33 Stats That Prove That SOMETHING Desperately Needs To Be Done About The National Debt

(Michael Snyder)  The U.S. national debt is 36 times larger than it was just 40 years ago. That is not a misprint. That is actually the truth. We are literally destroying the future of America, but most Americans don’t really seem to care. In fact, the most hated politicians in America are the Tea Party politicians that recently tried to take a stand against the out of control borrowing that the federal government has been doing. Pew Research has just released a new survey that shows that the popularity of the Tea Party is at an all-time low. So while many Americans may say that they theoretically want something to be done about the national debt, when push comes to shove they don’t actually mean that. You see, the reality of the matter is that about 128 million Americans get money from the federal government every month. That accounts for the majority of all government spending. Anyone who tries to take those goodies away is going to be hated. So we are going to continue down this crazy path until the system completely crashes someday.

The “deal” that was just made in Congress does nothing to reduce our spending or control the growth of our debt. It just kicks the decisions about government spending and the debt ceiling down the road for a few months.

In fact, the agreement on the debt ceiling did not actually place any limits on how much the federal government can borrow over the next few months. It just temporarily suspended enforcement of the debt ceiling. So the federal government could technically go out and borrow trillions of dollars during the next few months and nobody could do anything about it.

Let’s hope that does not happen.

And of course the “debt deal” contained all kinds of pork that will benefit certain politicians that were instrumental in putting together the deal.

When are the American people finally going to get sick and tired of this kind of thing?

Meanwhile, our debt problem continues to get even worse. The following are 33 stats that prove that SOMETHING desperately needs to be done about the national debt…

#1 The U.S. national debt is on pace to more than double during Obama’s eight years in the White House. In other words, under Barack Obama the United States will accumulate more debt than it did under all of the other presidents in U.S. history combined.

#2 During fiscal year 2013, the U.S. Treasury paid off $7,546,726,000,000 in maturing U.S. government debt and issued $8,323,949,000,000 in new debt. In fiscal year 2014 those numbers will be even larger.

#3 In September, the average rate of interest on the government’s marketable debt was 1.981 percent. In January 2000, the average rate of interest on the government’s marketable debt was 6.620 percent. If we got back to that level today, it would collapse our entire financial system.

#4 Between 2008 and 2012, the ratio of government debt to government income increased from 4.0 to 6.6.

#5 Between 2008 and 2012, U.S. government debt grew by 60.7 percent, but U.S. GDP only grew by a total of about 8.5 percent during that entire time period.

#6 Since 2007, the U.S. debt to GDP ratio has increased from 66.6 percent to 101.6 percent.

#7 A revised IMF policy paper entitled “An Analysis of U.S. Fiscal and Generational Imbalances: Who Will Pay and How?” projects that U.S. government debt will rise to about 400 percent of GDP by the year 2050.

#8 At this point, the federal government hands out money to approximately 128 million Americans every single month. In case you were wondering, that is about 41.3 percent of the population of the entire country.

#9 Back in 1980, the U.S. national debt was less than one trillion dollars. Today, it is rapidly approaching 17 trillion dollars.

#10 Since the year 2000, the size of the U.S. national debt has grown by more than 11 trillion dollars.

#11 During Barack Obama’s first four years in the White House, the amount of new debt accumulated by the federal government breaks down to approximately $50,521 for every single household in the United States.

#12 The United States already has more government debt per capita than Greece, Portugal, Italy, Ireland or Spain.

#13 At this point, the United States government is responsible for about a third of all the government debt in the entire world.

#14 According to the U.S. Treasury, foreigners hold approximately 5.6 trillion dollars of our debt.

#15 The amount of U.S. government debt held by foreigners is about 5 times larger than it was just a decade ago.

#16 If the federal government used GAAP accounting standards like publicly traded corporations do, the real federal budget deficit for 2011 would have been 5 trillion dollars instead of 1.3 trillion dollars.

#17 As I noted recently, if the U.S. national debt was reduced to a stack of one dollar bills it would circle the earth at the equator 45 times.

#18 How much money is one trillion dollars? If you were alive when Jesus Christ was born and you spent one million dollars every single day since that point, you still would not have spent one trillion dollars by now.

#19 If right this moment you went out and started spending one dollar every single second, it would take you more than 31,000 years to spend one trillion dollars.

#20 If you started paying off just the new debt that the U.S. has accumulated during the Obama administration at the rate of one dollar per second, it would take more than 189,000 years to pay it off.

#21 The U.S. national debt is now more than 5000 times larger than it was when the Federal Reserve was first established in 1913.

#22 If Bill Gates gave every single penny of his entire fortune to the U.S. government, it would only cover the U.S. budget deficit for 15 days.

#23 The federal government is stealing close to 100 million dollars from our children and our grandchildren every single hour of every single day.

#24 Historically, the interest rate on 10 year U.S. Treasuries has averaged 6.68 percent. If the average interest rate on U.S. government debt rose to that level today, the U.S. government would find itself spending more than a trillion dollars per year just on interest on the national debt.

#25 Federal spending on entitlement programs has been increasing six times faster than population growth has.

#26 Overall, the federal government runs nearly 80 different “means-tested welfare programs“, and almost all of them are experiencing explosive growth.

#27 According to a Government Accountability Office report that was released earlier this year, Obamacare is going to cause the federal debt to rise by $6.2 trillion.

#28 If you can believe it, today more than 70 million Americans are on Medicaid, and it is being projected that Obamacare will add 16 million more Americans to the Medicaid rolls.

#29 As I have written about previously, the number of Americans on Medicare is projected to grow from a little bit more than 50 million today to 73.2 million in 2025.

#30 Medicare is facing unfunded liabilities of more than 38 trillion dollars over the next 75 years. That comes to approximately $328,404 for each and every household in the United States.

#31 It is being projected that the number of Americans on Social Security will rise from about 62 million today to more than 100 million in 25 years.

#32 Overall, the Social Security system is facing a 134 trillion dollar shortfall over the next 75 years.

#33 Boston University economist Laurence Kotlikoff is warning that the U.S. government is facing a gigantic tsunami of unfunded liabilities in the coming years that we are counting on our children and our grandchildren to pay. Kotlikoff speaks of a “fiscal gap” which he defines as “the present value difference between projected future spending and revenue”. His calculations have led him to the conclusion that the federal government is facing a fiscal gap of 222 trillion dollars in the years ahead.

Our financial situation is clearly not even close to sustainable. We are heading for an inevitable collapse, but in the aftermath of the “deal” in Congress, Barack Obama declared that all Americans “need to stop focusing on the lobbyists, and the bloggers, and the talking heads on radio”. Apparently he does not want you reading articles like this or listening to radio programs that are warning about the dangers of our national debt.

At the same time, the U.S. government continues to waste money in some of the most bizarre ways imaginable. It is almost as if they don’t even care that they are destroying the future of our children and our grandchildren with their incredibly reckless spending.

And of course the mainstream media is very much on the side of the big spenders. In recent weeks, those that identify themselves with the Tea Party have been endlessly called names on the big mainstream news networks even though they are just about the only ones that are trying to pull us back from the path to self-destruction that we are on.

The big mainstream news networks have portrayed those that identify with the Tea Party as idiots and morons, but the truth is that studies have found that Tea Partiers are better educated, more scientifically literate and have higher incomes than the general population.

The real idiots and morons are the ones that want us to continue down this road to financial oblivion. We have accumulated the largest mountain of debt in the history of the world, and unless something dramatic is done, America is not going to have any kind of a future.

Article appeared first on The American Dream

The Government Is Researching How To Use Technology To Change Your Religious Beliefs

(Michael Snyder)  Should the U.S. government be trying to figure out how to use technology to change the beliefs of “religious extremists”? Before you answer yes to that question, perhaps you should consider whether or not the U.S. government considers you to be a “religious extremist”. After all, as I have documented previously, conservatives, libertarians, Tea Party activists and evangelical Christians are all considered to be “extremists” in various U.S. government documents. So if we open up Pandora’s Box and say that it is okay for the government to use technology to wipe away the religious beliefs of some “extremists”, what would stop them from using that same technology on you someday? The truth is that this kind of technology should never be used on anyone, and it is very disturbing that the government seems so determined to develop it.

We would probably know very little about the development of this technology if a whistleblower had not recently come forward. The following is a YouTube video in which investigative reporter Ben Swann interviews this whistleblower and explains what the U.S. government is actually trying to do…

That video should chill you to the core.

And apparently this kind of technology already exists. It is called “Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation” and it can reportedly alter your most cherished beliefs. The following is a short excerpt from Ben Swann’s interview with the whistleblower that worked on this project…

Ben: Phase III is fairly interesting. I noticed in the documentation it says lets not talk too much about this because who knows if we’ll ever get there. But when you do read what Phase III is it is a little surprising, it’s called Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation. This is not something that’s science fiction, it’s not something they’ve cooked up. This is a real technique that’s already been used in the past, correct?

Whistleblower: Yes, it started out in the psychiatry field when people were depressed and when you’re depressed certain parts of your brain are not functioning correctly. So they created this technology, which is basically a big magnet, and you put it on their brain and it turns off that part of the brain that’s bad or wrong and it would help them with their depression for several weeks to a month and they’d go back and do it again. So this technology has been around for ten or fifteen years.

Ben: So it’s very high tech propaganda, what we’re talking about.

Whistleblower: High tech and validated propaganda, yes. So if they’re able to turn off a part of the brain and get rid of that master narrative that will make you not believe in a particular statement, they would have validated this propaganda. So if they turn off portion X, they know that the propaganda is going to work and the individual is going to believe whatever is being told to them.

Once the U.S. government starts using this technology on people, will there be any limit on who they can use it on?

As Ben Swann noted, the label “extremist” can be applied to almost any kind of religious belief…

After all, aren’t extremist Muslims dangerous? Extremist Christians? See the problem with the question is who gets to define extremist? Who decides if religious beliefs are inherently dangerous?

And if we believe that government should have the power to control how the extremist thinks… wouldn’t they have the authority to decide how and what we all think?

Don’t be tempted to think that this can’t happen. Just this week Fox News reported that the American Family Association, a very mainstream evangelical Christian organization, was classified as “a domestic hate group” during a U.S. Army briefing…

Several dozen U.S. Army active duty and reserve troops were told last week that the American Family Association, a well-respected Christian ministry, should be classified as a domestic hate group because the group advocates for traditional family values.

The briefing was held at Camp Shelby in Mississippi and listed the AFA alongside domestic hate groups like the Ku Klux Klan, Neo-Nazis, the Black Panthers and the Nation of Islam.

And this is hardly an isolated incident. In a previous article entitled “72 Types Of Americans That Are Considered ‘Potential Terrorists’ In Official Government Documents“, I listed a whole bunch of different types of Christians that are considered to be “extremists” in U.S. government documents.

And this attitude of animosity toward Christians is manifesting itself in a multitude of ways all over the country. In fact, according to the new Religious Hostility Survey, the number of incidents of hostility toward Christians in the United States is growing at a very frightening pace…

Hostility against Christian Americans is growing at an alarming rate, according to a new survey from the Family Research Council and Liberty Institute.

The Liberty Institute’s Jeff Mateer noted that while last year’s survey was based on 600 cases, “this survey that we’re releasing right now is almost 1,200. So we’ve almost doubled in just one year.”

One such case involved college student named Audrey Jarvis, who was asked twice to remove her cross, or at least hide it, at a student orientation.

“My supervisor came up to me out of nowhere and asked me to remove my cross necklace because he thought it would be offensive to incoming freshmen,” she recalled.

Will we eventually get to the point where evangelical Christianity is looked down upon so much in this nation that it is considered acceptable for the government to use technology to wipe away the religious beliefs of “extremist” Christians?

Once upon a time, it would have been insane to even suggest such a thing. But now the technology is being developed and mainstream evangelical Christians are being labeled as “extremists” and “potential terrorists” in official U.S. government documents.

It is frightening to think about where all of this might end up.

Article appeared first on The Truth Wins

Lock and Load: Are You Prepared for Civil Unrest?

(Daisy Luther)

  Do you get the feeling that we are right on the verge of chaos? With the government shutdown, the congressional budget deadline of the 17th, the EBT system under threat, and assorted “drills” that, if history proves to be any guide, could be a loose cover for an upcoming false flag, we could be looking at civil unrest in a matter of days.

These are all situations that we, as individuals, have little control over.

What we CAN control is our response to a crisis.

By planning ahead, we can avoid the fear, panic, and confusion that leads people to rush to the store and clear the shelves like a horde of hungry locusts. We can stay away from the angry masses, the rioters who will use any excuse to steal, and the hungry people who are determined to feed their kids no matter who stands in their way.

Whether the next few weeks lead to pandemonium due to the welfare strings being cut or some type of martial law, a prepared mindset, a defense plan, and a well-stocked home can help to keep you and your family out of harm’s way.

In her article Anatomy of a Breakdown, Tess Pennington wrote:

“When you take the time to understand how a breakdown behaves and how it progresses, only then can you truly prepare for it.

This glimpse into a systemic breakdown is based on an isolated, limited disaster or event where emergency responders have been deployed. I must emphasize that all bets are off if the event is wide spread, affecting multiple tens of millions of people simultaneously.”

Here are the most vital things that you can do to be prepared for civil unrest.

Get home

In a perfect world, we’d all be home, watching the chaos erupt on TV from the safety of our living rooms. However, reality says that some of us will be at work, at school, or in the car when unrest occurs. You need to develop a “get-home” plan for all of the members of your family, based on the most likely places that they will be.

Devise an efficient route for picking up the kids from school. Be sure that anyone who might be picking up the children already has permission to do so in the school office.

Discuss the plan with older kids – there have been rumors that children could be moved by the schools to a secondary location in the event of a crisis. Some families have formulated plans for their older kids to leave the school grounds in such an instance and take a designated route home or to another meeting place.

Keep a get-home bag in the trunk of your car in case you have to set out on foot.

Stash some supplies in the bottom of your child’s backpack – water, a snack, any tools that might be useful, and a map. Be sure your children understand the importance of OPSEC.

Find multiple routes home – map out alternative backroad ways to get home as well as directions if you must go home on foot.

Find hiding places along the way. If you work or go to school a substantial distance from your home, figure out some places to lay low now, before a crisis situation. Sometimes staying out of sight is the best way to stay safe.

Avoid groups of people. It seems that the mob mentality strikes when large groups of people get together. Often folks who would never ordinarily riot in the streets get swept up by the mass of people who are doing so.

Keep in mind that in many civil disorder situations the authorities are to be avoided every bit as diligently as the angry mobs of looters. Who can forget the scenes of innocent people being pepper sprayed by uniformed thugs in body armor just because they happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time?

Stay home

Once you make your way home or to your bug-out location …. STAY THERE.

By staying home, you are minimizing your risk of being caught in the midst of an angry mob or of sitting in stalled traffic while looters run amok. In most scenarios you will be far safer at home than you will be in any type of shelter or refuge situation. (Obviously if there is some type of chemical or natural threat in your immediate neighborhood, like a toxic leak, a flood, or a forest fire, the whole situation changes – you must use common sense before hunkering down.)

This is when your preparedness supplies will really pay off. If you are ready for minor medical emergencies and illnesses, a grid down scenario, and a no-comm situation, you will be able to stay safely at home with your family and ride out the crisis in moderate comfort.

Be sure you have a supply of the following:

Water
Necessary prescription medications
Food and an off grid way to cook it
Or food that requires no cooking
First aid supplies
Lighting in the event of a power outage
Sanitation supplies (in the event that the municipal water system is unusuable, this would include cleaning supplies and toilet supplies)
A way to stay warm in harsh winter weather
Over-the-counter medications and/or herbal remedies to treat illnesses at home
Survival and first aid manuals (hard copies in case the internet and power grid are down)
Alternative communications devices (such as a hand-crank radio) so that you can get updates about the outside world
Off-grid entertainment: arts and craft supplies, puzzles, games, books, crossword or word search puzzles, needlework, journals
Be prepared to defend your home

Sometimes despite our best intentions, the fight comes to us. Even though we stay home, something about our place draws the attention of an unsavory person or group. Defense is two-fold. Your best defense is avoiding the fight altogether. You want to stay under the radar and not draw attention to yourself. The extent to which you strive to do this should be based on the severity of the unrest in your area. Some of the following recommendations are not necessary in an everyday grid-down scenario, but could save your life in a more extreme civil unrest scenario.

Keep all the doors and windows locked. Secure sliding doors with a metal bar. Consider installing decorative gridwork over a door with a large window so that it becomes difficult for someone to smash the glass and reach in to unlock the door.

Put dark plastic over the windows. (Heavy duty garbage bags work well.) If it’s safe to do so, go outside and check to see if any light escapes from the windows. If your home is the only one on the block that is well-lit, it is a beacon to others.

Don’t answer the door. Many home invasions start with an innocent-seeming knock at the door to gain access to your house.

Keep cooking smells to a minimum. If everyone else in the neighborhood is hungry, the meat on your grill will draw people like moths to a flame.

Remember that first responders may be tied up. If the disorder is widespread, don’t depend on a call to 911 to save you – you must be prepared to save yourself. Also keep in mind, as mentioned earlier in the article – the cops are not always your friends in these situations.

If, despite your best efforts, your property draws the attention of people with ill intent, you must be ready to defend your family.

Many preppers stockpile weapons and ammunition for just such an event. When the door of your home is breached, you can be pretty sure the people coming in are not there to make friendly conversation. Make a plan to greet them with a deterring amount of force.

Have a safe room established for children or other vulnerable family members.

Plan an escape route. If the odds are against you, devise a way to get your family to safety.

Article appeared first on SHTF Plan

Obama Administration Caught in Blatant Software Piracy; Script Powering Healthcare.gov Ripped Off From UK company

(Mike Adams)

 The Obama administration has been caught red-handed engaged in software piracy. Computer code used on Healthcare.gov was stolen (and then modified in an effort to conceal the theft) from a UK company called Spry Media.

To my best knowledge, this story was broken by WeeklyStandard.com in a blog authored by Jeryl Bier.

The computer code that was stolen is called DataTables, and it is exclusively provided under a GPL v2 license which requires anyone who uses the software code to keep the copyright notice visible in the code itself. This allows the original author of the code to receive attribution for creating it.

An analysis of the code running Healthcare.gov reveals that the Obamacare development team maliciously removed the copyright notice and credit attributions from the code while copying and using the rest of the code. In the field of journalism, this would be called “plagiarism.” In the field of computer software, it’s called “piracy” according to the U.S. government.

Here’s an image capture of the copyright notice which is supposed to remain in the code:

On Healthcare.gov, however, the copyright attribution is removed, leaving only the functional code of the script (which is a piracy violation):

Nearly all of the remainder of the script is identical to the Spry Media code, proving beyond any doubt that the Obama administration pirated this code in its construction of the failed website Healthcare.gov.

The Weekly Standard says they contacted SpryMedia for a comment: “A representative for the company said that they were ‘extremely disappointed’ to see the copyright information missing and will be pursuing it further with the Department of Health and Human Services, the agency that runs the Healthcare.gov site.”

Will DHS now seize Healthcare.gov?

The Department of Homeland Security has seized hundreds of other websites that it says were engaged in piracy.

These website seizures are conducted completely outside of law and utterly without due process. When sites are seized by DHS, the following notice is placed on the website home page:

This notice reads, in part:

Willful copyright infringement is a federal crime that carries penalties for first time offenders of up to five years in federal prison, a $250,000 fine, forfeiture and restitution.

Will the developers of Healthcare.gov who pirated the DataTables software from SpryMedia now be sentenced to federal prison?

Don’t hold your breath on that one. Prisons aren’t used to lock up actual criminals anymore. They are “work camps” with the sole purpose of locking up black Americans so they can be exploited as a “human resource” of ultra-cheap labor. Yes, the prison labor industry needs more output, and that’s why the entire “war on drugs” is allowed to continue even though it is a complete failure.

Sounds like Obamacare, come to think of it: A disastrous program that wastes billions of dollars while enslaving innocent Americans in a system where they will be financially raped for life.

Am I the only one who thinks we might be better off if we forced all politicians to trade places with all prison inmates?

Article appeared frist on Natural News

Which 60k Americans Are Considered Modern Day Slaves?

(Susanne Posel)

 According to the Global Slavery Index (GSI), has published a report stating that three quarters of the world, which translates to 29.8 million people, are living in modern global slaves.

The overall tone of the report asserts that with more governmental oversight, stricter laws enforced and political over-reaching control, the threat of modern slavery can be abolished.

Women, ethnic groups and children are forced into bondage and deemed worthless by social perception and therefore receive less community protections.

In America, although the modern slave rate is estimated at 0.02%, that still translates to 5,000 US citizens being indentured servants. In the entirety of the GSI definition of slave, there are 60,000 Americans alone who fall under this category.

India was estimated as having 14 million human slaves which could also be understood as the population of the state of Pennsylvania as being modern slaves.

GSI “provides a ranking of 162 countries, reflecting a combined measure of three factors: estimated prevalence of modern slavery by population, a measure of child marriage, and a measure of human trafficking in and out of a country.”

The countries with the highest incidents of modern slavery include:

• Haiti
• Pakistan
• India
• Nepal

Nations with the highest numbers of enslaved people include:

• India
• China
• Pakistan
• Ethiopia
• Russia
• Thailand

Shockingly, in some countries, 4% of the population are enslaved wherein the majority of children born in those regions are born into slavery; used or sold by their own parents.

In Mauritania, 1 out of 25 citizens are in some form of indentured servitude.

Unlike the image of slaves we have been given from the past, modern slaves are understood as people forced into labor, prostitution, child soldiers, child brides; as well as indentured servitude and humans are chattel under absolute ownership.

The report states that the cause of these conditions is trends such as:

Developed nations have lowest slavery rates
“Effective government policies, rule of law, political stability and development levels” reduce probability of slavery
Severe governmental punishment of those perpetrating the feudal conditions deter those who might enslave others
Orig.src.Susanne.Posel.Daily.News- slavery-per-capita-map-wo-arrows

The cause of the problem could be found in a study released by the Swiss Federal Institute last year.

This report entitled, “The Network of Global Corporate Control” proves a small consortiums of corporations – mainly banks – run the world. A mere 147 corporations which form a “super entity” have control 40% of the world’s wealth; which is the real economy. These mega-corporations are at the center of the global economy.

The banks found to be most influential include:

• Barclays
• Goldman Sachs
• JPMorgan Chase & Co
• Vanguard Group
• UBS
• Deutsche Bank
• Bank of New York Melon Corp
• Morgan Stanley
• Bank of America Corp
• Société Générale

However as the connections to the controlling groups are networked throughout the world, they become the catalyst for global financial collapse.

James Glattfelder, complex systems theorist at the SFI explains: “In effect, less than one per cent of the companies were able to control 40 per cent of the entire network.”

Using mathematic models normally applied to natural systems, the researchers analyzed the world’s economy. Their data was taken from Orbis 2007, a database which lists 37 million corporations and investors. The evidence showed that the world’s largest corporations are interconnected to all other companies and their professional decisions affect all markets across the globe.

George Sudihara, complex systems expert for SFI claims that this phenomenon is a common structure that could be found in nature. Comparing the manufactured reality of the financial markets to the ecosystems of the planet, Sudihara says that although the 147 corporations that rule the world through influence and interconnectedness are no more harmful than the natural cycles of our weather or animal kingdoms.

Yet because of the facts presented in the study, the financial crash of 2008 can be traced back to these tightly-knit networks. Future disasters can also be projected based on this analysis because of the “connectedness” of these influential entities which are only 147 corporations.

It is suggested the global capitalism could be a useful tool to make the markets more stable by simply acquiescing to control by the technocrats. The world’s transitional corporations (TNCs) guide the flow of all economies through influence and manipulation which created a structure of economic power.

Most corporations are guided by the shareholders who use the companies to wield incredible power over the shift of economic consciousness. And the behavior of the system reflects the direction taken by those who fund the super entities.

Assumed by many that there was a complex architecture to the global economic power that caused financial systems to ebb and flow or crash and burn is not a scientific fact as evidenced in this study.

Article appeared first on Occupy Corporatism

The NSA Spying and Lying Does Relate to 9/11

(Kevin Ryan)

 Earlier this month, National Security Agency (NSA) head Keith Alexander admitted that he had lied to the U.S. Congress and the American people in an attempt to justify the NSA’s growing surveillance of U.S. citizens.[1] In June, while attempting to defend the secret NSA programs revealed by whistleblower Edward Snowden, Alexander claimed that over 50 terrorist plots had been thwarted though collection of the phone and internet records of American citizens. Alexander said that his agency had provided Congress with 54 specific cases in which the programs helped disrupt terror plots in the U.S. and around the world.[2]

Just a few weeks before the “54 plots” claim, Alexander had testified to the U.S. Senate Appropriations Committee that NSA spying on American citizens had played a critical role in thwarting “dozens” of terrorist attacks.[3] Alexander spent the next three months declaring that the NSA’s spying on Americans was preventing terrorism and another 9/11.

None of that was true as we found out a few weeks ago. Of the 54 alleged plots, only one or two were identified as a result of bulk phone record collection, according to Alexander’s most recent comments. That number has since been whittled down to just one incident that wasn’t a terrorist plot at all but was a case of a cab driver sending cash to an alleged terrorist organization.[4] Bottom line ― the NSA spying on Americans has not stopped any terrorist plots, let alone dozens or 54.

Alexander’s lies followed closely after National Intelligence Director James Clapper’s lie, or as he called it ― his “least most untruthful statement” ― that the NSA was not even collecting information on large number of Americans citizens. In March, Clapper appeared before Congress and was asked “Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?” Clapper replied, “No, sir.” Clapper’s blatant lie was premeditated. Senator Ron Wyden’s office had sent him the question the day before the hearing.[5]

Overlooking these unprosecuted felonies, the idea that the NSA programs prevent terrorism is absurd given NSA’s knowledge about previous terrorist suspects. Although the Bush and Obama administrations have claimed for more than a decade that spying on Americans was justified by 9/11, the intelligence the NSA had prior to 9/11 was enough to stop the attacks. Three examples help to demonstrate this fact.

On March 7, 2001, during trial proceedings for the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings in Africa, an FBI agent read aloud in court a phone number that had been used by alleged al Qaeda plotters to plan and execute the embassy attacks.[6] This was the phone number of the “Yemen Hub,” which doubled as the home phone of Ahmed Al-Hada, the father-in-law of alleged 9/11 hijacker Khalid Al-Mihdhar. According to U.S. officials, the same phone was used for planning the USS Cole bombing and, later, the 9/11 attacks. The phone number was also published in the British weekly the Observer, just five weeks before 9/11. As author Kevin Fenton wrote: “Any of the Observer’s readers could have called the number and asked for a message to be forwarded to Osama bin Laden.”[7] This widely reported FBI gaffe should have alerted al Qaeda to U.S. knowledge of its secret Yemen operations center while also ensuring that anyone listening would know the exact al Qaeda phone number being monitored by the NSA. Despite this major tip-off, al Qaeda continued to use the phone to contact the alleged 9/11 hijackers until “only weeks before 9/11.”[8]

The NSA later claimed that, although it was listening in on the calls it didn’t want to dig into who the calls were going to in the U.S. because it did not want to be accused of spying on Americans. However, the NSA was already well aware of who was receiving the calls ― two of the alleged 9/11 hijackers. This is clarified by the second example.

According to former NSA director Michael Hayden, “In early 2000, we had the Al-Hazmi brothers, Nawaf and Salem, as well as Khalid Al-Mihdhar, in our sights. We knew of their association with al-Qaeda, and we shared this information with the [intelligence] community.”[9] The NSA knew about these suspects well before that, however, because an early 1999 NSA communications intercept referenced Nawaf Al-Hazmi, so it was clear that the NSA knew about him for more than two years before 9/11.

The third example has to do with the U.S. Army program called Able Danger that had identified and was tracking Mohamed Atta and several other of the alleged 9/11 hijackers. Alexander was running the Army’s Intelligence and Security Command at the time, and was therefore in charge of Army counterterrorism programs. Apparently, Alexander “covered up and destroyed the Able Danger discovery of two of the 9-11 terrorists prior to 9-11.”[10] The program was shutdown and its records were destroyed in the year before 9/11. Erik Kleinsmith, an Army major who testified to this destruction of evidence, said that Able Danger had shown that the al Qaeda network, prior to 9/11, had “a surprisingly significant presence within the United States.”[11]

These examples indicate that the NSA knew about the alleged hijackers before 9/11 and did little or nothing to stop the attacks. Apparently the NSA is not really in the business of preventing terrorist attacks, no matter what information it obtains. What the NSA’s actual purpose is behind the mass surveillance of American citizens is not yet clear.

What is clear is that high-level U.S. leaders are becoming comfortable lying to Congress and the American people. It’s also clear that the September 11 crimes share similarities with the crimes the NSA is committing today in some interesting ways. Sure, Dick Cheney and others have been bellowing that the 9/11 attacks would have been prevented if the NSA had been able to spy on Americans. And although the examples above make it clear that those claims are false, there are important similarities between how 9/11 and the NSA spying has been handled by military and intelligence community leaders.

One way is that the recent lies told by NSA leaders are reminiscent of the lies told to Congress and the 9/11 Commission by CIA Director George Tenet and NORAD Commander Ralph Eberhart during the investigations into 9/11.[12] That’s not surprising given that Alexander got the NSA job because of his connection to Donald Rumsfeld, who had worked closely with Tenet on the deceptions behind the Iraq War and who supervised Eberhart.[13]

As described in Another Nineteen, Eberhart testified to the U.S. Senate in October 2001 that NORAD had received notification about three of the four hijacked planes with plenty of time to ensure interception and had scrambled jets from multiple bases as the attacks proceeded. Eberhart presented a timeline giving the exact times that the military was notified about the hijackings. He repeatedly told Senators that this was “documented notification.”[14]

However, the 9/11 Commission later told us that all of Eberhart’s statements were untrue. According to the Commission’s account, which exonerated the military, NORAD was not given notification about any of the hijacked flights. And although the Commission claimed that U.S. Air Force officers had knowingly provided false information on these questions, Eberhart was never held accountable.

George Tenet lied extensively about the events surrounding 9/11. He lied to the 9/11 Commission about having met with Bush in the month before the attacks, he lied under oath about CIA foreknowledge of the alleged hijackers, and he lied to the 9/11 Commission by failing to tell them about torture videos that his agency later destroyed. And although Tenet retired in 2004, his protégé John Brennan runs the CIA today and is known for lying to the public about torture and the killing of innocent civilians using drones.

The behavior exhibited by Alexander and Clapper appears to be similar to that of Eberhart and Tenet during the 9/11 investigations. Coupled with Alexander’s role in the Able Danger cover-up, people should wonder if the crimes that the NSA is committing against American citizens today are, in fact, somehow connected to the crimes of 9/11. Not in the sense of preventing terrorism, but in a way that suggests the ongoing implementation of a long-term plan to control the world’s most strategic resources and also the American people.

[1] NSA Director Alexander Admits He Lied about Phone Surveillance Stopping 54 Terror Plots, AllGov.com, Monday, October 07, 2013

[2] Gopal Ratnam, NSA’s Alexander Says Secret Programs Stopped Terror Plots, Bloomberg, June 27, 2013

[3] Jerry Markon and Ellen Nakashima, NSA director says surveillance programs thwarted ‘dozens’ of attacks, The Washington Post, June 12, 2013

[4] NSA Spying Did Not Result In a SINGLE Foiled Terrorist Plot, Washington’s Blog, October 15, 2013

[5] David Sirota, James Clapper is still lying to America, Salon, July 1, 2013

[6] United States v. Usama bin Laden et al., transcript of day 14, March 7, 2001, accessed at Cryptome, http://cryptome.org/usa-v-ubl-14.htm

[7] Kevin Fenton, Disconnecting the Dots: How CIA and FBI officials helped enable 9/11 and evaded government investigations, Trine Day, 2011, p 220

[8] Transcript of Hardball Special Edition, MSNBC, July 24, 2004

[9] Steven Strasser and Craig R. Whitney, ed.s, The 9/11 Investigations: Staff Reports of the 9/11 Commission, PublicAffairs, 2004, p 396

[10] Robert David Steele VIivas, Intelligence for the President–and Everyone Else, Counter Punch, March 1, 2009

[11] Hearing Before the Committee on the Judiciary United States Senate One Hundred Ninth Congress, Able Danger and Intelligence Information Sharing, September 21, 2005, U.S. Government Printing Office

[12] Because providing false testimony to Congress is a crime, these men would be in prison today if the U.S. justice system was still functioning.

[13] Shane Harris reported that Alexander got the NSA job due to Rumsfeld, see his article in Foreign Policy called Profile of NSA Director General Keith Alexander, September 9, 2013

[14] Transcript of Hearing Before the Committee on Armed Services, United States Senate, October 25, 2001, U.S. Government Printing Office.

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Wash. State Attorney General Sues Anti-GMO Labeling Group For Laundering Donations

(Mikael Thalen)

 Washington State Attorney General Bob Ferguson filed suit against the Grocery Manufacturers Association (GMA) Wednesday, following earlier reports that revealed the group was laundering donation money to oppose I-522, Washington’s GMO-labeling initiative.

GMA Donations IllegalAfter multiple GMA members including PepsiCo, Kraft, and Coca-Cola experienced massive public backlash for donating millions against California’s labeling proposition, the GMA created the “Defense of Brands Strategic Account” for Washington state, an avenue to funnel and conceal its members’ donations.

“Truly fair elections demand all sides follow the rules by disclosing who their donors are and how much they are spending to advocate their views,” Ferguson said in a press release. “The GMA explicitly attempted in their own words, to shield members from criticism for opposing Initiative 522.”

Unknown GMA members have so far donated a total of $7.2 million, becoming 522′s largest opposition group, surpassing Monsanto, Dow, Bayer and Dupont. Given the large donation amount, the GMA is now responsible for the largest campaign disclosure violation in Washington state history.

“$7.2 million is awful lot of money to conceal from the public where they are making a decision about an initiative. The people of the state of Washington feel strongly about disclosure through our campaigns,” Ferguson said. “That’s why we’re bringing this action, and that’s why we want to send a message of deterrence as well for future violators.”

Under state law, the GMA is required to form a registered political committee with the Public Disclosure Commission (PDC), disclosing how much each individual company contributes. So far, the GMA’s cash has been used to fund a No on 522 TV ad, which GMO labeling supporters want taken down.

“I think that the GMA and the No on 522 campaign is anti-transparency,” Yes on 522 spokeswoman Elizabeth Larter told Q13 Fox. “They just don’t want people to know who’s funding their campaign, just like they don’t want us to know what’s in our food.”

The GMA released a public statement Wednesday, claiming they were unaware of their illegal campaign donation activity.

“GMA…is surprised to learn that the Washington state authorities viewed the association’s actions as improper. GMA will review its actions in Washington state and relevant statutes and continue to cooperate with state authorities to fully resolve the issue as promptly as possible.”

The attorney general is not the first in Washington to file suit against the GMA. Just last month, the group “Moms for Labeling” filed a similar lawsuit in Thurston County Superior Court, pointing to the GMA donation laundering as well.

Despite No on 522′s seemingly endless cash supply, now passing $17 million, a poll conducted last September revealed that 66 percent of Washington voters approved of the labeling initiative. Although the opposition has brought in much more than Yes on 522′s $5.5 million, grassroots labeling supporters have donated over $145,000. Astonishingly, only $60 in small contributions have gone to oppose GMO labeling.

At this moment it is unclear whether the GMA will comply by disclosing its donating members, or face “substantial” fines by ignoring state law.

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