A Gentleman’s view.

AFA Spokesman Bryan Fischer Says Mitt Romney Will Be A Pushover As President

I almost feel sorry for Romney..Can you imasgine how hard it was to make it to adulthood being as clueless, spineless & mindless as him? On that note, let’s call the GOP, it’s supporters & Romney for what it really is this Campaign year:

Ted Nugent: Hitless

Massachusets: Gritless

The White House: Mittless.

It’s not often you hear an extreme right-wing talk show host slam the Republican Presidential nominee, but this time, Bryan Fischer made an exception for Mitt Romney. During his show on Saturday, Fischer bludgeoned Romney over his complete lack of leadership and tendency to become a pushover.

Fischer attacked Romney because of the forced resignation of Richard Grenell, the gay foreign policy spokesman hired by the Romney campaign. After taking heavy criticism from anti-gay conservatives, Grenell resigned after only two weeks on the job. Romney never once defended Grenell, nor did he offer any public support. He merely caved in to the demands of conservative groups, including Fischer and the American Family Association, which leads us to Bryan Fischer on Saturday.

Fischer was genuinely dismayed at how easy it was to control Romney like a marionette puppet, essentially calling him out for being a weak leader who could be led by the nose on the international stage by China, Russia, North Korea, and maybe even Iran.

According to Fischer,⁠

“If Mitt Romney can be pushed around, intimidated, coerced, co-opted by a conservative radio talk show host in Middle America, then how is he going to stand up to the Chinese? How is he going to stand up to Putin? How is he going to stand up to North Korea if he can be pushed around by a yokel like me? I don’t think Romney is realizing the doubts that this begins to raise about his leadership.”

As unlikely as it sounds, a hardcore religious right-wing conservative voice is casting doubt about Romney’s leadership ability. The man basically just admitted that if Romney can’t stand up to a radio host, he could certainly be intimidated by tough and dangerous foreign leaders. This is in stark contrast to President Obama, who has shown the ability to stand against his own party and be a world leader at the same time.

Earlier this year at CPAC, Grover Norquist said that conservatives should elect a President they can use as a puppet. Romney is clearly that guy. He’s that guy because he couldn’t even withstand a week or two of pressure by right-wing activists before allowing Grenell to resign. How does this make us believe that Romney has a mind of his own? When a guy as conservative as Bryan Fischer says Romney is too weak and too puppet-like, that’s definitely worth sounding the alarm for.

Krugman: Obama May Lose Re-Election

SAHIL KAPUR

There may not be much President Obama can do to improve the economy between now and the election, but telling a clear story about why it remains weak could mean the difference between victory and defeat this November. Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman fears the Obama team is getting that critical narrative wrong.

“They’ve tied themselves up in knots because they’ve bought into this notion that it would sound wrong to admit that they haven’t been able to do everything that they really should have done,” Krugman told TPM in an interview following the release of his new book, “End This Depression Now!” “It’s incredible — they can’t quite make up their minds on whether the theme is that Republicans are standing in the way of doing what has to be done, or things are really good and America’s back on track. The problem is that you can’t perceive both of those lines at the same time.”

Team Obama’s narrative — that the stimulative measures he took were precisely what the country needed, and as a result America is on the mend — is based on a gamble that the economy will be in a steady recovery come Election Day. But if outside factors diminish the outlook, it will leave voters with the impression that Obama’s approach itself was the problem, rather than the vigorous Republican resistance that forced him to scale back his ambitions.

“What they should be saying is, ‘We have the right ideas and we’re pursuing them as far as we can given the opposition from Republicans,’ which would be more or less the true narrative,” Krugman said. “They have decided that it sounds like weakness to say that we haven’t been doing everything that we should be doing. And so they have instead opted to always pretend that what they thought they were able to get is also exactly what they should have done. So they’ve never conceded that that first stimulus was too small, or that there really should have been a second round of stimulus. And that means that if things go badly, they end up owning it. They can’t say, ‘Don’t blame us, blame the do-nothing Congress.’”

In his book, which hit shelves May 1, Krugman laments the “shadow of economic catastrophe” we live in, and the opportunity cost of huge stockpiles of underutilized human and physical capital. The government should put that to work, Krugman says, first by reversing the state layoffs of teachers, firefighters and other employees, and then ideally with a New Deal-style public works push to rebuild American infrastructure by putting the unemployed to work. But even though GOP opposition makes that all but impossible, Krugman believes it’s a mistake for Obama not to go the extra mile and at least tell voters what more he would do if only he could.

“There is a political danger to Obama, which is that [Mitt] Romney can go around saying, ‘The economy is still lousy,’ which is true,” Krugman said. “And the fact that Obama has never made a really clear case for his own economic leadership hurts. Now, I still think Obama will probably win, because there are other issues, but they have created a trap for themselves on the economic policy front by allowing themselves to own a weak economy in a way that they shouldn’t, because a lot of the problem has been tortured opposition from the Republicans.”

The White House’s narrative developed amid strong political headwinds. Pressure not only from Republicans but many Democrats and even administration officials, along with a broad establishment consensus, compelled Obama to pivot to deficit-reduction, after the Democrats’ 2010 congressional losses and in the face of an exploding national debt.

When the ensuing negotiations with Republicans collapsed and nearly took the U.S. economy with it, Obama turned to his current narrative. Krugman worries that the story’s not strong enough, and there’s still some chance that the economic recovery could slip and toss the election to the GOP.

“We have a slowly developing cycle of an improving economy and improving household balance sheets that lead you on the road to recovery,” Krugman said. “But obviously a lot can go wrong if there’s some kind of major setback — problems in Europe could still hurt the United States, or a spike in oil prices as a result of what’s happening in the Middle East. … We could have morning in America still. But probably not in 2012. So I don’t think there’s going to be a strong enough recovery to make it easy for [Obama].”

A Thus Far Bloodless Coup of America???  by Cheryl Courtney-Evans

Every day I watch MSNBC, and am appalled at the shenanigans of the Republican Party of today. The current election and the determination to remove President Obama from office seems to have pushed them so far right so as to be virtually indistinguishable from a gang of business-suited thugs. And as I watch, I wonder if anyone (besides myself) sees that we’re in the middle of what I would consider to be a “bloodless coup” of America.

One would wonder why I would say something like this. Let us then consider the chain of events that have taken place since the election of President Obama.

On the very night of Obama’s inauguration, 15 Republicans met for drinks and dinner in a secret meeting to plot against him (at the Caucus Room, steak & seafood restaurant). As an insider in the House of Representatives, Robert Draper in his book “Do Not Ask What Good We Do: Inside the U.S. House of Representatives“, details this meeting. It was called by Frank Luntz, supposedly for them to commiserate over their common loss of the election, but it became clear as they continued to drink and talk, that he had ideas…

Present were Republican Reps. Eric Cantor (Va.), Kevin McCarthy (Calif.), Paul Ryan (Wis.), Pete Sessions (Texas), Jeb Hensarling (Texas), Pete Hoekstra (Mich.) and Dan Lungren (Calif.), along with Republican Sens. Jim DeMint (S.C.), Jon Kyl (Ariz.), Tom Coburn (Okla.), John Ensign (Nev.) and Bob Corker (Tenn.). The non-lawmakers present included Newt Gingrich and Frank Luntz. Noticeably absent from the meeting was Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) because of their admitted hatred for Frank Luntz.

The dinner lasted four hours, and they came up with these initiatives:

– Go after Geithner. (And indeed Kyl did, the next day: ‘Would you answer my question rather than dancing around it—please?’)

– Show united and unyielding opposition to the president’s economic policies. (Eight days later, Minority Whip Cantor would hold the House Republicans to a unanimous No against Obama’s economic stimulus plan.)

– Begin attacking vulnerable Democrats on the airwaves. (The first National Republican Congressional Committee attack ads would run in less than two months.)

– Win the spear point of the House in 2010. Jab Obama relentlessly in 2011. Win the White House and the Senate in 2012.

This plan, converging as it did with “disappointed” Dems and increased intensity of conservative and extreme right-wing Republicans, allowed Tea Party Republicans to take control of the House of Representatives during the mid-term elections, and the real “gumming up” of Congress began.

With this obstructionism in Congress, the recovery left to President Obama has been slow for everyone except the rich, and behind the scenes, rich folks and corporations like the Koch brother billionaires started their machinations to keep it that way by installing Republicans in offices of control. The Koch brothers also managed to get Citizens United passed by the Congress and Supreme Court, so that corporations do not have to account for or report the ammount of money they contribute to campaigns of their chosen candidates for public office.

Grover Norquist came along with a “No Tax Pledge” Republican lawmakers all rushed to sign, but it also became clear that this was only a ruse to excuse cutting social programs to pay off the deficit while not taxing the rich “one percent” of the United States. (This “one percent” had been highlighted by the Occupy Wall Street Movement [representing the "99 percent"]). The congressional Republicans seem very amiable to signing “pledges”, as they further signed the American Families Association’s “Pledge to continue defending DOMA (Defense Of Marriage Act).

Republican legislators and candidates, both state and federal, have used manipulation, truth spin and outright lies to play on the hate/fears of the rank and file Republican public (since 9/11), which has seemed to be ever more far right and bigotted. Their millionaire/billionaire backers like Foster Friess (for Santorum), Sheldon Adelson (for Gingrich) and the Koch brothers (for any Republican candidate willing to follow their agenda) fund their activities.

Now here’s the sign of the ‘coup’…

Since the mid-term elections, when Republicans took control of the federal House of Representatives, they also took control of a number of state legislatures and governor’s mansions. This has allowed them to enact a number of “anti-middle class” laws that have been far reaching and radical in their perspective states. These laws have been passed under the influence of corporate-rich organizations like ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council) and the Koch brothers. There are two states in particular that I believe are test cases for what an American coup is meant to look like.

The first one, Wisconsin, was the first most publicized one due to its new radical Republican governor, Scott Walker who attacked union bargaining rights as soon as he was elected during the mid-terms. He and his Republican controlled legislature removed bargaining rights from all of Wisconsin’s unions. This has sparked a recall effort that the country is watching to see if it can be successful (thanks to the Koch brothers, Karl Rove and other outside-Wisconsin fat cats, Walker’s recall campaign has garnered over $13 million, with a total of $25 million ready for negative ads in the final days). If Walker succeeds in beating this recall effort, it will be a sign to the radical Republican governors elected in states like Florida, Arizona (aggressive/reressive immagration law) and Virginia (passed strict anti-abortion law) that they can continue to run roughshod over the rights of their constituents.

But I think the second state to have become “Republican/fat cat controlled”, Michigan is the most telling in it’s ‘coup’/dictatorship practice(s)…they have removed the ‘power of the vote’ from the citizenry!

Republican governor Rick Snyder (with the help of a Republican controlled legislature) has signed into law an “Emergency” law which allows him to appoint an “Emergency Manager” to cities/towns who are having ‘budgetary problems’. This Emergency Manager has the power to fire entire city councils, city clerks, city attorney and directors of public works. They can sell city property (including the city hall, police station, fire stations, water-pumping stations, the library, the golf course, and cemeteries) or outsource city departments. The votes of the citizens of the city no longer matter, as the officials they have voted for are now powerless (as they have been released of their jobs). This Emergency Manager also controls the school boards, can nullify contracts and privatize public services.

At the time of this article, Benton Harbor, Pontiac, Flint and Ecorse, Michigan have all been appointed Emergency Managers.

March 30, 2012 update:  A judge ordered Flint’s emergency manager to step aside, finding that he had been appointed without adequate public input. A week later, an appeals court temporarily reversed the decision and put him back in charge while the case is being heard. Governor Rick Snyder has asked Detroit to sign an agreement in which it would renegotiate union contracts and outsource city work in exchange for not receiving an emergency manager [blackmail?]. In February, a statewide coalition opposed to the emergency-manager law, submitted signatures to put it up for referendum. If the state validates the signatures in early May, the law will be suspended until voters decide its fate in November.

April 26, 2012 update:  The Michigan Board of State Canvassers has rejected the more than 200,000 signatures collected in support of holding a referendum on the state’s emergency manager law. The board’s two Republican members said the petitions used the incorrect font size.

Can you imagine this action being taken on a federal level?? Consider the Republican candidate for President, Willard Mitt “Etchasketch” Romney; he has no convictions, will do/say anything to appease the far Right/Radical Republicans…and in the words of the afore-mentioned Grover Norquist, “…we don’t need someone to think for America, all we need is someone to sign what’s brought to him that we bring him…” (and mind you, the Koch brothers are throwing millions at the Romney campaign to buy the presidency). 

It scares me that they could use the United States’ own democratic process to ultimately subvert it, with the sheen of “legitimacy” to the move. To top that off, with Republican legislatures passing “stand your ground” laws, this thus far “bloodless coup” could get bloody “legitimately”…

Boasting About Bin Laden

Savvy politicians know that it’s usually a good sign when a political advertisement provokes cries of outrage from the opposition. The picture gets murkier, though, when that same advertisement prompts high-minded expressions of disappointment from the politician’s own supporters. Sometimes that’s a signal that the ad in question has overreached and risks a backlash. But sometimes it’s just a sign that those high-minded supporters don’t recognize the weakness that the ad is trying to exploit, or just don’t have the stomach for a necessary fight.

This is the dilemma the Obama re-election campaign faces with the ad it released recently suggesting that Mitt Romney might not have given the order to send Navy SEALS to kill Osama Bin Laden. The attack clearly touched a nerve with Republicans, but it also earned the White House a rebuke from several liberals, including no less a left-wing eminence than Arianna Huffington.

On the Early Show on CBS, Huffington called the ad “despicable,” suggested that questioning an opponent’s ability to serve as commander-in-chief is “not the way to run campaigns on either side,” and compared the attack to the “3 A.M. phone call” ad Hillary Clinton’s campaign released in 2008, which made a similar case against then-candidate Obama’s ability to make the toughest national security decisions.

When even Huffington thinks a Democratic attack goes too far, it usually has. And yet a moment’s scrutiny reveals that her argument doesn’t make much sense. Why do we have election seasons, after all, if not to argue about which candidate would be better-suited to making decisions that put Americans in harm’s way overseas? How can we not politicize national security, given how central it is to the work of the modern presidency, and how unconstrained the executive branch’s national security powers have become no matter which party holds the White House?

These are the arguments that Hillary Clinton partisans mounted in defense of that “3 A.M. ad,” and that George W. Bush’s partisans mounted in defense of his 9/11-centric 2004 re-election campaign. And those arguments were right! It’s one thing to say that candidates shouldn’t impugn one another’s patriotism. But impugning a rival’s judgment, as the Obama camp’s Bin Laden advertisement just did, is precisely what a presidential campaign is for.

Strategically, too, the White House has every reason to press these kind of arguments to the hilt. As I’ve noted in this space before, most of President Obama’s record is unpopular – sometimes deeply so – with the voting public. But the big exception is national security, where polls often show that Obama has built up a fair amount of credibility with voters. Foreign policy thus offers the White House its best (and perhaps only) opportunity to draw contrasts with Romney by highlighting the president’s actual accomplishments.

Whereas on domestic issues the Romney camp can answer almost every Obama attack by changing the subject to the unemployment rate, on foreign policy the Republican message is much more muddled and uncertain. In the usual order of things, Romney would be simply try to out-hawk the president, but this is not a hawkish moment in American politics. Outside of the most Republican portions of the electorate, the Iraq War is still widely regarded as a bad blunder, and even conservatives are increasingly supportive of a speedy exit from Afghanistan. Public opinion on Iran is unsettled, but there is next to no support for the kind of stepped-up American intervention in Syria that some Republicans have championed.

Meanwhile, by keeping much of the Bush-era anti-terror architecture in place and stepping up covert warfare from Waziristan to the Horn of Africa, the president has effectively undercut the soft-on-terror arguments that Republicans used so effectively against John Kerry in 2004. Indeed, the most compelling criticisms of this White House have come from libertarians and anti-interventionists on both the left and right, on issues ranging from the dubiously-legal “kinetic military action” in Libya to the White House’s willingness to order the assassination of an American citizen abroad.

Shawn Thew/European Pressphoto AgencySenator Marco Rubio spoke at a conference at the Brookings Institute in Washington on April 25.

This explains why the Republican Party’s foreign policy rhetoric can seem so opportunistic and confused. The Rand Paul-led, anti-interventionist wing of the party arguably has a more coherent case against the president than the more hawkish wing, which often finds itself emphasizing what it has in common with the president – as Florida Senator Marco Rubio did in a widely-touted foreign policy address defending interventionism last week. (Tellingly, the word “Iraq” did not appear in his remarks.) Yet the hawkish line of attack is still the Republican default, and Mitt Romney’s case — to date, at least — against the president has generally circled back to its tropes and premises.

The result is an incoherence that James Poulos described well in a recent column in Forbes:

With Obama, the GOP has become like Woody Allen’s neurotic diner: the food is horrible, and such small portions! The president is condemned for leading and for leading from behind; for relying too much on talk and too much on drones; for slavishly kowtowing to foreign leaders and for arrogantly refusing to stroke foreign leaders. Obama’s foreign policy has paralyzed the GOP by laying bare just how much Republicans collectively refuse to fully commit to one grand, unifying possibility in international affairs — including the possibility of stepping away from sweeping principles and playing it by ear for a while.

Arianna Huffington’s qualms notwithstanding, it would be political malpractice for the president not to exploit this kind of confusion with national security attacks on his opponent. Indeed, Republicans who care about these issues should welcome them. Advertisements like the Bin Laden spot and political stunts like last night’s almost-victory speech in Afghanistan present a challenge to the right, but also an opportunity.

The rough-and-tumble of a presidential campaign affords conservatives their best chance yet to come to terms with the Bush era in foreign policy and its aftermath — to figure out what they think about the recent past, where they stand at present and where they would have the country go from here.

Anti-Gay Conservatives Force Mitt Romney’s Gay Spokesman To Resign

By Stephen D. Foster Jr.

Only two weeks after being hired by Mitt Romney as his foreign policy spokesman, Richard Grenell, an openly gay man, has resigned after conservative anti-gay groups such as the American Family Foundation forced him to do so. According to the Washington Post, the groups gave the Romney campaign much grief about the hiring and the flak was too much for Grenell, who felt unsupported by the campaign.

”I have decided to resign from the Romney campaign as the Foreign Policy and National Security Spokesman,” Grenell announced. “While I welcomed the challenge to confront President Obama’s foreign policy failures and weak leadership on the world stage, my ability to speak clearly and forcefully on the issues has been greatly diminished by the hyper-partisan discussion of personal issues that sometimes comes from a presidential campaign. I want to thank Governor Romney for his belief in me and my abilities and his clear message to me that being openly gay was a non-issue for him and his team.”

Matt Rhoades, a Romney campaign manager, reacted on behalf of the campaign stating, “We wanted him [Grenell] to stay because he had superior qualifications for the position he was hired to fill.”

But this resignation is likely to harm Mitt Romney, who is currently trying to shed his conservative skin in exchange for a more moderate one. This resignation demonstrates the clout that right-wing extremists have over Mitt Romney, who couldn’t even be bothered to publicly defend his hiring of Grenell against the pressure from anti-gay conservatives. It speaks volumes about Romney’s ability to make his own independent decisions without bowing to the demands of right-wing activists and hate groups. Here you have a prime example of Romney making an applaudable decision to hire a gay man before being forced to flip flop and allow him to resign without defending him once in public. If Romney cannot stand up to his own party, especially the extremists, he will be the kind of President that Grover Norquist wished for at CPAC, a wishy washy Chief Executive who will sign any bill conservative groups demand him to sign.

14 signs that the collapse of our modern world has already begun

Posted by: True Activist

(NaturalNews) A lot of people believe the world as we know it is going to end on December 23, 2012. Nonsense, I say. The far more honest answer is that the end of the world as we know it has already begun. And it doesn’t mean the end of the world; it means the closing of one era and the birth of a new one. It is a transition between the ages. This particular transition, however, promises to be the most tumultuous and costly transition humankind has ever seen.

But don’t wait around for December 2012 to look for the signs. Here are 14 signs that the world as we know it is unraveling now. We are living through the end of one era and the birth of a new one. In the future, they’ll look back and call this all one moment in history, but when you’re living through it, it seems to move forward at almost a snail’s pace. But make no mistake: We are living through the opening chapters of the end of the world as we know it, and on the other side of all this will emerge a new world that’s very different from the one we know today.

#1 – Tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes and tsunamis – At first it seemed like a fluke; but now it’s a pattern. The weather is becoming increasingly extreme. Over 120 tornadoes recently struck the U.S. Midwest. Texas is on fire and suffering through an extreme drought. And where there aren’t fires and droughts, there are floods. This is only the beginning… watch for more freak weather over the next 18 months.

#2 – The silence of the bees – Colony Collapse Disorder continues to accelerate across North America. We already know it’s being caused in part by chemical pesticides(and possibly worsened by GMOs), but the chemical industry is engaged in a full-on cover-up to deny this truth while the pollinators of our world suffer a devastating population collapse. (http://www.naturalnews.com/028218_pesticides_honeybees.html)

#3 – failure of nuclear science – The Fukushima catastrophe proves one thing: Scientists are dangerously arrogant in their planning of large-scale projects, and they fail to account for the awesome power of Mother Nature. Nuclear science promised us clean, greenenergy– but now it has delivered a silent, invisible poison that infecting our planet.

#4 – The vicious pursuit of Wikileaks – In an age of such rampant deceit, there is no room for the truth. So those who tell the truth (Wikileaks) are viciously pursued as if they were criminals.

#5 – The rise of the medical police state – The armed SWAT raids on Maryanne Godboldo in Detroit are only the beginning (http://www.naturalnews.com/032091_Maryanne_Godboldo_gun_rights.html). The truth is that the medical system uses guns to force its vaccines and chemotherapy onto children and teens across America. The medical system has become so utterly useless, corrupt and dangerous that it must actually invoke guns in peoples’ facesjust to “convince” people to take its medicine. This is a gunpoint-enforced medical monopoly that exists as a threat to our health and our freedoms.

#6 – The increasing frequency of food shortages and crop failures - Notice the spike in food prices? That’s just the beginning: Food prices will continue to skyrocket in the years ahead due to extreme weather, the loss of pollinators and the global contamination of crops by GMOs. Real food is becoming increasingly scarce in our world. You might want to think about starting a home garden…

#7 – The runaway destruction of the world by energy companies – The radioactive fallout from Fukushima isn’t the only way in which energy companies are destroying our world: Don’t forget about the Deep water Horizon and the massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico — a spill that isn’t over, by the way. They’re still spraying Corexit in the Gulf one year later!

#8 – The continued GMO contamination of our planet – This may be the worst chapter in the coming collapse: The widespread genetic pollution of our planet through GMOs. This is a crime against nature and against humanity. It is a “gene spill” that may never be contained as it spreads its deadly DNA across the world’s foodcrops, leading to crop failures and starvation (http://www.naturalnews.com/032167_gene_spill_GMOs.html). The use of GMOs is the closest thing to “Satanic” that you’ll find in modern agriculture. The agenda behind this is pure evil.

#9 – The tyranny and criminal crackdowns targeting real food  - When you can’t even sell honest farm food to your neighbors without being targeted and arrested by the cops, something is terribly wrong with the world. But this is happening today, all across America. Now the feds are even targeting the Amish! (http://www.naturalnews.com/029322_raw_milk_Amish.html)

#10 – The escalation of the counterfeiting of the money supply – In a failed economic system approaching collapse, the moronic leaders can only think of “solutions” that actually accelerate their own downfall. The runaway counterfeiting of money by the Federal Reserve (with its “quantitative easing” and other counterfeit methods) is a classic sign that the end of our current system is fast approaching. The economic inanities are obvious to anyone who can still do math.

#11 – The plummeting intelligence of the masses - One of the most disturbing signs that we’re already in the collapse is the great dumbing-down of the masses. The drooling, CNN-watching television zombies who dominate our landscape offer absolutely nothing of value to the world. They are the “mindless consumers” who get vaccinated, watch television and eat processed, pasteurized junk food. They’re on psychiatric meds and believe everything the government tells them. Most of these people, of course, won’t make it through the collapse.

#12 – The complete and utter fabrication of the mainstream news – Much of the mainstream news is now utterly and completely fabricated these days: The reporting on Obama’s long-form birth certificate; the news about the war in Libya; the coverage of the economy and the U.S.debt… it’s all so utterly false and unbelievable that an intelligent person watching the news can’t help but explode with laughter. It is a sign of this collapse that the information sources relied upon by the masses are unable to report the truth anymore and must resort to weaving politically expedient fictions on everything from health care and medicine to the fate of the U.S. dollar itself.

#13 – The ongoing pharmaceutical pollution of our world – Beyond the GMO contamination and the radiation contamination of our world, we are also experiencing the mass pharmaceutical contamination of our planet. It’s not just the pharma factories that dump their products into the rivers (http://www.naturalnews.com/025415_water_Big_Pharma_chemicals.html); it’s also the fact that well over half the population is now taking drugs almost daily, and those drugs pass right through their bodies and end up in the watersupply where they contaminate the fish (http://www.naturalnews.com/025933.html). Even beyond that, the drugs end up in the human sewage sludgethat’s packaged and sold as “organic soil!” (http://www.naturalnews.com/029504_organic_biosolids_toxic.html)

#14 – The radioactive contamination of the global food supply – Here’s one that’s really insidious: The global food supply is now contaminated with the radioactive fallout from Fukushima. We’re told the levels are “low,” but we’re not told the truth of how radioactive cesium isotopes persist in the food supply for centuries. How is the human race going to survive its exposure to CT scans, radioactive food, chests X-rays, TSA body scanners and even the secret DHS mobile X-ray vans that can penetrate your body with X-rays as you’re walking into a football stadium? The total radiation burden on the human race is now reaching a point of mass infertility. That may be the whole idea, actually.

It’s accelerating, too

December, 2012 may be a useful date as some sort of mid-point in the crisis, or perhaps as a trigger date for some further acceleration of society’s rapid unraveling. But make no mistake: We are already living in the collapse of our modern world.And you have a front-row seat!(Exciting, huh?)

Think about what’s happening around you these days. These are the signs of the last, desperate clutches of civilization built on utterly unsustainable practices that don’t value life on our world. These are the End Times of the corporate oligarchy; the monopolistic for-profit corporation machine that destroyed everything in our world in exchange for a slightly higher quarterly earnings report.

In the quest for more money, humanity has sacrificed its food supply, its pollinators, it’s oceans, forests and soils. Greed-driven humans have used other humans as medical experiments and cannon fodder. We have created wars to sell more bombs, and we’ve invented disease to sell psychiatric chemicals.

These are the practices of a failed civilization… and one whose days are numbered. Watching it all crumble is far more interesting than watching it continue its destructive ways, of course, because those of us paying attention realize a future civilization must rise in the place of this one after the collapse.

Say goodbye to the false power of institutions

It would be nice if our future leaders remembered the importance of liberty and personal responsibility, of course. The answer to all the world’s problems, it turns out, isfreedom– freedom in medicine, freedom in economics and freedom from government tyranny.

Because, let’s face it: The root cause of most these problems that are bringing down our world now is bad government. It is bad government (Big Government) that approved the GMOs. Bad government enforced the medical monopoly and allowed the pesticides to kill the honey bees. Bad government drove us into inescapable debt and costly foreign wars. Bad government outlawed health freedom and protected the monopolistic practices of the food companies,drug companies and chemical companies.

The downfall of modern human civilization is, as you probably guessed, also the downfall of the very idea that Big Government creates a better society. Because if there’s one idea that needs to stay dead after the collapse, it’s the idea that We the People somehow need another group of people (government workers) to live off our hard work while hounding us with their false authority, directing every little detail of our lives.

What we need in our world isn’t more government, but more freedom. If we had freedom, integrity and personal responsibility, we wouldn’t even be facing the global collapse that has already begun. But alas, the human race is an infant species and it must learn some lessons the hard way, it seems.

This lesson should be long remembered: If you let the corporations, the banks and the governments run your economies, your farms and your lives, they will enslave you and steal your future while you sleep; they will inject silent poisons into the very world around you until you awaken one day to find that all you created has been destroyed. They will promise you paradise but deliver only death.Beware of any entity that is not a living person– no government, no institution, no corporation has a soul, nor a heart, nor a conscience. They are forces of organized destruction that decimate those things we hold dear while delivering to us things that will only enslave us or harm us.

Beware the corporation; the government; the non-profit institution working as a front group for industry. Never allow yourself to be ruled over by any institution which exists only as a fictional construct organized from the projection of human greed.

And be ready for the acceleration of the collapse. Because if you are reading this,you are the future of the human race. You have a duty to stay alive, keep your genes intact, and be around to help create the Next Society after this one crumbles into history.

Rupert Murdoch Admits A ‘Cover-Up’ At The News Of The World, Says ‘I Failed’

Rupert Murdoch told the Leveson inquiry on Thursday that there had been a “cover-up” at the News of the World, but claimed that he was a victim rather than an accomplice in the scheme. He also said that the phone hacking scandal will be a “blot on my reputation” for the rest of his life.

The second day of Murdoch’s testimony before the media ethics panel found the mogul facing far sharper questioning than he did on Wednesday. Murdoch did not back down from his insistence that he had known nothing about the extent of phone hacking at his newspapers. (Indeed, he said that he had essentially ignored the News of the World for over 30 years.) But he said that he had “failed” by being such a remote chief executive.

In Murdoch’s telling, the wool had been pulled over his eyes by a handful of people at the News of the World.

“I think the senior executives were all misinformed and shielded from anything that was going on there,” he said, adding that he blamed “one or two” unnamed people for that. “There’s no question in my mind that, maybe even the editor, but certainly beyond that, someone took charge of a cover-up, and we were all victims of that.”

He claimed that those “strong characters,” who appeared to be former News International legal adviser Tom Crone and News of the World editor Colin Myler, had prevented reporters from speaking to either James Murdoch or Rebekah Brooks.

Murdoch also portrayed the News of the World as the black sheep of his newspaper family, unloved and ignored by him. He called it an “aberration” and said he should have shut it down years earlier than he did. Asked why he closed it last July, Murdoch said, “I panicked. But I’m glad I did it.”

However, Murdoch also displayed an apparently deep lack of knowledge of how the scandal had proceeded. When Robert Jay, the chief interrogator at the inquiry, stated that News International had obstructed the initial phone hacking investigation, Murdoch objected, saying that his company had done no such thing.

“The evidence we’ve had conclusively demonstrates” the opposite, Jay said. “Does that not shock you?”

“That shocks me deeply,” Murdoch said. “I was not unaware of it and hadn’t heard it until you just said it.”

Later, he said that he should have gone in himself and questioned Clive Goodman, the first editor implicated in the hacking scandal.

Lord Brian Leveson, the judge leading the inquiry, asked how Murdoch could not have be more interested in phone hacking, given that he was so personally close to his print titles.

“I have to admit that some newspapers are closer to my heart than others, but I also have to say that I failed,” Murdoch said. After a long pause, he added, “and I am sorry about that.”

There were several sharper moments as well, though. In one particularly spiky exchange, Jay took Murdoch’s own usage of the word “cover-up” a bit too far for the News Corp. chief.

After Murdoch said he had done “nothing” to involve himself personally in dealing with phone hacking, since he trusted his deputies, Jay said, “Some might say this is consistent with the desire to cover up.”

“Maybe people with minds like yours,” Murdoch snapped back. After a concerned noise from Leveson, Murdoch quickly said, “I take that back,”

“I have a very thick skin,” Jay replied.

The inquiry also briefly addressed the News Corp.-related scandal currently plaguing the British government. Minister Jeremy Hunt has been accused of an improper level of closeness and communication with the company while he was acting in a “quasi-judicial role” and weighing Murdoch’s attempt to take over all of satellite broadcaster BSkyB.

Asked if he had ever spoken to Hunt about the bid, Murdoch said he had not. He claimed not to remember ever meeting him. (Journalists were quick to point out that Hunt has disclosed a 2010 dinner with Murdoch and others.)

Murdoch’s first day was dominated by a detailed discussion of his relationships with three decades of politicians and the powerful. The News Corp. chief insisted that he was not the political kingmaker he thought he was, and denied that he had ever used his papers to further his commercial or political interests.

MF Global: The Untold Story of the Biggest Wall Street Collapse Since Lehman

There are plenty of lessons to be learned from MF Global, all of which we can count on Congress to ignore at the behest of Wall Street money until the next financial crisis.

Only on Wall Street can you bankrupt a company; misplace $1.6 billion of customers’ money; lose 75 percent of shareholders’ money in two weeks; speed dial a high priced criminal attorney and get a court to authorize the payment of your multi-million dollar legal tab from the failed company’s insurance policies; have regulators waive your requirements to take licensing exams required to work in the securities and commodities industry; have your Board of Directors waive your loyalty to the firm; run a bucket shop out of the UK; and still have the word “Honorable” affixed to your name in a Congressional investigations hearing.

This is not a flashback to the rotting financial carcasses of 2008. This putrid saga has been playing out in five Congressional hearings since December with the next episode scheduled for Tuesday, April 24, before the Senate Banking Committee under the auspicious title: “The Collapse of MF Global: Lessons Learned and Policy Implications.” (The title might more appropriately be, “MF Global: Lessons  Never Learned and Policy Implications of a Wild West Financial System Just One TradeAway from the Next Taxpayer Bailout.”)

There are plenty of lessons to be learned from MF Global and heart-pounding policy implications; all of which we can count on Congress to ignore at the behest of the Wall Street money and lobby machine until the next epic financial crisis – an eventuality that is growing more likely each day as Congress refuses to restore the Glass-Steagall Act, the depression era legislation that bars Wall Street securities firms from owning banks holding insured deposits.

MF Global, the eighth largest bankruptcy in U.S. history, held 36,000 customer accounts in the U.S., over 5,000 in the U.K., and an unknown number in Japan, Australia, and Hong Kong. It’s a forensic accounting mess.  Can you imagine what it would be like if one of the major Wall Street firms failed with more than 3 million customer accounts?

MF Global filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in the U.S. on October 31, 2011 because of off balance sheet transactions and proprietary trading – a quaint name for betting the house with other people’s money – resulting in a downgrade of their credit rating to junk and a resulting collapse in liquidity.

In MF Global’s unique world of risk controls, the CEO of the firm was doing the proprietary trading. Off balance sheet transactions blew up Citigroup in 2008, requiring hundreds of billions in taxpayer funds and guarantees to shore it up.  Proprietary trading, of the heads we win, tails you lose kind, has cost Goldman Sachs and Citigroup serious reputational damage with customers.  And yet, no lessons have been learned.  Off balance sheet bombs are still lurking all over Wall Street and the SEC continues to stall on outlawing proprietary trading at securities  firms holding customer accounts.

The CEO of MF Global when it disintegrated was Jon Corzine, the former New Jersey Senator and Governor and former co-head of Goldman Sachs & Co.  Corzine took the reins of MF Global in March 2010.  Conflicts abounded with the knowledge and rubber stamp of the Board of Directors.  Corzine was not just Chairman and CEO, he was the firm’s top trader of volatile European BIIPS debt – Belgium, Italy, Ireland, Portugal and Spain.  Corzine took the firm’s position from approximately $500 million when he was hired to $8.1 billion (including Greece and France) in the 19 months it took him to blow up the firm. (How does the CEO of a financial firm police a cowboy trader when he’s the same individual?)  When the Chief Risk Officer of the firm, Michael Roseman, raised warnings about the risk with the Board of Directors, Rosemanwas asked to leave and replaced with a new Chief Risk Officer acceptable to Corzine, according to Congressional testimony given by Roseman and Corzine.

But wearing the three incompatible hats was not the only fatal flaw in Corzine’s management model: he contractually did not owe his total loyalty to MF Global. The August 11, 2011 proxy issued to shareholders and filed with the SEC carried this caveat:

“During the term of Mr. Corzine’s employment agreement with the Company, Mr. Corzine will spend substantially all of his business time and attention on Company matters, except that he may serve as an operating partner of J.C. Flowers. Pursuant to his contract with J.C. Flowers, Mr. Corzine will not receive any salary from J.C. Flowers as long as he is serving as Chief Executive Officer of the Company, but he will have a financial interest as a limited partner in certain of J.C. Flowers’s investment management entities. Mr. Corzine’s employment agreement with the Company contains a provision regarding corporate opportunities. In general, this provision provides that, if Mr. Corzine acquires knowledge from J.C. Flowers (and not the Company) of a potential transaction or other business opportunity that may be a business opportunity for the Company he will have no duty to communicate or present such opportunity to the Company…”

JC Flowers was the namesake of J. Christopher Flowers, a former colleague of Corzine’s at Goldman Sachs. Flowers had acquired a stake in MF Global to help shore it up in 2008 after a trader blew up $141 million of the firm’s money overnight in what the firm called an unauthorized trade. It was Flowers who invited Corzine to become CEO of MF Global.  Corzine left MF Global on November 4, four days after its bankruptcy filing, at the request of the Board.

Why Corzine, a man of great wealth and political stature, would join an obscure brokerage firm is a mystery worthy of pursuit by the FBI, which is investigating the missing customer funds according to Congressional sources. One avenue worthy of pursuit according to Wall Street veterans, is whether Jon Corzine turned MF Global into a giant parking lot for other Wall Street firms’ bad bets on sovereign debt. Fueling that speculation is the fact that JPMorgan, Citigroup and Bank of America were part of a syndicate of 22 banks that provided MF Global with an unsecured $1.2 billion revolving credit line that required no posting of collateral, despite the company’sstring of losses and weak credit rating.  The firm heavily tapped this line of credit in its last days.

The trustee of the Chapter 11 proceeding for the parent holding company is Louis J. Freeh, a former FBI director. On April 19, Freeh asked the court for an expedited hearing to grant him the ability to issue subpoenas to “the Debtors’ affiliates and subsidiaries, the Debtors’ former employees, current and former officers, directors and employees of the Debtors’ affiliates and subsidiaries, lenders, investors, creditors and counterparties to transactions with the Debtors…”

The court is allowing Freeh’s own firm, Freeh Group International Solutions, to perform the accounting work. Four docket entries show that Freeh has asked for and received four extensions by the court to file a list of assets of the holding company.

Compared to Corzine’s former employer, Goldman Sachs, MF Global was a flea on an elephant’s back.  It had experienced a string of quarterly losses since 2007, waspredominantly a Futures Commission Merchant (FCM) holding retail and institutional commodity and futures trading accounts, and had 80 regulatory actions against it since 1997. It had a securities brokerage unit with 300 to 400 U.S. accounts according to the trustee. How big those accounts were is unknown.  If they were all institutional or hedge fund accounts, it could have been a sizeable operation.  One known account, which presciently moved out before the bankruptcy, belonged to the $100 billion private energy firm, Koch Industries, majority owned by Charles and David Koch, financial backers to numerous corporate front groups.

Corzine had no expertise with running a commodities firm.  His trading background at Goldman was in U.S. Government bonds, not commodities. According to a spokesman for the National Futures Association, Corzine passed a limited exam called the Series 32 on August 17, 2010 but never took the full National Commodity Futures Exam, Series 3, which would be expected of Registered Associated Persons working for an FCM.  The spokesman suggested Corzine may have been given a waiver.

Corzine testified to Congress that he was trading debt instruments.  That would have required a valid Series 7 securities license.  But the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) shows that Corzine last took his Series 7 on June 21, 1975 – 37 years ago.  Securities rules require that if one has a gap of more than two years in working for a securities firm, they must retake the exam.  Corzine had a nine year gap while serving as U.S. Senator and Governor of New Jersey.  A FINRA spokeswoman said Corzine was given a waiver. Corzine would have also been required to take ongoing continuing education  – some of which can only be administered by the securities firm one works for.  Since Corzine didn’t work for a securities firm for 9 years, it’s difficult to see how that requirement could be waived.

According to FINRA’s rules, “Principal examinations are rarely waived.” A Principal is the person charged with supervising other security personnel and requires a Principal’s license. Based on Corzine’s testimony, he was not only trading debt but he was instructing others to write tickets.  Corzine’s Principal license, a Series 24, would have lapsed when he left Goldman Sachs in 1999.  Even though its own rules say that waving a Principal examination should be a rare occurrence, FINRA waived that for Jon Corzine as well, according to a spokeswoman.

Against this backdrop of regulatory and Board waivers, it is painful to watch 10 hours of Congressional hearing videos and listen to the Chief Executive Officer, two Chief Financial Officers, Chief Operating Officer, Chief Risk Officer and General Counsel tell Congress and the American people they have no idea how $1.6 billion of what should have been legally segregated funds in customer accounts is missing. Edith O’Brien, the former assistant treasurer, took the fifth in house hearings, while smiling like Mona Lisa.

The final meltdown of the firm came during the week of Monday, October 24 through Monday, October 31, 2011 – the day the firm filed bankruptcy. On Monday, October 24, according to a Congressional memo, Michael Stockman, the Chief Risk Officer who had replaced Michael Roseman, sent an email that listed the firm’s net funded exposure to European sovereign debt from Greece, Ireland, Italy, Spain and Portugal at $7.687 billion and $422 million for Belgium and France.  On the same day,the ratings agency, Moody’s, downgraded MF Global to the lowest investment grade rating, Baa3.

According to an email obtained by Congress, on October 24, Henri Steenkamp, the CFO of the holding company for MF Global, sent an email to Standard and Poor’s, writing that MF Global’s “capital and liquidity has never been stronger…MF Global is in its strongest position ever….”  Mr. Steenkamp is still employed at the firm and is signing financial documents for the bankruptcy trustee of the holding company.

On Tuesday, October 25, the firm announced the largest quarterly loss since going public in 2007, a net loss of $191.6 million.  Corzine was on the earnings call with investors and explained his bets on sovereign debt as follows: “…the structure of the transactions themselves essentially eliminated market and financing risk.” The stock price lost 44 percent on the day.

On Wednesday, October 26, Standard and Poor’s issued a Credit Watch with negative implications, noting that it might soon downgrade the debt to below investment grade, i.e., junk. On Thursday, October 27, Moody’s again downgraded the firm’s rating, this time to junk (Ba2), citing the firm’s “outsized proprietary position.” In the wee hours of Sunday morning, the firm owned up to customer money missing from the segregated accounts. A potential sale of the firm was aborted. On Monday, October 31, MF Global Holdings Ltd., the parent entity, filed for bankruptcy and the Securities Investor Protection Act (SIPA) liquidation proceeding was filed for the securities brokerage and Future Commission Merchant which held the customer accounts.

Eighteen days before the firm failed, the Treasury, Finance Group, and a Senior risk officer prepared a hypothetical death spiral scenario for the firm titled “Break the Glass.”  Disturbingly, the following sentence appears in the document:

“How quickly do we want to send cash back to clients, what is the message if we do not send immediately, what is the strategy if we want to keep the customer and wait until the storm passes…”

The checks that were mailed to customers who wanted their money out of MF Global after its credit ratings downgrades and announcement of a record quarterly lossbounced.

Customers have moved their accounts elsewhere now but the cumulative total of money missing in the customer accounts is $1.6 billion, according to the liquidation trustee hired by the Securities Investor Protection Corporation (SIPC), James W. Giddens of the law firm, Hughes Hubbard and Reed.  Hughes Hubbard has served as bond underwriting counsel for Citigroup, JPMorgan, and Bank of America on multiple occasions. These are three of the 22 banks which provided the unsecured credit facility of $1.2 billion to MF Global.  The law firm told the court it would drop JPMorgan as a client in response to letters of complaint from customers. The trustee is currently negotiating with JPMorgan to return money it says belongs to customers. Hughes and Hubbard’s current relationship with the 21 other banks in the syndicate is unknown.

Hughes Hubbard and Reed is the same law firm handling the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers.  After more than three years, customers have yet to be made whole. There are over 7600 law firms in New York City according to the legal web site, Martindale.com.  Why SIPC has selected the same firm for two of the largest Wall Street collapses in history is noteworthy.

Hughes Hubbard and Reed hired the same public relations firm to handle both the Lehman and MF Global matters, APCO Worldwide.  APCO was originally formed as a subsidiary of Arnold & Porter, the law firm aligned with spin for Big Tobacco in the 90s.

According to Wendell Potter, an insurance company public relations insider and whistleblower, writing in his book  Deadly Spin, ”One of the deceptive practices of which APCO has a long history is setting up and running front groups for its clients. In 1993, Philip Morris hired APCO to organize a front group called the Advancement of Sound Science Coalition in response to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s ruling that secondhand tobacco smoke was a carcinogen. Philip Morris also hired APCO to manage what it called a ‘massive national effort aimed at altering the American judicial system to be more hostile toward product liability suits’ and to build a coalition to advocate for tort reform. According to the Center for Media and Democracy, the tobacco industry paid APCO almost a million dollars in 1995 to implement behind-the-scenes tort reform efforts and specifically to create chapters of ‘grassroots’ citizens’ groups called Citizens Against Lawsuit Abuse.”

Amy Goodman, host of Democracy Now!, interviewed Wendell Potter on November 17, 2010.  Potter revealed more about APCO and front groups: “…there was a front group that was set up called Health Care America, and the sole purpose for it to be set up was to attack Michael Moore [who was about to release his documentary on health care, Sicko] and to attack the notion of a single-payer system in this country…the media contact for it was a guy named Bill Pierce, who I had known and worked with in the past…He was listed as a media contact, and if you called his number, you would have reached him at his desk at APCO Worldwide… There was an article that the New York Times wrote as a kind of a review of  Sicko, not really a review but just a story about the movie actually premiering in the U.S. in June of 2007. And theNew York Times story quoted the Health Care America spokesman as saying that this represented a move toward socialism. And there was not an — apparently not an attempt on the part of the reporter, or any reporter that I saw, to disclose the fact that this was funded largely by the insurance industry.”

In the same month that Corzine was hired by MF Global, March 2010, there were confirmed news reports that APCO Worldwide had been hired by the Financial Services Roundtable, a Wall Street trade group, to promote the image of Wall Street as trustworthy.  An APCO spokeswoman says they no longer represent the account.

While customers on this side of the pond are left in the dark as to how the sanctity of segregated accounts was bulldozed at MF Global, a recent filing by KPMG, the administrator of the bankruptcy proceeding in the UK of a subsidiary, MF Global UK Limited, provides more fodder for Congressional hearings.  The subsidiary was running an operation in the UK called spread betting.  That practice was known as bucket shops in the US in the 1920s and is outlawed here.  It involves making bets on the price direction of financial stocks, commodities, indexes, and other financial derivatives without the trades ever being placed on an exchange.  No security  asset is owned by the customer.

Another spread betting firm in the UK, WorldSpreads Group, was put under an administrator on March 18.  Customer accounts were frozen with a reported £13 million shortfall in client funds.

There is an old saying by Wall Street cynics: “Where are the customers’ yachts?”  Today, the public can’t even find out where are the customers’ funds.

Copyright Pam Martens