Wednesday, March 06, 2013

Chavez, and other News


 

 

 

 

Hugo Chavez died at 58 years old. He was the President of Venezuela. He wanted socialism to spread all across the world, especially in South America. Hugo Chavez was a controversial figure within the annals of human history. He only lived for 58 years. He had supporters and distractors. Yet, his death was tragic situation since he died of cancer unfortunately. He tried his best to find ways to treat it, but these efforts failed. I feel sympathy for his friends, colleagues, and his family. I feel that he didn't reach his full potential, because this could have been a lot of more that he could of accomplish. He was not a communist regardless of what a Texas radio host like Alex Jones said. He was a socialist that decried imperialism and believed that the oligarchs ought not to have a disproportionate amount of power and wealth of the world society. Chavez was not perfect as no human being is perfect. There have been discussions and debate about free speech and free press suppression accusations in Venezuela. I believe in free speech, free association, and a free press. On the other hand, Hugo Chavez was not a Hitler neither was he was some 100% ruthless dictator bent on global domination as the Western reactionaries would have you to believe. He was a man with ambition, with passion, with flaws, and he spoke numerous truths about the world. When he said that he had black African heritage, that incident was an honorable moment in his life. He was not perfect, but he was right that imperialism is wrong, that the Iraq War was unjust, and that war mongering in Iran is detrimental to the Iranian people at the end of the day. Just before Chavez died, he threw out U.S. officials out of Venezuela. Now, there has been civil rights groups in the USA filling a FOIA or a Freedom of Information Act that demands an investigation about information regarding poisons or assassination plans against Hugo Chavez. There has been no conclusive evidence of the U.S. killing Chavez, but fact is stranger than fiction. We do know that since 9/11, the U.S. government has revoked President Ford's 1976 Executive Order 12333 which banned the CIA from conducting targeted assassinations. In South America, times are changing indeed. We know that the Bolivarian revolution has reduced poverty, nationalized strategic industries, and advanced a range of new forms of participatory democracy. Human beings were mourning all over the streets of Venezuelan.

 

 

There is the issue of the FED's monetary policy of zero interest rates. Our banking institutions for centuries have been heavily infiltrated by private interests. Many private banks have more power than nations in our age. Even Bernanke's action of trying to fix short term interest rates at close to zero percent (with inflation at 2 percent or so) and forcing negative real interest rates are not radically improving the economy. It has caused the maintaining of the super large American banks that were on the verge of bankruptcy when the investment bank Lehman Brothers failed on September 15, 2008. The FED has transferred hundreds of billions to these super banks at a huge cost to the rest of the economy and to international holders of U.S. dollars. Greenspan years ago created the housing bubble and let the derivatives market explode. This sowed the seeds of the 2007-2008 financial crisis. The Bernanke FED used a faulty economic analysis had embarked upon a policy of zero short term interest rates for many years. This action is the open ended QE3 policy of buying mortgages and other financial instruments with newly printed money, which caused the largest bond bubble in U.S. history. The FED is unloading the financial assets it has acquired from the near insolvent super large American banks. In the future, bond prices could be danger in collapsing and nominal interest rates could spike with a negative impact on financial markets on the real economy. Price controls and price fixing according to some economists won't work in the long term. In any market, for any good or service, when prices are fixed by a government or a government agency below the market clearing price, sooner or later a gap develops between the excess quantity demanded and the insufficient quantity offered. Even though housing can be subsidized, freezing prices is not an efficient way to subsidize housing or any other commodity or service. What happens when the Fed artificially sets the short-term interest rate at close to zero for a long period? A long series of negative economic repercussions follow. The large banks can have FED loans at a low rate artificially and borrow as much money as they can with a deficit laden government. Banks can increase their borrowing requirements for private borrowers. The urging for bank loans will go up with the banks' prime borrowing rate artificially low. Banks and their preferential clients will use part of their excess reserves obtained at close to zero percent to buy financial assets. Stock prices and bond prices will go up. Some insurance companies and pension funds could even benefit from the FED keeping the short term rates low for a long time. They could buy long term bonds and keep prices artificially high mixed with the inflation risk. With borrowing rates so low for so long, some financial operators will begin buying up companies with leveraged money, thus placing finance ahead of industry. Many savers and retirees on a fixed income have seen their revenues collapse over five years. Former FED chairman Alan Greenspan was respected by Wall Street, because he had a policy of low interest rates, easy money, junk mortgages and inadequate banking regulation brought down the economy in a great degree. The reality is that the American central banking system is partly owned by large private banks. The reason is that so many bankers sit on the Federal Open Market Committee or the FOMC. The FOMC is the committee that sets interest rates. This conflict of interests has a recurring tendency to create financial bubbles and economic booms including busts (that benefits large banks and their CEOs at the expense of the real economy). The FED for decades has been an institution that subsidizes large banks with public money. Even parts of the TARP program worth $700 billion have been subsidized by the U.S. government to the large banks. The FED intervened with the failure of Lehman Brothers. We now have the slowest recovery from a recession since WWII. Wall Street cannot be subsidized permanently and the cost is sent to the rest of the economy (with a lax approach to their behavior).

 

When someone tried to justify libertarianism, they bring up eugenics as solely a progressive ideology. That is a lie. Not only are many Austrian economic extremists tied to eugenics historically, but some of them embrace other forms of extremism as well. Eugenics has been advanced by reactionaries for years. Progressives and human beings from across the political spectrum have opposed eugenics before modern day laissez faire lovers were born. Austrian Economic leaders agreed with extremism for decades. Austrian economics leader Lew Rockwell is known for hating civil rights laws. Austrian economic leader Mises believed in gender inequality and the racial inferiority of those of color. He was wrong. Austrian economic leader Murray Rothard hated the poor and those on welfare. Some Austrian economic leaders are neo-Confederate. The Austrians' hatred of any general welfare is expressed by the words of them past and present. Reactionaries and racists have advanced eugenics, debt filled money, unjust wars, technocratic aims, aristocracy, the Maafa, imperialism, etc. for centuries. I reject eugenics and other evils completely. One of the biggest proponents of this libertarian extremism is called the Mont Pelerin Society. This group was created in 1947 by Friedrich von Hayek inside of Mont Pelerin, Switzerland. Von Hayek agreed with Austrian economic principles and wanted laissez faire capitalism and the free market, unencumbered by government regulation. One time, he was formally affiliated with the British Fabian Society back in 1931. His earlier group called the Society for the Renovation of Liberalism had Frank Knight and Henry Simons. Both men would train Milton Friedman at the University of Chicago; the American Fabian socialist Walter Lippman; Viennese Aristotelian Society leader Karl Popper; fellow Austrian School economist Ludwig von Mises; and Sir John Clapham, a senior official of the Bank of England who from 1940-46 was the president of the British Royal Society. The aristocracy was in the Mont Pelerin group with human beings like Otto von Hapsburg or the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne and Max von Thorn und Taxis. Friedrich von Hayek hated the New Deal in his "The Road to Serfdom" book. The membership of the Mont Pelerin Society included high level government officials, Nobel Prize recipients, journalists, legal scholars, etc. They wanted market oriented solutions.  Friedrich von Hayek was strongly influenced by Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973). Von Mises was an aristocrat. Other founders of the Mont Pelerin Society were members of numerous eugenics societies which wanted depopulation and so called race purification. One famous founding member of the Mont Pelerin Society was Ralph Harris. Ralph Harris was a leader of the British Eugenics Society, which had earlier helped to draft Hitler's race laws. Ralph Harris (1924-2006), a former president of the British Eugenics Society, was a director of Rupert Murdoch’s Times Newspapers Company from 1988 to 2001.  FOX News television host Glenn Beck also works for Rupert Murdoch, the owner of Fox News.  Friedrich von Hayek was one key figure who created the modern establishment conservative revolution. Ludwig von Mises was funded by the Rockefeller Foundation; Coudenhove-Kalergi was financed by the banking houses of Rothschild and Warburg. See how far the rabbit hole goes. The aristocrats wanted an United Europe for decades and centuries. Hitlers Minister of Economics and original Mont Pelerin Society member, Hjalmar Schacht, assured the Pan European supporters that Hitler would create Pan Europa. So, many extremists were in the Mont Pelerin Society and the Nazis murdered socialists in concentration camps. The Nazis never loved socialism or communism per se. They were corporatists and fascists. Now, Ayn Rand is found leader of libertarian doctrine. Rand in a 1959 interview with Mike Wallace loved Objectivism, disparaged God, advanced unbridled capitalism, and believed that self-interest as the highest virtue. This political agitation furthered the Left/Right paradigm and deception. The good news is that a lot of human beings globally know the truth and sincerely want to advance success for the entire human race.

 

Folks have exposed fracking for years. There has been news about the shale gas and coal bed methane (CBM) extraction in terms of underground coal gasification or UCG. One campaign group called Frack Off disagrees with this plan. Almost 2 years ago, there were earthquakes caused by the first attempt to frack a shale gas well in the UK. The damage caused to Caudrilla's well bore as well. Sometimes, cheap energy is hard to get. There are oil rigs pushing into deeper and deeper water to the vast tar sands mining operations in Alberta. These actions take a lot of energy and effort. There is the exploitation of unconventional gas. Yet, this deed threatened to spread to thousands of wells, pipelines, and other industrial infrastructure across the nation. There is a relentless rise in energy extraction effort is finally being more known about. The use of fracking and new biomass power stations can devour the world's remaining forests. There are plans for new, more dangerous nuclear power stations. This can cause energy extraction to be more destructive. There are updates in Afghanistan as well.  Even on March 1, 2013, an US/NATO helicopter gunship killed 2 Afghan brothers. They were of 7 and 8 years of age. They tended cattle in the Uruzgan province. Residents reported that the boys were listening to a radio and the helicopter crew interpreted the radio signals from the Afghan resistance fighters. This comes in a long line of atrocities against civilians that enflamed more opposition to the ongoing occupation. On February 24, the U.S. installed leader of Afghanistan Hamid Karzai said that he is demanding the withdrawal of all U.S. Special Forces troops from Wardak province within 2 weeks. Wardak is a key strategic region and an area of active resistance to the U.S./NATO occupation. NATO commanders will not likely obey Karzai's latest order. What prompted Karzai’s latest proclamation was explained in a statement from his office, which read in part: “After a thorough discussion, it became clear that armed individuals named as US special force[s] stationed in Wardak province engage in harassing, annoying, torturing and even murdering innocent people....A recent example in the province is an incident in which nine people were disappeared in an operation by this suspicious force and in a separate incident a student was taken away at night from his home, whose tortured body with throat cut was found two days later under a bridge.” You know that the U.S. commanders will deny those accusations from Karzai. The popular anger in Wardak was made clear by street protests and threats by civilian groups to join the armed resistance if U.S. forces were not withdrawn.  On February 26, 500 people marched in protest of the killings. “If the situation remains like this, this province will collapse very soon,” protester Haji Abdul Qadim told the Reuters news service. “People will join the insurgency very soon because of the abuses of these forces.” In another recent incident brought to international attention on Feb. 26, a Swedish organization that operates health clinics in Afghanistan said that U.S. military forces occupied and damaged one of their clinics in Wardak on Feb. 11. The Swedish Committee for Afghanistan said in a statement: “Foreign soldiers entered the health facility by force, tied up and blindfolded the guard on duty, and occupied the facility.” Andreas Stefansson is the director of SCA. SCA clinics have been occupied by NATO troops. There have been 10 human beings including women and children killed in a NATO air strike in Kunar province. There have been 18 civilians killed in a strike in Logar province. There has been so-called "accidental" lasting over a decade. Karzai made orders forbidding Afghan army units from calling in US/NATO air support and for U.S. troops to withdraw from Wardak. He wants to end the night raids on people's homes. The truth is that the U.S. military commanders are doing what they want in Afghanistan irrespective of Karzai's words. The U.S. wants a long term presence in that country. There was a Feb. 3 joint interview with then-Secretary of Defense Leon E. Panetta and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Martin Dempsey. Panetta and Dempsey reaffirmed that the United States would sustain a “strategic partnership” with Afghanistan. They cited a decision by the NATO heads of state during a 2012 summit meeting in Chicago to maintain a long-term presence in the country despite a drawdown in the number of U.S. ground troops in the country.  “We’re committing to an enduring presence,” Mr. Panetta said on Feb. 3. “Strategic partnership” and “enduring presence” are more Washington weasel words for continuing colonial domination over Afghanistan. Afghanistan is still very poor. The rich are the Afghan elite and NATO including U.S. contractors not the Afghan human beings. The Afghan government only spends 46 dollars per year on health care per person. Infant mortality is high being 122 infant deaths per 1,000 live births. That is high. In America, it is 6 per 1,000 and in Cuba is 4.8 per 1,000. Life expectancy is just 49 years. Thousands of Afghanis and Americans have been killed in this war. More than 2.7 million Afghans are still external refugees. Some of them reside in Pakistan and Iran. There are 425,000 Afghans being internally displaced. The war has been a disaster and the only solution is a settlement done peacefully.

 

 

Popular culture in 2013 is definitely coming out in a bang. From Taylor Swift's performance in awards shows to Kanye West's rants about the industry, you will never find or witness a dull moment in the mainstream pop culture industry. The dance craze of the Harlem Shake (which is not the real Harlem Shake per se) is coming on strong. Such dances have been around for years, but in these times of economic uncertainly; folks want to let off steam by dancing to uniquely displayed music. Music is creative, diverse, and highly intelligent or sophisticated (since you must know rhythm, cords, keys, and history in order to appreciate real music). All of the individuals who participate in music enhance their creativity skills, language skills, and power in forming their own thoughts. That is why art and music ought to be included in any school building regardless if it is in a public or private location. Many great researchers have found occult symbolism, secret histories, and other important facts that relate to Hollywood & pop culture in general. It has been years since I wrote on these issues. It has been a great journey in showing the world the truth. In our generation, new deception come about. In 2013, unHolyweird has sent out new movies that either have historical revisionism or glamorize the wickedness of the war on terrorism. Even Speilberg's "Lincoln" omitted the huge contributions that African Americans had in their leadership role in abolishing slavery in the USA. Zero Dark Thirty acted as a campaign to advance torture and Argo was a pro-CIA, anti-Iran war (when the US government supported the terrorist police state SAVAK before the Iranian Revolution transpired in 1979). Operation Mockingbird was a real CIA program that tried to infiltrate the mainstream media. Today, the current White House want to support the new CIA head as Brennan when he was a drone and torture architect in the establishment. Django Unchained was a spaghetti film about slavery, which tries to make sadomachism as a means to justify its agenda. All 3 of these films are rewarded by the establishment for the establishment.

 

By Timothy

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