Yeswecanistan

All the crying from the left about how Obama “the peace candidate” has now become “a war president” … Whatever are they talking about? Here’s what I wrote in this report in August 2008, during the election campaign:

We find Obama threatening, several times, to attack Iran if they don’t do what the United States wants them to do nuclear-wise; threatening more than once to attack Pakistan if their anti-terrorist policies are not tough enough or if there would be a regime change in the nuclear-armed country not to his liking; calling for a large increase in US troops and tougher policies for Afghanistan; wholly and unequivocally embracing Israel as if it were the 51st state.

Why should anyone be surprised at Obama’s foreign policy in the White House? He has not even banned torture, contrary to what his supporters would fervently have us believe. If further evidence were needed, we have the November 28 report in the Washington Post: “Two Afghan teenagers held in U.S. detention north of Kabul this year said they were beaten by American guards, photographed naked, deprived of sleep and held in solitary confinement in concrete cells for at least two weeks while undergoing daily interrogation about their alleged links to the Taliban.” This is but the latest example of the continuance of torture under the new administration.

But the shortcomings of Barack Obama and the naiveté of his fans is not the important issue. The important issue is the continuation and escalation of the American war in Afghanistan, based on the myth that the individuals we label “Taliban” are indistinguishable from those who attacked the United States on September 11, 2001, whom we usually label “al Qaeda”. “I am convinced,” the president said in his speech at the United States Military Academy (West Point) on December 1, “that our security is at stake in Afghanistan and Pakistan. This is the epicenter of violent extremism practiced by al Qaeda. It is from here that we were attacked on 9/11, and it is from here that new attacks are being plotted as I speak.”

Obama used one form or another of the word “extremist” eleven times in his half-hour talk. Young, impressionable minds must be carefully taught; a future generation of military leaders who will command America’s never-ending wars must have no doubts that the bad guys are “extremists”, that “extremists” are by definition bad guys, that “extremists” are beyond the pale and do not act from human, rational motivation like we do, that we — quintessential non-extremists, peace-loving moderates — are the good guys, forced into one war after another against our will. Sending robotic death machines flying over Afghanistan and Pakistan to drop powerful bombs on the top of wedding parties, funerals, and homes is of course not extremist behavior for human beings.

And the bad guys attacked the US “from here”, Afghanistan. That’s why the United States is “there”, Afghanistan. But in fact the 9-11 attack was planned in Germany, Spain and the United States as much as in Afghanistan. It could have been planned in a single small room in Panama City, Taiwan, or Bucharest. What is needed to plot to buy airline tickets and take flying lessons in the United States? And the attack was carried out entirely in the United States. But Barack Obama has to maintain the fiction that Afghanistan was, and is, vital and indispensable to any attack on the United States, past or future. That gives him the right to occupy the country and kill the citizens as he sees fit. Robert Baer, former CIA officer with long involvement in that part of the world has noted: “The people that want their country liberated from the West have nothing to do with Al Qaeda. They simply want us gone because we’re foreigners, and they’re rallying behind the Taliban because the Taliban are experienced, effective fighters.” ¹

The pretenses extend further. US leaders have fed the public a certain image of the insurgents (all labeled together under the name “Taliban”) and of the conflict to cover the true imperialistic motivation behind the war. The predominant image at the headlines/TV news level and beyond is that of the Taliban as an implacable and monolithic “enemy” which must be militarily defeated at all costs for America’s security, with a negotiated settlement or compromise not being an option. However, consider the following which have been reported at various times during the past two years about the actual behavior of the United States and its allies in Afghanistan vis-à-vis the Taliban, which can raise questions about Obama’s latest escalation: ²

The US military in Afghanistan has long been considering paying Taliban fighters who renounce violence against the government in Kabul, as the United States has done with Iraqi insurgents.

President Obama has floated the idea of negotiating with moderate elements of the Taliban. ³

US envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, said last month that the United States would support any role Saudi Arabia chose to pursue in trying to engage Taliban officials. ⁴

Canadian troops are reaching out to the Taliban in various ways.

A top European Union official and a United Nations staff member were ordered by the Kabul government to leave the country after allegations that they had met Taliban insurgents without the administration’s knowledge. And two senior diplomats for the United Nations were expelled from the country, accused by the Afghan government of unauthorized dealings with insurgents. However, the Afghanistan government itself has had a series of secret talks with “moderate Taliban” since 2003 and President Hamid Karzai has called for peace talks with Taliban leader Mohammed Omar.

Organizations like the International Committee of the Red Cross as well as the United Nations have become increasingly open about their contacts with the Taliban leadership and other insurgent groups.

Gestures of openness are common practice among some of Washington’s allies in Afghanistan, notably the Dutch, who make negotiating with the Taliban an explicit part of their military policy.

The German government is officially against negotiations, but some members of the governing coalition have suggested Berlin host talks with the Taliban.

MI-6, Britain’s external security service, has held secret talks with the Taliban up to half a dozen times. At the local level, the British cut a deal, appointing a former Taliban leader as a district chief in Helmand province in exchange for security guarantees.

Senior British officers involved with the Afghan mission have confirmed that direct contact with the Taliban has led to insurgents changing sides as well as rivals in the Taliban movement providing intelligence which has led to leaders being killed or captured.

British authorities hold that there are distinct differences between different “tiers” of the Taliban and that it is essential to try to separate the doctrinaire extremists from others who are fighting for money or because they resent the presence of foreign forces in their country.

British contacts with the Taliban have occurred despite British Prime Minister Gordon Brown publicly ruling out such talks; on one occasion he told the House of Commons: “We will not enter into any negotiations with these people.”

For months there have been repeated reports of “good Taliban” forces being airlifted by Western helicopters from one part of Afghanistan to another to protect them from Afghan or Pakistani military forces. At an October 11 news conference in Kabul, President Hamid Karzai himself claimed that “some unidentified helicopters dropped armed men in the northern provinces at night.” ⁵

On November 2, IslamOnline.net (Qatar) reported: “The emboldened Taliban movement in Afghanistan turned down an American offer of power-sharing in exchange for accepting the presence of foreign troops, Afghan government sources confirmed. ‘US negotiators had offered the Taliban leadership through Mullah Wakil Ahmed Mutawakkil (former Taliban foreign minister) that if they accept the presence of NATO troops in Afghanistan, they would be given the governorship of six provinces in the south and northeast … America wants eight army and air force bases in different parts of Afghanistan in order to tackle the possible regrouping of [the] Al-Qaeda network,’ a senior Afghan Foreign Ministry official told IslamOnline.net.” ⁶

There has been no confirmation of this from American officials, but the New York Times on October 28 listed six provinces that were being considered to receive priority protection from the US military, five which are amongst the eight mentioned in the IslamOnline report as being planned for US military bases, although no mention is made in the Times of the above-mentioned offer. The next day, Asia Times reported: “The United States has withdrawn its troops from its four key bases in Nuristan [or Nooristan], on the border with Pakistan, leaving the northeastern province as a safe haven for the Taliban-led insurgency to orchestrate its regional battles.” Nuristan, where earlier in the month eight US soldiers were killed and three Apache helicopters hit by hostile fire, is one of the six provinces offered to the Taliban as reported in the IslamOnline.net story.

The part about al-Qaeda is ambiguous and questionable, not only because the term has long been loosely used as a catch-all for any group or individual in opposition to US foreign policy in this part of the world, but also because the president’s own national security adviser, former Marine Gen. James Jones, stated in early October: “I don’t foresee the return of the Taliban. Afghanistan is not in imminent danger of falling. The al-Qaeda presence is very diminished. The maximum estimate is less than 100 operating in the country, no bases, no ability to launch attacks on either us or our allies.” ⁷

Shortly after Jones’s remarks, we could read in the Wall Street Journal: “Hunted by U.S. drones, beset by money problems and finding it tougher to lure young Arabs to the bleak mountains of Pakistan, al-Qaida is seeing its role shrink there and in Afghanistan, according to intelligence reports and Pakistan and U.S. officials. … For Arab youths who are al-Qaida’s primary recruits, ‘it’s not romantic to be cold and hungry and hiding,’ said a senior U.S. official in South Asia.” ⁸

From all of the above is it not reasonable to conclude that the United States is willing and able to live with the Taliban, as repulsive as their social philosophy is? Perhaps even a Taliban state which would go across the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, which has been talked about in some quarters. What then is Washington fighting for? What moves the president of the United States to sacrifice so much American blood and treasure? In past years, US leaders have spoken of bringing democracy to Afghanistan, liberating Afghan women, or modernizing a backward country. President Obama made no mention of any of these previous supposed vital goals in his December 1 speech. He spoke only of the attacks of September 11, al Qaeda, the Taliban, terrorists, extremists, and such, symbols guaranteed to fire up an American audience. Yet, the president himself declared at one point: “Al Qaeda has not reemerged in Afghanistan in the same numbers as before 9/11, but they retain their safe havens along the border.” Ah yes, the terrorist danger … always, everywhere, forever, particularly when it seems the weakest.

How many of the West Point cadets, how many Americans, give thought to the fact that Afghanistan is surrounded by the immense oil reserves of the Persian Gulf and Caspian Sea regions? Or that Afghanistan is ideally situated for oil and gas pipelines to serve much of Europe and south Asia, lines that can deliberately bypass non-allies of the empire, Iran and Russia? If only the Taliban will not attack the lines. “One of our goals is to stabilize Afghanistan, so it can become a conduit and a hub between South and Central Asia so that energy can flow to the south …”, said Richard Boucher, Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asian Affairs in 2007. ⁹

Afghanistan would also serve as the home of American military bases, the better to watch and pressure next-door Iran and the rest of Eurasia. And NATO … struggling to find a raison d’être since the end of the Cold War. If the alliance is forced to pull out of Afghanistan without clear accomplishments after eight years will its future be even more in doubt?

So, for the present at least, the American War on Terror in Afghanistan continues and regularly and routinely creates new anti-American terrorists, as it has done in Iraq. This is not in dispute even at the Pentagon or the CIA. God Bless America.

Although the “surge” failed as policy, it succeeded as propaganda.

They don’t always use the word “surge”, but that’s what they mean. Our admirable leaders and our mainstream media that love to interview them would like us to believe that escalation of the war in Afghanistan is in effect a “surge”, like the one in Iraq which, they believe, has proven so successful. But the reality of the surge in Iraq was nothing like its promotional campaign. To the extent that there has been a reduction in violence in Iraq (now down to a level that virtually any other society in the world would find horrible and intolerable, including Iraqi society before the US invasion and occupation), we must keep in mind the following summary of how and why it “succeeded”:

• Thanks to America’s lovely little war, there are many millions Iraqis either dead, wounded, crippled, homebound or otherwise physically limited, internally displaced, in foreign exile, or in bursting American and Iraqi prisons. Many others have been so traumatized that they are concerned simply for their own survival. Thus, a huge number of potential victims and killers has been markedly reduced.
• Extensive ethnic cleansing has taken place: Sunnis and Shiites are now living much more than before in their own special enclaves, with entire neighborhoods surrounded by high concrete walls and strict security checkpoints; violence of the sectarian type has accordingly gone down.
• In the face of numerous “improvised explosive devices” on the roads, US soldiers venture out a lot less, so the violence against them has been sharply down. It should be kept in mind that insurgent attacks on American forces following the invasion of 2003 is how the Iraqi violence all began in the first place.
• For a long period, the US military was paying insurgents (or “former insurgents”) to not attack occupation forces.
• The powerful Shiite leader Muqtada al-Sadr declared a unilateral cease-fire for his militia, including attacks against US troops, that was in effect for an extended period; this was totally unconnected to the surge.

We should never forget that Iraqi society has been destroyed. The people of that unhappy land have lost everything — their homes, their schools, their neighborhoods, their mosques, their jobs, their careers, their professionals, their health care, their legal system, their women’s rights, their religious tolerance, their security, their friends, their families, their past, their present, their future, their lives. But they do have their surge.

The War against Everything and Everyone, Endlessly

Nidal Malik Hasan, the US Army psychiatrist who killed 13 and wounded some 30 at Fort Hood, Texas in November reportedly regards the US War on Terror as a war aimed at Muslims. He told colleagues that “the US was battling not against security threats in Iraq and Afghanistan, but Islam itself.” ¹⁰ Hasan had long been in close contact with Anwar al-Awlaki, a US-born cleric and al Qaeda sympathizer now living in Yemen, who also called the US War on Terror a “war against Muslims”. Many, probably most, Muslims all over the world hold a similar view about American foreign policy.

I believe they’re mistaken. For many years, going back to at least the Korean war, it’s been fairly common for accusations to be made by activists opposed to US policies, in the United States and abroad, as well as by Muslims, that the United States chooses as its bombing targets only people of color, those of the Third World, or Muslims. But it must be remembered that in 1999 one of the most sustained and ferocious American bombing campaigns ever — 78 days in a row — was carried out against the Serbs of the former Yugoslavia: white, European, Christians. Indeed, we were told that the bombing was to rescue the people of Kosovo, who are largely Muslim. Earlier, the United States had come to the aid of the Muslims of Bosnia in their struggle against the Serbs. The United States is in fact an equal-opportunity bomber. The only qualifications for a country to become an American bombing target appear to be: (a) It poses a sufficient obstacle — real, imagined, or, as with Serbia, ideological — to the desires of the empire; (b) It is virtually defenseless against aerial attack.

Notes

1. Video on Information Clearinghouse ^↩
2. For the news items which follow if not otherwise sourced, see:
   • The Independent (London), December 14, 2007
   • Daily Telegraph (UK) December 26, 2007
   • The Globe and Mail (Toronto) May 1, 2008
   • BBC News, October 28, 2009 ^↩
3. New York Times, March 11, 2009 ^↩
4. Kuwait News Agency, November 24, 2009 ^↩
5. Pakistan Observer (Islamabad daily), October 19, 2009; The Jamestown Foundation (conservative Washington, DC think tank), “Karzai claims mystery helicopters ferrying Taliban to north Afghanistan”, November 6, 2009; Institute for War and Peace Reporting (London), “Helicopter rumour refuses to die”, October 26, 2009 ^↩
6. IslamOnline, “US Offers Taliban 6 Provinces for 8 Bases“, November 2, 2009^↩
7. Washington Times, October 5, 2009, from a CNN interview ^↩
8. Wall Street Journal, October 13, 2009 ^↩
9. Talk at the Paul H. Nitze School for Advanced International Studies, Washington, DC, September 20, 2007. ^↩
10. Christian Science Monitor, November 17, 2009 ^↩

The Great Stimulus Debate of ‘09

“Crybabies need not apply”

Barack Obama has decided to push the economy back into recession, and no one can figure out why. Perhaps the impressionable Obama has come under the spell of the deficit hawks and crystal gazers who see Armageddon around every corner. Or maybe he’s thrown-in with the snappish Marc Faber whose dire predictions of hyperinflation are about as cheery as Hieronymus Bosch’s vision of Hell. Whatever the reason, the President has done a hasty volte-face and decided that trimming the deficits in the middle of a severe economic downturn is the way to go. Here’s what Obama said just days ago on his Asia tour:

“I think it is important to recognize if we keep on adding to the debt, even in the midst of this recovery, that at some point, people could lose confidence in the U.S. economy in a way that could actually lead to a double-dip recession.”

Obama is either getting some very bad advice or he’s simply determined to drive a stake into the flickering economy. All plans for deficit-pruning should be postponed until the economy steadies itself and the jobs picture improves. Raising taxes or slashing spending while the economy is still contracting is crazy. It shows that Obama is being influenced by the half-baked theories of amateur economists on the Internet who think that mass liquidation and years of bitter retrenchment are the best medicine. They’re wrong. Sensible people look for solutions that don’t involve hair shirts, moving to underground bunkers or living off root-crops for the next mellenia.

Obama’s metamorphosis into Ludwig von Mises sends a disturbing message to working people as well as to foreign creditors. It suggests that the commander-in-chief is in the thrall of careworn Jeremiahs, ideologues, survivalists and other assorted screwballs who dominate blog-world and preach Resurrection Day from every soapbox available. If that’s the case, things could get ugly fast. With the Democrats backing-down on a second round of stimulus, the Fed signaling an end to quantitative easing, and Obama moaning about rising deficits; there’s a good chance that the ailing economy could take another dunk down the elevator chute.

Deficits are not the problem. Deflation is. Bank lending is shrinking, consumer spending is down, housing prices are falling, unemployment is soaring and the wholesale credit markets are in a shambles. Which one of these problems is deficit related? None. This isn’t the time to slash government support in the name of “fiscal responsibility”. Obama needs to ignore the alarmists and deficit-psychos and pay attention to the Nobel laureates like Stiglitz and Krugman. These are the guys you want at the tiller when the water gets rough.

Has Obama perused the jobless figures lately? Has he noticed the Fed shoving more than a $1 trillion under the collapsing housing market with no sign of improvement? Has anyone told our strapping sagamore that the entire financial system is resting on a crumbling foundation of garbage mortgages, toxic paper, and non-performing loans?

Cutting the deficits now–when we should be expanding them–will lead to a cycle of debt deflation that will push-down asset prices, increase defaults, force more layoffs, slow consumer spending, lower earnings and put the economy into a long-term funk. It’s a suicidal policy that will end in catastrophe.

If Obama wants more proof that the economy is still tanking, he should read Fed chair Ben Bernanke’s speech to the Economic Club of New York delivered earlier this week. The presentation is a sobering snapshot of lingering stagnation with precious few glimmers of light. Here’s an excerpt:

“The flow of credit remains constrained, economic activity weak, and unemployment much too high. Future setbacks are possible….How the economy will evolve in 2010 and beyond is less certain….

Access to credit remains strained for borrowers who are particularly dependent on banks, such as households and small businesses. Bank lending has contracted sharply this year, and the Federal Reserve’s Senior Loan Officers Opinion Survey shows that banks continue to tighten the terms on which they extend credit for most kinds of loans…

Household debt has declined in recent quarters for the first time since 1951. For their part, many small businesses have seen their bank credit lines reduced or eliminated, or they have been able to obtain credit only on significantly more restrictive terms. The fraction of small businesses reporting difficulty in obtaining credit is near a record high, and many of these businesses expect credit conditions to tighten further.

The demand for credit also has fallen significantly….Because of weakened balance sheets, fewer potential borrowers are creditworthy, even if they are willing to take on more debt. Also, write-downs of bad debt show up on bank balance sheets as reductions in credit outstanding. Nevertheless, it appears that, since the outbreak of the financial crisis, banks have tightened lending standards by more than would have been predicted by the decline in economic activity alone….. Unfortunately, reduced bank lending may well slow the recovery by damping consumer spending, especially on durable goods, and by restricting the ability of some firms to finance their operations.

The best thing we can say about the labor market right now is that it may be getting worse more slowly. (Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke Speech Before Economic Club of New York)

Is this really Bernanke speaking, or is the Fed chief channeling Nouriel Roubini?

To summarize, credit is tight. Consumers aren’t borrowing and the banks aren’t lending. Unemployment is soaring and deflation is pushing down asset prices while the burden of personal debt is rising in real terms. It’s a very bleak report. The only sign of improvement is that “things are getting worse more slowly”. Now that’s encouraging.

But there is a remedy, and it doesn’t involve decades of cave-dwelling and a steady diet of canned meat and lentils. Stimulus works. It speeds up recovery, minimizes unemployment and stops asset prices from overshooting on the downside. Here’s an excerpt from “The effectiveness of fiscal and monetary stimulus in depressions” a scholarly analysis of stimulus by economist-authors Miguel Almunia, Agustin S. Benetrix, Barry eichengreen, Kevin O’ Rourke, and Gisela Rua:

“Where tried, fiscal policy was effective in the 1930s….The details of the results differ, but the overall conclusions do not. They show that where fiscal policy was tried, it was effective.

Our estimates of its short-run effects are at the upper end of those estimated recently with modern data….This is, in fact, what one should expect if one believes that the effectiveness of fiscal policy is greatest when interest rates are at the zero bound, leading to little crowding out of private spending. It is what one should expect when households are credit constrained by a dysfunctional banking system. Given similar circumstances in 2008, this underscores the advantages of using 1930s data as a source of evidence on the effects of current policy.” (The effectiveness of fiscal and monetary stimulus in depressions” by Miguel Almunia, Agustin S. Benetrix, Barry Eichengreen, Kevin O’ Rourke, and Gisela Rua, 18 November 2009, VOX)

Stimulus works in multiple ways. It also helps increase inflation expectations which is necessary to get people spending again. In a deflationary environment, consumers stop spending and the economy grinds to a halt. The Fed tries to spur economic activity by convincing people that the dollars they hold today will be worth less tomorrow. That’s why Bernanke keeps pointing out that the Fed will keep rates at zero indefinitely. It’s a way of managing perceptions to spark spending. Regrettably, the goldbugs are the only folks who have taken the Fed chairman seriously, which is why gold prices have zoomed to the stratosphere. Personal savings rates are still rising. There’s been a sharp drop-off in consumption. All the signs indicate that Bernanke’s psychological experiment has flopped. The masses still believe we’re in a recession, so they’re clinging to their cash like grim death.

The economy is headed for another slowdown that could drag on for a decade or more. The choices are stark; either policymakers take emergency action to reverse the trend or the economy will slip into a Japan-type slump.

What’s needed now, is a gargantuan blast of stimulus to jolt the economy out of its lethargy and put the mighty wheels of industry back in motion. That will require public mobilization and a massive commitment of resources. $1 trillion, $2 trillion, even $3 trillion–whatever it takes–should be pumped into the jet-stream so the dollars fall to earth like a spring rain from sea to shining sea. That will get people spending again. That will put people back to work. We’ll worry about the red ink later.

No more excuses. No more crybaby blabber about deficits. Just do it.

Obama’s China Junket

“We’re Opening Doors for Wall Street and Nothing More”

Barack Obama took Hu Jintao to task this morning, scolding the dejected-looking Chinese leader at a press conference held in Beijing. Obama delivered one ferocious jab after another, claiming that China’s dollar-peg has cost the US millions of high-paying manufacturing jobs while creating gigantic trade imbalances which have destabilized the global economy and thrust the world into severe economic contraction. Obama demanded that the Chinese government convert to market-oriented exchange rates immediately to preserve jobs in America and to end the de facto tariff that China applies to US goods through its persistent currency manipulation. Obama’s sharply-worded prepared statement left the Chinese President gasping for air while the assembled members of the western media snapped to their feet in raucous applause.

Hard to believe, isn’t it? Hard to believe that an American president would stand up for his own people and act in the national interest.

The aforementioned press conference never took place. It’s a fairy tale. Barack Obama made a few innocuous comments about repricing the renimbi, but it was all just meaningless blather concocted for the American audience. US policymakers have no intention of rocking-the-boat and upsetting their Chinese benefactors. The system works just fine as it is…for the Big money guys, that is.

Do you know the real reason that Obama is in China?

Obama is carrying on the work of George W. Bush and Henry Paulson. He’s trying to pry open Chinese markets to US financial services. That’s right, the lavish executive junket doesn’t have anything to do with human rights, climate change, or dollar/yuan rebalancing. That’s all just public relations mumbo-jumbo. 100% bunkum.

True, China’s dollar-peg creates an unfair advantage for China’s manufactured goods, but so what? The Congress could change that in a minute by applying trade sanctions. But they won’t. Because Congress is owned by Wall Street, and Wall Street thrives on the current system. Here’s how it works: China sells the US cheap lead-based widgets, and then recycles the dollars into US Treasurys and “complex and utterly worthless” financial products. This provides the gargantuan investment banks with an endless flow of cheap capital to goose stocks and fatten the bottom line. Of course, the process does have it’s shortcomings, like the fact that it crushes the domestic work-force, but that’s how it was designed to work anyway. What economists call “unsustainable imbalances” are praised at the big brokerage houses as “windfall profits”. The total destruction of the US labor movement is just an added perk for these well-heeled, flag-waving, uber-patriots.

And here’s another item that might be of interest curious readers. This is an excerpt from an interview with Morgan Stanley’s Stephen Roach:

Question: How big are China-based multinational corporations now and how do they factor into this issue of global imbalances?

Stephen Roach: “They’re a big deal. Over 60 percent of export growth over the past twelve years has come from growth by Chinese subsidiaries of Western multinationals, but again the problem I have is that too many in the United States, especially the Congress but also Washington, focus on the bilateral trade imbalance between the United States and China. That’s just a fundamental economic mistake that’s being made.” http://www.cfr.org/publication/20486/avoiding_a_uschina_trade_showdown.html
peter Roach

Hmmm. So, a large portion of China’s industrial capacity is actually “China-based multinational corporations”. Now that’s interesting. So US workers are actually competing with US industries that are using sweatshop labor to enrich themselves while savaging the American middle class. Great. I wonder how many of these “industry leaders” affix the stars-n-stripes to their lapel each morning before they trundle off to work?

This just proves that the outsourcing of jobs, the off-shoring of businesses, and the “free trade” laws are mainly the work of cutthroat American corporatists not the “rascally Chinese” as the media would like everyone to believe. China is not destroying America; blue-blooded, brandy-guzzling, Harvard-educated Americans are. It’s just good-old-fashioned class warfare….and our class is losing.

For those who want to know what Obama’s trip is really all about; ignore Obama altogether and read Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner’s article in the Wall Street Journal, “The Road Ahead for Asia’s Economies.” It tells the whole story. Geithner candidly admits that US markets will remain stagnant for years to come and that other emerging nations (ie China) will have to develop their own domestic markets so that Wall Street speculators can attach themselves parasitically to a more succulent host.

Timothy Geithner: “As U.S. households save more and the U.S. reduces its fiscal deficit, others must spur greater growth of private demand in their own economies……We also must keep our sights on maximizing the potential of global markets. Both exports and imports remain critical stimulate the flow of knowledge and innovation that is enabling emerging economies to catch up with developed-world living standards….To achieve durable growth, all of our economies must have flexible labor markets.”

In other words, more lowering of trade barriers, more lost jobs at home, more unemployment.

Geithner again: “Each of us has recognized the importance of strong financial regulation and fiscal balance, and is pursuing these goals in ways that reflect our own circumstances but complement each others’ efforts.”

Check.

The article concludes with a spirited appeal from Geithner to China to open its markets to the gaggle of financial pirates and bank-vermin who just blew up the global system and are looking for new prey.

Geithner again: “Among other things, emerging economies must strengthen their social safety nets through sustainable health and retirement-benefit schemes,(re: Wall Street) thus reducing the need for high precautionary saving that contributes to global imbalances. Regulatory frameworks conducive to competitive markets will support private enterprise, investment and innovation. (re: MBS, CDOs, CDS and other debt-backed exotica) In the emerging economies, deeper and more efficient financial markets will enable better intermediation of savings and enhance investment productivity.(re: “Please, let G-Sax and JPM hang their shingles in Tienanmen Square. We promise we won’t blow up your financial system like we did ours.”)

Reforms are also necessary to promote cross-border private investments, while ensuring an institutional capacity and prudent regulatory framework to enable markets to absorb capital flows … finance ministers of our respective countries, we are keenly aware that our future prosperity will be founded on a continued commitment to globalization.” (Timothy Geithner, Wall Street Journal, “The Road Ahead for Asia’s Economies”)

Blah, blah, blah.

Summary: Geithner and Co. see the US economy languishing in a low-grade Depression for the foreseeable future, therefore, Wall Street must progressively move its base-of-operations eastward.

This is the real reason behind Obama’s trip to China. There’s no truth to the rumor that US policymakers care about “currency manipulation” or the ongoing looting of the American middle class. That’s rubbish. China’s “dollar-peg” essentially serves the interests of the giant multinational corporations and Wall Street speculators who own the media, the courts, the congress, the White House and most of the country.

What is Israel’s Role in the Destabilization of Pakistan?

When waging war “by way of deception,” the motto of the Israeli Mossad, well-timed crises play a critical agenda-setting role by displacing facts with what a target population can be deceived to believe. Thus the force-multiplier effect when staged crises are reinforced with pre-staged intelligence. In combination, the two often prove persuasive.

That duplicity was on display when U.S. lawmakers were induced to invade Iraq in response to the mass murder of 9-11. That crisis alone, however, was insufficient. Military mobilization required a “consensus” belief in Iraqi WMD, Iraqi ties to Al Qaeda, Iraqi mobile biological weapons, Iraqi meetings in Prague, and so forth. Though all were false, those “facts” proved sufficient to induce an invasion of Iraq.

Such agent provocateur operations typically include collateral incidents as pre-staging for the intended main event. Ongoing incidents suggest a follow-on operation is underway. Recent history suggests we’ll see an orgy of evidence that plausibly indicts a pre-staged Evil Doer. Though Iran is an obvious candidate, Pakistan is also a possibility where outside forces have been destabilizing this nuclear Islamic nation with a series of violent incidents.

Will it be coincidence if the next war—like the last—is consistent with the expansive goals of Jewish nationalists?

The Indo-Israel Alliance

December 2007 saw the murder of former Pakistan Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto. Mark Siegel, her Ashkenazim biographer and lobbyist, assured U.S. diplomats that her return was “the only possible way that we could guarantee stability and keep the presidency of Musharraf intact.”

President Pervez Musharraf had announced that resolution of the Israel-Palestine conflict was essential to the resolution of conflicts in Iraq and neighboring Afghanistan. That comment made him a target for Tel Aviv.

During Bhutto’s two terms as prime minister, Pakistani support for the Taliban—then celebrated as the freedom-fighting Mujahadin—enabled her to wield influence in Afghanistan while also catalyzing conflicts in Kashmir. By fueling tension with India, she also fueled an Indo-Israel alliance as Tel Aviv provided New Delhi an emergency shipment of artillery shells during a conflict over the Kirpal region of Kashmir.

In January 2009, Israel delivered to India the first of three Phalcon Airborne Warning & Control Systems (AWACS) shifting the balance of conventional weapons in the region. That sale confirmed what Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had earlier announced: “Our ties with India don’t have any limitation….” That became apparent in April when Israel signed a $1.1 billion agreement to provide India an advanced tactical air defense system developed by Raytheon, a U.S. defense contractor.

In August 2008, Ashkenazim General David Kezerashvili returned to Georgia from Tel Aviv to lead an assault on separatists in South Ossetia with the support of Israeli arms and training. That crisis ignited Cold War tensions between the U.S. and Russia, key members of the Quartet (along with the EU and the UN) pledged to resolve the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Little was said about the Israeli interest in a pipeline across Georgia meant to move Caspian oil through Turkey and on to Eurasia, using Israel as an intermediary while undermining Russia’s oil industry.

More Game Theory Warfare?

Bhutto’s murder ensured a crisis that replaced Musharaff with Asif Ali Zardari, her notoriously corrupt husband. By Washington’s alliance with Zardari, the U.S. could be portrayed as extending its corrupting influence in the region.

On August 7, 2008, the Zadari-led ruling coalition called for a no-confidence vote in Parliament against Musharraf just as he was departing for the Summer Olympics in Beijing. On August 8, heavy fighting erupted overnight in South Ossetia. As with many of the recent incidents in Pakistan, this violent event involved armed separatists.

But for pro-Israeli influence inside the U.S. government, would our State Department have installed in office the corrupt Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan, leading to record-level poppy production? Is the heroin epidemic presently eroding Russian society traceable to Israel’s infamous game theory war-planners? [See “How Israel Wages Game Theory Warfare” http://palestinethinktank.com/2009/08/26/jeff-gates-how-israel-wages-game-theory-warfare/ and “Israel and 9-11” http://www.middle-east-online.com/English/?id=34283.]

In late November 2008, a terrorist attack in Mumbai, India’s financial center, renewed fears of nuclear tension between India and Pakistan. When the attackers struck a hostel managed by Chabad Lubavitch, an ultra-orthodox Jewish sect from New York, Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni announced from Tel Aviv: “Our world is under attack.” By early December, Israeli journalists urged that we “fortify the security of Jewish institutions worldwide.”

Soon after “India’s 9-11” was found to include operatives from Pakistan’s western tribal region, Zardari announced an agreement with the Taliban to allow Sharia law to govern a swath of the North West Frontier Province where Al Qaeda members reportedly reside.

Pakistani cooperation with “Islamic extremists” created the impression of enhanced insecurity and vulnerability for the U.S. and its allies. That perceived threat was marketed by mainstream media as proof of the perils of “militant Islam.”

With the Taliban and Al Qaeda portrayed as operating freely in a nuclear-armed Islamic state, Tel Aviv gained traction for its claim that a nuclear Tehran posed an “existential threat” to the Jewish state. Meanwhile Israel’s election of an ultra-nationalist/ultra-orthodox coalition further delayed resolution of the Israel-Palestine conflict.

More delay is destined to evoke more extremism and gain more traction for those marketing the “global war on terrorism.” Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni argued after the assault in Mumbai: “Israel, India and the rest of the free world are positioned in the forefront of the battle against terrorists and extremism.”

In announcing that list, Islamabad was indicted by its exclusion even though Pakistan is dominantly Sunni and, unlike Iran’s Shi’a, abhors theocratic rule. The fact patterns suggest that Pakistan, not India, was the target of the murderous terrorism in Mumbai.

Advised by legions of Ashkenazim, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s recent mission to Islamabad was a diplomatic disaster. Abrasive and arrogant, America’s top diplomat reinforced Pakistani concerns that it is surrounded by hostile forces and that the nation is being set up to fail by Jewish nationalist advisers to a nation it considered an ally.

In a climate of heightened tensions, Clinton undermined U.S. interests, boosted the Israeli case for a global war on “Islamo-fascism” and lent credence to the Clash of Civilizations.

Destabilization as a Prequel to Domination

As Afghanistan and Pakistan join other nations being destabilized by outside forces, key questions must be answered:

• Was India’s 9-11 a form of geopolitical misdirection meant to serve both the tactical goals of Muslim extremists and the strategic goals of Jewish nationalists? Who benefits—within Pakistan—from humiliation at the hands of India and the U.S.?
• With Bhutto’s murder and Musharraf’s departure, the crisis in Mumbai drew Pakistani forces to the Indian border and away from the western tribal region. Was that the geostrategic goal of these well-timed crises? What role, if any, did Israel play?
• Is delay in ending the occupation of Palestine part of an agent provocateur strategy? Was the latest assault on Gaza part of this strategy?

Each of these crises incrementally advanced the expansionist agenda of Colonial Zionists. Do these collateral incidents trace their origin to a common source? Is that source again using serial events to pre-stage a main event?

The public has an intuitive grasp of the source of this oft-recurring behavior. An October 2003 poll of 7,500 respondents in member nations of the European Union found that Israel was considered the greatest threat to world peace.

Is terrorism limited to “Islamo-fascists”? Are mass murders also deployed—from the shadows—as a strategy of geopolitical manipulation by those who Ashkenazim philosopher Hannah Arendt described as “Jewish fascists”?

Minsky to Bernanke: “Size Matters!”

Size matters. And it particularly matters when the size of the financial system grossly exceeds the productive capacity of the underlying economy. Then problems arise. Surplus capital flows into paper assets triggering a boom. Then speculators pile in driving asset prices higher. Margins grow, debts balloon, and bubbles emerge. The frenzy finally ends when the debts can no longer be serviced and the bubble begins to unwind, sometimes violently. As gas escapes; credit tightens, businesses are forced to cut back, asset prices plunge and unemployment soars. Deflation spreads to every sector. Eventually, the government steps in to rescue the financial system while the broader economy slumps into a coma.

The crisis that started two years ago, followed this same pattern. A meltdown in subprime mortgages sent the dominoes tumbling; the secondary market collapsed, and stock markets went into freefall. When Lehman Bros flopped, a sharp correction turned into a full-blown panic. Lehman tipped-off investors that that the entire multi-trillion dollar market for securitized loans was built on sand. Without price discovery, via conventional market transactions, no one knew what mortgage-backed securities (MBS) and other exotic debt-instruments were really worth. That sparked a global sell-off. Markets crashed. For a while, it looked like the whole system might collapse.

The Fed’s emergency intervention pulled the system back from the brink, but at great cost. Even now, the true value of the so-called toxic assets remains unknown. The Fed and Treasury have derailed attempts to create a public auction facility–like the Resolution Trust Corporation (RTC)–where prices can be determined and assets can be sold. Billions in toxic waste now clog the Fed’s balance sheet. Ultimately, the losses will be passed on to the taxpayer.

Now that the economy is no longer on steroids, the financial system needs to be downsized. The housing/equities bubble was generated by over-consumption that required high levels of debt-spending. That model requires cheap money and easy access to credit, conditions no longer exist. The economy has reset at a lower level of economic activity, so changes need to be made. The financial system needs to shrink.

The problem is, the Fed’s “lending facilities” have removed any incentive for financial institutions to deleverage. Asset prices are propped up by low interest, rotating loans on dodgy collateral. While household’s have suffered humongous losses (of nearly $14 trillion) in home equity and retirement savings; the financial behemoths have muddled through largely unscathed. The Fed handed Wall Street a golden parachute while ordinary working stiffs were kicked to the curb. That’s why household spending has plunged while the big brokerage houses are gearing up. Here’s an excerpt from an article by former Morgan Stanley analyst Andy Xie which explains what’s really going on:

“First, let’s look at the most basic objective of deleveraging the financial sector. Top executives on Wall Street talk about having cut leverage by half. That is actually due to an expanding equity capital base rather than shrinking assets. According to the Federal Reserve, total debt for the financial sector was US$ 16.5 trillion in the second quarter 2009 — about the same as the US$ 16.6 trillion reported one year earlier. After the Lehman collapse, financial sector leverage increased due to Fed support. It has come down as the Fed pulled back some support, creating the perception of deleveraging. The basic conclusion is that financial sector debt is the same as it was a year ago, and the reduction in leverage is due to equity base expansion, partly due to government funding.” (Andy Xie, “Why One Good Bubble Deserves Another”, Caijing.com)

See? The financial Goliaths are still leveraged to their eyeballs.

Fed chair Ben Bernanke has bent-over-backwards to preserve the system in its present form. That’s why the lending facilities should be viewed with a degree of skepticism. They weren’t set up merely to rescue the system from disaster, but to keep asset prices artificially high so institutions could continue to maximize profits via risky investments. And, it’s worked, too. The S&P 500 is up over 60 percent since March 9. Still, even though Bernanke has succeeded in resuscitating the flagging financial sector, investors remain pessimistic. According to Bloomberg News:

“An eight-month, 68 percent rally in global stocks failed to convince investors and analysts that it’s time to take on more risk or dispel their concerns about U.S. economic policies and its banking system.

Only 31 percent of respondents to a poll of investors and analysts who are Bloomberg subscribers in the U.S., Europe and Asia see investment opportunities, down from 35 percent in the previous survey in July. Almost 40 percent in the latest quarterly survey, the Bloomberg Global Poll, say they are still hunkering down. U.S. investors are even more cautious, with more than 50 percent saying they are in a defensive crouch.

“The doubt and the pessimism just won’t go away,” says James Paulsen, who helps oversee $375 billion as chief investment strategist at Wells Capital Management in Minneapolis.” (Bloomberg News)

Few people seem to believe in the much-ballyhooed economic recovery. And even though the media triumphantly announced the “end of the recession” last week (when GDP came in at 3.5 percent) a closer look at the data, leaves room for doubt. Goldman Sachs analysts put it like this:

“How much of the rebound in real GDP was due to the fiscal stimulus, and where do we stand in terms of the effects of stimulus thus far? Although precise answers are impossible at this juncture, several aspects of the report are consistent with our estimates that the fiscal package enacted in mid-February as the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) would have accounted for virtually all of the growth reported for the third quarter.” ( http://www.zerohedge.com/article/hedging-their-bets )

Positive growth is an illusion created by government spending. In fact, the economy is still flat on its back. Consumer spending and credit are in sharp decline. Unemployment is steadily rising (although at a slower pace) and wages are flatlining with a chance of falling for the first time in 30 years. Deflationary pressures are building. The talk of a “jobless recovery” is intentionally misleading. Jobs ARE recovery; therefore a jobless recovery merely points to asset-inflation brought on by erratic monetary policy. Surging stocks shouldn’t be confused with a real recovery.

Bernanke is a scholar of the Great Depression. He is familiar with Hyman Minsky and Minsky’s “Financial Instability Hypothesis” (FIH), which states that, “A fundamental characteristic of our economy is that the financial system swings between robustness and fragility and these swings are an integral part of the process that generates business cycles.”

Boston Globe Correspondent, Stephen Mihm, summarized Minsky’s theory in his article “When Capitalism Fails”:

“In the wake of a depression, he noted, financial institutions are extraordinarily conservative, as are businesses. With the borrowers and the lenders who fuel the economy all steering clear of high-risk deals, things go smoothly: loans are almost always paid on time, businesses generally succeed, and everyone does well. That success, however, inevitably encourages borrowers and lenders to take on more risk in the reasonable hope of making more money. As Minsky observed, “Success breeds a disregard of the possibility of failure.”

As people forget that failure is a possibility, a “euphoric economy” eventually develops, fueled by the rise of far riskier borrowers – what he called speculative borrowers, those whose income would cover interest payments but not the principal; and those he called “Ponzi borrowers,” those whose income could cover neither, and could only pay their bills by borrowing still further. As these latter categories grew, the overall economy would shift from a conservative but profitable environment to a much more freewheeling system dominated by players whose survival depended not on sound business plans, but on borrowed money and freely available credit.

Once that kind of economy had developed, any panic could wreck the market. The failure of a single firm, for example, or the revelation of a staggering fraud could trigger fear and a sudden, economy-wide attempt to shed debt. This watershed moment – what was later dubbed the “Minsky moment” – would create an environment deeply inhospitable to all borrowers.

The speculators and Ponzi borrowers would collapse first, as they lost access to the credit they needed to survive. Even the more stable players might find themselves unable to pay their debt without selling off assets; their forced sales would send asset prices spiraling downward, and inevitably, the entire rickety financial edifice would start to collapse. Businesses would falter, and the crisis would spill over to the “real” economy that depended on the now-collapsing financial system.” (When Capitailsm Fails, Stephen Mihn, Boston Globe)

Stability leads to instability. By zeroing in on capitalism’s genetic flaws, Minsky countered the prevailing orthodoxy that markets are fundamentally efficient and rational. He not only showed that capitalism was inherently crisis-prone, but also, that it was most vulnerable during those periods which seemed to be most stable. (like during Greenspan’s “Great Moderation”) Stability invites speculation and risk-taking. Investors are buoyed by market euphoria and fat returns; borrowing to purchase dodgy equities turns into a mania which distorts prices and leads to massive credit bubbles. Eventually, the foundation cracks and debts cannot be rolled over. Then markets tumble.

The point is, Bernanke knows that a bloated financial system poses unnecessary risks to the economy; just as he knows he should wind-down existing lending programs (which just encourage more speculation) and focus on rebuilding household balance sheets. The only way to put the economy back on a solid foundation is by helping struggling workers get back on their feet so they can create more demand. The objective should be full employment and broad, sustained wage growth, which is precisely what Minsky’s recommended.

Stephen Mihm again: “The government – or what Minsky liked to call ‘Big Government’ – should become the ‘employer of last resort,’ he said, offering a job to anyone who wanted one at a set minimum wage. It would be paid to workers who would supply child care, clean streets, and provide services that would give taxpayers a visible return on their dollars. In being available to everyone, it would be even more ambitious than the New Deal, sharply reducing the welfare rolls by guaranteeing a job for anyone who was able to work. Such a program would not only help the poor and unskilled, he believed, but would put a floor beneath everyone else’s wages too, preventing salaries of more skilled workers from falling too precipitously, and sending benefits up the socioeconomic ladder.” (“Why Capitalism Fails, by Stephen Mihm, Boston Globe)

Minsky’s analysis not only sheds light on the causes of the current crisis, but also provides a practical way to fix the system. Too bad Bernanke’s not paying attention.

U.S. Filling Up With Dumb People: Chaos of Illiteracy

Part 2: Ethnic division, welfare, balkanization, clashing cultures.

Over 18 million human beings starve to death in third world countries around the world annually. According to the World Health Organization,10 million of them are children that die of starvation or related conditions yearly. When you watch religious channels featuring appeals to “Save the Children” in Africa, South America and Asia, what constitutes the driving condition of their plight?

Illiteracy! Culture! Profligate fecundity!

At the same time, how can the Western world in Europe and North America enjoy endless ‘all you can eat’ buffets seven days a week that created over 180 million obese people in the United States alone?

Education! Culture! Personal choice!

What happens when a highly educated society, culture and people such as the United States degrades or devolves its educational systems toward illiteracy and loss of personal accountability?

Look around you!

You watched that process clutch at the throat of American educational system for the last 40 years— and today; it’s got us by the carotid artery.

What do 35 million Americans subsisting on food stamps indicate? Answer: poor or no educational achievement.

APATHY AND TOLERANCE: THE MOST DEADLY VIRTUES OF AMERICAN SOCIETY

Personal responsibility: do you think 400,000 pregnant women that arrive annually in America, unlawfully, will birth tomorrow’s responsible citizens? Do you think millions of unwed American mothers that bring 1,2,3,4 and five children into this world using welfare “Aid to Dependent Children” will rear responsible, intelligent and contributing future citizens?

Personal accountability: do you think the 1.2 million high school dropouts annually in the USA will become thriving, contributing and responsible future citizens? You see, that number of academic failures has been mounting for over 10 years, thus, more than 11 million illiterate kids wandering the streets of America.

Do you think ethnic groups that abhor education or quit from their own lack of parental guidance, drive and academic ability – will remain docile in the burgeoning slums? Here or worldwide? I address that dilemma in Chapter 20: Burgeoning Cities of Poverty in America on the Brink: The Next Added 100 Million Americans. {Copies available:1 888 289 7715}

ABSOLUTE VOID OF DECENT STRATEGIC PLANNING

“Most cities in developing countries already have pressing concerns, including crime, lack of clean water and sanitation, and sprawling slums,” said Thoraya Obaid, Executive Director of the UN Population Fund. “But these problems pale in comparison with those that could be raised by future growth. If we do not plan ahead, it will be a catastrophe.”

Please note that China, India, Mexico, Bangladesh, Rio, Indonesia, etc. constitute present day catastrophes already manifesting.

Where does this lead to?

What do we see happening in the USA?

Why won’t anyone address it?

Illiteracy can and will kill our civilization! No if’s, and’s or but’s! And the “when” is easily predicted.

Social Interaction EXPLOSIONS Are Inevitable.

The fact grows that the United States injects volatile mixtures of incompatible cultures, antagonistic races (e.g. – Jewish and Muslims), illiteracy and multiple languages into its core culture— hoping that it won’t explode. Yet, you can see the explosions, strife and conflict already manifesting in Great Britain, France, Holland, Norway, Germany, Austria, Spain and elsewhere.

Cultural Assimilation is NOT Happening.

In “The Silent Catastrophe” by Jared Taylor, October 12, 2009, he said, “Part of the problem for immigrants is adjusting to the U.S.; Hispanics born here are more likely to finish high school than those who immigrate as children. However, the graduation rate slightly decreases for the second U.S.-born generation (85.1 percent vs. 85.9 percent), so that in 2007, even after three generations in the United States, Hispanics had a dropout rate that was still 2.3 times the white rate – and 33 percent higher than the black rate.

“Big-city public school districts, which are heavily black and Hispanic, have appalling track-records.

In Detroit, only 26.8 percent of students graduated on time in 2006. (76 percent in 2008 reported by Brian Williams, NBC) The other worst performers were Philadelphia: 39.1 percent, Dallas: 40.7 percent, Los Angeles: 47.7 percent, and Washington, DC: 48.8 percent. Jefferson High School, which is 90 percent Hispanic and 10 percent black, had the worst dropout rate in Los Angeles: 58 percent.

“That is not the figure for students who fail to graduate on time; it is those students do not graduate at all.”

Today, newspapers and magazines publish to a sixth grade reading level for audiences across this country! The U.S. Army manuals scale their educational efforts to a 4th grade level.

Taylor continued, “The American workforce has historically been the best educated in the world: 85 percent of adult Americans are high school graduates, up from just 25 percent in 1940. Twenty-eight percent have a college degree, a fivefold increase since 1940. Better education helped raise real average per-capita income in the United States 40 percent between 1980 and 2000 – but that money had less purchasing power.

California Illiteracy; Legal AND Illegal Immigrants

“According to a 2007 report from the Migration Policy Institute, an estimated 400,000 legal immigrants and 350,000 illegal immigrants were illiterate in their native languages, much less English. This contributed to the first decline in literacy in California’s history. In 2003, its adult illiteracy rate of 23 percent— up 50 percent in the most recent 10 years— put it last among all states.”

Please note that California suffers an estimated five (ten ?) million illegal immigrants and five million recently arrived legal immigrants. It suffers a gigantic, untaxed underground economy resulting in $24 ($47 ?) billion in debt. Across the USA, immigrants cost taxpayers, according to economist Edwin Rubensetin, www.thesocialcontract.com — $346 billion annually across 15 federal agencies.

“The California Dropout Research Project at U.C. Santa Barbara estimated in 2009 that because high school dropouts commit more crime than students who stay in school, dropouts cost California $1.1 billion annually in law enforcement costs and victim damages while they are still minors,” said Taylor. “This estimate did not include lost productivity costs as adults or continuing public outlays for adult criminals and indigents.”

“For the U.S. economy, the implication of these trends is really stark,” said Patrick Callan, president of the center.

Andrew Sum of Northeastern University in Boston works with ETS on research projects said, “There is no time that I can tell you in the last hundred years,” he says, when literacy and numeracy have declined, “but if you don’t change outcomes for a wide variety of groups, this is the future we face.”

“If blacks, Hispanics, and immigrants are excluded from the American results, our performance rises from 12th, to 2nd in reading and 5th in math,” said Taylor. “This means immigrants, blacks, and Hispanics are dragging our rating down to 12th from 2nd and 5th. Likewise, the oldest Americans (56 and older) came in second in reading whereas younger Americans, those 26-35 and 16-25 years old, ranked 11th and 14th, respectively.

The oldest age groups— the ones with the most whites— are doing the best, while the youngest groups with the fewest whites do the worst. The ETS also found that native-born blacks and Hispanics performed at only the 28th percentile, compared to other rich countries, and immigrants at only the 17th percentile.”

In 2009, we suffer $35 million in shoplifting DAILY within the United States by those that lack education, personal responsibility and accountability.

As the inequities accelerate, we face entrenched and growing slums that will drive food stamp usage beyond our ability to feed our citizens. As they grow more volatile, expect balkanization, ethnic separation and confrontation. As inequities grow between the haves and have not’s, expect extreme disrespect for law and order.

Finally, why continue importing 2.5 million immigrants into this country annually when we cannot support or employ our own citizens?

Additionally, when you see 600,000 Muslim immigrants added to the Detroit, Michigan region— sporting a 76 percent dropout rate from area high schools— you can count on illiterate, upset, angry and culturally incompatible Muslim-Americans taking their frustrations out on the rest of us.

Expect growing domestic violence, honor killings, FGM, rapes and much worse as now experienced in Sweden, France and Great Britain, and, of course here in the U.S. Check out the numbers, take action at www.NumbersUSA.com and join as if your kids’ lives and this civilization depended on it. In Truth, it does.

Russia’s Daring Vote

Russia’s vote to endorse the Goldstone Gaza report in the United Nations Human Rights Council last Friday was an important, milestone event both for Palestine and for Russia. For Palestine, this vote opened a way to try and sentence Israeli mass-murderers, and thus ushered Israel into a new era of responsibility after a long period of Wild West-style, Colt-45 justice. For Russia, this vote has proved to its own country and to the world that it is free from American and Zionist diktat and able to navigate its own policy.

This story began on Christmas with the Israeli onslaught on defenceless Gaza. Taking advantage of the holiday lull, the Israeli army killed hundreds of Palestinian children and other civilians by indiscriminate use of white phosphorus and artillery. The world was horrified, and the UN Human Rights Council appointed Judge Richard Goldstone, a former prosecutor for Rwanda and Yugoslavia, to find out the facts.

Many people doubted his impartiality: Goldstone is a Jew — a self-described Zionist, well-connected to Israel – he sits on the board of its University and his daughter even lived in Tel Aviv for a while. Goldstone was guided by his conscience and not by his blood. He went to Gaza, invested a lot of time and effort, and concluded: Israel has committed war crimes and crimes against humanity. He recommended the case be transferred to the ICC court in the Hague. Israel did not cooperate and tried to undermine and block the report, but failed. That was the first Israeli defeat.

The second defeat occurred a few days later. The Fatah chairman, Ramallah PNA ruler Mahmud Abbas, was ready to do anything in order to remain in power after his electoral defeat. Netanyahu threatened him with taking away the broadcasting frequency for a second mobile phone provider – Abbas promptly called his representative in Geneva and ordered him to put the Goldstone report on a slow, very slow burner. Popular indignation was furious; he was called `traitor’ and worse. Facing revolt and sure political demise, Abbas u-turned once again and ordered his ambassador to proceed at full speed. Thus Bibi undermined and delegitimised his agent Abbas, while the report made its way to the council anyway. That was the second defeat.

Israel was infuriated by this development. The Jewish State considered itself invulnerable behind the triple defense of the Sixth Fleet, the US Senate and the Holocaust Museum. President Obama’s soft request to freeze the settlement building was met in Tel Aviv by what Internet chat calls “lol”. He was ridiculed. Ehud Barak and Bibi Netanyahu even sped up their building plans in the West Bank and East Jerusalem in order to show that they could not care less. And now, all of a sudden, Jewish ministers of state are going to be judged as if they were Serbs or Sudanese.

Israeli leaders activated their main reserves, the US State Department and the Lobby. A few days ago I spoke with Martin Indyk, former US ambassador to Tel Aviv, and he confirmed that the US State Department will do all it can to stop the Goldstone report before it gets to the Security Council. Another American veto would not look good. Worse, an insulted and hurt Obama might just forget to veto an anti-Israeli decision.

Israel began courting Russia, hoping to build bridges and to enlist Moscow in its cause. Avigdor Lieberman, Israeli Moldova-born Foreign minister, met ten times with his Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov; Netanyahu flew to Moscow on a “secret mission” for a talk with Medvedev, and President Peres met with Medvedev in Sochi. They wanted Russian support for Iran sanctions and for silencing the Goldstone report. They said to the Russians that it would create a dangerous precedent: If today they judge Israeli ministers and generals for Gaza, tomorrow they will judge Russian ministers and generals for Chechnya. This is a false comparison: Chechens are Russian citizens with full rights, Gazans have no rights at all; Chechens are free to travel and live in Moscow or elsewhere, Gazans are not allowed to leave their concentration camp. Though Russia’s campaign against Chechen separatists was bloody and cruel, it could not be compared with the cold-blooded murder the Israelis unleashed on Gaza.

Moreover, the precedents were established a long time ago, when Milosevic the Serb was tried in The Hague. The question is whether the Jews are indeed above the law. Israeli observers were certain that Russia would stand by them. There is a small but profitable trade between the two countries; there is a Russian immigrant community in Israel; there are many bilateral relations. Beside, Russia has traditional interests in the Holy Land, and hundreds of thousands of Russian pilgrims make their way to the Holy Sepulchre.

On top of all this, Russia was interested in hosting a Moscow Middle East Peace Conference, in direct continuity with the Madrid Conference of 1989. There is also a powerful Zionist lobby in Moscow. True, some of the most obnoxious oligarchs are gone, whether to a Siberian jail or to exile in Tel Aviv or London. Power is now concentrated in the hands of Putin and Medvedev, and money is respected but not more than that. But there are many very wealthy Russian Jews who like to play the Jewish Lobby game.

Some arguments by the Zionist Lobby for supporting Israel were spectacularly feeble. They said that Russia should be forever grateful to Israel because it had allowed a few Russian wives to leave Gaza just before their homes were bombed to smithereens. If you buy that one, you may also buy their argument for bombing Iran: in 1836 (sic!), the Persians had lynched Russian playwright and diplomat Alexander Griboedov, who had sneaked into a harem and gotten caught.

Notwithstanding, the Russians disregarded the US and Israel’s overtures and stalwartly voted to endorse Goldstone’s report. They were joined by their three allies, China, India and Brazil, together representing the lion’s share of mankind’s human resources – of oil, of industry.

The Chinese sage Mencius (or Mengzi 372-289 BC) went to see t King Hui who said: “Old man, since you dared the distance of 1000 li to come here, you may know of a way to profit my state.” Mencius replied: “Why should you ever mention the word `profit’? What counts is benevolence and righteousness. If the King says `How can I profit my country?’ the high officials will say, `how can we profit our fiefs?’, and the intellectuals and the commoners will say: `How can we profit ourselves?’ If the upper and lower classes strive to snatch profit one from another, the state will be endangered.”

Apparently the Eurasian landmass of Russia, China and India prefer benevolence and righteousness, while the Anglo-American world prefers lust for gain. Russian leaders Putin and Medvedev were very outspoken in their objections to the Israeli plans to attack Iran. They spoke against the sanctions, too, and here they were fully supported by China. At the same time, Turkey refused to let the Israeli Air Force join its joint maneuvers with the US. The Zionist-run US immediately withdrew from the maneuvers as well. The position of Turkey is extremely relevant: This is the old imperial power that protected and controlled the Middle East for centuries. Turkey, together with Russia and Greece, are the main heirs to Byzantium. If we want to help Turkey to support the Palestinian cause we must not allow the Zionists to play the Armenian card right now. When Turkey joins Russia and China, they can decide quite a bit. They have put paid to the notion of Israeli impunity. One can’t overestimate the importance of the Russian vote:

1. This vote confirmed the principle of equality. All human beings are equal. If the ICC can judge Milosevic and Burundians and Sudanese, they can also judge Jewish ministers and generals.
2. This vote demonstrated that Russia is independent, not only of Washington, but even of Tel Aviv. The Zionist Lobby in Russia is powerful, but not omnipotent.
3. This vote saved innumerable children, women and men from death. After this vote, an Israeli general will have to think twice before dropping a bomb on a civilian target. This will save Israeli children as well from retaliation.
4. Russia regained its position lost by Gorbachev and Yeltsin. Russia became again a leader of the free world, I mean the world free of US bases. Moscow’s position was decisive in forming China’s position as well.
5. It seems that the main weapon of Zionists, their voice, has worn out. Once upon a time they could convince individuals and nations as easily as the sirens by the charm of their persuasion. Now the witch of Zion had lost her charm.

A few years ago I wrote: “The world needs Russia, for since her star was obscured in 1990, for almost twenty years the runaway train of the US and the loose cannon of Israel made a mess on the planet. Russia must stop their orgy of aggression and regain its place as the ultimate protector of the weak and the meek. This is her manifest destiny”. The Geneva vote proved that Russia has done just that. We may once again connect our hopes with Russia in her friendship with China. They also can stop Israel from hurting itself and others.

So many people in the US and France, in Egypt and Palestine are tired of Israeli intransigence, egotism, hypocrisy and impunity. That is why so much hope was invested in Barack Obama after his Cairo talk. Obama had promised to cut Israel down to size, but meanwhile Israel cut him down to smaller-than-life. That is why the US is going down just like the Titanic, undermined by a Lobby iceberg and fleeced by financial wizards. Now Russia is coming under tremendous pressure from the US and other Zionist-led groups and states. We should pray she will withstand it and maintain her and our dignity.

U.S. Filling Up With Dumb People: Immigration’s Ultimate Dilemma

“Transforming the American dream into the American tragedy.”

Part 1: Illiteracy leads to shoplifting, babies, crime, gangs…

As an educator in Colorado through the 70s, 80s and 90s, I watched academic standards and expectations drop like a brick in a bucket of water, like a jet fighter plane auguring into the ground, like water cascading over Niagara Falls.

As if guided by an invisible hand nationwide, administrators forced teachers to dumb down the academic requirements. Teachers passed kids to the next grade level… whether those children performed… or not.

Good students dragged down by their illiterate peers

As they failed to cement their educational foundations with the basics— the gaps in their math, science, reading and English skills— created terrible frustrations in their personal lives. When their irritation levels became too great, they ‘gave up’ their pursuit of minimal levels of educational achievement.

Often, while being ‘pushed’ up through grade levels, they acted out their annoyances with disrespect for teachers as they became malcontents, troublemakers or shut down altogether to cope with their growing lack of self-esteem… and failures.

Cannot think critically, read at a fifth grade level or balance a check book.

This year, Paul Robeson High School in Chicago, Illinois featured 115 pregnant girls. That equals not only 115 dumb girls, but 115 dumb boys, which will beget 115 more troubled babies facing horrific futures on all counts. Thus, millions drop out or ‘graduate’ functionally illiterate, i.e., cannot think critically, read at a fifth grade level or balance a check book.

To completely upend and degrade the educational systems of America, the late U.S. Senator Teddy Kennedy, in 1965, passed a bill to inject 1.2 to 1.5 million immigrants into the equation annually. While some are doctors and nurses, to be sure, others come from third-world nations with precious few academic skills. They arrive with dozens of languages, cultural bias against education and hostility toward learning.

Forty years later, we have 100 million people added to the United States from disparate cultures around the world, as K-12 educational systems around America grind on in total chaos.

With a 600,000 Middle Eastern immigrant load in central and suburban Detroit, Michigan, as reported by NBC’s Brian Williams, “…76 percent of high school students in Detroit schools flunked out this June… other cities like Chicago, Los Angeles and Houston feature similar dropout rates from 50 to 60 percent… each year 1.2 million teens hit the streets illiterate.”

That leads up to the distressing fact that 1 in 7 Americans remains functionally illiterate:

Illiteracy Statistics

• 42 million American adults can’t read at all; 50 million are unable to read at a higher level that is expected of a fourth grader.
• The number of adults that are classified as functionally illiterate increases by about 2.25 million each year.
• 20 percent of high school seniors can be classified as being functionally illiterate at the time they graduate.

Source: National Right to Read Foundation

Where Illiteracy Leads

• 70 percent of prisoners in state and federal systems can be classified as illiterate.
• 85 percent of all juvenile offenders rate as functionally or marginally illiterate.
• 43 percent of those whose literacy skills are lowest live in poverty.

Source: National Institute for Literacy

Yet, with those disturbing figures, our U.S. Congress, by their action and by their inaction, imports an added 2.5 million legal and illegal immigrants into this country every year. That equals over 200,000 every 30 days. AND THE FOLKS FROM THIRD-WORLD NATIONS HAVE HIGH BIRTH RATES. Their kids overwhelm our schools… subverting education for our own children. The immigrants themselves face daunting challenges as to culture, language and jobs.

In Denver, we suffer 85 languages and a 67 percent Denver Public Schools flunkout rate, as reported by the now defunct Rocky Mountain News in a story “What Happened?” Ironically, the ‘Rocky’ bankrupted in 2008 because not enough people could read! The same holds true for dozens of cities across our country.

Becoming a nation of dummies in the 21st Century

What happens when somebody cannot read, write or perform simple math?

If they cannot obtain a labor job, they pursue crime, drugs, alcohol, welfare, homelessness and worse. Such uneducated women usually become pregnant and their children become abused, live in poverty and become wards of the state. Over 13.4 million American children live below the poverty line according to Katie Couric in a recent telecast. An astounding 35 million Americans subsist on food stamps.

Massachusetts; A Glaring Example.

What happens when young adult women fail their educational pursuits? Let’s use one state to show you the underbelly of what’s happening to the United States:

Nearly nine of every 10 teen-agers who gave birth in Massachusetts were unmarried, the highest percentage of out-of-wedlock teen-age births of any state in the nation. According to the most recent data available from the National Center for Health Statistics, 86 percent of the 7,018 mothers under age 20 who gave birth in this state two years ago were not married.

The percentage was higher in Boston, hitting 92 percent. In Springfield, 90 percent of teen-age mothers were unmarried. “It is staggeringly high,” said state Health and Human Services Secretary Charles D. Baker Jr. Additionally, it is estimated that 80 percent of unwed teen mothers end up welfare.

The declining quality of the American work force.

In a penetrating article, Jared Taylor, “The Silent Catastrophe” October 12 2009, “One great, avoidable evil we face is the declining quality of the American work force. The Census Bureau tells us that if immigration continues at its current rate of some two million people a year, whites will become a minority of the under-18 child population in just 14 years— in 2023— and will become a minority of the working population just 16 years later.

The greatest increase will be in Hispanics, who are now dropping out of high school at higher rates than blacks, doing little better than blacks when they manage to stay in school, and are the group least likely to go to college. Demographers are beginning to warn that as well-educated, white baby boomers retire and are replaced by poorly educated blacks and Hispanics, the productivity gains of the last several hundred years will be reversed, and the United States could go into a tailspin.”

“We have the possibility of transforming the American dream into the American tragedy,” says Irwin Kirsch, senior research director at the Educational Testing Service. He warns that our increasingly non-white and immigrant workforce threatens not only our standard of living, but the very survival of republican government (the U.S. is a Republic) based on an informed middle class.

“Here are some of the facts,” said Taylor. “In 2007, 93.5 percent of white and 93.1 percent of Asian 18- to 24-year-olds had graduated from high school. The figures for blacks and Hispanics were 88.8 percent and 72.7 percent, meaning that Hispanics were more than four times more likely than whites… and 2.4 times more likely than blacks… to have failed to graduate from high school.”

Painfully, as witnessed in Detroit, so many poor people shoplifted from grocery stores and retail merchants that the businesses bankrupted or vacated the inner city. Thus, the poor cannot find a place to buy their groceries… even with food stamps. On a national scale, shoplifters hoist $35 million a day in goods from retail stores. We all pay for that massive theft. Think of the implications of adding 70 million more immigrants (half of whom are illiterate) to our cities across America.

John Wayne said, “Life is tough, but it’s even tougher if you’re stupid!”

Next — Part 2: Consequences from rapidly growing illiterate numbers.

Translating the Bible into Hebrew

Or, How We Can Upset the Elders of Zion Conspiracy…

[A Talk at Rhodes Conference, 8-12 October 2009]

They say that at a press-conference before departing from Israel, President George W. Bush was asked: “What impressed you most of all in Israel?” The Texan replied: “The Bible in my room. It was in your tongue! Despite the wars and terrorism, you did not begrudge the effort and translated the Holy Bible into Hebrew in such a short time! That impressed me the most”.

Besides ridiculing proverbial Texan ignorance, this Israeli joke aims to remind us that the Old Testament was written in Hebrew, and every Old Testament book that you find in your hotel room is a translation from the ancient Hebrew text. There is a far-reaching implication: the Jews are the guardians and keepers of a primary sacred text of Christendom. This implication is subliminally or even consciously accepted by the West.

The consequences of this implication go far beyond textual details. India’s Brahmins are guardians of the Vedas, and this brings them influence, money, ministerial positions. Likewise in the West, the Jewish guardians of the Scripture possess by this right such extraordinary influence – totally out-of-sync with their demographic numbers – that can’t be explained in any other way.

Money, clannishness, media ownership – all are frequently mentioned among the reasons for this disproportionate Jewish influence. Here’s the problem, though: This influence is greatest in the US in particular and in the West in general. The Jews of Serbia and Greece, of Turkey and Syria, of India and China are not poor either, and are no less clannish, but they are much less influential. We may propose a different reason, then: the Texan-Israeli joke wouldn’t have been immediately understood in these countries, because for Muslims, for Hindus, for the Chinese as well as for Orthodox Christians, Jews have no sacred function – they are not the guardians of a holy text. Non-Christians have their own scriptures. And for Orthodox Christians, the Old Testament is the Septuagint, the Greek text composed some two hundred years before Christ and one thousand years before the present Jewish Bible (called MT, Masoretic Text) was completed.

Though the schism between the Eastern and the Western churches is usually connected with the filioque controversy, the true bifurcation point between the Christian East and the Christian West is located in their choice of the primary text (aside from the New Testament). Westerners (Catholics and Protestants) use the Old Testament they translated from the Jewish MT; Easterners use the Greek text as the original. This is an extremely important difference. When St Paul said that the opposites are united in Christ, he mentioned man and woman, Jew and Hellene (Galatians 3:28). Indeed, the ideal Jew and Hellene are as opposed to each other as the ideal man and woman, and the Jewish and Hellenic texts are equally opposed to each other. Moreover, translations from either of these texts carry the imprint of the original spirit with them. The Hellenic spirit found its expression in the Septuagint, while the Judaic spirit was expressed in the Masoretic Hebrew text, the MT. Christianity as a whole treads a narrow path between its Judaic and Hellenic tendencies, which are locked in an eternal fight like the Yin and the Yang. Their choice of primary text for the Old Testament caused the Eastern churches to favour the Hellenic, and the Western the Judaic tendency.

Before continuing, a full disclosure: until fairly recently, I was not aware of the problem, and like everybody else, I thought that the Old Testament in every language was a translation from the Hebrew MT original. A few months ago, I visited Moscow where I thoroughly enjoyed the fabulous hospitality of the Muscovites, who can turn every friendly meeting over a couple of vodkas into a Platonic symposium – a banquet of reason and a celebration of the soul. Once, my friend Michael, a Moscow University teacher, told me that a famous Starets wanted to receive me. “Starets,” the Russian equivalent of Greek gerōn, or “elder”, means, in Eastern Orthodoxy, a monastic spiritual leader – a charismatic spiritual guide who can aid others in attaining spiritual progress and success, as the Encyclopaedia Britannica tell us. The Starets is well known in Moscow as a confessor and heart-reader – a man who understands the human soul and its way to salvation. I was immensely touched and flattered by the invitation, for people normally wait months on end to see him and receive his blessing. Though I have met with princes of the Church – with bishops and cardinals, with the monks of Athos and Jerusalem – the elders are the hidden heart of the faith.

We drove out of Moscow to the monastery at four a.m. The road was empty, and there were only a few pilgrims in front of the monastery waiting for the heavy gates to open. This is neither the time nor the place to relate everything that happened at this meeting, but I’ll tell you the most important thing: the Starets told me of his desire to publish the Old Testament in Hebrew, corrected in accordance with the Queen Elizabeth Bible of the Russian Orthodox Church. At first, I was deeply shocked and confused. The Queen Elizabeth Bible (1751), or the QEB, is a translation, and a translation of the Greek translation into the Old Church Slavonic. Wasn’t this rather too daring a project, to correct the original according to a translation? Its scope would eclipse any post-modernist project!

Here another, even fuller disclosure is called for: the idea of translating a translation or even reconstructing the original according to a translation was not totally foreign to me. Translations are not machine-made neutral reproductions; they carry with them the twin loads of the original culture and of the translator’s culture. A translation can be translated. I was aware of this complexity – some years ago I had translated the Odyssey into Russian from the English translations of Lawrence (1932) and Rieu (1946) instead of from the Greek original. (It was published by Aletheia, the Heidegger-inspired St Petersburg publishers of Greek classics in AD 2000). I did it that way in order to convey Jorge Luis Borges’ idea that for the modern reader Joyce’s Ulysses precedes Homer’s Odyssey. The English post-Joyce translations of the Odyssey carried this subliminal message, and I tried to preserve it in my translation into Russian. (More on this in Russian on http://www.israelshamir.net/ru/odysseia0.htm )

The longer I considered the words of the Starets, the more sense they made to me. Practically, he was proposing to reconstruct the H70, the lost Hebrew original of the Septuagint, while using the QEB to select between numerous versions. You will see soon why this could begin the reversal of a long-term Judaisation and degradation process, and start the healing of the schism between the West and the East, while at the same time helping the Jews to overcome their hubris and to make peace with the nations. The Jews have translated the Bible into the languages of the nations in order to influence them; the world is indebted to them, and it’s time to pay them back by giving them the true original Hebrew text of the Old Testament, free from censorship and later additions, just as it was read in the days of the Second Temple.

Why will this bookish project influence the real world? Sacred matters influence our world far more than is acceptable to admit in polite society. The dummies believe that all things are done out of pecuniary considerations, but in truth, it is spiritual authority that decides. The world based on the Jewish Bible is not the same as would be a world based on the Greek Bible. Its priorities would be different. Even the texts themselves are different. The Hebrew text used today by Jews (and by tiny communities of Hebrew-speaking Christians), usually called MT (Masoretic text) is not the same text that was read by Christ and His apostles.

If you open the New Testament you’ll see that its references to the Old Testament do not fit. For instance, Matt. 12:21 quotes Isaiah: “in His name will the Gentiles trust”. But if you look up Isaiah 42:4, you’ll see something completely different: “the isles shall wait for his law”. Or (Acts 7:14) Stephen says “seventy-five” souls went down to Egypt with Jacob. But look up your Old Testament (Gen. 46:27; Deut. 10:22) – it says that only seventy people went to Egypt. This does not mean that the translators of King James, or any other translators of the Old Testament, made a mistake. They translated correctly, but from the wrong version, from the MT, while Jesus, His apostles and the New Testament writers in general had read and quoted the Septuagint (LXX) or its Hebrew Source (H70).

The transposition of the MT in place of the Septuagint (LXX) or its Hebrew Source (H70), making it the source for all subsequent Western translations, was the biggest coup the Jewish scholars ever pulled off, and this is the deep-lying cause of Judaisation of the West.

The MT is not particularly old. The oldest complete manuscript of the MT – The Leningrad Codex (1008) – is just over a thousand years old, whilst the LXX is much, much older. The LXX translation was created in a very different era – not only before Christ, but even before the Maccabee revolt. In those days, in the third century BC, the Hellenistic world embraced Palestine, Egypt, Syria and their neighbours. The Jews were integrating well into this Hellenic world, and the long struggle between the two spirits of the ancient faith of Israel had just started:

One was the inward-looking nationalist exclusivist spirit. It claimed private ownership over the Divine Law and exclusive access to the Creator for the Chosen of Israel. A stranger reading the Law was to be executed. A translation of the Bible into Greek was a most serious sin, equivalent to fashioning a golden calf (Ex 32:4), they said.

The other spirit proclaimed universality and led to Christ. The Law and God’s mercy were to be given to all.

In modern terms, these are the spirits of privatisation and nationalisation. The battle was fought in the three seats of ancient wisdom, – Alexandria, Babylon and Jerusalem. Alexandria was the most universalistic, Babylon the most proprietary – Jerusalem was their battleground. In Alexandria, a happy synthesis of Jewish and Hellenic ideas was reached in the translation of Seventy Elders appointed by the High Priest. Thus came the revelation of Israel to the world, preparing the way for Christ.

This translation was nothing short of miraculous. The translators consisted of six from each tribe of Israel, making altogether seventy-two. But the translation is called the Translation of the Seventy because seventy is the numeric value of “Sod” – “Secret” in Hebrew. The Seventy revealed the secret that the exclusivist Jews did not want to share. “A curse upon him who reveals our secret to the Gentiles”, they had written on the floor of the En-Gedi Synagogue. Three times the daughters of Jerusalem were charged “not to stir or awaken love until she pleases” (Song of Songs 3) and this meant “do not disclose our secret to Gentiles”, says the Talmud. Furious at the disclosure of the secret, the exclusivist Jews destroyed the Hebrew Source of the Septuagint. Every single copy perished. In Jerusalem, the nationalist Jews slaughtered the Hellenised proto-Christian Jews in the Maccabean revolt.

With the coming of Christ, the free Judeo-Hellenic spirit once again found its expression which was hated by the nationalists, who embarked on the long road to regaining full control over the Scripture. For hundreds of years, the scribes worked over the Old Testament, taking advantage of its ambiguous consonant readings, until they eventually achieved a text we know today. Its main paradigm was changed: if the old text led to Christ, the personal/universal Saviour, the new text implanted the nationalist concept of a messiah of and for the people of Israel. The nations of the world were to be seen as sinful semi-animals who had no access to God. The name ‘Jews’ stuck with this small fanatic band, while the Hellenised Jews became known as ‘Christians’ and were no longer called ‘Jews’. What was previously a battle between two schools of thought within the Judaic framework, became known as the battle between Judaic and Christian spirits.

The exclusivist Jews could not destroy the Septuagint – there were too many copies extant among non-Jews, and the LXX had been spread around and had succeeded in bringing the nations to Christ. That is why, in their attempt to force the genie of free spirit back into its bottle, the Jews made – one after another – three translations of the Old Testament into Greek to counter the LXX. These translations were made from their proto-Masoretic version, and were quite tendentious. “The Virgin” in the prophecy became “a young woman” in their rendering. Since then, the Jews have made and/or influenced dozens of translations into all languages, while ferociously defending their own Hebrew version, the MT, as the only legitimate primary source.

The young church had not worried overmuch, as they considered Hebrew only a language of the scribes, whilst cultured people used Greek, and the local masses spoke Aramaic. The Church dismissed the Hebrew version as an empty cocoon shed by a beautiful butterfly. LXX was considered the God-inspired text, and on its basis, the New Testament and the works of the Fathers of the Church were created. The Eastern Orthodox Church still prefers the Septuagint to the MT, for the translation of the Seventy Elders had been kept in the Church and by the Church, whereas the Hebrew text had been kept and prepared by anti-Christian forces.

When later Christian scholars became interested in the Old Testament, and compared the Judaic translations with the LXX, they unavoidably resorted to the Jewish Bible, for by that time the Jews had the edited Hebrew manuscripts and tools for their interpretation. As you will recall, the H70, the old Hebrew Source of the Septuagint had been destroyed by the nationalists. A great scholar, Origen, therefore turned to the Jews for advice, and they gave him plenty of advice – only their advice was based on their understanding of their text. Origen decided to improve the Septuagint and emended the LXX according to the Jewish Bible of his day. Some of these emendations made their way into the body of the LXX. Still, the Eastern Church remained rather safe, for the Septuagint remained the official version of the Old Testament for the Greek-speaking East from Constantinople to Alexandria.

But the West did not read Greek. For a long while, the West used the Old Latin translations from the Septuagint; the unity of the Church remained strong, but the translations were weak. Eventually Jerome, a wonderful man and a great scholar, who lived for 34 years in Palestine, decided to correct the Old Latin translations and update them. He even began his work using the Septuagint. Afterwards, though, he followed Origen and turned to the Jews for their advice and interpretation. That was his undoing. He got carried away, and took the fateful step that made the West susceptible to Jewish influence. He parted with LXX and made a brand new translation into Latin – from the Hebrew Bible of his day, the proto-MT. The Jews surely liked the result, but St Augustine was shocked by this deed, and wrote in The City of God:

Although the Jews acknowledge this very learned labour [of Jerome translating the Old Testament from the Hebrew] to be fruitful, while they contend that the Seventy translators have erred in many places, still the churches of Christ judge that no one should be preferred to the authority of [the Seventy], and we ought to believe that the prophetic gift is with [the Seventy].

Contemporaries condemned Jerome, as they noticed that he slowly began to appear more and more Jewish in his positions as he got older and his Jewish friends began to have more influence. One of his former friends, Rufinus, publicly attacked Jerome’s Jewish leanings. Jerome, in response to this work of Rufinus, freely admitted the truth of Rufinus’s claims. Jerome wrote in his own Apology: “There is nothing to blame in my getting the help of a Jew in translating from the Hebrew.” He said that he “did not understand how Jewish interpretations here and there would undermine the faith of Christians.” In this way the Jews managed to plant the seed that would eventually blossom into the acceptance of the Hebrew MT and the virtual abolition of the Greek Septuagint, the authentic Christian Scriptures of Christ and His Apostles.

A reason why Jerome, and Origen before him, accepted the Jewish version was their lack of historical perspective. Perspective in the visual art was discovered in 15th century, while the historical perspective was not known until the seventeenth century. Until that time, mankind was not aware of the torrent of Time. Don Quixote considered Achilles and Hector to have been knights like himself or like Lancelot. The Crusaders had thought the Muslim mosque of Jerusalem was the Temple of Solomon. For Origen and Jerome, the Old Testament was the Old Testament, and the Jews were the Jews. They did not understand that the Hebrew text of the OT had been changed since the days of Ptolemy II Philadelphus, when the Septuagint was produced. Some of these changes were tendentious, others were due to scribal errors, and still others were the result of misunderstanding.

Orthodox Bible scholar Nicolas Glubokovsky wrote: “The Greek translation reproduced an independent Hebrew textual type that was not severely censored and redacted by rabbinic authorities. That is why LXX and MT do differ profoundly, and their readings of messianic and Christian spirit are at loggerheads”.

Origen and Jerome believed the myth about careful Jewish stewardship of the OT scrolls. They did not know that the Jews had destroyed the manuscripts of other types. The Church had no such practice, and at Jerome’s time there were “tot exemplaria paene quot codices” — as many versions as there are codices. Islam, however, followed the Jewish way, and all differing versions of the Koran were destroyed, so only one type survived.

Jerome planted the seed of Jewish influence, and it had made its major inroads by the Ninth century, when the Vulgate of Jerome became universally accepted. Still, the Old Testament was not widely read – Latin was not universally understood and its influence remained somewhat limited – that is, until the Protestants began to spread their translations of the Old Testament in the vernacular.

The immediate result can be likened to an outbreak of a long-sleeping disease: Previously unheard-of devastation and massacres of civilians during the Thirty Years’ War were influenced by spread of the MT-based vernacular translations, as the nations were infected by its exclusivist nationalist spirit unknown in Europe until that time. The King James Bible was translated from the MT, and the result was amazing: the Brits began to consider themselves a racial new Israel of the flesh, as opposed to the Church being regarded the New Israel of the spirit. They fought the Church, and inflicted the ethnic cleansing prescribed in the book of Joshua on their colonies in the New World. They privatised the commons and turned ordinary British people into paupers. The German Bible translated from the MT turned the Germans into ferocious nationalists and eventually prepared the ground for Hitler. Thus, the MT and its translations had an enormous, even magical, effect. The petard placed in the second century below the walls of the Christian society went off!

The Jews became the collective Merlin behind the throne of a British King Arthur. People dissatisfied with this pre-eminence of the Jews left Christianity for various heathen cults, or became engrossed with the material side of the world. The Judaisation of the West and the degradation of its spirit accelerated.

Today, the translation battle continues as unabatedly and as one-sidedly as ever. The Jews produce dozens of translations into many languages, each more Judaic than the last. Some are openly Jewish, like the Jewish Publication Society Bible, others are crypto-Jewish or “Christian-Zionist”, like the Scofield Reference Bible that reduces the Christian faith to ‘love of Jews and of the Jewish state”. This long, hard work on these corrosive translations is the real Conspiracy of the Elders of Zion.

Russia was the latest to submit to the Judaising influence of the MT translation. Until the late 19th century, the Russians were exposed only to the QEB, the Old Slavonic translation from the Septuagint, and they were pious, religious, loyal to the throne. In the late 19th century, the pro-British Masonic Bible Society had published a translation of the MT into the Russian vernacular. Very soon, the Jewish influence in Russia began to rise. However, the Russian Church did not accept this Judaised Russian Bible for liturgical purposes, and continues to pray and read from the QEB. This caused a tragic rift between the LXX-orientated Church and MT-induced reading public, a rift that came to forefront with the Revolution.

Let me add yet another disclosure: As an ex-Jew who was received into the Greek Orthodox Church of Jerusalem, I am acutely and personally aware of the continuous struggle of these two spirits in the world. Will the Christian world submit to Judaisation, or will the Jews accept Christ? A few days ago, in a church in the Holy Land, I saw a Bible in Hebrew published by a Christian society for the purpose of bringing the Jews to Christ. However, the Old Testament had been reproduced from the MT. If a Jew sees that Christians actually use the Jewish text prepared by anti-Christian Jewish Rabbis, how can he ever accept the Christian interpretation? The encounter of Jews and Christians should bring Jews to the Church, not lead to Christians leaving the Church in dismay.

Proselytising efforts usually fail because the Jews consider themselves the guardians of the Scripture, while they should be seen as keepers of their own distinct text on a par with the Aramaic Peshitta, the Ethiopian Bible or the Samaritan Torah.

The MT is the petard laid centuries ago under the besieged City of God’s fortifications. The reconstruction of the Hebrew OT according to the LXX would hoist the Jewish sappers on their own petard and relieve the siege. A truly Christian Hebrew Bible has now become a distinct possibility. The H70, the Hebrew Source of the LXX, can be reconstructed on the basis of the textological discoveries of the last hundred years, with the help of the Qumran scrolls. We can do it – we can do it fairly quickly and fairly accurately. We intend to do it, with your help. Such a publication will become the turning point in this millennial struggle. The battle will be carried into the adversary’s territory for the first time since A.D. 128, when Rabbi Akiba’s disciple and convert Aquila produced his Judaic translation of the OT into Greek. If this project had been attempted by the young Church in the second century, the Jewish influence today would be the same as the Samaritan one – negligible. Now it is late, but not too late.

People who doubt the very possibility of reconstructing H70 usually refer to the multiple interpretations and versions within the sea of LXX manuscripts. These objections are not sincere. The Church has an exact answer regarding interpretations and versions, and we can trust Her inspiration. In our dark times of confusion, we can follow the interpretation of the Queen Elizabeth Bible, as I said in the beginning.

Why the Queen Elizabeth Bible, and not any other? Why not the Greek text? The QE Bible was prepared in the least Judaised country of the Christian world, in 18th century Russia, under the royal protection of its least Judaised queen. Queen Elizabeth was asked to permit Jewish traders to enter Russia, as they would bring her much profit, and she replied: “I wish no profit from Christ’s enemies.” Western ideas (and in their guise, Judaic influence) made few inroads then. The QE Bible was edited by churchmen, not by scientists, and edited within the full view of the Church tradition. The QE Bible can be likened to a mammoth unearthed in the frozen tundra – its corpse survived for millennia because it was protected by permafrost. One may dislike permafrost and prefer the tropics, but permafrost is better for preservation. Likewise, one may prefer more Westernised, more Judaised Christianity, but if one wants to discover the pure old Hellene tradition, one can turn to Queen Elizabeth.

The Septuagint has plural interpretations and various versions. The QEB has the great advantage of being a single text based on the LXX and fully approved by the Church. Its language is lucid, its meaning is clear, and this allows us to find and reconstruct its lost Hebrew source. (However, other possible approaches could be considered.) The reconstruction of the Pentateuch can be completed soon – with your help.

In order to receive a few chapters of our tentative reconstruction of H70, send an email to adam@israelshamir.net with subject H70. Your contribution is tax-exempt in the US; for small contributions use PayPal to the email above; for bigger contributions a bank account will be supplied upon request.

How long before we become a nation of 50 Californias?

While you discovered the dreary reality of Detroit, Michigan—that’s only one American city! Commensurately—Miami, Chicago, Houston, New York, Los Angeles and others follow toward a range of similar futures.

Ask yourself, with 15 million Americans unemployed and 35 million subsisting on food stamps, does it make sense to import 160,000 legal immigrants into this country every 30 days and a total of 1.5 million plus annually? Especially when those immigrants cost American taxpayers (you) a total of $346 billion in resettling services across 15 federal agencies annually?

At this point in time, with 10 million legal and unlawful immigrants, California suffers a $24 billion debt. It cannot pay its bills. It sinks deeper into collapse as it adds 1,700 people per day, every day of the year.

Next question: what if all of our states turned into Californias? Given enough time, they will! Remember that U.S. population projections show immigration adding 100 million people to the USA in 26 years. (Source: Fogel/Martin March 2006, “US Population Projections”, www.fairus.org)

In a brilliant expose’ famed economist Edwin Rubenstein wrote, “As California Goes – Facts behind California’s Fiscal Meltdown.” (Volume 19, Number 4, summer 2009, www.thesocialcontract.com)

In it, Rubenstein illustrates California’s plight as the canary in the coal mine.

Why California?

“The state’s top income tax rate—10.3 percent—is the highest in the nation, and this surely explains why the richest 1 percent of residents end up contributing half of all the personal income taxes the state collects,” Rubenstein said. “Even the state sales tax rate—a poor man’s levy—is well above the national average.

“The usual suspects—high spending and low taxes—are not to blame. In their place stands something far more fundamental: demographic change. An ever-growing share of California residents are immigrants. The vast majority of immigrants are from Latin America (56 percent) and Asia (35 percent). They are generally young, poorly educated, and mired in low-income jobs that do not provide health insurance. Their English is often rudimentary. They depend on state social services at far higher rates than natives or earlier immigrant cohorts.”

A whopping third of California’s immigrants entered unlawfully! At least half of them work off the books thereby not paying any taxes into the system, but their children tap into education, food and health care at an astounding cost to the state. In the last eight years, 86 hospitals and ER wards bankrupted out of business.

“Latino families are larger than those of other immigrant groups. Their children swell elementary schools but are less likely than other groups to graduate high school or finish college,” Rubenstein said. “Second-generation Latinos are also less likely to grow up with two parents, and more likely to go to jail or become teenage mothers.

“Many observers—including prominent Latin Americans—have concluded that the same traditional values that lie behind Latin America’s difficulties in achieving prosperity and political stability are being substantially perpetuated among Hispanic immigrants and their descendants in California. This implies that the problem is primarily cultural, not economic, and that fiscal measures alone will not suffice to solve it.”

California’s Immigration Tsunami

“Between 1970 and 2006 the number of California residents born abroad increased by more than five-fold, from 1.8 million to 9.9 million,” said Rubenstein. “Currently the state has a much higher share of immigrants in its population than the U.S. as a whole.”

For more than a century California has set the immigration trend for the nation:

“Using official state figures, demographer Leon Bouvier concluded that immigration accounts directly and indirectly for 98 percent of California’s population growth between 1990 and 2002. Direct immigration contributed 57 percent of the rise, while the rest came from births to foreign-born women,” said Rubenstein. “Behind the headline statistics are two telling factoids. First, net migration from other states has virtually ceased. Traffic congestion, schools, the water crisis, the state’s fiscal meltdown, are all a big turn-off to citizens of other, less troubled parts of the country.

“Second, the average California mother is expected to give birth to 2.1 children over her lifetime. This is the so-called “replacement” fertility rate which, if sustained over time, will result in a stable population. The devil is in the details: established residents and immigrants from non-Hispanic groups —Asians, Blacks, Whites, American Indians, and Pacific Islanders—are all reproducing at below replacement rates. Hispanic mothers, by contrast, are on course to have 3.25 children over their reproductive lifetimes.”

The Immigration Deficit

Once upon a time political correctness did not prevent Californians from discussing the fiscal burden imposed by illegal aliens. In the early 1990s California faced a sinking economy not unlike today’s. Social welfare caseloads exploded, state revenue declined by more than 25 percent, and the state’s budget deficit was an unprecedented one-third of total general fund spending.

“Caseloads continued rising even after the recession ended, a trend many officials blamed on illegal immigrants,” said Rubenstein. “In 1993 California Gov. Pete Wilson sued the federal government for the costs of state services to illegals—widely estimated at $2 billion ($2.9 billion in 2009 dollars)—arguing that Washington mandated the provision of such services while failing to prevent the illegal influx. Five other magnet states—Arizona, Florida, New York, New Jersey, and Texas—joined the suit.

“The issue propelled the drafting of Proposition 187, a state initiative denying certain services to illegal aliens. A firestorm ensued. Besides racism and anti-Latino bias, immigrant groups charged the Wilson administration with grossly exaggerating the net cost of illegal aliens on the state’s budget.”

The 1994 study found that the 1.7 million illegal aliens then residing in California and their U.S.-born children:

• Received $4.3 billion in state services
• Paid $739 million in state taxes
• Received about $3.6 billion more than they paid in taxes.

“K-12 education is the largest state expenditure, accounting for 40 percent of the budget,” Rubenstein said. “Enrollments have increased dramatically since 1994, swelled primarily by Hispanic immigrants and their U.S.-born children. Consider this: between 1994 and 2005 California K-12 enrollment grew by 1,054,806; Hispanic student enrollment rose by 1,009,489, accounting for 96 percent of the total increase. White enrollment declined by 246,220 students over the same period.” (See article.)

California Is Our Canary

California still has the nation’s largest immigrant population. But its lead is shrinking: In 1994 32 percent of the nation’s foreign-born lived in California; today about 26 percent do. Only 17 percent of immigrants arriving in the U.S. between 2005 to 2006 settled in California.

“Unfortunately, the same social pathologies that attend the foreign-born in California travel to other U.S. destinations,” said Rubenstein. “In every instance immigrants are, on average, poorer than natives, more dependent on public largesse, more likely to require remedial education, less likely to finish high school, and more likely to evade taxation and to be incarcerated. Throughout the nation native-born citizens are digging ever deeper into their pockets to subsidize public services for immigrants.”

Interesting to see what happens with the projected 70 million new immigrants to be added within 26 years at current immigration rates!

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