Corruption Information 1137
The politics of greed is what keeps this world wrapped in corruption. If you want to stick around for a while longer, I suggest you educate yourself and try to do something constructive to help save what little good, honesty, and trust we have left.
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http://www.roguegovernment.com/news.php?id=7793
One In Six West Virginians On Food Stamps
03-29-2008
Charleston Daily Mail
About one in every six West Virginians gets food stamps, the highest level of participation in at least 30 years.
Amid rising food and fuel costs, the assistance is becoming worth less and less.
And supplemental food programs for poor families are struggling to keep up with the added demand as donations are on the decline.
Last month, 274,487 state residents received food stamps. That's up from 246,890 just five years ago, according to data from the state Department of Health and Human Resources.
A total of 122,877 of the state's estimated 743,064 households currently receive food stamps. That's up from 105,365 households in 2003.
But while the number of people on the program has jumped sharply, the federal government has raised the average per-person monthly benefits over that time by just $12 to $85.
Meanwhile, the cost of food is expected to jump by up to 4 percent this year, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Economic Research Service.
Food costs have been increasing by at least 2.4 percent each year since 2004.
Added to that budget strain are record gasoline prices.
Nationally, the average cost of a gallon of regular gas today is $3.26, according to the AAA Daily Fuel Gauge Report. A year ago, the average cost was $2.59 a gallon.
Sarah Young, a policy specialist with the Department of Health and Human Resources, says the agency is seeing more of the state's working poor applying for food stamps in order to make ends meet.
"Even those eligible for lower amounts are coming back onto the program because they have less to spend on food," Young said. "These are historically higher rates. I think even nationwide, we're at our highest rates."
Nationally, more than 26 million Americans were on the food stamp program last year, according to the federal agriculture department.
The food stamp benefit is based on income and the number of people in a household, Young said. Monthly benefits range from a minimum of $10 to $1,219 for a 10-person household with little to no income.
Go to 13037
http://www.roguegovernment.com/news.php?id=7768
Areas Of Baghdad Fall To Militias
03-28-2008
Times Online
Iraq’s Prime Minister was staring into the abyss today after his operation to crush militia strongholds in Basra stalled, members of his own security forces defected and district after district of his own capital fell to Shia militia gunmen.
With the threat of a civil war looming in the south, Nouri al-Maliki’s police chief in Basra narrowly escaped assassination in the crucial port city, while in Baghdad, the spokesman for the Iraqi side of the US military surge was kidnapped by gunmen and his house burnt to the ground.
Saboteurs also blew up one of Iraq's two main oil pipelines from Basra, cutting at least a third of the exports from the city which provides 80 per cent of government revenue, a clear sign that the militias — who siphon significant sums off the oil smuggling trade — would not stop at mere insurrection.
Go to 13036
http://www.roguegovernment.com/news.php?id=7786
Russian Intel Sees U.S. Build Up Near Iran
03-29-2008
RIA Novosti
Russian military intelligence services are reporting a flurry of activity by U.S. Armed Forces near Iran’s borders, a high-ranking security source said Tuesday.
“The latest military intelligence data point to heightened U.S. military preparations for both an air and ground operation against Iran,” the official said, adding that the Pentagon has probably not yet made a final decision as to when an attack will be launched.
He said the Pentagon is looking for a way to deliver a strike against Iran “that would enable the Americans to bring the country to its knees at minimal cost.”
He also said the U.S. Naval presence in the Persian Gulf has for the first time in the past four years reached the level that existed shortly before the invasion of Iraq in March 2003.
Col.-Gen. Leonid Ivashov, vice president of the Academy of Geopolitical Sciences, said last week that the Pentagon is planning to deliver a massive air strike on Iran’s military infrastructure in the near future.
A new U.S. carrier battle group has been dispatched to the Gulf.
The USS John C. Stennis, with a crew of 3,200 and around 80 fixed-wing aircraft, including F/A-18 Hornet and Superhornet fighter-bombers, eight support ships and four nuclear submarines are heading for the Gulf, where a similar group led by the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower has been deployed since December 2006.
The U.S. is also sending Patriot anti-missile systems to the region.
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http://www.roguegovernment.com/news.php?id=7787
High Rice Cost Creating Fears Of Asia Unrest
03-29-2008
NY Times
HANOI — Rising prices and a growing fear of scarcity have prompted some of the world’s largest rice producers to announce drastic limits on the amount of rice they export.
The price of rice, a staple in the diets of nearly half the world’s population, has almost doubled on international markets in the last three months. That has pinched the budgets of millions of poor Asians and raised fears of civil unrest.
Shortages and high prices for all kinds of food have caused tensions and even violence around the world in recent months. Since January, thousands of troops have been deployed in Pakistan to guard trucks carrying wheat and flour. Protests have erupted in Indonesia over soybean shortages, and China has put price controls on cooking oil, grain, meat, milk and eggs.
Food riots have erupted in recent months in Guinea, Mauritania, Mexico, Morocco, Senegal, Uzbekistan and Yemen. But the moves by rice-exporting nations over the last two days — meant to ensure scarce supplies will meet domestic needs — drove prices on the world market even higher this week.
This has fed the insecurity of rice-importing nations, already increasingly desperate to secure supplies. On Tuesday, President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo of the Philippines, afraid of increasing rice scarcity, ordered government investigators to track down hoarders.
The increase in rice prices internationally promised to put more pressure on prices in the United States, which imports more than 30 percent of the rice Americans consume, according to the United States Rice Producers Association. The price that consumers pay for rice has already increased more than 8 percent over the last year.
But the United States is fortunate in also exporting rice; poor countries ranging from Sengal in West Africa to the Solomon Islands in the South Pacific are heavily dependent on imports and now face higher bills.
Vietnam’s government announced here on Friday that it would cut rice exports by nearly a quarter this year. The government hoped that keeping more rice inside the country would hold down prices.
The same day, India effectively banned the export of all but the most expensive grades of rice. Egypt announced on Thursday that it would impose a six-month ban on rice exports, starting April 1, and on Wednesday, Cambodia banned all rice exports except by government agencies.
Governments across Asia and in many rice-consuming countries in Africa have long worried that a steep increase in prices could set off an angry reaction among low-income city dwellers.
“There is definitely the potential for unrest, particularly as the people most affected are the urban poor and they’re concentrated, so it’s easier for them to organize than it would be for farmers, for example, to organize to protest lower prices,” said Nicholas W. Minot, a senior research fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute in Washington.
Several factors are contributing to the steep rice in prices. Rising affluence in India and China has increased demand. At the same time, drought and other bad weather have reduced output in Australia and elsewhere. Many rice farmers are turning to more lucrative cash crops, reducing the amount of land devoted to the grain. And urbanization and industrialization have cut into the land devoted to rice cultivation.
In Vietnam, an obscure plant virus has caused annual output to start leveling off; it had increased significantly each year until the last three years.
Until the last few years, the potential for rapid price swings was damped by the tendency of many governments to hold very large rice stockpiles to ensure food security, said Sushil Pandey, an agricultural economist at the International Rice Research Institute in Manila.
But those stockpiles were costly to maintain. So governments have been drawing them down as world rice consumption has outstripped production for most of the last decade.
The relatively small quantities traded across borders, combined with small stockpiles, now mean that prices can move quickly in response to supply disruptions.
At the same time, prices set in international rice trading now have an increasingly important effect on prices within countries. This has been particularly true in an age of Internet and mobile phone communications when even farmers in remote areas can learn about distant prices and decide whether their own buyers are giving them a fair price.
Even before governments imposed restrictions this week, trading companies in exporting nations had become increasingly reluctant to sign contracts for future delivery as they wait to see how high prices will go.
“The market has pretty much ground to a halt for the past few weeks,” said Ben Savage, the managing director for rice at Jackson Son & Company, a commodities trading firm in London. Soaring prices are already causing hardship across the developing world.
In a crumbling covered market in an old neighborhood of Hanoi, Cao Minh Huong, a ceramics saleswoman, said that rising food prices, especially for rice, were forcing her to change her diet. “I’m spending the same amount on food but I’m getting less,” she said.
Together with rising prices for other foods, like wheat, soybeans, pork and cooking oil, higher rice prices are also contributing to inflation in many developing countries. Retail rice prices have already jumped by as much as 60 percent in recent months in Vietnam, trailing increases in wholesale prices but leading a broader acceleration in inflation. Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung of Vietnam announced Wednesday that the government’s top priority now was fighting inflation. Overall consumer prices are more than 19 percent higher this month than last March. . The inflation rate has nearly tripled in the last year.
Rice is unusual among major agricultural commodities in that most of the major rice-consuming countries are self-sufficient or nearly so. Only 7 percent of the world’s rice production is traded across international borders each year, according to figures from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome.
Nguyen Van Bo, the president of the Vietnam Academy of Agricultural Sciences, which oversees government farm research institutes, said in an interview that the government expected rice production to rise further by 2010 despite the rapid expansion of residential housing and factories into what had been prime rice-growing land. But the government needs to train farmers to alternate corn with rice to defeat rice pests like the virus, he said.
Vietnam, Egypt and India all limited rice exports last year, but the limits were much less drastic and were imposed much later in the year, after much more rice had been shipped.
The government of Thailand, the world’s largest rice exporter followed by Vietnam, has not yet limited exports. But a national debate has started in Thailand over whether to do so ,and Thai exporters have already practically stopped signing delivery contracts, Mr. Savage said.
Even before Friday’s export restrictions by Vietnam and India, bids for commonly traded grades of Thai medium-grain rice had doubled this year to $735 a metric ton. Vietnamese medium-grain rice had almost doubled to more than $700 a ton, with most of the increase coming in the last four weeks. Bids jumped as much as $50 a ton on Friday.
Governments have been reluctant to tell farmers to sell their rice at low fixed prices, for fear that farmers would hoard rice or not bother to grow as much as they could. On Friday, China, which is virtually self-sufficient in rice, raised the minimum prices for rice and wheat that it guarantees to farmers.
Go to 13034
http://www.thetruthseeker.co.uk/article.asp?ID=8307
Americans in Green Zone under siege
Dieter Bednarz – Der Spiegel via Salon.com March 28, 2008
Sarah is not the type of woman who loses her cool very easily. As an employee of the U.S. State Department, she has seen too much for that. Her superiors in Washington have repeatedly sent her to the world's hot spots. Now Sarah works as a "special agent" in the personal protection unit of the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, where she is responsible for the security of high-ranking guests.
Since Tuesday, it has been Sarah's job to look after German politician Elke Hoff. And, since Wednesday afternoon, Sarah has occasionally had to address her charge – "Sorry about that, ma'am!" – more forcefully than usual: "Hurry up! We have to duck and cover."
Sarah already has helmets and bulletproof vests at the ready when she and her security team urge a small delegation of members of the German parliament, the Bundestag, to board an armored personnel carrier. The sound of incoming rockets and grenades isn't long in coming.
The security team doesn't tell the German delegation where exactly the missiles have landed. Having to admit that attacks are taking place in the Green Zone, the best-secured district in the Iraqi capital, is already embarrassing enough. And because the attacks continue into the afternoon, long-scheduled meetings between parliamentarian Hoff, a member of the liberal Free Democratic Party, and high-ranking Iraqi politicians, including former Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari, have to be canceled "for security reasons."
The attacks on the "I.Z.," or "International Zone," as the U.S. military has dubbed the former Karkh neighborhood, represent one of the biggest challenges to the American forces in Iraq to date. The enclave covers fewer than seven square kilometers (2.7 square miles) and houses the headquarters of the U.S. armed forces and their allies. Until the beginning of the week, the enclave was considered the safest place in a country plagued by violence and terror.
Wreathed in smoke from rocket and mortar strikes, the Green Zone Friday March 28, 2008.
Former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein chose the area, which is strategically located along a bend in the Tigris River, as the site for his palaces. The hangers-on of the regime lived there, and only the despot's most loyal henchmen were allowed in.
The country is still ruled from this neighborhood today, and access hasn't become much easier. Tens of thousands of soldiers and diplomats live and work behind roof-high concrete walls. An estimated 4,000 people, most of them soldiers and security personnel, live on the grounds of the U.S. Embassy in a former Saddam palace.
The huge area is like a "Little America" in the midst of this hostile country. Even though the number of attacks has declined by about half compared with what it was like during the height of insurgent activity three years ago, Western news agencies still counted 455 attacks throughout Iraq last week. Foreigners – and especially Americans – can only feel safe in their I.Z.
The unrest in the Green Zone continued Thursday. Reuters reported that a giant column of black smoke could be seen near the U.S. Embassy after what was believed to be a mortar strike on a former palace of Saddam that is being used as a headquarters for American civilian and military personnel. However, an embassy spokeswoman said there had been no serious injuries or deaths as a result of the attack. Four people, including two U.S. civilians, were wounded by mortar attacks in the Green Zone Wednesday.
The special zone also has room for some privileged Iraqis. The Green Zone is home to Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, who has his office there, and to the most important ministries. The Iraqi parliament has taken up temporary quarters here, in a former conference center Saddam had built in the early 1980s. It is also home to influential Iraqis such as Sunni member of parliament Mithal al-Alusi. Al-Alusi is one of the most popular politicians in postwar Iraq and hence one of the people the Hoff delegation had arranged to meet.
Al-Alusi has gotten used to the fact that his life is in danger. It used to be threatened by Saddam and his intelligence services, and today it is threatened by insurgents such as the militia headed by Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. Al-Alusi also blames the Badr Brigades for the rocket and mortar attacks of the past few days. The attacks, says an outraged al-Alusi, are a "targeted provocation."
Al-Alusi is also one of the few to hazard an explanation: America's two highest-ranking representatives in Iraq – Gen. David Petraeus, the top commander in Iraq, and ambassador Ryan Crocker – are scheduled to deliver their reports on the situation in Iraq in one week. According to al-Alusi, the security analyses destined for Washington will not conclude that "the Americans have the situation under control," at least not if "Sadr and his backers in Iran have their way."
No one doubts that the fanatical cleric hates the Americans more than anyone and wants to drive them out of the country as quickly as possible. It is also considered likely that Sadr is in league with his fellow Shiites in Tehran. According to Western security experts, the most recent proof of al-Sadr's Tehran connection is the fact that the projectiles landing in and around the Green Zone are Iranian made.
The attacks on the high-security zone are also intended to strike the Iraqi government of Prime Minister al-Maliki, a Shiite. Some political observers in Baghdad are even convinced that the mortars and rockets are aimed more at the prime minister than at the Americans. The secular al-Maliki declared war on religious fanatic al-Sadr a few days ago.
Since last weekend, government troops have started energetically pursuing "terrorists, bandits and a few foreign elements," as government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh cautiously puts it. Al-Dabbagh, an experienced diplomat, falls short of saying that the true target of the government's attack is al-Sadr's militia, which has apparently developed its bastion in the south and has received reinforcements in the form of Iranian fighters.
Nevertheless, al-Dabbagh is quick to emphasize the successes of the Iraqi government troops. In the capital there are increasing reports that the government's enemies are retreating across the border into another country. No one mentions that the country in question is Iran, probably out of consideration for Baghdad's new partnership with the regime in Tehran.
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's visit to Baghdad early this month was still a "historic event" for the Iraqi government, especially in light of the fact that former dictator Saddam plunged both countries into an eight-year war that claimed millions of lives. Now, though, Baghdad and Tehran are planning economic cooperation programs worth billions of dollars -- much to the chagrin of George W. Bush.
Washington also appears to be doomed to impotence when it comes to the attacks on its only true stronghold in Iraq. The attacks are said to come from the city's eastern part, which is controlled by al-Sadr and his militia. The insurgents apparently launch their rockets and mortars from movable ramps and then immediately disappear into the densely populated neighborhoods.
Officials on the grounds of the U.S. Embassy say that the insurgents are trying to draw the Americans into a trap that would force them to launch "aerial attacks with many dead and wounded." Besides, the Americans can hardly afford grueling house-to-house combat in the al-Sadr-controlled neighborhood, especially after the U.S. armed forces reported this week their 4,000th death in Iraq.
As a result, the Americans have limited themselves to ducking, at least for the time being, even in front of political visitors like German parliamentarian Hoff, to whom it had hoped to present a picture of progress in Iraq.
On Tuesday evening, the "esteemed guest" from Berlin, whose safety the U.S. Embassy had assumed responsibility for, was moved to new quarters – from the Al-Rashid Hotel on the edge of the security zone, where government guests stayed in the days of Saddam, to the U.S. Embassy. The small German delegation will be flown out Thursday – ahead of schedule.
Go to 13033
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003781895
NAA Reveals Biggest Ad Revenue Plunge in More Than 50 Years
By Jennifer Saba
Published: March 28, 2008 12:55 PM ET
NEW YORK The newspaper industry has experienced the worst drop in advertising revenue in more than 50 years.
According to new data released by the Newspaper Association of America, total print advertising revenue in 2007 plunged 9.4% to $42 billion compared to 2006 -- the most severe percent decline since the association started measuring advertising expenditures in 1950.
The drop-off points to an economic slowdown on top of the secular challenges faced by the industry. The second worst decline in advertising revenue occurred in 2001 when it fell 9.0%.
Total advertising revenue in 2007 -- including online revenue -- decreased 7.9% to $45.3 billion compared to the prior year.
There are signs that online revenue is beginning to slow as well. Internet ad revenue in 2007 grew 18.8% to $3.2 billion compared to 2006. In 2006, online ad revenue had soared 31.4% to $2.6 billion. In 2005, it jumped 31.4% to $2 billion.
As newspaper Web sites generate more advertising revenue, the growth rate naturally slows.
The NAA reported that online revenue now represents 7.5% of total newspaper ad revenue in 2007 compared to 5.7% in 2006.
That growth could not stave off the losses in the print however. National print advertising revenue dropped 6.7% to $7 billion last year. Retail slipped 5% to $21 billion. Classified plunged 16.5% to $14.1 billion.
"Even with the near-term challenges posed to print media by a more fragmented information environment and the economic headwinds facing all advertising media, newspapers publishers are continuing to drive strong revenue growth from their increasingly robust Web platforms," John Sturm, president and CEO of the NAA, said in a statement.
Go to 13032
http://www.rense.com/general81/chenn.htm
Is Cheney betting On
Economic Collapse?
By Mike Whitney
3-27-8
Wouldn't you like to know where Dick Cheney puts his money? Then you'd know whether his "deficits don't matter" claim is just baloney or not.
Well, as it turns out, Kiplinger Magazine ran an article based on Cheney's financial disclosure statement and, sure enough, found out that the VP is lying to the American people for the umpteenth time. Deficits do matter and Cheney has invested his money accordingly.
The article is called "Cheney's betting on bad news" and provides an account of where Cheney has socked away more than $25 million. While the figures may be estimates, the investments are not. According to Tom Blackburn of the Palm Beach Post, Cheney has invested heavily in "a fund that specializes in short-term municipal bonds, a tax-exempt money market fund and an inflation protected securities fund. The first two hold up if interest rates rise with inflation. The third is protected against inflation."
Cheney has dumped another (estimated) $10 to $25 million in a European bond fund which tells us that he is counting on a steadily weakening dollar. So, while working class Americans are loosing ground to inflation and rising energy costs, Darth Cheney will be enhancing his wealth in "Old Europe". As Blackburn sagely notes, "Not all 'bad news' is bad for everybody."
This should put to rest once and for all the foolish notion that the "Bush Economic Plan" is anything more than a scam aimed at looting the public till. The whole deal is intended to shift the nation's wealth from one class to another. It's also clear that Bush-Cheney couldn't have carried this off without the tacit approval of the thieves at the Federal Reserve who engineered the low-interest rate boondoggle to put the American people to sleep while they picked their pockets.
Reasonable people can dispute that Bush is "intentionally" skewering the dollar with his lavish tax cuts, but how does that explain Cheney's portfolio?
It doesn't. And, one thing we can say with metaphysical certainty is that the miserly Cheney would never plunk his money into an investment that wasn't a sure thing. If Cheney is counting on the dollar tanking and interest rates going up, then, by Gawd, that's what'll happen.
The Bush-Cheney team has racked up another $3 trillion in debt in just 6 years. The US national debt now stands at $8.4 trillion dollars while the trade deficit has ballooned to $800 billion nearly 7% of GDP.
This is lunacy. No country, however powerful, can maintain these staggering numbers. The country is in hock up to its neck and has to borrow $2.5 billion per day just to stay above water. Presently, the Fed is expanding the money supply and buying back its own treasuries to hide the hemorrhaging from the public. Its utter madness.
Last month the trade deficit climbed to $70 billion. More importantly, foreign central banks only purchased a meager $47 billion in treasuries to shore up our ravenous appetite for cheap junk from China.
Do the math! They're not investing in America anymore. They are decreasing their stockpiles of dollars. We're sinking fast and Cheney and his pals are manning the lifeboats while the public is diverted with gay marriage amendments and "American Celebrity".
The American manufacturing sector has been hollowed out by cutthroat corporations who've abandoned their country to make a fast-buck in China or Mexico. The $3 trillion housing (equity) bubble is quickly loosing air while the anemic dollar continues to sag. All the signs indicate that the economy is slowing at the same time that energy prices continue to rise.
This is the onset of stagflation; the dreaded combo of a slowing economy and inflation.
Did Americans really think they'd be spared the same type of economic colonization that has been applied throughout the developing world under the rubric of "neoliberalism"?
Well, think again. The American economy is barrel-rolling towards earth and there are only enough parachutes for Cheney and the gang.
The country has lost 3 million jobs from outsourcing since Bush took office; more than 200,000 of those are the high-paying, high-tech jobs that are the life's-blood of every economy.
Consider this from the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) June edition of Foreign Affairs, the Bible of globalists and plutocrats:
"Between 2000 and 2003 alone, foreign firms built 60,000manufacturing plants in China. European chemical companies, Japanese carmakers, and US industrial conglomerates are all building factories in China to supply export markets around the world. Similarly, banks, insurance companies, professional-service firms, and IT companies are building R&D and service centers in India to support employees, customers, and production worldwide." ("The Globally integrated Enterprise" Samuel Palmisano, Foreign Affairs page 130)
"60,000manufacturing plants" in 3 years?!?
"Banks, insurance companies, professional-service firms, and IT companies"?
No job is safe. American elites and corporate tycoons are loading the boats and heading for foreign shores. The only thing they're leaving behind is the insurmountable debt that will be shackled to our children into perpetuity and the carefully arranged levers of a modern police-surveillance state.
Welcome to Bush's 21st Century gulag; third world luxury in a Guantanamo-type setting.
Take another look at Cheney's investment strategy; it tells the whole ugly story. Interest rates are going up, the middle class is going down, and the poor dollar is headed for the dumpster. The country is not simply teetering on the brink of financial collapse; it is being thrust headfirst by the blackguards in office and their satrapies at Federal Reserve.
Go to 13031
http://www.uruknet.org/?p=m42527&hd=&size=1&l=e
IRAQ: Guns for money
Los Angeles Times
March 28, 2008
Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki's hopes of forcing Shiite militiamen to hand in their weapons has fallen flat, so he has extended a disarmament deadline and sweetened the deal by offering money in exchange for guns.
A spokesman for the government's Interior Ministry, Abdul Kareem Khalaf, acknowledged today that not a single weapon had been turned in since Maliki ordered the disarmament Wednesday and gave fighters a three-day deadline. The call came as Shiite Muslim militias battled Iraqi security forces in the aftermath of Maliki's crackdown on militiamen. The offensive was launched Tuesday in the southern city of Basra and has since spread to Shiite strongholds across Iraq.
Khalaf said Maliki had extended the deadline until April 8 and that a "financial reward" awaits militiamen who comply. There's no word on how much this reward could be. Maliki has said fighters who disarm must also sign a pledge to refrain from future militia activities and follow Iraqi law.
If it sounds familiar, that's because this is similar to the model in use by U.S. forces as they work to keep former insurgents from resuming anti-U.S. activities. That program, launched in late 2006, has been aimed mainly at Sunni Muslims who once supported the insurgency but who, for a variety of reasons, have opted out of the fight.
Now, some 80,000 of them receive about $10 per day from the United States military in exchange for manning checkpoints in their neighborhoods and bolstering security. Before earning their positions in the so-called Sons of Iraq program, they had to go through background checks and sign pledges of loyalty to the Iraqi government.
That system has its own problems, as the Times reported in a recent story that outlined the potential pitfalls of paying people not to shoot you. But getting the Sunnis to agree to the deal was not as difficult as it could be to get Shiites to accept a guns-for-money plan. As analysts such as Stephen Biddle of the Council on Foreign Relations has noted, the Sunnis are vastly outnumbered in Iraq. Unlike the one-time Sunni fighters who switched loyalties, Shiite militiamen have a far better chance of coming out on top in the power struggles raging across Iraq.
"The real tough nuts are the Shiite militias," Biddle said in an interview with the Times last year, as he discussed the chances of success of President George W. Bush's plan of using additional American troops to pacify Iraq. The Sunnis, he explained, saw themselves as "potential losers" in any Iraqi conflict, so they had plenty to gain by switching sides.
"The big hurdles to overcome are persuading the people who think they're going to win a civil war to settle for less," he said.
That's the headache facing Maliki. Sadr militiamen and loyalists say they have no intention of stopping their resistance to the current offensive. Some warn it will make them more determined to fight.
"It is up to Maliki whether there will be detente," said Abu Ali, a Mahdi Army member who took part in a large march in Baghdad's Sadr City neighborhood to protest the situation. He said violence would soar if Maliki did not call off his troops. "We will be more determined. Enough humiliation!"
Maliki, meanwhile, has turned to outside help in Basra. U.S. forces killed three "criminal enemy militia" members during an air strike on Thursday night, the U.S. military said. It was not immediately clear if the Navy warplane used in the strike dropped bombs or strafed the mortar-launching position with cannon fire.
Initially, a British military spokesman, Maj. Tom Holloway, said two U.S. bombs were dropped. Holloway said the Iraqis requested air support and that the targets happened to be in the radar of American jets flying overhead. Later, he said he was mistaken and that cannon fire was used. A U.S. statement confirmed the American action but not the type of weapon fired.
Holloway said U.S. and British jets have been flying over the city 24 hours a day since Tuesday.
--Tina Susman in Baghdad
Go to 13030
http://www.uruknet.org/?p=m42528&hd=&size=1&l=e
Iraqi police in Basra shed their uniforms, kept their rifles and switched sides
James Hider, Times
March 28, 2008
Abu Iman barely flinched when the Iraqi Government ordered his unit of special police to move against al-Mahdi Army fighters in Basra.
His response, while swift, was not what British and US military trainers who have spent the past five years schooling the Iraqi security forces would have hoped for. He and 15 of his comrades took off their uniforms, kept their government-issued rifles and went over to the other side without a second thought.
Such turncoats are the thread that could unravel the British Army?s policy in southern Iraq. The military hoped that local forces would be able to combat extremists and allow the Army to withdraw gradually from the battle-scarred and untamed oil city that has fallen under the sway of Islamic fundamentalists, oil smugglers and petty tribal warlords. But if the British taught the police to shoot straight, they failed to instil a sense of unwavering loyalty to the State.
"We know the outcome of the fighting in advance because we already defeated the British in the streets of Basra and forced them to withdraw to their base," Abu Iman told The Times.
"If we go back a bit, everyone remembers the fight with the US in Najaf and the damage and defeat we inflicted on them. Do you think the Iraqi Army is better than those armies? We are right and the Government is wrong. [Nouri al] Maliki [the Iraqi Prime Minister] is driving his Government into the ground."
The reason for his apparent switch of sides was simple: the 36-year-old was already a member of the al-Mahdi Army which, like other militias, has massively infiltrated the British-trained police force in the southern oil city. He claimed that hundreds of others from the 16,000-strong force have also defected to the rebels? ranks.Abu Iman joined the new Iraqi police force after the invasion, joining the Mugawil, a special police unit infamous for brutality, kidnapping and sectarian murders.
"We already heard two weeks ago that we were going to attack the Mahdi Army, so we were ready," he said. "I decided to take off my uniform and join my brothers and friends in the Mahdi Army. All these years, we were like a scream in the face of the dictator and the occupation." He said: "I joined the police because I believed we have to protect Basra and save it with our own hands. You can see we were the first fighters to take on Sadd-am and his regime, the best example being the Shabaniya uprising."
Abu Iman said that the fighting raging in Basra yesterday was intense because the al-Mahdi Army was operating on its own turf. He was confident that the Shia militia would prevail because its cause was just.
"The Iraqi Army is already defeated from within. They come to Basra with fear in their hearts, knowing they have to fight their brothers, the sons of Iraq, because of an order from Bush and his friends in the Iraq Government. For this reason, all of the battles are going in the Mahdi Army?s favour."
Major-General Abdelaziz Moham-med Jassim, the director of operations at the Ministry of Defence, played down reports of defections in the Basra police force. "The problem of one policeman doesn?t make up for the whole of the force," he said.
In recent months Major-General Abdul Jalil Khalaf, Basra?s police chief, has tried to shake up the force and drive out militia infiltrators, who have wrought havoc in the past, often turning police stations into torture cells in which factions settled vendettas and power struggles with murder and abuse. But he only narrowly escaped an assassination attempt yesterday when a suicide car bomb attack in Basra killed three of his policemen. A local tribal leader said the police directorate building was later gutted by fire.
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http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601101&sid=aoJl5t7W7hTI&refer=japan
Dollar Posts Biggest Weekly Decline Against Euro Since 2006
By Bo Nielsen
March 28 (Bloomberg) -- The dollar posted the biggest weekly drop against the euro in more than two years as traders increased bets the Federal Reserve will cut borrowing costs further while the European Central Bank holds rates steady.
The currency fell against most of its major counterparts this week as reports showed U.S. manufacturing and housing weakened while German and French business confidence rose. The pound declined to a record versus the euro as March consumer confidence slumped to a 15-year low.
``Most other central banks focus on inflation pressures building in their economies, while the Fed, although concerned about inflation, clearly is more concerned about the downside risk to the economy,'' said Robert Sinche, head of global currency strategy in New York at Bank of America Corp., in an interview with Bloomberg Radio. ``That leaves the Fed out of step and the dollar out of sorts.''
The dollar traded at $1.5798 per euro at 4:32 p.m. in New York, compared with $1.5779 yesterday. It traded at 99.25 yen, compared with 99.65 yesterday. Japan's currency traded at 156.80 per euro, compared with 157.21.
The U.S. currency dropped 2.4 percent against the euro this week, the biggest decline since January 2006. The dollar traded within 2 cents of $1.5903 per euro, the all-time low reached on March 17.
The Icelandic krona was the biggest loser against the dollar today among the 177 currencies monitored by Bloomberg News on concern financial firms will suffer from the global credit freeze. The risk of Iceland's biggest banks defaulting rose above 49 percent, credit-default swaps show.
Turkish Lira
The Turkish lira dropped to the lowest level in almost seven months against the dollar before a March 31 hearing on a suit brought by the chief prosecutor to shut down the ruling party for undermining secularism. The lira fell as much as 2.4 percent to 1.3059 per dollar, its lowest level since Sept. 10.
The pound dropped against most of the major currencies on the decline in consumer confidence and a separate report showing U.K. housing prices advanced in March at the slowest pace in more than a decade. Sterling fell as much as 0.8 percent to a record of 79.29 pence against the euro.
European Central Bank council member Axel Weber indicated policy makers would raise borrowing costs if inflation accelerated. While the current ECB benchmark rate of 4 percent is helping to contain inflation, the bank ``will act'' if its price-stability goal is threatened, Weber said in a speech in Luxembourg today.
German Confidence
German business confidence rose in March as companies increased efficiency and reduced labor costs, helping them remain competitive even after the euro gained 17 percent against the dollar in the past year. French business confidence got a boost from consumer spending and export orders.
Orders for U.S. durable goods unexpectedly fell in February, led by a slump in demand for machinery. Sales of new homes dropped last month to a 13-year low.
``Numbers from the U.S. show the economy is worse than most people expected, while numbers from Europe have been better than expected,'' said Tom Fitzpatrick, global head of currency strategy in New York at Citigroup Global Markets Inc., the world's third-biggest currency trader. ``Overlay the comments from the ECB on inflation and you have a weak dollar.''
The euro's nine-day stochastic oscillator, a measure of deviations from a trend, was 81.2, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. A level above 80 suggests a currency has risen too fast to be sustained.
ECB Rates
Europe's currency has gained 8.4 percent versus the dollar this quarter as traders reduced bets the ECB will lower rates this year. The yield on the Euribor interest-rate futures contract expiring in December increased to 4.04 percent, compared with 3.91 percent a week earlier.
Futures on the Chicago Board of Trade show traders increased bets the Fed will lower its 2.25 percent target lending rate by a half-percentage point on April 30. The futures showed a 46 percent chance of a cut to 1.75 percent, compared with 42 percent odds yesterday. The remaining bets were for a reduction of a quarter-percentage point.
The Dollar Index traded on ICE Futures in New York, which tracks the currency against those of six trading partners, was at 71.77, down from 72.71 a week ago. It reached a record low of 70.698 on March 17.
To contact the reporter on this story: Bo Nielsen in New York at bnielsen4@bloomberg.net
Last Updated: March 28, 2008
Go to 13028
http://www.opednews.com/articles/genera_sherwood_080327_bush_is__22biggest_thu.htm
March 27, 2008 at 19:36:25
Bush Is "Biggest Thug" Ever To Occupy White House, Historian Parenti Says
by Sherwood Ross Page 1 of 2 page(s)
President George W. Bush is “the biggest thug” ever to occupy the White House, writes historian Michael Parenti, adding that most post-World War II U.S. presidents have also acted like “thugs.”
His “thug” list includes Presidents John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and Bill Clinton. Conspicuously absent from his list are Republican Dwight Eisenhower and Democrat Jimmy Carter.
What the thugs have in common, Parenti says, is their dedication “to a U.S. global interventionist policy” and support for “gargantuan, bloated, criminally wasteful military budgets” to execute those interventions.
President Kennedy “undermined the democratic government in Guyana and supported a lot of the counter-insurgency dirty works that were going on in Central America,” Parenti writes in The Long Term View, a journal of informed opinion published by The Massachusetts School of Law at Andover.
President Johnson followed him, perpetrating “the first major escalation of Vietnam” and also invading the Dominican Republic “when it threatened to have a reformist left government that would take over and move in a democratic revolutionary course.”
After LBJ, “Nixon committed terrible crimes in IndoChina: massive carpet bombings of Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam, killing literally hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people,” Parenti recalled.
In Laos, “Nixon went and bombed the Plain of Jars and just bombed every square inch and killed ---only God knows how many---hundreds of thousands of people and destroyed that whole society.”
Parenti holds President Reagan responsible for the invasion of Grenada, “an unoffending, small country that was trying to develop a communitarian way, and overthrew its government” and had some of its leaders killed. Reagan, he said, “brought Grenada back to where it was before: a country of high unemployment. He abolished the communal farms which it was starting, and the land was converted back into golf courses for the tourists.”
Reagan also waged war “against a wonderful democratic revolution in Nicaragua, the Sandanistas, and destroyed it and bled that country,” supporting “the worst murderers and thugs” of the Contra Armies and then lying about his role in support of the war.
As for President George H.W. Bush, he “waged a war against Iraq that was totally avoidable,” pointing out, “The Iraqis were ready to negotiate a withdrawal from Kuwait” but “just wanted the slant drilling of the Ramallah oil fields to stop.” However, he adds, ”Bush used it as an excuse to bomb, to kill huge numbers of Iraqis and destroy that country’s infrastructure, and it’s because that country was self-defining, was committing the ‘sin’ of economic nationalism, and was not acting like a good obedient client state.”
Parenti further charged the senior President Bush also invaded Panama to capture its leader Noriega, and after its victory abolished “all sorts of education programs.”As for President Clinton, he “bombed Somalia and killed thousands of people there and waged a 78-day, around-the-clock, aerial war against Yugoslavia…and was also thuggish in his determination to expand and to increase the military budget.”
Parenti, author of some 20 books including “Democracy for the Few”(Wadsworth), reserves his harshest criticism for President George W. Bush:
“He has been a total thug in overthrowing a democratic government in Haiti and supporting the death squads and murderers there, and in pursuing a war of aggression in Iraq,” Parenti writes.“
He (Bush) unilaterally has announced that the U.S. will be held to none of the international treaties that it has signed, that no strictures of international law will inhibit foreign policy, and that the U.S. reserves the right to act as it will on its own accord, according to its own interests, and the limitations of its own power,” Parenti points out.“
The U.S. will,” he goes on to say, “of itself, decide unilaterally what countries it will attack, when, and for what reasons,” a policy he adds that has “caused such an alarm throughout the world that people have demonstrated massively…”
Parenti said the Iraqi war has given President Bush “the opportunity to clamp down on dissent at home, to intimidate, and to accumulate more power.”
Go to 13027
http://www.rense.com/general46/45.htm
Department of Agriculture The Overthrow Of The
American Republic - Part 45
Saddam, Prisoner Of Carlyle Group
By Sherman H. Skolnick
12-16-3
As usual, the Liars and Whores of the Press promote the Big Lie as to the secret team that snatched Saddam Hussein.
Some claim the unit was not fully informed, other than they had a high priority target. And there are contentions that the unit, part of the American CIA, came within a few seconds of misguidedly hurling a grenade down into the "spider hole" in which Saddam was kept as a prisoner. Left unsaid by the oil-soaked, spy-riddled monopoly press is that Saddam was being kept as a prisoner buried in a grave-like hole, breathing air through a tube to the surface, rather than the media fairy tal that he was simply hiding.
WHY?
The reasons for having kept Saddam a prisoner under such circumstrances, and elsewhere kept for some time in captivity, revolve around his huge worldwide properties. Through some of his relatives, and through secret trust accounts and agreements, and through secret bank accounts and other financial intermediaries, Saddam Hussein has been a major stockholder/bond holder, through nominees, front persons, and other ways to conceal ownership, of and in the following, among his other worldwide properties:
===as owner of Daimler-Chrysler, maker of Mercedes Benz car and trucks and through cars and products of Chrysler. Supposedly, if Saddam was not held prisoner as he was for some time prior to be removed from the hole near a farm house, on the outskirts of his home-town of Tikrit, Saddam could come to a meeting of Daimler's Board of Directors and demand to sit down as a duly authorized member of the Board, Saddam being a major owner of the firm.
===Hachette, the foreign firm,owning, among other things, magazines in the U.S. and elsewhere. In the U.S., Saddam's firm owned George Magazine, now defunct, the editor of which was John F. Kennedy, Jr. In 1999, as the son of assassinated President John . Kennedy, Junior was fighting around with magazine owner Hachette which was planning to cease publication of George magazine on or about December, 1999. Junior claimed this would violate his contract and agreement with Hachette.
John F. Kennedy, Jr., was secretly intending to use the magazine to publicize at least two otherwise censored stories. (A) As to who-all was complicit in the murder of his father, including the Bush Crime Family, particularly Daddy Bush, the Texas oil tycoons tied to Daddy Bush and then Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson, as well as some owners of the Federal Reserve key unit, the Federal Reserve District Bank of New York.
Just prior to being assassinated, President Kennedy issued an Executive Order, under a little-known provision, authorizing him to issue hundreds of millions of dollars of genuine U.S. paper money, principally two-dollar bills, in opposition to the Federal Reserve private paper money masquerading as "the U.S. Dollar".[More details in Part 42 of this website series, sub-titled "The Public Execution of John F. Kennedy". And, as archived through MAIN PAGE, left-hand side of same CLICK on COLUMNISTS Sherman Skolnick at
And further, (B) For JFK, Jr., planning to use George Magazine to publicize, as he knew, the treasonous arrangements of Daddy Bush with Saddam Hussein. Junior was threatening, to keep Hachette from suspending publication of George Magazine, to publicize Daddy Bush's private business partner, Saddam, as a major owner of Hachette. Also, to expose the long-time trickery and game-playing by Saddam by, for, and with the American CIA and Daddy Bush and his various business pals including Carlyle Group.
The monopoly press, belatedly ran a story of Saddam's more than 40 year role with the American CIA. United Press International, UPI. AFTER the U.S. as a pre-emptive strike, not by a Declaration of War, invaded Iraq, ran a story of the secret role of Saddam with the American CIA. The UPI story, April 10, 2003, had an opening statement in a detailed article "U.S. forces in Baghdad might now be searching high and low for Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, but in the past Saddam was seen by U.S. intelligence services as a bulwark of anti-communism and they used him as their instrument for more than 40 years, according to former U.S. intelligence diplomats and intelligence officials." UPI goes on to point out that Saddam, at a very young age, was made by CIA, a part of an assassination team in 1959, trying to murder the Iraqi Monarch running the country. Saddam, apparently incompetent to do so, failed.
Also, visit our website story "The Secrets of Timothy McVeigh", where we point out the secret private business partnership in the billions of dollars between Daddy Bush and Saddam Hussein, as shown by suppressed records of a Chicago unit of an Italian bank owned in part by the Vatican. It became the subject of a Chicago Federal Court lawsuit where we were the only journalists attending a key hearing in the
litigation and in the back of the courtroom we interviewed participants.
As to the murder of JFK, Jr., by a sabotaged airplane, visit our website series, "What Happened to America's Golden Boy". The series has the substance of a secret FBI report of what happened. Also, in the series, the aborted attempt, one week apart in July, 1999, to first assassinate Vice President Albert Gore, Jr., intending to be a candidate for President, and then succeeding in murdering John F. Kennedy, Jr., who was himself secretly planning to be a candidate for President in the year 2000.
===ownership by Saddam of Fairchild Missiles, of italy.
===ownersip by Saddam of Matra, the Paris-based firm operating, by satellite, among other things, the "People Mover" System at O'Hare International Airport, Chicago,a light railway transporting passengers and baggage between the airport terminals and the airplanes. Hey, with Saddam owning this system, what is all this talk about "terrorists" at airports?
So, Saddam Hussein was being kept as a prisoner in a grave-like hole, called by a top U.S. Military Officer as a "spider hole", where Saddam himself could NOT get out. Saddam Hussein was being kept as a prisoner by surrogates, including Saddam's relatives as CIA contract employees, for CARLYLE GROUP.
Carlyle is run by by a group of top level stooges for the American/British aristocracy, including a former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, a former top official of the American CIA, Daddy Bush, and others jointly with Saudi Royals. Carlyle is a sinister worldwide operation to take over war production firms, among others and reportedly by corruption, squeeze war contracts out of the Pentagon. Among other things, Carlyle reportedly owns in great part a sinister manufacturer of anthrax vaccine---Are THEY the cause in part of strange illnesses and deaths among U.S. Military? Visit Part Three of the Overthrow series, subtitled "The Anthrax Commissars".
Also, there have been many stories elsewhere about Carlyle. Visit search engine
By holding Saddam Hussein as a prisoner for many months before he was removed from the grave-like hole he was kept in(somewhat similar to a Viet Cong "tiger cage" for humans), and in other places where he was kept captive, Carlyle Group was determined to force Saddam somehow to divulge his portion of at least a two-part series of codes into Saddam's vast ownership of worldwide properties.
The other half of the secret codes has been kept by Saddam's half-brother who resided in Switzerland. That relative, according to European sources, made public statements in the 1990s, that were Saddam to be harmed or assassinated by the American CIA, that the relative would release secret records of the Bush Crime Family's treason, requiring that they be subject to criminal prosecution, as shown by their worldwide 25 secret accounts.
Late in the 1990s, that relative's great bunch of documents fell into our possession. We began posting them early in 2000, ON-LINE as attached to our website series "Greenspan Aids and Bribes Bush".The records are in two parts. First, there are the hand-written notes of the head of the Internal Affairs Division of the U.S. Treasury, analyzing with codes the Bush Crime Family's secret 25 worldwide accounts. Then there are the secret Federal Reserve wire transfer records, under the secret code of Alan Greenspan, Fed Commissar, showing the worldwide accounts of the Bush Crime Family.
One document shows the Bush Crime Family with their joint account with Queen Elizabeth II, of ONE HUNDRED BILLION DOLLARS, in HER private bank, Coutts Bank London. Part of that sum belongs to Saddam Hussein. There are related documents in our website series. Also, the Hundred Billion Dollar document is archived through
Thus, the secret codes of the vast ownership of Saddam's worldwide properties are divided in at the minimum, two parts, One, with Saddam's half-brother, the other with Saddam himself. Shortly after the U.S. without resistance captured Baghdad (the top Iraqi military were bribed by the American CIA and the Iraqis and their families taken to safety and profitable refuge in the U.S.), Saddam's half-brother mysteriously showed up in Baghdad where he was seized by the American CIA and put into captivity.
The sinister, war-mongering, worldwide octopus, Carlyle Group, has been in the process of keeping Saddam as a prisoner, in a grave-long hole and elsewhere. To facilitate surveillance of Saddam's captivity by satellite imaging, a orange and white taxicab was parked, for example, nearby to the "spider hole" at the ramshackle farm house.
Will Carlyle Group succeed in extracting, from Saddam, his part of the secret codes to unlock the details of his worldwide properties, so they can reportedly be stolen by the Bush Crime family jointly with the Carlyle Group?
Acting as a "terrorist" stooge for the Carlyle Group/Bush Crime Family/Saudi Royal Family Bankers/American CIA, has been Osama bin Laden, originally an inhabitant of Saudi. Convenient to this adjunct nest of the American/British aristocracy is the mass media and their accusation, repeatedly using the word "terrorist", of "Osama did it!" This, as an excuse to cancel the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights (as outlined in this website series).
WILL THE CARLYLE GROUP GET ALL THE SECRET CODES of Saddam's worldwide properties?
Naive and foolish folks repeatedly heckle us why we do not make these details "available" to the mass media. To state an answer bluntly if not crudely, we try to be polite in responding to assholes. Evidently, we sometimes do not succeed. Plainly said, the monopoly press has dumbed down America.
Go to 13026
http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/3574/blue_collar_bare_cupboards/ky
. The rest—the vast majority—comes from donations by the local community. It’s a model that works during flush times, but it isn’t a particularly effective way of feeding the hungry during down times, when more people are struggling to make ends meet and fewer are able to donate food to charity.
Becky Darnall, 34, volunteers at the pantry and also relies on the food boxes from it. She says that when the pantry first opened two years ago, “we had 26-to-28 families. Within the last six months, it’s gone up to 40.”
Becky’s husband is a cook at a restaurant in nearby Springfield. In 2006, he earned $24,000. Last year, $27,000. This year, with a pay raise, he hopes to earn $30,000. As for Becky, she works part time as house-help for one of her neighbors, which brings in $8 an hour.
They have three kids, are raising a nephew and are living in a 30-year-old mobile home with a leaky roof and dubious electrical wiring. They drive an old Chevy Blazer with a malfunctioning engine that they cannot afford to repair, and that reduces the vehicle’s fuel efficiency to a ludicrous—and prohibitively expensive—seven miles per gallon. Becky’s husband spends $15 per day just driving to and from work.
Until this year, the family was unable to afford co-payments on the health insurance offered through her husband’s work. As a result, the Darnalls were saddled with $1,000 in emergency room bills when Becky came down with asthmatic bronchitis last year. The bills got sent to a collection agency, and the family is now struggling to pay them off. This past November, Becky’s husband needed an MRI, which landed the family with an additional $1,200 to pay off.
“We can get by,” Becky says cautiously, “but the difference between volunteering [at the church] and not is vegetable soup with macaroni thrown in. … It’s more like a real dinner.”
Before she started coming to the pantry, she says her family jumped through hoops to qualify for food stamps, and still ended up with hardly enough food to survive. “There were a few times it was really tight. But we got by.”
At first, Becky says, they borrowed from friends. Then they started borrowing against their future income. “The payday loan thing, which is a nightmare,” she says, referring to the practice many low-income Americans have resorted to in recent years of borrowing against their paychecks in order to make it through the last days of the pay period. It’s an exploitative—and usurious—financial trap that, over the years, has contributed to the economic crippling of America’s poor.
“It took us almost a year to get out of it,” Becky acknowledges. “But without it, we’d have been S.O.L,” she says, laughing bitterly.
The Darnalls have been married 17 years, but only in the last year have they had to decide, month to month, which bills to pay and which services will get shut off.
“And my husband’s worked the whole time,” Becky says. “We didn’t sit back and live off the system.”
JELL-O, but no fruit
Across America, close to 40 million people are listed as being “food insecure,” according to the USDA. That means that even if they don’t actually go hungry, they constantly worry about how to put food on the table.
The Darnalls fit this category. So, too, does 83-year-old widow Helen Wagy, a retired laundress who worked for 35 years and now receives $912 a month in Social Security—her entire retirement income. Wagy lives in a mobile home in the town of Corvallis, Ore. She gets boxes of food from a group known as Gleaners that gathers unpicked produce from local fields and persuades supermarkets to donate produce that is damaged or has exceeded sell-by dates.
“I have rent to pay, electricity to pay, telephone to pay and the luxury of a TV to pay,” Wagy says, bundled in a fleece jacket and purple trousers, as she sits in a chilly wooden building owned by the city’s park department, in a little park off the highway. The building—not much more than a shack crammed with fridges and freezers—serves as a distribution point for Gleaners.
Her friend Roberta Coulter chips in. Without Gleaners, she explains, “I’d probably lose a lot of weight. They help me very much. Without them, I could make the JELL-O but I wouldn’t have the fruit.”
And they are the lucky ones.
Of the nearly 40 million who fear going hungry, an estimated 11 million-plus Americans occasionally miss meals, according to the USDA. They include many adults in a family who sacrifice their own portions to ensure their children are fed.
In most countries, such people would be defined as being “hungry.” Bush’s America uses a more Orwellian term.
In 2006, the USDA instructed government agencies to no longer refer to this group as being hungry. The change came about after a Committee on National Statistics of the National Academies reported it could not conclusively determine whether people who couldn’t afford to buy food actually experienced “discomfort, illness, weakness or pain that goes beyond the usual uneasy sensation.”
As a result, the 11 million Americans who cannot afford to stock their houses with food are now classfied as experiencing “very low food security.”
In the decades since the Great Depression of the 1930s, this category would have been made up largely of the long-term unemployed, the homeless, perhaps the mentally ill and other marginalized groups.
These days, however, increasingly it is the working poor—whose wages have stagnated, whose cost of living has gone up with higher gas, food and healthcare expenses, and whose time is now spent standing in line at food banks.
A 21st century depression
Over the past decade, the percentage of food bank clients in Oregon who are members of a family with at least one person employed has gone from 30 percent to 47 percent—an increase that translates into tens of thousands of Oregon families.
But this problem is not exclusive to Oregon, where the local economy has been decimated by the collapse of the timber industry, and the threat of going to bed hungry absent the aid of food charities is constant.
Throughout the United States, a startlingly raw form of poverty has entrenched itself within the bottom tier of the economy. In Appalachia, where hunger has never been far from the surface, states such as Virginia and Tennessee continue to see high levels of hunger.
In parts of Texas, especially border regions dotted with the colonias of immigrant populations, food insecurity swells.
Next page »Page 1 of 2
Sasha Abramsky is the author, most recently, of American Furies: Crime, Punishment, and Vengeance in the Age of Mass Imprisonment.
Go to 13025
http://www.thetruthseeker.co.uk/article.asp?ID=8290
Posted 26/03/2008
We are all victims of Freemasonry and Common Purpose
Second Family UK - Human Rights newsletter No 25/08
Scroll down for a readers reponse
Every person who works within TV, Newspapers and Radio are all helping the Masons. By not investigating or reporting about this criminal organisation, they are helping this evil. They are not clever enough to realise they are shooting themselves in the foot (big time). They are turning us all (themselves included) into slaves and tax generators for the corrupt establishment. So if you know someone in the media, ask them how can they sleep in their Masonic owned bed ? They have been withholding the truth for far too long, so don't buy, watch or listen to their (foaming at the mouth) fed lies any more. Isolate them until they cure the problem. The same goes for your local politician, these people are supposed to be trusted but seem to be blinded by cash and self preservation.
When you place brainwashed police in a responsible position, you effectively destroy your own protection as well. D.R. Ray.
We told you about the blue and yellow squares on the police vehicles and an ex-mason told us that the green/yellow squares on the ambulance and paramedics vehicles are Masonic as well. Green is what you get when you mix the colours of blue and yellow. Did you know that the ambulances have the emblem of "The Order Of St. John" on them ? Re-read the D.R. Ray comment above this.
We have said this many times "why can't we have a public register of Freemasons"? Any sensible person would want to know if any of their real family, their doctor, teacher, religious leaders, QC, neighbour, politician, best friend, police, supermarket staff, dentist, landlord, scientist, vet, councillor, professor, solicitor, local take-away, emergency services, judge, etc is a member of this legal gang. This register would comprehensively prove if Freemasonry is good or bad. We at SF know that all of these pseudo security issues are part of the NWO's plans. We also know that there is only one real security issue and that is these secret society nutters that control us. You should take this up with your local MP right now. Don't take no more BS. Do it now, nothing else matters.
We received this below from an anonymous American friend. It has been edited for the UK.
Are you a target of multiple stalkers? Are you being followed, harassed, or threatened? Is your phone tapped? If so... YOU may be a Targeted Individual of... The Freemasons or Common Purpose (same gang)
Think what your life would be like if you were the target of an endless illicit investigation! An investigation that would continue for years! Your phone wiretapped, your residence bugged, your mail intercepted, and yes, even your car would be bugged and tracked by satellite! Under constant surveillance, followed by teams of agents every time you leave home! Even when authorities find no criminal activity, all information gathered is used to follow and harass you at every opportunity in a perpetual Covert War!
And finally, agents extort cooperation from friends and family, threatening to jail them they refuse to participate in their scheme to trash your life! Do you really believe this could never happen in the UK?
The alarming fact is: Thousands of law-abiding citizens are being subjected to this type of abuse every day! And…Yes, It is Legal!
The very same investigative powers originally granted to authorities to facilitate the gathering of evidence in criminal cases are now being used to harass law-abiding citizens! Persons usually targeted for this kind of scrutiny are: Political activists, protesters, feminists, gays, lesbians, people with tolerant attitudes, people who are a little odd or eccentric, and anyone who questions authority, signs a petition, or sends letters to the editor of a newspaper. Actually, anyone exercising their constitutional rights is considered subversive by authorities, who can then find any excuse to open a never-ending, bogus investigation!
And who is watching the authorities? The really bad news is: Currently, there is no recourse for anyone who is the target of this kind of harassment! Court orders are signed off with very little scrutiny, resulting in flagrant violations of privacy! All too often, the real reason for the "investigation" has nothing to do with criminal activity and everything to do with the targeted individual's political activities. There is nothing in place to stop these abuses! No congressional oversight committee, no government commission where a citizen can go to file a complaint, no way to even find out who is conducting this horrendous scheme of harassment or even why it is being done. This lack of accountability has led to blatant abuse of investigative powers at all levels! What this means is: Authorities conducting these "investigations" are currently above the law! Change the EFFIN law now.
You are a Target of the criminal Masons if: You check your e-mail or snail mail to find: Your time-sensitive mail is consistently late. You continually miss organizational meetings, entertainment events, and political rallies because all of your mail, both snail mail and e-mail arrives after the event occurs. This is especially true if the piece of mail is from any organization working for political change or government accountability. E-mail appears to be "filtered", that is, someone is taking time to read it before sending it on to you. When inspecting your clothing you notice: Shirts have "L-shaped" tears with no rough handling involved. Underwear has been torn or shredded. Shoes or boots have been "sliced" with something sharp. Newly purchased clothing has disappeared and neighbours appear wearing the same apparel.
You return to your vehicle after shopping to find: The contents have been rearranged, or the door is open after you left it locked, or the radio volume is turned on high when you never listen to loud radio, or the lights are on. Someone has parked too close to you, forcing you to enter the car from the passenger side. You notice new dents in the vehicle which appear to be caused by someone striking the vehicle with a fist or blunt object.
When leaving any business establishment you notice: You are never able to back up out of a parking space without almost having a collision with another car. When walking to and from, there is always someone on collision course with you. A person casually exits the business or adjacent business and stands looking out into the parking lot as though waiting for a ride. This person is usually the trigger for the near collision you experience when backing out of your parking space. More about this later.
When driving on the motorway you notice: You are surrounded by a team of four to six vehicles, traveling in a box shaped formation, with your vehicle in the middle of the box. These vehicles are directed by a team leader in a command vehicle. Quite often you will see a long antenna on the command vehicle, but with the growing use of cell phones, this may not be the case. The purpose of the team is to keep you in the box, so that you will be in sight at all times. They may also attempt to impede your progress by driving in front of you at speeds below the legal limit. Occasionally, they will tailgate. Teams will swap places at intervals to avoid detection.
When starting a new job, you notice: The first month you get along with the employees, become part of the team, the boss seems delighted to have you on board, expresses surprise at how quickly you learn your new skills. You are continuing to excel when the boss and a few employees begin to behave strangely. Their attitude and demeanor change, they seem bent on ignoring you. When returning from break, your desk is re-arranged, your phone is broken, some of your customer notes have been removed. Within the next few weeks, altercations with employees occur for no apparent reason. Employees congregate around your desk and talk loudly, but only when you are on the phone with a customer. Your computer files are altered and become useless.
Complaints to the boss are useless. You quit.
When returning home from work, you notice: Characters resembling gang members are loitering around their parked cars in front of your house, the house across the street, or the house next door. The mirrors on your parked vehicle have been moved or vandalized. Cast letter logos designating the make and model of the vehicle have been broken off or removed. The contents of your home are out of place. Paperwork is out of place or missing. The lock on the door becomes sticky or hard to operate.
When tending your yard you notice: Trees or shrubs have been pruned (mutilated) without your permission. This is often done by city workers with the excuse of "keeping the tree limbs away from the power lines." Further inspection often reveals other trees in the neighborhood were also close to the power lines and were NOT pruned. Sometimes the pruning is done by the guy mowing the lawn with the excuse, "I don't know why my guy pruned your tree, it was a mis-communication. Sorry, I won't charge you anything for mowing your grass today." Close inspection will usually uncover the real reason for the mutilation. The limb/tree/shrub was blocking the line of sight from the perp observation point to your front door, garage door, or other pathway you frequently access. The perps also have been known to pour weed killer on a lawn or plant poison ivy in the yard.
When contracting for repairs: The repair persons show up late or not at all, making it necessary to reschedule on another day or find another person to do the job. Suddenly the charges are escalated 30-50% more than the original quote. The repair people make unnecessary noise and do mischief such as turning water in the yard on or off, pulling up the ground wire on the tv cable, and other things that are not related to the job being done or are clearly not in the vicinity of the work site. The job done is sloppy, occasionally making it necessary to "touch up" or even redo some of the work.
When sitting outdoors at your house or a friends house you notice: The neighbor next door, or across the street, or in the house behind you decides to run the lawn mower, leaf blower or chain saw. When you walk into the house for more tea, the activity may stop, but as soon as you step out the door, the activity will start again. Cars with questionable looking characters suddenly appear to parade slowly by, stereos booming loud enough to vibrate your nose hairs. Another neighbour may decide to burn the trash, but only if the wind is wafting the smoke in your direction. These activities occur with astounding predictability.
At other times you notice: Abrupt and unnecessary rudeness coming from strangers, friends, or employees of business establishments. You are never alone on a country road or anywhere low traffic is the norm. And you are "swarmed" in retail establishments: You stop at any kind of business not currently occupied by anyone other than employees and suddenly, within 5 minutes, at least 6 cars appear and the establishment is "swarming" or "mobbing" with perps eagerly looking for an opportunity to invade your space. Spack invasion happens every time you use a public rest room, go shopping, or use a public phone. At other times you notice bad food or bad service in a good restaurant. When venturing to an establishment for the first time, you are
treated with courtesy, on subsequent visits, employees look at you fearfully and refuse to talk to you as though someone has told lies about you.
When attempting to sleep you notice: The phone rings at odd hours of the night, you answer, they hang up. You are awakened in the wee hours of the morning by a loud banging on the door or ringing of the door bell. You answer, only to find no one is there. Creaks and pops occur in the house at odd hours to wake you up. Inspection of the premises in the daylight you find golf balls, tennis balls, and baseballs lying in the yard. You wake up at exactly the same time to the minute, every night, as though someone flipped a switch.
If you experience the above on a daily basis, you are probably a target of the Freemasons or Common Purpose.
In a nutshell: It's just Psychological Terrorism! Sometimes a bogus investigation is being done which isolates the Targeted Individual from friends and family, who are told by "investigators" to initiate no contact with the Targeted Individual unless told to do so by the so-called investigators. A charge of "giving aid and comfort to a criminal" will be lodged against those who do not comply! The constant crowding of the Targeted Individual's space through non-random foot traffic and non-random vehicular traffic will eventually take a toll on some individuals. Add to that terroristic break-ins of home and car so that the Targeted Individual never feels safe! Add to that the continual noise campaign so the Target almost never sleeps! Stress, isolation, sleep deprivation, these things are done to the individual every day, creating constant, ongoing stress. The goal being to cause mental and/or physical breakdown of the Targeted Individual or death by suicide, disease, or accident. The so-called investigators are never brought to justice, for they have truly committed the perfect murder!
Footnote, SF can't find one victim worldwide that knows why they have been chosen for this evil treatment by the Freekmasons.
Poverty, starvation, war, etc. Haven't you worked it out yet ? there will always be, until you do your bit to stop them now. You should ask your religion or faith if Freemasonry is involved. If it is then question why. Write to management and make sure you get a reply. Or you can phone them, definitely record the call. If you do nothing, then the Masons win and continue to be..... UNDILUTED EVIL
SF are not Anti-Freemason or Common Purpose. SF are Anti-Criminal Network Organisations, SF are Anti-Cult. SF are Anti- Mind Control. SF are Anti-DEW's (Directed Energy Weapons). Second Family UK are hero's fighting for you (the ignorant masses).
Second Family UK are a support group for victims of Freemasonry & Common Purpose. www.secondfamily-uk.com We are not a revenge or hatred group, only to peacefully campaign for change. Everyone has the right to reply, please be focused and sensible.
Contact/write to SF at 93 Ashburn Road, Glasgow G62 7PQ or call 0141 560 4743 or mobiles 07834 329 287 or 07799 612 227 (leave details/message and we'll call you back asap) or email voacs@mac or kim.stirling@ntlworld.com Make sure you get a reply as the Masons will try to stop the truth. Please continue to send info, ideas and suggestions. Join SF, it's absolutely free. This newsletter is brought to you by SF & Joe Stirling, a veteran victim of Freemasonry & Common Purpose. Small donations welcome to help us keep up this important cause. If you do nothing today, the Masons will continue unhindered with their NWO plans.
A Reader Writes
This is good and meets my own research, with one exception, you mention homosexuals being harassed, this is not so.
Henry Kissenger was a senior partner in Bio-litton laboratories, where A I D S was designed to rid the world of homosexuality, when this reached people of ordinary sexuality, the resulting policy change meant homosexulas were no longera target, even the use of the word homosexual was illegal and the term gay used instead. Big firms like Ford motors and Walt Disney follow the NWO agenda and donate big money to "gay" charties to promote homosexuality. British T V features in their comedy programmes an almost entirely homsexual list.
When parliament recently voted for changes in the law for homosexual consent, they wanted the age for homosexuals reduced for boys to age 14, in their own words to "promote alternative lifestyles". The article was wrong in this context. Thanx
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