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Showing posts with label Obama. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Obama. Show all posts

Monday, April 27, 2015

UPDATE: Can American Banks Raiding Safety Deposit Boxes Be Legal Next After they Loot their Customers Personal Accounts?

CV 1st posted 08.29.2012

"Yes, We Can! We don't need no phreakin' Constitution!"
                    ...and the people's response is:

the People say "You phreakin' DO need to obey the Federal and state constitutions!" Any actions to seize our private property by any federal agency or their law officers will be nullified by the individual states. Violators or trespassers of these personal rights can and will be arrested and judged in a state court. No federal magistrate has the granted authority to interpret or end-around our Rule of Constitutional Law.

Our own state law enforcement entities will no longer be a "team player" with tyrants, but will as they should be, do the right thing and become team players with the people, not accessories to oppression. 

Any bank likewise delegating these confiscations to third parties jeopardize their being prohibited for having any business authority or surrogates within those states.  

Questions? Watch:  ▶ Nullification a Tool We All Have by Thomas Woods - YouTube

Friday, March 27, 2015

US military officers resort to lying and deception at all levels, finds damning official report

  • Shock 52-page report finds dishonesty at all levels in the U.S. Army 
  • Warns officers have become 'ethically numb' and urges quick action 
  • Says leaders 'espouse lofty values' but slog 'through mire of dishonesty' 
  • Finds personnel expect requested information to be 'questionable' 
  • But notes staff are 'happy to go along with the illusion all is well'  
Published: 08:55 EST, 20 February 2015

A damning official report claims dishonesty within the U.S. military is so endemic that everyone assumes they are being lied to at all times.

The shock report calls on officials to 'urgently confront the corrupting influence of dishonesty' within the army, warning officers have become 'ethically numb'.

The situation has become so bad, the executive summary concludes it has 'allowed leaders to espouse lofty professional values while slogging through the mire of dishonesty and deceit'. 
Dishonesty: The report claims dishonesty is endemic in the army on all levels, discovering personnel expect to not be told the truth at certain points, and accusing officers of becoming 'ethically numb' (Stock picture)

The report's executive summary also claims 'much of the deception and dishonesty... is actually encouraged and sanctioned by the military institution'.

Report authors Leonard Wong and Stephen J. Gerras say it is often justified one of three ways: 'mission accomplishment', 'supporting the troops' or that the task or reporting requirement is unreasonable or 'dumb'.

They go onto note lying and 'adjusting the truth' is so common, military personnel who order a report do not trust its content.

The report authors, who interviewed staff at all levels in the army in order to compile the 53-page document, state: 'It appears that a peculiar situation where those requesting the information, and those supplying it know that the information is questionable.'

However, they add, personnel are 'happy to go along with the illusion all is well'.  
Concerns: Former U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel sent a memo to military leaders before he stepped down from his post asking to deal with 'unethical or morally questionable behaviour'

The report, created for the Strategic Studies Institute and U.S. Army War College Press, say comes just a week after departing Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel's final words of advice to senior military staff were to sort out 'unethical behaviour'.

According to CNN, Hagel wrote: 'The vast majority of our senior leaders are men and women who have earned the special trust and confidence afforded them by the American people.

'However, when senior leaders forfeit this trust through unprofessional, unethical or morally questionable behavior, their actions have an enormously negative effect on the profession.' 

via dailymail

Friday, March 6, 2015

A Lone Wolf President & His Executive Orders

Can the president rewrite federal laws? Can he alter their meaning? Can he change their effect? These are legitimate questions in an era in which we have an unpopular progressive Democratic president who has boasted that he can govern without Congress by using his phone and his pen, and a mostly newly elected largely conservative Republican Congress with its own ideas about big government.

These are not hypothetical questions. In 2012, President Obama signed executive orders that essentially said to about 1.7 million unlawfully present immigrants who arrived in the U.S. before their 16th birthdays and who are not yet 31 years of age that if they complied with certain conditions that he made up out of thin air they will not be deported.

In 2014, the president signed additional executive orders that essentially made the same offer to about 4.7 million unlawfully present immigrants, without the age limits that he had made up out of thin air. A federal court enjoined enforcement of the 2014 orders last month.

Last week, the Federal Communications Commission — the bureaucrats appointed by the president who regulate broadcast radio and television — decreed that it has the authority to regulate the Internet, even though federal courts have twice ruled that it does not.

Also last week, the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, whose director is appointed by the president, proposed regulations that would outlaw the only mass-produced bullets that can be fired from an AR-15 rifle. This rifle has been the target of the left for many years because it looks like a military weapon; yet it is a lawful and safe civilian rifle commonly owned by many Americans.

This week, the president’s press secretary told reporters that the president is seriously thinking of signing executive orders intended to raise taxes on corporations by directing the IRS to redefine tax terminology so as to increase corporate tax burdens. He must have forgotten that those additional taxes would be paid by either the shareholders or the customers of those corporations, and those shareholders and customers elected a Congress they had every right to expect would be writing the tax laws. He has eviscerated that right.

What’s going on here?

What’s going on is the exercise of authoritarian impulses by a desperate president terrified of powerlessness and irrelevance, the Constitution be damned. I say “damned” because when the president writes laws, whether under the guise of administrative regulations or executive orders, he is effectively damning the Constitution by usurping the powers of Congress.

The Constitution could not be clearer.

Article I, section 1 begins, “All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States.” Obama actually asked Congress to write the laws he is now purporting to write, and Congress declined, and so he does so at his peril.

In 1952, President Truman seized America’s closed steel mills because steel workers went on strike and the military needed hardware to fight the Korean War. He initially asked Congress for authorization to do this, and Congress declined to give it to him; so he seized the mills anyway. His seizure was challenged by Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co., then a huge operator of steel mills. In a famous Supreme Court decision, the court enjoined the president from operating the mills.

Youngstown is not a novel or arcane case. The concurring opinion by Justice Robert Jackson articulating the truism that when the president acts in defiance of Congress he operates at his lowest ebb of constitutional power and can be enjoined by the courts unless he is in an area uniquely immune from congressional authority is among the most highly regarded and frequently cited concurring opinions in modern court history. It reminds the president and the lawyers who advise him that the Constitution imposes limits on executive power.

The president’s oath of office underscores those limits. It requires that he enforce the laws faithfully. The reason James Madison insisted on using the word “faithfully” in the presidential oath and putting the oath itself into the Constitution was to instill in presidents the realization that they may need to enforce laws with which they disagree — even laws they hate.

But Obama rejects the Youngstown decision and the Madisonian logic. Here is a president who claims he can kill Americans without due process, spy on Americans without individualized probable cause, start wars on his own, borrow money on his own, regulate the Internet, ban lawful guns, tell illegal immigrants how to avoid the consequences of federal law, and now raise taxes on his own.

One of the safeguards built into the Constitution is the separation of powers: Congress writes the laws, the president enforces the laws, and the courts interpret them. The purpose of this separation is to prevent the accumulation of too much power in the hands of too few — a valid fear when the Constitution was written and a valid fear today.

When the president effectively writes the laws, Congress is effectively neutered. 

Yet, the reason we have the separation of powers is not to protect Congress, but to protect all individuals from the loss of personal liberty. Under Obama, that loss has been vast. Will Congress and the courts do anything about it?

COPYRIGHT 2015 ANDREW P. NAPOLITANO
source 10thACtr

Tuesday, March 3, 2015

Obama-Netanyahu "Fallout" is Theater - Planned in 2009

US and Israel attempting to establish feigned "diplomatic row" to justify "unilateral" Israeli attack on Iran.

March 2, 2015 (Tony Cartalucci - LD) - In a 2009 US policy paper published by the corporate-financier funded Brookings Institution, it was made clear that the US was determined to provoke Iran into a conflict and effect regime change at any cost - up to and including an outright military invasion and occupation of Iran with US troops.

However, before it came to that, the Brookings Institution's policymakers explored other options including fomenting US-backed political unrest coupled with covert, violent force, the use of US State Department listed foreign terrorist organizations to carry out assassinations and attacks within Iran, and limited airstrikes carried out by either the US or Israel, or both.

In retrospect, 6 years on, all of these tricks have not only been attempted to one degree or another in Iran, but have been demonstrably employed in neighboring Syria to diminish its strength - which according to Brookings - is a necessary prerequisite before waging war on Iran.

And of particular interest - considering what appears to be a growing diplomatic row between the United States and Israel - is just how precisely the US planned to covertly back what would be made to appear as a "unilateral" Israeli first strike on Iran - an attack that appears to be in the process of being justified through a carefully orchestrated propaganda campaign now unfolding.

From the Mouths of US Policymakers Themselves 

The Brookings Institution's 2009 policy paper titled, "Which Path to Persia? Options for a New American Strategy Toward Iran," makes clear that negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program is merely theater, and that it will be used to give the world the impression that the United States explored all possible "peaceful" options before resorting to violent regime change.  The report states specifically that:
...any military operation against Iran will likely be very unpopular around the world and require the proper international context— both to ensure the logistical support the operation would require and to minimize the blowback from it. The best way to minimize international opprobrium and maximize support (however, grudging or covert) is to strike only when there is a widespread conviction that the Iranians were given but then rejected a superb offer—one so good that only a regime determined to acquire nuclear weapons and acquire them for the wrong reasons would turn it down. Under those circumstances, the United States (or Israel) could portray its operations as taken in sorrow, not anger, and at least some in the international community would conclude that the Iranians “brought it on themselves” by refusing a very good deal.

Of course, Iran - as admitted to by Brookings themselves - is not governed by irrational leadership, and would not turn down a genuinely "superb offer." The Brookings Institution admits openly that the US pursues a dual track foreign policy - one for public consumption (making "superb offers") and another aimed at ensuring Iran looks as unreasonable as possible.

At one point in the policy paper, Brookings would state:
The truth is that these all would be challenging cases to make. For that reason, it would be far more preferable if the United States could cite an Iranian provocation as justification for the airstrikes before launching them. Clearly, the more outrageous, the more deadly, and the more unprovoked the Iranian action, the better off the United States would be. Of course, it would be very difficult for the United States to goad Iran into such a provocation without the rest of the world recognizing this game, which would then undermine it. (One method that would have some possibility of success would be to ratchet up covert regime change efforts in the hope that Tehran would retaliate overtly, or even semi-overtly, which could then be portrayed as an unprovoked act of Iranian aggression.)
READ MORE

Tuesday, February 24, 2015

La Raza's Growing Influence: Gaining clout and tax dollars in all branches of government

Come the resurgence to launch the NAU, La Raza and its political subversives including the Republican Party will be a tremendous tool for the NWO to ensnare the non-thinking citizenship. Afterall, who would oppose "reform"?

CRC Staff | February 23, 2015

By Barbara Joanna Lucas, Organization Trends, February 2015 (PDF here)


Summary: President Obama’s stunning reversal of his own views on deportation policy is only the most prominent example of influence enjoyed by the National Council of La Raza, which calls itself “the largest national Hispanic civil rights and advocacy organization in the United States.” In addition to its sway with the president, the group has seen its government revenues rise with help from a high-level White House staffer and also seen a former member be named to the Supreme Court.

Before President Barack Obama told a prime-time TV audience on Nov. 20, 2014, that he was going to bypass Congress and shield 5 million illegal aliens from deportation, he confided the details of his sweeping plan to Janet Murguía, president and CEO of the National Council of La Raza. “I knew a lot of what he was going to say before he said it,” Murguía bragged in a C-SPAN interview on Dec. 5. “I met with the president that day, that afternoon.”

It’s hardly a surprise that Obama’s address to the nation sounded like something a La Raza staffer might have written, full of emotional appeals and framing the enforcement of immigration law as an inherent cruelty. 

“Are we a nation that accepts the cruelty of ripping children from their parents’ arms? Or are we a nation that values families, and works to keep them together?” Obama said in the speech.

Obama added that the Department of Homeland Security would focus on recent illegal border crossers, criminals, terrorists, and gang members. “Felons, not families, criminals, not children, gang members, not a mother who’s working hard to provide for her kids,” would be targeted, he said.

La Raza demanded that Obama “go big” in his executive actions on immigration because the president had been unable in previous years to push a comprehensive immigration reform bill—which critics deride as “amnesty”—through Congress. Obama went big indeed. In addition to focusing on criminals facing deportation, he expanded the Deferred Action on Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, raising the age cap to 31 in order to include anyone who came to the United States from 2007 through 2009.

Less than a year before announcing these actions, hecklers at a San Francisco rally demanded that Obama take similar executive actions to stop deportations. “You have the power to end [deportation],” a heckler told Obama on Nov. 25, 2013.

Obama responded, “Actually I don’t,” as other audience members chanted “stop deportations.” Obama added, “I respect the passion of these young people because they feel deeply about the concerns for their families. Now what you need to know, when I’m speaking as President of the United States, and I come to this community, is that if in fact I could solve all these problems without passing laws in Congress, then I would do so.”

This means that a year before the president unveiled his unilateral immigration plan, he recognized that the Constitution purposely created a pesky separation of powers and that Congress serves in more than an advisory role in American governance. So what happened in the intervening year?

La Raza happened.

The Rise of La Raza

The National Council of La Raza was founded in the stormy days of 1968 and has one of the most questionable names in the political realm. La Raza can be translated as “The Race.” (NCLR disputes this translation, saying it is more properly translated as “the people.”) It has gone from a fringe organization that many would view as outright racist to a leading voice on policy making, influential in the Obama administration and corporate America. It has used this clout to claim it speaks for all Hispanic Americans. But that’s not always the case. The politically connected organization claims 300 affiliates in 41 states, Puerto Rico, and the District of Columbia. Headquartered in the nation’s capital, it has state and regional offices in Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, Phoenix, and San Antonio, Texas.

La Raza has pushed for immigration amnesty, opposed workplace enforcement, and fought against even the most basic voter integrity and national security proposals. (La Raza was previously profiled in the December 2007 Foundation Watch.)

President Obama, a longtime ally of La Raza, has been taking friendly fire from the group of late, but the drama is left-wing kabuki theater. As President Franklin Roosevelt told his left-wing allies after winning the election in 1932, “I agree with you, I want to do it, now make me do it.”

That’s what La Raza is doing.

A year ago Murguía seemed to turn against the president. “For the president, I think his legacy is at stake here,” Murguía said. “We consider him the deportation president, or the deporter-in-chief” (Politico, March 4, 2014).


“Deporter-in-chief” was an epithet hurled at Obama by amnesty activists throughout the year. The Obama administration frequently touted the speedy clip of enforcement action since 2009, and so the slogan was calculated to shame the president into slowing the pace. 

But it wasn’t true. Deportations have actually fallen under Obama. The administration has manipulated the numbers by changing the definition of “deportation.”
 
“We respectfully disagree with the president on his ability to stop unnecessary deportations,” Murguía continued. “He can stop tearing families apart. He can stop throwing communities and businesses into chaos. 

He can stop turning a blind eye to the harm being done. He does have the power to stop this. Failure to act will be a shameful legacy for his presidency.”


After Obama unveiled his executive action, Murguía decided to walk back the “deporter-in-chief” phrase. 

Janet Murguía, NCLR
“When we had seen the deportations, the number of deportations hit two million—a historic high and much higher than the previous administration under George Bush—there was a lot of frustration and anger in our community, but I actually used that term to really highlight how off-based Speaker [John] Boehner was when he said that the reason he couldn’t move a bill forward on comprehensive immigration reform is because he couldn’t trust President Obama to enforce the laws when in fact, and the fact is, at least two million people have been deported in this fifth year of the Obama presidency,” she said.

Brian Bennett of the Los Angeles Times debunked the left-wing claim that Obama is keen on deporting illegal aliens in an April 1, 2014 article:
“Expulsions of people who are settled and working in the United States have fallen steadily since his first year in office, and are down more than 40% since 2009. On the other side of the ledger, the number of people deported at or near the border has gone up – primarily as a result of changing who gets counted in the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency’s deportation statistics. The vast majority of those borders crossers would not have been treated as formal deportations under most previous administrations. If all removals were tallied, the total sent back to Mexico each year would have been far higher under those previous administrations than it is now.”
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) publishes an annual Yearbook of Immigration Statistics. Jessica Vaughn of the nonpartisan Center for Immigration Studies wrote in a December 2013 report that “because the Obama administration has blurred the lines of which agencies can take credit for deportations, the only fair way to assess their performance is to count all deportations done by all the DHS agencies.” The DHS Yearbook showed at the time that Bill Clinton’s administration holds the record for deportations. In the Clinton years, an average of 1,536,363 deportations were carried out.

Vaughn writes that “the total number of aliens ‘sent back’ under [the] first four years of the Obama administration is just over 3.2 million.” This represents an annual average of 800,863 deportations. During the presidency of George W. Bush, there were a total of 10,328,850 deportations, which works out to an average of 1,291,106 deportations per year.

Obama is clearly not hellbent on deporting illegal aliens, but the imagery is politically useful, which is why La Raza and its allies promote it.
 
Murguía herself was long active in Democratic politics before becoming head of La Raza in 2005. She worked in Bill Clinton’s White House, eventually serving as deputy assistant to the president. Murguía went on to be the deputy campaign manager and director of constituency outreach for the Al Gore presidential campaign in 2000.
 
From there, she became vice chancellor for university relations at the University of Kansas in 2001. She was an activist in 2004 against the voter-approved Proposition 200 in Arizona, which required residents to prove citizenship before registering to vote or legal immigration status before applying for public benefits.
 
Murguía does well for herself at La Raza. Her salary alone was $330,513 for the year ended Sept. 30, 2013, and she also received an additional $81,112 in other compensation from La Raza and its related entities. That lands Murguía well into the ranks of the much-maligned 1 percent.
 
Under her tenure at La Raza, the organization has advocated for speech restrictions. The organization led a campaign in 2008 against advocates of immigration law enforcement, urging that they be taken off of cable TV news networks. A “We Can Stop the Hate” campaign was initiated by La Raza, Center for American Progress, Media Matters, and the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF). It targeted amnesty opponents, who were described as “hate groups, nativists, and vigilantes” (Discover the Networks).
 
Borrowing a page from Marxist theoretician Herbert Marcuse, Murguía has also “argued that hate speech should not be tolerated, even if such censorship were a violation of First Amendment rights,” according to a New York Times report of a speech she gave at the National Press Club (Feb. 1, 2008).
 
Murguía hopes to continue to have the same sway with the next president, and expects Obama’s executive actions to continue in force. “I believe that the next president of the United States will have to come right through the Latino community to get to the White House, and they have to be very thoughtful of how they position themselves on immigration, and I think they have to stay away from this executive order and not try to undo it if they want to be president,” Murguía said during the December C-SPAN interview.
 
The historic Republican victory in 2014 congressional elections came without the GOP taking any clearly discernible position on comprehensive immigration reform. Still, Murguía said the party wouldn’t win the presidency without supporting amnesty, claiming that in 2016, “the demographics of the Electoral College will come home to roost for Republicans.”
 
“If they continue on this trajectory, Republicans will have elected their last president for the foreseeable future. Latino voter priorities must be reflected in Republican policy priorities,” Murguía said (Breitbart, Nov. 6, 2014).
 
Murguía cited the questionable Latino Decisions poll after the 2014 election that said immigration was the top issue with 45 percent of Hispanic voters, ahead of the economy, which registered just 34 percent.
 
“This is a call to action for both parties,” Murguía said after the Republican tsunami. “We fully expect the president to act boldly, but that action should spur Congress to pass comprehensive immigration reform at long last. It’s not an either/or situation. For the good of the nation, we need both the president and Congress to act now. Latinos will expect the GOP to use its majority position to not only make inroads with our community but, most importantly, do what’s in the best interest of our country.” (TheBlaze, Nov. 11, 2014)
 
La Raza takes part in sophisticated get-out-the-vote operations. Part of that voter-mobilization has come through the “ya es hora ¡VE Y VOTA!” (“It’s Time, Go Vote!”) project, which describes itself as “an historic non-partisan Latino civic participation campaign launched as the Latino community’s action-oriented follow-up to the immigrant mobilizations of 2006.  The campaign represents the largest and most comprehensive effort to incorporate Latinos as full participants in the American political process.  Unlike past approaches which focused on one component of civic engagement, this multi-layered campaign takes a comprehensive approach that links naturalization to voter participation and Census enumeration under a single message: ‘it’s time.’”
 
This project is the child of multiple “national Latino organizations including Mi Familia Vota, the NALEO [National Association of Latino Elected and appointed Officials] Educational Fund, the National Council of La Raza and Spanish language media companies Entravision Communications, ImpreMedia and Univision Communications.”
 
In January 2014, La Raza teamed with the Mi Familia Vota Education Fund for the “Mobilize to Vote 2014” campaign. The goal was to register more than 250,000 new Hispanic voters by mail for that year’s midterm elections. The effort involved three targets: 
18-year-olds, registered voters who moved, and the broader Hispanic voting-age public in Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Texas, Utah, Florida, and California (Discover the Networks).
As it turned out, this didn’t help Democrats stay in power. In many cases, Republicans did well with Latino voters. But La Raza’s influence lies in bending policymakers on Capitol Hill and—especially—the White House.
 
Capital Research Center reached out to National Council of La Raza providing the group opportunities to respond to this article. At press time no response had been received.
 
Conservatives may not be enthusiastic about La Raza’s political activities, but supporters say it does perform some good works. In a July 23, 2013 speech at La Raza’s annual conference, First Lady Michelle Obama called La Raza a “great American organization” that for more than four decades “has served as a powerful voice on the most important issues of our time — from voting rights to health care, from education to immigration. 

Because of all of you, your steadfast work, we have seen such great progress for the Latino community and for our country.”
 
NCLR boasts that it “conducts applied research, policy analysis, and advocacy, providing a Latino perspective in five key areas — assets/investments, civil rights/immigration, education, employment and economic status, and health. In addition, it provides capacity-building assistance to its Affiliates who work at the state and local level to advance opportunities for individuals and families.”
 
Finances and Organizational StructureRead more

Thursday, February 19, 2015

In Harvard essay, young Michelle Obama argued for race-based faculty hiring


In Harvard essay, young Michelle Obama argued for race-based faculty hiring

By Charles Johnson

BOSTON, United States: Democratic National Convention keynote speaker Barack Obama and his wife Michelle wave after he spoke 27 July, 2004, in Boston, Massachusetts.

Wednesday, February 18, 2015

US Army General Wesley Clark Discloses CLASSIFIED Policy Changes

1st published by CV 10.26.2011 

Be Cautioned: Wesley Clark is CFR and staff member of socialist George Soros - - read sketch below short video!

See also: CFR'S MILITARY MEMBERSHIP ROSTER

Libya destroyed: next stop Syria and then Iran


Retired US Army General Wesley Clark, Former NATO Supreme Allied Commander Europe, is now working directly with socialist George Soros, whose stated goal is to defeat capitalism and make America a socialist country. See article below:

International Crisis Group: George Soros is on the Board along with Council on Foreign Relations Members, Thomas R. Pickering, Morton Abramowitz, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Wesley Clark, James V. Kimsey, George J. Mitchell and Kenneth Adelman and UN Leaders, Kofi Annan, Lakhdar Brahimim, Asma Jahangir and Louise Arbour. These Men are Enemies of America. Wonder What New Financial Crisis They're Planning Next for Us?

04.24.10
Why are 3 George Soros funded/associated organizations (Microsoft, Amnesty International and Goldman Sachs -- the only ones mentioned) all specifically identified in this Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) document, written by the CFR's president? 

The document describes the US and other countries giving up sovereignty, for example, to cap carbon emissions. The CFR Organization's 4,300 Members include very big names. 

George Soros has written and/or is mentioned in 379 CFR Documents. "Goldman Sachs" is found in 888 CFR Documents and "Jeffrey Sachs" is found in 319 CFR Documents. "New World Order" is a frequent focus and found in 135 CFR Documents. The Communist code word, "Social Justice" is found in 916 CFR Documents. The Communist code word, "Sustainable Development" is found in 352 CFR Documents. The Communist "Global Warming" Scam is found in 957 CFR Documents. "Socialist" is found in 562 CFR Documents. 


Example, CFR "must read" (their words, not ours): New World Order Document, says "Copenhagen talks are an indication that a new world order may be forming with increasing power given to China." We suspect most Americans will not like what this powerful "think tank" is thinking...Read rest of article here 





Monday, February 16, 2015

Who Is the Ruler of Israel? by Uri Avnery

Posted By Uri Avnery On February 15, 2015 

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, of course.

Wrong

The real ruler of Israel is one Sheldon Adelson, 81, American Jew, Casino king, who was rated as the world’s tenth richest person, worth 37.2 billion dollars at the latest count. But who is counting?

Besides his casinos in Las Vegas, Pennsylvania, Macao and Singapore, he owns the U.S. Republican party and, lately, both Houses of the U.S. Congress.

He also owns Binyamin Netanyahu.

Adelson’s connection with Israel is personal. On a blind date, he fell in love with an Israeli woman.

Miriam Farbstein was born in Haifa, attended a prestigious high school, did her army service in the Israeli institute which deals with bacteriological warfare and is a multifaceted scientist. After an adopted son died of an overdose, she is devoted to the fight against drugs, especially cannabis.

Both Adelsons are fanatical supporters of Israel. Not just any Israel, but a rightist, supremacist, arrogant, violent, expansionist, annexationist, non-compromising, colonialist Israel.
Sheldon, Bibi & Miriam
In "Bibi" Netanyahu they found their man. Through Netanyahu they hope to rule Israel as their private fief.

To assure this, they did an extraordinary thing: they founded an Israeli newspaper, solely devoted to the furthering of the interests of Binyamin Netanyahu. Not of the Likud, not of a specific policy, but of Netanyahu personally.

Years ago I invented a Hebrew word for papers which are 
distributed for nothing. "Hinamon" translates, roughly, into "ragratis" or "gratissue" and was intended to denigrate. 

But I did not dream of a monster like "Israel Hayom" ("Israel Today") – a paper with unlimited funds, distributed every day for nothing in the streets and malls all over the country by hundreds, perhaps thousands of paid young persons.

Israelis love getting something for nothing. Israel Hayom is now the daily paper with the widest distribution in Israel. It drains readers and advertising revenue from its only competitor – Yedioth Ahronoth ("Latest News"), which held this title until then.

Yedioth reacted furiously. It became a ferocious enemy of Netanyahu. Yossi Werter, a commentator of the center-left Haaretz (which has a far lower circulation) even believes that the present election boils down to a contest between the two papers.

That is vastly exaggerated. Judged by political and social content, there is little to differentiate the two. Both are super-patriotic, warmongering and rightist. That is the journalistic recipe for attracting the masses anywhere in the world.

Yedioth is owned by the Moses family, a business-minded clan. The present, third-generation publisher is Arnon ("Noni") Moses, the publicity-shy boss of a large economic empire based on the paper. The paper serves his business interests, but he has no special political interests.

Adelson is unique.

In Israel, betting is forbidden by law. We have no casinos, and secret gambling dens are raided by the police. In our early youth we were taught that casino moguls are bad people, almost like arms merchants. They take the money off poor addicted people, throwing them into despair, even suicide. See Dostoyevsky.

Israelis read Israel Hayom (it’s something for nothing, after all), but they don’t necessarily like the man and his methods. So some members of the Knesset were encouraged to enter a bill forbidding gratis newspapers altogether.

Netanyahu and the Likud party did everything to obstruct this bill. But in the preliminary vote (necessary for private members’ bills) they were beaten in an amazing way. Even members of Netanyahu’s governing coalition voted for it. The cameras caught Netanyahu literally running in the Knesset plenum hall to gain his seat before the voting started.

The vote was 43 to 23. Almost half the Likud members absented themselves. Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman and his party voted for the bill. So did ministers Ya’ir Lapid and Tzipi Livni.

From the preliminary vote to the final adoption, such a bill has to pass several stages. There was plenty of time to bury it in one of the committees. But Netanyahu was furious. A few days after the vote, he dismissed Lapid and Livni from the cabinet, causing the government coalition to break up and the Knesset to disperse.

Why did Netanyahu do such a foolish thing less then half way through his (third) term of office? There can be only one logical explanation: he was ordered to do so by Adelson, in order to prevent the adoption of the law.

If so, Adelson is now our chief lawmaker. Perhaps he is also our chief government-maker.

Money plays an ever-increasing role in politics. Election propaganda is made on television, which is very expensive. Both in Israel and the U.S., legal and illegal funds pour into the campaign, directly and indirectly. Corruption is abetted or tolerated by the courts. The very rich (known euphemistically in America as the "wealthy") exercise undue influence.

In the last U.S. presidential elections, Adelson poured rivers of dollars into the contest. He supported Newt Gingrich, and then Mitt Romney, with huge sums of money. In vain. Perhaps Americans don’t like to be ruled by captains of casinos.

For the next U.S. presidential elections, Adelson has started early. He has summoned to his Las Vegas casino HQ all leading Republican candidates, to grill them on their allegiance to him – and to Netanyahu. Nobody dared to refuse the summons. Would a Roman senator refuse the summons of Caesar?

In Israel, such rituals are superfluous. The Adelsons – both Miri and Sheldon – know who their man is.

The Israel Hayom newspaper is, of course, a big propaganda machine, totally devoted to the re-election of Netanyahu. All quite legal. In a democracy, who can tell a newspaper whom to support? We are still a democracy, for God’s sake!

It seems to be strange for a country to allow a foreigner, who never lived in the country, to have such enormous power over its future, indeed, over its very existence.

That’s where Zionism comes in. According to the Zionist creed, Israel is the state of the Jews, all the Jews. Every Jew in the world belongs to Israel, even if temporarily residing somewhere else. A few days ago, Netanyahu publicly claimed to represent not just the State of Israel but also the entire "Jewish People". No need to ask them.

Accordingly, Adelson is not really a foreigner. He is one of us. True, he cannot vote in Israel, though his wife probably can. But many people, including himself, believe that he, being a Jew, has a perfect right to interfere in our affairs and dominate our lives.

For example, the appointment of our ambassador in the U.S. Ron Dermer is an American, born in Miami, who was active in Republican politics. To appoint an American functionary of the Republican Party as ambassador of Israel to a Democratic administration may seem strange. Not so strange if Netanyahu acted under the orders of Sheldon Adelson.

It was Adelson who prepared the witches’ brew that is now endangering Israel’s lifeline to Washington. His stooge, Dermer, induced the Republicans in Congress – all of them dependent on Adelson’s largesse or hoping to be so – to invite Netanyahu to give an anti-Obama speech before both Houses.

While this intrigue was in preparation, Dermer met with John Kerry but did not tell him of Netanyahu’s coming. Neither did Netanyahu inform President Obama, who, in a fury, announced that he would not meet with the Prime Minister.

From the point of view of Israel’s vital interests, it is sheer madness to provoke the President of the United States of America, who controls American’s flow of arms to Israel and the American veto power in the UN. But from the point of view of Adelson, who wants to elect a Republican president in 2016, it makes sense. He has already threatened to invest unlimited sums of money to prevent the reelection of any Senator or Representative who is absent from Netanyahu’s speech.

We are nearing open warfare between the Government of Israel and the President of the United States.

Is someone playing roulette with our future?

Read more by Uri Avnery