put some distance between the White House and the IRS, noting that while the agency is part of the Treasury Department it “is an independent enforcement agency.” What Carney failed to acknowledge is that the Treasury Department and the IRS are part of the executive branch of the federal government. Furthermore, he deflected questions about whether the White House itself would conduct an investigation, and said he didn’t know when the president became aware of the abuse. “What we know about this is of concern and we certainly find the actions taken, as reported, to be inappropriate. And we would fully expect the investigation to be thorough and for corrections to be made in a case like this,” he said.
Latest example of IRS abuse conducted by the Obama administration
Unfortunately, this case may only be the latest example of IRS abuse conducted by the Obama administration. On Aug. 27, 2010, an “anonymous senior administration official,” subsequently revealed to be Austan Goolsbee, gave an on-the-record background briefing to reporters, singling out Koch Industries for condemnation. In the course of that briefing, he implied that the business was cheating on its taxes. “So in this country we have partnerships, we have S corps, we have LLCs, we have a series of entities that do not pay corporate income tax,” said Goolsbee. “Some of which are really giant firms, you know Koch Industries is a multibillion dollar business,” he added.
Mark Holden, senior vice president and general counsel of Koch Industries, wondered how the White House managed to procure that information from the IRS.
Investors Business Daily reminds Americans that in 1971, a memo by Nixon White House counsel John Dean described how “we can use the available federal machinery to screw our political enemies,” even as he warned that “a low visibility of the project is imperative.” National Review’s Kevin Williams further illuminates the serious nature of these revelations, noting that the “abuse of IRS resources…were cited in the second article of impeachment against Richard Nixon.”
Obama administration has another burgeoning scandal on its hands
In other words, the Obama administration has another burgeoning scandal on its hands. Yet if one couples the administration’s penchant for political calculation with a media determined to protect Obama and company at all costs, another scandal may be exactly what is needed right now. At the precise moment when the Benghazi atrocity is reaching critical mass, the public is forced to pay attention to yet another seeming abuse of power. As one scandal piles on top of another, including the green energy scandal, and the Fast and Furious gun running scandal, the White House intel leaks, the Benghazi coverup and now an abusive IRS—all of which have engendered stonewalling from the White House, as well as ongoing investigations—a pattern emerges. At this point, however, one can only hope the public has not reached “information overload” and is not tuning events out on account of so much malfeasance occurring in such rapid succession.
One can rest assured, the Obama administration is counting on this public uninterestedness. Obviously, such cynical calculations would have to be based on an almost unprecedented level of contempt for the public by the administration and its media water-carriers. There is little doubt that both the administration and the left-wing media establishment are more than up to the task.
http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/55147
Statistics: Posted by yoda — Mon May 13, 2013 6:13 am
View full post on opinions.caduceusx.com
American • Obama’s Budget Is a Ridiculous Charade: Doug Casey
Obama’s Budget Is a Ridiculous Charade: Doug Casey
http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/daily-ti … 54712.html
Doug Casey loves controversy.
He is quick to spit out divisive statements like, “the ethical thing to do would be for the U.S. to declare bankruptcy,” “the next generation will be turned into indentured servants,” and “people who buy government debt deserve to be punished and taught a lesson.”
It can be difficult to determine just how sincere Casey’s public declarations are.
In an interview with The Daily Ticker, Casey explains his provocative oratory style. “Look, this is an academic point that I’m making. I know that [the U.S. debt] is not going to be defaulted on tomorrow morning," he says. "I’m just putting the thought out there so people can think about these things in a new unit of time, and try to think about it rationally.”
Does Doug Casey believe what he says? Absolutely. Does he actually expect anyone to act on his beliefs? Not anytime soon. By making exaggerated and divisive statements, he wants to challenge common notions portrayed by the media and many others.
When asked him about President Obama’s newly released budget. Casey told The Daily Ticker that any budget, no matter what it stipulates, is ridiculous. “The thought of having a budget when you’re already bankrupt and digging the hole deeper at the rate of $1.5 trillion per year is a ridiculous charade," he says. "I don’t see why people pay attention to it."
Casey also believes the U.S. deficit is much larger than $16 trillion. “If you use accrual accounting the deficit would actually be $3 trillion to $4 trillion dollars a year…The acknowledged debt is $16 trillion but there’s actually much more, the numbers go up to $200 trillion if you account for all kinds of other liabilities like Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and numerous other things,” he explains.
Meanwhile, the latest Fed report shows that the federal budget deficit is actually falling. For the first six months of FY 2013, receipts rose by 12% while outlays fell by 3% and some expect the deficit to come in below the CBO’s prediction of $845 billion. Greg Valliere of Potomac Research believes that deficit as a percentage of GDP could fall to below 3% by FY 2015.
Statistics: Posted by DIGGER DAN — Sun Apr 14, 2013 11:37 pm
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