Fear Extreme Islamists in the Arab World? Blame Washington!

In the last year of his life, Martin Luther King Jr. questioned US military interventions against progressive movements in the Third World by invoking a JFK quote: "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable."

Were he alive to witness the last three decades of US foreign policy, King might update that quote by noting: "Those who make secular revolution impossible will make extreme Islamist revolution inevitable."

For decades beginning during the Cold War, US policy in the Islamic world has been aimed at suppressing secular reformist and leftist movements. Beginning with the CIA-engineered coup against a secular democratic reform government in Iran in 1953 (it was about oil), Washington has propped up dictators, coaching these regimes in the black arts of torture and mayhem against secular liberals and the left.

In these dictatorships, often the only places where people had freedom to meet and organize were mosques - and out of these mosques sometimes grew extreme Islamist movements. The Shah's torture state in Iran was brilliant at cleansing and murdering the left - a process that helped the rise of the Khomeini movement and ultimately Iran's Islamic Republic.

In a pattern growing out of what King called Washington's "irrational, obsessive anti-communism," US foreign policy also backed extreme Islamists over secular movements or government that were either Soviet-allied or feared to be.

In Afghanistan, beginning BEFORE the Soviet invasion and evolving into the biggest CIA covert operation of the 1980s, the US armed and trained native mujahedeen fighters - some of whom went on to form the Taliban. To aid the mujahedeen, the US recruited and brought to Afghanistan religious fanatics from the Arab world - some of whom went on to form Al Qaeda. (Like these Washington geniuses, Israeli intelligence - in a divide-and-conquer scheme aimed at combating secular leftist Palestinians - covertly funded Islamist militants in the occupied territories who we now know as Hamas.)

This is hardly obscure history.

Except in US mainstream media.

One of the mantras on US television news all day Friday was: Be fearful of the democratic uprisings against US allies in Egypt (and Tunisia and elsewhere). After all, we were told by Fox News and CNN and Chris Matthews on MSNBC, it could end up as bad as when "our ally" in Iran was overthrown and the extremists came to power in 1979.

Such talk comes easy in US media where Egyptian victims of rape and torture in Mubarak's jails are never seen. Where it's rarely emphasized that weapons of repression used against Egyptian demonstrators are paid for by US taxpayers. Where Mubarak is almost always called "president" and almost never "dictator" (unlike the elected president of Venezuela).

When the US media talks about the Egyptian and Tunisian "presidents" being valued "allies in the war on terror," it's no surprise that they offer no details about the prisoners the US has renditioned to these "pro-Western" countries for torture.

The truth is that no one knows how these uprisings will end.

But revolution of some kind, as King said, seems inevitable. Washington's corrupt Arab dictators will come down as surely (yet more organically) as that statue of Saddam, another former US ally.

If Washington took its heel off the Arab people and ended its embrace of the dictators, that could help secularists and democrats win hearts and minds against extreme Islamists.

Democracy is a great idea. Too bad it plays almost no role in US foreign policy.

Egypt: U.S. Puppet Regime On Verge of Collapse

In an interview with NPR, Joe Biden stumbles his way through soft ball questions about Egypt and the dictator Hosni Mubarak, who Biden identifies as a personal friend. In the process, Biden reveals the U.S. attitude toward dictators and client states.
“Mubarak has been an ally of ours in a number of things,” said Biden. “And he’s been very responsible on, relative to geopolitical interest in the region, the Middle East peace efforts; the actions Egypt has taken relative to normalizing relationship with — with Israel. … I would not refer to him as a dictator.”
Remarkably, Biden is considered the go-to man in the Obama administration on foreign policy. The vice president has been famously and consistently called a foreign policy expert by the Washington establishment. In fact, President Obama admitted during his campaign for president that he relied on Biden’s foreign policy advice while both men were in the Senate.
Mubarak’s knuckle-dragging dictatorship is so crucial to the foreign policy of the United States, it is the number two recipient of money (it receives around $2 billion per year). Only Israel receives more.
Egypt under Mubarak uses its billions in U.S. military aid to detain, beat and torture dissenters, opposition politicians and journalists; many have died in custody, Thousands of political prisoners and pro-democracy activists are held in overcrowded, disease-ridden prisons, without charges or trials. Press restrictions, including newspaper shutdowns, are widespread.
This sort of behavior is not the exception but the rule. Egypt has faced repeated criticism from human rights activists and others for decades.
Biden told NPR the U.S. government encourages Egypt to embrace democracy, but this is at best a sick joke.
In 2005, after similar gentle nudging from the Bush administration, Mubarak allowed opposition candidates to run against him, including Ayman Nour. After Nour won a paltry 7 percent of the vote (according to the Egyptian government), he was arrested on politically motivated charges of forgery and sentenced him to five years in prison, thus sending a strong message to anybody who would dare challenge Mubarak.
Since Tuesday, Egypt has witnessed widespread protests against poverty and corruption, and calls for democratic changes. Authorities suspended Internet and cell phone service, according to news reports and mobile operators, in an attempt to block media coverage and communications between protesters. Security forces today continued violent physical attacks on journalists. Mubarak’s thugs have targeted the BBC, Al-Jazeera, CNN, and French journalists working for Le Figaro, Journal du Dimanche, Sipa Photo Agency, and Paris Match.
Beating up journalists and confiscating their equipment, however, will not prevent the regime’s collapse, which now appears imminent.
Even the globalists gathered in Davos, Switzerland, are issuing hollow calls for Egypt to guarantee the freedoms of its residents and eschew violence in order to avoid the fall of Biden’s friend in Cairo.
Prior to the threat posed against Mubarak’s authoritarian rule financed mainly by the U.S. tax payer, Ban Ki-moon and the globalists did not complain much about the despot’s treatment of journalists and the political opposition in his country. Now that the linchpin of globalist control in the Middle East is about the fall, they are calling for reform.
Even Secretary of State Clinton was obliged to offer mild rebuke of Mubarak and his thugs. She suggested Mubarak open “a dialogue between the government and people of Egypt.”
Mubarak’s dialogue was heard this evening in Cairo. He did not answer with words, but with bullets.

Does the Constitution Have Any Binding Power?

Now that Republicans have a majority in Congress, they are pretending to be constitutionalists. In order to demonstrate this, they will theatrically read aloud the Constitution from the floor of the House next week. “And then they will require that every new bill contain a statement by the lawmaker who wrote it citing the constitutional authority to enact the proposed legislation,” reports The Washington Post.
Establishment Republicans, of course, have the same amount of contempt for the Constitution as establishment Democrats. As dedicated worshipers of state power over the individual, establishment Republicans and their ideological twins the establishment Democrats hate the founding principles of this country.
Conservatives regard civil liberties as coddling devices for criminals and terrorists. They see the First Amendment as a foolish protection for sedition. The conservative assault on the US Constitution is deeply entrenched. Today’s conservatives are so poorly informed that they cannot understand that to lose the Constitution is to lose the country. While so-called conservatives pay lip-service to the Constitution, so-called progressives actively trash it and cosign the founding document to irrelevance.
A columnist for the Washington Post says the Constitution has “no binding power on anything” and is confusing – for liberals and other advocates of state power over the individual – because it is over a hundred years old.
Nancy Pelosi and the formerly ruling Democrats also believe the Constitution is irrelevant. “Madam Speaker, where specifically does the Constitution grant Congress the authority to enact an individual health insurance mandate?” a reporter for CNN asked Speaker Pelosi as Democrats prepared to shove Obamacare down the throats of the American people. Pelosi responded: “Are you serious? Are you serious?”
In August, Illinois Democrat Phil Hare told his constituents that he does not give a whit about the Constitution. “I don’t worry about the Constitution on this to be honest,” Hare said in response to a question about the constitutionality of Obamacare.
Hare also demonstrated his contemptible ignorance by saying that the Constitution guarantees each of us “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” In fact, that line is in the Declaration of Independence, not the Constitution.
We’ve now arrived at the point where a sitting Congressman can openly state that he doesn’t care what the Constitution says, a sentiment obviously held by a majority of members since Congress continues to putatively enact ‘laws’ in the utter absence of express constitutional text. For the establishment political class, the Constitution is completely irrelevant.
Even the soon to be leader of the House, John Boehner, is largely clueless about the Constitution. He, like Phil Hare, has mistakenly attributed a line from the Declaration of Independence to the Constitution. Obama did the same, but then he was reading from a teleprompter.
Good 'Ol George W. Bush was reported to have said, "Stop throwing the Constitution in my face. It's just a goddamned piece of paper!"
Dismissive remarks about the Constitution are shared by a large number of politicos and other worshipers of state power in the District of Criminals. If the establishment political class is going to successfully strip us of our natural and god-given rights, they have to support the idea that the Constitution is irrelevant and nothing more than a quaint piece of goddamn paper.

U.S. Senate Passes S. 510 Food Safety Bill

The new Food Tyranny Act — called the “Food Safety Modernization Act” in the U.S. Senate — has been passed by the senate today. It would give the FDA vast new powers to criminalize and imprison farmers and food producers while doing absolutely nothing to address to real root of the food contamination problem: Factory animal farm operations (which are regulated under the USDA, not the FDA).
The bill passed 73 to 25, with Sen Tom Coburn (R-Oklahoma) emerging as the greatest “voice of reason” in the debate. His last-ditch amendment to reduce the scale of the bill was defeated this morning.
Notably, there wasn’t a single Democrat who opposed the bill.
This bill, as originally written, would have outlawed most nutritional supplements through “harmonization” with European laws. It also would have authorized ten-year prison sentences for farmers selling raw milk to their neighbors. Both of those provisions were eventually stripped out of the bill thanks to some last-minute amendments, but it gives you an idea of the outright police state mentality of the original bill authors who attempted to put in place complete government control over food, gardens, raw milk and more.
To give you an idea of how clueless U.S. Senators are about food, the New York Times is reporting that when Senate staff members met to discuss this bill, they would eat Starburst candies and jellybeans. As the NYT reports, “In the midst of negotiations, the negotiators — nearly all women — took a field trip to a nearby food market so that a Republican staff member could teach the Democrats how to buy high-quality steaks.”
So what we have here is a new food tyranny law that was essentially negotiated by a group of women who eat dead foods, animals products and candy.
No wonder they still don’t get it. The contamination of lettuce and other fresh produce is caused by factory animals farms, not by produce farms. (E.coli can only thrive in the digestive tracts of animals, not plants.)
The Tester Amendment of the bill did manage to exclude some smaller farmers from the more tyrannical provisions of the bill. As currently stated, this would exclude small farms that sell less than $500,000 worth of food and which sell most of their food locally.
However, Senators failed to consider what’s going to happen when the Federal Reserve keeps printing counterfeit money, devaluing the dollar and causing massive food price inflation. A farm that right now produces merely $100,000 worth of food (which could be a small, two-person farm) will soon find itself producing $500,000 worth of food (or more) due to the rapidly falling value of the U.S. dollar.
This is how the Federal Reserve’s money counterfeiting actions will further destroy America and place small family farms under the tyranny of the FDA
The Senate version of the bill must now be reconciled with the House version that was passed last year. This reconciliation committee must hammer out the differences between the two bills.
Democrats are urgently rushing to do this during their “lame duck” session in order to avoid more Republicans getting involved who would seek to scale back the power and size of the federal government.
Some House Democrats are even suggesting they would support passing the Senate version of the bill as it is written, without requiring any changes whatsoever, just to rush it through before the end of the year. NaturalNews and other health freedom organizations intend to fight this effort, hoping to stall the bill until the new Congress can enter the picture and hopefully interject some common sense into the negotiations.
If signed into law by the President (who is sure to sign it), this Food Safety Bill would provide yet more power and funding to one of the most dangerous monsters our nation has ever known: The FDA. This is the agency responsible for the death of more Americans than all the wars our nation has ever been involved with — combined!
The idea that we’re going to save a few lives from food poisoning while subjecting everyone to yet another layer of Big Government tyranny is so abhorrent and downright evil that if our country’s founding fathers saw all this going on, they would be stunned into silence that it’s happening in “the land of the free.” Fresh milk being criminalized? You’ve got to be kidding…
Only they’re not kidding. The FDA is the agency that has raided vitamin companies, arrested nutritional supplement manufacturers and ordered the destruction of books containing stevia recipes. This is the agency that censors the scientific truth about natural foods like cherries and walnuts while promoting the outright fraud and quackery of the pharmaceutical industry.
And now the FDA is to be rewarded for its malfeasance with yet MORE power and authority?
This is how Washington works, folks. The government always thinks it’s here to save you, and the Democrats want Big Government to be your nanny and “take care of you.” (The Republicans, for their part, just want to bail out the wealthy banksters with your money.) And yet, when it all comes down to it, these people are just tyrants who have forgotten American history and abandoned the Constitution and its founding principles.
Mark my words: Five years down the road, when the FDA’s armed “food police” are running rampant across America, arresting farmers and imprisoning lettuce growers, people will be appalled, and they’ll wonder, “How could we have let this happen!?” The answer is right here: You let it happen because you allowed Big Government to rule over the food supply. And if there’s one thing we know about Big Government, it’s that it always wants to get bigger.
It always wants more power. More authority. More funding. And more excuses to function as a dictatorship that rules over the American people.
The Food Safety Modernization Act is to the food supply what the Patriot Act is to the Bill of Rights. We must make every effort to prevent this from becoming law, lest we find ourselves living under a food dictatorship where only dead, fumigated or irradiated food will be allowed to be sold to the public. The “food irradiation plot” has been the plan from the very beginning of all this.
Of course, once the real food is all criminalized and outlawed, there’s always soylent green. That might not be too far off, come to think of it.

The TSA and America's Turning Point

The recently-escalated battle between the American people and the TSA is far more important than it first appears.  The final outcome of this argument will determine whether we still live in a nation “of the people, by the people, for the people”, or whether we have become a soft tyranny where our democratic forms of elections and representatives have been reduced to a meaningless veneer as in the old Soviet Union or Red China.
If America has a single founding principle, it is this: no government has any authority to take any action without the consent of the governed.  Our Founding Fathers did not object to the principle of paying taxes per se; they objected strongly to the idea of being forced to pay taxes to a government where they had no input.  Freedom’s cry was not “No taxation” then, and it isn’t now; it was “No taxation without representation.”  The same goes for any other intrusive regulation.
The concept of “the consent of the governed” means more than just voting, however.  A hundred years ago, Prohibition was enacted scrupulously according to democratic forms: Congress and then the required number of states passed a constitutional amendment allowing it, and then Congress and the President passed the Volstead Act enforcing it.
However, events quickly revealed that Prohibition did not have the consent of the governed, or at least a very sizable minority of them: whole sectors of American society insisted on having their booze no matter what the law said.  The end result was vast wealth poured into crime syndicates; eventually Prohibition was repealed with the nation much the worse off for the experience.
There are many laws on the books today which do not really have the consent of the governed, but the government enforces them with a light touch so as not to provoke a backlash.  Consider speed limits: almost everybody speeds, and the police almost never ticket people for going just a hair over.  You usually have to be speeding by a good bit, and even then, getting caught is relatively rare.  If the police seriously tried to ticket every single speeder, voters would demand that the limits be changed. Or so we’ve always assumed – after all, government ultimately answers to the people, doesn’t it?
We are about to find out.  There is no question that America is in the midst of a long-overdue revolt against intrusive government on many levels, but the TSA’s indignities and incompetence reach into every middle-class life.  The molestations, porno-scans, and general harassment set off so many warning signals it’s a wonder anyone’s still flying at all.
The people have made their fury loudly known.  The TSA’s response?  Screw you!
Janet Napolitano, the Secretary of Homeland Security, said “if people want to travel by some other means,” they have that right – which is perfectly true but entirely beside the point.  The TSA’s chief John Pistole was even more blunt, as the Wall Street Journal reports:

Faced with growing public criticism of new airport security measures, the head of the Transportation Security Administration has a simple message: They’re necessary, and they’re going to stay for now. The good news for wary travelers is that the TSA has no plans to ratchet up airport screening even further to combat potential threats.

That’s the good news – that things aren’t going to get any worse, at least for now?  Is this how public servants are supposed to treat the public who are their masters?
It’s clear that the TSA no longer considers the flying public to be their own higher authority; quite the contrary, they are subjects to be ordered around at a whim and made to do whatever the Powers That Be wish on whatever pretext comes to hand.
Let’s be clear: neither the new porno-scanners nor the fondling-patdown could have caught the Underwear Bomber, much less a terrorist like the one in Saudi Arabia who shoved explosives up his butt.  After nearly a decade, the TSA has yet to catch one single terrorist using any of their airport inspections – all the terrorists who’ve been caught, have been caught by intelligence agencies using surveillance and counterintelligence techniques, not goons with gloves and wands.
So, we have the public being forced to do something they very strongly do not want to do, for no reason at all; they are protesting loudly; and the government blithely blows them off.  Something is very badly wrong here.
I cannot help but think of German poet Bertold Brecht’s observation about a Communist government’s dissatisfaction with its revolting people:

Would it not be easier
In that case for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?

To sum up: we have an arm of the government openly and public committing sexual molestation on protesting innocent Americans, arrogantly proclaiming their intention to continue doing it no matter what, and merrily agreeing that the Constitution is a dead letter:

"Nobody likes to have their 4th Amendment violated going through a security line, but truth of the matter is, we’re gonna have to do it". Stated former Assistant TSA Admin. on Security Checkpoints, Mo McGowan, on FOX News.

What? Is that all it takes?  A simple pronouncement of official regret for the passing of our founding documents, and then off we go into total tyranny?
This conflict with the TSA is merely a skirmish in the far larger ongoing war to determine if there are any limits whatsoever on Big Government, but it’s perhaps the most telling one yet.
If Americans will permit their wives, children, and themselves, to be sexually molested and openly humiliated in full view of the public by uniformed government operatives – in what still purports to be a representative democracy – then, indeed, they will tolerate anything, and there is little hope for the future.
This battle must be won, for to lose it means losing everything.

Food Fascism in the Land of the Free

The food industry is no longer a free market.  In fact, I’d go as far as saying it’s becoming the most glaring example of corporate-government fascism in America.

Actual monopolies fully control the basic building blocks of the food that makes up the majority of the American diet — and no one seems to care.  Simply put, those who control the corn, wheat, and soybeans control all food, since all livestock and all processed foods are dependent on those food resources.  These monopolies place their cronies in government regulatory agencies like the FDA and USDA to weed out their competition through excessive regulation.  Currently proposed legislation are textbook examples of their methods.

There once was a time when free markets existed for food.  Back when local food ruled the day, if a farmer sold milk that was bad, he would not get return customers unless he adjusted his practices to make a healthier product.  This free market was self-regulating.  In other words, in a truly free market we shouldn’t need the FDA.  However, as mentioned before, we are light years from a free market.

Subsidies rain down on big agribusinesses that grow what the government tells them to grow.  Industry leaders like Cargill, Monsanto, and Tyson essentially turn farmers into indentured sharecroppers.  The food engineers at General Mills and others weave corn, wheat, and soybeans into chemical concoctions that end up in brightly colored packages — some even come with free Chinese-made toys.  The finished product develops from a Genetically Modified base, using multiple poisons to glue it together, demonstrating that the monopolies and their regulatory lapdogs care not for our health.

But what about voting with our pocketbooks, isn’t that a free market? Surely that is what we have been taught.  Yet, all 16 flavors of Cheerios — which give the appearance of free choice — are all made by General Mills from a genetically modified corn base.  This illusion of choice hides the monopolistic nature of food.

Enter Senate bill S. 510 Food Safety Modernization Act, already passed in the House as HR 2749.  Some have demonized the bill as ultimate food fascism where the FDA will micromanage even small farms and co-ops to the point where it will become illegal to grow, share, trade or sell homegrown food.  While others see it as a measured way to control the health and quality of factory farms. One thing is for sure, S.510 gives more power to the corrupt FDA to regulate our food.  And there is renewed interest in the Senate to pass this bill since the recent massive egg and meat recalls due to salmonella and E. coli outbreaks.

This bill does nothing to change the actual practices of factory farming and the way the food for animals is grown and delivered.  It does give the FDA draconian powers to force inspections to be paid for by the farmers themselves.  This can be an effective tool for the big multinational agri-corporations to further squeeze out their competition and gain near complete control of food resources in America.  Furthermore, S.510 essentially hands much of the FDA’s duties over to the liberty-smashing Department of Homeland Security — which is mentioned 41 times in the bill.

All 273 pages of the bill contain legalize that can be difficult to decode, but one of the easiest ways to determine if it is good for average Americans is to view who is supporting the bill, versus who opposes the bill.  Monsanto and other agri-monopolies support the bill with full force.  Indeed, some speculate that they even wrote the bill themselves.

Sadly, this bill is gaining momentum because of the recent food recalls.  One way or another, our corrupt politicians and their corporate overlords will see to it that there is more regulation over our food.  If this bill passes, we can expect more consolidation in agriculture and more police-state raids of private health-food cooperatives.  Worse yet, this bill may just be the primer for the even more egregious bill HR.759 Food and Drug Administration Globalization Act, which fully restricts local food producers and natural health remedies.

Food freedom starts at home with the individual choices that we make.  However, exposing the corrupt regulatory system and educating the powers that be about healthier ways to produce food is also vital to maintaining our food freedom.  It’s time we tell the corporate government to back off our food.

You can read the proposed bill for yourself at:
http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bil…

Policing the Internet

Two cybersecurity bills that would hand President Obama the power to shut down parts of the Internet in the event of a national emergency have now been merged into a single unified piece of legislation that Democrats will try to pass before the end of the year, with the Department of Homeland Security being given a larger role in policing the world wide web.

Under the new draft bill, which is a combination of the two versions originally crafted by Senators Joe Lieberman and Jay Rockefeller, Janet Napolitano’s DHS will be handed broader authority to determine how to handle potential cybersecurity threats.
“DHS will get expanded authorities. I think that’s clear,” said James Lewis, a cybersecurity expert with think tank Center for Strategic and International Studies, who has studied the new bill.
An expanded role for Homeland Security would be somewhat ironic given the fact that the DHS itself recently failed an extensive cyber-security audit conducted by the agency’s own Inspector General.

“The DHS US-CERT office is currently plagued by at least 600 vulnerabilities that could compromise sensitive data, including 202 which have been classified as high-risk,” reported TG Daily.
Homeland Security’s failure to adequately secure its own internal network will lead to questions about why the agency should be given vast new authority to secure America’s cyber assets and the public Internet.
Democrats want to get the bill passed within the next four weeks, although “sticking points” could delay the legislation, according to a Senate aide familiar with the bill. However, lawmakers are determined to put the package up for a vote before the end of the year.

“Senate Majority Harry Reid has put the measure on his list of top-priority bills to get through the Senate this year,” sources told MoneyControl.com.

Lieberman’s version of the original bill includes language that would hand President Obama the power to shut down parts of the world wide web for at least four months with no congressional oversight. The combined version appears to shift that responsibility to DHS, who under the pretext of a national emergency could block all Internet traffic to the U.S. from certain countries, and close down specific hubs and networks, creating an ominous precedent for government regulation and control over the Internet.

Cybersecurity legislation is being promoted as a vital tool to defend the nation’s critical infrastructure against cyber- terrorism. However, the threat from cyber-terrorists to the U.S. power grid or water supply is minimal. The perpetrators of an attack on such infrastructure would have to have direct physical access to the systems that operate these plants to cause any damage. Any perceived threat from the public Internet to these systems is therefore completely contrived and strips bare what many fear is the real agenda behind cybersecurity – to enable the government to regulate free speech on the Internet.

The Obama administration’s release of the Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative, a government plan to “secure” (or control) the nation’s public and private sector computer networks, coincided with Democrats attempting to claim that the independent news website The Drudge Report was serving malware, an incident Senator Jim Inhofe described as a deliberate ploy “to discourage people from using Drudge”.

Fears that cybersecurity legislation could be used to stifle free speech were heightened when Senator Lieberman told CNN’s Candy Crowley that the real motivation behind the bill was to mimic the Communist Chinese system of Internet policing. “Right now China, the government, can disconnect parts of its Internet in case of war and we need to have that here too,” said Lieberman.

The Communist Chinese government does not disconnect parts of the Internet because of genuine security concerns, it habitually does so only to oppress and silence victims of government abuse and atrocities, and to strangle dissent against the state, a practice many fear is the ultimate intention of cybersecurity in the United States.