Friday, December 25, 2009
Saturday, December 12, 2009
Mission Bulletin of Strategic Crisis Center
Mission Bulletin of Strategic Crisis Center
Jeff Nyquist Mission Statement
http://www.strategiccrisis.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=170:7-december-2009&catid=48:mission-statement&Itemid=18
A grave strategic crisis is coming. The U.S. Congress has decided to allow the nation's nuclear arsenal to sink into disrepair. At the same time, the president is eager to sign a nuclear arms reduction treaty with Russia, while Russia is modernizing its nuclear forces (not to mention what China is doing). It is possible, within a year, that America will have less than 400 strategic nuclear warheads. The strategic posture of the United States has become a makeshift affair; partly based on the dictates of political correctness, partly based on the false market optimism of a business community that wants to trade with Communist China. It does not occur to these businessmen that China is trading with them today in order to hang them tomorrow.
Today's strategic crisis is an intellectual crisis. It occurs because men have not studied the strategic situation with due diligence. They have abandoned common sense, and they have failed to name their enemies. The Islamic threat notwithstanding, the United States faces two powerful opponents: Russia and China. Due to the advance of "politically correct" thinking in Washington, and to the softening of the American psyche, few politicians are willing to admit that Russia and China are working against the security interests of the United States. Other countries, as well, are part of the Russian-Chinese alliance. These include Iran, North Korea, Cuba, Vietnam, Venezuela, and others.
It would seem, indeed, that the old Communist Bloc still exists, and is growing, especially in the Third World. Meanwhile, Communist influence in Europe is spreading through KGB-businesses, Russian organized crime, and agents of influence. Though former Soviet Republics and Warsaw Pact states have gained entry into NATO, the governments and economies of these countries are largely in the hands of Moscow's agents. Even Lech Walesa in Poland has long since been exposed as an agent of the communist secret police. It is no wonder, therefore, that Russia and China are engaged in a military buildup while the strategic attention of the United States is focused on Iran and Afghanistan. A deception has been promulgated, and the United States has been taken for a ride.
It now becomes evident, twenty years after the so-called collapse of communism, that America didn't win the Cold War. The communist bloc merely reorganized itself under new banners and new slogans. The old ideology was outwardly abandoned to facilitate the interpenetration of East and West. It is an indisputable fact that the collapse of Communism in 1989 was part of a longstanding Kremlin plan. We know this from the testimony of defectors and researchers like Jan Sejna, Anatoliy Golitsyn and Vladimir Bukovsky. It was Bukovsky who acquired documents from the Communist Party Soviet Union archive proving the existence of the plan. We also know that this plan did not play out as envisioned. After the unification of Germany, the German people did not abandon NATO as Kremlin strategists had projected. The Kremlin's miscalculation in this regard led to a major upset for the Soviet side, leading to a series of setbacks. To recover lost ground, the Kremlin strategists set to work after 1991. They built what has been called a KGB regime in Moscow. And they have been building an international alliance with which to change the global balance of power.
Some historical background is necessary to understand how we got where we are today: In December 1961 a KGB major named Golitsyn defected to the United States with information about a Soviet long-range strategy. He provided the CIA with a package of documents, including one that described a new KGB directorate of disinformation (Department “D”). The document said that catching American spies was not the KGB’s primary concern. Better to create an elaborate web of disinformation “to negate and discredit authentic information the enemy has obtained.” The KGB’s tactic was to feed the CIA a steady diet of pleasing falsehoods. Eventually, the CIA would only believe stories tailored by the KGB. This, in turn, would allow Soviet agents to penetrate more easily into the heart of U.S. intelligence.
Golitsyn warned the CIA that Soviet disinformation was carefully devised to support a long-range plan in which the balance of power would be inconspicuously shifted in favor of the communist bloc. With the exception of the CIA’s James Angleton, few credited Golitsyn’s warning. Having been disbelieved and cast aside, Golitsyn submitted a top secret manuscript to the CIA in 1982. According to this manuscript, by 1986 the Soviet Union would be led by a man “with a more liberal image.” This man would initiate “changes that would have been beyond the imagination of Marx or the practical reach of Lenin and unthinkable to Stalin.” The Soviet system would be liberalized, and the liberalization “would be spectacular and impressive. Formal pronouncements might be made about a reduction in the Communist Party’s role; its monopoly would be apparently curtailed…. The KGB would be reformed. Dissidents at home would be amnestied; those in exile abroad would be allowed to take up positions in the government…. Political clubs would be opened to nonmembers of the Communist Party. Leading dissidents might form one or more alternative political parties. Censorship would be relaxed; controversial books, plays, films, and art would be published, performed, and exhibited.”
The CIA did not take Golitsyn’s manuscript seriously, and gave Golitsyn permission to publish it as a book, titled New Lies for Old, which appeared in 1984. It included 148 falsifiable predictions. According to researcher Mark Riebling “139 out of 148” of Golitsyn’s predictions “were fulfilled by the end of 1993 – an accuracy rate of nearly 94 percent.” Did anyone agree with Golitsyn’s analysis, or approve his predictions at the time? Leading pundits and CIA analysts mocked Golitsyn’s work. “Unfortunate is the only term for this book,” wrote a CIA analyst in 1985. There were no CIA apologies tendered to Golitsyn when 139 of his predictions came true. By that time Golitsyn’s critics were busy congratulating themselves on winning the Cold War. The success of Soviet disinformation was total. From that point forward the world would only understand what the KGB wanted them to understand.
According to the 1982 memoirs of a high-level Czechoslovakian defector named Jan Sejna,, “One of the basic problems of the West is its frequent failure to recognize the existence of any Soviet ‘grand design’ at all. Those rejecting this concept unwittingly serve Soviet efforts to conceal their objectives and further complicate the process of determining such objectives.” As a leading official, Sejna worked directly for the top level of the Czech communist government. In 1967 Sejna and his colleagues were briefed on Moscow’s strategy. “It had always been made clear that the Plan’s objectives were firm but the means and methods of achieving them were flexible,” wrote Sejna in his memoirs. “This flexibility often serves to confound Western political analysts, who tend to confuse a change in tactics with a profound change in … thinking.” Therefore, Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin in 1956 was a tactic and not a change of heart. According to Sejna, even though Khrushchev denounced Stalin’s crimes, the Kremlin had not abandoned Stalin’s objectives.
While addressing Western ambassadors during a reception at the Polish Embassy in Moscow on 18 November 1956, Khrushchev publicly stated: “Whether you like it or not, history is on our side. We will bury you!” ("Мы вас похороним!") On 24 July 1959 Khrushchev told visiting U.S. Vice President Richard Nixon that his grandchildren would live under communism. Two months later Khrushchev visited the United States where he made the exact same boast to U.S. Agriculture Secretary Ezra Taft Benson. When Benson assured him the opposite, Khrushchev reportedly said: “You Americans are so gullible. No, you won’t accept communism outright, but we’ll keep feeding you small doses of socialism until you’ll finally wake up and find you already have communism. We won’t have to fight you. We’ll so weaken your economy until you’ll fall like overripe fruit into our hands.”
Khrushchev’s intention was recently explained by the former deputy chief of Romania’s foreign intelligence service, Ion Pacepa, who made the following observation to the Czech-American researcher Robert Buchar: “The whole foreign policy of the Soviet bloc states, indeed its whole economic and military might, revolved around the larger Soviet objective of destroying America from within through the use of lies. The Soviets saw disinformation as a vital tool in the dialectical advance of world communism. KGB priority number one was to damage American power, judgment, and credibility.”
It is noteworthy that Khrushchev did not say, “You will live under communism.” He also did not say, “Your children will live under communism.” He told his American opposites that their grandchildren would live under communism. Khrushchev was admitting that Moscow’s plan was a long-range plan, involving decades of work. Starting in February 1967 the Warsaw Pact countries received regular directives detailing their part in the overall Plan. “When my friends and I studied the Strategic Plan,” wrote Sejna, “our initial reactions were identical: we considered it quite unrealistic, especially in its timing, which we thought wildly optimistic.” Only after Sejna defected to the West did he change this opinion. “I could find no unity, no consistent objective or strategy among Western countries. It is not possible to fight the Soviet system and strategy with small tactical steps. For the first time I began to believe that the Soviet Union would be able to achieve her goals – something I had not believed in Czechoslovakia.”
The Kremlin strategists envisioned that sometime after 1990 an economic and political sequence would unfold, leading to the collapse of the American economy and “the advent to power in Washington of a transitional liberal and progressive government.” In September 1967 the Secretary of the Soviet Central Committee, Konstantin Katushev, arrived in Prague to orally brief the Czech communist leaders. The Czechs feared that an economic crisis in America would lead to the emergence of a right-wing regime. The United States could move to “either extreme,” Katushev admitted, “as … in the McCarthy period and the Vietnam War. If we can impose on the U.S.A. the external restraints proposed in our Plan, and seriously disrupt the American economy, the working and lower middle classes will suffer the consequences and they will turn on the society that has failed them. They will be ready for revolution.”
The Russian strategists foresaw that the American workforce would be facing a difficult situation in twenty to forty years. America’s enormous progress in technology, said Katushev, was a destabilizing influence because it led to underemployment by unskilled workers. “This phenomenon,” Katushev noted, “is one I consider the United States cannot deal with.” Though American workers could turn to the right, he added, “It’s more likely … that a progressive regime will emerge because, in spite of their power, the governing bureaucratic elite and industrial elite, and the media, are fundamentally liberal in their outlook and ashamed of their failure to solve basic national problems.”
In 1967 Soviet Marshal Matvei Zhakarov visited Prague to encourage the recruitment of “high-level agents of influence” in the rising elite of America’s universities, media and government. Moscow perceived that power was passing from the hands of the “old industrial plutocracy.” If the Soviet bloc could penetrate the U.S. media and academia, it would be easier to manipulate the society as a whole. While the Strategic Plan called for disrupting the U.S. economy and encouraging the election of a progressive presidential candidate, it also aimed at splitting the United States from Europe. According to Sejna, “The Russians planned to play upon the nationalist, bourgeois prejudices of the leading European countries in order to convince them that Europe must strive to become a distinct entity, separate from the United States.”
In order to gain technology and money from the West, Moscow also planned to launch an unprecedented peace offensive, which would involve the liquidation of the communist bloc. About this plan, Sejna wrote: “The erosion of NATO begun in Phase Two [of the Plan] would be completed by the withdrawal of the United States from its commitment to the defense of Europe, and by European hostility to military expenditure, generated by economic recession and fanned by the efforts of the ‘progressive’ movements. To this end we envisaged that it might be necessary to dissolve the Warsaw Pact, in which event we had already prepared a web of bilateral defense arrangements, to be supervised by secret committees of Comecon.”
In terms of operational details, the Plan relied on future sabotage and terrorist operations. These would benefit from the infiltration of organized crime and Soviet-sponsored drug trafficking. The Russian planners believed that the American economy could be sabotaged, that the CIA was effectively blind, and that drug trafficking could open a back door to America’s financial centers and geographical heartland. Sejna’s testimony on this subject was published in 1990 a book titled Red Cocaine, written by Joseph D. Douglass, Jr., with an introduction by Ray S. Cline, former Deputy Director for Intelligence at the CIA.
The role of terrorism was especially important to the thrust of the Strategic Plan. When researcher Robert Buchar asked Russian historian Vladimir Bukovsky whether the Soviets fathered modern terrorism, Bukovsky replied: “Oh definitely. I can show you hundreds of documents proving that. I mean how they supplied, trained, created and … control almost every terrorist organization on earth. I have these documents.”
The former Deputy Director of the Romanian intelligence service, Ion Mihai Pacepa, has written about Russia’s involvement with international terrorism. “Today’s international terrorism,” he wrote in August 2006, “was conceived at the Lubyanka, the headquarters of the KGB…. I witnessed its birth in my other life, as a Communist general.”
In a 1987 book, titled Spetsnaz: The Inside Story of the Soviet Special Forces, a Soviet military intelligence defector writing under the pen name Viktor Suvorov explained the ultimate purpose to which terrorism would be put to use. In Chapter 15 of the book, Suvorov listed various acts of economic sabotage and terrorism to be undertaken in advance of all-out war against the United States. “All these operations,” wrote Suvorov, “are known officially in the GRU as the ‘preparatory period,’ and unofficially as the ‘overture.’ The overture is a series of large and small operations the purpose of which is, before actual military operations begin, to weaken the enemy’s morale, create an atmosphere of general suspicion, fear and uncertainty, and divert the attention of the enemy’s armies and police forces to a huge number of different targets, each which may be the object of the next attack.” According to Suvorov, the overture is carried out by intelligence agents and by “mercenaries recruited by intermediaries.” The strategy they follow is known as “grey terror,” described by Suvorov as “a kind of terror which is not conducted in the name of the Soviet Union.” Instead, the terror is carried out in the name of “already existing extremist groups not connected in any way” with Russia. According to Suvorov, “The terrorist acts carried out in the course of the ‘overture’ require very few people, very few weapons and little equipment.” The example of 19 men with box-cutters comes to mind, though Suvorov lists “a screw driver, a box of matches or a glass ampoule.”
In a July 2005 interview with the Polish Newspaper Rzeczpospolita, FSB/KGB defector Alexander Litvinenko alleged that al Qaeda’s second-in-command, Ayman Al-Zawahri, was “an old agent of the FSB.” Political writer and former KGB officer, Konstantin Preobrazhenskiy, confirmed Litvinenko’s allegation, stating: “[Litvinenko] was responsible for securing the secrecy of Al-Zawahri’s arrival in Russia, who was trained by FSB instructors in Dagestan, Northern Caucasus, in 1996-97.” Preobrazhenskiy further stated: "At that time, Litvinenko was the Head of the Subdivision for Internationally Wanted Terrorists of the First Department of the Operative-Inquiry Directorate of the FSB Anti-Terrorist Department. He was ordered to undertake the delicate mission of securing Al-Zawahri from unintentional disclosure by the Russian police. Though Al-Zawahri had been brought to Russia by the FSB using a false passport, it was still possible for the police to learn about his arrival and report to Moscow for verification. Such a process could disclose Al-Zawahri as an FSB collaborator.”
Litvinenko detailed Russia’s role as the originator of modern terrorism in his July 2005 interview with Rzeczpospolita: “I know only one organization that has made terrorism the main tool of solving political problems. It is the Russian special services. The KGB has been engaged in terrorism for many years, and mass terrorism. At the special department of the KGB they trained terrorists from practically every country in the world. These courses lasted, as a rule, for half a year. Specially trained and prepared agents of the KGB organized murders and explosions, including explosions of tankers, the hijacking of passenger airliners, along with hits on diplomatic, state and commercial organizations worldwide.” Litvinenko added that the agents of the KGB/FSB were “the bloodiest terrorist in the world.” He then listed Carlos Ilyich Ramiros (Carlos the Jackal), Yassir Arafat, Saddam Hussein, and a host of others. According to Litvinenko, “all these figures and movements operated under their own slogans; however, none of them especially hid their ‘intimate’ … relationship with the Kremlin and Lubyanka. There is a simple question: whether the Russian special services would train and finance people and groups which are unsupervised by Lubyanka and did not serve the interests of the Kremlin? You understand perfectly, they would not. Each act of terrorism made by these people was carried out as an assignment and under the rigid control of the KGB of the USSR.”
Asked if this terrorism continues under the post-Soviet leadership, Litvinenko warned that “the center of global terrorism is not in Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan or the Chechen Republic. The terrorist infection is spread worldwide from Lubyanka Square and the Kremlin cabinet. And until the Russian special services are outlawed, dispersed and condemned, the terrorism will never stop.” Roughly 16 months after his public statements about the KGB’s connection to Al Qaeda, Litvinenko was poisoned at the bar of a London hotel by Kremlin agents who put radioactive polonium-210 in his tea. He died in November 2006.
The strategic crisis facing the United States is a life-and-death crisis. If we continue to ignore the growing evidence of danger, the free world may not survive. The Strategic Crisis Center wants to encourage widespread debate, involvement, and concern with these issues. Citizens need to get educated, they need to get involved, and they need to alert their neighbors, their friends, and their families to the danger.
Jeff Nyquist Mission Statement
http://www.strategiccrisis.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=170:7-december-2009&catid=48:mission-statement&Itemid=18
A grave strategic crisis is coming. The U.S. Congress has decided to allow the nation's nuclear arsenal to sink into disrepair. At the same time, the president is eager to sign a nuclear arms reduction treaty with Russia, while Russia is modernizing its nuclear forces (not to mention what China is doing). It is possible, within a year, that America will have less than 400 strategic nuclear warheads. The strategic posture of the United States has become a makeshift affair; partly based on the dictates of political correctness, partly based on the false market optimism of a business community that wants to trade with Communist China. It does not occur to these businessmen that China is trading with them today in order to hang them tomorrow.
Today's strategic crisis is an intellectual crisis. It occurs because men have not studied the strategic situation with due diligence. They have abandoned common sense, and they have failed to name their enemies. The Islamic threat notwithstanding, the United States faces two powerful opponents: Russia and China. Due to the advance of "politically correct" thinking in Washington, and to the softening of the American psyche, few politicians are willing to admit that Russia and China are working against the security interests of the United States. Other countries, as well, are part of the Russian-Chinese alliance. These include Iran, North Korea, Cuba, Vietnam, Venezuela, and others.
It would seem, indeed, that the old Communist Bloc still exists, and is growing, especially in the Third World. Meanwhile, Communist influence in Europe is spreading through KGB-businesses, Russian organized crime, and agents of influence. Though former Soviet Republics and Warsaw Pact states have gained entry into NATO, the governments and economies of these countries are largely in the hands of Moscow's agents. Even Lech Walesa in Poland has long since been exposed as an agent of the communist secret police. It is no wonder, therefore, that Russia and China are engaged in a military buildup while the strategic attention of the United States is focused on Iran and Afghanistan. A deception has been promulgated, and the United States has been taken for a ride.
It now becomes evident, twenty years after the so-called collapse of communism, that America didn't win the Cold War. The communist bloc merely reorganized itself under new banners and new slogans. The old ideology was outwardly abandoned to facilitate the interpenetration of East and West. It is an indisputable fact that the collapse of Communism in 1989 was part of a longstanding Kremlin plan. We know this from the testimony of defectors and researchers like Jan Sejna, Anatoliy Golitsyn and Vladimir Bukovsky. It was Bukovsky who acquired documents from the Communist Party Soviet Union archive proving the existence of the plan. We also know that this plan did not play out as envisioned. After the unification of Germany, the German people did not abandon NATO as Kremlin strategists had projected. The Kremlin's miscalculation in this regard led to a major upset for the Soviet side, leading to a series of setbacks. To recover lost ground, the Kremlin strategists set to work after 1991. They built what has been called a KGB regime in Moscow. And they have been building an international alliance with which to change the global balance of power.
Some historical background is necessary to understand how we got where we are today: In December 1961 a KGB major named Golitsyn defected to the United States with information about a Soviet long-range strategy. He provided the CIA with a package of documents, including one that described a new KGB directorate of disinformation (Department “D”). The document said that catching American spies was not the KGB’s primary concern. Better to create an elaborate web of disinformation “to negate and discredit authentic information the enemy has obtained.” The KGB’s tactic was to feed the CIA a steady diet of pleasing falsehoods. Eventually, the CIA would only believe stories tailored by the KGB. This, in turn, would allow Soviet agents to penetrate more easily into the heart of U.S. intelligence.
Golitsyn warned the CIA that Soviet disinformation was carefully devised to support a long-range plan in which the balance of power would be inconspicuously shifted in favor of the communist bloc. With the exception of the CIA’s James Angleton, few credited Golitsyn’s warning. Having been disbelieved and cast aside, Golitsyn submitted a top secret manuscript to the CIA in 1982. According to this manuscript, by 1986 the Soviet Union would be led by a man “with a more liberal image.” This man would initiate “changes that would have been beyond the imagination of Marx or the practical reach of Lenin and unthinkable to Stalin.” The Soviet system would be liberalized, and the liberalization “would be spectacular and impressive. Formal pronouncements might be made about a reduction in the Communist Party’s role; its monopoly would be apparently curtailed…. The KGB would be reformed. Dissidents at home would be amnestied; those in exile abroad would be allowed to take up positions in the government…. Political clubs would be opened to nonmembers of the Communist Party. Leading dissidents might form one or more alternative political parties. Censorship would be relaxed; controversial books, plays, films, and art would be published, performed, and exhibited.”
The CIA did not take Golitsyn’s manuscript seriously, and gave Golitsyn permission to publish it as a book, titled New Lies for Old, which appeared in 1984. It included 148 falsifiable predictions. According to researcher Mark Riebling “139 out of 148” of Golitsyn’s predictions “were fulfilled by the end of 1993 – an accuracy rate of nearly 94 percent.” Did anyone agree with Golitsyn’s analysis, or approve his predictions at the time? Leading pundits and CIA analysts mocked Golitsyn’s work. “Unfortunate is the only term for this book,” wrote a CIA analyst in 1985. There were no CIA apologies tendered to Golitsyn when 139 of his predictions came true. By that time Golitsyn’s critics were busy congratulating themselves on winning the Cold War. The success of Soviet disinformation was total. From that point forward the world would only understand what the KGB wanted them to understand.
According to the 1982 memoirs of a high-level Czechoslovakian defector named Jan Sejna,, “One of the basic problems of the West is its frequent failure to recognize the existence of any Soviet ‘grand design’ at all. Those rejecting this concept unwittingly serve Soviet efforts to conceal their objectives and further complicate the process of determining such objectives.” As a leading official, Sejna worked directly for the top level of the Czech communist government. In 1967 Sejna and his colleagues were briefed on Moscow’s strategy. “It had always been made clear that the Plan’s objectives were firm but the means and methods of achieving them were flexible,” wrote Sejna in his memoirs. “This flexibility often serves to confound Western political analysts, who tend to confuse a change in tactics with a profound change in … thinking.” Therefore, Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin in 1956 was a tactic and not a change of heart. According to Sejna, even though Khrushchev denounced Stalin’s crimes, the Kremlin had not abandoned Stalin’s objectives.
While addressing Western ambassadors during a reception at the Polish Embassy in Moscow on 18 November 1956, Khrushchev publicly stated: “Whether you like it or not, history is on our side. We will bury you!” ("Мы вас похороним!") On 24 July 1959 Khrushchev told visiting U.S. Vice President Richard Nixon that his grandchildren would live under communism. Two months later Khrushchev visited the United States where he made the exact same boast to U.S. Agriculture Secretary Ezra Taft Benson. When Benson assured him the opposite, Khrushchev reportedly said: “You Americans are so gullible. No, you won’t accept communism outright, but we’ll keep feeding you small doses of socialism until you’ll finally wake up and find you already have communism. We won’t have to fight you. We’ll so weaken your economy until you’ll fall like overripe fruit into our hands.”
Khrushchev’s intention was recently explained by the former deputy chief of Romania’s foreign intelligence service, Ion Pacepa, who made the following observation to the Czech-American researcher Robert Buchar: “The whole foreign policy of the Soviet bloc states, indeed its whole economic and military might, revolved around the larger Soviet objective of destroying America from within through the use of lies. The Soviets saw disinformation as a vital tool in the dialectical advance of world communism. KGB priority number one was to damage American power, judgment, and credibility.”
It is noteworthy that Khrushchev did not say, “You will live under communism.” He also did not say, “Your children will live under communism.” He told his American opposites that their grandchildren would live under communism. Khrushchev was admitting that Moscow’s plan was a long-range plan, involving decades of work. Starting in February 1967 the Warsaw Pact countries received regular directives detailing their part in the overall Plan. “When my friends and I studied the Strategic Plan,” wrote Sejna, “our initial reactions were identical: we considered it quite unrealistic, especially in its timing, which we thought wildly optimistic.” Only after Sejna defected to the West did he change this opinion. “I could find no unity, no consistent objective or strategy among Western countries. It is not possible to fight the Soviet system and strategy with small tactical steps. For the first time I began to believe that the Soviet Union would be able to achieve her goals – something I had not believed in Czechoslovakia.”
The Kremlin strategists envisioned that sometime after 1990 an economic and political sequence would unfold, leading to the collapse of the American economy and “the advent to power in Washington of a transitional liberal and progressive government.” In September 1967 the Secretary of the Soviet Central Committee, Konstantin Katushev, arrived in Prague to orally brief the Czech communist leaders. The Czechs feared that an economic crisis in America would lead to the emergence of a right-wing regime. The United States could move to “either extreme,” Katushev admitted, “as … in the McCarthy period and the Vietnam War. If we can impose on the U.S.A. the external restraints proposed in our Plan, and seriously disrupt the American economy, the working and lower middle classes will suffer the consequences and they will turn on the society that has failed them. They will be ready for revolution.”
The Russian strategists foresaw that the American workforce would be facing a difficult situation in twenty to forty years. America’s enormous progress in technology, said Katushev, was a destabilizing influence because it led to underemployment by unskilled workers. “This phenomenon,” Katushev noted, “is one I consider the United States cannot deal with.” Though American workers could turn to the right, he added, “It’s more likely … that a progressive regime will emerge because, in spite of their power, the governing bureaucratic elite and industrial elite, and the media, are fundamentally liberal in their outlook and ashamed of their failure to solve basic national problems.”
In 1967 Soviet Marshal Matvei Zhakarov visited Prague to encourage the recruitment of “high-level agents of influence” in the rising elite of America’s universities, media and government. Moscow perceived that power was passing from the hands of the “old industrial plutocracy.” If the Soviet bloc could penetrate the U.S. media and academia, it would be easier to manipulate the society as a whole. While the Strategic Plan called for disrupting the U.S. economy and encouraging the election of a progressive presidential candidate, it also aimed at splitting the United States from Europe. According to Sejna, “The Russians planned to play upon the nationalist, bourgeois prejudices of the leading European countries in order to convince them that Europe must strive to become a distinct entity, separate from the United States.”
In order to gain technology and money from the West, Moscow also planned to launch an unprecedented peace offensive, which would involve the liquidation of the communist bloc. About this plan, Sejna wrote: “The erosion of NATO begun in Phase Two [of the Plan] would be completed by the withdrawal of the United States from its commitment to the defense of Europe, and by European hostility to military expenditure, generated by economic recession and fanned by the efforts of the ‘progressive’ movements. To this end we envisaged that it might be necessary to dissolve the Warsaw Pact, in which event we had already prepared a web of bilateral defense arrangements, to be supervised by secret committees of Comecon.”
In terms of operational details, the Plan relied on future sabotage and terrorist operations. These would benefit from the infiltration of organized crime and Soviet-sponsored drug trafficking. The Russian planners believed that the American economy could be sabotaged, that the CIA was effectively blind, and that drug trafficking could open a back door to America’s financial centers and geographical heartland. Sejna’s testimony on this subject was published in 1990 a book titled Red Cocaine, written by Joseph D. Douglass, Jr., with an introduction by Ray S. Cline, former Deputy Director for Intelligence at the CIA.
The role of terrorism was especially important to the thrust of the Strategic Plan. When researcher Robert Buchar asked Russian historian Vladimir Bukovsky whether the Soviets fathered modern terrorism, Bukovsky replied: “Oh definitely. I can show you hundreds of documents proving that. I mean how they supplied, trained, created and … control almost every terrorist organization on earth. I have these documents.”
The former Deputy Director of the Romanian intelligence service, Ion Mihai Pacepa, has written about Russia’s involvement with international terrorism. “Today’s international terrorism,” he wrote in August 2006, “was conceived at the Lubyanka, the headquarters of the KGB…. I witnessed its birth in my other life, as a Communist general.”
In a 1987 book, titled Spetsnaz: The Inside Story of the Soviet Special Forces, a Soviet military intelligence defector writing under the pen name Viktor Suvorov explained the ultimate purpose to which terrorism would be put to use. In Chapter 15 of the book, Suvorov listed various acts of economic sabotage and terrorism to be undertaken in advance of all-out war against the United States. “All these operations,” wrote Suvorov, “are known officially in the GRU as the ‘preparatory period,’ and unofficially as the ‘overture.’ The overture is a series of large and small operations the purpose of which is, before actual military operations begin, to weaken the enemy’s morale, create an atmosphere of general suspicion, fear and uncertainty, and divert the attention of the enemy’s armies and police forces to a huge number of different targets, each which may be the object of the next attack.” According to Suvorov, the overture is carried out by intelligence agents and by “mercenaries recruited by intermediaries.” The strategy they follow is known as “grey terror,” described by Suvorov as “a kind of terror which is not conducted in the name of the Soviet Union.” Instead, the terror is carried out in the name of “already existing extremist groups not connected in any way” with Russia. According to Suvorov, “The terrorist acts carried out in the course of the ‘overture’ require very few people, very few weapons and little equipment.” The example of 19 men with box-cutters comes to mind, though Suvorov lists “a screw driver, a box of matches or a glass ampoule.”
In a July 2005 interview with the Polish Newspaper Rzeczpospolita, FSB/KGB defector Alexander Litvinenko alleged that al Qaeda’s second-in-command, Ayman Al-Zawahri, was “an old agent of the FSB.” Political writer and former KGB officer, Konstantin Preobrazhenskiy, confirmed Litvinenko’s allegation, stating: “[Litvinenko] was responsible for securing the secrecy of Al-Zawahri’s arrival in Russia, who was trained by FSB instructors in Dagestan, Northern Caucasus, in 1996-97.” Preobrazhenskiy further stated: "At that time, Litvinenko was the Head of the Subdivision for Internationally Wanted Terrorists of the First Department of the Operative-Inquiry Directorate of the FSB Anti-Terrorist Department. He was ordered to undertake the delicate mission of securing Al-Zawahri from unintentional disclosure by the Russian police. Though Al-Zawahri had been brought to Russia by the FSB using a false passport, it was still possible for the police to learn about his arrival and report to Moscow for verification. Such a process could disclose Al-Zawahri as an FSB collaborator.”
Litvinenko detailed Russia’s role as the originator of modern terrorism in his July 2005 interview with Rzeczpospolita: “I know only one organization that has made terrorism the main tool of solving political problems. It is the Russian special services. The KGB has been engaged in terrorism for many years, and mass terrorism. At the special department of the KGB they trained terrorists from practically every country in the world. These courses lasted, as a rule, for half a year. Specially trained and prepared agents of the KGB organized murders and explosions, including explosions of tankers, the hijacking of passenger airliners, along with hits on diplomatic, state and commercial organizations worldwide.” Litvinenko added that the agents of the KGB/FSB were “the bloodiest terrorist in the world.” He then listed Carlos Ilyich Ramiros (Carlos the Jackal), Yassir Arafat, Saddam Hussein, and a host of others. According to Litvinenko, “all these figures and movements operated under their own slogans; however, none of them especially hid their ‘intimate’ … relationship with the Kremlin and Lubyanka. There is a simple question: whether the Russian special services would train and finance people and groups which are unsupervised by Lubyanka and did not serve the interests of the Kremlin? You understand perfectly, they would not. Each act of terrorism made by these people was carried out as an assignment and under the rigid control of the KGB of the USSR.”
Asked if this terrorism continues under the post-Soviet leadership, Litvinenko warned that “the center of global terrorism is not in Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan or the Chechen Republic. The terrorist infection is spread worldwide from Lubyanka Square and the Kremlin cabinet. And until the Russian special services are outlawed, dispersed and condemned, the terrorism will never stop.” Roughly 16 months after his public statements about the KGB’s connection to Al Qaeda, Litvinenko was poisoned at the bar of a London hotel by Kremlin agents who put radioactive polonium-210 in his tea. He died in November 2006.
The strategic crisis facing the United States is a life-and-death crisis. If we continue to ignore the growing evidence of danger, the free world may not survive. The Strategic Crisis Center wants to encourage widespread debate, involvement, and concern with these issues. Citizens need to get educated, they need to get involved, and they need to alert their neighbors, their friends, and their families to the danger.
Sunday, December 6, 2009
Sunday, November 22, 2009
The Second Wave of The Financial Tsunami
The Wave Is gathering force & could hit between the first & second quarter of 2010
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.p...t=va&aid=16218
November 22, 2009
by Matthias Chang
Many of my friends who have been receiving my e-mail alerts over the last two years have lamented that in recent weeks I have not commented on the state of the global economy. I appreciate their anxiety but they forget that I am not a stock market analyst who is paid to write articles to lure investors back into the market. My website is free and I do not sell a financial newsletter so there is no need for me to churn out daily forecasts or analysis.
However, when the data is compelling and supports an inevitable trend, it is time for another review. This Red Alert is to enable visitors to my website to take appropriate actions to safeguard their wealth and welfare of their families in the coming months.
Since the last quarter of 2008, unrelenting currency warfare has been waged by the key global economies and while this competition thus far has been non-antagonistic, it will soon be antagonistic because the inherent differences are irreconcilable. The consequences to the global economy will be devastating and for the ordinary people, massive unemployment and social unrest are assured.
The policy-makers of these countries faced with the total collapse of the international financial architecture have concluded that the solution, the only solution is quantitative easing (i.e. massive injection of liquidity) to salvage the “too big to fail” banks and reflate their depressed economies. This is best reflected in Bernanke’s candid remark that, “the US government has a technology, called the printing press (or today, its electronic equivalent), that allows it to produce as many US dollars as it wishes at essentially no cost”.
This is the crux of the problem!
The Irreconcilable Differences
Some two decades ago, it was decided by the global financial elites that the framework for the global economy shall consist of:
1) A global derivative-based financial system, controlled by the US Federal Reserve Bank and its associate global banks in the developed countries.
2) The re-location from the West to the East in the production of goods, principally to China and India to “feed” the developed economies.
The entire system was built on a simple principle, that of a FED-controlled global reserve currency which will be the engine for growth for the global economy. It is essentially an imperialist economic principle.
Once we grasp this fundamental truth, Bernanke’s boast that the “US can produce as many US dollars as it wishes at no cost” takes on a different dimension.
I have talked to so many economists and when asked what is the crux of the present financial problem, they all respond in unison, “it is the global imbalances… the West consumes too much while the East saves too much and consumes not enough”. This is exemplified by the huge US trade deficits on the one part and China’s massive surpluses on the other.
Incredible wisdom and almost everyone echoes this mantra. The recent concluded APEC Summit was no different. This mantra was repeated as well as the call for freer trade between trading nations.
This is a grand hoax. All the current leaders on the world’s stage are corrupted to the rotten core and as such have no interest to call a spade a spade and expose the inherent contradictions within the existing financial system.
The call for a multi-polar world is meaningless when the entire global financial system is based on the unipolar US dollar reserve currency. This is the inherent contradiction within the present system and the problems associated with it cannot be resolved by another global reserve currency based on the IMF’s Special Drawing Rights as advocated by some countries. It was stillborn, the very moment it was conceived!
The leaders of China, Japan and the oil producing countries of the Middle East are all cursing and pissing about the current situation, but they don’t have the courage of their convictions to spell it out to their countrymen that they have been conned by the financial spin masters from the Fed acting on the instructions from Goldman Sachs.
Tell me which leader would dare admit that they have exchanged the nation’s wealth for toilet papers?
The toilet paper currency pantomime continues.
We have now reached a stalemate in the current currency war, not unlike the situation of the Cold War between the NATO pact countries and the Warsaw pact countries. Both sides were deterred by the MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) doctrine of nuclear wars. The costs to both sides were horrendous and it was only when the Soviet Union could not continue with the pace and cost of maintaining a nuclear deterrent and was forced into bankruptcy that the balance tilted in favour of the NATO alliance.
But it was a pyrrhic victory for the US and it allies. What kept the ability of the US to maintain its military might and outspend the Soviet Union was the right to print toilet paper currency and the acceptance of the US dollar by her allies as the world’s reserve currency.
But why did the countries allied to the US during the Cold War accepted the status quo?
Simple! They were all conned into believing that without the protection of Big Brother and its military outreach, they would be swallowed up by the communist menace. They agreed to march to the tune of the US Pied-Piper.
The next big question – why did the so-called “liberated” former communist allies of the Soviet bloc jump on the bandwagon?
Simple! They all believed in the illusion that was fostered by the global banks, led by Goldman Sachs that trading and selling their goods and services for the toilet paper US reserve currency would ensure untold wealth and prosperity.
But the biggest game in town was the Asia gambit. Japan, after a decade of recession following the burst of her property bubble did not have the means and the capacity to bring the game to the next level as envisaged by the financial architects in Goldman Sachs.
And China was the biggest beneficiary. The senior management of Goldman Sachs brokered a secret pact with China’s leaders that in exchange for orchestrating the most massive injection of US dollar capital and wholesale re-location of manufacturing capacity in the history of the global economy, China would recycle their hard-earned US toilet paper reserve currency wealth into US treasuries and other US debt instruments.
This was the necessary condition precedent for the global financial casino to rise to the next level of play.
Why?
The New Game
The financial architects at Goldman Sachs had a master plan – to dominate the global financial system. The means to achieve this financial power was the Shadow Banking System, the lynchpin being the derivative market and the securitization of assets, real and synthetic. The stakes would be huge, in the hundreds of US$ trillions and the way to transform the market was through massive leverage at all levels of the financial game.
But there was an inherent weakness in the overall scheme – the threat of inflation, more precisely hyperinflation. Such huge amounts of liquidity in the system would invariably trigger the depreciation of the reserve currency and the confidence in the system.
Hence the need for a system to keep in check price inflation and the illusion that the purchasing power of the toilet paper reserve currency could be maintained.
This is where China came in. Once China became the world’s factory, the problem would be resolved. When a suit which previously cost US$600 could be had for less than US$100, and a pair of shoes for less than US$5, the scam masterminds concluded that there would be no foreseeable threat to the largest casino operation in history.
China agreed to the exchange as it has over a billion mouths to feed and jobs for hundreds of millions needed to be secured, without which the system could not be maintained. But China was pragmatic enough to have two “economic systems” – a Yuan based domestic economy and a US$ based export economy, in the hope that the profits and benefits of the export economy would enable China to transform and establish a viable and dynamic domestic market which in time would replace the export dependent economy. It was a deal made with the devil, but there were no viable alternative options at the material time, more so after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
The Next Level of the Game
The next level of the game was reached when the toilet paper reserve currency literally went virtual – through the simple operation of a click of the mouse in the computers of the global banks.
The big boys at Goldman Sachs and other global banks were more than content to leave Las Vegas for the mafia and their miserable billions in turnover. The profits were considered dimes when compared to the hundreds of trillions generated by the virtual casino. It was a financial conquest beyond their wildest dreams. They even called themselves, “Master of the Universe”. Creating massive debts was the new game, and the big boys could even leverage more than 40 times capital! Asset values soared with so much liquidity chasing so few good assets.
However, the financial wizards failed to appreciate and or underestimate the amount of financial products that were needed to keep the game in play. They resorted to financial engineering – the securitization of assets. And when real assets were insufficient for securitization, synthetic assets were created. Soon enough, toxic waste was even considered as legitimate instruments for the game so long as it could be unloaded to greedy suckers with no recourse to the originators of these so-called investments.
For a time, it looked as if the financial wizards have solved the problem of how to feed the global casino monster.
Unfortunately, the music stopped and the bubble burst! And as they say the rest is history.
The Goldman Sachs Remedy
When losses are in the US$ trillions and whatever assets / capital remaining are in the US$ billions, we have a huge problem – a financial black-hole.
The preferred remedy by the financial masterminds at Goldman Sachs was to create another hoax – that if the big global banks were to fail triggering a systemic collapse, there would be Armageddon. These “too big to fail” banks must be injected with massive amount of virtual monies to recapitalize and get rid of the toxic assets on their balance sheet. The major central banks in the developed countries in cahoots with Goldman Sachs sang the same tune. All sorts of schemes were conjured to legitimize this bailout.
In essence, what transpired was the mere transfer of monies from the left pocket to the right pocket, with the twist that the banks were in fact helping the Government to overcome the financial crisis.
The Fed and key central banks agreed to lend “virtual monies” to the “too big to fail” global banks at zero or near zero interest rate and these banks in turn would “deposit” these monies with the Fed and other central banks at agreed interest rates. These transactions are all mere book entries. Other “loans” from the Fed and central banks (again at zero or near zero interest rates) are used to purchase government debts, these debts being the stimulus monies needed to revive the real economy and create jobs for the growing unemployed. So in essence, these banks are given “free money” to lend to the government at prior agreed interest rates with no risks at all. It is a hoax!
These “monies” are not even the dollar bills, but mere book entries created out of thin air.
So when the Fed injects US$ trillions into the banking system, it merely credits the amount in the accounts of the “too big to fail” banks at the Fed.
When the system is applied to international trade, the same modus operandi is used to pay for the goods imported from China, Japan etc.
For the rest of world, when buying goods denominated in US$, these countries must produce goods and services, sell them for dollars in order to purchase goods needed in their country. Simply put, they have to earn an income to purchase whatever goods and services needed. In contrast, all that the US needs to do is to create monies out of thin air and use them to pay for their imports!
The US can get away with this scam because it has the military muscle to compel and enforce this hoax. As stated earlier, this status quo was accepted especially during the Cold War and with some reluctance post the collapse of the Soviet Union, but with a proviso – that the US agrees to be the consumer of last resort. This arrangement provided some comfort because countries which have sold their goods to the US, can now use the dollars to buy goods from other countries as more than 80 per cent of world trade is denominated in dollars especially crude oil, the lifeline of the global economy.
But with the US in full bankruptcy and its citizens (the largest consumers in the world) being unable to borrow further monies to buy fancy goods from China, Japan and the rest of the world, the demand for dollar has evaporated. The dollar status as a reserve currency and its usefulness is being questioned more vocally.
The End Game
The present fallout can be summarized in simple terms:
Should a bankrupt country (the US) be allowed to use money created out of thin air to pay for goods produced with the sweat and tears of hardworking citizens of exporting countries? Adding insult to injury, the same dollars are now purchasing a lot less than before. So what is the use of being paid in a currency that is losing rapidly its value?
On the other hand, the US is telling the whole world, especially the Chinese that if they are not happy with the status quo, there is nothing to stop them from selling to the other countries and accepting their currencies. But if they want to sell to the mighty USA, they must accept US toilet paper reserve currency and its right to create monies out of thin air!
This is the ultimate poker game and whosoever blinks first loses and will suffer irreparable financial consequences. But who has the winning hand?
The US does not have the winning hand. Neither has China the winning hand.
This state of affairs cannot continue for long, for whatever cards the US or China may be contemplating to throw at the table to gain strategic advantage, any short term gains will be pyrrhic, for it will not be able to address the underlying antagonistic contradictions.
When the survival of the system is dependent on the availability of credit (i.e. accumulating more debts) it is only a matter of time before both the debtor and creditor come to the inevitable conclusion that the debt will never be paid. And unless the creditor is willing to write off the debt, resorting to drastic means to collect the outstanding debt is inevitable.
It would be naïve to think that the US would quietly allow itself to be foreclosed! When we reach that stage, war will be inevitable. It will be the US-UK-Israel Axis against the rest of the world.
The Prelude to the End Game
The US economy will be spiraling out of control in the coming months and will reach critical point by the end of the 1st quarter 2010 and implode by the 2nd quarter.
The massive US$ trillions of dollars stimulus has failed to turn the economy around. The massive blood transfusion may have kept the patient alive, but there are numerous signs of multi-organ failure.
There will be another wave of foreclosures of residential and more importantly commercial properties by end December and early 2010. And the foreclosed properties in 2009 will lead to depressed prices once they come through the pipeline. Home and commercial property values will plunge. Banks’ balance sheets will turn ugly and whatever “record profits” in the last two quarters of 2009 will not cover the additional red ink.
Given the above situation, will the Fed continue to buy mortgage-backed securities to prop up the markets? The Fed has already spent trillions buying Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac mortgages with no potential substitute buyer in sight. Therefore, the Fed’s balance sheet is as toxic as the “too big to fail” banks that it rescued.
In the circumstances, it makes no sense for anyone to assert that the worst is over and that the global economy is on the road to recovery.
And the surest sign that all is not well with the big banks is the recent speech by the President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, William Dudley at Princeton, New Jersey when he said that the Fed would curtail the risk of future liquidity crisis by providing a “backstop” to solvent firms with sufficient collateral.
This warning and assurance deserves further consideration. Firstly, it is a contradiction to state that a solvent firm with sufficient collateral would in fact encounter a liquidity crisis to warrant the need for a fall back on the Fed. It is in fact an admission that banks are not sufficiently capitalized and when the second wave of the tsunami hits them again, confidence will be sorely lacking.
Dudley actually said that, “the central bank could commit to being the lender of last resort… [and this would reduce] the risk of panics sparked by uncertainty among lenders about what other creditors think”.
To put it bluntly what he is saying is that the Fed will endeavour to avoid the repeat of the collapse of Bear Stearns, Lehman Bros and AIG. It is also an indication that the remaining big banks are in trouble.
It is interesting to note that a Bloomberg report in early November revealed that Citigroup Inc and JP Morgan Chase have been hoarding cash. The former has almost doubled its cash holdings to US$244.2 billion. In the case of the latter, the cash hoard amounted to US$453.6 billion. Yet, given this hoarding by the leading banks, the New York Federal Reserve Bank had to reassure the financial community that it is ready to inject massive liquidity to prop up the system.
It should come as no surprise that the value of the dollar is heading south.
When currencies are being debased, volatility in the stock market increases. But the gains are not worth the risks and if anyone is still in the market, they will be wiped out by the 1st quarter of 2010. The S&P may have shot up since the beginning of the year by over 25 per cent but it has been out-performed by gold. The gains have also lagged behind the official US inflation rate. It has in fact delivered a total return after inflation of approximately minus 25 per cent. When Meredith Whitney remarked that, “I don’t know what’s going on in the market right now, because it makes no sense to me”, it is time to get out of the market fast.
In a report to its clients, Société Générale warned that public debt would be massive in the next two years – 105 per cent of GDP in the UK, 125 per cent in the US and in Europe and 270 per cent in Japan. Global debt would reach US$45 trillion.
At some point in time, all these debts must be repaid. How will these debts be repaid?
If we go by what Bernanke has been preaching and practising, it means more toilet paper currency will be created to repay the debts.
As a result, debasement of currencies will continue and this will further aggravate existing tensions between the competing economies. And when creditors have enough of this toilet paper scam, expect violent reactions!
__________________
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.p...t=va&aid=16218
November 22, 2009
by Matthias Chang
Many of my friends who have been receiving my e-mail alerts over the last two years have lamented that in recent weeks I have not commented on the state of the global economy. I appreciate their anxiety but they forget that I am not a stock market analyst who is paid to write articles to lure investors back into the market. My website is free and I do not sell a financial newsletter so there is no need for me to churn out daily forecasts or analysis.
However, when the data is compelling and supports an inevitable trend, it is time for another review. This Red Alert is to enable visitors to my website to take appropriate actions to safeguard their wealth and welfare of their families in the coming months.
Since the last quarter of 2008, unrelenting currency warfare has been waged by the key global economies and while this competition thus far has been non-antagonistic, it will soon be antagonistic because the inherent differences are irreconcilable. The consequences to the global economy will be devastating and for the ordinary people, massive unemployment and social unrest are assured.
The policy-makers of these countries faced with the total collapse of the international financial architecture have concluded that the solution, the only solution is quantitative easing (i.e. massive injection of liquidity) to salvage the “too big to fail” banks and reflate their depressed economies. This is best reflected in Bernanke’s candid remark that, “the US government has a technology, called the printing press (or today, its electronic equivalent), that allows it to produce as many US dollars as it wishes at essentially no cost”.
This is the crux of the problem!
The Irreconcilable Differences
Some two decades ago, it was decided by the global financial elites that the framework for the global economy shall consist of:
1) A global derivative-based financial system, controlled by the US Federal Reserve Bank and its associate global banks in the developed countries.
2) The re-location from the West to the East in the production of goods, principally to China and India to “feed” the developed economies.
The entire system was built on a simple principle, that of a FED-controlled global reserve currency which will be the engine for growth for the global economy. It is essentially an imperialist economic principle.
Once we grasp this fundamental truth, Bernanke’s boast that the “US can produce as many US dollars as it wishes at no cost” takes on a different dimension.
I have talked to so many economists and when asked what is the crux of the present financial problem, they all respond in unison, “it is the global imbalances… the West consumes too much while the East saves too much and consumes not enough”. This is exemplified by the huge US trade deficits on the one part and China’s massive surpluses on the other.
Incredible wisdom and almost everyone echoes this mantra. The recent concluded APEC Summit was no different. This mantra was repeated as well as the call for freer trade between trading nations.
This is a grand hoax. All the current leaders on the world’s stage are corrupted to the rotten core and as such have no interest to call a spade a spade and expose the inherent contradictions within the existing financial system.
The call for a multi-polar world is meaningless when the entire global financial system is based on the unipolar US dollar reserve currency. This is the inherent contradiction within the present system and the problems associated with it cannot be resolved by another global reserve currency based on the IMF’s Special Drawing Rights as advocated by some countries. It was stillborn, the very moment it was conceived!
The leaders of China, Japan and the oil producing countries of the Middle East are all cursing and pissing about the current situation, but they don’t have the courage of their convictions to spell it out to their countrymen that they have been conned by the financial spin masters from the Fed acting on the instructions from Goldman Sachs.
Tell me which leader would dare admit that they have exchanged the nation’s wealth for toilet papers?
The toilet paper currency pantomime continues.
We have now reached a stalemate in the current currency war, not unlike the situation of the Cold War between the NATO pact countries and the Warsaw pact countries. Both sides were deterred by the MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) doctrine of nuclear wars. The costs to both sides were horrendous and it was only when the Soviet Union could not continue with the pace and cost of maintaining a nuclear deterrent and was forced into bankruptcy that the balance tilted in favour of the NATO alliance.
But it was a pyrrhic victory for the US and it allies. What kept the ability of the US to maintain its military might and outspend the Soviet Union was the right to print toilet paper currency and the acceptance of the US dollar by her allies as the world’s reserve currency.
But why did the countries allied to the US during the Cold War accepted the status quo?
Simple! They were all conned into believing that without the protection of Big Brother and its military outreach, they would be swallowed up by the communist menace. They agreed to march to the tune of the US Pied-Piper.
The next big question – why did the so-called “liberated” former communist allies of the Soviet bloc jump on the bandwagon?
Simple! They all believed in the illusion that was fostered by the global banks, led by Goldman Sachs that trading and selling their goods and services for the toilet paper US reserve currency would ensure untold wealth and prosperity.
But the biggest game in town was the Asia gambit. Japan, after a decade of recession following the burst of her property bubble did not have the means and the capacity to bring the game to the next level as envisaged by the financial architects in Goldman Sachs.
And China was the biggest beneficiary. The senior management of Goldman Sachs brokered a secret pact with China’s leaders that in exchange for orchestrating the most massive injection of US dollar capital and wholesale re-location of manufacturing capacity in the history of the global economy, China would recycle their hard-earned US toilet paper reserve currency wealth into US treasuries and other US debt instruments.
This was the necessary condition precedent for the global financial casino to rise to the next level of play.
Why?
The New Game
The financial architects at Goldman Sachs had a master plan – to dominate the global financial system. The means to achieve this financial power was the Shadow Banking System, the lynchpin being the derivative market and the securitization of assets, real and synthetic. The stakes would be huge, in the hundreds of US$ trillions and the way to transform the market was through massive leverage at all levels of the financial game.
But there was an inherent weakness in the overall scheme – the threat of inflation, more precisely hyperinflation. Such huge amounts of liquidity in the system would invariably trigger the depreciation of the reserve currency and the confidence in the system.
Hence the need for a system to keep in check price inflation and the illusion that the purchasing power of the toilet paper reserve currency could be maintained.
This is where China came in. Once China became the world’s factory, the problem would be resolved. When a suit which previously cost US$600 could be had for less than US$100, and a pair of shoes for less than US$5, the scam masterminds concluded that there would be no foreseeable threat to the largest casino operation in history.
China agreed to the exchange as it has over a billion mouths to feed and jobs for hundreds of millions needed to be secured, without which the system could not be maintained. But China was pragmatic enough to have two “economic systems” – a Yuan based domestic economy and a US$ based export economy, in the hope that the profits and benefits of the export economy would enable China to transform and establish a viable and dynamic domestic market which in time would replace the export dependent economy. It was a deal made with the devil, but there were no viable alternative options at the material time, more so after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
The Next Level of the Game
The next level of the game was reached when the toilet paper reserve currency literally went virtual – through the simple operation of a click of the mouse in the computers of the global banks.
The big boys at Goldman Sachs and other global banks were more than content to leave Las Vegas for the mafia and their miserable billions in turnover. The profits were considered dimes when compared to the hundreds of trillions generated by the virtual casino. It was a financial conquest beyond their wildest dreams. They even called themselves, “Master of the Universe”. Creating massive debts was the new game, and the big boys could even leverage more than 40 times capital! Asset values soared with so much liquidity chasing so few good assets.
However, the financial wizards failed to appreciate and or underestimate the amount of financial products that were needed to keep the game in play. They resorted to financial engineering – the securitization of assets. And when real assets were insufficient for securitization, synthetic assets were created. Soon enough, toxic waste was even considered as legitimate instruments for the game so long as it could be unloaded to greedy suckers with no recourse to the originators of these so-called investments.
For a time, it looked as if the financial wizards have solved the problem of how to feed the global casino monster.
Unfortunately, the music stopped and the bubble burst! And as they say the rest is history.
The Goldman Sachs Remedy
When losses are in the US$ trillions and whatever assets / capital remaining are in the US$ billions, we have a huge problem – a financial black-hole.
The preferred remedy by the financial masterminds at Goldman Sachs was to create another hoax – that if the big global banks were to fail triggering a systemic collapse, there would be Armageddon. These “too big to fail” banks must be injected with massive amount of virtual monies to recapitalize and get rid of the toxic assets on their balance sheet. The major central banks in the developed countries in cahoots with Goldman Sachs sang the same tune. All sorts of schemes were conjured to legitimize this bailout.
In essence, what transpired was the mere transfer of monies from the left pocket to the right pocket, with the twist that the banks were in fact helping the Government to overcome the financial crisis.
The Fed and key central banks agreed to lend “virtual monies” to the “too big to fail” global banks at zero or near zero interest rate and these banks in turn would “deposit” these monies with the Fed and other central banks at agreed interest rates. These transactions are all mere book entries. Other “loans” from the Fed and central banks (again at zero or near zero interest rates) are used to purchase government debts, these debts being the stimulus monies needed to revive the real economy and create jobs for the growing unemployed. So in essence, these banks are given “free money” to lend to the government at prior agreed interest rates with no risks at all. It is a hoax!
These “monies” are not even the dollar bills, but mere book entries created out of thin air.
So when the Fed injects US$ trillions into the banking system, it merely credits the amount in the accounts of the “too big to fail” banks at the Fed.
When the system is applied to international trade, the same modus operandi is used to pay for the goods imported from China, Japan etc.
For the rest of world, when buying goods denominated in US$, these countries must produce goods and services, sell them for dollars in order to purchase goods needed in their country. Simply put, they have to earn an income to purchase whatever goods and services needed. In contrast, all that the US needs to do is to create monies out of thin air and use them to pay for their imports!
The US can get away with this scam because it has the military muscle to compel and enforce this hoax. As stated earlier, this status quo was accepted especially during the Cold War and with some reluctance post the collapse of the Soviet Union, but with a proviso – that the US agrees to be the consumer of last resort. This arrangement provided some comfort because countries which have sold their goods to the US, can now use the dollars to buy goods from other countries as more than 80 per cent of world trade is denominated in dollars especially crude oil, the lifeline of the global economy.
But with the US in full bankruptcy and its citizens (the largest consumers in the world) being unable to borrow further monies to buy fancy goods from China, Japan and the rest of the world, the demand for dollar has evaporated. The dollar status as a reserve currency and its usefulness is being questioned more vocally.
The End Game
The present fallout can be summarized in simple terms:
Should a bankrupt country (the US) be allowed to use money created out of thin air to pay for goods produced with the sweat and tears of hardworking citizens of exporting countries? Adding insult to injury, the same dollars are now purchasing a lot less than before. So what is the use of being paid in a currency that is losing rapidly its value?
On the other hand, the US is telling the whole world, especially the Chinese that if they are not happy with the status quo, there is nothing to stop them from selling to the other countries and accepting their currencies. But if they want to sell to the mighty USA, they must accept US toilet paper reserve currency and its right to create monies out of thin air!
This is the ultimate poker game and whosoever blinks first loses and will suffer irreparable financial consequences. But who has the winning hand?
The US does not have the winning hand. Neither has China the winning hand.
This state of affairs cannot continue for long, for whatever cards the US or China may be contemplating to throw at the table to gain strategic advantage, any short term gains will be pyrrhic, for it will not be able to address the underlying antagonistic contradictions.
When the survival of the system is dependent on the availability of credit (i.e. accumulating more debts) it is only a matter of time before both the debtor and creditor come to the inevitable conclusion that the debt will never be paid. And unless the creditor is willing to write off the debt, resorting to drastic means to collect the outstanding debt is inevitable.
It would be naïve to think that the US would quietly allow itself to be foreclosed! When we reach that stage, war will be inevitable. It will be the US-UK-Israel Axis against the rest of the world.
The Prelude to the End Game
The US economy will be spiraling out of control in the coming months and will reach critical point by the end of the 1st quarter 2010 and implode by the 2nd quarter.
The massive US$ trillions of dollars stimulus has failed to turn the economy around. The massive blood transfusion may have kept the patient alive, but there are numerous signs of multi-organ failure.
There will be another wave of foreclosures of residential and more importantly commercial properties by end December and early 2010. And the foreclosed properties in 2009 will lead to depressed prices once they come through the pipeline. Home and commercial property values will plunge. Banks’ balance sheets will turn ugly and whatever “record profits” in the last two quarters of 2009 will not cover the additional red ink.
Given the above situation, will the Fed continue to buy mortgage-backed securities to prop up the markets? The Fed has already spent trillions buying Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac mortgages with no potential substitute buyer in sight. Therefore, the Fed’s balance sheet is as toxic as the “too big to fail” banks that it rescued.
In the circumstances, it makes no sense for anyone to assert that the worst is over and that the global economy is on the road to recovery.
And the surest sign that all is not well with the big banks is the recent speech by the President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, William Dudley at Princeton, New Jersey when he said that the Fed would curtail the risk of future liquidity crisis by providing a “backstop” to solvent firms with sufficient collateral.
This warning and assurance deserves further consideration. Firstly, it is a contradiction to state that a solvent firm with sufficient collateral would in fact encounter a liquidity crisis to warrant the need for a fall back on the Fed. It is in fact an admission that banks are not sufficiently capitalized and when the second wave of the tsunami hits them again, confidence will be sorely lacking.
Dudley actually said that, “the central bank could commit to being the lender of last resort… [and this would reduce] the risk of panics sparked by uncertainty among lenders about what other creditors think”.
To put it bluntly what he is saying is that the Fed will endeavour to avoid the repeat of the collapse of Bear Stearns, Lehman Bros and AIG. It is also an indication that the remaining big banks are in trouble.
It is interesting to note that a Bloomberg report in early November revealed that Citigroup Inc and JP Morgan Chase have been hoarding cash. The former has almost doubled its cash holdings to US$244.2 billion. In the case of the latter, the cash hoard amounted to US$453.6 billion. Yet, given this hoarding by the leading banks, the New York Federal Reserve Bank had to reassure the financial community that it is ready to inject massive liquidity to prop up the system.
It should come as no surprise that the value of the dollar is heading south.
When currencies are being debased, volatility in the stock market increases. But the gains are not worth the risks and if anyone is still in the market, they will be wiped out by the 1st quarter of 2010. The S&P may have shot up since the beginning of the year by over 25 per cent but it has been out-performed by gold. The gains have also lagged behind the official US inflation rate. It has in fact delivered a total return after inflation of approximately minus 25 per cent. When Meredith Whitney remarked that, “I don’t know what’s going on in the market right now, because it makes no sense to me”, it is time to get out of the market fast.
In a report to its clients, Société Générale warned that public debt would be massive in the next two years – 105 per cent of GDP in the UK, 125 per cent in the US and in Europe and 270 per cent in Japan. Global debt would reach US$45 trillion.
At some point in time, all these debts must be repaid. How will these debts be repaid?
If we go by what Bernanke has been preaching and practising, it means more toilet paper currency will be created to repay the debts.
As a result, debasement of currencies will continue and this will further aggravate existing tensions between the competing economies. And when creditors have enough of this toilet paper scam, expect violent reactions!
__________________
Sunday, November 15, 2009
Wednesday, November 11, 2009
The Perilous Future of U.S. Strategic Forces
The Perilous Future of U.S. Strategic Forces
Bradley A. Thayer &
Thomas M. Skypek
Today, the United States finds itself in a curious position in international politics. While its conventional military power remains unparalleled, its once-formidable strategic deterrent—encapsulated in its nuclear forces and infrastructure—is atrophying.
It is painfully clear that Washington’s interest in its strategic forces has waned greatly since the collapse of the Soviet Union. The United States has not produced a new nuclear warhead in almost two decades, and its Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) force and nuclear infrastructure are stretched to the point of exhaustion with their current missions. Problems that would have been unthinkable during the Cold War now seem to be commonplace. Such a decline is unprecedented, and will have grand strategic consequences for American power in the years ahead.
Understanding this state of affairs is important for several reasons. First, conventional wisdom has it that the strategic forces and infrastructure of the United States are strong and will remain so into the future. In fact, however, quite the opposite is true. America’s nuclear capabilities are sufficient at present, but are decaying in every aspect—from the nuclear warheads themselves to the missiles that deliver them to the specialized scientists and engineers who build them. There are serious weaknesses in the nuclear arsenal that will manifest themselves in the years ahead, and cause U.S. strategic forces to fail to meet future mission requirements.
Second, if this problem is not addressed, the credibility of the U.S. extended deterrent will be doubted by both allies and adversaries. A weak extended deterrent capability will make aggression more likely, and further hinder Washington’s ability to advance U.S. interests against foes who—for the first time in history—may be better-armed with nuclear weapons than the United States.
Third, if the credibility of America’s strategic deterrent is in question, the United States will have created an incentive to proliferate. Under those conditions, it is reasonable to expect that many states now covered by U.S. extended deterrent commitments, such as Japan, Saudi Arabia, and South Korea, would themselves be driven to acquire nuclear forces.
The bear is back
While the United States faces substantial problems in its strategic force posture, and is, indeed, the only nuclear country that cannot manufacture a new nuclear weapon, other nuclear states—China, France, Great Britain, India, Israel, North Korea, Pakistan, and Russia—have not taken a similar “nuclear holiday.” As we noted not long ago in The National Interest, the strategic nuclear balance has changed appreciably in recent years, and not in Washington’s favor.1
While Chinese nuclear modernization is important, and will become ever more so, it is salient for our discussion to acknowledge what Moscow is accomplishing. This is because, first, Chinese strategic modernization continues slowly and steadily but is still modest. China’s Xia SSBN, for example, has never conducted a deterrent patrol; second, and more important, is the inescapable conclusion that the strategic torch has been passed from Washington to Moscow.
Quite simply, Russia is building a twenty-first-century nuclear arsenal, while the United States is not. If the United States does not change course and take the necessary steps to modernize its arsenal, Russia will secure strategic dominance, with the accompanying political benefits accruing to Moscow.
This is not to argue that the Russian nuclear enterprise is flawless. It is not. Moscow’s nuclear command and control suffers from serious deficiencies, particularly in the realm of Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR) capabilities. In time, however these deficiencies will be resolved. Indeed, the Russians are moving to solve them already, through improvements to both their strategic and conventional forces.
Since 1999, the Russians have conducted annual strategic exercises, the scale of which matches what was typical during the Cold War, and far beyond what the United States has undertaken. Russian exercises also involve the highest echelons of their government. In August 2005, during a major exercise, President Vladimir Putin himself flew in a Blackjack bomber that launched four Kh-555 land attack cruise missiles. The commitment of the Russian leadership to building and maintaining a modernized nuclear arsenal is unquestionable. The most convincing evidence is the depth and breadth of their modernization efforts.
Russian strategic modernization began in earnest this decade. Unlike the United States, Russia is modernizing each leg of its triad, has significantly reformed its nuclear doctrine, and continues to build new nuclear weapons. The Russian strategic hiatus of the 1990s, in other words, ended with the ascension of Vladimir Putin to the Russian presidency roughly a decade ago. It continues today under the leadership of Putin’s handpicked protégé, Dmitry Medvedev.
While it has never been the cornerstone of the Russian triad, Moscow’s modernization of its strategic bomber fleet nevertheless continues steadily. Two strategic bombers will be commissioned into the Russian Air Force every three years, according to General Vladimir Mikhailov, the commander of the Russian Air Force.2 Russia has three types of bombers in its fleet, the Tu-160 “Blackjack,” Tu-22 “Blinder,” and Tu-95 “Bear.” The new bombers will be Tu-160s.
Like bombers, submarines have always played second fiddle to the Russian ICBM force. Still, there is significant modernization under way to this leg as well. This modernization began by eliminating the vestiges of the Soviet ballistic missile submarine fleet. By the start of 2007, Russia had decommissioned 148 out of 197 Soviet-era submarines. Russia dismantles eighteen nuclear submarines annually, and Moscow expects to have decommissioned all Soviet-era submarines by 2010.3
Russia is also making progress on its sea-launched ballistic missile capabilities. In June 2007, it successfully tested its new Bulava SLBM, following a series of failed tests throughout 2006. Russia’s leadership remains committed to the system, despite the failure of the Bulava’s most recent (December 2008) test. Colonel General Anatoly Nogovitsyn, deputy chief of the Russian General Staff, announced in January 2009 that tests of the Bulava will continue.4 Once operational, the Bulava—a slightly modified version of the new Topol-M ICBM—will equip Russia’s three new Borei-class nuclear submarines. It carries a single 500 kiloton nuclear weapon, plus decoys, and has a maneuvering capability of unknown effectiveness intended to defeat U.S. missile defenses.
As was the case with the Soviet Union in its day, the backbone of Russia’s strategic nuclear forces lies with its ICBMs. The SS-18 will stay in service until 2016. In addition, Russia has developed the silo-based SS-27, of which it has 40 now, and will add 34 more. A road mobile derivative is also under development, and Russia is expected to have 50 by 2015.5 Additionally, in May and December 2007, Russia tested a new MIRVed ICBM, the RS-24. This missile, which has not yet been given a NATO designation, will replace the old SS-18 and SS-19 ICBMs by 2050.
There are also reports that Russia is working on a new liquid-fueled ICBM which will carry ten warheads with a throw-weight of four tons.6 This would far outclass its closest U.S. counterparts, the Minuteman and Trident II. Also in the realm of potential weapons, the Russians have discussed the development of a hypersonic glide vehicle that would reach distant continents quickly and would be able to penetrate U.S. missile defenses.7
The Russians are also modernizing their low-yield nuclear warheads, which may be used for tactical or strategic purposes. Moscow is developing a precision, low-yield nuclear weapon, on the order of several tens of tons to 100 tons of TNT, and a “clean” nuclear earth penetrator, even as Congress has canceled new low-yield programs such as the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator (RNEP).8
Moscow is also interested in EMP weapons, and is believed to possess a robust capability that could give it the capacity to target the U.S.’ dependency on insufficiently hardened electronics for its military and key civilian sectors. Such a scenario may sound far-fetched, but it is plausible—and potentially catastrophic. As Brian Kennedy of the Claremont Institute recently outlined in the Wall Street Journal:
Gamma rays from the explosion, through the Compton Effect, generate three classes of disruptive electromagnetic pulses, which permanently destroy consumer electronics, the electronics in some automobiles and, most importantly, the hundreds of large transformers that distribute power throughout the U.S. All of our lights, refrigerators, water-pumping stations, TVs and radios stop running. We have no communication and no ability to provide food and water to 300 million Americans.9
Russia has the world’s largest nuclear weapons production complex, with two plants for nuclear weapons assembly and one plant for plutonium and uranium pit production. Russia has the stated capacity to disassemble 2,000 warheads a year, which equals the technical capability to produce about the same number of warheads. The United States, meanwhile, is not developing or producing any new warheads, and has not since 1989. In an emergency, the U.S. might be able to produce about 40 warheads a year at the TA-55 facility at Los Alamos. Not until 2023, under present plans, will the U.S. have large scale pit production capability. Russia’s nuclear testing facilities require minimal lead time in order to conduct a nuclear test, and Russia has admitted to conducting a robust program of hydrodynamic experiments, or “sub-critical” tests, that produce a very small yield, the equivalent of 0.1 gram of TNT.
From the above survey, it is abundantly clear that the Russian leadership has made the modernization of its strategic nuclear weapons a priority. While other states may not, Russia recognizes that nuclear weapons remain a major source of strategic power, and for that reason it will continue to produce the most advanced nuclear forces in the world. Their nuclear infrastructure is also the most advanced and capable in the world. Given these capabilities, and its conventional weakness, it is no surprise that Russia has the lowest declared threshold for nuclear use of any of the major nuclear powers. In January 2008, Yury Baluyevsky, then the Chief of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces, detailed publicly exactly how low that threshold actually is:
We do not intend to attack anyone, but we consider it necessary for all our partners in the world community to understand clearly... that to defend the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Russia and its allies, military forces will be used, including preventively, including with the use of nuclear weapons.10
Baluyevsky’s remarks about the preventive use of nuclear weapons underscore the value Russia places on its nuclear capabilities. Nuclear weapons and strategic strike capabilities will remain the highest force maintenance and procurement priority of the Russian Federation for decades to come.
An agenda for renewal
In Washington, by contrast, nuclear weapons have become an afterthought for policymakers and military leadership alike. If U.S. nuclear forces were a stock, its price would have collapsed in the 1990s, and its value would remain near an all-time low. Yet nuclear modernization is a non-negotiable imperative if the United States wishes to achieve its grand strategic goals into the future, including credible extended deterrence commitments to allies like Japan and South Korea. Given the time required to develop these complicated systems, and the period needed to integrate them into the force, modernization must begin immediately.
Using 2009 as a baseline, the ages of the current systems of the nuclear triad are 39 years for the Minuteman III, 19 years for the Trident II D-5 SLBM, 48 years for the B-52H, 12 years for the B-2, and 28 years for the Ohio Class SSBNs. The startling age of these strategic systems and the increasing costs to deploy and maintain them accounts in large part for the rapid reductions in the nuclear forces of the United States that have taken place since 2001—including an 18 percent reduction in ICBMs, a 63 percent decline in the number of bombers in service, and a constriction of nearly a quarter in the size of the SSBN fleet.11
The first step toward reversing this decline is to modernize the U.S. ICBM force. Today, ICBMs serve as the anchor of the United States’ strategic deterrent, for good reason. ICBMs possess a robust payload capacity and are survivable against would-be first strikes initiated by any current likely adversaries. In addition, ICBMs have the power to hold a spectrum of targets at prompt risk, whether using nuclear or conventional warheads.
However, drastic reductions in the size of the ICBM force—due to Minuteman II, Minuteman III, and Peacekeeper retirements, and the lack of a replacement ICBM for the Minuteman III—will raise doubts about the capabilities of the United States in the years ahead. America’s ICBM force may be robust now, but it will not be in the future.
A second area of focus must be the development of robust defenses against ballistic and cruise missiles. The global proliferation of ballistic and cruise missile technologies has left the U.S. homeland vulnerable. Ballistic missiles are capable of delivering WMD as well as large conventional payloads, and the technologies needed to build them are widely available, often indigenously or on the global market. At present, there are 25 states armed with ballistic missiles. Many, like Iran and North Korea, not only produce ballistic missiles but export them as well, and share critical missile technologies with other states. For example, Pakistan’s Ghauri medium-range ballistic missile (MRBM) is based on the North Korean No Dong, and was produced with North Korean assistance. Iran’s Shahab-3 MRBM is a version of the No Dong that has been improved with Russian assistance. Even ICBMs are no longer a monopoly of the superpowers. In the next eight to ten years, North Korea and Iran are expected to develop an ICBM capability, which would allow them to target the United States, as well as its allies.
To combat the growing threat of ballistic missiles, the Bush administration deployed a limited defense during its time in office. Key components of this system are the ground-based interceptors based at Fort Greely in Alaska and Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. A third interceptor site, which would give the United States and NATO the capability for limited defense against the Iranian Shahab family of missiles, is currently planned for Poland and the Czech Republic.
It is unclear, as of yet, how the Obama administration plans to approach the issue of missile defense. Early signs, however, are not encouraging. In November 2008, the Obama transition team released the following statement after a telephone call with Polish President Lech Kaczynski: “President-elect Obama made no commitment on it [placing interceptors in Poland]. His position is as it was throughout the campaign—that he supports deploying a missile defense system when the technology is proved to be workable.”12 This ambiguity is troubling, since a robust missile defense capability not only strengthens Washington’s deterrence posture but also hedges against a failure of deterrence.
The technologies in question, moreover, are mature. The Pentagon’s successful shoot-down of a damaged U.S. satellite with a Standard Missile-3 in February 2008 demonstrated the versatility of hit-to-kill technology. The operation also highlighted why further investments are warranted. It is important that the leadership in Beijing, Moscow, Pyongyang, and Tehran knows that U.S. missile defense technologies work.
But significant work remains. Cruise missiles, for example, pre-sent as serious a danger to the United States as ballistic missiles, and yet this threat currently receives almost no attention from policymakers or the popular media. Cruise missiles may be launched from any location: the ground, on or under the sea, or in the air. They are very difficult to detect because they fly at low altitudes, at relatively high speeds, and have a low radar cross section with a modest infrared signature.
Cruise missiles are ideal platforms for countries like China, Iran, or North Korea to attack the United States because they are proven weapons systems, easily affordable, easier to maintain and deploy, hard to defeat, and can be delivered by several different weapons platforms. The United States is deeply vulnerable; seventy-five percent of the U.S. population and 80 percent of the wealth of the U.S. lie within 200 miles of the coast. Cruise missiles are even more widely distributed than ballistic missiles, moreover. About 75 countries are estimated to possess cruise missiles, and by 2015, at least 24 states are expected to pose a serious cruise missile threat to the United States due to the proliferation of sophisticated systems. With effective missile defenses, the United States could not only defend itself against ballistic or cruise missile attack, but also assure allies that they will be protected as well.
Another, seldom analyzed, problem for the strategic forces of the United States is an aging workforce—one created by our long national procurement holiday for strategic systems. No other nuclear country faces this problem, since all others are modernizing their strategic forces. And this “critical skills” gap is only widening. The Defense Science Board Task Force on Future Strategic Strike Skills convened in 2006 evaluated the critical skills of the United States in six categories: development capabilities and skills; production capabilities and skills; sustainment capabilities and skills; material availability; critical suppliers; and special facilities, such as for nuclear testing. The DSB report is shocking in its assessments. It found that the United States faces great dangers in the reliability of the guidance, re-entry systems, and propulsion of the ICBM force.13 The state of the U.S. SLBM and SSBN force is better, at least for the moment. But, as the DSB study made clear, current demographics do not favor the maintenance of critical skills over the next ten years.14
With respect to nuclear command and control issues, there are two areas of concern. The first is access to space, upon which many U.S. military capabilities rely. The shrinking launch schedules due to commercial satellite providers, decreasing military and NASA missile launches, and an aging workforce mean that fewer individuals have participated in a successful launch and know the difficulties that may be encountered and how to solve them. Second, the aging workforce also hinders the government’s ability to gauge nuclear weapons effects on systems. As the DSB recognizes:
Today, the number of individuals working on the various C4ISR [Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance] programs who have worried about system or subsystem vulnerabilities to EMP [Electromagnetic Pulse]—including black-out, red-out, or other nuclear weapon-induced effects—continues to decline, and the people with these skill sets are not being replaced.15
These vulnerabilities, moreover, will almost certainly increase if they are not addressed immediately, because many of the people who addressed EMP vulnerability during the Cold War are retiring.
When it comes to strategic forces—including warheads and delivery systems—the United States is faring even worse, for three major reasons. First, spending on nuclear weapons systems has declined significantly in the post-Cold War period, and is now the smallest share of the defense budget since the 1940s. The decline has been greatest in nuclear offensive strike systems. For these systems, funding has fallen to 4 percent of DoD’s total current budget. In 1991, the United States funded the last SSBN and the last Peacekeeper ICBM; and, in 1993, it bought the last B-2 of its fleet. So, funding has declined, while each component of the triad has aged.
The second major problem is the nuclear warheads themselves. At the present time, the key challenge for the United States is ensuring the reliability of its strategic arsenal. The Bush administration opposed the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, but did not break our country’s nearly twenty-year moratorium on nuclear testing. As a result, the nuclear weapons labs are confronted with the momentous challenge of ensuring reliability without the scientific evidence that only testing can provide.
Congress, meanwhile, has consistently reduced and/or eliminated funding for nuclear modernization programs, including the Reliable Replacement Warhead (RRW) program. In September 2008, Congress refused once again to fund RRW. Opposition on Capitol Hill has been bipartisan. Only a handful of members, such as Senators Jon Kyl (R-AZ) and Jeff Sessions (R-AL), and Representative Terry Everett (R-AL), have consistently voted to fund critical modernization efforts such as RRW. Fortunately, the Obama administration shows signs that it could spur greater attention to this issue. Writing in the January/February 2009 issue of Foreign Affairs, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates indicated as much when he challenged congressional inaction on the RRW, stating that “Congress needs to do its part by funding the Reliable Replacement Warhead Program—for safety, for security, and for a more reliable deterrent.”16
Toward a nuclear renaissance
In the post-Cold War world, the United States will continue to depend on its strategic nuclear forces to accomplish its grand strategic goals. That will become increasingly difficult if it does not act—and act now—to redress the key vulnerabilities in its arsenal. While these vulnerabilities may not receive significant attention in the press, they are noticed by the allies and foes of the United States. Nuclear weapons remain a tremendous source of power in the international system. Quite simply, states with nuclear weapons are treated differently than those without them.
America currently shows few signs of understanding this reality. There are no new ICBMs or SLBMs under development, and the U.S. targets no states with its missiles. B-2 production has halted, and no U.S. bombers are on alert. Many strategic and tactical nuclear weapons programs have been canceled. U.S. Army, Marines, and Navy surface and air components are out of the nuclear weapons business. There has been a reduction of over 85 percent in the number of NATO sub-strategic nuclear weapons in Europe as their delivery systems have dropped from eleven to one.
The upcoming Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) and Nuclear Posture Review (NPR)—both of which will be gearing up in the coming months—present a major opportunity for the Obama administration to ameliorate America’s deteriorating nuclear weapons enterprise. Modernization of the entire nuclear enterprise should be the chief priority of these strategic policy documents.
The stakes could not be higher. The overwhelming military superiority of the United States is not guaranteed into perpetuity. Eventually, as its nuclear capabilities and skills atrophy, the United States will lose the great advantages it now possesses, because other nuclear states will continue to modernize their arsenals and maintain robust nuclear infrastructure. And, once lost, recapturing a credible extended deterrent capability will be increasingly difficult for America to accomplish.
Bradley A. Thayer is an Associate Professor of Defense and Strategic Studies at Missouri State University, located in Fairfax, Virginia. Thomas M. Skypek is a Washington-based defense policy analyst. The views expressed herein are exclusively those of the authors.
Bradley A. Thayer and Thomas M. Skypek, “Russia Goes Ballistic,” The National Interest, no. 97 (September/October 2008), 61-68.
“Russian Air Force to Get Two Strategic Bombers Every Three Years,” RIA Novosti, January 19, 2007, http://www.defencetalk.com/news/publish/airforce/Russian_Air_Force_To_Get_Strategic_Bombers100010013.php.
“Russia Scraps 148 out of 197 Decommissioned Nuclear Submarines,” RIA Novosti, December 27, 2006, http://en.rian.ru/russia/20061227/57958170.html.
“Russia not to Give up Bulava Missile Test Launches,” RIA Novosti, January 4, 2009, http://en.rian.ru/russia/20090104/119365579.html.
Vladimir Isachenkov, “Weapons Plan Strives to Beat Soviet Readiness,” Washington Times, February 8, 2007, http://www.washtimes.com/world/20070207-104140-3775r.htm.
Mark B. Schneider, “The Strategic Nuclear Forces and Doctrine of the Russian Federation,” in Bradley A. Thayer, ed., American National Security Policy: Essays in Honor of William R. Van Cleave (Fairfax, VA: National Institute Press, 2007), 148.
“Arms Control and Proliferation Profile: Russia,” Arms Control Association, November 2007, http://www.armscontrol.org/factsheets/russiaprofile.
Schneider, “The Strategic Nuclear Forces and Doctrine of the Russian Federation,” 148.
Brian T. Kennedy, “What a Single Nuclear Warhead Could Do,” Wall Street Journal, November 24, 2008, http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB122748923919852015-lMyQjAxMDI4MjI3MzQyODM5Wj.html.
Steve Gutterman, “Baluyevsky Warns of Nuclear Defense,” Moscow Times, January 21, 2008, http://www.themoscowtimes.com/stories/2008/01/21/017.html.
These percentages are based on nuclear force reductions in the U.S. arsenal from 2001 to 2007.
Christina Bellantoni, “Obama, Polish President at Odds on Call,” Washington Times, November 9, 2008, http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2008/nov/09/obama-polish-president-at-odds-on-call/.
Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics, Report of the Defense Science Board Task Force on Future Strategic Strike Skills, March 2006, 24-26.
Ibid., 32-34.
Ibidem, 43.
Robert Gates, “How to Reprogram the Pentagon,” Foreign Affairs, January/February 2009.
© Copyright 2001-2009 JINSA. All rights reserved. Terms of Use. top home
Bradley A. Thayer &
Thomas M. Skypek
Today, the United States finds itself in a curious position in international politics. While its conventional military power remains unparalleled, its once-formidable strategic deterrent—encapsulated in its nuclear forces and infrastructure—is atrophying.
It is painfully clear that Washington’s interest in its strategic forces has waned greatly since the collapse of the Soviet Union. The United States has not produced a new nuclear warhead in almost two decades, and its Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) force and nuclear infrastructure are stretched to the point of exhaustion with their current missions. Problems that would have been unthinkable during the Cold War now seem to be commonplace. Such a decline is unprecedented, and will have grand strategic consequences for American power in the years ahead.
Understanding this state of affairs is important for several reasons. First, conventional wisdom has it that the strategic forces and infrastructure of the United States are strong and will remain so into the future. In fact, however, quite the opposite is true. America’s nuclear capabilities are sufficient at present, but are decaying in every aspect—from the nuclear warheads themselves to the missiles that deliver them to the specialized scientists and engineers who build them. There are serious weaknesses in the nuclear arsenal that will manifest themselves in the years ahead, and cause U.S. strategic forces to fail to meet future mission requirements.
Second, if this problem is not addressed, the credibility of the U.S. extended deterrent will be doubted by both allies and adversaries. A weak extended deterrent capability will make aggression more likely, and further hinder Washington’s ability to advance U.S. interests against foes who—for the first time in history—may be better-armed with nuclear weapons than the United States.
Third, if the credibility of America’s strategic deterrent is in question, the United States will have created an incentive to proliferate. Under those conditions, it is reasonable to expect that many states now covered by U.S. extended deterrent commitments, such as Japan, Saudi Arabia, and South Korea, would themselves be driven to acquire nuclear forces.
The bear is back
While the United States faces substantial problems in its strategic force posture, and is, indeed, the only nuclear country that cannot manufacture a new nuclear weapon, other nuclear states—China, France, Great Britain, India, Israel, North Korea, Pakistan, and Russia—have not taken a similar “nuclear holiday.” As we noted not long ago in The National Interest, the strategic nuclear balance has changed appreciably in recent years, and not in Washington’s favor.1
While Chinese nuclear modernization is important, and will become ever more so, it is salient for our discussion to acknowledge what Moscow is accomplishing. This is because, first, Chinese strategic modernization continues slowly and steadily but is still modest. China’s Xia SSBN, for example, has never conducted a deterrent patrol; second, and more important, is the inescapable conclusion that the strategic torch has been passed from Washington to Moscow.
Quite simply, Russia is building a twenty-first-century nuclear arsenal, while the United States is not. If the United States does not change course and take the necessary steps to modernize its arsenal, Russia will secure strategic dominance, with the accompanying political benefits accruing to Moscow.
This is not to argue that the Russian nuclear enterprise is flawless. It is not. Moscow’s nuclear command and control suffers from serious deficiencies, particularly in the realm of Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR) capabilities. In time, however these deficiencies will be resolved. Indeed, the Russians are moving to solve them already, through improvements to both their strategic and conventional forces.
Since 1999, the Russians have conducted annual strategic exercises, the scale of which matches what was typical during the Cold War, and far beyond what the United States has undertaken. Russian exercises also involve the highest echelons of their government. In August 2005, during a major exercise, President Vladimir Putin himself flew in a Blackjack bomber that launched four Kh-555 land attack cruise missiles. The commitment of the Russian leadership to building and maintaining a modernized nuclear arsenal is unquestionable. The most convincing evidence is the depth and breadth of their modernization efforts.
Russian strategic modernization began in earnest this decade. Unlike the United States, Russia is modernizing each leg of its triad, has significantly reformed its nuclear doctrine, and continues to build new nuclear weapons. The Russian strategic hiatus of the 1990s, in other words, ended with the ascension of Vladimir Putin to the Russian presidency roughly a decade ago. It continues today under the leadership of Putin’s handpicked protégé, Dmitry Medvedev.
While it has never been the cornerstone of the Russian triad, Moscow’s modernization of its strategic bomber fleet nevertheless continues steadily. Two strategic bombers will be commissioned into the Russian Air Force every three years, according to General Vladimir Mikhailov, the commander of the Russian Air Force.2 Russia has three types of bombers in its fleet, the Tu-160 “Blackjack,” Tu-22 “Blinder,” and Tu-95 “Bear.” The new bombers will be Tu-160s.
Like bombers, submarines have always played second fiddle to the Russian ICBM force. Still, there is significant modernization under way to this leg as well. This modernization began by eliminating the vestiges of the Soviet ballistic missile submarine fleet. By the start of 2007, Russia had decommissioned 148 out of 197 Soviet-era submarines. Russia dismantles eighteen nuclear submarines annually, and Moscow expects to have decommissioned all Soviet-era submarines by 2010.3
Russia is also making progress on its sea-launched ballistic missile capabilities. In June 2007, it successfully tested its new Bulava SLBM, following a series of failed tests throughout 2006. Russia’s leadership remains committed to the system, despite the failure of the Bulava’s most recent (December 2008) test. Colonel General Anatoly Nogovitsyn, deputy chief of the Russian General Staff, announced in January 2009 that tests of the Bulava will continue.4 Once operational, the Bulava—a slightly modified version of the new Topol-M ICBM—will equip Russia’s three new Borei-class nuclear submarines. It carries a single 500 kiloton nuclear weapon, plus decoys, and has a maneuvering capability of unknown effectiveness intended to defeat U.S. missile defenses.
As was the case with the Soviet Union in its day, the backbone of Russia’s strategic nuclear forces lies with its ICBMs. The SS-18 will stay in service until 2016. In addition, Russia has developed the silo-based SS-27, of which it has 40 now, and will add 34 more. A road mobile derivative is also under development, and Russia is expected to have 50 by 2015.5 Additionally, in May and December 2007, Russia tested a new MIRVed ICBM, the RS-24. This missile, which has not yet been given a NATO designation, will replace the old SS-18 and SS-19 ICBMs by 2050.
There are also reports that Russia is working on a new liquid-fueled ICBM which will carry ten warheads with a throw-weight of four tons.6 This would far outclass its closest U.S. counterparts, the Minuteman and Trident II. Also in the realm of potential weapons, the Russians have discussed the development of a hypersonic glide vehicle that would reach distant continents quickly and would be able to penetrate U.S. missile defenses.7
The Russians are also modernizing their low-yield nuclear warheads, which may be used for tactical or strategic purposes. Moscow is developing a precision, low-yield nuclear weapon, on the order of several tens of tons to 100 tons of TNT, and a “clean” nuclear earth penetrator, even as Congress has canceled new low-yield programs such as the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator (RNEP).8
Moscow is also interested in EMP weapons, and is believed to possess a robust capability that could give it the capacity to target the U.S.’ dependency on insufficiently hardened electronics for its military and key civilian sectors. Such a scenario may sound far-fetched, but it is plausible—and potentially catastrophic. As Brian Kennedy of the Claremont Institute recently outlined in the Wall Street Journal:
Gamma rays from the explosion, through the Compton Effect, generate three classes of disruptive electromagnetic pulses, which permanently destroy consumer electronics, the electronics in some automobiles and, most importantly, the hundreds of large transformers that distribute power throughout the U.S. All of our lights, refrigerators, water-pumping stations, TVs and radios stop running. We have no communication and no ability to provide food and water to 300 million Americans.9
Russia has the world’s largest nuclear weapons production complex, with two plants for nuclear weapons assembly and one plant for plutonium and uranium pit production. Russia has the stated capacity to disassemble 2,000 warheads a year, which equals the technical capability to produce about the same number of warheads. The United States, meanwhile, is not developing or producing any new warheads, and has not since 1989. In an emergency, the U.S. might be able to produce about 40 warheads a year at the TA-55 facility at Los Alamos. Not until 2023, under present plans, will the U.S. have large scale pit production capability. Russia’s nuclear testing facilities require minimal lead time in order to conduct a nuclear test, and Russia has admitted to conducting a robust program of hydrodynamic experiments, or “sub-critical” tests, that produce a very small yield, the equivalent of 0.1 gram of TNT.
From the above survey, it is abundantly clear that the Russian leadership has made the modernization of its strategic nuclear weapons a priority. While other states may not, Russia recognizes that nuclear weapons remain a major source of strategic power, and for that reason it will continue to produce the most advanced nuclear forces in the world. Their nuclear infrastructure is also the most advanced and capable in the world. Given these capabilities, and its conventional weakness, it is no surprise that Russia has the lowest declared threshold for nuclear use of any of the major nuclear powers. In January 2008, Yury Baluyevsky, then the Chief of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces, detailed publicly exactly how low that threshold actually is:
We do not intend to attack anyone, but we consider it necessary for all our partners in the world community to understand clearly... that to defend the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Russia and its allies, military forces will be used, including preventively, including with the use of nuclear weapons.10
Baluyevsky’s remarks about the preventive use of nuclear weapons underscore the value Russia places on its nuclear capabilities. Nuclear weapons and strategic strike capabilities will remain the highest force maintenance and procurement priority of the Russian Federation for decades to come.
An agenda for renewal
In Washington, by contrast, nuclear weapons have become an afterthought for policymakers and military leadership alike. If U.S. nuclear forces were a stock, its price would have collapsed in the 1990s, and its value would remain near an all-time low. Yet nuclear modernization is a non-negotiable imperative if the United States wishes to achieve its grand strategic goals into the future, including credible extended deterrence commitments to allies like Japan and South Korea. Given the time required to develop these complicated systems, and the period needed to integrate them into the force, modernization must begin immediately.
Using 2009 as a baseline, the ages of the current systems of the nuclear triad are 39 years for the Minuteman III, 19 years for the Trident II D-5 SLBM, 48 years for the B-52H, 12 years for the B-2, and 28 years for the Ohio Class SSBNs. The startling age of these strategic systems and the increasing costs to deploy and maintain them accounts in large part for the rapid reductions in the nuclear forces of the United States that have taken place since 2001—including an 18 percent reduction in ICBMs, a 63 percent decline in the number of bombers in service, and a constriction of nearly a quarter in the size of the SSBN fleet.11
The first step toward reversing this decline is to modernize the U.S. ICBM force. Today, ICBMs serve as the anchor of the United States’ strategic deterrent, for good reason. ICBMs possess a robust payload capacity and are survivable against would-be first strikes initiated by any current likely adversaries. In addition, ICBMs have the power to hold a spectrum of targets at prompt risk, whether using nuclear or conventional warheads.
However, drastic reductions in the size of the ICBM force—due to Minuteman II, Minuteman III, and Peacekeeper retirements, and the lack of a replacement ICBM for the Minuteman III—will raise doubts about the capabilities of the United States in the years ahead. America’s ICBM force may be robust now, but it will not be in the future.
A second area of focus must be the development of robust defenses against ballistic and cruise missiles. The global proliferation of ballistic and cruise missile technologies has left the U.S. homeland vulnerable. Ballistic missiles are capable of delivering WMD as well as large conventional payloads, and the technologies needed to build them are widely available, often indigenously or on the global market. At present, there are 25 states armed with ballistic missiles. Many, like Iran and North Korea, not only produce ballistic missiles but export them as well, and share critical missile technologies with other states. For example, Pakistan’s Ghauri medium-range ballistic missile (MRBM) is based on the North Korean No Dong, and was produced with North Korean assistance. Iran’s Shahab-3 MRBM is a version of the No Dong that has been improved with Russian assistance. Even ICBMs are no longer a monopoly of the superpowers. In the next eight to ten years, North Korea and Iran are expected to develop an ICBM capability, which would allow them to target the United States, as well as its allies.
To combat the growing threat of ballistic missiles, the Bush administration deployed a limited defense during its time in office. Key components of this system are the ground-based interceptors based at Fort Greely in Alaska and Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. A third interceptor site, which would give the United States and NATO the capability for limited defense against the Iranian Shahab family of missiles, is currently planned for Poland and the Czech Republic.
It is unclear, as of yet, how the Obama administration plans to approach the issue of missile defense. Early signs, however, are not encouraging. In November 2008, the Obama transition team released the following statement after a telephone call with Polish President Lech Kaczynski: “President-elect Obama made no commitment on it [placing interceptors in Poland]. His position is as it was throughout the campaign—that he supports deploying a missile defense system when the technology is proved to be workable.”12 This ambiguity is troubling, since a robust missile defense capability not only strengthens Washington’s deterrence posture but also hedges against a failure of deterrence.
The technologies in question, moreover, are mature. The Pentagon’s successful shoot-down of a damaged U.S. satellite with a Standard Missile-3 in February 2008 demonstrated the versatility of hit-to-kill technology. The operation also highlighted why further investments are warranted. It is important that the leadership in Beijing, Moscow, Pyongyang, and Tehran knows that U.S. missile defense technologies work.
But significant work remains. Cruise missiles, for example, pre-sent as serious a danger to the United States as ballistic missiles, and yet this threat currently receives almost no attention from policymakers or the popular media. Cruise missiles may be launched from any location: the ground, on or under the sea, or in the air. They are very difficult to detect because they fly at low altitudes, at relatively high speeds, and have a low radar cross section with a modest infrared signature.
Cruise missiles are ideal platforms for countries like China, Iran, or North Korea to attack the United States because they are proven weapons systems, easily affordable, easier to maintain and deploy, hard to defeat, and can be delivered by several different weapons platforms. The United States is deeply vulnerable; seventy-five percent of the U.S. population and 80 percent of the wealth of the U.S. lie within 200 miles of the coast. Cruise missiles are even more widely distributed than ballistic missiles, moreover. About 75 countries are estimated to possess cruise missiles, and by 2015, at least 24 states are expected to pose a serious cruise missile threat to the United States due to the proliferation of sophisticated systems. With effective missile defenses, the United States could not only defend itself against ballistic or cruise missile attack, but also assure allies that they will be protected as well.
Another, seldom analyzed, problem for the strategic forces of the United States is an aging workforce—one created by our long national procurement holiday for strategic systems. No other nuclear country faces this problem, since all others are modernizing their strategic forces. And this “critical skills” gap is only widening. The Defense Science Board Task Force on Future Strategic Strike Skills convened in 2006 evaluated the critical skills of the United States in six categories: development capabilities and skills; production capabilities and skills; sustainment capabilities and skills; material availability; critical suppliers; and special facilities, such as for nuclear testing. The DSB report is shocking in its assessments. It found that the United States faces great dangers in the reliability of the guidance, re-entry systems, and propulsion of the ICBM force.13 The state of the U.S. SLBM and SSBN force is better, at least for the moment. But, as the DSB study made clear, current demographics do not favor the maintenance of critical skills over the next ten years.14
With respect to nuclear command and control issues, there are two areas of concern. The first is access to space, upon which many U.S. military capabilities rely. The shrinking launch schedules due to commercial satellite providers, decreasing military and NASA missile launches, and an aging workforce mean that fewer individuals have participated in a successful launch and know the difficulties that may be encountered and how to solve them. Second, the aging workforce also hinders the government’s ability to gauge nuclear weapons effects on systems. As the DSB recognizes:
Today, the number of individuals working on the various C4ISR [Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance] programs who have worried about system or subsystem vulnerabilities to EMP [Electromagnetic Pulse]—including black-out, red-out, or other nuclear weapon-induced effects—continues to decline, and the people with these skill sets are not being replaced.15
These vulnerabilities, moreover, will almost certainly increase if they are not addressed immediately, because many of the people who addressed EMP vulnerability during the Cold War are retiring.
When it comes to strategic forces—including warheads and delivery systems—the United States is faring even worse, for three major reasons. First, spending on nuclear weapons systems has declined significantly in the post-Cold War period, and is now the smallest share of the defense budget since the 1940s. The decline has been greatest in nuclear offensive strike systems. For these systems, funding has fallen to 4 percent of DoD’s total current budget. In 1991, the United States funded the last SSBN and the last Peacekeeper ICBM; and, in 1993, it bought the last B-2 of its fleet. So, funding has declined, while each component of the triad has aged.
The second major problem is the nuclear warheads themselves. At the present time, the key challenge for the United States is ensuring the reliability of its strategic arsenal. The Bush administration opposed the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, but did not break our country’s nearly twenty-year moratorium on nuclear testing. As a result, the nuclear weapons labs are confronted with the momentous challenge of ensuring reliability without the scientific evidence that only testing can provide.
Congress, meanwhile, has consistently reduced and/or eliminated funding for nuclear modernization programs, including the Reliable Replacement Warhead (RRW) program. In September 2008, Congress refused once again to fund RRW. Opposition on Capitol Hill has been bipartisan. Only a handful of members, such as Senators Jon Kyl (R-AZ) and Jeff Sessions (R-AL), and Representative Terry Everett (R-AL), have consistently voted to fund critical modernization efforts such as RRW. Fortunately, the Obama administration shows signs that it could spur greater attention to this issue. Writing in the January/February 2009 issue of Foreign Affairs, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates indicated as much when he challenged congressional inaction on the RRW, stating that “Congress needs to do its part by funding the Reliable Replacement Warhead Program—for safety, for security, and for a more reliable deterrent.”16
Toward a nuclear renaissance
In the post-Cold War world, the United States will continue to depend on its strategic nuclear forces to accomplish its grand strategic goals. That will become increasingly difficult if it does not act—and act now—to redress the key vulnerabilities in its arsenal. While these vulnerabilities may not receive significant attention in the press, they are noticed by the allies and foes of the United States. Nuclear weapons remain a tremendous source of power in the international system. Quite simply, states with nuclear weapons are treated differently than those without them.
America currently shows few signs of understanding this reality. There are no new ICBMs or SLBMs under development, and the U.S. targets no states with its missiles. B-2 production has halted, and no U.S. bombers are on alert. Many strategic and tactical nuclear weapons programs have been canceled. U.S. Army, Marines, and Navy surface and air components are out of the nuclear weapons business. There has been a reduction of over 85 percent in the number of NATO sub-strategic nuclear weapons in Europe as their delivery systems have dropped from eleven to one.
The upcoming Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) and Nuclear Posture Review (NPR)—both of which will be gearing up in the coming months—present a major opportunity for the Obama administration to ameliorate America’s deteriorating nuclear weapons enterprise. Modernization of the entire nuclear enterprise should be the chief priority of these strategic policy documents.
The stakes could not be higher. The overwhelming military superiority of the United States is not guaranteed into perpetuity. Eventually, as its nuclear capabilities and skills atrophy, the United States will lose the great advantages it now possesses, because other nuclear states will continue to modernize their arsenals and maintain robust nuclear infrastructure. And, once lost, recapturing a credible extended deterrent capability will be increasingly difficult for America to accomplish.
Bradley A. Thayer is an Associate Professor of Defense and Strategic Studies at Missouri State University, located in Fairfax, Virginia. Thomas M. Skypek is a Washington-based defense policy analyst. The views expressed herein are exclusively those of the authors.
Bradley A. Thayer and Thomas M. Skypek, “Russia Goes Ballistic,” The National Interest, no. 97 (September/October 2008), 61-68.
“Russian Air Force to Get Two Strategic Bombers Every Three Years,” RIA Novosti, January 19, 2007, http://www.defencetalk.com/news/publish/airforce/Russian_Air_Force_To_Get_Strategic_Bombers100010013.php.
“Russia Scraps 148 out of 197 Decommissioned Nuclear Submarines,” RIA Novosti, December 27, 2006, http://en.rian.ru/russia/20061227/57958170.html.
“Russia not to Give up Bulava Missile Test Launches,” RIA Novosti, January 4, 2009, http://en.rian.ru/russia/20090104/119365579.html.
Vladimir Isachenkov, “Weapons Plan Strives to Beat Soviet Readiness,” Washington Times, February 8, 2007, http://www.washtimes.com/world/20070207-104140-3775r.htm.
Mark B. Schneider, “The Strategic Nuclear Forces and Doctrine of the Russian Federation,” in Bradley A. Thayer, ed., American National Security Policy: Essays in Honor of William R. Van Cleave (Fairfax, VA: National Institute Press, 2007), 148.
“Arms Control and Proliferation Profile: Russia,” Arms Control Association, November 2007, http://www.armscontrol.org/factsheets/russiaprofile.
Schneider, “The Strategic Nuclear Forces and Doctrine of the Russian Federation,” 148.
Brian T. Kennedy, “What a Single Nuclear Warhead Could Do,” Wall Street Journal, November 24, 2008, http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB122748923919852015-lMyQjAxMDI4MjI3MzQyODM5Wj.html.
Steve Gutterman, “Baluyevsky Warns of Nuclear Defense,” Moscow Times, January 21, 2008, http://www.themoscowtimes.com/stories/2008/01/21/017.html.
These percentages are based on nuclear force reductions in the U.S. arsenal from 2001 to 2007.
Christina Bellantoni, “Obama, Polish President at Odds on Call,” Washington Times, November 9, 2008, http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2008/nov/09/obama-polish-president-at-odds-on-call/.
Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics, Report of the Defense Science Board Task Force on Future Strategic Strike Skills, March 2006, 24-26.
Ibid., 32-34.
Ibidem, 43.
Robert Gates, “How to Reprogram the Pentagon,” Foreign Affairs, January/February 2009.
© Copyright 2001-2009 JINSA. All rights reserved. Terms of Use. top home
Wednesday, November 4, 2009
FASCIST STYLE BRAIN WASHING IN OUR SCHOOLS!
Check this website out and decide for yourselves. This is why my children will not attend public schools.
http://bighollywood.breitbart.com/jjmnolte/2009/11/04/elementary-epidemic-11-uncovered-videos-show-school-children-performing-praises-to-obama/
Welcome to the Socialist states of America.,
http://bighollywood.breitbart.com/jjmnolte/2009/11/04/elementary-epidemic-11-uncovered-videos-show-school-children-performing-praises-to-obama/
Friday, October 30, 2009
Another one goes to China
Another one goes to China
J. Thompson II
I visited Agilent Technologies in Liberty lake, Washington while executing my regular work duties. I had never been there before, as I entered the complex I noticed it lacked something, employees! I checked in at the front desk and found I needed a visitors pass, and would be escorted at all times by a security guard. My work is mostly with banks so I am used to strict security, but this seemed odd. The place felt empty.
I asked the guard, He said the security was always high because the things they manufactured were 'very sensitive'. I later found out this facillity developed, built, and tested, test and measurement equipment prototypes, related to Biological, chemical, and Electronic analysis equipment. He also let me know the operation had been sold to an over seas company. I guessed correctly that it was China. Only a skeleton crew of about 100 people remained completing certain tasks. Originally the facility employed over 3,000. He said by next March it will be completely shut down and gone. Another one gone to China, maybe they will relocate next to the company that builds gyroscopes for our guided missiles. In history, has a nation ever commited suicide the way the United States is right now ? Giving the finances and the technology to our enemies to destroy us with. I would say 'God help us!' but our government asked Him to leave along time ago.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agilent_Technologies
__________________
Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both.
Benjamin Franklin
J. Thompson II
I visited Agilent Technologies in Liberty lake, Washington while executing my regular work duties. I had never been there before, as I entered the complex I noticed it lacked something, employees! I checked in at the front desk and found I needed a visitors pass, and would be escorted at all times by a security guard. My work is mostly with banks so I am used to strict security, but this seemed odd. The place felt empty.
I asked the guard, He said the security was always high because the things they manufactured were 'very sensitive'. I later found out this facillity developed, built, and tested, test and measurement equipment prototypes, related to Biological, chemical, and Electronic analysis equipment. He also let me know the operation had been sold to an over seas company. I guessed correctly that it was China. Only a skeleton crew of about 100 people remained completing certain tasks. Originally the facility employed over 3,000. He said by next March it will be completely shut down and gone. Another one gone to China, maybe they will relocate next to the company that builds gyroscopes for our guided missiles. In history, has a nation ever commited suicide the way the United States is right now ? Giving the finances and the technology to our enemies to destroy us with. I would say 'God help us!' but our government asked Him to leave along time ago.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agilent_Technologies
__________________
Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both.
Benjamin Franklin
Tuesday, September 29, 2009
Friday, September 4, 2009
A Declaration of the Free People of America -
A Declaration of the Free People of America -
When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that ALL men are created equal. Not that some men are more equal than others because of their skin color or minority status. That they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. Not healthcare, living wages and "social justice"
That to secure these rights of life, liberty and happiness, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it. And we charge this government and those now in power as being destructive to our lives, our liberty and our happiness. In the course our Founders declared, we have such right to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as our Founding Fathers laid them down to effect in the best perfection achievable by man - our Safety and Happiness.
Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind is more disposed to suffer tyranny, while tyranny is sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they have become enslaved. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.
Such has been the patient sufferance of Conservative Americans; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter and abolish the federal Systems of Socialism in Government.
The history of this present Administration, Congress and the Judiciary and to extents, the previous twelve Administrations, Congresses and Courts, is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States and the people in them. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world:
They have violated our Constitutionally-protected rights of free exercise of religion and worship by abolishing Christian exercise and presence in public via courts pushing a secular religion.
They have violated our Constitutionally-protected right of speech by passing laws that criminalize belief and opinion; by laws written to impact and restrict citizen support in elective campaigns of representatives; by requiring licenses, fees, tickets and other assorted sundry demands to peaceably assemble; by demonizing citizens petitioning for a redress of grievances and shutting constituents from meetings to discuss pending legislation by stacking the halls with bussed-in supporters; by creating a climate of hatred, fear and loathing for those opposed to this government's actions.
They seek to violate our Constitutionally-protected right of press and political speech by use of clever locality, diversity and content applications designed to restrict opinions and punish mass communication providers that do not comply with government-mandated rules designed to suppress dissent.
They have violated our Constitutionally-protected right to bear arms in outright infringement and by nefarious tax schemes intended to bar the right of the citizen to arms and possessions of arms to carry on his person or own in his own home.
They have bankrupted the entire nation in unfathomable and unrecoverable debt in behemoth government social programs robbing the treasury of the People by welfare ponzi schemes that have created mass entitlements designed to keep the people dependent on government assistance.
They have bankrupted the social security and medical aid programs that take by fiat, a portion of every income to support continued abuse and misappropriations by government bureaucrats.
They have bankrupted private industry by mandating regulations designed for cronyism and dependence of constituents to politicians for reelection.
They pass into law, thousands of pages of legislation, written by unknown persons and lobbyists without reading the bills or knowing what they contain.
They pass into law by inserting hidden 'riders' and 'pork', programs, taxes, regulations and tyranny into bills having nothing to do with the purpose of the proposed legislation.
They hamstring industry vital to national infrastructure by myriad regulations beholden to environmentalists that lobby Congress with money and advisement that ensure our national dependence on foreign energy supplies.
They have robbed wholesale the taxpaying public by nationalizing the private business and industry of mortgage banking and auto manufacturers, misappropriating billions of funds to bail out unspecified recipients and impoverishing the people and future generations of Americans in the process.
They are in the process of unconstitutionally mandating all citizens purchase government health insurance or face penalty.
They have designed bureaucratic panels to rule on matters of life and death in health care that they devise to take over.
They pass laws on the citizenry that they exempt themselves from.
They have continually violated the law of the land and diminished the rights of American citizens by allowing foreign illegal immigrants entry and rein into the country without consequence at the expense of the citizenry for the purpose of expanding a political party with dependents.
They have provided aid and comfort to an Islamic enemy at war with the people of the nation, and afforded non-citizen enemy combatants with rights that are the sole province of American citizens.
The Courts have routinely legislated from the bench without any authority in cases brought before them.
The Courts have stated their decisions to rule according to foreign laws, personal life experiences and biases and not by the rule of the Constitution of the United States.
The Courts have overturned the express will of the people who have petitioned and passed legislation to alleviate their burdens by personal political biases that are ruled unconstitutional based on wrongful precedents.
The Executive has unlawfully nationalized private business with taxpayer money, without our consent.
The Executive has engaged in treason by denouncing his country and his countrymen on foreign soil.
The Executive has pursued a goal of redistributing wealth and private property by demonizing private citizens and enacting policies designed to in his words "return the nation's wealth to their rightful owners".
The Executive is engaged in creating a standing civilian political army answerable only to him, that is "just as strong, just as large and just as well funded as the military".
The Executive is engaged in a preemptive and constant program of demagoguery and derision of political opponents to the point of using federal agencies to declare opponents "domestic terrorists" and to turn the citizenry against specific individuals and professions in order to enact takeovers of those properties.
The Executive has established a government snitch program by requiring citizens report opponents of the President's policies to a White House website that collected the information of 'dissidents' for further use in violation of the Constitution and law.
The Executive has unlawfully and unconstitutionally breached the Separation of Powers and duties specifically assigned to Congress by running the 2010 Census out of the Oval Office with a host of invasive questions for the purpose of redistricting the nation to ensure permanent political office for their party.
The Executive has engaged in routine deception of his policies, plans and statements, even concealing his eligibility for the High Office that he holds by refusing to reveal and release information that would qualify his tenure.
The Executive has erected a multitude of New Czars, unaccountable, unreviewable and untenable to oversight or the recall of the people who will make law and policy outside of legislation to send swarms of Officers to harass our people, eat out of their substance and impoversh classes of Americans.
The Executive has combined with others to subject us to an ideology and jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts without Legislation.
For protecting Jihad terrorists and Black Panther poll intimidators, by immunity from investigation or punishment for any lawbreaking which they should commit on the citizens of these States:
For penalizing our industries in deference to third world nations:
For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:
For depriving us of our liberties:
For abolishing the Free Market System, establishing therein a Marxist government, and enlarging its power so as to render it at once as an absolute oligarchy of power in this country.
For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws and altering fundamentally the foundation and principles of the nation:
He has declared us "an unjust nation" and is waging War against us.
He has plundered our wealth, ravaged our liberty, impoverished our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.
He is at this time recruiting large armies of political Mercenaries to complete the works of redistribution, enslavement, death, desolation, and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Oppression and Enslavement paralleled in brutal Marxist regimes, and totally unworthy to hold the office of a civilized nation.
He has encouraged our fellow Citizens taken captive by decades of indoctrination, to bear false witness and eventually Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren.
He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our nation, merciless Socialism and despotism whose history is one of destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.
In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A government, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define tyranny, is unfit to govern of a free people.
Nor have We been wanting in attentions to our government-supporting brethren. We have warned them of attempts by their government to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us all. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our liberty and the facts in our Constitution here. We have appealed to our commonality of citizenry and love of liberty to disavow these usurpations, which would inevitably enslave us all. They too seem deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.
We, therefore, the free individuals and Conservative people of the united States of America, in General Agreement, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of God Almighty and our fellow citizens, solemnly publish and declare, That we sovereign citizens of America are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent from the authoritarian arm of the federal government, that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the federal government, and that all political connection between them and the federal government in Washington D.C., is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent Sovereign Citizens, have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things that our Founder’s intended within the boundaries of the Constitution of the United States of America which was our bulwark against an oppressive and intrusive government.
And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.
Thomas Jefferson updated by Invar
When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that ALL men are created equal. Not that some men are more equal than others because of their skin color or minority status. That they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. Not healthcare, living wages and "social justice"
That to secure these rights of life, liberty and happiness, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it. And we charge this government and those now in power as being destructive to our lives, our liberty and our happiness. In the course our Founders declared, we have such right to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as our Founding Fathers laid them down to effect in the best perfection achievable by man - our Safety and Happiness.
Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind is more disposed to suffer tyranny, while tyranny is sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they have become enslaved. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.
Such has been the patient sufferance of Conservative Americans; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter and abolish the federal Systems of Socialism in Government.
The history of this present Administration, Congress and the Judiciary and to extents, the previous twelve Administrations, Congresses and Courts, is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States and the people in them. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world:
They have violated our Constitutionally-protected rights of free exercise of religion and worship by abolishing Christian exercise and presence in public via courts pushing a secular religion.
They have violated our Constitutionally-protected right of speech by passing laws that criminalize belief and opinion; by laws written to impact and restrict citizen support in elective campaigns of representatives; by requiring licenses, fees, tickets and other assorted sundry demands to peaceably assemble; by demonizing citizens petitioning for a redress of grievances and shutting constituents from meetings to discuss pending legislation by stacking the halls with bussed-in supporters; by creating a climate of hatred, fear and loathing for those opposed to this government's actions.
They seek to violate our Constitutionally-protected right of press and political speech by use of clever locality, diversity and content applications designed to restrict opinions and punish mass communication providers that do not comply with government-mandated rules designed to suppress dissent.
They have violated our Constitutionally-protected right to bear arms in outright infringement and by nefarious tax schemes intended to bar the right of the citizen to arms and possessions of arms to carry on his person or own in his own home.
They have bankrupted the entire nation in unfathomable and unrecoverable debt in behemoth government social programs robbing the treasury of the People by welfare ponzi schemes that have created mass entitlements designed to keep the people dependent on government assistance.
They have bankrupted the social security and medical aid programs that take by fiat, a portion of every income to support continued abuse and misappropriations by government bureaucrats.
They have bankrupted private industry by mandating regulations designed for cronyism and dependence of constituents to politicians for reelection.
They pass into law, thousands of pages of legislation, written by unknown persons and lobbyists without reading the bills or knowing what they contain.
They pass into law by inserting hidden 'riders' and 'pork', programs, taxes, regulations and tyranny into bills having nothing to do with the purpose of the proposed legislation.
They hamstring industry vital to national infrastructure by myriad regulations beholden to environmentalists that lobby Congress with money and advisement that ensure our national dependence on foreign energy supplies.
They have robbed wholesale the taxpaying public by nationalizing the private business and industry of mortgage banking and auto manufacturers, misappropriating billions of funds to bail out unspecified recipients and impoverishing the people and future generations of Americans in the process.
They are in the process of unconstitutionally mandating all citizens purchase government health insurance or face penalty.
They have designed bureaucratic panels to rule on matters of life and death in health care that they devise to take over.
They pass laws on the citizenry that they exempt themselves from.
They have continually violated the law of the land and diminished the rights of American citizens by allowing foreign illegal immigrants entry and rein into the country without consequence at the expense of the citizenry for the purpose of expanding a political party with dependents.
They have provided aid and comfort to an Islamic enemy at war with the people of the nation, and afforded non-citizen enemy combatants with rights that are the sole province of American citizens.
The Courts have routinely legislated from the bench without any authority in cases brought before them.
The Courts have stated their decisions to rule according to foreign laws, personal life experiences and biases and not by the rule of the Constitution of the United States.
The Courts have overturned the express will of the people who have petitioned and passed legislation to alleviate their burdens by personal political biases that are ruled unconstitutional based on wrongful precedents.
The Executive has unlawfully nationalized private business with taxpayer money, without our consent.
The Executive has engaged in treason by denouncing his country and his countrymen on foreign soil.
The Executive has pursued a goal of redistributing wealth and private property by demonizing private citizens and enacting policies designed to in his words "return the nation's wealth to their rightful owners".
The Executive is engaged in creating a standing civilian political army answerable only to him, that is "just as strong, just as large and just as well funded as the military".
The Executive is engaged in a preemptive and constant program of demagoguery and derision of political opponents to the point of using federal agencies to declare opponents "domestic terrorists" and to turn the citizenry against specific individuals and professions in order to enact takeovers of those properties.
The Executive has established a government snitch program by requiring citizens report opponents of the President's policies to a White House website that collected the information of 'dissidents' for further use in violation of the Constitution and law.
The Executive has unlawfully and unconstitutionally breached the Separation of Powers and duties specifically assigned to Congress by running the 2010 Census out of the Oval Office with a host of invasive questions for the purpose of redistricting the nation to ensure permanent political office for their party.
The Executive has engaged in routine deception of his policies, plans and statements, even concealing his eligibility for the High Office that he holds by refusing to reveal and release information that would qualify his tenure.
The Executive has erected a multitude of New Czars, unaccountable, unreviewable and untenable to oversight or the recall of the people who will make law and policy outside of legislation to send swarms of Officers to harass our people, eat out of their substance and impoversh classes of Americans.
The Executive has combined with others to subject us to an ideology and jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts without Legislation.
For protecting Jihad terrorists and Black Panther poll intimidators, by immunity from investigation or punishment for any lawbreaking which they should commit on the citizens of these States:
For penalizing our industries in deference to third world nations:
For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:
For depriving us of our liberties:
For abolishing the Free Market System, establishing therein a Marxist government, and enlarging its power so as to render it at once as an absolute oligarchy of power in this country.
For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws and altering fundamentally the foundation and principles of the nation:
He has declared us "an unjust nation" and is waging War against us.
He has plundered our wealth, ravaged our liberty, impoverished our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.
He is at this time recruiting large armies of political Mercenaries to complete the works of redistribution, enslavement, death, desolation, and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Oppression and Enslavement paralleled in brutal Marxist regimes, and totally unworthy to hold the office of a civilized nation.
He has encouraged our fellow Citizens taken captive by decades of indoctrination, to bear false witness and eventually Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren.
He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our nation, merciless Socialism and despotism whose history is one of destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.
In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A government, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define tyranny, is unfit to govern of a free people.
Nor have We been wanting in attentions to our government-supporting brethren. We have warned them of attempts by their government to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us all. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our liberty and the facts in our Constitution here. We have appealed to our commonality of citizenry and love of liberty to disavow these usurpations, which would inevitably enslave us all. They too seem deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.
We, therefore, the free individuals and Conservative people of the united States of America, in General Agreement, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of God Almighty and our fellow citizens, solemnly publish and declare, That we sovereign citizens of America are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent from the authoritarian arm of the federal government, that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the federal government, and that all political connection between them and the federal government in Washington D.C., is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent Sovereign Citizens, have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things that our Founder’s intended within the boundaries of the Constitution of the United States of America which was our bulwark against an oppressive and intrusive government.
And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.
Thomas Jefferson updated by Invar
Tuesday, September 1, 2009
How ?
I have been listening to various radio and television programs talking about the progressive (means Communist/fascist) push to remake the United States. Almost without exception, they list and warn about all the different bills, EOs (exec. orders), the power of the unelected tzars, gov. take over of banks, and auto companies. The fact that the deficit is now bigger than all previous deficits combined, and climbing. These are all true and legitimate concerns. They also point out correctly, that this government projects anger and hostility at opponents of their agenda. This government also has shown the willingnes to use its power against its own citizens to squash opposition. Another common thread of commentary is that this administration shows no signs of relenting in its push for power. We are advised constantly not to do anything provacative, or extreme.
The radio commentators inform their audiences, which rightly become more incensed with each new revelation. We are encouraged to attend tea partys, write our congressman, call the whitehouse and more. All of these ideas are good and should be done, but what if this administration doesn't repond to our concerns ? What if they continue in their march toward socialism/communism ? At some point, and it is approaching quickly, we will reach a moment very similar to that moment in 1776. We will keep telling the government to stop, to leave us alone, to follow the Constitution, Bill of Rights and Declaration of Indepenence, but I don't think they care. So to the patriotic media leaders, the ones that seem to speak for us. The ones telling us to remain calm, what next ? How do we respond when they shut down the web, or install media controls like The Peoples Republic of China, USSR, or Nazi Germany ? I know what I'll do, But what do you say ? What do we say to the pro 'O' cops that tell us they can arrest us for anything they want, simply because we don't agree with their leader. There is anger and unrest growing in this country, I hope the politicians start paying attention.
I travelled across part of the US this summer with my family, People out there are unhappy about many things; being ignored by their elected officials, being marginalized by the state run media, being taxed to death, being called rascist, nazis and basically stupid. Oh yes, we remember, We bitter people, clinging to our God, and our Constitution. The funny thing is, we ignorant unwashed masses can do something our elitist elected officials say they can't, ...read the bills they try to force down out throats !
Now to end this post I'd like to leave you with something chilling. It's a video, the man in it was part of Bill Ayers terrorist group. Listen to what he says and remember, Bill Ayers is one of Obama's long time supporters and friends, their goals are the same. Bill Ayers has never repented for what he attempted to do in the 70s, in fact, he has made statements indicating he wishes they had done more.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HWMIwziGrAQ
JB Maccabee Sept. 1, 2009
Sunday, August 30, 2009
Who Is Behind Quashing the Birth Certificate Issue?
Who Is Behind Quashing the Birth Certificate Issue?
ByJoan Swirsky Tuesday, August 25, 2009
Back in October of 2008, when the subject of Obama's Constitutional eligibility to be president of the United States was just a blip on the radar screen of public awareness, I wrote an article about how easy it was to find my then -92-year-old mother’s birth certificate.
Frankly, I didn't think finding my mother's birth certificate was possible, given the fact that she had been born in a farmhouse in Storrs , CT , along with nine of her 10 siblings, to parents who didn’t speak English. Despairing that she would never be “qualified” to receive the care [in a nursing home} that she desperately needed, I set about to find the document, which I was sure had vanished in the unreliable record-keeping of 1913. When I called the third number, I explained to the woman who answered the phone that I was “asking something impossible.” I gave her my mother’s first name and her father’s last name. Within four minutes, she said, “Here it is!” When I expressed my amazement, the woman said: “That’s nothing…we’re routinely asked to find birth certificates from the 1800s, and we do that all the time!” Total time it took me to find my mother’s 1913, born-in-a-farmhouse birth certificate: 10 minutes!
Obama was born not in 1913, like my mother, but in 1961—or perhaps in 1957, according to his MySpace page, which would make him 52, born supposedly in Hawaii before it became a state in 1959. So it was quite curious that not one cyber-sleuth could find an authentic, verifiable copy of his original vault copy birth certificate. I’m not talking about the faux version Obama posted on his website, which was deemed the real thing by FactCheck.org, a “truth”-detecting site that is sponsored by the Annenberg Foundation, the same foundation that hired Obama and his terrorist pal William Ayers and gave them millions of dollars for a research project in Chicago. In other words, the least credible source!
Even more significant is that no one in the media thought Obama’s missing birth certificate worth even casual mention. Their thinking seemed to be: If we’re not going to check on his eligibility to be president, then why question why the other crucial documents were—and continue to be—sealed? For instance: his baptism certificate; elementary, high school, college and graduate school transcripts; visa(s); selective service record; alleged multiple Social Security numbers; Illinois attorney’s license; Illinois State Senate records; law practice client list; Univ. of Chicago scholarly articles; financial records while a community organizer in Chicago; and medical records. I’m also curious about why Michelle Obama’s law license was suspended in 1993 by the Illinois Supreme Court, but then again she wasn’t running for president.
Instead, the media were frantically busy trying to divert public attention away from those pesky things known as credentials with gossip-driven tabloid reportage of Sarah Palin and Joe the Plumber in order to avoid the bigger-than-Watergate potential scandal of whether or not Obama was eligible—according to the U.S. Constitution—to become President of the United States!
NOW WE KNOW WHY
In an explosive interview by Dr. Laurie Roth on her syndicated West Coast radio show on August 7th, Douglas Hagmann—a respected journalist, director of the Northeast Intelligence Network and longtime private investigator, and Judi McLeod, a prolific journalist and the managing editor of Canada Free Press—the reason for the media blackout about the birth-certificate issue was nothing less than organized Mafia-like dire threats to members of the media issued not only from the heads of major TV and radio stations but also from Federal Communication Commission officials!
According to Hagmann and McLeod, who conducted a nine-month investigation and documented their findings scrupulously, after Obama was elected but before he was inaugurated:
A major TV talk-show host reported that he was ordered not to raise the birth certificate issue or risk losing his job.
FCC officials threatened to yank broadcasting licenses, break up conglomerates, and make the enactment of the Fairness Doctrine “look mild” in comparison to other consequences.
In at least one corporate TV headquarters, memos were circulated to all on-air employees not to mention the birth certificate issue, as well as other specific subjects like Obama’s Illinois lawyer’s license, his college records, etc., under both implied and explicit threats.
During the interview, Hagmann and McLeod—who never mentioned a particular network by name—alluded to e-mails and other evidence in their possession, copies of which, they said, were secreted in several locations. But they did tantalize listeners with descriptions of meeting with “sources” outside of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City, a high-placed contact looking nervously over his shoulder, references to directives and warnings given by “those at the top,” and the undisguised threat of one executive to his underlings: “This is serious, and so will the consequences be if anyone chooses not to be a team player with this.”
This comes as no surprise to Fox watchers who have noticed that the Stalinist-style censorship of the Obama regime is already here. This couldn’t possibly be because of the healthy shares of stock the Saudis bought in Fox, could it? If so, why would the Saudis care so much about quashing potentially damning revelations about Obama? Have they also bought shares in Obama?
Come to think of it, who exactly paid the tuition for Obama’s stint at Harvard Law School ? What role did Obama’s long-time friend, Khalid al-Mansour, a key advisor to a Saudi billionaire, play? Writer Kenneth Tim merman describes al-Mansour as “well known within the black community as a lawyer, an orthodox Muslim, a black nationalist, an author, an international deal-maker, an educator, and an outspoken enemy of Israel.” This is not to omit that al-Mansour was originally contacted to intervene with Harvard on Obama’s behalf by Percy Sutton, former Manhattan Borough President and the lawyer of Malcolm X. Ah…the tangled web of it all!
Then there is the question of what role was played by Saudi Prince Alwaleed, the nephew of King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia? You remember Prince Alwaleed, who offered then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani $10 million after September 11 if he would only blame America for the terrorist attacks of which 15 of 19 perpetrators were Saudi Arabian—a “gift” the mayor promptly and with appropriate contempt rejected!
In short, what influence have the Saudis exerted on Fox to muzzle the issue of Obama’s birth certificate? I don’t ask this about the network TV channels or cable channels like CNN and MSNBC, which are still issuing daily hagiographies of Obama.
TIP OF THE ICEBERG
Just who has been sending “the message”? And how did it permeate not only the media, but also the once-respected U.S. Congress and the courts of our land, including the once-incorruptible Supreme Court? And what menacing forces made the once-courageous conservative media abandon their mission to expose rank corruption and collusion?
Two words: Money Talks!
If you’re a media mogul and you get word from the FCC that your license will be pulled immediately and irrevocably if you mention only three words—Obama’s birth certificate—poof! You send that word to your employees and tell them that their mega-salaries—in fact, their employment—are on the line.
If you’re a conservative talk-show host and you get your boss’s directive not to dare to mention only three words—Obama’s birth certificate—poof! Lips sealed; curiosity zero!
If the money thing doesn’t work, there’s always the threat thing, i.e., “going public” about tax records, health status, or family secrets. Or be audited by the IRS. Or be investigated by any number of regulatory agencies.
And if the money thing and the threat thing don’t work, how about being reminded of all those “accidents” and “unfortunate incidents”—broken kneecaps, missing children, “falls” from buildings, punctured tires—that resulted not in joblessness or embarrassment but in death?
We know that’s how the Mafia works. It’s also how political machines work. It’s also how community organizers work. Wasn’t it Obama himself who in 2008 said ’‘If They Bring a Knife…We Bring a Gun’‘ and in 2009 advised his followers to “Get in Their Faces!”?
So determined are Obama’s handlers to keep the facts of his parentage and place of birth out of the public domain that, as writer Chelsea Schilling has scrupulously documented, ¬†“the Federal Election Commission shows Obama’s campaign has made regular payments to Perkins Coie since Jan. 1, 2007—the month he formed a presidential exploratory committee and only weeks before he formally announced his candidacy for president—[and up to the present]—has paid Perkins Coie, a single law firm, $2.3 million…to crush eligibility lawsuits.”
But paying lawyers to quash the dozens of lawsuits that have challenged Obama’s eligibility still doesn’t answer the question of who exactly is behind the blanket blackout of the media, Congress and courts when it comes to Obama’s origins, parentage, credentials, indeed identity.
We certainly can’t attribute this massive power play to Obama himself. After all, while “owning” the Congress and the media, he is failing miserably to gain support for his two signature pieces of legislation, cap & tax and healthcare “reform.” No one that ineffectual—or, as Jonah Goldberg says, “astoundingly incompetent”—could possibly mute the media, castrate the Congress, and cow the courts.
And we can’t attribute the blackout to Obama’s union and community organizing buddies. While the former are quite expert at threatening members to fall in line…or else, and the latter have mastered standing outside polling places with glowering facial expressions and menacing Billy clubs, neither has the heft to have compelled the media to roll over, the Congress to say they “know nothing,” or the courts to load one side of the scales of justice with rocks and the other side with feathers.
A COUP D' ETAT?
Scholars and historians have documented exhaustively the Left’s obsession with (1) the acquisition of power, and (2) transforming America from a free-market, Constitution-respecting, freedom-loving, God-embracing society into a Socialist-cum-Communist “share the wealth” collective that echoes the beliefs and “values” of their heroes Marx and Engels.
But it takes money to bring about the kind of poverty both Socialism and Communism deliver to their masses. The kind of money only a few at the top enjoy while they’d like the rest of us to wait on food lines and appear before death panels of impersonal state functionaries who decide if we’re worthy of antibiotics or surgery and, if not, convenient “go-to-sleep” pills.
The kind of money that “talks”—that can buy people off, finance revolutions, launder money, pay to rig voting machines, manipulate allies into positions of power (czars, anyone?), conveniently crash markets (as George Soros did in England in 1992, Asia in 1997, and, I believe, the U.S. in September 200, make people disappear, make birth certificates and other vital records disappear and then make sure that an entire media, Congress and court system is terrified of “going there.”
We all know of the many multimillionaires and billionaires—including Soros, the Saudi royal family, et al—who contributed to Obama’s presidential campaign and continue to fund his leftist agenda, all of them with an ideological, religious, or personal stake in his remaining in power. And all of them part of a larger, more ubiquitous conspiracy—yes, conspiracy!—to conceal Obama’s origins and true parentage.
Among them, as JB Williams has documented, are “international socialists working through CPUSA - SPUSA and DSAUSA, funded by literally hundreds of leftist front-groups operating as special interest 527 organizations. Here’s a short list of the BIGGEST leftist front groups: America Coming Together - Joint Victory Campaign 2004 - Media Fund - Service Employees International Union - American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees - MoveOn.org - New Democrat Network - Sierra Club - EMILY’s List - AFL-CIO - League of Conservation Voters.”
Further, Williams asks: “Who spends an obscene $1-billion dollars to win a lousy $400,000-per-year job, and why?”
Richard Poe, award-winning journalist and New York Times-bestselling author, has written extensively on Soros and makes a good case that the Hungarian-born Jew and self-admitted Nazi collaborator is the primary brains and money behind Obama—and, I believe, his healthcare travesty. When President Bush was in office, Poe wrote that Soros talked openly of a “regime change” in the United States.
"What about our country offends Soros so deeply,” Poe asked, “that he would tell the BBC—during a time of war—that he means to use all of his power to `puncture the bubble of American supremacy’? Poe explained that Soros’s Open Society Foundation, founded in 1984, “has spent millions promoting a radical agenda that includes abortion, feminism, gun control, abolition of capital punishment, voting rights for felons, drug legalization, euthanasia and gay marriage rights…the Soros cult preaches secularism, the godless faith of a world without nations, families, loyalty or tradition, a world in which the very words `mother,’ `father,’ `husband,’ `wife,’ `son’ and `daughter’ will be bleached of meaning forever.”
Soros,Poe continued, “is one of the world’s leading promoters of euthanasia, or `mercy killing.’ Not only does he advocate `physician-assisted suicide’ for patients who choose death voluntarily, he also lobbies for the right of family members or court-appointed guardians to authorize the killing of patients whose wishes are not known.” Sounds a lot like the Death Panels Sarah Palin warned about, doesn’t it? Soros also founded the Project on Death in America [which] promotes suicide and euthanasia and urges doctors to warehouse terminally ill patients in hospices and give them `palliative’ care ...rather than wasting time, energy and money actually trying to cure them.”
Of course, all of these beliefs are eerily echoed in Obama’s healthcare legislation, almost as if Soros had dictated the terms. Maybe he did! Maybe that was the price he exacted for financing a large part of Obama’s presidential campaign and facilitating the cover-up of Obama’s birth certificate and other documents. And maybe that’s why Obama is still paying Soros back by recently announcing that he will invest $2 billion (or more) in drilling for oil off the shores of Brazil, where none other than George Soros owns $5.8 million of the Brazilian oil company’s U.S.-traded preferred shares of stock!
THE USUAL SUSPECTS
While Soros may top the list of conspirators who have been trying to topple big bad capitalist America for decades, others figure prominently as well, including but not limited to: Noam Chomsky, Louis Farrakhan,,Jane Fonda, Tom Hayden, Jesse Jackson, Michael Moore, Cornel West, Ted Turner, former National Security Advisor to Pres. Jimmy Carter Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Rockefeller family, The Carnegie family, and, I might add, Fidel Castro and the cozy cabal of America-loathing Marxist revolutionaries he met with at the Theresa Hotel in Harlem.
Then there are: The Congressional Progressive Caucus(their members here) aka the Democratic Socialists of America, formed by partners from the Communist Party USA and Socialist Party USA (Founder: Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VA); The Congressional Black Caucus (their members here), originally established and controlled by the Communist Party USA (Founder: Cong. John Conyers (D-VT), and now controlled by ACORN and The Democratic Socialists of America; The ACLU, founded in 1917 by Communist Roger Baldwin; The Southern Poverty Law Center—a mini ACLU; The FORD Foundation; The Annenberg Foundation; The NAACP; The Council on Foreign Relations; The Trilateral Commission; numerous labor unions, and of course the mega-rich sheiks of Araby.
While all of the above and many others have worked assiduously to dismantle America, there are probably only a relative handful of aiders and abettors who ushered the modern-day Trojan Horse Barack Obama into America’s body politic and were sophisticated and connected and rich and arch enough to have facilitated his path to the U.S. Senate, sealed all of his records both home and abroad, assembled the massive¬†organization for his run for the presidency, and delivered in only seven months the most radical leftwing—actually more Communist than Socialist—agenda in the history of the United States.
WHO'S NOT CAVING ON THE BIRTH CERTIFICATE ISSUE?
McLeod and Hagmann have come very close to explaining a major piece of the conspiracy puzzle, specifically how some in the media were either bribed or threatened into silence vis-√†-vis Obama’s birth certificate. But the American people have a peculiar resistance to and revulsion for these thuggish tactics. In fact, the birth certificate issue has gained momentum. Why is it not going away but instead gathering steam?
1. The huge amount of money Obama has spent on this cover-up is, to most Americans, fishy.
2. Obama’s serial apologies for America as he travels the world have offended Americans and convinced them that no genuine American could or would ever behave in such a way.
3. Last month, when Army Reserve Major Stefan Frederick Cook sued Obama claiming he was not legally qualified to be President and Commander-in-Chief and therefore was unqualified to give him orders to deploy to Afghanistan, the government rescinded his orders, thereby negating the “standing” Cook no doubt would have had to sue. District Judge Richard Lazzara of Tampa denied Cook’s motions as “frivolous and wholly without merit” and then—guess what?—sealed the records! This should have disqualified the judge. In fact, it raised the eyebrows of millions of Americans.
4. To the public, rescinding Cook’s orders was a de facto admission that Obama is not a natural-born American citizen, and it gives rise to the possibility that untold numbers of military enlistees, in the U.S. and around the world, will follow suit. According to one source, as many as 100 lawyers are preparing to file such litigation and even class-action suits are being considered.
As Obama’s poll numbers continue to plunge, more and more people are waking up to his unique lack of qualifications and inability to lead the greatest nation in the world. As Kyle-Ann Shiver has written, “It’s as though [in 2008] 59 million Americans joined hands and shouted at the top of their little lungs, `Yes, We Can March off This Cliff.’”
Writer James Lewis asks: “How do we fight Obama and his psychopathic lust for power?”...and answers: “You fight evil by exposing it.””
Indeed, the American electorate has never been so energized, with millions upon millions of ordinary citizens—many of them seniors with vested interests in avoiding Obama’s death panels—attending Tea Parties, Town Hall meetings, and writing and calling their representatives in massive numbers. In addition, people are now speaking openly about the man without a birth certificate. Who is this guy? What is he hiding? Why are media people studiously avoiding this issue? And why are those who “dare” raise it—like Lou Dobbs at CNN—being targeted by far-left groups, many of them funded by George Soros?
Yet in spite of their efforts to conceal the truth about Obama’s birth place and parentage, increasing numbers of articles, radio hosts and their callers and regular Americans have lost their amazingly forbearing patience and are now asking and will continue to ask until the question is answered:
WHERE’S THE BIRTH CERTIFICATE ?
ByJoan Swirsky Tuesday, August 25, 2009
Back in October of 2008, when the subject of Obama's Constitutional eligibility to be president of the United States was just a blip on the radar screen of public awareness, I wrote an article about how easy it was to find my then -92-year-old mother’s birth certificate.
Frankly, I didn't think finding my mother's birth certificate was possible, given the fact that she had been born in a farmhouse in Storrs , CT , along with nine of her 10 siblings, to parents who didn’t speak English. Despairing that she would never be “qualified” to receive the care [in a nursing home} that she desperately needed, I set about to find the document, which I was sure had vanished in the unreliable record-keeping of 1913. When I called the third number, I explained to the woman who answered the phone that I was “asking something impossible.” I gave her my mother’s first name and her father’s last name. Within four minutes, she said, “Here it is!” When I expressed my amazement, the woman said: “That’s nothing…we’re routinely asked to find birth certificates from the 1800s, and we do that all the time!” Total time it took me to find my mother’s 1913, born-in-a-farmhouse birth certificate: 10 minutes!
Obama was born not in 1913, like my mother, but in 1961—or perhaps in 1957, according to his MySpace page, which would make him 52, born supposedly in Hawaii before it became a state in 1959. So it was quite curious that not one cyber-sleuth could find an authentic, verifiable copy of his original vault copy birth certificate. I’m not talking about the faux version Obama posted on his website, which was deemed the real thing by FactCheck.org, a “truth”-detecting site that is sponsored by the Annenberg Foundation, the same foundation that hired Obama and his terrorist pal William Ayers and gave them millions of dollars for a research project in Chicago. In other words, the least credible source!
Even more significant is that no one in the media thought Obama’s missing birth certificate worth even casual mention. Their thinking seemed to be: If we’re not going to check on his eligibility to be president, then why question why the other crucial documents were—and continue to be—sealed? For instance: his baptism certificate; elementary, high school, college and graduate school transcripts; visa(s); selective service record; alleged multiple Social Security numbers; Illinois attorney’s license; Illinois State Senate records; law practice client list; Univ. of Chicago scholarly articles; financial records while a community organizer in Chicago; and medical records. I’m also curious about why Michelle Obama’s law license was suspended in 1993 by the Illinois Supreme Court, but then again she wasn’t running for president.
Instead, the media were frantically busy trying to divert public attention away from those pesky things known as credentials with gossip-driven tabloid reportage of Sarah Palin and Joe the Plumber in order to avoid the bigger-than-Watergate potential scandal of whether or not Obama was eligible—according to the U.S. Constitution—to become President of the United States!
NOW WE KNOW WHY
In an explosive interview by Dr. Laurie Roth on her syndicated West Coast radio show on August 7th, Douglas Hagmann—a respected journalist, director of the Northeast Intelligence Network and longtime private investigator, and Judi McLeod, a prolific journalist and the managing editor of Canada Free Press—the reason for the media blackout about the birth-certificate issue was nothing less than organized Mafia-like dire threats to members of the media issued not only from the heads of major TV and radio stations but also from Federal Communication Commission officials!
According to Hagmann and McLeod, who conducted a nine-month investigation and documented their findings scrupulously, after Obama was elected but before he was inaugurated:
A major TV talk-show host reported that he was ordered not to raise the birth certificate issue or risk losing his job.
FCC officials threatened to yank broadcasting licenses, break up conglomerates, and make the enactment of the Fairness Doctrine “look mild” in comparison to other consequences.
In at least one corporate TV headquarters, memos were circulated to all on-air employees not to mention the birth certificate issue, as well as other specific subjects like Obama’s Illinois lawyer’s license, his college records, etc., under both implied and explicit threats.
During the interview, Hagmann and McLeod—who never mentioned a particular network by name—alluded to e-mails and other evidence in their possession, copies of which, they said, were secreted in several locations. But they did tantalize listeners with descriptions of meeting with “sources” outside of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City, a high-placed contact looking nervously over his shoulder, references to directives and warnings given by “those at the top,” and the undisguised threat of one executive to his underlings: “This is serious, and so will the consequences be if anyone chooses not to be a team player with this.”
This comes as no surprise to Fox watchers who have noticed that the Stalinist-style censorship of the Obama regime is already here. This couldn’t possibly be because of the healthy shares of stock the Saudis bought in Fox, could it? If so, why would the Saudis care so much about quashing potentially damning revelations about Obama? Have they also bought shares in Obama?
Come to think of it, who exactly paid the tuition for Obama’s stint at Harvard Law School ? What role did Obama’s long-time friend, Khalid al-Mansour, a key advisor to a Saudi billionaire, play? Writer Kenneth Tim merman describes al-Mansour as “well known within the black community as a lawyer, an orthodox Muslim, a black nationalist, an author, an international deal-maker, an educator, and an outspoken enemy of Israel.” This is not to omit that al-Mansour was originally contacted to intervene with Harvard on Obama’s behalf by Percy Sutton, former Manhattan Borough President and the lawyer of Malcolm X. Ah…the tangled web of it all!
Then there is the question of what role was played by Saudi Prince Alwaleed, the nephew of King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia? You remember Prince Alwaleed, who offered then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani $10 million after September 11 if he would only blame America for the terrorist attacks of which 15 of 19 perpetrators were Saudi Arabian—a “gift” the mayor promptly and with appropriate contempt rejected!
In short, what influence have the Saudis exerted on Fox to muzzle the issue of Obama’s birth certificate? I don’t ask this about the network TV channels or cable channels like CNN and MSNBC, which are still issuing daily hagiographies of Obama.
TIP OF THE ICEBERG
Just who has been sending “the message”? And how did it permeate not only the media, but also the once-respected U.S. Congress and the courts of our land, including the once-incorruptible Supreme Court? And what menacing forces made the once-courageous conservative media abandon their mission to expose rank corruption and collusion?
Two words: Money Talks!
If you’re a media mogul and you get word from the FCC that your license will be pulled immediately and irrevocably if you mention only three words—Obama’s birth certificate—poof! You send that word to your employees and tell them that their mega-salaries—in fact, their employment—are on the line.
If you’re a conservative talk-show host and you get your boss’s directive not to dare to mention only three words—Obama’s birth certificate—poof! Lips sealed; curiosity zero!
If the money thing doesn’t work, there’s always the threat thing, i.e., “going public” about tax records, health status, or family secrets. Or be audited by the IRS. Or be investigated by any number of regulatory agencies.
And if the money thing and the threat thing don’t work, how about being reminded of all those “accidents” and “unfortunate incidents”—broken kneecaps, missing children, “falls” from buildings, punctured tires—that resulted not in joblessness or embarrassment but in death?
We know that’s how the Mafia works. It’s also how political machines work. It’s also how community organizers work. Wasn’t it Obama himself who in 2008 said ’‘If They Bring a Knife…We Bring a Gun’‘ and in 2009 advised his followers to “Get in Their Faces!”?
So determined are Obama’s handlers to keep the facts of his parentage and place of birth out of the public domain that, as writer Chelsea Schilling has scrupulously documented, ¬†“the Federal Election Commission shows Obama’s campaign has made regular payments to Perkins Coie since Jan. 1, 2007—the month he formed a presidential exploratory committee and only weeks before he formally announced his candidacy for president—[and up to the present]—has paid Perkins Coie, a single law firm, $2.3 million…to crush eligibility lawsuits.”
But paying lawyers to quash the dozens of lawsuits that have challenged Obama’s eligibility still doesn’t answer the question of who exactly is behind the blanket blackout of the media, Congress and courts when it comes to Obama’s origins, parentage, credentials, indeed identity.
We certainly can’t attribute this massive power play to Obama himself. After all, while “owning” the Congress and the media, he is failing miserably to gain support for his two signature pieces of legislation, cap & tax and healthcare “reform.” No one that ineffectual—or, as Jonah Goldberg says, “astoundingly incompetent”—could possibly mute the media, castrate the Congress, and cow the courts.
And we can’t attribute the blackout to Obama’s union and community organizing buddies. While the former are quite expert at threatening members to fall in line…or else, and the latter have mastered standing outside polling places with glowering facial expressions and menacing Billy clubs, neither has the heft to have compelled the media to roll over, the Congress to say they “know nothing,” or the courts to load one side of the scales of justice with rocks and the other side with feathers.
A COUP D' ETAT?
Scholars and historians have documented exhaustively the Left’s obsession with (1) the acquisition of power, and (2) transforming America from a free-market, Constitution-respecting, freedom-loving, God-embracing society into a Socialist-cum-Communist “share the wealth” collective that echoes the beliefs and “values” of their heroes Marx and Engels.
But it takes money to bring about the kind of poverty both Socialism and Communism deliver to their masses. The kind of money only a few at the top enjoy while they’d like the rest of us to wait on food lines and appear before death panels of impersonal state functionaries who decide if we’re worthy of antibiotics or surgery and, if not, convenient “go-to-sleep” pills.
The kind of money that “talks”—that can buy people off, finance revolutions, launder money, pay to rig voting machines, manipulate allies into positions of power (czars, anyone?), conveniently crash markets (as George Soros did in England in 1992, Asia in 1997, and, I believe, the U.S. in September 200, make people disappear, make birth certificates and other vital records disappear and then make sure that an entire media, Congress and court system is terrified of “going there.”
We all know of the many multimillionaires and billionaires—including Soros, the Saudi royal family, et al—who contributed to Obama’s presidential campaign and continue to fund his leftist agenda, all of them with an ideological, religious, or personal stake in his remaining in power. And all of them part of a larger, more ubiquitous conspiracy—yes, conspiracy!—to conceal Obama’s origins and true parentage.
Among them, as JB Williams has documented, are “international socialists working through CPUSA - SPUSA and DSAUSA, funded by literally hundreds of leftist front-groups operating as special interest 527 organizations. Here’s a short list of the BIGGEST leftist front groups: America Coming Together - Joint Victory Campaign 2004 - Media Fund - Service Employees International Union - American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees - MoveOn.org - New Democrat Network - Sierra Club - EMILY’s List - AFL-CIO - League of Conservation Voters.”
Further, Williams asks: “Who spends an obscene $1-billion dollars to win a lousy $400,000-per-year job, and why?”
Richard Poe, award-winning journalist and New York Times-bestselling author, has written extensively on Soros and makes a good case that the Hungarian-born Jew and self-admitted Nazi collaborator is the primary brains and money behind Obama—and, I believe, his healthcare travesty. When President Bush was in office, Poe wrote that Soros talked openly of a “regime change” in the United States.
"What about our country offends Soros so deeply,” Poe asked, “that he would tell the BBC—during a time of war—that he means to use all of his power to `puncture the bubble of American supremacy’? Poe explained that Soros’s Open Society Foundation, founded in 1984, “has spent millions promoting a radical agenda that includes abortion, feminism, gun control, abolition of capital punishment, voting rights for felons, drug legalization, euthanasia and gay marriage rights…the Soros cult preaches secularism, the godless faith of a world without nations, families, loyalty or tradition, a world in which the very words `mother,’ `father,’ `husband,’ `wife,’ `son’ and `daughter’ will be bleached of meaning forever.”
Soros,Poe continued, “is one of the world’s leading promoters of euthanasia, or `mercy killing.’ Not only does he advocate `physician-assisted suicide’ for patients who choose death voluntarily, he also lobbies for the right of family members or court-appointed guardians to authorize the killing of patients whose wishes are not known.” Sounds a lot like the Death Panels Sarah Palin warned about, doesn’t it? Soros also founded the Project on Death in America [which] promotes suicide and euthanasia and urges doctors to warehouse terminally ill patients in hospices and give them `palliative’ care ...rather than wasting time, energy and money actually trying to cure them.”
Of course, all of these beliefs are eerily echoed in Obama’s healthcare legislation, almost as if Soros had dictated the terms. Maybe he did! Maybe that was the price he exacted for financing a large part of Obama’s presidential campaign and facilitating the cover-up of Obama’s birth certificate and other documents. And maybe that’s why Obama is still paying Soros back by recently announcing that he will invest $2 billion (or more) in drilling for oil off the shores of Brazil, where none other than George Soros owns $5.8 million of the Brazilian oil company’s U.S.-traded preferred shares of stock!
THE USUAL SUSPECTS
While Soros may top the list of conspirators who have been trying to topple big bad capitalist America for decades, others figure prominently as well, including but not limited to: Noam Chomsky, Louis Farrakhan,,Jane Fonda, Tom Hayden, Jesse Jackson, Michael Moore, Cornel West, Ted Turner, former National Security Advisor to Pres. Jimmy Carter Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Rockefeller family, The Carnegie family, and, I might add, Fidel Castro and the cozy cabal of America-loathing Marxist revolutionaries he met with at the Theresa Hotel in Harlem.
Then there are: The Congressional Progressive Caucus(their members here) aka the Democratic Socialists of America, formed by partners from the Communist Party USA and Socialist Party USA (Founder: Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VA); The Congressional Black Caucus (their members here), originally established and controlled by the Communist Party USA (Founder: Cong. John Conyers (D-VT), and now controlled by ACORN and The Democratic Socialists of America; The ACLU, founded in 1917 by Communist Roger Baldwin; The Southern Poverty Law Center—a mini ACLU; The FORD Foundation; The Annenberg Foundation; The NAACP; The Council on Foreign Relations; The Trilateral Commission; numerous labor unions, and of course the mega-rich sheiks of Araby.
While all of the above and many others have worked assiduously to dismantle America, there are probably only a relative handful of aiders and abettors who ushered the modern-day Trojan Horse Barack Obama into America’s body politic and were sophisticated and connected and rich and arch enough to have facilitated his path to the U.S. Senate, sealed all of his records both home and abroad, assembled the massive¬†organization for his run for the presidency, and delivered in only seven months the most radical leftwing—actually more Communist than Socialist—agenda in the history of the United States.
WHO'S NOT CAVING ON THE BIRTH CERTIFICATE ISSUE?
McLeod and Hagmann have come very close to explaining a major piece of the conspiracy puzzle, specifically how some in the media were either bribed or threatened into silence vis-√†-vis Obama’s birth certificate. But the American people have a peculiar resistance to and revulsion for these thuggish tactics. In fact, the birth certificate issue has gained momentum. Why is it not going away but instead gathering steam?
1. The huge amount of money Obama has spent on this cover-up is, to most Americans, fishy.
2. Obama’s serial apologies for America as he travels the world have offended Americans and convinced them that no genuine American could or would ever behave in such a way.
3. Last month, when Army Reserve Major Stefan Frederick Cook sued Obama claiming he was not legally qualified to be President and Commander-in-Chief and therefore was unqualified to give him orders to deploy to Afghanistan, the government rescinded his orders, thereby negating the “standing” Cook no doubt would have had to sue. District Judge Richard Lazzara of Tampa denied Cook’s motions as “frivolous and wholly without merit” and then—guess what?—sealed the records! This should have disqualified the judge. In fact, it raised the eyebrows of millions of Americans.
4. To the public, rescinding Cook’s orders was a de facto admission that Obama is not a natural-born American citizen, and it gives rise to the possibility that untold numbers of military enlistees, in the U.S. and around the world, will follow suit. According to one source, as many as 100 lawyers are preparing to file such litigation and even class-action suits are being considered.
As Obama’s poll numbers continue to plunge, more and more people are waking up to his unique lack of qualifications and inability to lead the greatest nation in the world. As Kyle-Ann Shiver has written, “It’s as though [in 2008] 59 million Americans joined hands and shouted at the top of their little lungs, `Yes, We Can March off This Cliff.’”
Writer James Lewis asks: “How do we fight Obama and his psychopathic lust for power?”...and answers: “You fight evil by exposing it.””
Indeed, the American electorate has never been so energized, with millions upon millions of ordinary citizens—many of them seniors with vested interests in avoiding Obama’s death panels—attending Tea Parties, Town Hall meetings, and writing and calling their representatives in massive numbers. In addition, people are now speaking openly about the man without a birth certificate. Who is this guy? What is he hiding? Why are media people studiously avoiding this issue? And why are those who “dare” raise it—like Lou Dobbs at CNN—being targeted by far-left groups, many of them funded by George Soros?
Yet in spite of their efforts to conceal the truth about Obama’s birth place and parentage, increasing numbers of articles, radio hosts and their callers and regular Americans have lost their amazingly forbearing patience and are now asking and will continue to ask until the question is answered:
WHERE’S THE BIRTH CERTIFICATE ?
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)
