Imagine for a moment that somewhere in the middle of Texas there was a large foreign military base, say Chinese or Russian. Imagine that thousands of armed foreign troops were constantly patrolling American streets in military vehicles. Imagine they were here under the auspices of “keeping us safe” or “promoting democracy” or “protecting their strategic interests.”

Imagine that they operated outside of US law, and that the Constitution did not apply to them. Imagine that every now and then they made mistakes or acted on bad information and accidentally killed or terrorized innocent Americans, including women and children, most of the time with little to no repercussions or consequences. Imagine that they set up checkpoints on our soil and routinely searched and ransacked entire neighborhoods of homes. Imagine if Americans were fearful of these foreign troops, and overwhelmingly thought America would be better off without their presence.

Imagine if some Americans were so angry about them being in Texas that they actually joined together to fight them off, in defense of our soil and sovereignty, because leadership in government refused or were unable to do so. Imagine that those Americans were labeled terrorists or insurgents for their defensive actions, and routinely killed, or captured and tortured by the foreign troops on our land. Imagine that the occupiers’ attitude was that if they just killed enough Americans, the resistance would stop, but instead, for every American killed, ten more would take up arms against them, resulting in perpetual bloodshed. Imagine if most of the citizens of the foreign land also wanted these troops to return home. Imagine if they elected a leader who promised to bring them home and put an end to this horror.

Imagine if that leader changed his mind once he took office.

The reality is that our military presence on foreign soil is as offensive to the people that live there as armed Chinese troops would be if they were stationed in Texas. We would not stand for it here, but we have had a globe-straddling empire and a very intrusive foreign policy for decades that incites a lot of hatred and resentment towards us.

According to our own CIA, our meddling in the Middle East was the prime motivation for the horrific attacks on 9/11. But instead of re-evaluating our foreign policy, we have simply escalated it. We had a right to go after those responsible for 9/11, to be sure, but why do so many Americans feel as if we have a right to a military presence in some 160 countries when we wouldn’t stand for even one foreign base on our soil, for any reason? These are not embassies, mind you, these are military installations. The new administration is not materially changing anything about this. Shuffling troops around and playing with semantics does not accomplish the goals of the American people, who simply want our men and women to come home. 50,000 troops left behind in Iraq is not conducive to peace any more than 50,000 Russian soldiers would be in the United States.

Shutting down military bases and ceasing to deal with other nations with threats and violence is not isolationism. It is the opposite. Opening ourselves up to friendship, honest trade and diplomacy is the foreign policy of peace and prosperity. It is the only foreign policy that will not bankrupt us in short order, as our current actions most definitely will. I share the disappointment of the American people in the foreign policy rhetoric coming from the administration. The sad thing is, our foreign policy WILL change eventually, as Rome’s did, when all budgetary and monetary tricks to fund it are exhausted.

Imagine!: speech written & given by Ron Paul
should you be a US citizen in support of Ron Paul: http://revolutionpac.com/defense

Gerald Celente on Greece, the IMF, financial criminals, austerity measures, Christine Lagarde, Jean-Claude Trichet, bailouts and other economic predators.

Celente describes how we are living the beginning of the first world war of the 21st century. The Great Depression, currency wars, trade wars… The break down of the global economic system. One big ponzy scheme.

Gerald Celente’s famous statement: “When all else fails, go to war”. With the latest news on Iran-Israel the next big war is on the horizon: The big World War III.

A grim Federal Security Services (FSB) report on Prime Minister Putin’s plan to meet China’s leader Hu Jintao [both pictured top photo left] in Beijing next week warns that both Russian and Chinese military forces are being placed on their ‘highest alert’ in anticipation of a massive land invasion believed being planned by the United States of both the Middle East and Central Asia.

The plans for this “Total Global War” the Americans are preparing to launch were first revealed to China’s Ministry of State Security (MSS) by the former Blackwater mercenary Bryan Underwood who is currently being held by US authorities for spying and which we reported on in our 4 October report titled “China Warns Russia Of Coming American “Great Event.”

Within hours of Putin’s reading of the coming US plans for Total Global War, this report says, he wrote a rare article in the Izvestia daily outlining a grand project to integrate post-Soviet states into closer cooperation, scheduled an emergency trip to China to meet with Hu, and ordered the FSB to notify China’s MSS of the arrest and detention of their spy Tun Sheniyun who was captured last year for attempting to steal sensitive information on Russia’s most powerful anti-aircraft system.

As we had detailed in our previously mentioned report, the “New Great Game” moves being planned by the Americans that is striking fear into both Russiaand China includes:

1.) The deliberate implosion of both the US and EU economies in order to destroy the Global Financial System that has been in place since the ending of World War II

2.) The launching of a massive conventional war by the US and EU on the North American, African and Asian Continents to include the Middle East

3.) During this all-out war the deliberate releasing of bio-warfare agents meant to kill off millions, if not billions, of innocent civilians

4.) At the height of this war the US and its allies will sue for peace and call for a new global order to be established in order to prevent the total destruction of our planet.

This past week an unidentified source within the US Department of Defense (DOD) further warned that the Obama regime was preparing for a massive“tank-on-tank” war and that US military forces are “expecting something conventional, and big, coming down the pipe relatively soon.”

To how close this war may be the FSB in their report states that it will be “much sooner than later” as the Americans have pre-positioned in Iraq nearly 2,000 of their M1 Abrams main battle tanks, have pre-positioned another 2,000 of them in Afghanistan, and between the Middle East and Asia have, likewise, put into these war theaters tens-of-thousands of other typed armored vehicles.

The “final piece” for the activation of this massive armored force, standing poised like a dagger at the heart of both Asia and the Middle East, the FSB says, is the call for a “Full Mobilization” of over 1.5 million American reserve forces which can occur at “at a moments notice” as the US is currently at war and needs no further authorization from its Congress to expand their areas of operation.

Important to note about the American plan for global domination through massive warfare is that it is not really a secret, and as (curiously) revealed on the tenth anniversary of the 11 September attacks upon the United States when the US National Security Archive released a memo written by former US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in September 2001wherein he warned “If the war does not significantly change the world’s political map, the US will not achieve its aim.”

To what the “aim” of the United States is as their war against the world has now entered its 10^th year, the FSB says, is to prevent “at all costs” the implosion of the US Dollar as the main reserve currency of the present global economic system before the West’s envisioned “New World Order” can be established.

The first threat to the Americans “master plan” for global hegemony came in November 2000 when the former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein quit accepting US Dollars for oil and, instead, stated his country would only accept Euros.  In less than 10 months the US was attacked and used that as an excuse to topple Hussein and reestablish the US Dollar as the world’s main reserve currency.

Interesting to note is the failure of Libya’s former leader Gaddafi’s plan to introduce the gold dinar, a single African currency that would serve as an alternative to the US Dollar and allow African nations to share the wealth, but which like Iraq’s Hussein “plan” brought a swift and brutal invasion by the Americans and their Western allies to keep it from happening.

The only nation that has successfully abandoned the US Dollar is Iran, who since February 2009 abandoned all American currency opting instead to value their oil and gas in Euros. Iran, however, and unlike oil rich Iraq and Libya, has not been attacked due to the Iranians having acquired from Ukraine between 6-10 nuclear armed X-55 missiles (range of 3,000km [2,000 miles]) in 2005. [Note: Former UkrainePresident Viktor Yushchenko stated that the missiles sold to Iran did not contain their nuclear tips, a statement disputed by the FSB who states they were armed and “ready to fire.”]

This FSB report further states that both Putin and Hu were “enraged” by the deception of the West in regards to Libya, who after being given “absolute assurances” by the Obama regime that they weren’t planning an invasion, broke their word and did it anyway.

Russian and China, in turn, stopped the West’s plan for another war this week by their vetoing the US-backed plan in the United Nations Security Council to turn Syria into another Libya. So angry did the Americans become that their furious UN envoy Susan Rice stormed out of the meeting after the West didn’t get what it wanted.

Even worse for the West’s war plan against Syria was its President warning this week that if his nation was attacked by NATO he would cause to be fired hundreds of missiles into Israel’s most populated city of Tel Aviv within six hours, which would, of course, bring about a catastrophic nuclear response.

And in a preemptory move to counter the planned American blitzkrieg into Central Asia and Pakistan from Afghanistan, Indian Army Chief General VK Singh warned yesterday that thousands of Chinese military forces have now moved into Pakistan-occupied-Kashmir joining an estimated 11,000 more of them believed to have entered that region in the past year.

To the coming deliberate implosion by the US of the global economy, the FSB further says in their report, it now appears “certain” after a new report emerged this past from Philippa Malmgren, a former economics adviser to President George W. Bush, stating that Germany was preparing to abandon the Euro and has ordered the printing of Deutsche Marks to replace it.

Most frightening of everything in this FSB report, however, is the reply Putin gave to Russia’s top generals yesterday when asked what preparations should be made and he answered…. “Prepare for Armageddon.”

7 October 2011 © EU and US all rights reserved. Permission to use this report in its entirety is granted under the condition it is linked back to its original source at WhatDoesItMean.Com.

History Is About To Repeat Itself. – Stockmarket Crash’s Into World War.

Has America become a nation of psychotics? You would certainly think so, based on the explosion in the use of antipsychotic medications. In 2008, with over $14 billion in sales, antipsychotics became the single top-selling therapeutic class of prescription drugs in the United States, surpassing drugs used to treat high cholesterol and acid reflux.

Once upon a time, antipsychotics were reserved for a relatively small number of patients with hard-core psychiatric diagnoses – primarily schizophrenia and bipolar disorder – to treat such symptoms as delusions, hallucinations, or formal thought disorder. Today, it seems, everyone is taking antipsychotics. Parents are told that their unruly kids are in fact bipolar, and in need of anti-psychotics, while old people with dementia are dosed, in large numbers, with drugs once reserved largely for schizophrenics. Americans with symptoms ranging from chronic depression to anxiety to insomnia are now being prescribed anti-psychotics at rates that seem to indicate a national mass psychosis.

It is anything but a coincidence that the explosion in antipsychotic use coincides with the pharmaceutical industry’s development of a new class of medications known as “atypical antipsychotics.” Beginning with Zyprexa, Risperdal, and Seroquel in the 1990s, followed by Abilify in the early 2000s, these drugs were touted as being more effective than older antipsychotics like Haldol and Thorazine. More importantly, they lacked the most noxious side effects of the older drugs – in particular, the tremors and other motor control problems.

The atypical anti-psychotics were the bright new stars in the pharmaceutical industry’s roster of psychotropic drugs – costly, patented medications that made people feel and behave better without any shaking or drooling. Sales grew steadily, until by 2009 Seroquel and Abilify numbered fifth and sixth in annual drug sales, and prescriptions written for the top three atypical antipsychotics totaled more than 20 million.  Suddenly, antipsychotics weren’t just for psychotics any more.

Not just for psychotics anymore

By now, just about everyone knows how the drug industry works to influence the minds of American doctors, plying them with gifts, junkets, ego-tripping awards, and research funding in exchange for endorsing or prescribing the latest and most lucrative drugs. “Psychiatrists are particularly targeted by Big Pharma because psychiatric diagnoses are very subjective,” says Dr. Adriane Fugh-Berman, whose PharmedOut project tracks the industry’s influence on American medicine, and who last month hosted a conference on the subject at Georgetown. A shrink can’t give you a blood test or an MRI to figure out precisely what’s wrong with you. So it’s often a case of diagnosis by prescription. (If you feel better after you take an anti-depressant, it’s assumed that you were depressed.) As the researchers in one study of the drug industry’s influence put it, “the lack of biological tests for mental disorders renders psychiatry especially vulnerable to industry influence.” For this reason, they argue, it’s particularly important that the guidelines for diagnosing and treating mental illness be compiled “on the basis of an objective review of the scientific evidence” – and not on whether the doctors writing them got a big grant from Merck or own stock in AstraZeneca.

Marcia Angell, former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine and a leading critic of the Big Pharma, puts it more bluntly: “Psychiatrists are in the pocket of industry.” Angell has pointed out that most of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), the bible of mental health clinicians, have ties to the drug industry. Likewise, a 2009 study showed that 18 out of 20 of the shrinks who wrote the American Psychiatric Association’s most recent clinical guidelines for treating depression, bipolar disorders, and schizophrenia had financial ties to drug companies.

In a recent article in The New York Review of Books, Angell deconstructs what she calls an apparent “raging epidemic of mental illness” among Americans. The use of psychoactive drugs—including both antidepressants and antipsychotics—has exploded, and if the new drugs are so effective, Angell points out, we should “expect the prevalence of mental illness to be declining, not rising.” Instead, “the tally of those who are so disabled by mental disorders that they qualify for Supplemental Security Income (SSI) or Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) increased nearly two and a half times between 1987 and 2007 – from one in 184 Americans to one in seventy-six. For children, the rise is even more startling – a thirty-five-fold increase in the same two decades. Mental illness is now the leading cause of disability in children.” Under the tutelage of Big Pharma, we are “simply expanding the criteria for mental illness so that nearly everyone has one.” Fugh-Berman agrees: In the age of aggressive drug marketing, she says, “Psychiatric diagnoses have expanded to include many perfectly normal people.”

Cost benefit analysis

What’s especially troubling about the over-prescription of the new antipsychotics is its prevalence among the very young and the very old – vulnerable groups who often do not make their own choices when it comes to what medications they take. Investigations into antipsychotic use suggests that their purpose, in these cases, may be to subdue and tranquilize rather than to treat any genuine psychosis.

Carl Elliott reports in Mother Jones magazine: “Once bipolar disorder could be treated with atypicals, rates of diagnoses rose dramatically, especially in children. According to a recent Columbia University study, the number of children and adolescents treated for bipolar disorder rose 40-fold between 1994 and 2003.” And according to another study, “one in five children who visited a psychiatrist came away with a prescription for an antipsychotic drug.”

A remarkable series published in the Palm Beach Post in May true revealed that the state of  Florida’s juvenile justice department has literally been pouring these drugs into juvenile facilities, “routinely” doling them out “for reasons that never were approved by federal regulators.” The numbers are staggering: “In 2007, for example, the Department of Juvenile Justice bought more than twice as much Seroquel as ibuprofen. Overall, in 24 months, the department bought 326,081 tablets of Seroquel, Abilify, Risperdal and other antipsychotic drugs for use in state-operated jails and homes for children…That’s enough to hand out 446 pills a day, seven days a week, for two years in a row, to kids in jails and programs that can hold no more than 2,300 boys and girls on a given day.” Further, the paper discovered that “One in three of the psychiatrists who have contracted with the state Department of Juvenile Justice in the past five years has taken speaker fees or gifts from companies that make antipsychotic medications.”

In addition to expanding the diagnoses of serious mental illness, drug companies have encouraged doctors to prescribe atypical anti-psychotics for a host of off-label uses. In one particularly notorious episode, the drugmaker Eli Lilly pushed Zyprexa on the caregivers of old people with Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia, as well as agitation, anxiety, and insomnia. In selling to nursing home doctors, sales reps reportedly used the slogan “five at five”—meaning that five milligrams of Zyprexa at 5 pm would sedate their more difficult charges. The practice persisted even after FDA had warned Lilly that the drug was not approved for such uses, and that it could lead to obesity and even diabetes in elderly patients.

In a video interview conducted in 2006, Sharham Ahari, who sold Zyprexa for two years at the beginning of the decade, described to me how the sales people would wangle the doctors into prescribing it. At the time, he recalled, his doctor clients were giving him a lot of grief over patients who were “flipping out” over the weight gain associated with the drug, along with the diabetes. “We were instructed to downplay side effects and focus on the efficacy of drug…to recommend the patient drink a glass a water before taking a pill before the  meal and then after the meal in hopes the stomach would expand” and provide an easy way out of this obstacle to increased sales. When docs complained, he recalled, “I told them, ‘Our drug is state of the art. What’s more important? You want them to get better or do you want them to stay the same–a thin psychotic patient or a fat stable patient.’”

For the drug companies, Shahrman says, the decision to continue pushing the drug despite side effects is matter of cost benefit analysis: Whether you will make more money by continuing to market the drug for off-label use, and perhaps defending against lawsuits, than you would otherwise. In the case of Zyprexa, in January 2009, Lilly settled a lawsuit brought by with the US Justice Department, agreeing to pay $1.4 billion, including “a criminal fine of $515 million, the largest ever in a health care case, and the largest criminal fine for an individual corporation ever imposed in a United States criminal prosecution of any kind,”the Department of Justice said in announcing the settlement.” But Lilly’s sale of Zyprexa in that year alone were over $1.8 billion.

Making patients worse

As it turns out, the atypical antipsychotics may not even be the best choice for people with genuine, undisputed psychosis.

A growing number of health professionals have come to think these drugs are not really as effective as older, less expensive medicines which they have replaced, that they themselves produce side effects that cause other sorts of diseases such as diabetes and plunge the patient deeper into the gloomy world of serious mental disorder. Along with stories of success comes reports of people turned into virtual zombies.

Elliott reports in Mother Jones: “After another large analysis in The Lancet found that most atypicals actually performed worse than older drugs, two senior British psychiatrists penned a damning editorial that ran in the same issue. Dr. Peter Tyrer, the editor of the British Journal of Psychiatry, and Dr. Tim Kendall of the Royal College of Psychiatrists wrote: “The spurious invention of the atypicals can now be regarded as invention only, cleverly manipulated by the drug industry for marketing purposes and only now being exposed.”

Bottom line: Stop Big Pharma and the parasitic shrink community from wantonly pushing these pills across the population.

Source.

Yahoo – According to The New York Times, the FBI just raided a data center in Virginia and seized many of its servers, causing websites owned by “tens of clients” to go offline — including those belonging to people who hadn’t broken a law, and were not suspected of any crime.

It may seem silly to get upset about the police taking down websites you don’t use. A certain quote may come to mind, though, as we look at other ways that the police in America abuse their power.

Tasering nonviolent people to death

A 72-year-old woman named Kathryn Winkfein got tasered not too long ago after she lost her temper at the cop who pulled her over. Her offense? Shouting at him.

Luckily, she “learned her lesson” about talking back to America’s authority figures. She was also awarded $40,000 in damages, which her County Constable, Richard McCain, complained was a reward for “bad behavior.” Apparently putting 50,000 volts through the heart of someone’s great-grandma is not bad behavior, as long as you wear a police uniform.

Winkfein was lucky. In what Digby calls the “Taser Atrocity Of The Day,” a man who took groceries without having paid for them was tasered continuously for 37 seconds, after he became “aggressive and was communicating loudly.” He died in the hospital.

The police officer who killed him was suspended for five days.

Stealing your cellphone (and its data)

Recordings of government workers performing their duty are, by law, in the public domain. So if you think a police officer is going to do something untoward, try filming him so you have evidence. Right?

Not so fast. Prepare to have your cellphone taken from you and stomped on. The Miami Beach, Fla., police in particular have a history of doing this, and they aren’t alone. But the people who have their phones stolen and vandalized by the police are lucky; a man named Michael Allison faces up to 75 years in prison for trying to record a judge, and was arrested without any warning.

Meanwhile, the Michigan State Police is taking people’s cellphones when they pull them over for traffic violations, and using “extraction” devices on the phones. The ACLU is trying to find out why they’re doing that, but the police department placed a price tag of over $500,000 on their Freedom of Information request. How much justice can you afford?

Arresting nonviolent activists

Want to feed homeless people free meals in the park? Prepare to be arrested. Or how about dancing in front of the Jefferson Memorial? Prepare to get tied up and beat up.

Our country’s police has a long history of suppressing nonviolent activists, and it hasn’t stopped with the Civil Rights Era. Environmental activists like Tim DeChristopher are served 10-year prison sentences for civil disobedience, that harms no one but impedes oil companies’ profits. Meanwhile, the FBI labels nonviolent activists as “domestic terrorists.”

They were recently granted more power to go through your trash and your data, so expect things to only get worse. Actually, expect things to get worse in general. The police state is the new normal.

The USA is a prime example of a failed society

The US is ranked #1 in some impressive areas but being #1 for incarceration isn’t something to brag about. In fact, more than 1 in every 100 adults in America are incarcerated at any given time. In some states such as Louisiana as many as 1 in 55 adults are incarcerated at any time. But even in states with fewer incarcerations like Maine, 1 in 226 are still incarcerated. In light of such numbers it isn’t surprising that the US has 25% of the world’s incarcerated population even though the US only makes up around 5% of the population globally.

Despite the huge population of incarcerated people it is far from a representative portion of the population. While the national average is 1 in 100, only 1 in 106 is a white male. Shockingly, 1 in 15 Black men are incarcerated. This is like 2 people out of every classroom. Comparatively 1 in 36 Hispanic men are incarcerated fully 300% more than their white counterparts.

The actual breakdown tells more of the story. Even though more Black and Hispanic men are incarcerated total they don’t actually dominate the prison population. Whites make a large percentage of people in prison making up 34.72% of the population, and Hispanics make up 18.26%. Unsurprisingly Blacks still make up the largest one ethnicity at 43.91% of the population of incarcerated persons. With only 3.11% combined for other ethnicities. In total we have 2.3 million people in prison in the US which is roughly 10% of our population.

To give some weight to these numbers if we compare this to the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, we have some 435 times that number incarcerated right now. Obviously we have a problem especially since 51.8% of those incarcerated who are released wind up right back in prison within 3 years, even though the average prison sentence is only 5 years. While these numbers represent people and we should remember that, there are also some very real monetary costs to consider.

Consider firstly the yearly tax burden of the average US household which is roughly $19,000. Comparatively, it costs $23,876 a year to house, feed, and care for an inmate. To give more perspective most parents spend $7,000 per child on education and close to $9,000 in healthcare costs per person. In light of such numbers no one should be shocked to find out that we spent $44 Billion on corrections in 2007 alone.

Perhaps it is time to jail the politicians and leaders for this miserable failure?

Daily Mail – When farmers Danielle and Matt Boerson realised they could no longer afford to run their tractors, they took the bull by the horns – and ditched them for oxen.

Soaring petrol prices had become so high that the couple, who run an 80-acre farm near Madison, Wisconsin, were forced to get rid of their two tractors, hay baler, plough and rotavator.

So they took a course at the agricultural institute in traditional farming techniques.

‘It gave me the confidence that, yes, I could do this’, Danielle told the Times. ‘It just required a lot of concentration and a firm voice.’

Their instructor was former peace core volunteer Dick Roosenberg, 64, who learned the trade while working for the UN in West Africa.

He took the skills he had honed back to Michigan and set up Tillers International.

At first the company was aimed at helping Third World farmers harvest in the cheapest way possible.

On the side, he also helped historically-themed villages.

But his specialist knowledge is now enjoying a new wave of interest with farmers from Wisconsin to Alaska now joining his courses.

He is already teaching up to 20 farmers every weekend.

‘People want to get away from petroleum fuels where they can, because it’s getting more expensive,’ he said.

A pair of plough-ready oxen cost $3,000 (£1,800) – roughly the same as a second hand tractor.

But younger cattle are a snip at $150 each. They only eat grass and can work for up to 14 years.

They are also a handy source of fertilizer and can be eaten when they die.

The only downside is that they are slow and are not viable on a large farm. They are however perfect for ‘small farms, with high-value garden crops’, said Mr Roosenberg.

Todd Juzwiak, 42, bought two oxen after learning how to command them with Mr Roosenberg.

He told the Times: ‘We are definately saving on fuel. Though it’s not necessarily easier. Tractors don’t often jump over fences.’

KINGSTON, NY, 4 May 2011— From the fans at Citizens Bank Park in Philadelphia to the mobs at the White House gates, “USA, USA,” was the chant heard across the nation. Jubilant Americans celebrated the breaking news that Public Enemy No.1, terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden was dead.

Ten years have passed since the Twin Towers toppled and the Pentagon was whacked. After two failing wars and billions of dollars spent on the global manhunt to bring in Bin Laden “Dead or Alive,” America has now claimed victory. “This is bigger than the moon landing, this is huge,” exclaimed Fox News’ Geraldo Rivera.

“Justice has been done,” intoned President Barack Obama announcing Bin Laden’s death. He not only called it “a good day for America,” but also declared that “The world is safer. It is a better place because of the death of Osama Bin Laden.”

While Secretary of State Hillary Clinton echoed the sentiment that “justice has been served,” she evidently took issue with the Presidential vision of a “safer” world, warning that terror “won’t stop with the death of Bin Laden, we must redouble our efforts.”

If it’s a “safer” world, why the need to “redouble our efforts”? These were but two of the contradictions coming from the White House in the early hours of the breaking story, and many discrepancies would follow. Some of them would be noted and debated, but totally absent from the 24/7 news coverage, political “high-fives” and patriotic triumphalism was the simple question: Why did Osama Bin Laden, former mujahedin ally of the United States, turn against it to become Public Enemy No.1?

Was it that he and his Al Qaeda fighters suddenly decided to hate America’s “freedom and liberties” as George W. Bush maintained? Or was it remotely possible that the attacks were motivated by US foreign policy – with its unconditional support of Israel and concomitant support of the same Middle East monarchs, autocrats and dictators now being toppled in the wave of revolution?

Also absent from America’s non-stop exultation and self-congratulation, absent from the acres of newsprint and the countless hours of air time, was any discussion of the practical consequences of the death of Bin Laden who, before making it back into the headlines, had been both a fading memory and a non-issue.
Osama Bin Who?

So irrelevant had Bin Laden and his jihad rhetoric become that, in the months preceding his assassination, every one of the uprisings occurring throughout the Middle East and North Africa was secular and in direct opposition to Bin Laden’s militant pan-Islamic vision.

In a sentence: There were no practical consequences whatsoever attending the death of Osama Bin Laden. It would do nothing to:

Help America win losing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Lower the unemployment rate.
Stop the US or European nations from sinking deeper into recessions and depression.
Revive failing real estate markets or solve the debt and deficit crises.
Lower oil and food prices.
Reverse the damage or stop the radioactive fallout from Fukushima.

What Osama’s death did do was boost the President’s sagging poll numbers and deflect public attention from the news that really mattered.

On Wednesday, April 27th, just four days before Bin Laden was killed, a new Public Enemy No.1 held his organization’s first ever press conference. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke told the world that the United States would continue its low interest rate polices and, in effect, continue to flood the world with cheap money.

The global equity markets immediately responded to the predictably destructive consequences. Before Bernanke ended the press conference, gold prices shot up $20 an ounce, silver $2, and the dollar fell to a 3 year low against a trade-weighted basket of currencies. Despite the Chairman’s claims to the contrary, the US dollar would continue to devalue and subsequently dollar based commodity prices would soar.

Needing neither a mountain lair nor sequestration behind closed Fed doors, the new Public Enemy No.1, “Osama” Ben Bernanke committed, in broad daylight, an act of financial terrorism that would have far reaching and long lasting implications for the American public. As the value of the dollar went down, the cost of nearly everything would go up…excepting the cost of “risk.”

This meant that financiers could continue to speculate and exploit the equity markets, with the profits going only to the 10 percent of Americans that owned 90 percent of the stocks, bonds and mutual funds. Moreover, the Fed reasoned the cheap dollar would also give a competitive edge to big US exporters. But as exports rose, so did the price of imports, putting further strains on average consumers whose real wages fell ever further behind the pace of inflation.

Bombs Away

What Osama Bin Laden’s death also did was to deflect attention from the US/NATO “humanitarian” mission in Libya, which, just two days earlier, had delivered several humanitarian bombs upon the home of Muammar Qaddafi’s son, killing him and three of his children.

The bungled attempt to assassinate Qaddafi (who had been visiting his son) was condemned by Russia, brought recriminations against NATO from other UN members for overstepping the UN mandate, and called into question the legality of the air strike. With a groundswell of public sympathy building around the world for Qaddafi’s murdered grandchildren, the very purpose and future of the entire mission was being called into question.

Trend Forecast: With the death of Osama Bin Laden, the restored, rebuilt, new and improved terror bandwagon rolls again…and it will keep rolling until Election Day 2012. Whether a real terror attack happens or not, Barack Obama, as he has done before, will take a page from the G.W. Bush playbook and keep the American public in a state of fear and hysteria.

And should terror strike the US, UK, France or other NATO ally, their governments, media “presstitutes,” pundits, and the public at large will debate and deplore the “cowardly act” and demand “swift justice.” They will blame Bin Laden sympathizers, Al Qaeda cells, Muammar Qaddafi, radical Islamists…but never will they blame themselves. They will refuse to acknowledge that what they called “terror” was nothing more than “revenge”; reprisal for foreign meddling in the domestic affairs of other nations, or retaliation for military invasions launched by the US, UK, France or other NATO ally upon a sovereign nation.

Meanwhile, back in DC, the Chairman of the Fed, Public Enemy No.1, “Osama” Ben Bernanke, will mastermind the destruction of the American dollar, the US economy and the purchasing power of the American people.

As we have been forecasting for years, gold, despite its recent pull back, is on-trend to reach $2000 per ounce (and possibly higher). And while Ben Bernanke claims that inflation is merely “transitory,” considering his penchant for printing trillions of digital dollars not worth the paper it’s not printed on, we see inflation as both entrenched and rising.

Press TV – America has 104 nuclear power plants and some have the same design as Japan. According to polls 28 percent of Americans are very concerned about the safety of these plants.

In an interview with Press TV, Paul Gunter, president of Beyond Nuclear in the US, explains both the risks posed by the pursuit of nuclear energy and the actual value of this type of energy, which debunk the industry propaganda machine. Following is a transcript of that interview.

Press TV: Why should Americans be concerned about nuclear power plants in their country?

Paul Gunter: The idea of splitting the atom to boil water is an extremely poor way — a dangerous and inefficient way — to generate electricity.

There is so much waste heat energy that is generated by nuclear power that only 33 percent of heat generated by splitting the atom actually goes to making electricity.

The other 67 percent has to be gotten rid of into the atmosphere or into the water. So you have this tremendous amount of waste from heat and you have this tremendous amount of radiation that is generated in splitting the atoms.

Really we are concerned about it being very inefficient; it’s a little like using a cannon to ring a door bell – to use nuclear power to boil water.

Press TV: Why is nuclear power a problem?

Paul Gunter: Of most concern, electricity is merely a fleeting by-product of nuclear power plants. The real legacy — the lasting product of nuclear power plants — is nuclear waste, which will be a hazard to future generations who will not get one watt of electricity, but will get this toxic legacy for millions of years.

We will pass this problem on to generations to come while we can benefit from electricity today. The problem of nuclear waste will last virtually forever.

Press TV: What is the value of nuclear energy?

Paul Gunter: Both nuclear power and nuclear weapons make our world a much more dangerous place — particularly now, as we are seeing from the Fukushima accident in Japan. The consequences of the radiation being released from this accident are not just limited to Japan. They are going into the ocean, going into the atmosphere, and they have consequences that reach well beyond the shores of Japan.

Press TV: What are the health concerns of radiation?

Paul Gunter: Concerning radiation exposure, you should understand that there is no safe dose. Any tiny does increases your risk to contract cancer, genetic mutations, disturbance of the DNA genetic code: birth defects.

Press TV: Why do Americans seem to be in the dark about what is really going on with nuclear energy in their country?

Paul Gunter: The average person really doesn’t understand much about nuclear power because there has been a series of myths about nuclear power. At first, we were told that the atomic power plants were the peaceful atom; and then we learned the fact that they could be generated to produce materials for nuclear weapons. We were told that atomic power would be too cheap to meter, it would be so inexpensive. And now, there is no other more expensive way of boiling water than by the splitting of the atom. And now they’re telling us that nuclear power can be used as a solution to climate change, but in fact, there are much safer, cleaner, cheaper and quicker ways through the sun and the wind and energy efficiency to achieve those goals and still find peace in the world.

The nuclear industry has so much money that they can sell their propaganda; they can buy politicians; they can spread these untruths about nuclear power, and really it’s a question of learning what the real risks are and what the real costs of nuclear power are.