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"Obama’s bizarre assault on U.S. sovereignty..." [just another routine wake up call...WAKE THE H UP PEOPLE!]

Pajamas Media

Obama Surrenders U.S. Sovereignty: His INTERPOL Executive Order

Posted By Bob Owens

At ThreatsWatch.org, Steve Schippert and Clyde Middleton have dug up the bizarre and unsettling issuance of an executive order recently signed by President Barack Obama. Executive Order — Amending Executive Order 12425 ^[1], signed December 16 and released a day later, grants the International Criminal Police Organization (INTERPOL) rights on American soil that place it beyond the reach of our own law enforcement agencies, such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).

Schippert and Middleton note ^[2] that Obama’s order removes protections placed upon INTERPOL by President Reagan in 1983. Obama’s order gives the group the authority to avoid Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests — which means this foreign law enforcement organization can operate free of an important safeguard against governmental abuse. “Property and assets,” including the organization’s records, cannot be searched or seized. Their physical locations and records are now immune from U.S. legal or investigative authorities.

If the president of the United States has an aboveboard reason for making a foreign law enforcement agency exempt from American laws on American soil, it wasn’t shared by the White House.

Andy McCarthy, former assistant United States attorney for the Southern District of New York and senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, notes at National Review ^[3] that the limitations that Obama removed are “what prevents law-enforcement and its controlling government authority from becoming tyrannical.”

A paragraph later, McCarthy describes Obama’s actions in the starkest of terms:

This international police force (whose U.S. headquarters is in the Justice Department in Washington) will be unrestrained by the U.S. Constitution and American law while it operates in the United States and affects both Americans and American interests outside the United States.

Some bloggers covering this story are noting that the law enforcement agency to which Obama has extended such extraordinary powers to has had a dismal past.

INTERPOL’s senior leadership was flush with Nazis ^[4] from the late 1930s all the way into the 1970s. That fact allowed, going Godwin ^[5] isn’t necessarily relevant to today’s organization. Khoo Boon Hui of Singapore is the current president of the organization, and the current secretary general is American Ronald Noble. Noble is perhaps best known in America for overseeing the Treasury Department’s review of the disastrous 1993 raid and siege of a Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, that left nearly 80 people dead. Noble had cautioned against the initial raid plan as being too dangerous, but the lack of any significant ramifications for federal officials that approved of the raid and allegations of a cover-up have inspired conspiracy theorists ^[6] to derisively dub Noble “the Enforcer.”

But INTERPOL’s past isn’t what concerns us at this moment. Its current actions and the actions of our president are those that we question.

With the flourish of a pen and no warning at all, Barack Obama surrendered American sovereignty to an international force with a checkered past. To what end?

The consensus opinion among those commenting on this development is that the most radical president in American history seems to be intent on submitting American citizens to the whims of the International Criminal Court (ICC). Previous administrations have been very leery of signing onto agreements that would make citizens susceptible to the ICC, due to the possibility that U.S. servicemen could be dragged into show war crimes trials. Such events are obviously heavily politicized, and demands for war crimes arrests can come from any government, even those that sponsor terrorism or genocide themselves.

No finer point can be made about the endemic problems of the INTERPOL/ICC than that made by a recent diplomatic incident ^[7] that erupted in Great Britain, where an Israeli government official had to cancel travel plans to England because of an arrest warrant issued by an English judge — because of Iranian charges of Israeli war crimes in Gaza. The brief but intense conflict was one Iran helped instigate, as the Persians supplied the terrorists in Gaza with the rockets they used against Israeli civilians, triggering an inevitable Israeli response.

If President Obama and his radical allies in the Democratic leadership have their way, American soldiers could presumably be brought up on charges as war criminals by enemy nations and marked for arrest and deportation by an international police force on American soil. They would face charges in a foreign land without the constitutional protections they fought and bled to protect. The White House seems to be on the bewildering path of giving al-Qaeda terrorists who murder innocent women and children more legal protection than the very soldiers that risk their lives trying to bring terrorists to justice. The asinine court-martial charges being brought against three Navy SEALs based upon the word of a terrorist they captured suddenly make a sickening kind of sense ^[8].

It also stands to reason that Obama’s seeming willingness to put American soldiers’ lives in the hands of a corrupt international community could also be brought to bear against his political enemies. Foreign investigators of dubious intent, and our own left-wing extremists, have long branded officials of the previous administration “war criminals” for actions they’d taken in the war on terror. It is entirely conceivable — perhaps even likely — that these same organizations and enemy governments that went after 25 Israeli government officials ^[9] through INTERPOL and the ICC would quickly move to indict a wish list of current and former U.S. government officials for alleged “war crimes.” Former President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney would obviously be at the top of such a list of politically motivated suspects, but such a list could just as easily include General David Petraeus, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, congressmen, and senators.

As the Iranian gambit has shown, Obama’s bizarre assault on U.S. sovereignty could have disastrous repercussions. We can only hope that his fetish for weakening this nation can be stopped before American politicians and servicemen are made pawns by our enemies.

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Buried Alive! - "The autopsy result is blood-curdling..." All In The Name Of Muslim "Honor"

Source: Bare Naked Islam

ANOTHER HONOR KILLING IN TURKEY: 16-year-old girl BURIED ALIVE

A 16-year old Muslin girl buried alive by relatives in southeastern Turkey in a gruesom honor killing carried out because she reportedly befriended boys.

Acting on a tip, police discovered the body of the girl, identified only as M.M., in a sitting position with her hands tied, in a 2-meter-deep hole dug under a chicken pen outside her house in Kahta, a town in the southeastern province of Adıyaman, the news agency reported.

The body was found in December, around 40 days after M.M. went missing. She is being identified by her initials because she was under the age of 18. Her father and grandfather are suspected in the murder.

A subsequent postmortem examination revealed that M.M. had a significant amount of soil in her lungs and stomach, indicating that she was buried alive and conscious, forensic experts told the news agency. “The autopsy result is blood-curdling. According to our findings, the girl – who had no bruises on her body and no sign of narcotics or poison in her blood – was alive and fully conscious when she was buried,” one anonymous expert said.

The girl’s father and grandfather have been formally arrested and jailed pending trial over her killing, according to the agency. The father is reported to have said in his testimony that the family was unhappy that M.M. had male friends. HURRIYET NEWS H/T TROP

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End

Public Bank, Public Health Care...what do you think?

Op Ed News [My comment is at the end]

Funding Public Health Care With A Publicly Owned Bank: How Canada Did It

January 25, 2010

By Ellen Brown

The Massachusetts gubernatorial upset means the President may have to start over with his health care bill. The good news is that there's still a chance for the public option the voters thought they would be getting. How to fund it? The way Canada did -- with credit issued by the government's own central bank.

The story goes that Churchill offered a woman 5 million pounds to sleep with him. She hedged and said they would have to discuss terms.Then he offered her 5 pounds."Sir!" she said. "What sort of woman do you think I am?""Madam," he replied, "We've already established that. Now we're just haggling over the price."

The same might be said of President Obama's health care bill, which was sold out to corporate interests early on. The insurance lobby had its way with the bill; after that they were just haggling over the price. The "public option" was so watered down in congressional deal-making that it finally disappeared altogether.

However, the bill passed both Houses by razor-thin margins, and the stunning loss on January 19 of the late Ted Kennedy's Democratic seat to a Republican may force Obama to start over with his agenda. The good news is that this means there is still a chance of getting legislation that includes what Obama's supporters thought they were getting when they elected him a universal health care plan on the model of Medicare.

That still leaves the question of price, but all industrialized countries except the United States have managed to foot the bill for universal health care. How is it that they can afford it when we can't? Do they have some secret funding source that we don't have?

In the case of our nearest neighbor Canada, the answer is actually that they do. At least, they did for the first two decades of their national health service -- long enough to get it up and running. Now the Canadian government, too, is struggling with a mounting debt to private banks at compound interest; and its national health service is suffering along with other public programs. But when Canada first launched its national health service, the funding came from money created by its own central bank.Canada's innovative funding model is one that could still be followed by a President committed to deliver on his promises.

The Canadian National Health Service Today

Despite what you may have read in the corporate-controlled press, studies show that Canadians are generally happy with the care they receive; and they live an average of 2.5 years longer than Americans. They receive free health service for all diagnostic procedures, hospital and home care deemed medically necessary. People can choose the general practitioners they want; there are no deductibles on basic care; and co-pays are low or zero. Care continues despite changing jobs, and no one is excluded for having a pre-existing condition. Drug prices are negotiated by the government and are paid with public money for the elderly and homeless. For the rest of the population, cost-sharing schemes are arranged between private insurers and provincial governments, with most provinces requiring families to pay small monthly premiums (generally around $100 for a family of four).

According to a 2007 study, the government pays for more than two-thirds of all Canadian health care costs. The US government, by contrast, pays for less than half of these costs. In 2007, the US spent a staggering 16% of GDP on health care compared to 10% in Canada. Health costs paid for out-of-pocket by Canadians amount to less than $300 per capita annually.

But while that arrangement may look good to people in the U.S., it is only a shadow of Canada's former system. The federal government's contributions have decreased significantly, making up only slightly more than 20% of provincial medical care costs in 2002; and this money is largely borrowed by the Canadian government at interest. The portion not paid by the federal government must be borne by provincial governments through taxes. In its early years, however, Canada's public health system was funded under a provision of the Bank of Canada Act allowing the Bank to create the money to finance federal, provincial, and municipal projects on a nearly interest-free basis.

Money Created the Old-fashioned Way by the Government Rather than the Banks

What was extraordinary about the Bank of Canada was not so much that it created money on its books as that it managed to wrest that power away from the private banking monopoly. All banks actually create the money they lend simply with accounting entries on their books. This was confirmed by Graham Towers, the first governor of the Bank of Canada, in hearings in 1935. Asked whether banks create "the medium of exchange," he replied:

"That is right. That is what they are there for. . . . That is the banking business, just in the way that a steel plant makes steel. The manufacturing process consists of making a pen-and-ink or typewriter entry on a card in a book. That is all."

The decision to fund government programs through a publicly-owned central bank was driven by a crisis much like that in the U.S. today. The country was in the throes of the Great Depression, and the money supply had radically contracted, causing businesses to close and unemployment to soar. Many Canadians blamed the private banks for making conditions worse by failing to extend loans.

Prior to the 1935 Bank of Canada Act, private banks in Canada issued their own banknotes, which were regulated less by the government than by the Canadian Banker's Association. The country's largest private bank, the Bank of Montreal, served as the government's de facto banker. By the eve of the Great Depression, interest on Canada's public debt had reached one-third of government expenditures, and many officials believed that the government needed a central bank to come up with the money to pay its foreign debts. A Royal Commission was put together in 1933 which supported creating a Bank. A major debate then ensued over whether the central bank should be public or private.

Much of the credit for the Canadian public banking model goes to a Canadian mayor named Gerald Gratton McGeer. He has been largely lost to history, and his book The Conquest of Poverty has been long out of print; but according to local historian Will Abrams, it was McGeer's lengthy presentations to the Ottawa Common Banking Committee that clarified for bankers, economists and legislators how well a publicly-owned bank could work. McGeer's model was based on the public banking system of Guernsey, an island state between Britain and France. The Guernsey government began issuing currency to pay for public works as far back as 1816. To this day, its system of publicly-issued money has allowed its inhabitants to maintain full employment and enjoy quality infrastructure, while paying modest taxes and without suffering from price inflation.

The Bank of Canada became publicly-owned in 1938 under Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King, a staunch supporter of McGeer's vision for a public central bank. King maintained:

"Until the control of the issue of currency and credit is restored to government and recognized as its most conspicuous and sacred responsibility, all talk of the sovereignty of Parliament and of democracy is idle and futile. Once a nation parts with the control of its currency and credit, it matters not who makes that nation's laws. Usury, once in control, will wreck any nation."

What Can Be Done by a Government Issuing Its Own Currency

Along with New Zealand, Australia and other progressive countries, Canada proceeded to fund infrastructure and social programs using national credit issued by its own central bank. The potential of this new credit tool for the Canadian economy was first demonstrated in World War II, in which Canada ranked fourth among the Allies for production of war goods. Under the Returning Veterans Rehabilitation Act of 1945, some 54,000 returning vets were given financial aid to attend university. The Department of Veterans Affairs provided another 80,000 vets with vocational training, and the Veterans' Land Act helped 33,000 vets buy farmland.

After the War, the Industrial Development Bank, a subsidiary of the Bank of Canada, was formed to boost Canadian businesses by offering loans at low interest rates. The Bank of Canada also funded many infrastructure projects and social programs directly. Under the 1950 Trans Canada Highway Act, Canada built the world's longest road and the world's longest inland waterway (a joint venture with the United States), as well as the 28-mile Welland Canal. People over 70, regardless of income or assets, received $40 a month from the government under the Old Age Security Act; and children under 15 got a tax-free allowance of $5-$8 a month.

Canadians first began talking about a government-run health system during the Great Depression, but at that time the government felt it could not afford the service. Various provincial programs were launched in the 1940s, often to care for returning veterans. But it was not until 1957 that the Canadian federal health care system was actually initiated, with funding from the Bank of Canada. A Hospital Act was passed under which the federal government agreed to pay half its citizens' bills at most hospitals; and a Diagnostic Services Act gave all Canadians free acute hospital care, as well as lab and radiology work. In 1966, the Hospital Act was expanded to cover physician services. In 1984, the Canada Health Act ensured that no medically-necessary care would include private fees or a charge to citizens.

A Misguided Economic Policy Kills the Golden Goose

For three decades, Canada paid for these projects through its own government-owned central bank, without sparking price inflation. Then in the late 1960s, a period of "stagflation" set in --rising prices accompanied by high unemployment. According to former Canadian Defense Minister Paul Hellyer, these elevated prices were the result of "cost-push" inflation, which could be traced to a combination of causes. Big labor unions, big government, and big corporations all negotiated top dollar for their contracts. In 1971, President Richard Nixon took the U.S. dollar off the gold standard, putting a strain on currencies in international markets. In 1974, the price of oil quadrupled, following a secret deal between Henry Kissinger and the OPEC countries in which the latter agreed to sell their oil only in U.S. dollars and to deposit the dollars in U.S. banks. Countries without sufficient dollar reserves had to borrow from these banks to buy the oil they needed, setting a debt trap that sprang shut when U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker raised interest rates to 20% in 1980.

These increased costs drove up prices worldwide; but in Canada, price inflation was blamed on the government drawing money from its own central bank. Under the sway of the classical monetarist theory promoted by U.S. economist Milton Friedman, the Canadian government abandoned its successful experiment in self-funding and began borrowing from private international lenders. These private banks created "credit" on their books just as the Bank of Canada had done; but they lent it to the government at compound interest, creating a soaring national debt. Today, interest on the debt is the Canadian government's single largest budget expenditure -- larger than health care, senior entitlements or national defense.

The provision of government-paid services is gradually being undermined by a combination of cuts to funding and provision of private services.Canada's health care system is suffering along with the rest of the economy, necessitating the cutbacks and long waits for elective procedures described by critics. But the achievements of an earlier debt-free era attest to the sustainability of a system of public health care funded with money issued through the government's own central bank.

Goosing the Economy Again

The Bank of Canada was created to end the hardships of the depression and give the government full responsibility for the health of the economy. As it turned out, the Bank also funded the health of the Canadian people.

The U.S. government could fund universal health coverage in the same way. Ideally, it would nationalize the Federal Reserve or set up a separate government-owned bank for this purpose. However, the same result could be achieved by borrowing from the privately-owned Federal Reserve, which always rebates the interest to the government after deducting its costs. The federal debt is never paid off but is just rolled over from year to year. Interest-free loans rolled over from year to year are the equivalent of debt-free government-issued money.

Contrary to popular belief, adding to the money supply in this way would not be inflationary. Inflation results when "demand" ("money") exceeds "supply" (goods and services). In this case the new money would be used to create new goods and services, so supply would be kept in balance with demand. The result would particularly not be inflationary today, when we are suffering from a deflationary crisis. As in the Great Depression, money is not available to buy products and fund programs because the money supply itself has collapsed. The solution is not to slash programs but to put more money into the economy; and that can be done by authorizing the government to create the funds it needs through its own bank.

Author's Bio: Ellen Brown developed her research skills as an attorney practicing civil litigation in Los Angeles. In Web of Debt, her latest book, she turns those skills to an analysis of the Federal Reserve and "the money trust." She shows how this private cartel has usurped the power to create money from the people themselves, and how we the people can get it back. Her earlier books focused on the pharmaceutical cartel that gets its power from "the money trust." Her eleven books include Forbidden Medicine, Nature's Pharmacy (co-authored with Dr. Lynne Walker), and The Key to Ultimate Health (co-authored with Dr. Richard Hansen). Her websites are http://www.webofdebt.com/ and http://www.ellenbrown.com/.

See also... Compulsory Private Health Insurance: Just Another Bailout for the Financial Sector? (plus the comments)

My comment to above article: In the overall scheme of things I think that this would be a good idea (although I wouldn't call it "good news" ...yet). Starting, of course, with a public owned bank...the way it should be and the way it was prior to 1913. As for financing universal health care, I would have to wait until we see how the bank is run. On another note, was it not John F. Kennedy that tried to re-establish the public control over the monetary system and wasn't that the reason he was asassinated? Some would say that the Office of the President of the United States is the most powerful position in the world... Not so! Its the people who control the money and Obama is not doing a good job in that area. ~ Norman E. Hooben

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When ya gotta go, ya gotta go! How convenient is this place?

----- Original Message -----

From: link removed

To: link removed

Sent: Wednesday, February 03, 2010 9:41 PM

Subject: Fw: Unique Rest Stop in Nevada

HWY 95 and Scotty's Junction in Nevada, about 30 miles on a dirt road on the way to The Hard Luck mine.

This beautifully landscaped unique rest stop has three working toilets, a phone and a memorial dedication marker . . . [click on picture(s) to enlarge]

Dedicated to members of both houses of Congress . . .

one a native of Nevada . . . and the other the neighboring state of California .

A designated repository for their legislative process including health care, stimulus acts, hairbrained socialist ideas, etc .

end of email....

Aaah heck I missed the Pelosi/Read Rest Area! I just came back from Nevada and all I saw out there were a few mountain goats (see below... how ya like that 70 to 1 optical zoom? )

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