|
|
 Authored By Dave Webb
What do we do when one or both of our political parties cross the line. I mean they cross the legal line of what you are supposed to do during an election and cheat.
When they do it at a convention, that is not really a federal crime. It is disgusting and the party involved should never be voted into office. But as far as I know, that is a private matter to be handled by the political party itself. No one forces you to belong to a political party. No one forces you to be informed. If we knew half the things both parties are doing, I think we would walk away in disgust.
When the voting process itself is a cheat, that is a different matter entirely. There are Federal Laws governing an election. There are State Laws as well. Translated: anyone caught cheating in an election is supposed to go straight to jail. I don't know which agency of government oversees this process. But I suggest it comes (Read More....) [...]
 There aren’t many people who go through their lives without getting at least a few traffic tickets or warnings. Many people believe that traffic tickets are just a method that state and local governments use to raise revenue. This belief often occurs alongside the belief that increasing traffic tickets in an area has little to no effect on the safety of drivers in that area.
However, these are just opinions. A study conducted around 2008 and just recently released looked into both of these beliefs to find out if either of them were accurate.
Are Governments Just Looking for Money?
Researchers decided to investigate whether areas that were having economic troubles had higher rates of traffic tickets. In order to determine if a town was suffering economically, certain area governments had asked for “override referendums” which would give them the ability to collect more revenue from their citizens. These (Read More....) [...]
 The problem with our financial system is world wide. In a few days, or a few weeks, or even a few months from now, I predict a bank crash of world wide proportions. It can be postponed as long as a year or more. It might happen on a Monday. It might happen on a Tuesday. But what will happen is one or more major billionaire investors will pull the plug on easy money by simply transferring their money into something a little wiser. It will probably happen gradually. This will be to keep a panic from occurring. I suggest they are going to put all their investments in something like Big Oil. Huge amounts of money are currently being quietly transferred to metals such as gold or silver. This comes from the conservative attitude that these metals and more will maintain value when currencies go down. It has been occurring for a long time now.
Simply put, the banks do not have enough money to cover themselves when a major account decides to go to Gold. And we are very close to seeing that happen at any time. Normally it would be buried by the election. The politicians need to get elected then let disaster happen. They are in and have nothing to (Read More....) [...]
 Celebrating Independence Day with Gratitude
by MN Gordon
Economic Prism
Uncompromising independence and limitless personal freedom were once essential to the American character. According to popular American folklore, they still are. We have some reservations.
No doubt, America was at one time the land of the free. Of course, that was long before 46.4 million citizens began using Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) cards to purchase their daily bread. Similarly, that was back when you could milk your cow and sell the milk to thirsty buyers without being visited at 5 a.m. by U.S. marshals.
These days the ideas that roused America’s War of Independence are, alas, just ideas. Limited government and individual liberty were long ago squandered for big government and collectivism. Gone are the days when you could earn a (Read More....) [...]
 Veterans of the Navy, Coast Guard and Fleet Marines (often referred to as the Blue Water Navy) who served in Vietnam in the offshore waters need your help and the help of everyone in your organizations. Veterans from this group who are currently disabled by diseases the VA links to the dioxin contained in Agent Orange are denied any health care and lost wage compensation. Ironically, any service member who can prove their boots touch the soil of mainland Vietnam automatically receives those benefits under a “presumption of exposure” rule. This rule allows those boots-on-ground veterans to claim their benefits without the need to prove any exposure to Agent Orange, the worst of the dioxin-based herbicides.
So, where’s the problem?
Between 1962 and 1971, the United States military sprayed 21,000,000 gallons of chemical herbicides and defoliants in Vietnam, eastern Laos and parts of Cambodia, as part of Operation Ranch Hand. The program’s goal was to defoliate forested and rural land, depriving the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army of places to hide. Another goal was to (Read More....) [...]
 America must recognize it does not stand alone. Our present political and economic crises are as much a part of the natural order of world events as evolution itself, and cannot be viewed shortsightedly as just a national issue. We must perceive ourselves for what we are: an integral part of the global economy where our influence, massive though it is— roughly 25 percent of the world’s GNP—cannot be expected to turn this economic malaise around. As never before, we “fatties” sit in the same bathtub with the other slimmer nations of the world, and it is overflowing. Our combined productive capacity (the bathtub’s water) has outstripped our ability to consume it all, with the result that the goods and services of our labors are worth less than the value of labor itself. Now we witness our current depression hitting the working class disproportionately, as it always does. Only by reducing our fat can we stabilize the water level, easing the worldwide depression at the same time.
The trick is to do this carefully; otherwise, the toll of our weakness is the fatal consequence of war. And it is this choice, (Read More....) [...]
 Bush and Cheney entered office in 2000, well before 9/11, ready to topple Saddam Hussein, according to then Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill in Ron Suskind’s The Price of Loyalty.(1) At their first National Security Council meeting, ousting Saddam was high on the agenda. After 9/11 no excuses were necessary. (Perhaps they knew it was coming?) So to get America into an imperialist war, contrary to the Constitution, both lied about Saddam’s nonexistent weapons of mass destruction. More than a decade later, with 4,000 dead and 50,000 seriously injured US troops, and at a conservative estimate, 650,000 dead and 1,000,000 displaced Iraqis, we are still there, stuck in alien territory. They even branched out to include Afghanistan, “surging” along attempting to “spread democracy.” Eight years later Obama took over. Instead of the promise of change he told us we could believe in, he widened the war, blowing up the Afghan campaign into a surge we were all made to believe in—meanwhile receiving the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize (sign on Texas gas station: “Free Nobel Peace Prize with Oil Change”)—while holding an election no one can believe (Read More....)
[...]
 ***The following is a guest post for Personal Security by author Jim Knapton***
Fourteen trillion dollars is a lot of money. That is the size of our national debt. Someone said recently that if it were in five-dollar bills placed end to end, they would almost reach the moon. That’s what the USA owes the world, from the newest born to the oldest still with us: $45,000 each! Yet we’re at war in Afghanistan wasting billions on what? Fighting the Taliban and Al Qaeda apparently. If we are the greatest military machine the world has ever known and they are a bunch of “desert derelicts” (quoting Mark Steyn’s delicate words in America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It), after a hundred months of conflict, why is President Obama “winding it down”? Isn’t it because we can’t afford it? In other words, thirty-six years since the end of the Vietnam War, haven’t we lost again?
I am sure President Obama doesn’t wish to see it that way. Motivated by pressure from the military-industrial (Read More....) [...]
|
|
