William Blum

The leaders of imperial powers have traditionally told themselves and their citizens that their country was exceptional and that their subjugation of a particular foreign land should be seen as a "civilizing mission", a "liberation", "God's will", and of course bringing "freedom and democracy" to the benighted and downtrodden. It is difficult to kill large numbers of people without a claim to virtue. I wonder if this sense of exceptionalism has been embedded anywhere more deeply than in the United States, where it is drilled into every cell and ganglion of American consciousness from kindergarten on. If we measure the degree of indoctrination (I'll resist the temptation to use the word "brainwashing") of a population as the gap between what the people believe their government has done in the world and what the actual (very sordid) facts are, the American people are clearly the most indoctrinated people on the planet. The role of the American media is of course indispensable to this process — Try naming a single American daily newspaper or TV network that was unequivocally against the US attacks on Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yugoslavia, Panama, Grenada, and Vietnam. Or even against any two of them. How about one? Which of the mainstream media expressed real skepticism of The War on Terror in its early years?

Overloaded with a sense of America's moral superiority, each year the State Department judges the world, issuing reports evaluating the behavior of all other nations, often accompanied by sanctions of one kind or another. There are different reports rating how each lesser nation has performed in the previous year in the areas of religious freedom, human rights, the war on drugs, trafficking in persons, and counterterrorism, as well as maintaining a list of international "terrorist" groups. The criteria used in these reports are mainly political, wherever applicable; Cuba, for example, is always listed as a supporter of terrorism whereas anti-Castro exile groups in Florida, which have committed literally hundreds of terrorist acts, are not listed as terrorist groups.

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Richard Edmondson

"Christ Driving the Merchants from the Temple"

“…and that no matter how many police state laws our AIPAC-vetted congress may enact, no matter how many of us they may round up and put into FEMA camps or some other detention facility, no matter how many wars they may start, no matter how many innocents they slaughter—no matter all of this, as long as there remain on this earth those who exalt this rebel, who follow his teachings, and who celebrate his birth each year, their control over humanity will never—never—be complete or total. And this they know.”

You could perhaps consider this a primer for Christian Zionists, although others, possibly even atheists, might find it interesting as well. Here is the question: If Jesus was a rebel, then who was he rebelling against? Jackson Browne, although his song is quite nice, doesn’t really give us an answer. Let us then examine the matter ourselves and see if we can reach a conclusion.

Was Jesus in revolt against Rome? This is something Jews often try and argue. Jesus, they tell us, was nothing more than a Jewish nationalist, who, like many other Jewish nationalists of the day, sought an end to the Roman occupation of Palestine (or the “land of Israel” as they now like to claim it). Some of these Jewish intellects have even gone so far as to hypothesize that Jesus practiced Pharisaic Judaism himself! But of course the preponderance of evidence does not support these claims.

And Jesus, answering, said unto them, “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.

The above quotation, from Mark 12:17, is one of the few statements from Jesus regarding Roman rule over Palestine that can be found in the canonized gospels, and it would suggest he had no strong grievances or objections to it. Of course, that’s only the canonized material. What of other early texts? What, say, of the Gnostic sources? Or the vast body of apocryphal writings? Is there anything in any of this material to support the notion that Jesus’ mission in life was setting up a Jewish state? The answer is little to none.

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Chris Floyd

Manifest Destiny: This painting (circa 1872) by John Gast called American Progress, is an allegorical representation of the modernization of the new west. Here Columbia, a personification of the United States, leads civilization westward with American settlers, stringing telegraph wire as she sweeps west; she holds a school book. The different stages of economic activity of the pioneers are highlighted and, especially, the changing forms of transportation. Native Americans and animals flee in terror. (Wikipedia)

The U.S. presidential campaign is now in full swing. (In truth, it never actually ends; the savage grasping and grappling among damaged souls seeking their brief season of domination and death-dealing goes on daily without respite.) In the months to come, we will be subjected to an ever-growing, ever-roaring flood of rhetoric about the unique, unquestionable, divinely ordained goodness of America. (And how the "other side" would destroy or demean this precious moral specialness.)

This rhetoric will come both from the radical, society-shaking extremists laughingly called "conservatives" in our fun-house political system, and from the reactionary defenders of elite wealth and murderous militarism laughingly known as "progressives." (And, of course, from the well-fed, milky mannered, comfortably numb burghers known as "centrists.")

All Americans are marianated in this mindset from birth, and it is reinforced in them, every day, by the most powerful and pervasive media machinery in history, by enormous societal pressure, and by the dead heavy weight of tradition. Even the most hardened cynics might feel the stirrings of atavastic response to these siren songs woven into the fabric of the American psyche.

In such cases, I recommend a reading of the following two articles. They will help remind you of the reality being cloaked by the psyche-stirring, button-pushing bullshit of the grasping wretches seeking power.

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Philip Giraldi

Nearly all the Republican presidential candidates are showing their muscles, supporting the war on terror and a robust military while also vowing to do whatever it takes to disarm Iran. They know that it is essential to play the jingoistic “American exceptionalism” card, and they understand that being president also means becoming commander in chief of America’s armed forces with the responsibility for committing U.S. soldiers to die for their country. But how are they qualified to do that? Of the sorry lot on display, only Ron Paul and Rick Perry have ever served in the military in any capacity, Paul as a U.S. Air Force medical officer and Perry as an Air Force pilot. The dramatically bellicose Newt Gingrich, who wants to coordinate a joint military operation with Israel to attack Iran, did not serve during the Vietnam War. He received deferments because he was a student and because he was, at the time, married to his first of three wives. Other candidates, including Rick Santorum and Jon Huntsman, are too young to have been subject to the draft, but neither volunteered for military service. Santorum entered a law firm, and Huntsman went to Indonesia as a Mormon missionary before stepping into the business run by his father.

But perhaps the most spectacular chickenhawk of all is Mitt Romney, frequently cited as the likely Republican candidate, who alone among GOP aspirants to the highest office in the land has advocated increasing the size of the Defense Department. Romney apparently is not aware of the foreign policy misadventures of the past 10 years and is eager to double down on a formula that has not worked very well. He believes that the correct response to the many threats in the world is to throw more money at the Pentagon. He also apparently has not noted the sinking economy, which might suggest to anyone but the politically ambitious that retrenchment would be preferable to more interventionism. But as an experienced self-described “businessman” he is not afraid of running up a little more debt.

Romney has several times declared that Iran will never acquire a nuclear weapon if he is president, suggesting that the other candidates are pusillanimous on the issue and implying that he alone will attack the mullahs “preventively” if such a development appears to be imminent. The willingness to start a war with a country that can hardly threaten the United States is the cornerstone of his foreign policy, which he describes as dealing with the world from a position of strength. If that sounds a bit like the Bush Doctrine, it should.

Romney’s personal history suggests, however, that his hawkishness might well be a recent affectation, carefully crafted to suit the presidential persona that he would like to present to the voting public. In particular, he has never been inclined to place either himself or anyone close to him in harm’s way to advance the wars that his country has been fighting, wars that he defends both in principle and in detail.

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Chris Floyd

Photo: Girl with amputated legs - victim of the US war on Iraq. Civilians make up 98 percent of the millions of dead and injured since the invasion. (The WE!)

In March 2003, the United States of America launched an entirely unprovoked act of military aggression against a nation which had not attacked it and posed no threat to it. This act led directly to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent people. It drove millions more from their homes, and plunged the entire conquered nation into suffering, fear, hatred and deprivation.

This is the reality of what actually happened in Iraq: aggression, slaughter, atrocity, ruin. It is the only reality; there is no other. And it was done deliberately, knowingly, willingly. Indeed, the bipartisan American power structure spent more than $1 trillion to make it happen. It is a record of unspeakable savagery, an abomination, an outpouring of the most profound and filthy moral evil.

Line up the bodies of the children, the thousands of children -- the infants, the toddlers, the schoolkids -- whose bodies were torn to pieces, burned alive or riddled with bullets during the American invasion and occupation of Iraq. Line them up in the desert sand, walk past them, mile after mile, all those twisted corpses, those scraps of torn flesh and seeping viscera, those blank faces, those staring eyes fixed forever on nothingness.

This is the reality of what happened in Iraq; there is no other reality.

These children -- these thousands of children -- are dead, and will always be dead, as a direct result of the unprovoked act of military aggression launched and sustained by the American power structure. Killing these children, creating and maintaining the conditions that led to the slaughter of these children, was precisely what the armed forces of the United States were doing in Iraq. Without the invasion, without the occupation, without the 1.5 million members of the American volunteer army who surrendered their moral agency to "just follow orders" and carry out their leaders' agenda of aggression, those children would not have died -- would not have been torn, eviscerated, shot, burned and destroyed.

This is the reality of what happened in Iraq; you cannot make it otherwise. It has already happened; it always will have happened. You cannot undo it.

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Joseph Kishore & James Cogan

Earlier this month, President Obama declared that with the departure of American combat troops the US was “leaving behind a sovereign, stable and self-reliant Iraq, with a representative government that was elected by its people”. — Nothing could be further from the truth.

Bombings ripped through sections of Baghdad on Thursday, killing at least 63 people and injuring nearly 200. The attacks, which mainly targeted Shiite Muslim areas, took place in the midst of intensifying sectarian conflicts, as different factions of the Iraqi elite battle over political and economic power in the wake of the departure of US combat troops.

One of the deadliest attacks was from a suicide car bomb near the central government’s Integrity Commission building and the Christian Nuns Hospital, which killed 25 people and injured more than 60. The combined death toll from the bombings made Thursday the deadliest day in Iraq in more than a year.

The bombings followed moves by the Iraqi central government led by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, who heads the dominant Shiite Muslim bloc in the parliament, to politically destroy several prominent Sunni politicians.

On Monday, Iraq’s Judicial Council issued an arrest warrant for Vice President Tariq Al-Hashemi, charging him with coordinating bombing attacks and running an assassination squad to target Shiite officials. Maliki is also seeking a parliamentary no-confidence vote to oust Deputy Prime Minister Saleh al-Multaq, the leader of a Sunni-based party.

Fuelling sectarian tensions, Maliki immediately suggested that his Sunni rivals were culpable for the blasts. He stated: “The timing of the crimes and the choice of their areas confirms again to all those in doubt the political nature of the objectives that these people want to achieve.” No one has claimed responsibility for the attacks, though media speculation has focused on the Sunni-dominated groups associated with Al Qaeda.

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Stephen Lendman

New global data show grim results. China's real estate was especially bleak. It reported 70% of its 70 largest cities experiencing home price deflation, up from 47% in October. Rarely ever does this bode well for economic prospects or banking.

As a result, copper is down 0.7% and 25% in 2011. The base metals complex also dropped 1%.

In Japan, department store sales were down 1.9% year over year, the fifth consequence negative reading. In October, Spain's service sector declined 2.7% year over year.

In America, recent data reflect downtrends in restaurants, clothing, jewelry, department, grocery, and drug store sales, household appliances, clothing, chemical products, electrical and communication equipment, machinery, paper and wood products, semiconductors, and computers and accessories.

Wage growth is especially weak, showing declines in four of the past six months, and 1% annually year over year.

Global economies also show weakness. Notably, it's showing up in negative paper boxes and containers four consecutive months and in free fall year over year.

On December 17, Hoisington Investment Management's Van Hoisington told Barrons he is bullish on bonds because of America's weak 2012 economic prospects.

He believes in Irving Fisher's 1930 Theory of Interest calling long rates a function of the real rate, plus expected inflation. In the last 140 years, the real rate's averaged about 2%, with wide variations up or down.

With deflationary pressures persisting, he sees bond price appreciation or bottoming around the real rate if (core) inflation stops at zero. "We aren't there yet, but we're headed in that direction. That's why we've had a bull market and why it will continue until such time as inflationary expectations start to rise."

The fundamental global problem, he believes, is "disequilibrium" because of over-indebtedness. In America's $15 trillion economy, "we have $52 trillion in debt, which is 350% of GDP."

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Melvin A. Goodman

The harsh treatment of alleged leaker Bradley Manning is part of a broader campaign to silence government whistleblowers, a pattern that began with Vice President Dick Cheney’s outing of CIA officer Valerie Plame but has expanded under President Obama, says ex-CIA analyst Melvin A. Goodman.

When Pvt. Bradley Manning appeared in a military courtroom at Fort Meade, Maryland, last week, it was his first public appearance in more than 19 months. Manning has been held without trial for the past year and a half; only now is a hearing being conducted to determine if there is sufficient evidence to refer his case to a general court martial.

During this period, Manning, who is charged with transferring classified information to an unauthorized source, has been treated as an “enemy combatant,” subjected to solitary confinement in a maximum-security cell as well as harassment day and night.

Manning’s inhuman and degrading treatment clearly is designed as a warning to other individuals who might be considering the unauthorized release of classified information. There were periods in his pre-trial confinement when he was forced to stand naked, which conjures up images of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib — not U.S. justice.

At the current hearings, the government has even been allowed to exclude journalists from portions of the proceedings. The norms of the legal system, including military justice, have been observed in the breach, particularly the right to a speedy trial.

The documents leaked by Manning were an embarrassment to the United States, but not a threat to U.S. security. The overwhelming majority of the documents were governmental boilerplate.

The campaign to intimidate potential whistleblowers or dissidents within the government is consistent with the national security state that the Bush and Obama administrations have created over the past decade.

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Ray McGovern

Pvt. Manning on the left. - In today's America, pro-
secutors & hanging judges use any means to convict.

When I was asked to speak at Saturday’s rally at Fort Meade in support of Pvt. Bradley Manning, I wondered how I might provide some context around what Manning is alleged to have done.

(In my talk, so as not to think I had to insert the word “alleged” into every sentence, I asked for unanimous consent to using the indicative rather than the subjunctive mood.)

What jumped into my mind was the letter Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote from the Birmingham City jail in April 1963, from which I remembered this:

“Like a boil that can never be cured as long as it is covered up, but must be opened with all its pus-flowing ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must likewise be exposed, with all of the tension its exposing creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured.”

I suggested that this is precisely what Bradley Manning did when he saw the need to uncover war crimes like the indiscriminate murder of civilians and torture he witnessed in Baghdad and read about in cables.

What he had become witness to was the inevitable result of aggressive war, which the post-World War II Nuremberg Tribunal called the “supreme international crime,” differing from other war crimes only inasmuch as it contains within itself the “accumulated evil of the whole.” Was he to obey orders to keep his mouth shut? Or was he to follow his conscience and lance this ugly boil of accumulated evil?

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Khalid Amayreh in occupied Palestine

Some of the pseudo intellectuals in the Arab world are lamenting the demise of "progressive regimes" in Libya, Tunisia and Egypt as well as the looming demise of some other regimes in the region.

These hypocrites and hangers-on, who had benefited immensely, financially and otherwise, from their close association with some of the defunct regimes, are now bewailing the allegedly negative impact of Arab revolutions on the overall Palestinian cause.

These orphans of tyranny and despotism falsely think that Arab tyrants, the ones who have been consigned to the dustbin of history and the others awaiting their turn, preserved the Palestinian cause from possible demise and prevented Israel from achieving its expansionistic goals.

The truth of the matter, however, is that all these regimes exploited the legitimate Palestinian cause in order to repress and torment their own people and stay in power as long as possible, all under the false rubric of challenging Zionism and Western imperialism.

Thus, thousands, probably tens of thousands of innocent Arabs and Muslims were brutally killed and tortured in the name of fighting Israel and Zionism. Hundreds of thousands were imprisoned and persecuted for demanding freedom, dignity and human rights.

The great Arab poet, al-Mutanabbi, may have had sycophants like these in mind when he said: "The tears of the eye betray their man if they happen to harrowing after the traitors."

Well, since when would the merciless murder of our fellow Arab citizens lead to the liberation of Palestine.

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Stephen Lendman

In today's America, prosecutors and hanging judges use any means to convict. Innocence and judicial fairness don't matter, just imprisoning another Muslim for political advantage with considerable major media help.

Post-9/11, Mehanna is one of hundreds of Muslim Americans victimized, vilified, and persecuted for their faith, ethnicity, prominence, activism, and at times charity.

On October 21, 2009, an FBI press release said:

"A Sudbury, Mass. man was charged today in federal court with conspiracy to provide support to terrorists."

Maliciously and spuriously, Mehanna was accused of

"conspir[ing] with Ahmad Abousamra and others to provide material support and resources for use in carrying out a conspiracy to kill, kidnap, main or injure persons or damage property in a foreign country and extraterritorial homicide of a US national."

Despite no evidence whatever proving it,

"Mehanna and co-conspirators [were accused of having] discussed their desire to participate in violent jihad against American interests and that they would talk about fighting jihad and their desire to die on the battlefield."

"[They also] attempted to radicalize others and inspire each other by, among other things, watching and distributing jihadi videos."

[In addition], Mehanna and two of his associates traveled to the Middle East in February 2004, seeking military-type training at a terrorist training camp [to] prepare them for armed jihad....including [against] US and allied forces in Iraq....[One] of Mehanna's coconspirators made two similar trips to Pakistan in 2002."

"....Mehanna and the co-conspirators had multiple conversations about obtaining automatic weapons [from a Mr. Maldonado, now serving a 10-year sentence for training with Al Queda in Somalia] and randomly shooting people in a shopping mall, and that the conversations went so far as to discuss the logistics of a mall attack, including coordination, weapons needed and the possibility of attacking emergency responders."

Yet no attack occurred. None, in fact, was planned or contemplated. According to FBI scoundrels, however, it was because no automatic weapons could be obtained even though legal semi-automatic ones are freely sold and illegal automatic ones easily gotten.

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Stephen Lendman

Right: Jacob Schiff, the Rothschild lieutenant who funded
communist revolution and the Japanese invasion of China.

The late Georgetown University historian Carroll Quigley said in his book titled, "Tragedy and Hope":

"(T)he powers of financial capitalism had another far-reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences."

By controlling democratic and despotic governments as well as others in between, they've moved closer to absolute global control of money, credit and debt to dominate economies, politics, commerce, and imperial adventurism. As a result, they've benefitted handsomely at the expense of nations and popular interests.

Josiah Stamp, former Director of the Bank of England said:

"Banking was conceived in iniquity and was born in sin. The bankers own the earth. Take it away from them, but leave them the power to create money, and with the flick of the pen they will create enough deposits to buy it back again." "However, take it away from them, and all the great fortunes like mine will disappear and they ought to disappear, for this would be a happier and better world to live in. But, if you wish to remain the slaves of bankers and pay the cost of your own slavery, let them continue to create money."

Aesop said "We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office." Bankers with money power are the most pernicious of all.

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Gilad Atzmon

We are indeed in a win-win situation. And it’s all because we know that truth is on our side.

It was a few years ago that I grasped that Zionism was just one manifestation of Jewish political power in the West. But at the time, hardly anyone was either brave or stupid enough to tackle the topic. In spite of Israel defining itself as the ‘Jewish State’, despite the fact that the warplanes that dropped their bombs on Palestinian civilians were covered in Jewish symbols, still no one was willing to openly ask exactly what Jewishness was all about or what it stood for – and those few who did dare to raise the question were subject to total abuse until they took cover or just faded away.

It’s also been clear for quite a while that many Palestinian solidarity activists, intellectuals and academics have been begging for recognition from mainstream Western institutions. For obvious reasons, many of us have been fearful of open confrontation with exponents of Zionist power, whether mainstream Zionist media organisations or even those AZZ (Anti Zionist Zionists) who have managed to lodge themselves so comfortably within our ranks.

But recently things have changed and the popularity of my book ‘The Wandering Who?’ (TWW) is just one example of that clear shift in consciousness. Somehow, we have lost our fear, somehow we have found the courage to say what we know to be the truth.

I’ve been engaged with Jewish identity politics issues for over a decade now but it was back in 2003 that I realised that total and uncompromised opposition to any form Jewish of identity politics was the only way forward. I also realised that I might be able to expose the framework of Jewish political infrastructure, not only within Israel but also within Zionist organisations, Western politics, Western media and the so-called Jewish ‘anti Zionist’ network. And it didn’t take long to realize I was in a true win-win situation. If they managed to destroy me, it would merely prove my point about their overwhelming influence but if they failed to neutralize me, that could only mean that Jewish power was disintegrating - which was exactly what I set out to achieve.

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Stephen Lendman

Corporate greed and profits over people priorities launched nationwide OWS protests in hundreds of US cities for change. Mindless of growing public rage, political Washington keeps cutting vital social benefits needing increases during hard times. With real unemployment approaching 23%, earlier cuts affected:

• Pell Grants help for college tuitions;
• federal wages;
• the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP) to help impoverished families have heat in winter;
• the Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP);
• community healthcare centers;
• nonprofit health insurance cooperatives;
• HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and other disease prevention programs;
• WIC (Women, Infants, and Children) grants to states for supplemental foods, healthcare, and nutrition education for low-income families;
• Head Start, providing comprehensive education, health, nutrition, and parent involvement services to low-income families with children;
• the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (targeted earlier with more coming), providing food stamps for poor households;
• community development block grants for housing, overall reducing HUD's budget by $1.1 billion;
• Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) first-responder funding;
• energy efficiency and renewable energy programs;
• Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) clean/safe water and other projects;
• National Institutes of Health (NIH) medical research;
• the National Park Service;
• vital infrastructure and transportation needs; and
• other non-defense discretionary spending.

New cuts will sustain Wall Street, militarism, favoritism, waste, fraud, and other rewards for Washington's usual special interests. They'll benefit at the expense of ordinary people losing out. Increasingly on their own sink or swim, Obama calls it "shared sacrifice." Ordinary people sacrifice to let business and super-rich elites share.

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John Chan

Residents gather on a street during a demonstration in Wukan
village in China's Guangdong province on Thursday.

Heavy-handed police-state responses to protracted protests by thousands of farmers at Wukan village in China’s Guangdong province have increasingly made the 20,000 villagers a national symbol of resistance against the Stalinist bureaucracy and the powerful corporate interests behind it.

Hundreds of paramilitary police armed with automatic weapons and water cannons sealed off the village throughout last week, cutting off food supplies for days. Despite this, the residents’ struggle against the sale of collective farmland to real estate developers has attracted the sympathy of working people throughout the country. Neighbouring villages and town people are providing food and supplies to Wukan.

Last Friday, the Wall Street Journal reporter in Wukan explained: “Interviews with people living near Wukan, meanwhile, suggested widespread sympathy with the protesters there and anger over what the locals said were many similar cases of local officials misappropriating farmland, or failing to pay sufficient compensation for land seized.”

Significantly, the unrest is drawing support from a section of the working class. Last Wednesday, a small demonstration in the provincial capital, Guangzhou, in solidarity with the Wukan villagers was quickly suppressed by the police. The crackdown revealed the Beijing regime’s fear that the protests could trigger broader anti-government demonstrations, not only in rural areas, but in the province’s manufacturing centres.

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Stephen Lendman

Under the UN Charter, other international law, and principles of sovereign equality, all states are equal. None are more or less legitimate than others.

Under the 1933 Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of States, Israel qualifies as one. It has:

• a fixed recognizable territory;
• a permanent population;
• a functioning government; and
• the capacity to have relations with other countries.

At issue isn't its legal nation state legitimacy. Its lawless ideology is illegitimate.

It is corrosive, destructive, racist, extremist, undemocratic and hateful. It claims Jewish supremacy, specialness and uniqueness as God's "chosen people." It espouses violence, not peaceful coexistence. It chooses confrontation over diplomacy. It employs strength through militarism, intimidation, and naked aggression. It is contemptuous of moral values and ethical principles.

According to Joel Kovel, it's "a machine for the manufacture of human rights abuses." Alan Hart calls it "the real enemy of the Jews," and no wonder. It's a monster threatening its host and all humanity, especially in partnership with its Washington paymaster/partner.

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Hans-Hermann Hoppe

Hans-Hermann Hoppe explains how the ruling and banking elite steal wealth from the workers and producers of society, and why the OWS protesters should be protesting the privately owned Federal Reserve instead.

Imagine you are in command of the state, defined as an institution that possesses a territorial monopoly of ultimate decision making in every case of conflict, including conflicts involving the state and its agents itself, and, by implication, the right to tax, i.e., to unilaterally determine the price that your subjects must pay you to perform the task of ultimate decision making.

To act under these constraints — or rather, lack of constraints — is what constitutes politics and political action, and it should be clear from the outset that politics, then, by its very nature, always means mischief. Not from your point of view, of course, but mischief from the point of view of those subject to your rule as ultimate judge. Predictably, you will use your position to enrich yourself at other people's expense.

More specifically, we can predict in particular what your attitude and policy vis-à-vis money and banking will be.

Assume that you rule over a territory that has developed beyond the stage of a primitive barter economy and where a common medium of exchange, i.e., a money, is in use. First off, it is easy to see why you would be particularly interested in money and monetary affairs. As state ruler, you can in principle confiscate whatever you want and provide yourself with an unearned income. But rather than confiscating various producer or consumer goods, you will naturally prefer to confiscate money. Because money, as the most easily and widely saleable and acceptable good of all, allows you the greatest freedom to spend your income as you like, on the greatest variety of goods. First and foremost, then, the taxes you impose on society will be money taxes, whether on property or income. You will want to maximize your money-tax revenues.

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Stephen Lendman

On December 17, Gerald Celente told On the Edge host Max Keiser:

"The entire financial system is collapsing. Look what's going on in China. All of the empty buildings. Look at the home sales and real estate market. They're in steep decline now."

"The only way they kept this global ponzi scheme afloat following the 2008 panic is for the central banks around the world to keep juicing money into the system to keep it going, and now it's collapsing."

"When all else fails, they take you to war....They're going to do it again."

A year ago, Celente's predictions were spot on. He said "America's trend is nowhere bottomed, and the worst is yet to come." Now it's happening in real time as debt piles on more of it, politicians are gridlocked, and conditions ahead look grim.

He said "(t)eetering economies will collapse, currency wars will ensure, trade barriers will be erected, (and) economic unions will splinter."

Today, Eurozone countries are in sovereign debt crisis. Currency wars are happening, and America and China trade barbs.

Out of work, money and indebted, "legions of on-the-edge desperate (people) will do whatever they must to keep a roof over their heads and put food on the table."

Today, "(t)hieves are stealing copper piping and cables, cooking oil and temple donation boxes. Criminal recycling is flourishing. In 2011, a record number of cyber crimes is reported....more than 23,000 per month."

During hard times and growing poverty, "authorities will intensify their efforts" to get funds for their fiscal obligations.

Today, America has a "two-tier" justice system. Corporate crooks get slap-on-the-wrist fines. In contrast, ordinary people are severely punished for "small time crimes." Justice means "just us!"

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Stephen Lendman

Millions of Americans now endure protracted Depression conditions at a time half the population is either poor or low income. Long-term unemployment is unprecedented, and federal aid is being cut, not increased.

Two new reports highlight enormous depravation levels and human suffering, getting little or no major media attention. Many affected families used to be middle class. They're now low-income or impoverished by unemployment or spotty low-pay part-time work.

Most important is that much worse conditions are coming during America's greatest ever Depression to last years and devastate many more households than already.

In December, the US Conference on Mayors published its "Hunger and Homelessness Survey: A Status Report on Hunger and Homelessness in America's Cities."

It covered 29 cities. The period between September 1, 2010 and August 31, 2011 was examined. Key findings reflected dire nationwide conditions.

Only four cities said emergency help wasn't requested in the past year. In two cities, conditions were unchanged. Two others said they improved. Overall, aid requests increased by 15.5%.

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Khalid Amayreh in occupied Palestine

An Arab-Israeli boy looks at the remains of the mosque burned over-
night in an arson attack by Jewish extremists in northern village of
Tuba Zangaria. (Photo/Caption: AFP/The Australian)

As Jewish terrorist attacks on mosques in occupied Palestine are assuming a phenomenal frequency.

Indeed, with the Israeli government and security establishment doing next to nothing to put an end to this wanton and unprovoked terror, a huge fire is being started in the region.

In religious wars, all sides are usually variably culpable and blamable . However, in the occupied Palestinian territories, Jewish fanatics bear nearly 100% of the blame.

Their attacks against mosques are not provoked by similar Palestinian attacks against Jewish religious places. In fact, Jewish terror groups readily admit that arson attacks against mosques are meant to embarrass the Israeli occupation army.

The attacks are perpetrated under the slogan "Price Tag" every time the Israeli army moves to dismantle a Jewish settlement outpost.

So why is it that the Palestinians and their places of worship are attacked, not the Israeli army?

Well, it takes a thoroughly sick mind to rationalize, even glamorize such attacks, but the Israeli settler camp never faces a shortage of virulence, mental depravity and mental sickness.

We are talking after all about the worst of the worst that racist, Talmudic Judaism could breed, people who view the rest of mankind as subhuman.

The practical implications of such a venomous ideology are enormous and absolutely nefarious. If non-Jews are subhuman, then their lives must be worthless, have no sanctity and expendable.

Think not I am making an exaggeration as it is difficult to exaggerate the evilness of these racist thugs who spend a lifetime demonizing and dehumanizing humanity as they celebrate their Chosen-people or Master-race status.

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