Laura Gottesdiener: Romney Ducks Reporters on Ending FEMA!

Presidential candidate Mitt Romney found himself in an awkward line of questioning yesterday, when reporters wanted to know if he would really slash funding to FEMA, the federal government agency in charge of Hurricane Sandy relief efforts. Rather than fall back on his tried and true model of flip flopping his position to fit the latest poll, he opted for a bold new strategy, entirely ignore the question. "Governor, you've been asked 14 times. Why are you refusing to answer the question?" One journalist complained at Romney's press conference yesterday in Ohio. But still, not a word from the man who just may, but probably not, find himself in the position to be making such decisions. Meanwhile, his aides scrambled to assure the journalists that he wouldn't kill the disaster relief agency, although their boss's silence spoke far louder than their words. Romney's past platforms have indicated that the candidate would, in fact, push to splinter and then privatize the agency, although their boss's silence spoke far louder than their words. Romney's past platforms have indicated that the candidate would, in fact, push to splinter and then privatize the agency, which is designed to provide rapid, federal assistance in crisis situations, particularly after natural disasters. "Every time you have an occasion to take something from the federal government and send it back to the states, that's the right direction," Romney said during a CNN debate in June 2011, and if you can get even further and send it back to the states, that's the right direction," Romney said during a CNN debate in June 2011. "And if you can go even further and send it back to the private sector, that's even better."

Robert Scheer: Non-Kenyan White Men for Romney!!

Let's look at the bright side of this interminable and and essentially superficial election process. I'm hoping that, even if Mitt Romney wins, the upside will be that I get to be taxed at the same rate he has enjoyed as one of the nation's most skillful hedge fund hustlers. I'm not asking for the super low rate that he probably paid during the many many years of tax returns he has refused to publicly disclosed. Nothing that extreme, I can't afford his ingenious accountants. But I am hoping that Romney will set the top rate at the 14 percent that he was willing to admit to having paid on his $13.7 million in income in 2011, when he knew his tax records would have to be revealed to the public, because he was running for tax collector in chief. If Romney would just commit to granting all of us the same deal that he gets from his hedge fund and capital gains tax breaks and offshore accounts, I might be tempted to join the ranks of terminally shortsighted white males who seemed poised to vote him into office. Of course, he has to make good on his promise in Florida that none of us senior citizens will ever lose a penny of what the GOP denigrates as our retirement "entitlements," and that all of his anti socialist budget balancing cuts will be exclusively at the expense of younger folks. It's only socialism when government benefits are extended to people other than us. I am down with the tea party types who demand that the government keep its clammy hands off our Social Security and Medicare programs. Yes, as long as Medicare remains a for profit, free market program, we seniors won't have to contend with death panels like under Obama-care. What we need instead of that socialist claptrap with which Obama has enslaved us is the insurance coverage that Romney required people in Massachusetts to purchase. Oh yes, true Obama-care is exactly modeled on Romney care, but just consider the source. When Romney mandated that citizens in his state be required to to buy health insurance, it was an extension of the free market, but when Obama gets the same requirement passed for the rest of us, you just know how dark his motives are. At least we non Kenyan white males do!

Tony Cartalucci: US Dumps Syrian National Council!

US Dumps Syrian National Council, Focus Exclusively on Arming Al Qaeda in Syria. The Washington Post in its recent article, "US looks to build alternative Syrian opposition leadership," claims: The Obama administration has spent the past several months in secret diplomatic negotiations aimed at building a new Syrian opposition leadership structure that it hopes can win the support of minority groups still backing President Bashar al Assad. The strategy, to be unveiled at a Syrian opposition meeting next week in Qatar, amounts to a last ditch effort to prevent extremists from gaining the upper hand within the opposition and to stop the Syrian crisis from boiling over into the greater Middle East. The Post also indicates that the de facto "administrative zones" are being set up along the Turkish Syrian border with "nonlethal" assistance provided by the United States, France and "other like minded governments." The so called "Syrian National Council" is being discarded, as it is wholly seen as illegitimate by both Syrians and the world at large. The Washington Post would also quote Secretary Clinton: The SNC, Clinton said, should no longer be considered the visible leader of the opposition. There has to be a representation of those who are on the front lines, fighting and dying today to obtain their freedom, she said during an unrelated visit to the Balkan states. And we also need an opposition that will be on record strongly resisting the efforts by extremists to hijack the Syrian revolution. It is clear that both the West's political proxies, and its armed militant proxies have been compromised, and the narrative that tentatively worked against Libya, is now unraveling and failing against Syria. While the US attempts to portray this latest move as an attempt to "prevent extremist elements from gaining the upper hand within the opposition," it must be remembered that as early as 2007, US officials had admitted that efforts to overthrow the governments of Syria and Iran would include primarily US, Israeli, and Saudi armed extremists drawn from across the Arab world, and sent into Syria to create the very sectarian bloodbath now unfolding. Rhetoric of "freedom" and "democracy" serve merely as cover within which foreign military aggression is couched. 

Robert Parry: The Source of Romney's Lying!!

If some recent polls are correct, a plurality of Americans are planning to vote for Mitt Romney, even though he may be the most persistent and professional liar to run for the US presidency in recent memory, which is saying something. But what has attracted very little media attention is the question: Why does Romney lie? There have been some suggestions that Romney's mendacity is an outgrowth of his business experience as a corporate takeover artist who tells investors and other stakeholders pretty much anything to close a deal. But that misses the reality of the business world, where a reputation as a chronic liar can be lethal to long term success. No, Romney's lying, most recently revealed in his false claim about General Motors and Chrysler shifting US auto jobs to China, appears connected to something deeper in his personality, psyche or life experience. One theory is that Romney is consumed by a blind ambition, obsessed with claiming the office of President that was denied his father, because he was too honest, while his Republican rival, Richard Nixon, was anything but. Another possibility is that Romney has surrendered whatever ethics he had to the longstanding Republican political strategy of winning at all cost, ironically a playbook inherited from Nixon. A third possible explanation is tied to Romney's Mormon religion which was founded in the 19th Century by a notorious conman, Joseph Smith Jr. who as a youth used a "seer stone" to advise people where to hunt for buried treasure. He later expanded on his supposed visions to start his own religion, Mormonism. Smith, aided by a few collaborators, created the Book of Mormon, which Smith claimed was delivered to him in 1827 by an angel Moroni via golden plates buried in upstate New York. Smith supposedly translated the plates, which told a truly unbelievable tale about ancient Israelites coming to the Americas.  

Julie Levesque: Money Laundering and Offshore Fraud for the Rich

Economic Austerity for the Poor. Offshore banking is the elephant in the global economic room, which the political and financial elite is trying to hide from the public view. While imposing austerity measures on hard working citizens, they are well aware that astronomical amounts of money are secretly held in offshore banks, thus lost in taxes. Where is that money from? What is it for? Drug cartels, fraud, tax evasion and money laundering are common answers to those questions. Despite this reality and even in this era of fiscal austerity, the question world leaders avoid is: Why is secret banking still allowed? Are they capable of putting a term to it, but unwilling to do it because of the benefits it provides? Clearly. Every once in a while a robber baron will serve as a scapegoat to give a pale illusion of justice to the common man. Although they deserve to be penalized, the corrupt banking system which allowed to operate remains inviolate and its flaws are never questioned . Offshore banking is not a parallel banking structure. It is at the heart of the banking system. All major banks have offshore subsidiaries. R Allen Stanford is one of the white collar criminals serving time for running a massive Ponzi scheme camouflaged as a bank, that sold some $7 billion in self styled certificates of deposit and $1.2 billion in mutual funds: SIBs chief financial officer James Davis told the Justice Department that his boss had been stealing from investors for decades, while paying bribes to regulators and even performing blood oaths never to reveal his secrets. And with connections and generous pay outs to US politicians going back more than a decade, 65% of which went to Democrats, including our change president, Allen Stanford was plugged in. Evidence also suggests he may have gotten an assist, covering his tracks from regulators and US secret state agencies, including the CIA. Allen Stanford did business the American way, he swindled depositors and then siphoned off the proceeds into a spiders web of offshore accounts.

Dean Henderson: Illuminati, Nazis, and the Illegal State of Israel

If we wish to end the Israeli Palestinian conflict, we need to know who created Israel and why. In 1917 British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour penned a letter to Zionist Second Lord Lionel Walter Rothschild, in which he expressed support for a Jewish homeland on Palestinian controlled lands in the Middle East. This Balfour Declaration justified the brutal seizure of Palestinian lands for the post WWII establishment of Israel. Israel would serve, not as some high minded"Jewish homeland" but as lynchpin in Rothschild Eight Families control over the world's oil supply. Baron Edmond de Rothschild built the first oil pipeline from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean to bring BP Iranian oil to Israel. He founded Israeli General Bank and Paz Oil, and is considered the father of modern Israel. The Rothschild's are the planet's wealthiest clan, worth an estimated $100 trillion. They control Royal Dutch Shell, BP, Anglo - American, BHP Billiton, Rio Tinto, Bank of America and scores of other global corporations and banks. They are the largest shareholders in the Bank of England, the Federal Reserve and most every private central bank in the world. They needed a footprint in the Middle East to protect their new oil concessions, which they procured through Four Horsemen fronts like the Iranian Consortium, Iraqi Petroleum Company and Saudi ARAMCO. Rothschild's Shell and BP formed these cartels with the Rockefeller half of the Four Horsemen Exxon Mobil and Chevron Texaco. This new alliance required a "special relationship" between Great Britain and the US, which still exists today. Rothschild and other wealthy European shareholders could now utilize the United States military as a "Hessianized" mercenary force, deployed to protect their oil interests and paid for by US taxpayers. Israel would serve the same purpose in closer proximity to the oilfields. The Israeli Mossad is less a national intelligence agency than it is a Rothschild Rockefeller family security force. The Rothschild's exert political control through the secretive Business Roundtable, which they created in 1909 with the help of Lord Alfred Milner and Cecil Rhodes, whose Rhodes Scholarship is granted by Cambridge University, out of which oil industry propagandist Cambridge Energy Research Associates operates. Rhodes founded De Beers and Standard Chartered Bank. The Roundtable takes its name from the legendary knight King Arthur, whose tale of the Holy Grail is synonymous with the Illuminati notion that the Eight Families possess Sangreal or holy blood, a justification for their lording over the people and resources of the planet. According to former British Intelligence officer John Coleman, who wrote Committee of 300, "Round Tablers armed with immense wealth from gold, diamond and drug monopolies fanned out throughout the world to take control of fiscal and monetary policies and political leadership in all countries where they operated." Rhodes and Oppenheimer deployed to South Africa to launch the Anglo American conglomerate. Kuhn and Loeb were off to re-colonize America with Morgan and Rockefeller. Rudyard Kipling was sent to India. Schiff and Warburg manhandled Russia. Rothschild, Lazard and Israel Moses Seif pushed into the Middle East. At Princeton, the Round Table founded the Institute for Advanced Studies (IAS) as partner to its All Souls College at Oxford. IAS was funded by the Rockefeller's General Education Board. IAS members Robert Oppenheimer, Neils Bohr and Albert Einstein created the atomic bomb. In 1919 Rothschild's Business Roundtable spawned the Royal Institute of International Affairs (RIIA) in London. The RIIA sponsored sister organizations around the globe, including the US Council on Foreign Relations. The RIIA is a registered charity of the Queen and, according to its annual reports, is funded largely by the Four Horsemen. Former British Foreign Secretary and Kissinger Associates co founder Lord Carrington is president of both the RIIA and the Bilderbergers. The inner circle at RIIA is dominated by Knights of St John Jerusalem, Knights of Malta, Knights Templar and 33rd Degree Scottish Rite Freemasons. The Knights of St John were founded in 1070 and answer directly to the British House of Windsor. Their leading bloodline is the Villiers dynasty, which the Hog Kong Matheson family owners of the HSBC opium laundry married into. The Lytton family also married into the Villiers gang.

Tina Dupuy: The Real Terror: 6,408 Deaths Caused By Extreme Weather!

The 14th Regiment Armory was built for the National Guard in 1893. The massive Brooklyn structure was supposed to mimic the castles of Europe, brick towers and fortifications of previous centuries. Now a YMCA, the Armory today is a shelter, filled to capacity with nursing home evacuees from Hurricane Sandy. The metaphor: What was built originally to protect us, has to be repurposed for a new type of foe. Wall Street, in Lower Manhattan, in the 1600's was an actual wall. The settlers of New Amsterdam built a northern border to guard themselves against the English and Native American encroachers. In recent times it could be re named Barricade Street. It's a militarized zone with checkpoints and barriers to presumably thwart an attack on the stock market. Those precautions did little when Wall Street was flooded, under water, during Sandy. The markets were closed for a third time in their history. The first being the blizzard of 1888, and the second being the attacks of September 11, 2001. Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney says he "will preserve a military that is so strong, no nation would ever dare to test it." Romney wants to build more ships instead of building infrastructure so we don't need ships to get down Canal Street. As I write, this part of Manhattan is still dark. Crews are still searching for missing family members on Staten Island. The final death toll has not been tallied. The victims not yet buried. We've been shortsighted. We've marginalized those who warned us. We've treated environmentalism as an irksome fad. We've given cadence to non-troversies and called it balance. We've spent trillions to protect ourselves against terrorists and done nothing to keep our biggest cities above water in a storm. "One of the very important security threats we face is climate change." said Senator Barbara Boxer in a 2007 cable interview.