What is Sequester?

 

 

What is sequester? Sequester is the automatic cuts to the American social safety net and the military by March 1, 2013. Sequester is about a historic assault on U.S. social programs. If it is to take effect, it will cause an $85 billion in across the board budget cuts in 2013. The ruling class continues their assault on the social conditions of the working human beings in America. The budget sequestration of January 1 was postponed until March 1, because of the bipartisan deal to head of the fiscal cliff (both parties used tax increases, cuts in jobless benefits, and other actions) in the fiscal cliff deal. Some populists view this whole March 1 deadline as contrived or the result of the 2011 deal between the White House and congressional Republicans to raise the U.S. debt ceiling. If the White House and Congress fail to have a deal by March 1, the cuts will come. It will be devastating to social programs at every level of government. Education, housing, home heating assistance, health care, nutritional assistance, road repair, and air transport will be negatively affected via the sequester. There will be cuts to civilian and military budgets. Thousands of furloughs and layoffs of public sector workers will come alone. The drive for the unprecedented cuts and structural changes in the basic social entitlement programs did date from the 1930's and 1960's like the Social Security and Medicare. The sequester entails a five percent cut in nonmilitary discretionary spending, amounting to $28.7 billion, as well as a $9.9 billion cut to Medicare. Public housing will be cut by nearly $2 billion, special education programs will be cut by $840 million, and Head Start will be slashed by $406 million, kicking 70,000 children out of the program. More reports show that 350 teachers would be laid off in Ohio. 4,180 fewer children in Georgia would get vaccinated and Virginia would be unable to provide assistance for 400 victims of domestic violence if the sequester continues. The sequester will have 42.7 billion dollars in cuts to the military spending, which the two parties don't support. The White House already agreed to 1.4 trillion in spending cuts for the past 2 years. Still, the White House says that the sequester is for them to want shared sacrificed and a balanced approach to deficit cutting. A balanced approach is made up of token tax increases on businesses and the wealthy (along with new cuts on social spending). The GOP doesn't want more tax increases on the rich. At the same time, Obama and the Democrats are pushing for a bipartisan agreement on a “comprehensive tax reform” that will slash corporate taxes, eliminate tax deductions on which millions of ordinary people depend, and shift the tax burden even more heavily onto the working class. The White House wants to cut spending. The difference is that that Republicans want more draconian cuts to the social safety net. White House Communications Director Jennifer Palmieri made this statement about the White House's position: "...The President is serious about cutting spending, reforming entitlements and the tax code to reduce the deficit in a balanced way.” It goes on to boast, “The President has already reduced the deficit by over $2.5 trillion, cutting spending by over $1.4 trillion, bringing domestic discretionary spending to its lowest level as a share of the economy since the Eisenhower era.” The White House wants billions of cuts in Medicare and Medicare, $200 billion in cuts in mandatory domestic spending, and $100 billion in discretionary domestic spending, including a $35 billion cut in federal retirement programs and a $50 billion cut in unemployment insurance. This is not populism, but the audacity of the status quo. Austerity is highly unpopular with the American people. A poll conducted last week by Pew Research found that 87 percent of the population is opposed to cuts in Social Security, 82 percent are against cuts in Medicare, and 89 percent oppose cuts in education. Wall Street has corporate record profits. We have colonial style wars and drone assassinations. Yet, the reactionaries lie and say that we have no money. Both parties are responsible for the sequester saga. For example, the Simpson-Bowles agenda was created heavily by Democrats. That committee influenced the White House to offer massive cuts in 2011. Gene Sperling of the White House National Economic Council Director came up with the sequestration scheme when the Republicans rejected a modest tax increase to the rich. The saga involved the lie that Medicare, Social Security, and Medicare play a huge role or is a root cause of the national debt. We must not advance profit for the ruling class at the expense of the poor including the suffering at all. The two party system is in league with big business and we have the right to advance independent populism. Even some in the Congressional Progressive Caucus made the Balancing Act of 2013, which will replace all of the sequestration cuts with new revenues (and then add a $276 billion stimulus to the economy. This bill is rejected not only by the Republicans, but by the Democratic establishment, who are pro-slick or smart austerity.

 

 

 

The struggle for universal health care continues. We are not there yet since health care in the United States of America is still a hot mess. We know for a fact that some in Big Pharma want to gain as much money as possible before all of us pass away. The health care system is dominated by big pharmaceutical corporations, bureaucrats, health insurance companies, etc. not the people. These corporate interests dominate Washington political power and they spend billions of dollars as a means for us to be dependent on many drugs. Many human beings lack care, some doctors are going broke, and our health care costs have increased. Other nations with universal health care have their money spent on health care much lower than America. About 60 percent of all personal bankruptcies in the United States are related to medical bills. The best locations of health care in the world like in France, Italy, and other nations have universal health care filled with public and private sector help to human beings in those nations. Basic healthcare is birthright among every industrialized country in the world except America. In the USA, folks from John McCain to Max Baucus want the status quo. Baucus refused to allow single payer advocates to testify at the hearings that he chairs. Even the Affordable Care Act has some legitimate parts in it mixed with a pro-healthcare insurance industry program in it. It is a shame that so many human beings don't care about the poor. One reason for that is that the military industrial complex and the intelligence community use the propaganda that capitalism is God and those differences in human beings out to be reviled instead of being cherished. The idea of share sacrifice, altruism, and human compassion are intrepid, honest characteristics that all of us should strive to embrace in our daily lives. It is not un American to have universal health care. It is American to do so triumphantly. It does not matter if the Business Roundtable, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Heritage Foundation, or even Blue Cross Blue Shield doesn't want it. The people deserve it. A mixed healthcare system ran by healthcare insurance elites have not been comprehensive in Minnesota, Massachusetts, and other locations. We spend trillions of dollars on health care each year in the United States. We can use some of that money to fund an universal health care system. Thirty-one percent of current healthcare spending is squandered on administrative costs related to our fragmented payment system with hundreds of different health plans. Over $350 billion or about half of the money currently are being wasted on overhead and bureaucracy. That money could be saved with a simplified single-payer administration, enough to cover all the 50 million uninsured. In other words, covering the uninsured is affordable and keeping the current broken private insurance system intact is not. A survey published in the April 2008 Annals of Internal Medicine showed that 59 percent of U.S. physicians support national health insurance. Polls outline that most Americans agree with some form of a single payer healthcare system.

 

 

 

It has been 20 years after the 1993 World Trade Center Bombings. The whole history has been controversial filled with aliases and decoys. It happened in February of 1993. President Bill Clinton was just in the White House. It was the first time that Islamic terror was carried out in a major fashion on U.S. soil. 6 human beings died from the blast. It was very tragic for the bereaved families and over 1000 people have been injured. The bomb was created by Ramzi Yousef. The bomb didn't destroy the entire Twin Towers. The bombing failed to kill more human beings. The event implanted the paranoia about Islamic terrorists in a higher level among the consciousness of Americans including Westerners. There is the story of the blind sheikh or Omar Adbel Rahman. He ruled the Egyptian Islamic Group or IG (al-Gama'a al-Islamiyya). It was at that time the largest overtly militant Islamic group in Egypt. They experienced a crackdown after the assassination of Anwar Sadat. NATO used an effort to use radical Islam as a means to defeat the Soviet Union. The Blind Sheikh escaped from house arrest in Egypt in the end of the 1980's (at the end of the Soviet-Afghan war), he visited America. He had a following at the Al-Kifah Refugee Centre at the Al Farooq mosque in New York.  Al-Kifah was the local branch of the Maktab Al-Khidamat or Services Office for the Mujahideen in Afghanistan, and was central to the process by which young men were recruited, moved around the world for training and ultimately deployed against the Soviets. The CIA monitored Al-Kifah. Even some U.S. officials met with the followers of the Blink Sheikh in Egypt at April and May of 1989. A lawyer represented the group. The cables recording their meetings were signed by Frank Wisner. Wisner was the U.S. ambassador to Egypt and the son of the veteran of CIA black ops. The Blind Sheikh moved to NYC permanently.  A follower of Rahman assassinated the rabbi Meir Kahane (founder of the Jewish Defense League and former FBI informant). Weeks later, the State Department revoked all of the Blind Sheikh's visas. Rahman was never arrested or deported. A couple of months later the Emir of the Farooq mosque Mustafa Shalabi was murdered, almost 2 years to the day prior to the WTC bombing.  Rahman effectively took over the mosque and the Al-Kifah center at that point.  The triple agent Ali Mohamed gave training sessions in intelligence and paramilitary operations that frequented the mosque like Nosair. Emad Salem was the decoy and he was an informant by the FBI. He infiltrated the Al-Kifah and the circle around the Blind Sheikh. In reality, Salem was fired by the FBI in bizarre circumstances in the summer of 1992.  He didn’t build the bomb – terrorists do not build a bomb and then wait around for six months before using it.  Exactly why Salem was fired is not clear, but when his original handler Nancy Floyd started asking questions the FBI leaked stories to the press that she had a relationship with Salem. After the bombing, Salem was recruited against by the FBI to infiltrate Al-Kifah once more. He did it. Salem talked Rahman's followers to attack the USA. The recordings with Salem talking with Anticev came from the period, spring-summer 1993.  When the FBI swooped in the summer of ’93, they arrested the Blind Sheikh and most of the group around him, and Salem’s evidence became the basis of the prosecution case. Some believe that Ramzi Yousef was the creator of the bomb that struck the WTC in 1993. Still, we don't know why the WTC building was bombed or real concrete facets of the 1993 WTC bombing even 20 years later.

 

 

 

The Trayvon Martin tragedy is over one year old. One teenager was murdered by George Zimmerman. Zimmerman is a murderer. Marissa Alexander is another Sister that tried to defend herself from person, but she was sentenced to more than 2 decades in prison. Marissa tried to invoke the Stand Your Ground law and she still was convicted. Rekia Boyd was another Sister who was shot to death by a Chicago cop when no weapon was found on her. George Zimmerman murdered Travyon Martin when he was unarmed and Zimmerman followed him in Sanford, Florida. Trayvon Martin's murder signifies the fact that there is still an epidemic of the murder of black youth not only in NYC, Chicago, LA, Philadelphia, etc. It occurs everywhere in the world as well. We can never ignore also of the fact that we should also disagree with police brutality, stop and frisk, and other similar unjust policies in the Earth. The courts, the judicial system, and the system of white supremacy in general benefit in the Drug on War policies, and the mass incarceration of human beings of color in the USA. Zimmerman's father or Robert Zimmerman was a retired Orange County magistrate judge. Zimmerman is a known female abuser and criminal before his murder of Trayvon Martin. Trayvon Martin was put in a morgue for 3 days as 'John Doe' after mom reported him missing. The officer in charge of the Trayvon murder scene was the same officer who failed to arrest a police lieutenant’s son who was videotaped attacking a black homeless man. The police lieutenant’s son was later arrested after local news broke the story. There were numerous police and cellphone recordings that clearly shown that Zimmerman was the initial aggressor. Mary Cutcher, who lived closest to where Zimmerman shot Trayvon to death said- 'I heard a young boy crying & then a gun-shot & then the crying stopped. To me mind if it had been Zimmerman crying - he would have continued crying after the gun-shot. I've tried to tell this to the Police several times but they refuse to take my statement...' “I heard someone crying – not boo-hoo crying, but scared or terrified or hurt maybe,” said Cutcher. “To me, it was a child.” - Cutcher and her roommate said they rushed outside to see Zimmerman Standing Over Trayvon, with one foot on either side of Trayvon’s body. In one hand, Zimmerman held a .9 mm handgun, his other hand was on Trayvon, who was face down in the grass. The Stand Your Ground law has been exploited as a means to enhance vigilantism in American streets instead of common sense policies. The law ought to be repealed. I believe in gun rights like the next man, but what I don't subscribe to are innocent teenagers who are unarmed being murdered. ALEC and even the NRA support to this day the extreme Stand Your Ground law. The struggle for freedom means that we have to fight for righteousness on multiple fronts. There are the threats of the privatization of public education, the social safety net being gutted, bailouts, and homeowner struggles. Trayvon Martin is a very important case and situation. It further shows that there is a long historical line of governmental and corporate criminal acts being done all around the globe. These crimes are not just done by some Americans, but by others in other nations as well. George Zimmerman was blatantly wrong for following innocent, non-threatening teenagers who just brought candy from a store (and harmed no one in that area at all). That is illegal profiling.

 

There is the Hotel Zaza in Houston, Texas. It has a mysterious room called Room 322. The Hotel Zaza is known for its complex luxurious suites, etc. The room had a chain holding the bed to the wall. There are pictures of skulls and a strange image of an old man. The room was about 1/3 the normal size with the furniture blocking part of the TV, bed, and window. The floor is made up of dirty concrete and the floor is cold, and hard. The room is about a third of the size of the other rooms in the hotel and is the only one with brick walls. The mirror is embedded in the brick wall. Some individuals speculate that this maybe a two way mirror. The bed is chained to the wall. The skull frame on the wall is related to 322 since that the Skulls and Bones' sacred number. There is the Skulls clock as well. The Skulls and Bones is a Yale based Secret society with strange rituals and their members have huge, influential power in Western society. George H. W. Bush, George W. Bush, John Kerry, and others are famous members of the Skulls and Bones secret society indeed. There are strange paintings of two girls which could outline split personalities. There is another image in the hotel with a male with distorted facial features. There is a painting of possibly Jay Comeaux or the President of the Stanford Group Company. The hotel's PR responded that room 322 was a theme room entitled “Hard Times” and was meant to recreate a “prison experience”. This room is however not advertised anywhere and, as some people noted, there is nothing in that room that really recalls a “prison experience”. Do jail cells have huge mirrors, brick walls and frames of skulls, weird deformed faces and company CEOs on walls? Not really.

 

 

By Timothy