The World Is Getting Worse, But This Time America Won't Save It

I cannot imagine any thinking person who does not believe the world is getting worse.  The number of slaughtered and the number of refugees from slaughter is immense and growing. Islamic State now controls territories from Afghanistan to West Africa. Libya is in the process of being added to that list. And other sadistic Islamist movements hold additional territory.
Read more at Townhall.com Read More......

Why We Should Care About America's Fading Economic Freedom

The Economic Freedom Team at Economic Freedom.org writes, "The word at the water cooler is that the U.S. has fallen to 18th in economic freedom. So what’s the big deal? Professor Antony Davies of Duquesne University explains in U.S. News & World Report that economic freedom benefits just about everyone. ✧ The conclusion is simple: Economic freedom yields beneficial results. ... data bears out what Americans know intuitively: The United States is less free than it once was, and our lives are the worse for it. The way to improve our lives as citizens is to return to our birthright as citizens: liberty." Read the full article at U.S. News & World Report... Read More......

Audit of the Federal Reserve Reveals $16 Trillion in Secret Bailouts

This summer, I heard a brief newscast teaser stating that $16 Trillion was 'missing' with a reference to the Federal Reserve. I thought details would follow and expected a huge backlash but never heard more until Jean Nelson sent a link to the following article this evening. Jean wrote, "Ron Paul’s persistence has resulted in a tremendous expose of the Federal Reserve Bank." --bc

SILVER BEAR CAFE (via unelected.org), July 21, 2011 - The first ever GAO (Government Accountability Office) audit of the Federal Reserve was carried out in the past few months due to the Ron Paul, Alan Grayson Amendment to the Dodd-Frank bill, which passed last year. Jim DeMint, a Republican Senator, and Bernie Sanders, an independent Senator, led the charge for a Federal Reserve audit in the Senate, but watered down the original language of the house bill (HR1207), so that a complete audit would not be carried out. Ben Bernanke, Alan Greenspan, and various other bankers vehemently opposed the audit and lied to Congress about the effects an audit would have on markets. Nevertheless, the results of the first audit in the Federal Reserve’s nearly 100 year history were posted on Senator Sander’s webpage earlier this morning [July 21, 2011].

What was revealed in the audit was startling:

$16,000,000,000,000.00 had been secretly given out to US banks and corporations and foreign banks everywhere from France to Scotland. From the period between December 2007 and June 2010, the Federal Reserve had secretly bailed out many of the world’s banks, corporations, and governments. The Federal Reserve likes to refer to these secret bailouts as an all-inclusive loan program, but virtually none of the money has been returned and it was loaned out at 0% interest. Why the Federal Reserve had never been public about this or even informed the United States Congress about the $16 trillion dollar bailout is obvious - the American public would have been outraged to find out that the Federal Reserve bailed out foreign banks while Americans were struggling to find jobs.

To place $16 trillion into perspective, remember that GDP of the United States is only $14.12 trillion. The entire national debt of the United States government spanning its 200+ year history is "only" $14.5 trillion. The budget that is being debated so heavily in Congress and the Senate is "only" $3.5 trillion. Take all of the outrage and debate over the $1.5 trillion deficit into consideration, and swallow this Red pill: There was no debate about whether $16,000,000,000,000 would be given to failing banks and failing corporations around the world.

In late 2008, the TARP Bailout bill was passed and loans of $800 billion were given to failing banks and companies. That was a blatant lie considering the fact that Goldman Sachs alone received 814 billion dollars. As is turns out, the Federal Reserve donated $2.5 trillion to Citigroup, while Morgan Stanley received $2.04 trillion. The Royal Bank of Scotland and Deutsche Bank, a German bank, split about a trillion and numerous other banks received hefty chunks of the $16 trillion.

"This is a clear case of socialism for the rich and rugged, you’re-on-your-own individualism for everyone else." - Bernie Sanders (I-VT)

When you have conservative Republican stalwarts like Jim DeMint (R-SC) and Ron Paul (R-TX) as well as self identified Democratic socialists like Bernie Sanders all fighting against the Federal Reserve, you know that it is no longer an issue of Right versus Left. When you have every single member of the Republican Party in Congress and progressive Congressmen like Dennis Kucinich sponsoring a bill to audit the Federal Reserve, you realize that the Federal Reserve is an entity onto itself, which has no oversight and no accountability.

Americans should be swelled with anger and outrage at the abysmal state of affairs when an unelected group of bankers can create money out of thin air and give it out to megabanks and supercorporations like Halloween candy. If the Federal Reserve and the bankers who control it believe that they can continue to devalue the savings of Americans and continue to destroy the US economy, they will have to face the realization that their trillion dollar printing presses will eventually plunder the world economy.

The list of institutions that received the most money from the Federal Reserve can be found on page 131 of the GAO Audit and are as follows...

• Citigroup: $2.5 trillion ($2,500,000,000,000)
  
• Morgan Stanley: $2.04 trillion ($2,040,000,000,000)
  
• Merrill Lynch: $1.949 trillion ($1,949,000,000,000)
  
• Bank of America: $1.344 trillion ($1,344,000,000,000)
  
• Barclays PLC (United Kingdom): $868 billion ($868,000,000,000)
  
• Bear Sterns: $853 billion ($853,000,000,000)
  
• Goldman Sachs: $814 billion ($814,000,000,000)
  
• Royal Bank of Scotland (UK): $541 billion ($541,000,000,000)
  
• JP Morgan Chase: $391 billion ($391,000,000,000)
  
• Deutsche Bank (Germany): $354 billion ($354,000,000,000)
  
• UBS (Switzerland): $287 billion ($287,000,000,000)
  
• Credit Suisse (Switzerland): $262 billion ($262,000,000,000)
  
• Lehman Brothers: $183 billion ($183,000,000,000)
  
• Bank of Scotland (United Kingdom): $181 billion ($181,000,000,000)
  
• BNP Paribas (France): $175 billion ($175,000,000,000)
  
• and many many more including banks in Belgium of all places

View the 266-page GAO audit of the Federal Reserve (July 21st, 2011): GAO-Fed-Investigation (on scribd.com)
Source: http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-11-696
FULL PDF on GAO server: http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d11696.pdf
Senator Sander’s Article: http://sanders.senate.gov/newsroom/news/?id=9e2a4ea8-6e73-4be2-a753-62060dcbb3c3
Hat tip: SILVER BEAR CAFE (via www.unelected.org) Read More......

WND: Federal obligations exceed world GDP

Does $65.5 trillion terrify anyone yet?
WorldNetDaily, February 13, 2009 by Jerome R. Corsi (Hat tip: Patrick Wills) - As the Obama administration pushes through Congress its $800 billion deficit-spending economic stimulus plan, the American public is largely unaware that the true deficit of the federal government already is measured in trillions of dollars, and in fact its $65.5 trillion in total obligations exceeds the gross domestic product of the world. The total U.S. obligations, including Social Security and Medicare benefits to be paid in the future, effectively have placed the U.S. government in bankruptcy, even before new continuing social welfare obligation embedded in the massive spending plan are taken into account. The real 2008 federal budget deficit was $5.1 trillion, not the $455 billion previously reported by the Congressional Budget Office, according to the "2008 Financial Report of the United States Government" as released by the U.S. Department of Treasury. Read more at World Net Daily... Read More......

Attack on Israel from Lebanon threatens 2nd front

JERUSALEM (AP) - Lebanese militants fired at least three rockets into northern Israel early Thursday, threatening to open a second front for the Jewish state as it pushed forward with its offensive in the Gaza Strip. Gaza militants fired a rocket barrage into southern Israel almost simultaneously. Read more at Breitbart... Read More......

U.N. Thugs

From American Congress for Truth, FrontPageMagazine.com by Christine Williams - Support for Israel has never ranked high on the United Nations’ agenda. And the upcoming World Conference Against Racism, scheduled for early 2009 in Geneva, Switzerland, presents a valid case. Many observers are concerned that the UN-sponsored event will simply serve as yet another a platform to launch attacks against Israel -- as the previous world anti-racism conference did in Durban, South Africa, seven years ago.

Even by the standards of the organization’s traditional antagonism toward the Jewish State, the U.N.’s 2001 Durban gathering marked a low point. To the extent that “racism” was discussed, it was only to condemn Israeli policies. Little wonder that the conference, known as “ Durban I,” is largely remembered as a U.N.-backed assault on Israel.

Now it’s back. And if early evidence is any guide, Durban II, as the Geneva event is already being called, will be a replay of its predecessor. Consider that the chair of the conference’s planning committee is Libya, whose longtime leader, Muammar Gadhafi, has recently claimed that the Israeli Mossad aims to assassinate Barack Obama. The vice chair of the conference, meanwhile, is communist Cuba. And the fact that Iran's president has notoriously called for Israel’s destruction has not, expectedly, prevented it from playing a key leadership role in the upcoming conference.

Nor does it bode well for Durban II that its agenda will be set by the 56-member Organization of Islamic Countries (OIC). In particular, the conference will consider responses to “Islamophobia.” In this connection, the OIC’s members will consider what they regard as the problematic Western right to free speech. Referring to the cartoons of the prophet Mohammed published in Danish newspaper Jyllands Posten and to “Fitna,” Dutch politician Geert Wilders’s documentary about Islam, OIC Secretary General Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu recently promised to send “a clear message to the West regarding the red lines that should not be crossed.” He went on to warn Western countries to “look seriously into the question of freedom of expression.”

For their part, Western countries should make clear that they will not allow the OIC to dictate what can and cannot be said about Islam. Instead, they should shift the focus onto the OIC. Instead of concerning themselves with alleged Western prejudices, Islamic states would do well to ponder the rampant racism in the Muslim World. Darfur, where an estimated 300,000 Muslims have been killed by their fellow Muslims, prompting the United Nations to call it the worst human rights disaster in the world, would be a logical starting point. From there, the OIC might consider the continued bloodshed between Shiites and Sunnis, and the fanatical suicide bombers who have claimed the lives of thousands of their co-religionists. One need hardly look to the West to find “Islamophobia” in action.

As for “racism,” the conference’s nominal subject, it is worth bearing in mind that slavery - the most racist of practices - endures in the Islamic world even as it has been abolished in the West. In OIC member states like Sudan and Mauritania, Arabs still keep black African slaves. Sudan 's president, Omar al-Bashir, who was indicted by the World Court for human rights abuses in Darfur, is reputed to have black slaves in his own house. According to NGO reports, some 200,000 southern Sudanese have been enslaved during Bashir’s reign, a practice that the UN has charged is “deeply rooted in Arab and Muslim supremacism.” (Such grim statistics did not deter the Sudanese Minister of Justice from demanding, in a stunning act of hypocrisy, reparations for historical slavery during Durban I.) And while Mauritania legally abolished slavery in 1980, it is still practiced secretly. Even Muslims in the West have not accepted its ban on slavery. For example, four Arab princesses were found in July living in Brussels with 17 slaves.

The persistence of slavery in the Muslim world is not, of course, surprising. In August 1990, the Cairo Declaration of Human Rights was affirmed by the 57 member states of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC). It stated that Islamic Sharia law is the sole source of the Islamic perspective on human rights. And slavery is codified in Sharia law. It is doubtful, naturally, that this detail will be much discussed during Durban II.

In light of recent history, it makes sense that Israel has decided to boycott next year’s conference. Canada has also decided to boycott Durban II, and other Western countries should consider following the Canadian example. It’s the height of absurdity for free nations to have to endure lectures on human rights from its preeminent abusers. In 2001, they could have claimed to be unaware of the conference’s sinister agenda. Seven years later, ignorance is no longer an excuse or an option.

Christine Williams is the producer and host of the Canadian award-winning daily current affairs program On the Line (CTS). Read More......

Bush denounces Russian violence in Georgia

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Bush is denouncing what he calls Russia's dramatic and brutal escalation of violence in the former Soviet republic of Georgia. He pressed Moscow to accept an immediate cease-fire and to pull back its troops. Bush put the crisis at the top of his agenda as he returned from the Olympic Games in Beijing. In a Rose Garden statement Monday, Bush said there appeared to be an attempt by Russia to unseat Georgia's pro-Western president, Mikhail Saakashvili.

He demanded an immediate cease-fire, the withdrawal of Russian troops from the conflict zone and a return to the status quo as of Aug. 6. Russia has ignored calls for a truce and has responded with overwhelming military force. Read More......