Uploaded on 2 September 2012 by lisamharrison Bruce H. Lipton, PhD is an internationally recognised leader in bridging science and spirit. Stem cell biologist and bestselling author of ‘The Biology of Belief’ and ‘Spontaneous Evolution’.
9/03/2012
Lisa M Harrison – Dr. Bruce Lipton Interview – 3 September 2012
John Ward – Exclusive : How The Super-Rich Scramble For 5-Star Property, And Siphon Off The Gold Output – 3 September 2012 | Lucas
Safe houses and raw gold are being snaffled up by the 3%
I read this kind of analysis four or five times already today:
‘…gold will head towards $1,700 an ounce or higher as central bank moves into purchase and production problems increase the demand for gold, analysts said…’
As we’ll see, those ‘production problems’ are not all they seem.
Yes – these are factors about the resurgent gold price, no doubt about it. Also a third factor is folks gambling on the alleged certainty of QE3…although the logic behind the gamble continues to elude me: QE means messing with the Dollar and thus compromising its value, but rather more directly it leads to higher stock market dividends and consequently reduced interest in gold as a stock market hedge.
However, none of that explains the overall sentiment for alternatives to cash, stocks and commodities in the context of falling global confidence in fiat currencies per se.
The Spanish bank run is the start of the accelerator against the euro, but when any currency is withdrawn, do people just stick it under the mattress? Peasants do, but the sleazy elite doesn’t.
The growing appetite for glitzy bricks
Here’s some fascinating news about top-end property prices in Five-Star locations: there is a rush to buy. In France, for example, while anything up to €550,000 simply isn’t selling, stuff in the €950,000-€3million band over the last three weeks has been flying off the agency shelves. So-called ‘known’ or ‘famous’ locations have been reporting a rush since the middle of August at the top end: it doesn’t matter whether it’s Nice on the /cote D’Azure or Issigeac in the Dordogne, the money is pouring in – at over 80% cash levels, and not for occupation, but for investment.
A similar syndrome has been under way in central London, as well as top-end Los Angeles, the West Indies, Singapore, Zurich and Vienna. But it is especially marked in ‘Raj’ Manhattan. As Shaun Osher, the chief executive of CORE says, “A lot of high-end buyers and sellers want to get on the gilded bandwagon.” Before long these may be more crowded than the last helicopter out of Saigon in 1973.
A new handful of properties in Manhattan are about to come on the market with listing prices of $90 million or more, And the wrinklies are partying in upmarket Miami neighbourhoods: apartments and single-family homes in and around Miami Beach are being listed and sold for record numbers…but again, very often not for occupation – more for ROI and a stable asset.
If the euro’s catatonic response to the liquidity emergency stays that way, other bank runs will begin….and currencies outside the eurozone must follow: banks will empty at record rates, and the property rush will become a stampede.
But very little of this is about swanky postcodes: the magic 3% with megamoney to spend are concerned to protect. They’re heading for places likely to keep both the value and the law and order.
The Coming Gold Rush
The one thing still holding gold back as a sector is the rapidly rising awareness – now well beyond blogosphere accusers like me – that the gold price is a fix designed to do all sorts of things. Things that can be summarised as ‘stopping the escape from all things prone to derivatives, zero demand, and exponential plunges’.
But there are signs that this inhibition is about to be cast to the four winds….above the sound of which can be heard the approach of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. “No, it’s some guy arsing about with empty coconuts” isn’t going to suffice for much longer as an explanation. The smell of doom-dung approacheth.
As long as QE is on the horizon – and Ben, Merv and Mario are weighing up the pros and cons – gold will wobble up unreliably from one plateau and small drop to another. But then – as and when the bank-emptying takes off and the property options run out – the shiny metal will break out once and for all.
Off the radar, it already has. I posted towards the end of last year about how lots of gold-trade middle-men are being cut out by wealthy investment combines and Arabian/Asian Sovereigns and their advisers approaching the miners direct. They offer the producers mouth-watering deals: have the cash now, set aside the gold for us in (say) six months time…have the money interest-free. Just sign here saying come what may, you’ll give us the gold.
Now I’m being told that the mining ‘production problems’ are not all they seem: that unrecorded output is being syphoned off direct to those off-the-record purchasers. Thus does yet another investment move I made (buying mining shares) fall victim to The Big Fix put in by The Big Money.
I’ve been out of that for some time now. I sold my last Gold Tracker at the $1872 level last year…a profit in excess of 120%. Now it’s back at $1690 in New York. As top-end bricks and mortar are way out of my league these days, I’m tempted by the amber gamble again.
My thought is to wait for the next euro-fudge and QE confirmation, hope for a smallish price fall, and then buy gold again….the real stuff this time. Commonsense says there will be millions of squeezed middles thinking exactly the same as me. I can but hope.
But like I opined at the start of this piece, the sense one gets researching, listening, asking, watching and monitoring today is that the flight from fiat money has just let go of it’s last booster stage. The escape-speed for these alternative investments is yet to be ascertained: but with stocks and commodities (outside some crops) looking sick, it seems clear that we are off to the Moon.
Jon Rappoport – America’s Leading Psychiatrist Convicts Himself Of Crimes Against Humanity
SEPTEMBER 2, 2012. The medical cartel, one of a handful of evolving super-cartels that strive for more power every day, is rife with so much fraud it’s astounding. In the psychiatric arena, for example, an open secret has been bleeding out into public consciousness for the past ten years.
THERE ARE NO DEFINITIVE LABORATORY TESTS FOR ANY SO-CALLED MENTAL DISORDER.
And along with that:
ALL SO-CALLED MENTAL DISORDERS ARE CONCOCTED, NAMED, LABELED, DESCRIBED, AND CATEGORIZED by a committee of psychiatrists, from menus of human behaviors.
Their findings are published in periodically updated editions of The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), printed by the American Psychiatric Association.
For years, even psychiatrists have been blowing the whistle on this hazy crazy process of “research.”
Of course, pharmaceutical companies, who manufacture highly toxic drugs to treat every one of these “disorders,” are leading the charge to invent more and more mental-health categories, so they can sell more drugs and make more money.
But we have a mind-boggling twist. Under the radar, one of the great psychiatric stars, who has been out in front inventing mental disorders, went public. He blew the whistle on himself and his colleagues. And for 2 years, almost no one noticed.
His name is Dr. Allen Frances, and he made VERY interesting statements to Gary Greenberg, author of a Wired article: “Inside the Battle to Define Mental Illness.” (Dec.27, 2010).
Major media never picked up on the interview in any serious way. It never became a scandal.
Dr. Allen Frances is the man who, in 1994, headed up the project to write the latest edition of the psychiatric bible, the DSM-IV. This tome defines and labels and describes every official mental disorder. The DSM-IV eventually listed 297 of them.
In an April 19, 1994, New York Times piece, “Scientist At Work,” Daniel Goleman called Frances “Perhaps the most powerful psychiatrist in America at the moment…”
Well, sure. If you’re sculpting the entire canon of diagnosable mental disorders for your colleagues, for insurers, for the government, for Pharma (who will sell the drugs matched up to the 297 DSM-IV diagnoses), you’re right up there in the pantheon.
Long after the DSM-IV had been put into print, Dr. Frances talked to Wired’s Greenberg and said the following:
“There is no definition of a mental disorder. It’s bullshit. I mean, you just can’t define it.”
BANG.
That’s on the order of the designer of the Hindenburg, looking at the burned rubble on the ground, remarking, “Well, I knew there would be a problem.”
After a suitable pause, Dr. Frances remarked to Greenberg, “These concepts [of distinct mental disorders] are virtually impossible to define precisely with bright lines at the borders.”
Frances might have been referring to the fact that his baby, the DSM-IV, had rearranged earlier definitions of ADHD and Bipolar to permit many MORE diagnoses, leading to a vast acceleration of drug-dosing with highly powerful and toxic compounds.
Finally, at the end of the Wired interview, Frances flew off into a bizarre fantasy:
“Diagnosis [as spelled out in the DSM-IV] is part of the magic…you know those medieval maps? In the places where they didn’t know what was going on, they wrote ‘Dragons live here’…we have a dragon’s world here. But you wouldn’t want to be without the map.”
Translation: People need to hope for the healing of their troubles; so even if we psychiatrists are shooting blanks and pretending to know one kind of mental disorder from another, even if we’re inventing these mental-disorder definitions based on no biological or chemical diagnostic tests—it’s a good thing, because people will then believe there is hope for them; they’ll believe it because we place a name on their problems…
If this is medical science, a duck is a rocket ship.
If I were an editor at one of the big national newspapers, and one of my reporters walked in and told me, “The most powerful psychiatrist in America just said the DSM is sheer b.s. but it’s still important,” I think I’d make room on the front page.
If the reporter then added, “This shrink was in charge of creating the DSM-IV,” I’d clear more room above the fold.
If the reporter went on to explain that the whole profession of psychiatry would collapse overnight if the DSM was discredited, I’d call for a special section of the paper to be printed.
I’d tell the reporter to get ready to pound on this story day after day for months. I’d tell him to track down all the implications of Dr. Frances’ statements.
I’d open a bottle of champagne to toast the soon-to-be-soaring sales of my newspaper.
And then, of course, the next day I’d be fired.
Because there are powerful multi-billion-dollar interests at stake, and those people don’t like their deepest secrets exposed in the press.
And as I walked out of my job, I’d see a bevy of blank-eyed pharmaceutical executives marching into the office of the paper’s publisher, ready to read the riot act to him.
Keep in mind that Dr. Frances’ work on the DSM IV allowed for MORE toxic drugs to be prescribed, because the definition of Bipolar was expanded to include more people.
Adverse effects of Valproate (given for a Bipolar diagnosis) include:
- acute, life-threatening, and even fatal liver toxicity;
- life-threatening inflammation of the pancreas;
- brain damage.
Adverse effects of Lithium (also given for a Bipolar diagnosis) include:
- intercranial pressure leading to blindness;
- peripheral circulatory collapse;
- stupor and coma.
Adverse effects of Risperdal (given for “Bipolar” and “irritability stemming from autism”) include:
- serious impairment of cognitive function;
- fainting;
- restless muscles in neck or face, tremors (may be indicative of motor brain damage).
Dr. Frances self-admitted label-juggling act also permitted the definition of ADHD to expand, thereby opening the door for greater and greater use of Ritalin (and other similar compounds) as the treatment of choice.
So what about Ritalin?
In 1986, The International Journal of the Addictions published a most important literature review by Richard Scarnati. It was called “An Outline of Hazardous Side Effects of Ritalin (Methylphenidate)” [v.21(7), pp. 837-841].
Scarnati listed a large number of adverse affects of Ritalin and cited published journal articles which reported each of these symptoms.
For every one of the following (selected and quoted verbatim) Ritalin effects, there is at least one confirming source in the medical literature:
- Paranoid delusions
- Paranoid psychosis
- Hypomanic and manic symptoms, amphetamine-like psychosis
- Activation of psychotic symptoms
- Toxic psychosis
- Visual hallucinations
- Auditory hallucinations
- Can surpass LSD in producing bizarre experiences
- Effects pathological thought processes
- Extreme withdrawal
- Terrified affect
- Started screaming
- Aggressiveness
- Insomnia
- Since Ritalin is considered an amphetamine-type drug, expect amphetamine-like effects
- Psychic dependence
- High-abuse potential DEA Schedule II Drug
- Decreased REM sleep
- When used with antidepressants one may see dangerous reactions including hypertension, seizures and hypothermia
- Convulsions
- Brain damage may be seen with amphetamine abuse.
A recent survey revealed that a high percentage of children diagnosed with bipolar had first received a diagnosis of ADHD. This is informative, because Ritalin and other speed-type drugs are given to kids who are slapped with the ADHD label. Speed, sooner or later, produces a crash. This is easy to call “clinical depression.” Then comes Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft. These drugs can produce temporary highs, followed by more crashes. The psychiatrist notices the up and down pattern—and then comes the diagnosis of Bipolar (manic-depression) and other drugs, including Valproate and Lithium.
In the US alone, there are at least 300,000 cases of motor brain damage incurred by people who have been prescribed so-called anti-psychotic drugs (aka “major tranquilizers”). Risperdal (mentioned above as a drug given to people diagnosed with Bipolar) is one of those major tranquilizers. (source: Toxic Psychiatry, Dr. Peter Breggin, St. Martin’s Press, 1991)
This psychiatric drug plague is accelerating across the land.
Where are the mainstream reporters and editors and newspapers and TV anchors who should be breaking this story and mercilessly hammering on it week after week? They are in harness.
And Dr. Frances is somehow let off the hook. He’s admitted in print that the whole basis of his profession is throwing darts at labels on a wall, and implies the “effort” is rather heroic—when, in fact, the effort leads to more and more poisonous drugs being dispensed to adults and children, to say nothing of the effect of being diagnosed with “a mental disorder.” I’m not talking about “the mental-disease stigma,” the removal of which is one of Hillary Clinton’s missions in life. No, I’m talking about MOVING A HUMAN INTO THE SYSTEM, the medical apparatus, where the essence of the game is trapping that person to harvest his money, his time, his energy, and of course his health—as one new diagnosis follows on another, and one new toxic treatment after another is undertaken, from cradle to grave. The result is a severely debilitated human being (if he survives), whose major claim to fame is his list of diseases and disorders, which he learns to wear like badges of honor.
Thank you, Dr. Frances.
Jon Rappoport
The author of an explosive collection, THE MATRIX REVEALED, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world.
www.nomorefakenews.com / www.jonrappoport.wordpress.com link to original article
PakalertPress – Ross Pittman – Verified Warnings From Former U.S. Presidents About The “Invisible Government” Running The U.S. With “No Allegiance To The People” – 3 September 2012
“Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”- George Santayana
Past presidents of the United States and other high profile political leaders have repeatedly issued warnings over the last 214 years that the U.S. government is under the control of an “invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people.”
According to a half-dozen of our former presidents, one vice-president, and a myriad of other high profile political leaders, an invisible government that is “incredibly evil in intent” has been in control of the U.S. government “ever since the days of Andrew Jackson” (since at least 1836). They “virtually run the United States government for their own selfish purposes. They practically control both parties… It operates under cover of a self-created screen [and] seizes our executive officers, legislative bodies, schools, courts, newspapers and every agency created for the public protection.”
As a result, “we have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated, governments in the civilized world—no longer a government by free opinion, no longer a government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a government by the opinion and the duress of small groups of dominant men.”
The sources for the above quotes (and more) are listed below. All of the quotes listed in this article have been verified as authentic and have associated links to the source materials. Also included below are statements made by David Rockefeller, Sr, former director of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), and Federal Reserve Chairman’s Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke that appear to confirm some of the warnings.
Warnings About the Invisible Government Running the U.S.
The warnings listed below, which appear in chronological order, began with our first president – George Washington. The last president to speak out was JFK, who was assassinated. Read what they and other political leaders have said about the invisible government.
Read the whole story at: www.pakalertpress.com link to original article
US Tells Iran It Will Not Assist Israel In A Preemptive Strike
The United States has no intention of joining in a preemptive Israeli strike on Iran and expects the Islamic Republic to refrain from attacking US targets in the case of such an attack, senior Washington officials told their Iranian counterparts, according to a report in Yedioth Ahronoth on Monday.
In recent days, senior administration officials reportedly sent messages to Iran, through diplomats from two European states, addressing the possibility that Israel would launch a unilateral strike and establishing that the US expects Iran to not draw it into a conflict by firing on American army bases and aircraft carriers in the Persian Gulf.
via soundofheart.org
Greed and Debt: The True Story of Mitt Romney and Bain Capital | Politics News | Rolling Stone:
Greed and Debt: The True Story of Mitt Romney and Bain Capital
How the GOP presidential candidate and his private equity firm staged an epic wealth grab, destroyed jobs – and stuck others with the bill
By Matt TaibbiAugust 29, 2012 7:00 AM ET-->-->
Mitt Romney illustrationIllustration by Robert GrossmanThe great criticism of Mitt Romney, from both sides of the aisle, has always been that he doesn't stand for anything. He's a flip-flopper, they say, a lightweight, a cardboard opportunist who'll say anything to get elected.
The critics couldn't be more wrong. Mitt Romney is no tissue-paper man. He's closer to being a revolutionary, a backward-world version of Che or Trotsky, with tweezed nostrils instead of a beard, a half-Windsor instead of a leather jerkin. His legendary flip-flops aren't the lies of a bumbling opportunist – they're the confident prevarications of a man untroubled by misleading the nonbeliever in pursuit of a single, all-consuming goal. Romney has a vision, and he's trying for something big: We've just been too slow to sort out what it is, just as we've been slow to grasp the roots of the radical economic changes that have swept the country in the last generation.
The incredible untold story of the 2012 election so far is that Romney's run has been a shimmering pearl of perfect political hypocrisy, which he's somehow managed to keep hidden, even with thousands of cameras following his every move. And the drama of this rhetorical high-wire act was ratcheted up even further when Romney chose his running mate, Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin – like himself, a self-righteously anal, thin-lipped, Whitest Kids U Know penny pincher who'd be honored to tell Oliver Twist there's no more soup left. By selecting Ryan, Romney, the hard-charging, chameleonic champion of a disgraced-yet-defiant Wall Street, officially succeeded in moving the battle lines in the 2012 presidential race.
RELATED LINKS
1/1
Like John McCain four years before, Romney desperately needed a vice-presidential pick that would change the game. But where McCain bet on a combustive mix of clueless novelty and suburban sexual tension named Sarah Palin, Romney bet on an idea. He said as much when he unveiled his choice of Ryan, the author of a hair-raising budget-cutting plan best known for its willingness to slash the sacred cows of Medicare and Medicaid. "Paul Ryan has become an intellectual leader of the Republican Party," Romney told frenzied Republican supporters in Norfolk, Virginia, standing before the reliably jingoistic backdrop of a floating warship. "He understands the fiscal challenges facing America: our exploding deficits and crushing debt."
Debt, debt, debt. If the Republican Party had a James Carville, this is what he would have said to win Mitt over, in whatever late-night war room session led to the Ryan pick: "It's the debt, stupid." This is the way to defeat Barack Obama: to recast the race as a jeremiad against debt, something just about everybody who's ever gotten a bill in the mail hates on a primal level.
Last May, in a much-touted speech in Iowa, Romney used language that was literally inflammatory to describe America's federal borrowing. "A prairie fire of debt is sweeping across Iowa and our nation," he declared. "Every day we fail to act, that fire gets closer to the homes and children we love." Our collective debt is no ordinary problem: According to Mitt, it's going to burn our children alive.
And this is where we get to the hypocrisy at the heart of Mitt Romney. Everyone knows that he is fantastically rich, having scored great success, the legend goes, as a "turnaround specialist," a shrewd financial operator who revived moribund companies as a high-priced consultant for a storied Wall Street private equity firm. But what most voters don't know is the way Mitt Romney actually made his fortune: by borrowing vast sums of money that other people were forced to pay back. This is the plain, stark reality that has somehow eluded America's top political journalists for two consecutive presidential campaigns: Mitt Romney is one of the greatest and most irresponsible debt creators of all time. In the past few decades, in fact, Romney has piled more debt onto more unsuspecting companies, written more gigantic checks that other people have to cover, than perhaps all but a handful of people on planet Earth.
By making debt the centerpiece of his campaign, Romney was making a calculated bluff of historic dimensions – placing a massive all-in bet on the rank incompetence of the American press corps. The result has been a brilliant comedy: A man makes a $250 million fortune loading up companies with debt and then extracting million-dollar fees from those same companies, in exchange for the generous service of telling them who needs to be fired in order to finance the debt payments he saddled them with in the first place. That same man then runs for president riding an image of children roasting on flames of debt, choosing as his running mate perhaps the only politician in America more pompous and self-righteous on the subject of the evils of borrowed money than the candidate himself. If Romney pulls off this whopper, you'll have to tip your hat to him: No one in history has ever successfully run for president riding this big of a lie. It's almost enough to make you think he really is qualified for the White House.
The unlikeliness of Romney's gambit isn't simply a reflection of his own artlessly unapologetic mindset – it stands as an emblem for the resiliency of the entire sociopathic Wall Street set he represents. Four years ago, the Mitt Romneys of the world nearly destroyed the global economy with their greed, shortsightedness and – most notably – wildly irresponsible use of debt in pursuit of personal profit. The sight was so disgusting that people everywhere were ready to drop an H-bomb on Lower Manhattan and bayonet the survivors. But today that same insane greed ethos, that same belief in the lunatic pursuit of instant borrowed millions – it's dusted itself off, it's had a shave and a shoeshine, and it's back out there running for president.
Mitt Romney, it turns out, is the perfect frontman for Wall Street's greed revolution. He's not a two-bit, shifty-eyed huckster like Lloyd Blankfein. He's not a sighing, eye-rolling, arrogant jerkwad like Jamie Dimon. But Mitt believes the same things those guys believe: He's been right with them on the front lines of the financialization revolution, a decades-long campaign in which the old, simple, let's-make-stuff-and-sell-it manufacturing economy was replaced with a new, highly complex, let's-take-stuff-and-trash-it financial economy. Instead of cars and airplanes, we built swaps, CDOs and other toxic financial products. Instead of building new companies from the ground up, we took out massive bank loans and used them to acquire existing firms, liquidating every asset in sight and leaving the target companies holding the note. The new borrow-and-conquer economy was morally sanctified by an almost religious faith in the grossly euphemistic concept of "creative destruction," and amounted to a total abdication of collective responsibility by America's rich, whose new thing was making assloads of money in ever-shorter campaigns of economic conquest, sending the proceeds offshore, and shrugging as the great towns and factories their parents and grandparents built were shuttered and boarded up, crushed by a true prairie fire of debt.
Mitt Romney – a man whose own father built cars and nurtured communities, and was one of the old-school industrial anachronisms pushed aside by the new generation's wealth grab – has emerged now to sell this make-nothing, take-everything, screw-everyone ethos to the world. He's Gordon Gekko, but a new and improved version, with better PR – and a bigger goal. A takeover artist all his life, Romney is now trying to take over America itself. And if his own history is any guide, we'll all end up paying for the acquisition.
To read the new issue of Rolling Stone online, plus the entire RS archive: Click Here
prev
The Federal Bailout That Saved Mitt Romney Politics Main Next
President Obama to Reddit Users: 'Ask Me Anything'
Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus. blog comments powered by Disqus
via rollingstone.com
Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan Speeches Make Me Miss George Bush Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/mitt-romney-paul-ryan-speeches-make-me-miss-george-bush-20120831#ixzz25S9yIcid
-->-->
Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney during the 2012 Republican National Convention at the Tampa Bay Times ForumChris Maddaloni/CQ Roll CallI didn't watch Mitt Romney's acceptance speech last night. I can't do it: even under normal circumstances, watching politicians of any stripe talk about anything at all makes me unable to sleep. And a convention speech, which is almost always a deeply schizoid address authored by 38 different infighting political consultants and amplified by the heaviest possible doses of network TV's goofball effects and nuclear-powered stagecraft, is generally the most unwatchable of all political performances. So I try always to watch such speeches the next morning, and am just now taking in the Romney address.
The Republican convention in general has been a strange affair. The vibe around Republican politics in general was much happier in the days before the Bush presidency cratered. Republican politics before Bush imploded was a confident brew of guns, Jesus, and Freedom.
A Republican politician's job back then was, if not easy, pretty clear: you bashed welfare queens and free-riders, told tearful stories of fetuses composing operas in the womb, and promised to bomb America's enemies back to the Stone Age. You didn't have to split hairs or hedge bets: you got up on stage, took a baseball bat to liberals and terrorists and other such perverts, and let the momentum of the crowd carry you to victory. You were like Slim Pickens at the end of Dr. Strangelove, riding high with a nuke between your legs, waving your ten-gallon hat at and going out in a blaze of yeeee-hah!!!s.
Republican politics used to be fun. Even I sort of got into it. When I was undercover working for George W. Bush in a campaign office in Orlando back in 2004, it was a much easier acting job than I expected it to be. You went into the campaign office, sat with the other volunteers, and talked about all the Hollywood actors you wished would keep their damned mouths shut. Any liberal who claims there isn't lots of fun to be had making fun of liberals is a goddmaned liar. Anyway, one of my fellow volunteers back then gave me a copy of Shut Up and Sing – not the Dixie Chicks documentary, the Laura Ingraham book – and that quickly replaced Lawrence Taylor's Over the Edge as my go-to bathroom reader. It was crazy, paranoid stuff, but that sort of politics had a reassuringly simple quality to it; it was dependable, like a rock.
But today's Republican politics are totally confused. The Romney-Ryan speeches were a bizarre exercise in tightroping and hair-splitting. Ryan's speech weirdly went after the Democrats for a plan to cut Medicare that he himself had rejected for not cutting enough – and then in the same speech went after the Obama vision of society that is a "dull, adventureless journey from one entitlement to the next, a government-planned life, a country where everything is free but us."
The Ryan VP pick was clearly a calculated gamble. Like the Palin pick, it was intended to fire up the base by bringing in a young, fresh-faced politician with hardcore conservative credentials. That would help bring out the red-state die-hard vote for Romney, a onetime pro-choice creator of a state-run health care program who struggled with exactly those voters in his primary battles against the likes of newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum.
But Ryan's conservative cred derives almost entirely from his strike-hard-strike-first-no-mercy-sir reputation as a ruthless chainsawer of all government-funded "waste," including sacred-cow entitlements like Medicare. If he was coming on board, surely it was to preach the gospel of budget bloodbaths.
So what does Ryan the Vice-Presidential candidate do? He goes to Tampa and spends half his speech doing a Ted Kennedy impersonation, talking about the "obligation we have to our parents and grandparents," pitching his party as the defender of a beloved government entitlement program! "The greatest threat to Medicare," he said, "is Obamacare, and we're going to stop it."
Then, like the Unknown Comic, who used to switch bag-faces mid-routine, he moved right back into his young-Barry Goldwater act, bashing entitlements and the "supervision and sanctimony of the central planners."
Are you confused yet? I was. Is the move here dog-whistling an unspoken promise to the base to slash "entitlements," while somehow retaining Medicare? Or is it dog-whistling an unspoken promise to the base to slash "entitlements," including Medicare?
I couldn't tell. Ultimately I think the answer was actually behind door number three, as in:
My fellow Americans, whatever Barack Obama is doing with Medicare, it's bad, and we promise to reverse it!
(APPLAUSE)
And not only that, we'll go even further in cutting wasteful entitlements from our bloated government budget!
(APPLAUSE)
Does that make logical sense? No. Does it make political sense? Sort of – if your voters either have extremely short attention spans, or they are themselves comfortable with certain minor rhetorical contradictions.
If they're like the Tea Partiers whom I watched in Kentucky lustily cheering Sarah Palin from their Medicare-funded wheelchairs as she railed against government entitlement programs, then a speech like Ryan's works well enough. It just doesn't work quite as well as a speech that doesn't have any contradictions at all – like George Bush's 2004 acceptance speech, cleverly set in post-9/11 New York, in which he promised that electing anyone but himself would result in terrorists running free down the smoldering wreckage of Your Town, U.S.A., followed by prancing sets of gay married actors from Hollywood.
Anyway, when Ryan had the Goldwater side of his paper bag turned to the audience, he railed against Obama's health care program, calling it "two thousand pages of rules, mandates, taxes, fees, and fines that have no place in a free country."
That line drew genuine cheers from the crowd, especially since it coincided with the ejection of much-despised Code Pink demonstrators from the stadium. But I could swear the cheers were tempered just a little bit at the end when the audience members – even these audience members, even that ridiculous lady wearing the red-white-and-blue "America" vest – slowly remembered that Ryan's running mate had not only proposed but implemented an extremely similar health care program in Massachusetts.
Which brings us to Romney's speech. Romney spent a lot of time talking about his various successes as a businessman. But the only reference to his government experience – his most relevant qualification for this office, remember – came in a moment where he reminded the audience that as governor, he "chose a woman lieutenant governor, a woman chief of staff."
He left out the part where he ran for governor of Massachusetts as a pro-choice centrist who supported the teaching of evolution and the banning of assault rifles. He completely omitted any mention of his own health care program and in fact said exactly two things about health care in the entire speech: he repeated Ryan's line about Medicare, and then promised to repeal "Obamacare."
On the other hand, he mentioned all the women he hired as governor, and in general spent an enormous amount of time talking about women's issues. Which would be great, if it were not for the fact that the reasoning behind this rhetorical decision is so transparent – Romney added to the traditional Republican weakness among female voters when he chose Ryan, whose other major claim to fame as a hardcore conservative is his uncompromising stance on abortion. Ryan's history here is similar to his history on budget cuts: he made himself famous by going further than other pols were willing to go.
He co-sponsored legislation with Todd Akin (who is about as popular with women right now as flesh-eating streptococcus) called the "Sanctity of Human Life Act," which would have given a human fertilized egg "all the legal and constitutional attributes and privileges of personhood." (I imagine that before Akin's gaffe, the next planned bill would have stripped those same fertilized eggs of Miranda rights). Moreover, Ryan supported the notorious "Let Women Die Act," which would have refused women access to abortion even if her life is in danger.
So to recap: the candidate himself used to be pro-choice, spoke glowingly of his mother's support of abortion rights in his 1994 Senate race against Ted Kennedy, then suddenly became anti-choice in 2006. The VP candidate has been firmly anti-choice his whole career. Yet neither candidate went anywhere near the abortion issue in his speech.
In fact, you could build a walking bridge across the Bering Strait with all the major stuff the two candidates didn't bring up in their speeches. Romney's signature achievement as a politician was his health-care program. Ryan's claim to fame was his budget. But they spent most of their time in their speeches slithering, Catherine-Zeta-Jones-in-Entrapment style, around their own records.
So what did they talk about? The line that astonished me most from Mitt's speech was this one, where he talked about the changes Americans "deserved" and should have gotten during Obama's presidency:
You deserved it because you worked harder than ever before during these years. You deserved it because, when it cost more to fill up your car, you cut out moving lights, and put in longer hours. Or when you lost that job that paid $22.50 an hour, benefits, you took two jobs at $9 an hour…
Are you kidding? Mitt Romney was the guy that fired you from that $22.50 an hour job, and helped you replace it with two $9 an hour jobs! He was a pioneer in the area of eliminating the well-paying job with benefits and replacing it with the McJob that offered no benefits at all. One of the things that killed him in the Senate race against Ted Kennedy were Kennedy ads that reminded voters that Mitt's takeovers resulted in slashed wages and lost benefits. He was exactly the guy that eliminated that classic $22.50 manufacturing job, like in the case of GST Steel, where Bain took over with an initial investment of $8 million, paid itself a $36 million dividend, ended up walking away with $50 million, and left GST saddled with over $500 million in debt. 750 of those well-paying jobs were lost.
What kinds of jobs were left for those fired workers to look for? Well, in the best-case scenario, you might have found one at Ampad, another Bain takeover target, where workers had their pay slashed from $10.22 to $7.88 an hour, tripled co-pays, and eliminated the retirement plan.
So a guy who eliminated hundreds of $22 an hour jobs and slashed hundreds more jobs to below $9 an hour blasts Barack Obama for not giving you the better life you deserved, after you lost your $22/hour job and had to take two $9/hour jobs. Are we all high or something? Did that really just happen?
Just a lame pair of speeches, overall. They made me miss George Bush. At least the Bush/Cheney/Rove era offered a clear ideological choice – and some pretty passionate, ingeniously-delivered political theater, comparatively. Where's the blood and guts, the bomb-‘em-till-they're-crispy war calls? Where are the screw-the-poor tirades, the "you can pry it from my cold dead hand" guns-and-liberty crescendos? This stuff is pretty weak beer compared to those days.
via rollingstone.com
Matt Taibbi Lambastes Romney's Time At Bain
We knew Matt Taibbi was working something, we didn't know that it was about Republican Presidential nominee, Mitt Romney.
More specifically, it's about Romney's time at Bain and how he earned his fortune— something his campaign hasn't necessarily been completely transparent about. The piece is called "Greed and Debt: The True Story of Mitt Romney and Bain Capital," and it's this month's Rolling Stone cover story.
The piece is long, and of course, written in classic Taibbi style, so it goes fast, but we pinpointed 10 points that we found shocking/damning overall.
Here we go:
Mitt Romney decries the national debt, but his career was made by running up debt on companies on their last lifeline.
"The result has been a brilliant comedy: A man makes a $250 million fortune loading up companies with debt and then extracting million-dollar fees from those same companies, in exchange for the generous service of telling them who needs to be fired in order to finance the debt payments he saddled them with in the first place."
Mitt Romney shirked military service.
"I longed in many respects to actually be in Vietnam and be representing our country there," he claimed years after the war. To a different audience, he said, "I was not planning on signing up for the military. It was not my desire to go off and serve in Vietnam."
Mitt Romney’s Bain was using the same trick as two-bit mobsters — the "bust out."
"Fans of mob movies will recognize what's known as the 'bust-out,' in which a gangster takes over a restaurant or sporting goods store and then monetizes his investment by running up giant debts on the company's credit line. (Think Paulie buying all those cases of Cutty Sark inGoodfellas.) When the note comes due, the mobster simply torches the restaurant and collects the insurance money. Reduced to their most basic level, the leveraged buyouts engineered by Romney followed exactly the same business model. "It's the bust-out," one Wall Street trader says with a laugh. 'That's all it is.'"
Mitt Romney coldly rebuffed a worker who wrote him a hand-written letter asking Romney to save his job.
"Romney has always kept his distance from the real-life consequences of his profiteering. At one point during Bain's looting of Ampad, a worker named Randy Johnson sent a handwritten letter to Romney, asking him to intervene to save an Ampad factory in Marion, Indiana. In a sterling demonstration of manliness and willingness to face a difficult conversation, Romney, who had just lost his race for the Senate in Massachusetts, wrote Johnson that he was 'sorry,' but his lawyers had advised him not to get involved."
He loves to manipulate people, even his own employees.
"Over the years, colleagues would anonymously whisper stories about Mitt the Boss to the press, describing him as cunning, manipulative and a little bit nuts, with 'an ability to identify people's insecurities and exploit them for his own benefit.' One former Bain employee said that Romney would screw around with bonuses in small amounts, just to mess with people: He would give $3 million to one, $3.1 million to another and $2.9 million to a third, just to keep those below him on edge."
Mitt Romney’s Bain still got paid, even when its acquisitions were floundering.
"In a typical private-equity fragging, Bain put up a mere $18 million to acquire KB Toys and got big banks to finance the remaining $302 million it needed. Less than a year and a half after the purchase, Bain decided to give itself a gift known as a 'dividend recapitalization.' The firm induced KB Toys to redeem $121 million in stock and take out more than $66 million in bank loans – $83 million of which went directly into the pockets of Bain's owners and investors, including Romney. 'The dividend recap is like borrowing someone else's credit card to take out a cash advance, and then leaving them to pay it off,' says Heather Slavkin Corzo, who monitors private equity takeovers as the senior legal policy adviser for the AFL-CIO."
Mitt Romney’s Bain financed one of its first takeover deals, with department stores Beals Brothers and Palais Royale with money dirtied by Michael Milken.
"...one of Romney's first LBO deals, and one of his most profitable, involved Mike Milken himself. Bain put down $10 million in cash, got $300 million in financing from Milken and bought a pair of department-store chains, Bealls Brothers and Palais Royal. In what should by now be a familiar outcome, the two chains – which Bain merged into a single outfit called Stage Stores – filed for bankruptcy protection in 2000 under the weight of more than $444 million in debt...But here's the interesting twist: Romney made the Bealls-Palais deal just as the federal government was launching charges of massive manipulation and insider trading against Milken and his firm, Drexel Burnham Lambert. After what must have been a lengthy and agonizing period of moral soul-searching, however, Romney decided not to kill the deal, despite its shady financing. 'We did not say, 'Oh, my goodness, Drexel has been accused of something, not been found guilty,' ' Romney told reporters years after the deal. 'Should we basically stop the transaction and blow the whole thing up?'"
Mitt Romney’s Bain sidled Dunkin’ Donuts with crushing debt.
"In 2010, a year after the last round of Hertz layoffs, Carlyle teamed up with Bain to take $500 million out of another takeover target: the parent company of Dunkin' Donuts and Baskin-Robbins. Dunkin' had to take out a $1.25 billion loan to pay a dividend to its new private equity owners. So think of this the next time you go to Dunkin' Donuts for a cup of coffee: A small cup of joe costs about $1.69 in most outlets, which means that for years to come, Dunkin' Donuts will have to sell about 2,011,834 small coffees every month – about $3.4 million – just to meet the interest payments on the loan it took out to pay Bain and Carlyle their little one-time dividend. "
Mitt Romney’s fortune was gained by gaming the government.
"Which brings us to another aspect of Romney's business career that has largely been hidden from voters: His personal fortune would not have been possible without the direct assistance of the U.S. government. The taxpayer-funded subsidies that Romney has received go well beyond the humdrum, backdoor, welfare-sucking that all supposedly self-made free marketeers inevitably indulge in."
Mitt Romney ran a super wasteful Olympics.
"Not that Romney hasn't done just fine at milking the government when it suits his purposes, the most obvious instance being the incredible $1.5 billion in aid he siphoned out of the U.S. Treasury as head of the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake – a sum greater than all federal spending for the previous seven U.S. Olympic games combined. Romney, the supposed fiscal conservative, blew through an average of $625,000 in taxpayer money per athlete – an astounding increase of 5,582 percent over the $11,000 average at the 1984 games in Los Angeles."
There are great quotes, personal stories, and more reporting in the full piece. Read it here>>
Gaza to be 'unlivable' by 2020 unless immediate action taken - UN
PressTV
August 26, 2012Thousands of opposition activists have held a demonstration in the Togolese capital, Lome, to protest against President Faure Gnassingbe’s government.
Togolese opposition supporters hold a demonstration in the capital, Lome, August 22, 2012.The demonstration started in Lome’s Be Kpota neighborhood and ended peacefully near a city beach on Saturday.However, the opposition coalition Let’s Save Togo said over 100 protesters were wounded and 125 others were detained during similar demonstrations on Tuesday and Wednesday, when security forces fired tear gas canisters to disperse the crowd.
To read the rest of this story, visit PressTV.ir.
via soundofheart.org
Gaza to be 'unlivable' by 2020 unless immediate action taken - UN
RT
Published: 28 August, 2012, 02:13
Edited: 29 August, 2012, 10:05A Palestinian girl sleeps in front of a house, destroyed during the three-week offensive Israel launched in the northern Gaza Strip October 16, 2009 (Reuters / Mohammed Salem)
Gaza will no longer be “livable” by 2020 unless urgent measures are taken to improve the area’s water supply, power, health and schooling, according to a UN report.
“Action needs to be taken right now on fundamental aspects of life: water sanitation, electricity, education, health and other aspects,” UN humanitarian coordinator Maxwell Gaylard told journalists.
To read the rest of this story, visit RT.com.
via soundofheart.org
Archbishop Tutu dodges event over Blair
PressTV
August 28, 2012Archbishop Desmond Tutu has decided not to take part at a leadership event in South Africa in protest at the presence of former British Prime Minister Tony Blair at the event.
The Discovery Invest Leadership Summit in Johannesburg was due to be held with the presence of Nobel Peace Prize winner Archbishop Tutu, Tony Blair and chess grandmaster and Russian activist Garry Kasparov.
But, the Archbishop described former premier’s support for the invasion of Iraq as "morally indefensible."
To read the rest of this story, visit PressTV.ir.
via soundofheart.org
Archbishop Tutu dodges event over Blair
The Washington Post
By Emma Brown, Sunday, September 2, 2012Sun Myung Moon, a self-professed messiah who claimed millions of religious followers in his Unification Church and sought to become a powerful voice in the American conservative movement through business interests that included the Washington Times, has died. He was 92.
The Washington Times reported that Mr. Moon died in South Korea early Monday morning (Sunday afternoon in Washington). Unification Church spokesman Ahn Ho-yeul told the Associated Press that Mr. Moon died at a church-owned hospital near his home in Gapyeong, northeast of Seoul. He had been under treatment for pneumonia.
To read the rest of this story and watch the video, visit WashingtonPost.com.
via soundofheart.org
Archbishop Tutu dodges event over Blair
PressTV
August 28, 2012Archbishop Desmond Tutu has decided not to take part at a leadership event in South Africa in protest at the presence of former British Prime Minister Tony Blair at the event.
The Discovery Invest Leadership Summit in Johannesburg was due to be held with the presence of Nobel Peace Prize winner Archbishop Tutu, Tony Blair and chess grandmaster and Russian activist Garry Kasparov.
But, the Archbishop described former premier’s support for the invasion of Iraq as "morally indefensible."
To read the rest of this story, visit PressTV.ir.
via soundofheart.org
Doctors and farmers find that eliminating GMOs prevents disease
Source: Natural News
August 29, 2012 by: Kim Evans
(NaturalNews) In recent years, more and more doctors have started warning their patients to avoid genetically modified foods and the results are paying off. Jeffrey Smith now tells us that thousands of doctors are reporting the elimination of disease simply when patients cut genetically modified foods out of their diets. They are finding the elimination of immune disorders, arthritis, diarrhea, irritable bowel syndrome, allergies, skin problems, general pain, migraines, and restless leg syndrome, among other problems. According to one doctor, the results happen pretty quickly too."In terms of allergies," Dr. Lindner tells us, "it might take two to five days. In terms of depression, it starts to lift almost instantaneously. When I change people from a GMO diet to a GMO-free diet, I see results instantaneously in people who have foggy thinking and people who have gut symptoms like bloating, gas, irritation."
Dr. Lindner is getting her patients off the most common genetically modified foods including soy, corn, canola oil, and sugar and recommending that they buy organic to avoid even more of them. Full results, she tells us, normally take four to six weeks.
The elimination of disease by dropping genetically modified foods isn't limited to people either. Farmers have been finding the same thing.
Jeffery also tells us that when a Danish farmer switched to non-GMO soy for his 450 pigs and their offspring, within two days the animals' diarrhea problems virtually disappeared. "During the following year," he says, "death from ulcers and bloat, which had claimed 36 pigs over the previous two years, vanished. Conception rate was up, litter size was up, diseases were down, and birth defects were eliminated."
One has to wonder if the 36 pigs that died were a direct result of eating the scientifically modified foods. It seems like it could have been quite a few. And if 36 out of 450 pigs died, one has to wonder how many human deaths the muted foods are also responsible for. In any case, it wouldn't be the first time that animals have died as a result of eating these scientific creations.
In India, thousands of sheep have died after eating genetically modified cotton plants, even though grazing on nature's cotton plants is common and produces no harm. Genetically modified corn was also implicated in cow deaths in Germany, as well as the deaths of horses, water buffalo, and chickens in The Philippines.
Resources for this article include:
http://vitalitymagazine.com
http://www.newswithviews.com/Smith/jeffrey125.htm
http://responsibletechnology.org/gmo-dangers/65-health-risks/1notesAbout the author:
Kim Evans is an author and natural health writer. Her book, Cleaning Up! The Ultimate Body Cleanse, outlines deep and powerful at-home body cleansing methods to address the root cause of most health problems. While it's becoming common knowledge that most people carry an extreme toxic burden and that these toxins can cause any disease imaginable, most people don't know that there is a direct connection between our spiritual reality and the state of our bodies as well. The methods in Cleaning Up! help folks gain both their health and their spiritual connectedness back to live in a love-based reality.
Learn more at http://www.cleaningupcleanse.com
via soundofheart.org
Local marchers join March on Wall Street South in Charlotte
Winston-Salem Journal
By: Lisa O'donnell
Updated: September 03, 2012 - 12:19 AMCredit: ANDREW DYE/JOURNAL
About 800 protesters, preceded by a throng of police officers and journalists, began their trek from Charlotte's Frazier Park toward the downtown financial district on Sunday during their March on Wall Street South.
The marchers who showed up for Sunday's March on Wall Street South through the heart of Charlotte's banking district in no way came close to matching the thousands that organizers had anticipated, but the 800 who did show up were a colorful bunch representing diverse political interests.
There were people wearing Fidel Castro shirts; others carried banners in support of undocumented immigrants, waved flags for Palestinian rights or yelled pro-union chants over a steady drum beat. Some even marched in support of saving post offices.
To watch the video and ead the rest of this story, visit journalnow.com.
via soundofheart.org
Vatican drops law suit against German magazine
ABC News, AP - 8/30/12
The German Bishops' Conference says the Vatican has dropped its lawsuit against a satirical German magazine over a cover that depicted Pope Benedict XVI with a yellow stain on his robe.
A Hamburg court had granted an injunction barring the magazine, Titanic, from distributing the image that fronted its July edition, headlined "Hallelujah at the Vatican — the leak has been found!" That was a reference to a scandal over leaked Vatican documents.
To read the rest of this story, visit ABCNews.go.com.
via soundofheart.org
Egypt retires 70 army generals
BBC News, 9/2/12
Seventy generals in the Egyptian armed forces are to be retired, the government has announced.
Defence Minister Abdul Fattah al-Sisi (left) announced the changes to Egypt's army leadership
The move comes weeks after President Mohammed Mursi replaced the defence minister and the chief of staff.
However, six of the generals will keep their positions on the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (Scaf).
To read the rest of this story, visit BBC.co.UK.
via soundofheart.org
120 NAM Countries Head to Iran Despite Western Pressure
The Real News, 8/26/12
Vijay Prashad: Syria will be the big issue in the Non Aligned Summit in Iran, with many heads of state visiting Tehran in spite of US/Israeli campaign to isolate Iran
Bio
Vijay Prashad is a professor of international studies at Trinity College. Among the many books he has authored are The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World and Arab Spring, Libyan Winter. He also writes regularly for Asia Times Online, Frontline magazine and Counterpunch.
Transcript
PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: Welcome to The Real News Network. I'm Paul Jay in Baltimore.
Sunday, the Non-Aligned Movement is meeting in Tehran. In fact, 50 heads of state are heading to Iran for this meeting. It doesn't sound like Iran is quite as isolated as the West would like it to be.
To read the rest of this story, visit therealnews.com.
via soundofheart.org
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)