Tuesday, June 30, 2009

Note From a Cop - Hat tip to Sustainablehome

Note From a Cop

Written By; Scott Wagner a Police Academy Commander and Professor at Columbus State Community College in Columbus Ohio, and Commander of the 727 Counter Terror Training Unit. A 29 year law enforcement veteran, and current Deputy Sheriff, he is the Precision Marksman for the Union County Sheriff's Office SRT Team.

The fear on the street is palpable. Ever since the election of Barack Obama as President of these United States in November 2008, coupled with the election of a democrat party majority in both the U.S. House and Senate, concern for the United States and personal safety has ignited like a fire in dry grass.

Sales of guns – black guns, rifles, shotguns and handguns (particularly 9mm) everywhere, have gone through the roof. AR15s have literally flown off of dealer shelves, and only now in the spring of 2009, have I seen the display samples of ARs begin to reappear on the wall of my favorite shooting emporium after the initial post election rush.

Manufacturers of ARs are still working to catch up and some of the major suppliers are as much as 150,000 guns behind. Not only that, ammo is in the shortest supply I have ever seen in the 43 years of my shooting life. Have you recently tried to get 5.56mm, 9mm or even 380 ammo?

Supplies of 5.56mm and 9mm ammo are in short supply due to the black gun buying craze; .380ACP because of the rise in people getting concealed carry permits and the resurgence of interest in convenient 380 handguns like the fine Ruger LCP. In fact, in doing a review of the Ruger LCP, my gun store only had a small supply of ONE .380 round on hand, the Winchesters 95-grain SXT, which they had just gotten in. Unfortunately, I had to do a 30-round review of that pistol. There was none other to be found.

What is odd about this new fear is that it is not coming from the average citizen gun owner out there, but it is coming from what to me is an almost shocking source: street cops.

Street cops and SWAT cops that I know from various agencies – rural, suburban and metro – in my area are scared. Cops that before November 2008 never gave much thought (that I knew of anyway) to politics or more
importantly to gun rights. For the most part, these are the guys that didn't generally have any interest in shooting or gun ownership beyond keeping track of where their duty gun is, and a few of them didn't even do that so well.

The guys I am talking about now are some of the same guys who used to not even carry off duty on a regular basis- but not anymore. They don't scare easily, defenders of the Constitution of this State and the United States (as our oath of office reads), have been buying ARs, survival gear, and all the ammo they can lay their hands on. All of them (or I should say "us") have been discussing and have been acquiring guns to provide a layered perimeter defense.

What are we suddenly so afraid of? Well in our discussions it seems to boil down to four areas.

First, fear of federal government intrusion into our lives. Every time I look at or listen to the news, there is something new and intrusive coming out of the Obama administration and this Congress. New tax schemes, government-run Canadian-style healthcare, a volunteer citizen defense force (whatever that is, what happened to the National Guard?) equipped with funding similar to our military, forced voluntary "service" after retirement, a lack of a southern border with hordes of illegal and criminal aliens pouring over our border, the swine flu scare as well as government forced closing of thousands of privately held Chrysler and GM dealerships, which will be the final nail in the coffin for these companies and the list goes on and on.

But these items in the news are just the tip of the iceberg. We can't see the full impact of these actions yet, but we don't know what was added into the thousand of pages of stimulus package bills in the dead of night yet. I predict however that when the plans contained in the stimulus packages go into effect, a lot of us are going to be surprised if not shocked by what has suddenly and sweepingly changed.

What also scares us is the second, well-founded fear that there is an assault weapons ban looming, one that would make the Clinton Ban appear like a look of disdain in comparison. I remember well the 1990s and the Clinton years: the rise of militia groups, the "black helicopter" rumors and paranoia, all of which was motivated by the Brady Law and the Assault Weapon's ban. What if a new ban comes requiring registration or confiscation and turn-in of banned weapons as what happened in Australia?

...I foresee much civil disobedience coming down the road. Americans are citizens, and not subjects like the British, Canadians or Australians. They just don't always obey the law blindly and not one officer or citizen that I spoke to said anything like "I hope I get to keep this gun for awhile before they are banned; They are fun to shoot, so I would hate to give it up." It isn't going to happen, so the cop on the street and the soldier on the base needs to think now what he will do if the orders come down. I think you all get what I am saying here.

Which leads me to the third fear, that there is a revolution coming, yes, a revolution on the scale of the original American Revolution. You can hear this topic discussed on many of the talk radio shows by even the big name hosts. The possibility of an armed revolution against the U.S. government being discussed, albeit very gingerly and fleetingly and as something to be avoided, which it is. I never heard this mentioned in the 90s. One of my quietest, low profile officer friends brought it up the other day.

He said that at some point in the near future, he felt there is going to be an armed revolt if things keep going the way they are. Something has got to give. I was shocked. Yes, I had heard this from some of my more radical
cop friends in the past, but to hear it from a guy like this was unprecedented. Now, these guys are not saying this will happen to foment revolution, preach sedition or to even participate. They just want to be ready if it happens, to at least defend their families, because number four on the fear list is general societal chaos.

Cops fear for their parents, wives, children or grandchildren more now than ever before. Most cops are encouraging their spouses and loved ones to get concealed carry permits. Not only that, but some of these same cops are buying gun mounts for their personal cars so they can carry an AR in the family ride at the ready all the time. They are also strapping on heavier forms of off-duty hardware. I have other friends that are issued ARs or subguns for tactical team use, who always have their gear with them and are planning on just commandeering these weapons for personal use in defending hearth and home.

Final Notes

This is pretty heady and maybe even dangerous stuff. Know fully that I am not advocating anything here. I am reflecting to you what I see and hear going on around me, and maybe saying things that haven't been said in the
open, until now. It is something to think about.

Written By; Scott Wagner is a Police Academy Commander and Professor at Columbus State Community College in Columbus Ohio, and Commander of the 727 Counter Terror Training Unit. A 29 year law enforcement veteran, and current Deputy Sheriff, he is the Precision Marksman for the Union County Sheriff's Office SRT Team.

Preparing for civil unrest - Claire Wolfe

A good article from Backwoods Home Magazine.

http://www.backwoodshome.com/articles2/wolfe118.html

Hat tip to Loco Gato at californiapreppersnetwork!

Pflugerville man is county's first to die of swine flu

Pflugerville man is county's first to die of swine flu

By Mary Ann Roser
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF

Tuesday, June 30, 2009

A 49-year-old man from Pflugerville is the first person in Travis County to die of swine flu and the 14th known death in Texas, health authorities said Monday.

Ron Stowe, a father of four who would have celebrated his 25th wedding anniversary this summer, died Saturday at Scott & White Memorial Hospital in Temple, his wife, Lauren Stowe, said. He had been airlifted from Scott & White University Medical Campus in Round Rock on June 13, two days after his diagnosis, she said.

Stowe, 44, did not know how her husband became infected and said he had no underlying health conditions. "He was in perfect health," she said. No one else in the family is ill, she added.

Stowe said her husband was a sales and service manager for Wells Fargo financial company, "put family first" and was strong in his faith.

"I am in shock," she said through her tears. "He was the glue of our family."

Their children are Ali, 20, Aaron, 16, Victoria, 15, and Nathan, 11.

The Austin/Travis County Health and Human Services Department reported the death Monday afternoon and is investigating. It does not provide patients' names or other identifying information.

Dr. Philip Huang, medical director for the health department, said in a written statement that "given the fact that several deaths in Texas and hundreds globally have occurred due to this illness — this is not an unexpected event. We continue to coordinate with local, state and national partners to monitor the spread of this illness."

As of Wednesday, Travis County had 127 confirmed and six probable cases of swine flu, or H1N1, according to the Texas Department of State Health Services, which updates the count weekly. The Austin/Travis County health department's combined figure was 114. Local health department spokeswoman Carole Barasch said the state data may include some noncounty residents.

In Texas, the state health department has reported 2,982 confirmed and probable cases of swine flu in 95 counties. Nationally, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported Friday that there were 27,717 confirmed and probable cases and 127 deaths.

However, those are "really just the tip of the iceberg," Dr. Anne Schuchat, a leading CDC expert, said last week. The CDC thinks more than 1 million Americans are infected with the H1N1 virus, she said. Most are younger than 25, she said.

The median age of hospitalized patients is 19, while the median age for people who have died from swine flu is 37 — "still quite young for anyone to be dying of an infectious disease," Schuchat told reporters last week.

To prevent the illness, health officials advise frequent hand washing, staying home when ill and covering coughs and sneezes.

maroser@statesman.com; 445-3619

Pickdog comment: I think we are going to see a nasty bout of Mexican flu this fall. Time to make sure you have all the things you need to bug in for a few weeks at the least.

Saturday, June 27, 2009

US Drought Monitor




Given the heat and lack of rain down here I thought it would be prudent to post this.

Here is the link for the entire nation.

http://drought.unl.edu/dm/monitor.html

Thursday, June 25, 2009

Bank Holiday Coming?

Latest Schultz Shock: a 'bank holiday'

Commentary: A leading newsletter paints a grim picture of the future

By Peter Brimelow, MarketWatch

NEW YORK (MarketWatch) -- The top-performing letter that predicted the Crash of 2008 now predicts a confiscatory Franklin D. Roosevelt-style "bank holiday." But it's surprisingly sanguine about stocks -- in the (very) short term.

The Harry Schultz Letter (HSL) was my pick for Letter of the Year in 2008 because it really did predict what it rightly called a coming "financial tsunami." But its performance in 2008 was still terrible, albeit arguably for technical reasons. ( See Dec. 28, 2008, column.)

Now HSL has bounced back big-time. ( See April 13 column.) Over the year to date through May, it's up a remarkable 81.7% by Hulbert Financial Digest count, compared to 4.1% for the dividend-reinvested Wilshire 5000 Total Stock Market Index.

Of course, simple arithmetic dictates that doesn't make up for 2008 -- over the past 12 months, HSL is still down 48.19% versus negative 32.63% for the total return Wilshire 5000. In fact, the damage inflicted by 2008 was so great that HSL is also under water over the past three years, down an annualized 14.89% against a drop of 8.18% annualized for the total return Wilshire 5000.

Still, over the past five years, the letter has achieved an annualized gain of 9.19%, compared to negative 1.26% annualized for the total return Wilshire 5000. This reflects its success in catching the post-millennium hard-asset bull market that caused me to name it Letter of the Year, for more conventional reasons, in 2005. ( See Dec. 29, 2005, column.)

And over the past 10 years, the letter still shows an annualized gain of 3.65%, against negative 0.86% annualized for the total return Wilshire.

In its current issue, HSL reports rumors that "Some U.S. embassies worldwide are being advised to purchase massive amounts of local currencies; enough to last them a year. Some embassies are being sent enormous amounts of U.S. cash to purchase currencies from those governments, quietly. But not pound sterling. Inside the State Dept., there is a sense of sadness and foreboding that 'something' is about to happen ... within 180 days, but could be 120-150 days."

Yes, yes, it's paranoid. But paranoids have enemies -- and the Crash of 2008 really did happen.

HSL's suspicion: "Another FDR-style 'bank holiday' of indefinite length, perhaps soon, to let the insiders sort out the bank mess, which (despite their rosy propaganda campaign) is getting more out of their control every day. Insiders want to impose new bank rules. Widespread nationalization could result, already underway. It could also lead to a formal U.S. dollar devaluation, as FDR did by revaluing gold (and then confiscating it)."

HSL is still sticking with its 20-year "V" formation forecast, but emphasizes that within the current 10-year downtrend phase there will be rallies that will "last 1-2 years." It attributes its current success to "successfully trading almost daily, especially in commodity stocks (coal/potash/energy/ fertilizer/gold). Take profits constantly and rebuy on mini pullbacks. Prefer non-U.S. dollar companies; many such companies are listed in U.S. & Canada or Australia."

HSL says: "The world is staggering today between stagflation and net deflation right now; it varies widely around globe. Net deflation is a maybe 35% risk, due to toxics and/or deepening depression. Bit more likely, we'll slowly creep up to a dangerous 4.5% inflation on average, medium-term. But the wild card is the currency risk, which has a 50% (?) chance of boiling over and causing literally overnight (i.e. 24 hours) mega inflation in the asset markets."

Nevertheless, in the very short term, HSL's charting leads it to say: "we MAY not get a new bear market decline that many bears are predicting. Likewise, DJIA & S&P500 may build a Head-and Shoulders right shoulder."

HSL's currently recommended allocation:

• 35%-45% Government notes, bills and bonds. (Not U.S.)

• 8%-10% Stocks (non-golds).

• 10%-30% Commodities, via futures, commodity stocks and/or physical assets.

• 35%-45% Gold stocks and bullion.

• 0-5% Bear stock protection via inverse ETFs like ProShares UltraShort QQQ ; ProShares UltraShort Dow30 ("Use to trade/hedge market downturns only.")

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/schultz-paints-bleak-picture-of-future

Monday, June 22, 2009

People on terrorist watch list can buy guns - more propaganda

People on terrorist watch list can buy guns

NRA opposes senator's proposal to tighten rules on gun purchases.

The New York Times

Sunday, June 21, 2009

WASHINGTON — People on the government's terrorist watch list tried to buy guns nearly 1,000 times in the past five years, and federal authorities cleared the purchases nine times out of 10 because they had no legal way to stop them, a government report says.

The new statistics, compiled in a report from the Government Accountability Office that is scheduled for release this week, draw attention to an odd divergence in federal law: People placed on the government's terrorist watch list can be stopped from getting on a plane or getting a visa, but they can't be stopped from buying a gun.

Gun purchases must be approved unless federal officials can find some other disqualification of the would-be buyer, like being a felon, an illegal immigrant or a drug addict.

"This is a glaring omission, and it's a security issue," said Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., who requested the study.

Lautenberg said he plans to introduce legislation Monday that would give the attorney general the discretion to block gun sales to people on terror watch lists.

Gun rights advocates said showing up on a terrorist watch list shouldn't necessarily be grounds for being denied a gun.

"We're concerned about the quality and the integrity of the list," National Rifle Association spokesman Andrew Arulanandam said. "We believe law-abiding people who are on the list by error should not be arbitrarily denied their civil rights" under the Second Amendment.


Find this article at:
http://www.statesman.com/search/content/news/stories/nation/2009/06/21/0621watchguns.html

Thursday, June 18, 2009

Global systemic crisis in summer 2009: The cumulative impact of three « rogue waves

Public announcement Special Summer 2009 GEAB N°36 (June 17, 2009) -



Three rogue waves by H-J Fandrich for LEAP/E2020 As anticipated by LEAP/E2020 as early as October 2008, on the eve of summer 2009, the question of the US and UK capacity to finance their unbridled public deficits has become the central question of international debates, thus paving the way for these two countries to default on their debt by the end of this summer.

At this stage of the global systemic crisis’ process of development, contrary to the dominant political and media stance today, the LEAP/E2020 team does not foresee any economic upsurge after summer 2009 (nor in the following 12 months) (1). On the contrary, because the origins of the crisis remain unaddressed, we estimate that the summer 2009 will be marked by the converging of three very destructive « rogue waves » (2), illustrating the aggravation of the crisis and entailing major upheaval by September/October 2009. As always since this crisis started, each region of the world will be affected neither at the same moment, nor in the same way (3). However, according to our researchers, all of them will be concerned by a significant deterioration in their situation by the end of summer 2009 (4).

This evolution is likely to catch large numbers of economic and financial players on the wrong foot who decided to believe in today’s mainstream media operation of “euphorisation”.

In this special « Summer 2009 » edition, our team describes in detail these three converging « rogue waves » and their impact, and gives a number of strategic recommendations (currencies, gold, real estate, bonds, stocks, currencies) to avoid being swept away in this deadly summer.





Duration (in months) of US recessions since 1900 (average duration: 14,43 months) - Sources: US National Bureau of Economic Research / Trends der Zukunft
LEAP/E2020 believes that, instead of « green shoots » (those which international media, experts and the politicians who listen to them (5) kept perceiving in every statistical chart (6) in the past two months), what will appear on the horizon is a group of three destructive waves of the social and economic fabric expected to converge in the course of summer 2009, illustrating the aggravation of the crisis and entailing major changes by the end of summer 2009… more specifically, debt default events in the US and UK, both countries at the centre of the global system in crisis. These waves appear as follows:

1. Wave of massive unemployment: Three different dates of impact according to the countries in America, Europe, Asia, the Middle East and Africa
2. Wave of serial corporate bankruptcies: companies, banks, housing, states, counties, towns
3. Wave of terminal crisis for the US Dollar, US T-Bond and GBP, and the return of inflation




World trade shrinks : Chart 1: Year-over-year change in total exports from 15 major exporting countries (1991-02/2009) / Chart 2: Year-over-year change in exports from 15 major exporters between February 2008 and February 2009 (size of circles reflects vo
In fact, these three waves do not appear in quick succession like the « sisters rogue waves ». They are even more dangerous because they are simultaneous, asynchronous and non-parallel. Hence their impact on the global system accentuates the risks because they hit at various angles, at different speeds and with varying strength. The only certain thing at this stage is that the international system has never been so weak and powerless to face such a situation. The IMF and global governance institutions’ reforms announced by the London G20 are at a standstill (7). The G8 becomes more like a moribund club whose utility is increasingly questioned (8). US leadership is the shadow of what it used to be, mostly concerned by desperately trying to find purchasers for its T-Bonds (9). The global monetary system is in a process of disintegration, with the Russians and Chinese in particular accelerating their positioning in the post-Dollar era. Companies foresee no improvement in the business climate and speed up the pace of layoffs. A growing number of states falter under the weight of their accumulated debt created to “rescue banks” and are about to be faced with a welter of failings by the end of this summer (10). And, last but not least, the banks, once they have squeezed money out of naive savers thanks to the market upsurge orchestrated in the past few weeks, will be have to admit that they are still insolvent by the end of summer 2009.

In the United States and United Kingdom in particular, the colossal public financial effort made in 2008 and at the beginning of 2009 for the sole benefit of large banks became so unpopular that it was impossible to consider injecting more public money into banks in spring 2009, despite the fact that they were still insolvent (11). It then became necessary to invent a “fairy tale” to convince the average saver to inject his/her own money into the financial system. By means of the « green shoots » story, overpriced stock indices based on no real economic grounds and promises of « anticipated public funding repayment », the conditioning was achieved. Hence, while big investors from oil-producing and Asian countries (12) withdrew capital from these banks, large numbers of small individual investors returned, full of hope. Once these small investors discover that public funding repayment is only a drop in the ocean of public aid granted to these banks (to help them dispose of their toxic assets) and that, after three or four months at best (as analyzed in this GEAB N°36), these banks are again on the verge of collapse, they will realize, powerless, that their share is worth nothing once again.




Growth in GDP (green) and US debt (red) (Bn USD) - Sources: US Federal Reserve / US Bureau of Economic Analysis / Chris Puplava, 2008
Intoxicated by financiers, world political leaders will be surprised - once again – to see all the problems of last year reappear, all the more severe since they were not addressed but only buried under piles of public money. Once that money has been squandered by insolvent banks compelled to « rescue » even more insolvent rivals, or by ill-conceived economic stimulus plans, problems will re-emerge, further exacerbated. For hundreds of millions of citizens in America, Europe, Asia and Africa, the summer 2009 will be a dramatic transition towards lasting impoverishment due to the loss of their jobs, with no hope of finding new ones in the next two, three or four years, or due to the disappearance of their savings invested in stocks or capital-based pension funds, or in banking investments linked to stock markets or denominated in US dollars or British pounds, or investment in shares of companies pressured to desperately wait for an improvement not coming soon.


--------
Notes:

(1) Not even the « jobless recovery » many experts are trying to make us believe in. In the United States, United Kingdom, Eurozone and Japan, it is a « recoveryless recovery » we must expect, i.e. a pure invention aimed at convincing US and UK insolvent consumers to start buying again and keeping US T-Bonds’ and UK Gilts’ country purchasers waiting as long as possible (until they decide that there is really no future selling their products to the lands of the US Dollar and British Pound.

(2) « Rogues waves » are very large and sudden ocean surface waves which used to be considered as rare, though we now know that they appear in almost every storm above a certain strength. « Rogue waves » can reach heights of 30 meters (98 ft) and exert tremendous pressure. For instance, a normal 3 meter-high wave exerts a pressure of 6 tons/m². A 10 meter-high tempest wave exerts a pressure of 12 tons/m². A 30 meter-high rogue wave can exert pressure of up to 100 tons/m². No ship yet built is able to resist such pressures. One specific kind of rogue wave is called the “three sisters”, i.e. a group of three rogue waves all the more dangerous in that, even if a ship had time to react properly to the first two waves, there is no way she could be in the right position to brave the third one. According to LEAP/E2020, it is a similar phenomenon that the world is about to encounter this summer; and no country (ship) is in a favourable position to face them, even if some countries are more at risk than others, as explained in this GEAB (N°36).

(3) LEAP/E2020 estimate that their anticipations of social and economic trends in the various regions of the world - published in GEAB N°28 (10/16/2008) – are still relevant.

(4) More precisely, in every region, media and stock markets will no longer be able to hide the deterioration.

(5) Our readers have not failed to notice that the same people, media and institutions, considered everything was for the best in the best of worlds 3 years ago, that there was no risk of a severe crisis 2 years ago, and that the crisis was under control a year ago. Their opinion is therefore highly reliable!

(6) As regards US economic statistics, it will be interesting to follow the consequences of the revision of the indexing formula by the Bureau of Economic Analysis due to take place on 07/31/2009. Usually, this type of revision results in further complexity of historical comparisons and favourable modification of important figures. For example, some previous revisions enabled the division of the average level of measured inflation by three. Source: MWHodges, 04/2008.

(7) Except at a regional level where each political entity is organized the way that it wants. For instance, the EU is taking advantage of the political fading away of the UK - mired in a financial, economic and political crisis - and taking supervisory control of the City of London (source: Telegraph, 06/11/2009). It is likely that summer 2009 will be the end of 300 years of the City’s supremacy at the centre of British power. On this subject, it is instructive to read George Monbiot’s article in The Guardian dated 06/08/2009 and take the time to read John Lanchester’s brilliant essay published in the London Review of Books dated 05/28/2009 entitled « It's finished ».

(8) Who cares any more about G8 final statements, such as that following the June 13th G8-Finance meeting (source: Forbes, 06/13/2009), at a time when each player in fact plays by his own rules: Americans on one side, Canadians and Europeans on another, British and Japanese in the middle, while the Russians play a complete different game?

(9) US Treasury’s Secretary of State, Timothy Geithner, recently suffered a very embarrassing experience whilst giving a speech in front of Beijing University students: his audience simply burst into laughter when he reassured that the Chinese government had made the right choice investing their holdings in US T-Bonds and Dollars (source: Examiner/Reuters, 6/02/2009)! There is nothing worse than arousing irony or ridicule when you are an established power because that power is nothing without respect (on the part of both friends and enemies), especially when the one mocking is supposed to be “trapped” by the one mocked. According to LEAP/E2020, this laughter is worth a thousand explanations of the fact that China does not feel at all « trapped » by the US dollar and the Chinese authorities know exactly what tracks greenbacks and T–Bonds are following. This kind of situation was unthinkable only 12 months, maybe even 6 months ago, first because the Chinese were still naive, second because they thought it was in their interest to make everyone believe they were naive. Obviously, on the eve of summer 2009, this situation has vanished: no need to pretend anymore, as highlighted by this survey of 23 famous Chinese economists, published on the first day of Timothy Geithner’s visit to Beijing, and revealing that most of them deem US assets « risky » (source: Xinhuanet, 05/31/2009). This student burst of laughter will continue to echo for many months to come…

(10) Not only in the US will shareholders be systematically prejudiced by the state under the pretext of higher common interest, as in the case of pension fund and bondholder losses related to the Chrysler and GM bankruptcies, or when the US government and Federal Reserve pressured Bank of America to hide the calamitous state of Merrill Lynch from its shareholders at the time of the latter’s takeover. Sources: OpenSalon, 06/10/2009 / WallStreetJournal, 04/23/2009. In the UK, Europe and Asia, the same causes will produce the same effects: the « raison d'état » has always been the simplest excuse to justify large-scale plundering … and severe crises are perfect times to call in the « raison d'état ».

(11) Germany has a similar problem due to next September’s national election. After the election, the country’s banking problems will be in the headlines, as several hundreds of billions of risky assets on the balance sheets of a number of banks, mainly regional ones, will need dealing with. It is far from the scope of US and UK banking problems, nevertheless Berlin will probably be faced with a number of potential bank failures. Source: AFP/Google, 04/25/2009. In the United States, the banks bailed out by the federal state have simply lowered the amount of loans granted when they are supposed to do the contrary. Source: CNNMoney, 06/15/2009

(12) Sources: Financial Times, 06/01/2009; YahooFinance, 06/04/2009; StreetInsider+Holdings/4656921.html, 05/15/2009; Financial Times, 06/01/2009



Mercredi 17 Juin 2009



In the same category:
LEAP/E2020 and Paris-Sorbonne university announce world premiere in the field of education in political anticipation and strategy - 09/06/2009
Towards a world war of interest rates aimed at capturing global savings - 26/05/2009
Open letter / London G20 Summit: Last chance before global geopolitical dislocation - 24/03/2009
LEAP/E2020 offers the GEAB archives to 100 academic libraries worldwide! - 05/11/2008
LEAP/2020: Global systemic crisis September 2008 - Special announcement - 24/09/2008
Traffic Info LEAP/E2020 - May 2008 - 12/05/2008
Special offer! Each new subscriber gets Special Edition 'GEAB/SUBPRIME CRISIS: Causes, development, consequences and strategic advice'... because an in-depth understanding is required to secure oneself - 12/08/2007
GEAB Archives Offer (1) - Six archive issues of your choice for 50 euros - 22/01/2007
French prospectivist, Pierre Gonod, analyses LEAP's work of anticipation - 30/08/2006 GEAB N°36 (Summer 2009 special edition) - Contents
- Published June 17, 2009 -

Global systemic crisis in summer 2009: The cumulative impact of three « rogue waves »
Because the origins of the crisis remain unaddressed, LEAP/E2020 estimates that the summer 2009 will be marked by the converging of three very destructive « rogue waves », illustrating the aggravation of the crisis and entailing major upheaval by September/October 2009… (page 2)
Read public announcement

The three « rogue waves » of summer 2009

The wave of massive unemployment: Three different dates of impact depending on the country: in America, Europe, Asia, the Middle East and Africa
Summer 2009 will be remembered as a tipping point as regards the impact of unemployment on the course of events of the global systemic crisis. Indeed, it will be the time when, instead of a consequence of the crisis, unemployment worldwide will turn into a factor aggravating it. Of course, this process will unwind neither at the same pace everywhere, nor with similar consequences... (page 7)
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The breaking wave of serial failures: companies, banks, housing, states, counties, towns
Apart from these very high profile events, the number of failures of large, medium and small companies and financial institutions is rapidly and steadily growing. The speed should increase even more after summer 2009. Meanwhile, in the United States, United Kingdom and Spain in particular, a second wave of real estate foreclosures is gestating as well as a wave of state, county and town debt defaults during summer 2009. Financial media’s “green shoots” are only hiding the “dead leaves” of the real economy… (page 15)
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The wave of the terminal crisis of US Treasuries, Dollars and Pounds, and the return of inflation
This first BRIC Summit (which it is not difficult to imagine how difficult it was to organize), is the first sign of dislocation of the current international system. The US probably did everything it could to prevent it from taking place; moreover they were refused the status of observers inside it, indicating clearly that what was to be discussed had nothing to do with diplomacy. The main topic was not a military and strategic issue, but a monetary and financial one: what to do with the hundreds of billions of US dollars (in the form of US Treasuries in particular) accumulated by these four countries in the past few years?... (page 22)
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Strategic recommendations to successfully navigate one deadly summer 2009
. Currencies / Gold
. Real estate
. Corporate shares / bonds
. Treasuries (page 27)
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The GlobalEurometre - Results & Analyses
The Europeans are still very pessimistic about US outlook; a large majority (81 percent) estimate that the United States will not be able to borrow the amounts of money needed to finance its deficits in 2009… (page 29)
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Full page

Once Upon a Time in America

Once Upon a Time in America

Posted By Stephen Green On June 18, 2009 @ 12:43 am In . Column2 04, Politics, Uncategorized | 46 Comments

When the s*** hits the fan, for more than two centuries the best people in the world have been able to count on one thing: escaping to America.

Even before there was a United States, the land we call America was a different place. In America, a peasant could own land. A slave could fight — literally — for his freedom. An Irish cop could arrest an English criminal.

In America, a Russian could speak his mind, an Italian could renounce the Pope, a Serbian could marry a Turk, an Asian or an Indian could find space to move, a Catholic could get divorced, a Jew could eat bacon, and a housewife could get a job. A … well, pretty much anyone could do most anything. Maybe not at first, and certainly not without ridicule if you chose do something really silly — but the choice was yours.

In America, you were free.

Here was a New World. No kings, no knights, no dukes, no earls. No titles, no shackles, no pales of settlement. Some of us, shamefully, owned slaves. But when push came to shove, Americans were willing to kill and die to make other men free. It was true in the Civil War. It was true in World War Two. It remains true today in Iraq and Afghanistan.

We were never perfect, but we were always working on it — at least when we weren’t trying to make a buck, or maybe just trying to avoid attention. America was the land of promise, and the land that delivered on that promise.

American freedom was a huge, sprawling, messy, brawling thing. It consumed everything and anything, and spewed out an unimaginable bounty. For some, the freedom was about growing their business and making money. For others, it was about growing their hair and making love. But it was always here, for anyone willing to risk the journey and leave behind the Old World and its old ways.

But now that we have this wonderful place, this precious idea — what are we doing with it?

Already, the government runs our children’s education and our parents’ retirement. Now we’re allowing it to usurp our banks and nationalize what remains of our auto industries. Within weeks, Washington promises a plan to dictate our health care. To do all this, we’ve let Washington run up enough red ink to impoverish our grandchildren. As if all that weren’t enough, the president still found the time to kick our friends in London and Tel Aviv while courting a genocidal, election-stealing maniac in Tehran. He even gave a speech in Cairo — that oppressed, impoverished Old World megalopolis — in which he assured the world that America really is no better than anywhere else.

Well, once upon a time, we were.

Absent a warp drive, a wormhole, or some other science fiction escape to an uninhabited Earth-like planet, it’s impossible to recreate the conditions which allowed the creation of these United States. It can’t be done; there aren’t any New Worlds left to discover. Our maps are all filled in.

If the Old World comes here, where does the New World have left to go?

When the Puritans were persecuted in England, they risked everything to come to America. When young Germans faced the Prussian army’s grip, they gave up their ancient towns to come here. When Jews faced the Czar’s pogroms, they gave up their bucolic steppes for the slums of New York. Rather than accept stagnant lives in their own countries, Latin Americans risked uncertain lives in America. Rather than accept far milder impositions than our own, America’s Founding Fathers risked their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor just to sign their names on parchment.

Anyone with nothing to lose and everything to gain — and bearing wits and character enough to risk it all — came here. They ventured here. To America.

Whatever liberty we have right here, right now, in America … well, for all practical purposes, that’s all that’s left anywhere. If France had our freedoms, there would be no French here. If China had it, there would be no Chinese here. If it existed in Latin America, there would be no Spanish spoken here. And so it goes.

And so if we, here in America, throw it all away in a fit of panic or pique, then what we once called “America” will become as false as a fairy tale.

In a future where cap-and-trade has made the comforts we take for granted something only the rich or privileged enjoy …

where public debt has starved private investment …

where confiscatory taxation has choked off risk-taking and entrepreneurship …

where the dole has reduced all of us to beggars …

where liberty is a dim memory or half-forgotten dream … in that future, there is nowhere to run.

No New Worlds for making fresh new starts.

Someday, our children might comfort their own with incredible stories that no one will believe, even though they are true.

Those stories will begin with: “Once upon a time there was a land called America.”

(Author’s note: The theme and closing line of this piece were taken from a speech given by Preston M. Green to the Association of Steel Distributors more than 25 years ago. Both have aged tragically well.)


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Article printed from Pajamas Media: http://pajamasmedia.com

URL to article: http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/once-upon-a-time-in-america/

Wednesday, June 17, 2009

New issue of Republic

Last night I uploaded the new issue of Republic to the website.

I know I keep saying this but, this is by far... our best issue!

Ineractive Flipbook Edition
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Digital PDF Edition:
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Sound the message far and wide!

Also, we are not yet to our goal and we need everyone on board for the Sponsor A Patriot program Action.

There are 8,000+ people that are getting the fr.ee digital edition of Republic and we've had only 441 donors TOTAL. We need everyone to pitch in on this one.

Please, if you have not yet donated, go to:
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I know that times are tough, but they will be a lot tougher if we loose our freedom. We need your support!

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Monday, June 15, 2009

We knew this was coming

Robinson: The lone wolves among us
Eugene Robinson, THE WASHINGTON POST
Monday, June 15, 2009

We are blessed to live at a time when violent acts of hatred based on race, ethnicity or religion have become rare, at least in this country. As the act of terrorism committed Wednesday at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum should remind us, though, rare doesn't mean nonexistent.

James W. von Brunn, the 88-year-old white supremacist who allegedly took a rifle into the museum and killed security guard Stephen Johns, is more than a bitter, demented old man. He is a known figure in the domestic hate industry, a venom-spewing polemicist whose Web site offered readers the chance to download the opening chapters of his racist, anti-Semitic tome for free — and to buy the rest of the book for the bargain price of 10 bucks.

Apparently, there weren't enough takers. The Washington Post reported Thursday that acquaintances say von Brunn had become virtually destitute and was complaining that "someone in Washington" had cut his Social Security benefits as punishment for his political views. His recent e-mail blasts were apocalyptic. "It's time to kill all the Jews," said one.

It's easy to surmise that von Brunn, a rabid Holocaust denier, could have chosen the Holocaust museum as a target because he thought it would offer the opportunity to kill Jews. His writings show that he also hates black people with great passion, however, so perhaps he took some measure of sick satisfaction in allegedly gunning down the 39-year-old Johns, an African American.

In April, a prescient Department of Homeland Security memo predicted that the election of the first African American president and the advent of economic hard times could worsen the threat from "right-wing extremist groups." In particular, the memo warned of an increase in anti-Semitic activity by extremists who buy into the whole Jewish-banker-secret-cabal paranoid fantasy — and would blame "the Jews" for engineering the global financial crisis, just as they blame "the Jews" for everything.

For days, some conservative commentators tried mightily to paint the memo as an underhanded attempt by the Obama administration to smear its honorable critics by equating "right-wing" with "terrorism." It made no difference to these loudmouths that the number of hate groups around the country has increased by more than 50 percent since 2000, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. It didn't matter that the memo was backed up by solid intelligence and analysis. For these infotainers, the point isn't to illuminate a subject with light but to blast it with heat.

And it wasn't just the Sean Hannitys, Rush Limbaughs and Glenn Becks of the world who pretended to be outraged. Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele accused the administration of trying "to segment out Americans who dissent from this administration, to segment out conservatives in this country who have a different philosophy or view from this administration, and labeling them as terrorists." Steele seems to have decided that telling the truth isn't nearly as important as the high-temperature exercise known as "firing up the base."

The thing is, though, that words have consequences.

There's profit for the pundits, and personal advantage for some politicians, in calling President Barack Obama a "socialist" and calling Judge Sonia Sotomayor a "racist Latina" and claiming that Democrats want to "take away your guns" — in creating and nurturing a sense of grievance among those inclined to be aggrieved. But what about those who might not understand that it's all just political theater?

The Homeland Security memo made the assessment that "lone wolves and small terrorist cells embracing violent right-wing extremist ideology are the most dangerous domestic terrorism threat in the United States." It recalled an April 4 incident in which three Pittsburgh-area police officers were killed, and said "the alleged gunman's reaction reportedly was influenced by his racist ideology and belief in anti-government conspiracy theories related to gun confiscations, citizen detention camps, and a Jewish-controlled 'one world government.'"

It's clear that James von Brunn was a firm believer in this whole insane scenario long before the financial meltdown or Obama's election. Maybe it was his personal financial situation that allegedly pushed him over the edge. Maybe he reached a point of no return years ago, when he made a bizarre attempt to take members of the Federal Reserve Board hostage.

What we don't know is whether all the blast-furnace rhetoric coming from the right is giving validation and encouragement to some confused, angry man or woman with a rifle or a truck full of fertilizer — the next "lone wolf," preparing to howl.

eugenerobinson@washpost.com



Find this article at:
http://www.statesman.com/opinion/content/editorial/stories/2009/06/15/0615robinson_edit.html

Sunday, June 14, 2009

An interesting read

From Meccania to Atlantis - Part 12: Swallowed by Leviathan
By Takuan Seiyo
Created 2009-06-07 10:32

Basic Russian for crash test dummies

Recently, I was at a boomer backyard barbecue in Boston.The males had Ivy League degrees and high incomes evident in subtle ways. The wives who were white had the perfect cheekbones and teeth that only generations of breeding and expensive maintenance can produce. The nonwhite wives had PhD’s instead.

The host in a Yes We Can T-shirt sneezed. “Barack you!” said a preppie-looking man, and explained with a broad smile that it’s a new locution replacing “Bless you.”

I walked up to the Obamapod and said, “I like your barackhlo line.”

“It’s Barack you,” he said, with the typical linguistic obtuseness of the American born-and-bred, of which genus he turned out to be a prize specimen. A Harvard MD, native of North Carolina, smart and personable, he told me how he grew up in a genteel and racist home where only the N-word was used to refer to Afro-Americans. He also said that since Barack Obama’s election he was at last able to breathe.

Come to think of it, the Arabic root of Barack, barakha, does mean blessing, and “barack sie!” is what Europeans will soon be wishing to each other too, instead of Gesundheit! But I did not go into that with my new Boston buddy, nor told him that barackhlo is the Russian word for junk.

In former chapters of “Meccania – Atlantis” I described Podism (1) as a sort of mental chip programmed for white people’s (2) collective guilt and self-loathing, irrational and false assumptions about the superior virtue and moral deservedness of nonwhites, nondiscrimination as the highest value, ahistorical and utopian delusions, and the conviction that the road to universal peace and brotherhood hinges on the unilateral self-disablement of the West’s collective survival mechanism and the disablement of autochthon Westerners’ individual (3) survival mechanisms as well.

Another way of putting it is that after decades of promoting yin (i.e. the cosmic female element) and suppressing yang (i.e. the cosmic male element), the West now suffers from yin toxemia. As per Chinese Taoist precepts, this produces an overabundance of the soft, wet, squishy, sweet, flabby, irrational, diffuse energy that characterizes yin, and a shortage of the hard, dry, salty, muscular, rational and compacting male (i.e. yang) energy that could rectify this imbalance.

The yin-soaked West rests on a foundation of feelings. It feels for the plight of the female trapped in a male body, the Somali who has never seen indoor plumbing, and the abandoned son of a Kenyan exchange student who made good. That all such feelings translate into actions that dismantle the West financially, demographically and culturally no longer registers, for reason no longer registers, nor does survival. This is the age of I feel, therefore I am. The essence of yin.

The West is no longer able to deal with the abundant yang characteristics of the nonwhite, male-dominated ethnic groups – acting as “minorities” on the inside, and rogue and semi-rogue nations on the outside. In particular, gelded Snatchland (4) is unable to perceive, let alone to protect itself, from the main characteristic of the yang groups: Nashism.

Nashism is a neologism derived from the Russian word for "ours." Nashi is how the Russian refers to the Russian side in a war, dispute, or soccer match, the other side being vashi, "yours." It is a command of the heart, the culture, almost the language itself, that a Russian identify with and support nashi, irrespective of right or wrong, gain or loss, truth or falsehood.

If this is so for the Russian, it's squared for the Chinese, for whom the white person is still laowai, “old outsider,” or gweizi, “foreign devil.” It's squared as well for the second and third generation Mexican-American, for whom Mexico is the land of the heart, and the US is a depot where idiot gringos hand out massive social entitlement gift packages to foreign invaders with user instructions in the invaders’ own language.

It's squared also for the 10th generation African American, who – a rare and despised 'Oreo' like Thomas Sowell or Ward Connerly excepted – all too-often acquits black murderers if he is on jury duty; takes up reflexively the cause of black hoodlums (the "Jena Six," "Free Mumia" etc); votes for black candidates irrespectively of their qualifications; sees white "racism" where there is only his own racism; and sees only other blacks as "brothers."

Muslim Nashism is the ultimate: it's dar-al-Islam, "the abode of peace," for Muslims, and dar-al-Harb, "the abode of war," for the kuffar – that's you and me, the infidels. A practicing Muslim, be he 4th generation Swiss, cannot be true to his faith unless he treat the Islamic ummah as nashi, in precedence to his civic nation, vashi. Incidentally, Switzerland’s motto being Einer für alle, alle für einen (One for All, All for One), only a ruling elite of Body Snatcher cretins could have thought up the idea of importing 350,000 Muslims (5), 4.5% of the population, to that country.

Postmodern identity politics have made of gender another powerful tribal force, with the feminist “sisterhood” or groups formed according to GLBT sexual practices supplanting traditional civic allegiance. In contrast, Western ethos instills a civic commitment to one's nation, not a tribal commitment to one’s folk or genital affinity group. This disparity, catalyzed by the Pod creed, causes Snatcher State to hobble its majority autochthon people in order to confer advantages on disaffected centrifugal groups who show no reciprocal munificence.

Raymond Kraft, [hat tip, Fjordman] has written that the Islamic movement has turned the civility of the Western peoples into a weapon against them. It has weaponized niceness, compassion and the fundamental decency of Western Civilization. “We have become too civilized to defeat our enemies, perhaps too civilized to survive.” True, but it applies to much more than just Muslim colonization.

The questions this begs is, first, how could such insanity have taken hold in a civilization based on reason, and second, how could a “mental virus” alone produce this level of collective psychopathology, unmatched in the recorded history of mankind. The answers require that we move on to the next Russian expression, kto kogo.

Kto kogo, which means the same in several Slavic languages is “who whom.” Like in “who is ruling, dominating, doing in, controlling whom.” This was Lenin’s formula for instant clarity in politics.

The good intentions of the squishy West stem from biblical morality so mainstream that a sermon in a random Western church or synagogue sounds like induction into the Body Snatcher creed. There is the shame and sorrow for Nazism and Fascism, Colonialism and Slavery, centuries of poisonous anti-Semitism, copious internecine bloodshed in the name of the loving Jesus or xenophobic nationalism, exploitation of peasants, workers and women.

Contrition and restoration one can understand. But suicide?

After all, any calamity, any atrocity committed in the history of Western civilization was exceeded in non-Western civilizations – and they don’t have the West’s redeeming features on the other side of the ledger either. Both Stalin and Mao murdered more people than Hitler did. The Khmer Rouge murdered 26% of Cambodia’s population in four years (6). In the 1200 years of Arab slave trading, millions more Africans were enslaved by Arabs and treated with far greater cruelty than were ever by white men. As Thomas Sowell, a descendant of slaves himself, has pointed out (7), more Europeans were enslaved and taken to North Africa by Barbary Coast pirates alone than there were African slaves taken to America.

In Japan, a samurai could cut a peasant in half under the pretext of an insult, but really just to test his sword. Besides the hard feudalism, racism and ethnocentrism of the East Asian peoples, there is the cruel gynophobia of the Muslims, the appalling savagery of the Amerindians, and so on. But according to such intellectual luminaries as Susan Sontag -- and I am quoting – it’s the white race that’s the cancer of human history.

That’s where Lenin’s kto kogo comes in. Since the 1920s, hard core Western leftists, under the guidance of the Comintern and the KGB (and KGB’s predecessors, OGPU and NKVD), have fashioned “fascism” and “racism” into a lever with which to upend the West. It’s with the help of this lever that Lenin’s useful idiots were once stamped assembly-line fashion out of Western yin material. Though the original masters are gone, it’s this lever still that 80 years later activates the hydraulic presses from which issue next generations of Pods.

The Spanish Civil War (1936–39), for instance, due to its "Fighting the Fascists” veneer is to this day a subject of veneration by the “progressive” West. But this hews to the line of Comintern's phony propaganda. For the noble cause that the West sees in the Spanish Republicans was in fact an attempt to create a totalitarian Soviet republic. The International Brigades of idealistic volunteers were led by Soviet commissars under the control of NKVD, and carried out genocidal actions against a civilian population. But for “progressive humanity” (Stalin’s words), facts can never stand in the way of feelings.

There are 80 years of conditioning, hundreds of millions of KGB dollars and dozens of still-extant institutions that have gone into manufacturing this “antifascist” and “antiracist” reflex of the useful idiots. ANSWER for instance, aka Act Now to Stop War and Racism is a peace-and-justice loving organization on whose Steering Committee sit, among others, IFCO/Pastors for Peace, Partnership for Civil Justice, a few Muslim organizations that dearly love peace and justice, and so on. What could be more rousing for “justice” than, “ANSWER condemns LAPD attack on immigrant rights movement; Stop racist police violence!“

But a former Soviet subject like me can smell the cordite under the candy of peace and justice. General Ion Pacepa, defector from Communist Romania and past acting chief of its foreign intelligence service (i.e. a KGB satellite), says that ANSWER is a front organization of the Workers World Party (WWP), which is a Marxist-Leninist front organization created, financed and trained by the KGB in 1957 “to disseminate Soviet propaganda among the trade unions and ‘colored’ population of the United States.”

Yuri Bezmenov, another KGB defector, has spoken much about this process, for instance:

“Only about 15% of [the KGB’s] time, money, and manpower is spent on espionage as such. The other 85% is a slow process which we call either ideological subversion, active measures, or psychological warfare. What it basically means is: to change the perception of reality of every American that despite of the abundance of information no one is able to come to sensible conclusions in the interest of defending themselves, their families, their community, and their country.”

The glue that holds the WWP together is the same one that holds the entire useful idiot Body Snatcher establishment together, from Austria to Australia. This is the glue – manufactured according to an original NKVD - Comintern formula:

“Workers World has united Black, Latino, Native, Asian, Arab and white in the struggle against racism. It has brought together women and men, lesbian, gay, bi, trans and straight, youth and seniors, workers and the unemployed, native-born and immigrants to fight for better conditions for all.”

Which should remind us: President Barack Obama has just proclaimed June as "Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Pride Month."

It’s partly through the efforts of Yagoda, Yezhov and Beria (8) that my Barack buddy from Harvard will continue flagellating himself and his country daily because of the N-word he grew up with. His shelves are crammed with books like Racism without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States, and he revels in the racial guilt indoctrination program his freshman daughter was compelled to undergo at the University of Delaware. There, Body Snatcher credo is expressed as follows:

“A RACIST: A racist is one who is both privileged and socialized on the basis of race by a white supremacist (racist) system. The term applies to all white people (i.e., people of European descent) living in the United States, regardless of class, gender, religion, culture or sexuality. By this definition, people of color cannot be racists, because as peoples within the U.S. system, they do not have the power to back up their prejudices, hostilities, or acts of discrimination.”

Meanwhile, quite a number of real (and black) Barack buddies are overt, genocidal racists of the frothing kind. Louis Farrakhan has taught his Black Muslim followers that white people are a race of devils created by the evil black scientist Yakub. American lawyer, Wahabbi activist and Obama mentor, Khalid al-Mansour, makes speeches with statements like this (at the 3:07 mark):

"White people don't feel bad, whatever you do to them, they deserve it, God wants you to do it and that's when you cut out the nose, cut out the ears, take flesh out of their body, don't worry because God wants you to do it."

But as successful as KGB’s destabilizing has been, as devastating as the Frankfurt School’s paving of the way for Hitler’s revenge, as brilliant as the psychological sabotage conceived by leftist tacticians Gramsci and Alinsky, Podism could never have taken over all social, political and cultural institutions of the West on the strength of its false propaganda alone. What has brought this takeover is the opportunism and greed for power and money by the 50-50 State (9) and by global economy’s managerial class.



Leviathan deconstructed

Leviathan is the Hebrew word for a giant sea creature, a whale (e.g. Jonah 1:17-2:10 KJV). Leviathan is also the title of a book by Thomas Hobbes, published in 1651, and the name Hobbes gives to a society based on the social contract. In exchange for security and order, individuals relinquish their native freedoms to a giant aggregate entity that assumes the absolute responsibility for their defense and welfare.

Hobbs’s Leviathan was embodied in the absolute monarch, but the modern democratic state is an even bigger Leviathan. Snatcher State maintains an ornate façade of constitutionality and rule of law, and makes a show of maintaining its side of the social contract. But it maintains that contract not with the signatory population.

Leviathan as manifest in Snatchland – i.e. all of the West -- exists only to perpetuate itself, and it perverts the social contract any way it can in pursuit of that goal. Like the whale sucking in krill for sustenance, it prospers (until the day of reckoning) by sucking in new groups of dependents. Some of these it creates internally, like the single mothers on welfare who increase their income in proportion to the number of fatherless children they breed with a parade of male pollinators passing through the drunken night. Others are imported aliens from all corners of the globe -- the foreigner and more primitive the better.

There is no better way to fatten Leviathan than by importing people useless to the modern economy and hopeless as prospects for melting in Western society. What excitement at the thought of the many more civil servants who will have to be hired per each 1000 newcomers, to administer ever-larger public welfare and wealth-transfer programs!

What joy at the new labor of instruction in 45 different languages in the proper use of the faucet and the fork and the filling out of forms for public housing and welfare subsidies! Innovative P.R. campaigns to discourage female genital mutilation and honor killings! New, taxpayer-funded clinics for hymen restoration for Muslim brides or dental implants for African refugees whose teeth were extracted or filed to sharp points by tribal custom!

New buildings with new roomfuls of new mid-level bureaucrats to requisition and dispense public funds for the building of mosques and multi-bedroom council housing for polygamous residents! Massive spending for a million new TV cameras in public places and for surveillance centers where new crime by the new people and by their descendants unto the nth generation (10) can be monitored by new state employees live on TV!

Not to mention that TV surveillance is useful for monitoring everyone. Leviathan never sleeps.

Thus doth the giant beast keep busy and growing. No matter that all this activity, the humongous and ultimately bankrupting fiscal and social cost, the diversion of attention and resources, do not generate a single penny in added economic surplus or social value, or elevate the standard of living, culture, or international competiveness of Snatchland.

There is plenty of work for Leviathan when, say, Sikh followers of Shri Guru Ravidas attack with knives and guns a temple of the “untouchable” Sikh followers of the Dera Sach Kand, as happened on May 25, 2009.

In Vienna. An der schönen blauen Donau.

Another method Leviathan uses to gorge and grow is to find an ineradicable fault in its subject population, which Podism accepts a priori. Leviathan then proceeds to requisition ever more funds and build ever-new programs to atone for that fault.

"Solving our racial problems in this country will require concrete steps, significant investment," speaketh Messiah. "We have a lot of work to do to overcome the long legacy of slavery and Jim Crow. It can't be purchased on the cheap.”

Taking under consideration the relative conditions of life in America and Africa, this racial shakedown gobbledygook is akin to a Grand Prize lottery winner who keeps complaining how all that money has wrecked his life, and demanding compensation. It’s a brazen shearing of a cowed sheeple.

But the fault is with the cowed sheeple. Imagine a Ukrainian leader dare to tell his people that they have a long and expensive way ahead of them to atone for the long legacy of genocidal anti-Semitism. Or a Hutu leader so addressing his people about the Tutsis.

The law and the judicial apparatus are the grinding surface of Leviathan’s teeth. Laws are passed to promote Leviathan’s preferred client groups, and new bureaucracies are established to enforce the preferential treatment. The judicial apparatus is turned from being the preserver of the original social contract to a Grand Inquisition Tribunal charged with promoting and multiplying Snatcher State’s client base, and identifying, branding, harassing, punishing and eliminating the infidels who resist this scheme.

Leviathan’s enemies are no longer those who do violence to its citizens or invade its territory but those, like Geert Wilders, who “sow hatred and insult [the invading] part of the population” (11). European laws proliferate to restrict criticism of Leviathan’s Eurabian gambit.

“Britain appears to be evolving into the first modern soft totalitarian state,” writes Hal Colebatch in The Australian. “The Government is pushing ahead with legislation that will criminalise politically incorrect jokes, with a maximum punishment of up to seven years prison.”

Colebatch cites a 14-year-old girl arrested for "racism" because she wanted to do her science project with a group of girls who could speak English, a 10-year-old arrested for calling a schoolmate “Paki”, and a hate crime investigation against a TV fox puppet, Basil Brush, for making a joke about Gypsies. Cases like this occur weekly in the UK.

The Belgian Anti-Racism Act (12) defines racial discrimination so broadly as to allow Leviathan to prosecute anyone who has anything negative to say about the demolition of that country through immigration. Under this law, the Belgian State ruled the ethno-conservative party Vlaams Blok a racist, therefore criminal organization, and forced it to disband in 2005. The state continues to persecute Vlaams Blok’s successor party, including stripping its leaders of their civic rights, ruining them financially and imprisoning them.

In Canada, the Human Rights Tribunal destroys people under the flimsiest allegations of “racism” or “discrimination”, with Ezra Levant and Mark Steyn the two better known cases among hundreds. But no country can hold a candle to the demolition derby that Snatcher Law wreaks in the United States.

American Leviathan has passed “civil rights” laws, then turned them into racial quotas, then encouraged the spread of nonwhite racial spite and victimology, then unleashed an army of prosecutors to enforce not merely the same starting line for everyone but to sue for race and gender discrimination if there are unequal results at the finish line.

Since the finish line results cannot be equal, because Reality decreed that most women are not as strong and fast as men, and most Blacks have a lower mean IQ than most Whites, and Muslims don’t make good employees in ham sandwich shops, and 200-kg. gluttons don’t make suitable fitness and beauty consultants, there is no end to Leviathan’s Reality-improving work, all done by well-paid employees with fringe benefits unheard of in the private sector. The result is the systematic wrecking of the United States.

Under the “Disparate Impact” doctrine, American employers are prevented from hiring based on competence, because minorities often cannot pass competence tests. Regardless of merit, if members of a “protected class” are selected at a rate less than four fifths (80%) of that of another group [read “white males”], the employer is subject to harassment and legal proceedings by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, currently employing 2200 persons, soon to go up to 3,000.

An employer cannot refuse to hire convicted felons, because a disproportionate ratio (13) of them is black, hence the refusal would have “disparate impact.” Customer Service employees of major American companies talk incomprehensibly, because a suitable screening policy would have a “disparate impact” on the protected class of nonwhite immigrants. And since requiring a down payment and a good credit score would have a “disparate impact” on black and brown minorities, American banks were forced to waive such requirements. Thus was the sub-prime mortgage born, leading to the unraveling of the American banking industry, and of America itself.

Moreover, Leviathan does all it can to transfer the levers of power to the clients themselves, particularly in jurisprudence, so that the punishment Body Snatchers yearn for in their erotic dreams can proceed ever more directly, by Nashist minorities in black robes, determined to avenge colonialism, “racism”, “inequality” or God’s stinginess with their own modest intellectual gifts that made them feel inferior at Yale or Oxford.

President Obama, a former constitutional law professor who has never published a single page about the law, singled out, as U.S. senator, empathy as the quality most desirable in judges. Fittingly, he has just nominated a racial spoils empathy queen (14) to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s main qualification for that position at the pinnacle of America’s power hierarchy seems to be her activist background as a fanatic Latina partisan using the judicial bench to sock it to whitey. According to her, policy is made [i.e. “empathy” applied] at the courts of appeal, and “A wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.”

As an appeals judge, Sotomayor has been a champion of the “disparate impact” doctrine. In Hayden v. Pataki, she wrote that felons doing time in prison should be allowed to vote because, Blacks and Latinos constituting a disproportionate share of the prison population, the denial of felons’ voting rights would be “race-based.” In Ricci v. DeStefano, she dismissed with one paragraph the racial discrimination lawsuit of 20 white firefighters against the city of New Haven, Conn. The city had thrown out the results of two Fire Department promotion tests that the plaintiffs had passed, because no black applicants had passed.

According to a dissenting judge, “The single-paragraph order issued by Sotomayor and her colleagues ignored over 1,800 pages of testimony and more than an hour of argument -- ignoring the facts of the case.” But a Washington Times editorial pinned the ruinous swindle on a higher figure:

“Barack Obama's legacy is coming sharply into focus,” wrote Wesley Pruden. “He's out to transform ‘a nation of laws,’ once the pride of the Anglo-Saxon heritage and exemplar to the world, into ‘a nation of feelings.’ We won't need judges, just social workers damp with empathy”.



The looters’ coalition

The way it works, the looters build up the Body Snatchers, and the Body Snatchers reward the looters with access to the spoils of power. Thus, Harry Reid, one of the biggest looters in the US Senate (e.g. here and here) has recently praised President Obama with the words, “Obama’s heart is bigger than any heart in the world.” This may well be true, and one shudders for America.

Built on the defining lameness of the Western soul, Leviathan’s forward thrust is fueled by the emotion Body Snatchers invest in the idea of the state as a dispenser of empathy, equality and protection from the white people’s wickedness. This allows Snatcher State to foray ever forward in the search for more krill, i.e. more aliens, more Muslims to import, more African refugees to save, more taxpayer-financed transgender post-ops, more oppressive laws, more racial revanchist judges, more salaried positions for Pod social engineers, more growth of the monstrous blimp, and more taxes to pay for it all.

“The Obama administration has a $3.6 trillion 2010 budget. Its 2009 deficit will be $1.841 trillion,” writes Declan McCullagh at CBS News. “A recent poll asked Americans how many million are in a trillion. 21% knew.”

In 1992, the U.S. federal, state and local government had 18.75 million (civilian) employees with a payroll of $43.1 billion. Just 14 years later, by 2006, the number of employees had grown by over 21%, to 22.75 million, and the payroll had grown by 73%, to $74.6 billion.

The average compensation per federal worker will go up by 3.5% to $75,419 in 2009, versus average compensation about 30% lower in the private sector and mounting unemployment.

On the local level, it’s the state and municipal employees’ unions whose sweetheart deals with Leviathan are the primary cause of bankruptcy for states like California and cities like New York. Even as both are raising taxes to match (with federal taxes added) the highest in Europe, the number of state employees in California has increased by more than a third since 1990, and public school janitors in New York make over $100,000 a year.

When looting by legal means is not viable, there are other means.

“Our democracy's going down the plughole with the Home Secretary's dirty bathwater”, writes Melanie Phillips. “Getting the taxpayer to reimburse them for eyeliner, plastic bags, nappies, mock Tudor beams, Maltesers, nail polish, plasma TVs, Christmas tree decorations, horse manure, bath plugs; and on and surreally on.”

Our favorite in this series, Home Secretary Jacqui Smith, who never saw a jihadi immigrant she didn’t like, claimed tax deductions for her husband's porn movies expenses. Alistair Darling, Chancellor of the Exchequer, has been a serial 'flipper', i.e. a practitioner of renovating one’s country estate and claiming it as the expense of maintaining one’s official little flat. MP Margaret Moran claimed £22,500 of taxpayers' money for treating dry rot in a house in Southampton, a long way from her constituency in Westminster. Communities Secretary Hazel Blears failed to pay capital gains tax on the sale of two properties -- the list is long and amusing, if it were not so indicative.

When the borders can no longer contain so much doing of good, Leviathan copulates with other Leviathans to spawn supranational super-whales, such as the European Union, or aggregates with groups of smaller whales like the UN and its mainspring, the 56-state Organization of the Islamic Conference. Together, they form an impregnable ring around the Western autochthons trapped within, in Meccania (15).

Each supranational tier requires the hiring of more people doing useless work, but useful because their handsome livelihood depends on Meccania. The European Commission alone has 54,000 employees (29,000 off the books) of whom 10,000 earn over 80,000 euro annually. The 745 members of the European Parliament earn up to €176,000 in salary and allowances, and do not overwork themselves.

It’s impossible to find out how many are employed at the United Nations, where a culture of impunity reigns. Claudia Rosett, who has done more than anyone to expose the degeneracy of that institution, estimates the number of UN’s employees at “somewhere in the six figures,” even though the official figure is 29,000. She pegs the UN’s annual expenditures at $30 billion, or more than 15 times its official “core budget” of $1.9 billion.

As to the grand looting at the UN that Rosett has been exposing layer by layer since the Oil-for-Food scandal, she has asked How Corrupt Is the United Nations?, and answered it memorably.

Ultimately, there is no whale. There is a class of people who make a splendid living by pulling levers behind the curtain like the Wizard of Oz in Emerald City. And like that bamboozling impostor, they too come and go by a hot air balloon.

But between the useful Pod idiots, the replacement electorate of “minorities”, and the leftist parties and labor unions, this fake wizard does rule by the consent of the majority of the governed. And that is the central and terminal dilemma of modern democracy.

The Pods want to repair Reality so it be “fair.” Resident ethnic tribes want social services and a lifestyle unachievable in their original countries. The socialist parties want more power. The unions want more loot. Hateful groups ranging from radical feminists to communists to Greens to Salafist Muslims just want to destroy the West. The coalition they form has the same shape in every Western country. They support Leviathan, and Leviathan supports them. As they grow, so does the beast.

In every Western country a coalitions of looters has seized power as a majority that preys on the autochthon minority under the pretext of being a minority standing up to a bigoted majority. In Europe, where there are ethno-nationalist (and mostly conservative) parties, all other parties and all MSM form a cordon sanitaire around them. Reduced to public protests, the untouchables are then subject to beatings and drowning in Antifa noise by fascist “youths” of the Muslim or socialist persuasion. This takes place inside a cordon policiaire of indifferent police. Snatcher State then picks off the leaders who survived the pogrom, like it has done repeatedly with the leaders of Vlaams Belang, for show trials. In a brilliant touch that the master himself, Lenin, would applaud, the fascists succeed by painting their victims as fascists.

Here we need another Russian word, kotiol, literally a cauldron but actually a strategic military concept employed by the Russians in battles such as Stalingrad. You surround them and then you pound them. While keeping a tight lid on the cauldron, you bring in more artillery to increase the crushing pressure to pulverizing and inescapable levels.

That is why Western ruling elites push constantly to enlarge the voting franchise not just to any clients, but to low-discernment, easily manipulable clients, e.g. teenagers and low-education resident and illegal aliens, who want the taxpayers’ money and have no ability to comprehend the long term consequences of their votes.

Obama Justice Department Decision Will Allow Non-Citizens to Register to Vote in Georgia, reads the official communiqué of the stunned State of Georgia (USA). Obama’s people have simply forbidden verification of the citizenship status of anyone who registers to vote in Georgia, citing the “disparate impact” doctrine. To translate this into kto kogo language, the BHO administration is willing to bus in voters straight from Guatemala, Jalisco, Yemen or Sudan to increase the number of Leviathan clients guaranteed to vote for the looters’ agenda. No wonder James Carville, one of the Democratic Party’s major tacticians, says, Democrats Will Dominate for 40 Years.

The Brussels Journal has documented a similar process going on in Belgium, and it’s the reason for the Government - Socialist – Muslim – Third World Immigrant alliance throughout the West.

But that’s just the beginning. Once you have this double enfilade set up, you crank up the pressure in the kotiol. For whatever share of the electorate remains that’s not clients old or new, you dumb down through content-free education full of self esteem, race, class and gender gibberish, revisionist History for Dummies, praising the glories of diversity, ceaseless condemnation of “racists”, compulsory introduction to the Religion of Peace, and audio-visual classes on the joys of the GLBT sex life. The dumb are easy to rule.

Then you wreck the economy through socialist policies, so that the headlines can read, “1 of every 6 dollars of Americans' income is government check or voucher.” Bingo; the cauldron is now a hermetic pressure cooker.

But even as Leviathan has swallowed its citizenry, willing and unwilling alike, its main enthusiasts will themselves be swallowed. Once the process of population replacement results in a majority of nonwhites, their inevitable Nashism will lead to a purge of the white Body Snatcher ruling elite. Like in the Bolshevik Revolution, Leviathan fattened on a diet of demographic change ultimately feeds on itself.



By then, Western Europe and United States will have already turned into a post-postmodern theme park. In erstwhile Fox and Hounds pubs renamed Salaam Aleikum, Britons who once formed a thin red line against barbarity will be serving halal root beer to throngs of thirsty Muslim colonizers coming out of gold-plated mosques after Dhuhr on sunny weekend afternoons. The Normans will be jousting in faux medieval armor for the benefit of Chinese tourists, and eight-generation American WASPs will be running the Mexican flag up the pole at the Alamo (17) in Davey Crockett costume.

For true prosperity is dependent not on the shuffling of phantom money but on technology and industry. To maintain the mirage of prosperity through global money shuffling you need 1000 men with an IQ of 140 and a black hole for a heart. We are now visiting the periphery of that black hole. But to do technology and industry, you need a population with a mean IQ of 100; universal, real high school education with math, science, language skills, history and geography; discipline, work ethic, ambition, faith and patriotism.

A very thin layer from the Indian subcontinent and Northeast Asia excepted, these conditions are not met by the new Western replacement population. Increasingly, that holds true also for the younger generations of autochthon Westerners -- shiftless socialist morons released from K-12 Snatcher farms oozing with self-esteem but with ambitions and capabilities no greater than enlarging the diameter of the plugholes in their earlobes and mastering the latest spastic move by some vertically integrated tycoon rapper with jeweled teeth.



When reality becomes taboo

It is fun to ridicule the sheer lunacy of the Body Snatchers. But in fact, the yin legumes are part of a motivated and cunning coalition phalanx. That phalanx has a masterly grasp of tactics, the morals of a wolverine and the size of Leviathan.

The Looter Coalition can run circles around its opposition because of its multiple, interlocking rings. The opposition is comprised of single-issue groups: counter-jihad, anti-socialists, traditionalists, anti-secularists etc. This is like Bruce Lee in Enter the Dragon trying to beat the evil Han in the hall of mirrors. Until the mirrors are broken, the underlying unity of the foe cannot be seen. The foe therefore cannot be defeated.

Those who are counter-jihad are pummeled not by jihadis but by socialists. Those who are anti-socialist are pummeled not by socialists but by immigrant demographics. Those who are traditionalists are pummeled not by nihilists but by global capitalists. Those who are social conservatives are pummeled not by libertines but by the very symbol of rectitude, the Law. Those who are declining fertility activists will be defeated even if they succeed, for any number of Western children would still be compelled to spend 12 – 18 years turning into Pods in the Snatchers’ zombie farms. It’s in light of all this that I see the tactical retreat of Exodus.

When Reality becomes taboo, and fiction becomes an official totem, civilization has driven itself into a swamp. From then on, it’s the flotation coefficient of the lying totem versus the suction force of Reality’s swamp. That is a contest with only one possible outcome, as gravity and entropy work for the swamp. Unless the lie be smashed and the taboo repealed, that civilization must be sucked under.

The lying totem of equality and the taboo on discrimination cannot be smashed or repealed in time to save the West from its own folly. For they are not merely the Snatchers’ mental chip but are the engine of Leviathan itself.

What sort of awakening can still save Rotterdam, with 40% of its population foreign born and procreating at triple the rate of whites, one in eight a Muslim, 30 mosques and a Moroccan as mayor of the city? Nor will the U.S. that Barack and Rahm found in 2009 be the same in 2014.

Those who refuse to be sucked under have only one option: step outside the swamp and construct a new civilization. Or, as we glimpsed in Part 4, an Altneuland – a new civilization that restores and reinvigorates the old one.





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(1) The basic analogy reverts to Part 1, where we cited the film Invasion of the Body Snatchers. In the film, alien “Body Snatchers” produce giant legume Pods that replace living people while appearing to be identical to them. From the Pods develop the new Body Snatchers who cultivate further Pods etc. I use these terms interchangeably, usually preferring Pods as a catchall term, and anti-Pod as the antithesis of Pod.

(2) To avoid my meaning being snatched by fools and racial provocateurs, it’s necessary to restate that I use terms like “whites,” “white people,” “Euro-people” etc. to denote anyone descended from a people living in Europe for at least the last 1200 years.

(3) E.g., Laurence Auster’s website has frequent postings about rapes and murders of young white women in the U.S., whom feminist and multiculti dogmas prevent from seeing Reality with respect to risky behavior versus males in general, and rape-prone “minorities” in particular. Recent case here.

(4) I use the terms “Snatchland” and “Snatcher State” to denote all contemporary nations founded and inhabited by people of Western-European origin. All of them have ruling elites following a multicultural, self-erasing dogma of such obvious madness that only the horror fiction of Invasion of the Body Snatchers seems adequate for interpreting this phenomenon.

(5) There were 310,807 legal Muslims in Switzerland according to a 2001 census.

(6) Cambodia’s population in 1975 was between 7.1 and 7.2 million. There are several different estimates of the number of the Khmer Rouge’s victims, with the highest being 3 million and the lowest being 800,000. Taking a middle figure of 1.9 million as a basis, between 1975 and 1979 Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge murdered 26% of the Cambodian population.

(7) Recently, Fjordman delved into this issue in detail here.

(8) Heads of the dreaded Soviet NKVD, predecessor of KGB, in the 1930s and 1940s.

(9) We explored this concept in The 50-50- solution chapter of Part 3

(10) E.g. the sociologists Alejandro Portes and Rubén G. Rumbaut found out [in a Nashism-inspired pro-immigration report at that] that the crime rate of Hispanic perpetrators in the US is eight times higher among the second generation than the first one. A look at any TV news footage of rioting “youth” in Europe, and personal data of apprehended resident Muslim terrorist make for a similar conclusion as to inter-generational immigrant crime patterns in Europe. Some academic confirmations of the universality of this phenomenon have been published.

(11) These, minus my bracketed comment, are the words of the Dutch judicial powers in justifying their decision to prosecute Geert Wilders

(12) Racism is defined as "each form of distinction, exclusion, restriction or preference, which has or may have as its aim or consequence that the recognition, the enjoyment or exercise on an equal footing of human rights and fundamental freedoms in the political, economic, social or cultural sphere or in other areas of social life, is destroyed, affected or restricted."

(13) The ratio ranges from 18% to 41%, depending on the type of felony. Blacks are 13% of America’s population.

(14) Not all female or female minority judges are like that, but when they are not, they are invisible to the Body Snatcher elite. President Bush’s nomination of a black conservative female judge, Janice Rogers Brown, was stalled by US Senate Democrats for two years until her confirmation in 2005.

(15) I defined Meccania in Part 1 as “Eurabia and Multimerica [merged] into one ideological superstate.” The name is taken from Gregory Owen’s 1918 sci-fi book, Meccania, the Super-State, though 90 years later is has the Islamic connotation too that was irrelevant then.

(16) At a recent Tea Party transmitted by Fox TV from the Alamo in San Antonio, a large Mexican flag was undulating in the breeze right in front of the host, Glenn Beck. Neither the “extreme right wing” Mr. Beck nor any of his “conservative” guests voiced any objection.


See also: From Meccania to Atlantis - Part 1: The March of the Body Snatchers, 28 October 2008.

From Meccania to Atlantis - Part 2: From the Clenched Fist to the Raised Middle Finger, 1 November 2008.

From Meccania to Atlantis - Part 3: From Encirclement to Breakout, 27 November 2008.

From Meccania to Atlantis - Part 4: Tribe, 12 December 2008.

From Meccania to Atlantis - Part 4½: Darkness in the Cranium, 14 December 2008.

From Meccania to Atlantis - Part 5: From Screeching Cats to SDG, 19 December 2008.

From Meccania to Atlantis - Part 51⁄2: Music We Can Believe In, 26 December 2008.

From Meccania to Atlantis - Part 6: When The Music Stops, 24 January 2009.

From Meccania to Atlantis - Part 7: The True Horror in Hitchcock Films, 31 January 2009.

From Meccania to Atlantis - Part 8 - Drenched to the Bone, 19 February 2009.

From Meccania to Atlantis - Part 9: Goodbye To All That, 6 March 2009.

From Meccania to Atlantis - Part 10: Tale of the Two Buglers, 7 April 2009.

From Meccania to Atlantis - Part 11: Mugged by Reality, 15 June 2009.


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Source URL:
http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/3951

It's Your Network!

I would like to remind all the preppers in Texas that this is your network. If you have ideas or information you would like to share with other preppers in the state, just e-mail your ideas or information to Pickdog, Mayberry, or myself and we will do our best to get it posted for the benefit of everyone. It's your network!

The Texas Prepper's Network is a commercial free environment for the free exchange of ideas and important information as it may relate to preppers in our great state. With the support of the preppers in Texas, hopefully TPN can continue to be a force for all preppers in Texas to be better prepared. You may know of a good link for food storage information or disaster preparedness information you would like to share. All you have to do is let us know about it. Pickdog and Mayberry have done an excellent job of posting information for preppers at TPN and I want to express my thanks to them. I also post a lot of different information on Stealth Survival for everyone but is done randomly as to what I happen to be thinking that day. let us know what you are thinking or are concerned with because TPN is for you and the ideas and information you think is important.

I visited Galveston recently and will be posting an update on Galveston after Hurricane Ike for everyone.


Special Note: Thanks go out to DP for a most generous contribution to Texas Preppers Network. It is the support of preppers in Texas that help us to keep everyone better prepared. Thanks D.
Your contribution is greatly appreciated.

Remember, it's your network! Send usyour ideas and information. Thanks. RW

Monday, June 1, 2009

Just to let y'all know

Is There a Right to Social Security?
by Michael D. Tanner


Michael Tanner is director of health and welfare studies at the Cato Institute. He is the co-author of two recent books on the issue, A New Deal for Social Security and Common Cents, Common Dreams.

Added to cato.org on November 25, 1998

This article appeared on cato.org on November 25, 1998.

You worked hard your whole life and paid thousands of dollars in Social Security taxes. Now it's time to retire. You're legally entitled to Social Security benefits, right? Wrong. There is no legal right to Social Security, and that is one of the considerations that may decide the coming debate over Social Security reform.

Many people believe that Social Security is an "earned right." That is, they think that because they have paid Social Security taxes, they are entitled to receive Social Security benefits. The government encourages that belief by referring to Social Security taxes as "contributions," as in the Federal Insurance Contribution Act. However, in the 1960 case of Fleming v. Nestor, (see here for full text of opinion http://supreme.justia.com/us/363/603/case.html ) the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that workers have no legally binding contractual rights to their Social Security benefits, and that those benefits can be cut or even eliminated at any time.

Ephram Nestor was a Bulgarian immigrant who came to the United States in 1918 and paid Social Security taxes from 1936, the year the system began operating, until he retired in 1955. A year after he retired, Nestor was deported for having been a member of the Communist Party in the 1930s. In 1954 Congress had passed a law saying that any person deported from the United States should lose his Social Security benefits. Accordingly, Nestor's $55.60 per month Social Security checks were stopped. Nestor sued, claiming that because he had paid Social Security taxes, he had a right to Social Security benefits.

The Supreme Court disagreed, saying "To engraft upon the Social Security system a concept of 'accrued property rights' would deprive it of the flexibility and boldness in adjustment to ever changing conditions which it demands." The Court went on to say, "It is apparent that the non-contractual interest of an employee covered by the [Social Security] Act cannot be soundly analogized to that of the holder of an annuity, whose right to benefits is bottomed on his contractual premium payments."


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Social Security is not an insurance program at all. It is simply a payroll tax on one side and a welfare program on the other. Your Social Security benefits are always subject to the whim of 535 politicians in Washington.


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The Court's decision was not surprising. In an earlier case, Helvering v. Davis (1937), the Court had ruled that Social Security was not a contributory insurance program, saying, "The proceeds of both the employee and employer taxes are to be paid into the Treasury like any other internal revenue generally, and are not earmarked in any way."

In other words, Social Security is not an insurance program at all. It is simply a payroll tax on one side and a welfare program on the other. Your Social Security benefits are always subject to the whim of 535 politicians in Washington. Congress has cut Social Security benefits in the past and is likely to do so in the future. In fact, given Social Security's financial crisis, benefit cuts are almost inevitable. Several proposals to cut benefits, from increasing the retirement age to means testing, are already being debated.

In contrast, under a privatized Social Security system, workers would have full property rights in their retirement accounts. They would own the money in them, the same way people own their IRAs or 401(k) plans. Congress would have no right to touch that money.

Opponents of privatizing Social Security often warn that it would be risky to rely on private markets to provide retirement benefits. But, with the Social Security system more than $10 trillion in debt, being forced to rely on the unsupported promises of politicians is far more risky. By giving individuals ownership of their own retirement money, privatization would guarantee the security of retirement.

Indeed, only privatization would give Americans a true right to their Social Security.


Michael Tanner is director of health and welfare studies at the Cato Institute. He is the co-author of two recent books on the issue, A New Deal for Social Security and Common Cents, Common Dreams.

More by Michael D. Tanner