FUTURE OF THE STOCK MARKET

Is Another Stock Market Collapse Imminent?

June 25, 2009 | From theTrumpet.com

Strong insider trading could mean that bad news is just over the horizon.

Business owners are losing faith in the companies they run. U.S. business executives are selling shares in their companies at the fastest pace since the credit crunch began two years ago, reports show. This may indicate an impending stock market slump.

“Historically, insiders have been a leading indicator of where the market’s going to move, and we’re seeing a clear indication that insider sentiment is becoming more neutral if not approaching bearish levels,” says the editor of Vickers Weekly Insider Report, David Coleman.

“Insiders” are company executives and directors, who usually know best how their companies are doing. They have information not available to the public. For these reasons, they are required by law to report how much stock they buy and sell.

Data compiled by InsiderScore.com shows that insiders working for companies on Standard & Poor’s 500 index were net sellers for 14 weeks straight.

Three months ago, insiders were buying shares in their own companies as the S&P 500 index reached its lowest level in over a decade. Now they have shifted from buying to selling in a big way. TrimTabs Investment Research reports that insiders have sold $2.6 billion worth of stock so far this month. That is 22 times the $120 million in stock they have bought: a ratio of $22 sold for every $1 bought.

Bloomberg reports:

Sales by ceos, directors and senior officers have accelerated to the highest level since June 2007, two months before credit markets froze, as the S&P 500 rebounded from its 12-year low in March. The increase is making investors more skittish because executives presumably have the best information about their companies’ prospects.

“If insiders are selling into the rally, that shows they don’t expect their business to be able to support current stock-price levels,” said Joseph Keating, the chief investment officer of Raleigh, North Carolina-based rbc Bank, the unit of Royal Bank of Canada that oversees $33 billion in client assets. “They’re taking advantage of this bounce and selling into it.”

Historically, this has not been a good sign, as Bloomberg points out:

The last time there were more U.S. corporations with executives reducing their holdings than adding to them was during the week ended June 19, 2007, the data show. The next month, two Bear Stearns Cos. hedge funds filed for bankruptcy protection as securities linked to subprime mortgages fell apart, helping trigger almost $1.5 trillion in losses and write-downs at the world’s biggest financial companies and the 57 percent drop in the S&P 500 from Oct. 9, 2007, to March 9, 2009.

Insider selling during the height of the dot-com bubble in the first quarter of 2000 climbed to a record $41.7 billion on a net basis, according to data compiled by Bethesda, Maryland-based Washington Service. The sales coincided with the end of the S&P 500’s bull market and preceded a 2½-year slump that erased half the value of U.S. equities.

Not all experts agree that another stock market fall is coming. The director of research at O’Shaughnessy Asset Management, Bill Latimer, doesn’t believe that insider selling is a good way of forecasting stock performance. “When you’re dealing with an individual’s buying or selling, you’re clouding the picture with what their specific financial situation may be,” he said.

Nevertheless, the whole American financial system is in uncharted territory. A major crash is coming, at some point soon. This collapse, however, will eventually have a good outcome. To find out how, read “The Future of Money.” •

ISRAEL WILL BE ALONE

The End of the U.S.-Israeli Alliance

June 12, 2009 | From theTrumpet.com

Obama abandons historic ally to win favor from Muslims.

Stephen Flurry

In his Cairo speech last week, President Obama said the historic bond between the U.S. and Israel was based on Jewish aspirations for a homeland that were “rooted” in the tragedy of the Holocaust. In fact, Jewish aspirations for statehood not only predate the Adolf Hitler era, they predate the Zionist movement.

In 1879, ten years before Adolf Hitler was even born and nearly two decades before Theodore Herzl published The Jewish State, the venerable New York Times made this prediction: “So much has been said for generations of the Jews regaining possession of Jerusalem that it is agreeable to think that they are likely to do so at last. They certainly deserve Jerusalem” (emphasis mine throughout). Much had been said, of course, because of the Jews’ millennia-old roots that run through Jerusalem and the surrounding hills of Judea and Samaria.

Palestinians, of course, have reinvented this history, claiming the Jews are without legal or historic right to their homeland and that modern-day Israel exists only because of the guilt left hanging over Europe after the Holocaust.

Last week, the president of the United States legitimized this bit of Arab propaganda.

And in the very same speech, he delegitimized the “natural growth” of Israeli settlements in Judea and Samaria, as well as Jerusalem suburbs, by demanding, “It is time for these settlements to stop.”

Even Democrats on Capitol Hill were alarmed. “I do not support a settlement freeze that calls on Israeli families not to grow, get married, or forces them to throw away their grandparents. Telling people not to have children is unthinkable and inhumane,” said Rep. Gary L. Ackerman, a New York Democrat.

Charles Krauthammer, who made a similar point in his column last week, also noted how farcical it was to blame the moribund peace process on settlement growth.

Ten years ago, President Bill Clinton and Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered the Palestinians 94 percent of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and unrestricted control of the Temple Mount. Added to that, in exchange for the most densely populated Jewish settlements, Barak offered a land swap that amounted to about half the territory Israel would retain to keep its largest settlements intact.

In swift response to the generous offer, Nobel Prize winner Yasser Arafat unleashed a bloody five-year campaign of rockets, sniper fire and suicide bombings aimed primarily at civilians. The second intifada resulted in the murder of more than 1,000 Jews.

In response to a particularly bloody month in 2002, Israel launched Operation Defensive Shield into Judea and Samaria and later constructed a 465-mile fence to separate the West Bank from Israel proper.

Last year, largely relying upon the boundaries established by the security fence, lame duck Prime Minister Ehud Olmert offered the Palestinians 93 percent of the West Bank, a one-for-one land swap for the larger Jewish settlements, including territory adjacent to the Gaza Strip and a checkpoint-free passageway connecting the Strip to the West Bank, a luxury Palestinians never had even before 1967.

Mahmoud Abbas’s spokesman called the Israeli proposal a “waste of time” and said it demonstrated a “lack of seriousness” on Israel’s part. But in comparing the most recent offer with the Camp David proposal in 2000, the landmass offered to Palestinians was actually a bit larger this time around, even after 10 years of natural growth in Israeli settlements.

Clearly, then, it’s not settlement activity that’s obstructing the process for peace. It’s the presence of Jews. As Abbas’s spokesman told the Palestine News Agency, “The Palestinian side will only accept a Palestinian state with territorial continuity, with holy Jerusalem as its capital, without settlements, and on the June 4, 1967, boundaries”—meaning hundreds of thousands of Jews would have to be removed from Judea, Samaria and East Jerusalem.

Even then, assuming Israel would ever agree to a massive evacuation that would dwarf the Gaza pullout of 2005, it’s difficult to imagine Fatah accepting such an offer, given its stubborn refusal to recognize Israel’s right to exist.

Then there is Hamas, which grabbed hold of Gaza less than a year after Israel completely evacuated all of its settlements, and remains adamantly opposed to any Palestinian state coexisting with Israel as its next-door neighbor.

Hamas and Fatah, if truth be told, remain steadfast in their aspirations for a homeland that includes all of Israel being ethnically cleansed of any Jewish presence.

Which brings us back to President Obama’s unreasonable demand for Israel to freeze settlement growth. Of all the “road map” issues that need settling before the establishment of a Palestinian state, why would the United States now elevate the marginal issue of settlement growth to the top of its Middle East peace agenda? Calling for a settlement freeze only applies intense pressure on an already fractured relationship between Washington and Jerusalem.

This, as several commentators have noted, is exactly what the new American government wants. In creating this crisis, Stratfor explains, Obama wins no matter what Israel’s response might be. “If Netanyahu gives in, then [Obama] has established the principle that the United States can demand concessions from a Likud-controlled government in Israel and get them” (June 8).

And if Netanyahu doesn’t give in, which is much more likely when viewing the collision from a prophetic standpoint, Obama can drive a wedge between the U.S. and Israel and then “use that split as a lever with Islamic states,” Stratfor notes.

The United States, in other words, is renouncing its special relationship with Israel in order to boost its standing in the Muslim world.

We’ve been predicting this U.S.-Israeli division for many years, thanks to two specific prophecies found in Hosea 5:13 and Zechariah 11:14. In the latter verse, God said He would “break the brotherhood between Judah [modern-day Israel] and Israel [primarily the United States and Britain].”

This is why in Hosea, God says that Judah, after being mortally wounded by the peace process, would seek help from Germany, rather than the United States.

President Obama went to Cairo last week in search of a “new beginning” in the relationship between the United States and the Muslim world. In doing so, the U.S. effectively ended its brotherly friendship and strategically critical alliance with Israel.

That “unbreakable” bond between America and Israel, the president’s assurances notwithstanding, is now broken. •

KOREAN NIGHTMARE

Korea at DEFCON 1?

May 21, 2009
Jim Rawles

Based upon this article in Yahoo! and an article earlier today from Joonang Ilbo, I estimate that as a minimum US Forces, Korea has gone to DEFCON 1 and I suspect that Pacific Command is at DEFCON 2 as a minimum. I base this on my year of service in Korea from October 1975 to October, 1976 which time included the “Tree War”. At that time I was an F-4 Weapons Systems Officer and squadron additional duty plans officer with the 80th Tactical Fighter Squadron (Juvats) at Kunsan Air Base.

Many of the articles I have read over the past few days indicate that the driving force behind this current “temper tantrum” is the United Nations Security Council rebuke for the Taepodong-2 test that failed to stage and crashed into the sea. Many other articles have opined that the real problem is succession. Their theory is that Mr. Kim, knowing his time on this Earth is severely limited after his last medical problem, is pressing for the guaranteed survival of the DPRK so he can name his successor.

At this point I’m not sure that the reason makes any difference. I believe we are at a point where if Kim backs down, he incurs a catastrophic loss of face. Add to that the cessation of the behind the scenes support from South Korea that occurred under the Roh government. Mr. Kim has also ejected the World Food Program from the DPRK. Since all information on North Korean agriculture appears to be classified at the SECRET level, we don’t have access to the LANDSAT photos that would allow us to know the condition of agriculture in the DPRK. We don’t even know if the KPA participated in the Spring Planting. Considering that they were supposedly on war alert for the Taepodong-2 launch, their participation is in serious question. If the KPA did NOT participate in the Spring Planting, that would be a strong indicator that the DPRK was not depending on this fall’s harvest for food.

There are in the Soviet system only two times when you go to war: Summer and Winter. Spring and Fall occupy the army fully with planting or harvest. Why? Because the army has all of the vehicles needed to accomplish either without emptying the cities and sending them to the collectives. Since there is so much we do not know about the state of North Korean agriculture, we must make educated estimates of same. We do know that over the last five or six years, a significant amount of newly terraced land on the western hills was planted and then washed into the Yellow Sea by typhoons. This land at almost at once became arable and useless. There are few other areas in the DPRK where land may be adapted to agriculture that is not already in use and over use.

There is good reason why the United States does not destroy the various facilities of the DPRK that are causing so much consternation. The first reason, and the most important, is that the DPRK holds Seoul hostage. The Korean People’s Army has about 11,000 artillery pieces and rocket launchers carefully concealed along and shortly behind the DMZ that target the area between the DMZ and the Han River. It is physically impossible to destroy these systems before they turn the heart of South Korea into rubble laden with chemical and biological agents. At worst for the South, these systems will have 24 hours to do their missions before we can destroy them. Whatever we may believe about a solution to the Kim problem, the Republic of Korea risks its existence whatever we do. I believe the decision about war or peace belongs to them.

Here I believe that the Joong Ang Article about command relationships is telling. It has been US policy since the creation of North and South Korea not to sell or allow the ROK forces to have offensive weapons. It has always been the United States that has supplied the heavy artillery and air power to defend the ROK. That is also why the US forces have been moved in stages south of the Han and out of initial range of the DPRK initial bombardment and assault. If the South Koreans, after many years of discussion and political discourse, decided to unify all military units in South Korea under a joint and South Korean lead command structure suddently decide to cancel that plan is a serious loss of face for the ROK. Not something they would do unless they were really scared.

This situation reminds me a lot of the “Tree War”. The DPRK created a major incident in the DMZ and then backed off when we applied significant force. At no point in this current run of events has the United States applied or even threatened significant force. When we went to chop down that offending tree, there were some 100 aircraft airborne including two cells of B-52s. I broke more peacetime flying rules in the following two weeks than ever before in my career. Live MigCAPS do get your attention.

That is exactly what bothers me about this current mess. There are sufficient imponderables here to keep all of us guessing. I do not see Mr. Kim backing down. I do not see USFK or the ROK backing down. I do see the imminent possibility of a black hole into which all disappear and only chaos reappears.

God help us all.

Richard E. Radcliffe
Captain, USAF (Retired)

Permission is granted to publish in its entirety.

WAR WILL EXPAND

Obama’s Animal Farm

Bigger, Bloodier Wars Equal Peace and Justice

By James Petras
5-17-9

“The Deltas are psychos. You have to be a certified psychopath to
join the Delta Force”, a US Army colonel from Fort Bragg once told me back in the 1980’s. Now President Obama has elevated the most notorious of the psychopaths, General Stanley McChrystal, to head the US and NATO military command in Afghanistan. McChrystal’s rise to leadership is marked by his central role in directing special operations teams engaged in extrajudicial assassinations, systematic torture, bombing of civilian communities and search and destroy missions. He is the very embodiment of the brutality and gore that accompanies military-driven empire building. Between September 2003 and August 2008, McChrystal directed the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations (JSO) Command which operates special teams in overseas assassinations.

The point of the ‘Special Operations’ teams (SOT) is that they do not distinguish between civilian and military oppositions, between activists and their sympathizers and the armed resistance. The SOT specialize in establishing death squads and recruiting and training paramilitary forces to terrorize communities, neighborhoods and social movements opposing US client regimes. The SOT’s ‘counter-terrorism’ is terrorism in reverse, focusing on socio-political groups between US proxies and the armed resistance. McChrystal’s SOT targeted local and national insurgent leaders in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan through commando raids and air strikes. During the last 5 years of the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld period the SOT were deeply implicated in the torture of political prisoners and suspects. McChrystal was a special favorite of Rumsfeld and Cheney because he was in charge of the ‘direct action’ forces of the ‘Special Missions Units. ‘Direct Action’ operative are the death-squads and torturers and their only engagement with the local population is to terrorize, and not to propagandize. They engage in ‘propaganda of the dead’, assassinating local leaders to ‘teach’ the locals to obey and submit to the occupation. Obama’s appointment of McChrystal as head reflects a grave new military escalation of his Afghanistan war in the face of the advance of the resistance throughout the country.

The deteriorating position of the US is manifest in the tightening circle around all the roads leading in and out of Afghanistan’s capital, Kabul as well as the expansion of Taliban control and influence throughout the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. Obama’s inability to recruit new NATO reinforcements means that the White House’s only chance to advance its military driven empire is to escalate the number of US troops and to increase the kill ratio among any and all suspected civilians in territories controlled by the Afghan armed resistance.

The White House and the Pentagon claim that the appointment of McChrystal was due to the ‘complexities’ of the situation on the ground and the need for a ‘change in strategy’. ‘Complexity’ is a euphemism for the increased mass opposition to the US, complicating traditional carpet ‘bombing and military sweep’ operations. The new strategy practiced by McChrystal involves large scale, long term ’special operations’ to devastate and kill the local social networks and community leaders, which provide the support system for the armed resistance.

Obama’s decision to prevent the release of scores of photographs documenting the torture of prisoners by US troops and ‘interrogators’ (especially under command of the ‘Special Forces’), is directly related to his appointment of McChrystal whose ‘SOT’ forces were highly implicated in widespread torture in Iraq. Equally important, under McChrystal’s command the DELTA, SEAL and Special Operations Teams will have a bigger role in the new ‘counter-insurgency strategy’. Obama’s claim that the publication of these photographs will adversely affect the ‘troops’ has a particular meaning: The graphic exposure of McChrystal’s modus operendi for the past 5 years under President Bush will undermine his effectiveness in carrying out the same operations under Obama.

Obama’s decision to re-start the secret ‘military tribunals’ of foreign political prisoners, held at the Guantanamo prison camp, is not merely a replay of the Bush-Cheney policies, which Obama had condemned and vowed to eliminate during his presidential campaign, but part of his larger policy of militarization and coincides with his approval of the major secret police surveillance operations conducted against US citizens.

Putting McChrystal in charge of the expanded Afghanistan-Pakistan military operations means putting a notorious practitioner of military terrorism ­ the torture and assassination of opponents to US policy ­ at the center of US foreign policy. Obama’s quantitative and qualitative expansion of the US war in South Asia means massive numbers of refugees fleeing the destruction of their farms, homes and villages; tens of thousands of civilian deaths, and eradication of entire communities. All of this will be committed by the Obama Administraton in the quest to ‘empty the lake (displace entire populations) to catch the fish (armed insurgents and activists)’.

Obama’s restoration of all of the most notorious Bush Era policies and the appointment of Bush’s most brutal commander is based on his total embrace of the ideology of military-driven empire building. Once one believes (as Obama does) that US power and expansion are based on military conquests and counter-insurgency, all other ideological, diplomatic, moral and economic considerations will be subordinated to militarism. By focusing all resources on successful military conquest, scant attention is paid to the costs borne by the people targeted for conquest or to the US treasury and domestic American economy. This has been clear from the start: In the midst of a major recession/depression with millions of Americans losing their employment and homes, President Obama increased the military budget by 4% – taking it beyond $800 billion dollars.

Obama’s embrace of militarism is obvious from his decision to expand the Afghan war despite NATO’s refusal to commit any more combat troops. It is obvious in his appointment of the most hard-line and notorious Special Forces General from the Bush-Cheney era to head the military command in subduing Afghanistan and the frontier areas of Pakistan.

It is just as George Orwell described in Animal Farm: The Democratic Pigs are now pursuing the same brutal, military policies of their predecessors, the Republican Porkers, only now it is in the name of the people and peace. Orwell might paraphrase the policy of President Barack Obama, as ‘Bigger and bloodier wars equal peace and justice’.

BIGGEST SCAM EVER

between the lines Joseph Farah The Obama eligibility cover-up

Posted: April 27, 2009
1:00 am Eastern

© 2009

Everyone reading this column knows that the news service over which I preside has been virtually alone in covering one of the biggest electoral scandals in American history – maybe the biggest.

I’m talking about the question of Barack Obama’s constitutional eligibility to serve as president.

Even many of Obama’s political opponents and harshest critics continue to pretend this is a non-issue, that it’s a matter that has somehow been settled, that it is a question only people who wear tin-foil hats are discussing.

I know that’s not the case, given a petition I began demanding proof Obama is a “natural-born citizen” has now attracted more than 360,000 signees.

Yet, the cover-up continues.

The rest of the media care not.

They have no idea how much concern there is for the sanctity of the Constitution out there throughout America.

But just to point out the duplicity of my colleagues in the establishment press, I would like to ask a rhetorical question: Did the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Chicago Tribune and ABC News cover a story about questions over a presidential candidate’s constitutional eligibility during the long campaign last year?

Surprisingly, perhaps, the answer is “Yes, they did.”

They all covered the question over John McCain’s eligibility as a “natural-born citizen.”

Back on Feb. 28, 2008, the New York Times covered it.

That very same day, the Wall Street Journal covered it.

The Chicago Tribune covered it 10 days earlier.

And, just over a year ago, ABC News covered it.

As I have pointed out before, John McCain’s constitutional eligibility was considered important enough that congressional hearings were held on the matter – with Barack Obama eagerly signing up as a co-sponsor of legislation declaring his opponent fit to hold the office of the presidency.

Yet, no such hearings were held to demand Obama prove he was born in Hawaii as he claimed – despite his refusal, right up to today, to provide something as simple, innocuous and non-invasive of his privacy as a long-form birth certificate that would lay all such questions to rest.

Instead, all Obama ever released to select media was a “certificate of live birth,” which, as we all know, could have been issued to a resident of Hawaii for a foreign birth.

Why the lack of curiosity then?

Why the lack of curiosity now?

Why is everyone so eager to put this chapter of American political history behind us when it potentially cheapens our collective respect for the Constitution and potentially places the current occupant of the White House in a compromised position – even subject to blackmail if indeed he is not telling the truth about where he was born?

It would be so easy for Obama to settle this matter.

Instead of fighting lawsuits from citizens, including some currently serving in the military services right now in Iraq and Afghanistan who have serious concerns about the eligibility of Obama to serve in office, why won’t he just release the long-form birth certificate?

Why is that so difficult?

Why is that so onerous?

Doesn’t he realize that even though his friends in the media and many of his weak-kneed political opponents dare not breathe word of this controversy other than to denigrate those who do, it just ain’t going away?

If you are like me and believe the Constitution actually means what it says, I urge you to get the latest issue of Whistleblower magazine by subscribing to WND’s groundbreaking monthly or purchasing the single copy for just $7.50. It represents the most complete and comprehensive investigative report on this matter yet undertaken by any news organization. (It is also the first issue of the magazine in its new glossy 48-page format – entirely devoted to this one topic.)

Get it today. Share the information. Spread the word. Do it for your country.

JOSEPH FARAH – OBAMA

between the lines Joseph Farah Why Obama evasion means he’s unfit
Posted: April 07, 2009
1:00 am Eastern

© 2009

“Fatetur facinus qui judicium fugit.”

If your Latin is a little rusty, that means, “A person who flees judgment confesses guilt.”

It is a principle of the law that can be traced back at least to Black’s Law Dictionary, published in 1718 and immensely influential to America’s founders.

It is almost a self-evident principle, but because we live in an age in which much of what was previously self-evident has become obscured, it’s worth mentioning again – particularly with regard to Barack Obama’s determined effort block any effort to ascertain whether or not he is actually constitutionally eligible to serve as president of the United States.

When American citizens demand proof that Obama is indeed a natural-born citizen, as the Constitution requires, it’s not like a criminal indictment of someone who is presumed innocent until proven guilty. In this case, the burden of proof is on Obama – and he has done everything humanly possible to avoid releasing that proof to controlling legal authorities and the people he serves.

Think about it.

When did government officials start ignoring our national charter – and why does it continue? Find out in “Who Killed the Constitution?”

Obama was elected to serve you under the parameters of the Constitution, to which he took a sworn oath to uphold. (We all watched him botch it so badly he was forced to do it again – in private.)

Yet he steadfastly refuses to provide the evidence of his own eligibility under that Constitution. No one has seen it – not the Federal Elections Commission, not the secretaries of state who presided over his elections, not the Supreme Court of the United States, not the governor of Hawaii who has refused to release what she claims is a birth certificate that would end this matter of supreme public interest, and not the Congress of the United States, whose members – both majority and minority – are apparently too afraid of public ridicule to do what they are sworn to do, enforce the Constitution.

What does that tell you?

According to the aforementioned principle of the law, Obama is a kind of fugitive, a kind of scofflaw, someone who is deliberately, and with malice aforethought, undermining the rule of law.

There are some people who insist none of this is really important. They will tell you Obama won the election fair and square and that ends the debate. They will tell you that pursuing this constitutional issue is a waste of time, a dead end. They will even tell you that anyone devoted to pursuing the truth is some kind of whack-job conspiracy nut.

I couldn’t disagree more vehemently.

There is a vital principle at stake. It’s called the sanctity of the Constitution and the rule of law. I am well aware of the many ways Washington has averted its eyes from the literal words of the Constitution throughout our history in an effort to do whatever it wants – legal or not. This is certainly not the first time.

But think of what it means if Obama is permitted to get away with his deliberate evasion of the law. He is, as president, the man charged with administering the law, with enforcing the law. Is he himself above it? Apparently he thinks he is – and that attitude has already manifested itself in a thousand ways in just the first 100 days he has illegitimately held office.

A president who is hiding secrets subjects himself, and, thereby, the best interests of our country, to blackmail. And there is no question Obama has a secret. I’m not sure what that secret is, but it apparently involves the circumstances of his birth and probably much more.

If he was truly born in Hawaii, it’s a simple matter to prove. It is nearly an impossible task to disprove it without that simple long-form birth certificate that every American is forced to show when they first obtain a driver’s license or attend school, to participate in organized sports activities or to obtain even a low-level government job.

Don’t you think it’s time the president of the United States came clean with us and released his?

If you agree with me, I urge you to sign our growing petition, now exceeding 350,000 names. Keep up the pressure. Don’t let this issue die. If it does, another little piece of the Constitution dies with it.

COMMENTARY BY HARRY GORMAN

Fellow Americans,
Sadly, sadly, sadly, I am convinced that Barack Obama, for whose Presidency I held out such hopes of real CHANGE — is off, and running IN THE WRONG DIRECTION.

The graphic genius who designed the visual below, catches, exactly, what is going to happen to the American people as his spend-a-holic team starts shoveling TRILLIONS of BORROWED or phony, printed money (with no gold backing) for thousands of hurriedly planned “projects” to magically and quickly bring millions of jobs to the jobless, healthcare for all from cradle to grave, “energy” (years away while we freeze), and “education” — one of the most inefficient, wasteful elements in our society. (Statistics? Log on to “Grandfather Economic Reports”, scroll down to “Education”, if you dare to face the truth from Michael Hodges, a genuine expert).
One hilarious (but not funny) project will “stimulate” unemployed men and women from the recent financial-stock market collapse by giving them a THREE-MONTH CRASH COURSE and then hire them (more stimulus money) to TEACH SCIENCE and MATH.
Insanity from Government “social engineers” visited on the unfortunate kids in the schools that always need “improving” (You’d think, after 200 years they might have gotten it right!).
“Give me a blackboard, a piece of chalk a child who wants to LEARN — and I will TEACH!” (Disgusted, old-time teacher in her retirement speech).

Reminder to Senators, Congressmen and President OBAMA
You CANNOT “stimulate” our dying economy back to the prosperity of the 1950s by SPENDING TRILLIONS MORE on
infrastructure “service” jobs, that COST taxpayer money but create no WEALTH for our country. (Present debt – over $11 trillion!)
The ONLY way is to WORK YOUR WAY OUT of DEPRESSION — with FACTORIES (now overseas) that produce thousands of products for sale here (see Walmart, etc.) and also quantities for E-X-P-O-R-T — which brought in foreign money into our BANKRUPT treasury. WAKE UP, you ‘book-learning’ economist pinheads advising Obama into FAILURE instead of success

THIS 94 year OLD MAN WHO LIVED EVERY MINUTE OF THE DEPRESSION OF THE 1930s, GUARANTEES — IF OBAMA CONTINUES ON THIS COURSE, HE WILL LEAD US ALL RIGHT INTO THE PIT THAT SWALLOWED UP OTHER CIVILIZATIONS IN THE PAST THAT ROTTED FROM THE INSIDE.

MASSES OF ASSESS WHO BLINDLY “FOLLOW THE LEADER” INTO EXTINCTION ARE NOT A NEW PHENOMENON — BUT JUST BEGINNING TO SHOW THEIR UGLY HEADS AS ‘TRUE BELIEVERS’ OF THE OBAMA HORDE — ESPECIALLY YOUNG “INTERNET” PEOPLE WHO ALREADY REGARDS HIM AS A MAN WHO CAN DO NO WRONG.

(no graphics are shown on this commentary)

“OBAMA” by Dr. S. VAKNIN

Dr. Sam Vaknin, an Israeli psychologist, has written extensively about narcissism.

Dr. Vaknin States “I must confess I was impressed by Sen. Barack Obama from the first time I saw him. At first I was excited to see a black candidate. He looked youthful, spoke well, appeared to be confident – a wholesome presidential package. I was soon put off, not just because of his shallowness but also because there was an air of haughtiness in his demeanor that was unsettling. His posture and his body language were louder than his empty words. Obama’s speeches are unlike any political speech we have heard in American history. Never has a politician in this land had such a quasi “religious” impact on so many people. The fact that Obama is a total incognito with zero accomplishments, makes this inexplicable infatuation alarming. Obama is not an ordinary man. He is not a genius. In fact he is quite ignorant on most important subjects.”

Dr. Sam Vaknin, the author of the Malignant Self Love believes “Barack Obama appears to be a narcissist.” Vaknin is a world authority on narcissism. He understands narcissism and describes the inner mind of a narcissist like no other person. When he talks about narcissism everyone listens. Vaknin says that Obama’s language, posture and demeanor, and the testimonies of his closest, dearest and nearest suggest that the Senator is either a narcissist or he may have narcissistic personality disorder (NPD).

Narcissists project a grandiose but false image of themselves. Jim Jones (the charismatic leader of People’s Temple who led over 900 of his followers to cheerfully commit mass suicide and even murder their own children) was also a narcissist. David Koresh, Charles Manson, Joseph Koni, Shoko Asahara, Stalin, Saddam, Mao, Kim Jong Ill and Adolph Hitler are a few more examples of narcissists of our time. All these men had a tremendous influence over their followers. They created a personality cult around themselves and with their blazing speeches elevated their admirers, filled their hearts with enthusiasm and instilled in their minds a new zest for life. They promised hope! They promised the moon, but alas, invariably they brought their followers to doom. When you are a victim of a cult of personality, you don’t know it until too late. One determining factor in the development of NPD is childhood abuse.

“Obama’s early life was decidedly chaotic and replete with traumatic and mentally bruising dislocations,” says Vaknin. “Mixed-race marriages were even less common then. His parents divorced when he was an infant (two years old). Obama saw his father only once again, before he died in a car accident. His mother re-married and Obama had to relocate to Indonesia, a foreign land with a radically different culture, to be raised by a step-father. At the age of ten, he was whisked off to live with his maternal (white) grandparents. He saw his mother only intermittently in the following years. She vanished from his life in 1979 and died of cancer in 1995″.

One must never underestimate the manipulative genius of pathological narcissists. They project such an imposing personality that it overwhelms those around them. Charmed by the charisma of the narcissist, people become clay in his hands. They cheerfully do his bidding and delight to be at his service. The narcissist shapes the world around himself and reduces others in his own inverted image. He creates a cult of personality. His admirers become his co-dependents. Narcissists have no interest in things that do not help them to reach their personal objectives. They focus on one thing alone, power. All other issues are meaningless to them and they do not waste their precious time on trivialities. Anything that does not help them is beneath them and does not deserve their attention.

If an issue raised in the Senate does not help Obama in one way or another, he has no interest in it. The “present” vote is a safe vote. No one can criticize him if things go wrong. Those issues are unworthy by their very nature because they are not about him.

Obama’s election as the first black president of the Harvard Law Review led to a contract and advance to write a book about race relations. The University of Chicago Law School provided for him a lot longer than expected and at the end it evolved into, guess what? His own autobiography! Instead of writing a scholarly paper focusing on race relations, for which he had been paid, Obama could not resist writing about his most sublime self. He entitled the book Dreams from My Father.

Conditions in our country today are similar to those in the German Weimer Republic just before the rise of the Nazis. Obama’s glowing speeches promising “change and hope” certainly sound like Adolf Hitler’s. That the government is taking control of privately held business, industry and banks is a reality and no accident. So are we living in the soon to be totalitarian country of the United States? All the signs are there, but only time will tell.

TERROR TRAINING CAMPS IN AMERICA

Terror Training Camps On American Soil
by Robert Spencer
02/19/2009

“We are fighting to destroy the enemy. We are dealing with evil at its roots and its roots are America.”

So said the Pakistani Sheikh Muburak Gilani, leader of the jihad terrorist group Jamaat ul-Fuqra. And the way that he and his organization are “dealing with evil at its roots” is to set up jihad terror training camps all over the United States — often under the noses of government and law enforcement officials who are either indifferent or too hamstrung by political correctness to do anything about it.

Sheikh Gilani is no shrinking violet, and Jamaat ul-Fuqra is a force to be reckoned with both in the United States and elsewhere. Journalist Daniel Pearl was on his way to interview Gilani when he was kidnapped and beheaded in 2002. The following year, a member of Jamaat ul-Fuqra, Iyman Faris, pled guilty to plotting to blow up the Brooklyn Bridge. In 2005, the Department of Homeland Security included the group among “predicted possible sponsors of attacks” on American soil. And in 2006, the Department of Justice reported that Jamaat ul-Fuqra “has more than 35 suspected communes and more than 3,000 members spread across the United States, all in support of one goal: the purification of Islam through violence.” That means, of course, violence against unbelievers.

Yet despite the fact that Justice and the DHS are obviously aware of what is going on, Jamaat ul-Fuqra continues to operate, relatively unhindered, in the United States. A new documentary from the Christian Action Network, Homegrown Jihad: The Terrorist Camps Around the U.S., tells the whole shocking story. CAN spent two years visiting many of these Jamaat ul-Fuqra terror compounds, at great risk to network personnel. The documentary filmmakers dared to go inside these camps, cameras rolling, to ask compound leaders pointed questions about who they were and what they were doing.

The documentary reveals that these compounds are dedicated to the training of Muslims in terrorist activities. Most of these camps are tucked away in remote rural areas — Hancock, N.y., Red House, Va. — as far away from the watchful eye of law enforcement as possible. And what goes on in them is truly hair-raising: a training video that the network obtained shows American Muslims receiving training in how to fire AK-47 rifles and machine guns, and how to use rocket launchers, mortars, and explosives, as well as training in kidnapping, the murder of hostages, sabotage, and subversive operations.

Yet the State Department doesn’t include Jamaat ul-Fuqra on its Foreign Terrorist Organization Watch List. And so far the mainstream media’s reaction to the documentary has run from indifferent to hostile. CBS News ran a hit piece on the film last Wednesday, saying that “officials describe the film to CBS News as ‘sensationalistic’ and without any real foundation. According to one official, it is strictly designed to upset and inflame people and does not present a true picture of any so-called ‘homegrown Jihad’ danger. No current intelligence exists to suggest any threat connected with this group, which officials describe as ‘wannabes’ and not terrorists.”

No current intelligence? Someone should notify the Colorado Attorney General’s Office, which currently has posted on its website a page about Jamaat ul-Fuqra. “In addition to being suspected of committing numerous acts of domestic terrorism,” it says, “FUQRA members in the United States have been suspected of committing fraud against various governmental entitlement programs in an effort to financially support their activities.” And “FUQRA or its members have been investigated for alleged terrorist acts including murder and arson in New York, Detroit, Philadelphia, Toronto, Denver, Los Angeles and Tucson. UL FUQRA is suspected of more than thirteen firebombings and, at least, as many murders within the United States.”

The Homegrown Jihad documentary, which premiered last week in Washington, does a great service in shedding light on this group’s activities. We can only hope that American law enforcement officials wake up out of their politically correct fever dream in time to close these camps and end once and for all the possibility that these jihadists could mount an attack on American citizens.

AMERICA’S DEMISE

Ship Of Fools
By Paul Craig Roberts
2-9-9

Is there intelligent life in Washington, DC? Not a speck of it.

The US economy is imploding, and Obama is being led by his government of neconservatives and Israeli agents into a quagmire in Afghanistan that will bring the US into confrontation with Russia, and possibly China, American’s largest creditor.

The January payroll job figures reveal that last month 20,000 Americans lost their jobs every day.

In addition, December’s job losses were revised up by 53,000 jobs from 524,000 to 577,000. The revision brings the two-month job loss to 1,175,000. If this keeps up, Obama’s promised three million new jobs will be wiped out by job losses.

Statistician John Williams (shadowstats.com) reports that this huge number is an understatement. Williams notes that built-in biases in seasonal adjustment factors caused a 118,000 understatement of January job losses, bringing the actual January job loss to 716,000 jobs.

The payroll survey counts the number of jobs, not the number of employed as some people have more than one job. The Household Survey counts the number of people who have jobs. The Household Survey shows that 832,000 people lost their jobs in January and 806,000 in December, for a two month reduction of Americans with jobs of 1,638,000.

The unemployment rate reported in the US media is a fabrication. Williams reports that “during the Clinton Administration, ‘discouraged workers’ those who had given up looking for a job because there were no jobs to be had–were redefined so as to be counted only if they had been ‘discouraged’ for less than a year. This time qualification defined away the bulk of the discouraged workers. Adding them back into the total unemployed, actual unemployment, [according to the unemployment rate methodology used in 1980] rose to 18% in January, from 17.5% in December.”

In other words, without all the manipulations of the data from a government that lies to us every time it opens its mouth, the US unemployment rate is already at depression levels.

How could it be otherwise given the enormous job loss from offshored jobs. It is impossible for a country to create jobs when its corporations are moving production for the American consumer market offshore. When they move the production offshore, they
shift US GDP to other countries. The US trade deficit over the past decade has reduced US GDP by $1.5 trillion dollars. That is a lot of jobs.

I have been reporting for years that American university graduates have had to take jobs as waitresses and bartenders. As over-indebted American consumers lose their jobs, they will visit restaurants and bars less frequently. Consequently, Americans with university degrees will not even have jobs waiting on tables and mixing drinks.

US policymakers have ignored the fact that consumer demand in the 21st century has been driven, not by increases in real income, but by increased consumer indebtedness. This fact makes it pointless to try to stimulate the economy by bailing out banks so that they can lend more to consumers. The American consumers have no more capacity to borrow.

With the decline in the values of their principal assets–their homes–with the destruction of half of their pension assets, and with joblessness facing them, Americans cannot and will not spend.

Why bail out GM and Citibank when the firms are moving as many operations offshore as they possibly can?

Much of US infrastructure is in poor shape and needs renewing. However, infrastructure jobs do not produce goods and services that can be sold abroad. The massive commitment to infrastructure does nothing to help the US reduce its massive trade deficit, the financing of which is becoming a major problem. Moreover, when the infrastructure projects are completed, so are the jobs.

At best, assuming Mexicans do not get most of the construction jobs, all Obama’s stimulus program can do is to reduce the number of unemployed temporarily.

Unless US corporations can be required to use American labor to produce the goods and services that they sell in American markets, there is no hope for the US economy. No one in the Obama administration has the wits to address this problem. Thus, the economy will continue to implode.

Adding to the brewing disaster, Obama has been deceived by his military and neoconservative advisers into expanding the war in Afghanistan, a large mountainous country. Obama intends to use the draw-down of US soldiers in Iraq to send 30,000 more American troops to Afghanistan. This would bring the US forces to 60,000–600,000 fewer than US Marine Corps and US Army counterinsurgency guidelines define as the minimum number of soldiers necessary to bring success in Afghanistan–and less than half as many as the army that was unable to occupy Iraq.
The Iranians had to bail out the Bush regime by restraining its Shi’ite allies and encouraging them to use the ballot box to attain power and push out the Americans. In Iraq the US troops only had to fight a small Sunni insurgency drawn from a minority of the population. Even so, the US “prevailed” by putting the insurgents on the US payroll and paying them not to fight. The withdrawal agreement was dictated by the Shi’ites. It was not what the Bush regime wanted.

One would think that the experience with the “cakewalk” in Iraq would make the US hesitant to attempt to occupy Afghanistan, an undertaking that would require the US to occupy parts of Pakistan. The US was hard pressed to maintain 150,000 troops in Iraq. Where is Obama going to get another half million soldiers to add to the 150,000 to pacify Afghanistan?

One answer is the rapidly growing massive US unemployment. Americans will sign up to go kill abroad rather than be homeless and hungry at home.

But this solves only half of the problem. Where does the money come from to support an army in the field of 650,000, an army 4.3 times larger than US forces in Iraq, a war that has cost us $3 trillion in out-of-pocket and already incurred future costs. This money would have to be raised in addition to the $3 trillion US budget deficit that is the result of Bush’s financial sector bailout, Obama’s stimulus package, and the rapidly failing economy. When economies tank, as the American one is doing, tax revenues collapse. The millions of unemployed Americans are not paying Social Security, Medicare, and income taxes. The stores and businesses that are closing are not paying federal and state income taxes. Consumers with no money or credit to spend are not paying sales taxes.

The Washington Morons, and morons they are, have given no thought as to how they are going to finance a fiscal year 2009 budget deficit of some two to three trillion dollars.

The practically nonexistent US saving rate cannot finance it.

The trade surpluses of our trading partners, such as China, Japan, and Saudi Arabia, cannot finance it.

The US government really has only two possibilities for financing its budget deficit. One is a second collapse in the stock market, which would drive the surviving investors with what they have left into “safe” US Treasury bonds. The other is for the Federal Reserve to monetize the Treasury debt.

Monetizing the debt means that when no one is willing or able to purchase the Treasury’s bonds, the Federal Reserve buys them by creating bank deposits for the Treasury’s account.

In other words, the Fed “prints money” with which to buy the Treasury’s bonds.

Once this happens, the US dollar will cease to be the reserve currency.

In addition, China, Japan and Saudi Arabia, countries that hold enormous quantities of US Treasury debt in addition to other US dollar assets, will sell, hoping to get out before others.

The US dollar will become worthless, the currency of a banana republic.

The US will not be able to pay for its imports, a serious problem for a country dependent on imports for its energy, manufactured goods, and advanced technology products.

Obama’s Keynesian advisers have learned with a vengeance Milton Friedman’s lesson that the Great Depression resulted from the Federal Reserve permitting a contraction of the supply of money and credit. In the Great Depression good debts were destroyed by monetary contraction. Today bad debts are being preserved by the expansion of money and credit, and the US Treasury is jeopardizing its credit standing and the dollar’s reserve currency status with enormous quarterly bond auctions as far as the eye can see.

Meanwhile, the Russians, overflowing with energy and mineral resources, and not in debt, have learned that the US government is not to be trusted. Russia has watched Reagan’s successors attempt to turn former constituent parts of the Soviet Union into US puppet states with US military bases. The US is trying to ring Russia with missiles that neutralize Russia’s strategic deterrent.

Putin has caught on to “comrade wolf.” He has succeeded in having the president of Kyrgyzstan, a former part of the Soviet Union, evict the US from its military base. This base is essential to America’s ability to supply its soldiers in Afghanistan.

To stop America’s meddling in Russia’s sphere of influence, the Russian government has created a collective security treaty organization comprised of Russia, Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan. Uzbekistan is a partial participant.

In other words, Russia has organized central Asia against US penetration.

To whose agenda is President Obama being hitched? Writing in the English language version of the Swiss newspaper, Zeit-Fragen, Stephen J. Sniegoski reports that leading figures of the neocon conspiracy–Richard Perle, Max Boot, David Brooks, and Mona Charen–are ecstatic over Obama’s appointments. They don’t see any difference between Obama and Bush/Cheney.

Not only are Obama’s appointments moving him into an expanded war in Afghanistan, but the powerful Israel Lobby is pushing Obama toward a war with Iran.

The unreality in which he US government operates is beyond belief. A bankrupt government that cannot pay its bills without printing money is rushing headlong into wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iran. According to the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Analysis, the cost to the US taxpayers of sending a single soldier to fight in Afghanistan or Iraq is $775,000 per year!

The world has never seen such total mindlessness. Napoleon’s and Hitler’s march into Russia were rational acts compared to the mindless idiocy of the United States government.

Obama’s war in Afghanistan is the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party. After seven years of conflict, there is still no defined mission or endgame scenario for US forces in Afghanistan. When asked about the mission, a US military official told NBC News, “Frankly, we don’t have one.” NBC reports: “they’re working on it.”

Speaking to House Democrats on February 5, President Obama admitted that the US government does not know what its mission is in Afghanistan and that to avoid “mission creep without clear parameters,” the US “needs a clear mission.”

How would you like to be sent to a war, the point of which no one knows, including the commander-in-chief who sent you to kill or be killed? How, fellow taxpayers, do you like paying the enormous cost of sending soldiers on an undefined mission while the economy collapses?