Apr 29, 2009

Great Pacific Garbage Patch

The horse latitudes are known for dead wind. They lie between the 30th and 35th latitudinal parallels, across the globe, above and below the equator. Their name supposedly comes from the days when Spanish merchant ships, bound for the West Indies, would practically screech to a halt upon crossing the area’s threshold and, to lighten their load and conserve water, would push overboard the horses they had brought along. 

While they’re no longer the gravesite of countless unfortunate horses, the horse latitudes are now home to a new menace born of unfettered commercial striving: the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. 

Fishermen shun it because its waters lack the nutrients to support an abundant catch. Sailors dodge it because it lacks the wind to propel their sailboats.


From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Garbage Patch is located within the North Pacific Gyre, one of the five major oceanic gyres.


The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, also described as the Eastern Garbage Patch or the Pacific Trash Vortex, is a gyre of marine litter in the central North Pacific Ocean located roughly between 135° to 155°W and 35° to 42°Nestimated to be twice the size of Texas. The patch is characterized by exceptionally high concentrations of suspended plastic and other debris that have been trapped by the currents of the North Pacific Gyre.

The existence of the Eastern Garbage Patch was predicted in a 1988 paper published by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration(NOAA) of the United States. The prediction was based on results obtained by several Alaska-based researchers between 1985 and 1988 that measured neustonic plastic in the North Pacific Ocean. This research found high concentrations of marine debris accumulating in regions governed by particular patterns of ocean currents.

Formation

Like other areas of concentrated marine debris in the world's oceans, the Eastern Garbage Patch has formed gradually over time as a result of marine pollution gathered by the action of oceanic currents.

The garbage patch occupies a large and relatively stationary region of the North Pacific Ocean bound by the North Pacific Gyre. The rotational pattern created by the North Pacific Gyre draws in waste material from across the North Pacific Ocean, including the coastal waters off North America and Japan. As material is captured in the currents, wind-driven surface currents gradually move floating debris toward the center, trapping it in the region.

The size of the affected region is unknown, but estimates range from 700,000 km2 to more than 15 million km2, (0.41% to 8.1% of the size of the Pacific Ocean). The area may contain over 100 million tons of debris.


Plastic photodegradation in the ocean

The Eastern Garbage Patch has one of the highest levels of plastic particulate suspended in the upper water column. As a result, it is one of several oceanic regions where researchers have studied the effects and impact of plastic photodegradation in the neustonic layer of water.Unlike debris which biodegrades, the photodegraded plastic disintegrates into ever smaller pieces while remaining a polymer. This process continues down to the molecular level.

As the plastic flotsam photodegrades into smaller and smaller pieces, it concentrates in the upper water column. As it disintegrates, the plastic ultimately becomes small enough to be ingested by aquatic organisms which reside near the ocean's surface. Plastic waste thus enters the food chain through its intense concentration in the neuston.

The eastern garbage patch cannot be characterised as a continuous visible field of densely floating marine debris. The process of disintegration means that the plastic particulate in much of the affected region may be too small to be seen. In many areas of the affected region, the overall concentration of plastics was greater than the concentration of zooplankton by a factor of seven.

What does exist in the gyres is a great variety of filter-feeding organisms that prey on the ever-renewed crop of tiny plants, or phytoplankton. Each day the phytoplankton grow in the sunlit part of the water, and each night they are consumed by the filter feeders, a fantastic array of alien-looking animals called zooplankton. The zooplankton include chordate jellyfishes known as “salps,” which are among the fastest-growing multicellular organisms on the planet. By fashioning their bodies into pulsating tubes, the salps are able, each day, to filter half the water column they inhabit, drawing out the phytoplankton and smaller zooplankton for food. But salps are gelatinous creatures with a low biomass, and so there is no market for them, either. Hence the realm they dominate, one of the largest uniform habitats on the planet, remains unexploited and largely unexplored.

If something isn't done, he says, the island will increase in size by a factor of ten every two to three years — making in time something more akin to an actual, solid island. "The consequence of putting that much stuff shading the surface of the ocean is unknown," he says. "We don't know the harm."

Yet you can’t see it in satellite photos, because the debris is more “soup” than continent. Instead of forming a trash island, a literal wasteland on the surface, plastic fragments permeate the sea to great depths.

As for a technological solution, something like a fleet of ships to scrape up the mess, is well intentioned, but the size and the fact that this material is mixed into the water column makes for an impossibly large area, about  five million square miles.

Curtis Ebbesmeyer, an oceanographer and leading authority on flotsam, has tracked the build-up of plastics in the seas for more than 15 years and compares the trash vortex to a living entity: "It moves around like a big animal without a leash." When that animal comes close to land, as it does at the Hawaiian archipelago, the results are dramatic. "The garbage patch barfs, and you get a beach covered with this confetti of plastic," he added.

The "soup" is actually two linked areas, either side of the islands of Hawaii, known as the Western and Eastern Pacific Garbage Patches. About one-fifth of the junk – which includes everything from footballs and kayaks to Lego blocks and carrier bags – is thrown off ships or oil platforms. The rest comes from land.

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is particularly dangerous for birds and marine life. Sea turtles mistake clear plastic bags for jellyfish. Birds swoop down and swallow indigestible shards of plastic. The petroleum-based plastics take decades to break down, and as long as they float on the ocean's surface, they can appear as feeding grounds. These animals die because the plastic eventually fills their stomachs. It doesn't pass, and they literally starve to death. A Greenpeace report found that at least 267 marine species had suffered from some kind of ingestion or entanglement with marine debris.

The slowly rotating mass of rubbish-laden water poses a risk to human health, too. Hundreds of millions of tiny plastic pellets, or nurdles – the raw materials for the plastic industry – are lost or spilled every year, working their way into the sea. These pollutants act as chemical sponges attracting man-made chemicals such as hydrocarbons and the pesticide DDT. They then enter the food chain. What goes into the ocean goes into these animals and onto your dinner plate. It's that simple.

Oprah

Oprah's green episode for Earth Day started with chilling footage and description of a giant island of trash -- "The Great Pacific Garbage Patch""This is the most shocking thing I have seen," Oprah says.

Watch her video here:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/04/23/oprah-shines-light-on-gre_n_190552.html

VBS.tv produced a 12-part Web series on Garbage Island. Here´s part one:
http://www.vbs.tv/player.php?bcpid=452319916&bctid=1485308505


Decomposed carcass of Laysan albatross with bottle caps and plastic objects inside

Bottle caps and other plastic objects are visible inside the decomposed carcass of this Laysan albatoss on Kure Atoll, which lies in a remote and virtually uninhabited region of the North Pacific. The bird probably mistook the plastics for food and ingested them while foraging.

SOA Grads Become Latin Death Squad

An Odd Coincidence: Many SOA Grads Become Latin Death Squad Killers


By Sherwood Ross

(The Intelligence Daily) -- If the Pentagon’s instructors haven’t been teaching assassination at the School of the Americas(SOA) in Fort Benning, Ga., is it just coincidental that so many of its star pupils graduate to become mass murderers?

Take the strange case of Francisco del Cid Diaz, an SOA-educated second lieutenant in the El Salvadoran army who ordered his unit to drag 16 people out of the Los Hojas cooperative of the Associacion Nacional de Indigenas, beat them, shoot them, and dump their bodies into the Cuyuapa River.

Not content with his SOA undergraduate work, Diaz re-enrolled after the massacre and was accepted again in 2003. By then the Pentagon had renamed SOA The Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, (WHINSEC) as Latins joked SOA stood for “School of Assassins.” Perhaps the most infamous Salvadoran SOA grad was Major Roberto D’Aubuisson, who ordered the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero and who operated a death squad that used blowtorches on his victims.

D’Aubuisson might not have learned to use this device at SOA, of course, as he also attended the CIA-run International Police Academy in Washington, one of the classier D.C. "finishing" schools.
  
It might just be that some weird metaphysical force beyond human understanding has been attracting thousands of criminally insane military officers like Diaz from all over Latin America to Ft. Benning---and that they were psychiatric basket cases before they got there. That’s unlikely, of course, as a WHINSEC official claims “only personnel of unquestionable character” are admitted to study.

Yet, it’s odd that case after case----hundreds of them, really---keep popping up in which SOA/WHINSEC alumni after leaving Georgia have gone stark raving berserk once they got home, overthrowing governments and filling elected officials full of holes. Didn’t Georgia’s “old sweet song” mellow them even a teensy-weensy bit?

Two of SOA’s more notorious alumni, Generals Roberto Viola and Leopoldo Galtieri, both of whom trained at SOA in 1981, went on to become dictators during the “Dirty War”, in which 30,000 Argentines were put to death. The generals were assisted by five other SOA grads and when civilian rule was restored Viola was sentenced to 17 years for his crimes.  Who’s to say, though, that he learned his grisly trade from the Pentagon?  He could have gotten his ideas just as well from studying Hitler’s “Mein Kampf,” right?

Then there’s Bolivia. In 1980, SOA alumni General Garcia Meza Tejada assaulted the National Palace and forced the president to resign. His top aide, Luis Arce Gomez was also an SOA alum as were seven other coup criminals. In Brazil, the human rights group Torture Never Again linked 20 SOA graduates and two SOA instructors to crimes including false imprisonment, and torture methods such as electric shock, suffocation and other methods too nauseating to iterate.

In Colombia, half of some 250 officers cited for human rights violations in 1993 took advanced education at SOA. After his involvement in the 1988 Uraba massacre of 20 banana workers, the massacre of 19 business executives, and the assassination of a city mayor, General Faouk Yanine Diaz was a guest speaker at SOA in 1990, apparently so good he was brought back for an encore next year.

Another SOA grad, General Jorge Plazas Acevedo, was tried for the 1998 kidnapping and murder of Jewish business leader Benjamin Khoudari, and Col. Jesus Maria Clavijo, another SOA grad, stands accused of 160 murders during 1995-98. Yet another SOA grad, General Montoya Uribe, ran a “scorched earth” campaign in Putumayo.

It is well known that after the CIA overthrow in 1954 of Guatamala’s president Jacobo Arbenz, more than 200,000 civilians were killed. Not as well known is that SOA graduates there created vigilante squads responsible for starring roles in the slaughter. One SOA grad, General Efrain Rios Montt, who seized power in a coup, wiped out more than 400 Mayan villages, killing thousands and forcing hundreds of thousands of people from their homes. Involved also were SOA grads General Angel Rodriguez, defense minister, and Colonel German Barahoma, National Police director.

In Peru, six officers educated at SOA were among those that burst into the men’s dorm at La Cantuta and dragged off six students and a professor that were “disappeared.” One of the SOA goons, Vladimiro Torres, went on to run the notorious “Colina” death squad and became head of the National Intelligence Service(SIN). His boss, Alberto Fujimori, of course, has just been convicted of humanitarian rights abuses, including massacre.

The above treatise is a short list of the achievements of SOA/WHINSEC which, for my nickel, President Obama could shut down tomorrow on suspicion that it has been teaching militarists how to turn their homelands into living hells.

Perhaps it seems also ironic that the U.S. military, which advertises its bravery in TV commercials, should be instructing officers in how to assassinate unarmed archbishops and priests whose principal “crime” has been advocating for Latin America’s poor---the banana pickers, copper miners, and tillers of the soil, etc.

Information for this article was taken from legal documents submitted to a Federal judge by Louis Wolf, a resident of Washington, D.C., currently under six months’ house arrest for his disrespectful, non-violent trespass at Ft. Benning, Ga., last November. Sentenced to prison at the same time by Federal Judge G. Mallon Faircloth of the U.S. District Court of Columbus, Ga., were Father Luis Barrios, of N. Bergen, N.J., an Associate Priest at St. Mary’s Episcopal Church, Manhattan; Theresa Cusimano, J.D.; seminary student Kristin Holm, of the Lutheran School of Theology, Chicago; Sister Diane Therese Pinchot of the Ursuline Sisters of Cleveland; and Viet Nam veteran Al Simmons, a retired pre-school teacher of Richmond, Va.

It’s a curious society that imprisons pacifists for trespass on military property where murder and torture allegedly are being taught to thousands of future Latin killers. Of course, the Pentagon may be teaching no such thing at Ft. Benning: the outcomes could all be one big coincidence, no es verdad? 
                                                   

Apr 25, 2009

Torture Worked to Sell the Iraq War


by: Steve Weissman, t r u t h o u t | Perspective

Dick Cheney torture image.
(Photo-illustration: Everett Bogue / t r u t h o u t)


    Three cheers for Dick Cheney. The former vice president has urged, however rhetorically, that the Obama administration release more of the torture memos. "One of the things that I find a little bit disturbing about this recent disclosure is they put out the legal memos, the memos that the CIA got from the Office of Legal Counsel, but they didn't put out the memos that showed the success of the effort," the former vice president told FoxNews.

    "I've now formally asked the CIA to take steps to declassify those memos so we can lay them out there and the American people have a chance to see what we obtained and what we learned and how good the intelligence was."

    News reports differ as to whether Mr. Cheney has formally made the request, but he is absolutely right that the American people need to see the complete record. He is wrong about what the record will show. From the material already released or ferreted out by journalists, it is clear that he and Mr. Bush succeeded in using torture, not primarily to secure needed intelligence, but to create the propaganda they used to sell their invasion of Iraq.

    The evidence comes from a variety of sources, including the report on the military's treatment of detainees, which Sen. Carl Levin's Armed Services Committee has just released. The report revealed that Pentagon officials began preparing to use torture - or "abusive interrogation techniques" - as early as December 2001. This was less than two months after the start of the war in Afghanistan and eight months before the Department of Justice gave legal authorization in two memos dated August 1, 2002, and signed by Jay Bybee, then-assistant attorney general for the Office of Legal Counsel. The first memo redefined physical and mental torture and suggested that the president, acting pursuant to his constitutional powers as commander-in-chief, could override the federal anti-torture statute. The second analyzed and approved specific interrogation tactics, including isolation, prolonged sleep deprivation, stress positions and waterboarding, which makes the victim feel that he is drowning.

    If not the Justice Department lawyers, who gave the earlier go-ahead? The Senate report puts the onus directly on the decider-in-chief, President George W. Bush. He issued a written determination on February 7, 2002, "that Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, which would have afforded minimum standards for humane treatment, did not apply to al-Qaeda or Taliban detainees."

    Former White House terrorist adviser Richard Clarke has confirmed that Mr. Bush gave an informal go-ahead even earlier. According to Clarke's account in his book, "Against All Enemies," Bush addressed his national security advisers late on September 11, 2001. "We are at war and we will stay at war until this is done," Bush told them. "Any barriers in your way, they're gone." Later he added in a heated exchange with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, "I don't care what the international lawyers say, we are going to kick some ass."

    The Senate report also pointed the finger at Mr. Cheney and other top officials of the Bush administration. "Members of the President's Cabinet and other senior officials participated in meetings inside the White House in 2002 and 2003 where specific interrogation techniques were discussed," the committee concluded. "National Security Council principals reviewed the CIA's interrogation program during that period."

    Why so much attention from the top? McClatchy news has provided the obvious answer. According to a former senior US intelligence official and a former Army psychiatrist, the Bush administration wanted "to find evidence of cooperation between al-Qaeda and the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's regime."

    "There were two reasons why these interrogations were so persistent, and why extreme methods were used," said the former official. "The main one is that everyone was worried about some kind of follow-up attack (after 9/11). But for most of 2002 and into 2003, Cheney and Rumsfeld, especially, were also demanding proof of the links between al-Qaeda and Iraq that (former Iraqi exile leader Ahmed) Chalabi and others had told them were there."

    In part to get that smoking gun, the CIA waterboarded Khalid Sheikh Mohammed 183 times and Abu Zubaydah 83 times. But neither man told the interrogators what Bush and Cheney wanted to hear about Iraq and al-Qaeda. That came from Ibn al Sheikh al Libi, whom the Bush administration sent to Egypt for what CIA Director George Tenet called "further debriefing." As PBS Frontline reported back in November 2007, al Libi "confessed" - after being beaten repeatedly and locked in a small box for some 17 hours - that Saddam Hussein had trained al-Qaeda in chemical weapons. Al Libi later retracted his statement and the CIA later rejected it as reliable intelligence. But the torture of al Libi worked to sell the war in Iraq, providing the "evidence" that Secretary of State Colin Powell used when he spoke before the United Nations Security Council in February 2003.

    "I can trace the story of a senior terrorist operative telling how Iraq provided training in these [chemical and biological] weapons to al-Qaeda," Powell asserted. "Fortunately, this operative is now detained, and he has told his story."

    Torture might not work as well as conventional interrogation to provide sound intelligence, but it certainly worked for Bush and Cheney in exactly the way they most wanted.

Who are the real 'pirates' in Africa?

Capitalists demonize Somalis, hide their own blood-soaked history

 The Somali "pirates" have killed zero sailors. Somali groups like the Central Regional Coast Guard patrol coastal waters and charge a "ransom" on foreign shipping for using the coastal waters of the poor nation.

Recent news coverage has been dominated by sensationalized stories of Somali pirates hijacking ships and taking hostages in order to secure large ransoms. 

Most recently, the Maersk Alabama, a U.S.-based container ship, was hijacked and its captain, Richard Phillips, was taken hostage. After a five-day standoff, Navy SEAL snipers shot and killed three pirates while freeing the captian. The U.S. mass media has portrayed the killings as a heroic military action. In fact, the teenage Somali hijackers were out of fuel and ammunition, and had been frantically pleading to give up Phillips to save their own lives. The United States refused to negotiate. 

Two days earlier, French navy commandos stormed a hijacked sailboat and killed two pirates while freeing four French hostages. 

Prior to the killings by the U.S. and French navies, there had been no fatalities in any of the hijackings. Somali pirates had never harmed any captives, and in fact, many former hostages have said they were treated extremely well. 

Yet the Western media has relentlessly demonized Somalis involved without making any attempt at understanding the larger political context behind these actions. Rather, the Somalis have been accused of looting and plundering and have been falsely accused of being terrorists. They have been purposely associated with al-Qaeda to justify their inclusion as targets in the criminal “Global War on Terrorism.” Washington is attempting to use the situation to further justify their bloody imperialist intervention in Somalia and the region. 

There is deep irony in the accusations of barbarity and brutality being hurled at Somali pirates. Western capitalism was in fact built on colonial plunder and the extraction of vast wealth from the Americas, Africa and Asia. 

Primitive accumulation: the roots of capitalism 

In Karl Marx’s landmark work, “Capital,” he attacked the myth that hard work, diligence and frugality enabled capitalists to amass their vast sums of wealth. In fact, the capitalist mode of production only began to develop after centuries of the “primitive accumulation of wealth.” This “accumulation” primarily took the form of piracy, raids, pillage, rape and massacres of whole peoples. 

In “Capital,” Marx wrote: “The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalized the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. … If money ‘comes into the world with a congenital blood-stain on one cheek,’ capital comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt.” 

Each European capitalist country competed savagely to exploit the colonial world. In the early 17th century, Spain and England struggled for control of the African slave trade to the Americas. An estimated two million Africans died in the “Middle Passage,” as European traders, planters and manufacturers raked in huge profits. 

They would stop at nothing. In acquiring slaves, Dutch colonizers rounded up entire populations and locked them in secret dungeons before sending them off in slave ships. Over the course of sixty years, the murderous Dutch occupation had reduced the population in one Javan province by 75 percent. Such genocides helped launch Dutch colonialism to its commercial supremacy by the mid 17th century. 

In India between the years 1769 and 1770, the English East India Company bought up all supplies of rice to artificially stimulate demand. The result was a devastating famine that caused massive suffering and death. 

Meanwhile, back in England the ruling class carried out a massive enslavement of child labor to convert the manufacturing industry into factory. Starting as young as seven years old, children were snatched from their homes, starved to the bone, and forced to work grueling hours. 

These are the barbaric roots of capitalism. The stage of primitive accumulation has long since passed—and now capitalists use the wage system to extract wealth—but the Western imperialists have maintained a fundamentally pirate-like approach to Africa. From the Congress of Berlin in 1884 to the present, imperialist rulers have always viewed the vast human and natural resources of Africa as “theirs.” Racist ideologies like the “white man’s burden” and “manifest destiny” have been used by capitalists to justify genocide, the rape of natural resources, and enslaving tens of millions of Africans. As noted Pan-Africanist George Padmore stated in 1936, “The Black man certainly has to pay dear for carrying the white man’s burden.” 

A modern-day manifestation of these ideologies was articulated by U.S. policymakers at a 2002 conference in Washington, D.C., entitled, “African Oil: A Priority for U. S. National Security and African Development.” At the conference, Walter Kansteiner, former assistant secretary of state for African affairs, declared: “It is undeniable that this [oil] has become of national strategic interest to us.” 

The roots of Somali piracy 

Although Africa has suffered through centuries of forced underdevelopment, resource extraction, and slavery, it has not been repaid a single dime in reparations. To the contrary, African nations remain neo-colonies of Western financial institutions, who leverage debt obligations to shape African economies and political systems. 

This is the context, which the Western media ignores, needed to understand the isolated incidences of piracy off the coast of Somalia. 

To the United States, Somalia—one of the poorest countries in the world—is of key geo-political importance. It lies at a commercial crossroads between the Middle East and Asia, and a large portion of the world’s oil tankers pass along its coast. 

For this reason, the Pentagon has repeatedly intervened to repress any semblance of independence in the Somali government. In the aftermath of a total governmental collapse in 1991, the United States invaded in 1992 and Somalia was left with no central government. 

In 2006, the Union of Islamic Courts, a coalition of Somali judges and courts with overwhelming popular support, was able to effectively unify the country for the first time since 1991. However, the UIC did not bow down sufficiently to U.S. dictates, and was quickly targeted for regime change. 

In coordinated actions by the United States and Ethiopia in late 2006 and early 2007, Somalia was bombarded, invaded and occupied. The aim was to overthrow the UIC and replace it with the Transitional Federal Government, a U.S. proxy regime lacking any popular support. As a direct result of U.S.-Ethiopian aggression, over 400,000 Somalis were displaced without access to food, clean water, shelter or medicine. 

These are the facts on the ground that shape Somali life and face young men and women just looking for a way to survive. While many are undoubtedly drawn to the hijacking business for purely economic reasons, there is a political dimension as well. 

Today, Somalia is completely surrounded by U.S. forces and its many proxies in the region. To the east, the U.S. Navy’s fifth fleet patrols the country’s coastline. On its northern, western and southern borders lie Djibouti, Ethiopia and Kenya, all of which are U.S. client states. 

Without any form of state structure to defend Somalia’s territory, its national sovereignty has been repeatedly violated, time and time again. Lacking forces to patrol its shoreline, Somalia’s territorial waters were soon plundered by commercial fishing fleets from around the world. The country’s coastline, the largest in the African continent, became an easy target for commercial vessels carrying nuclear waste to unload their toxic cargo without oversight. Somalia is roughly 8,000 nautical miles distant from the United States. 

In response to these flagrant violations of Somalia’s national sovereignty, fishermen stepped in to fulfill the role of naval and coast guard forces, arming themselves and protecting their territory by confronting illegal vessels. 

“We don’t consider ourselves sea bandits,” said Sugule Ali, a spokesman for the so-called pirates. “We consider sea bandits those who illegally fish in our seas and dump waste in our seas and carry weapons in our seas. We are simply patrolling our seas. Think of us like a coast guard.” (NY Times Sept. 30, 2008) 

The U.S. response to the Somali pirates is saturated with racism, with the aim of building public support for a greater military presence around the Horn of Africa. Progressive people need to be clear: Western imperialists are the real pirates in Africa and the real enemies of progress. 

Apr 9, 2009

History of Money

THE HISTORY OF MONEY

"History records that the money changers have used every form of abuse, intrigue, deceit, and violent means possible to maintain their control over governments by controlling money and its issuance." President James Madison

Truth is most people don't realise that the issuing of money is essentially a private business, and that the privilege of issuing money has been a major bone of contention throughout history.
Wars have been fought and depressions have been caused in the battle over who issues the money; however the majority of us are not aware of this, and this is largely due to the fact that the winning side became and increasingly continues to be a vital and respected member of our global society, having an influence over large aspects of our lives including our education, our media and our governments.

Wars have been fought and depressions have been caused in the battle over who issues the money; however the majority of us are not aware of this, and this is largely due to the fact that the winning side became and increasingly continues to be a vital and respected member of our global society, having an influence over large aspects of our lives including our education, our media and our governments.

Jesus was so upset by the sight of the money changers in the temple, he waded in and started to tip over the tables and drive them out with a whip, this being the one and only time we ever hear of him using force during his entire ministry.

So what caused the ultimate pacifist to become so aggressive?

For a long time the Jews had been called upon to pay their temple tax with a special coin called the half shekelshekel. It was a measured half ounce of pure silver with no image of a pagan emperor on it.

It was to them the only coin acceptable to God.
But because there was only a limited number of these coins in circulation, the money changers were in a buyers market and like with anything else in short supply, they were able to raise the price to what the market would bear.

They made huge profits with their monopoly on these coins and turned this time of devotion into a mockery for profit.

Once money is accepted as a form of exchange, those who produce, loan out and manipulate the quantity of money are obviously in a very strong position. They are the "Money Changers".
Jesus saw this as stealing from the people and proclaimed the whole setup to be. "A den of thieves".

Today banks are allowed to loan out at least ten times the amount they actually are holding, so while you wonder how they get rich charging you 11% interest, it's not 11% a year they make on that amount but actually 110%.


THE TALLY STICKS (1100 - 1854)
King Henry the First produced sticks of polished wood, with notches cut along one edge to signify the denominations. The stick was then split full length so each piece still had a record of the notches.

The King kept one half for proof against counterfeiting, and then spent the other half into the market place where it would continue to circulate as money.

Because only Tally Sticks were accepted by Henry for payment of taxes, there was a built in demand for them, which gave people confidence to accept these as money.
He could have used anything really, so long as the people agreed it had value, and his willingness to accept these sticks as legal tender made it easy for the people to agree. Money is only as valuable as peoples faith in it, and without that faith even today's money is just paper.
The tally stick system worked really well for 726 years. It was the most successful form of currency in recent history and the British Empire was actually built under the Tally Stick system, but how is it that most of us are not aware of its existence?

Perhaps the fact that in 1694 the Bank of England at its formation attacked the Tally Stick System gives us a clue as to why most of us have never heard of them. They realised it was money outside the power of the money changers, (the very thing King Henry had intended).
What better way to eliminate the vital faith people had in this rival currency than to pretend it simply never existed and not discuss it. That seems to be what happened when the first shareholder's in the Bank of England bought their original shares with notched pieces of wood and retired the system. You heard correctly, they bought shares. The Bank of England was set up as a privately owned bank through investors buying shares.

These investors, who's names were kept secret, were meant to invest one and a quarter million pounds, but only three quarters of a million was received when it was chartered in 1694. It then began to lend out many times more than it had in reserve, collecting interest on the lot.
This is not something you could just impose on people without preparation.

The English Revolution of 1642 was financed by the money changers backing Oliver Cromwell's successful attempt to purge the parliament and kill King Charles. What followed was 50 years of costly wars. Costly to those fighting them and profitable to those financing them.
So profitable that it allowed the money changers to take over a square mile of property still known as the City of London, which remains one of the three main financial centres in the world today.

The 50 years of war left England in financial ruin. The government officials went begging for loans from guess who, and the deal proposed resulted in a government sanctioned, privately owned bank which could produce money from nothing, essentially legally counterfeiting a national currency for private gain.

The Bank of England has been used as a model and now nearly every nation has a Central Bank with fractional reserve banking at its core. The country sells bonds to the bank in return for money it cannot raise in taxes. The bonds are paid for by money produced from thin air. The government pays interest on the money it borrowed by borrowing more money in the same way. There is no way this debt can ever be paid, it has and will continue to increase.

If the government did find a way to pay off the debt, the result would be that there would be no bonds to back the currency, so to pay the debt would be to kill the currency.

As hard as it might be to believe, in times of economic upheaval, wealth is rarely destroyed and instead is often only transferred. And who benefits the most when money is scarce? You may have guessed. It's those controlling what everyone else wants, the money changer's. When the majority of people are suffering through economic depression, you can be sure that a minority of people are continuing to get rich.


THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION (1764 - 1781)
By the mid 1700's Britain was at its height of power, but was also heavily in debt.
In order to make their interest payments to the bank, the British government set about a programme to try to raise revenues from their American colonies, largely through an extensive programme of taxation.

There was a shortage of material for minting coins in the colonies, so they began to print their own paper money, which they called Colonial Script. This provided a very successful means of exchange and also gave the colonies a sense of identity. Colonial Script was money provided to help the exchange of goods. It was debt free paper money not backed by gold or silver.
In Response the world's most powerful independent bank used its influence on the British parliament to press for the passing of the Currency Act of 1764.

This act made it illegal for the colonies to print their own money, and forced them to pay all future taxes to Britain in silver or gold.

Here is what Franklin said after that.
"In one year, the conditions were so reversed that the era of prosperity ended, and a depression set in, to such an extent that the streets of the Colonies were filled with unemployed."Benjamin Franklin

"The colonies would gladly have borne the little tax on tea and other matters had it not been that England took away from the colonies their money, which created unemployment and dissatisfaction. The inability of the colonists to get power to issue their own money permanently out of the hands of George III and the international bankers was the PRIME reason for the Revolutionary War." Benjamin Franklin's autobiography

In 1774, Parliament passed the Stamp Act which required that a stamp be placed on every instrument of commerce, indicating payment of tax in gold-which again threatened the colonial paper money. Less than two weeks later, the Massachusetts Committee of Safety passed a resolution directing the issuance of more colonial currency and honouring the currency of other Colonies. On 10 and 22 June 1775, the Congress of the Colonies resolved to issue $2 million in paper money based on the credit and faith of the "United Colonies". This flew in the face of the Bank of England and Parliament. It constituted an act of defiance, a refusal to accept a monetary system unjust to the people of the colonies.

Thus the bills of credit [Ie., paper money] which historians with ignorance or prejudice have belittled as instruments of reckless financial policy were really the standards of the Revolution. They were more than this: they were the Revolution itself.

By the time the first shots were fired in Concord and Lexington, Massachusetts, on 19 April 1775, the colonies had been drained of gold and silver coin by British taxation. Consequently, the continental government had no choice but to print its own paper money to finance the war.

At the start of the Revolution, the American colonial money supply stood at $12 million. By the end of the war, it was nearly $500 million. This was partly a result of massive British counterfeiting. Consequently, the currency was virtually worthless. Shoes sold for 55,000 a pair.


FIRST BANK OF THE UNITED STATES
Arms dealer, Robert Morris was allowed to set up a Bank of England style central bank in the USA in 1781. Already spending the money they would be loaned, no one made a fuss when Robert Morris couldn't raise the deposit, and instead suggested he might use some gold, which had been loaned to America from France.

Once in, he simply used fractional reserve banking, and with the banks growing fortune he loaned to himself, and his friends the money to buy up all the remaining shares. This lasted five years until in 1785, with the value of American money dropping like a lead balloon. The banks charter didn't get renewed.

"This institution, having no principle but that of avarice, will never be varied in its object... to engross all the wealth, power and influence of the state.”

Plutocracy, once established, will corrupt the legislature so that laws will be made in its favour, and the administration of justice will favour the rich only.

The men behind the Bank of North America-Alexander Hamilton, Robert Morris, and the Bank's President, Thomas Willing-did not give up. Only six years later, Hamilton, then Secretary of the Treasury, and his mentor, Morris, rammed a new privately owned central bank, the First Bank of the United States, through the new Congress. Thomas Willing again served as the bank's president. The players were the same, only the name of the bank was changed.

In the last decade of the eighteenth century the United States had just three banks but more than fifty different currencies in circulation: English, Spanish, French, Portuguese coinage, script issued by states, cities, backwood stores, and big city enterprises. The values of these currencies were wildly unstable, thereby making it a paradise for politically indifferent currency speculators who thrive on uncertainty. In addition, the value and exchange rate was almost always outdated or unknown.

And so there it was, in 1791, the First Bank of the United States (BUS). Not only deceptively named to sound official, but also to take attention away from the real first bank which had been shut down.

the American government borrowed 8.2 million dollars from the bank in the first 5 years and prices rose by 72%. This time round the money changer's had learned their lesson, they had guaranteed a twenty year charter.

The president, who could see an ever increasing debt, with no chance of ever paying back, had this to say.
"I wish it were possible to obtain a single amendment to our Constitution - taking from the federal government their power of borrowing."Thomas Jefferson, 1798
While the independent press, who had not been bought off yet, called the scam "a great swindle, a vulture, a viper, and a cobra."

As with the real first bank, the government had been the only depositor to put up any real money, with the remainder being raised from loans the investors made to each other, using the magic of fractional reserve banking. When time came for renewal of the charter, the bankers were warning of bad times ahead if they didn't get what they wanted. The charter was not renewed.

Five month later Britain had attacked America and started the war of 1812.
Meanwhile a short time earlier, an independent Rothschild business, the Bank of France, was being looked upon with suspicion by none other than:

NAPOLEON (1803 - 1825)
He didn't trust the bank saying:
"When a government is dependent upon bankers for money, they and not the leaders of the government control the situation, since the hand that gives is above the hand that takes... Money has no motherland; financiers are without patriotism and without decency; their sole object is gain." Napoleon Bonaparte, 1815

For both sides of a war to be loaned money from the same privately owned Central Bank is not unusual. Nothing generates debt like war. A Nation will borrow any amount to win. So naturally if the loser is kept going to the last straw in a vain hope of winning, then the more resources will be used up by the winning side before their victory is obtained more resources used, more loans taken out, more money made by the bankers; and even more amazing, the loans are usually given on condition that the victor pays the debts left by the loser.

In 1803, instead of borrowing from the bank, Napoleon sold territory west of the Mississippi to the 3rd President of the United States, Thomas Jefferson for 3 million dollars in gold; a deal known as the Louisiana Purchase.

Three million dollars richer, Napoleon quickly gathered together an army and set about conquering much of Europe. Each place he went to, Napoleon found his opposition being financed by the Bank of England, making huge profits as Prussia, Austria and finally Russia all went heavily into debt trying to stop him.

Defeats eventually forced Napoleon into exile. However in 1815 he escaped from his banishment in Elba, an Island off the coast of Italy, and returned to Paris. By March of that year Napoleon had equipped an army with the help of borrowed money from the Eubard Banking House of Paris. With 74,000 French troops led by Napoleon, sizing up to meet 67,000 British and other European Troops 200 miles NE of Paris on June 18th 1815, it was a difficult one to call.

Back in London, the real potential winner, Nathan Rothschild, was poised to strike a bold plan to take control of the British stock market, the bond market, and possibly even the Bank of England. Nathan, knowing that information is power, stationed his trusted agent named Rothworth near the battle field. As soon as the battle was over Rothworth quickly returned to London, delivering the news to Rothschild. This powerful man was not without observers as he hung his head, and began openly to sell huge numbers of British Government Bonds.

Reading this to mean that Napoleon must have won, everyone started to sell their British Bonds as well. The bottom fell out of the market until you couldn't hardly give them away. Meanwhile Rothschild began to secretly buy up all the hugely devalued bonds at a fraction of what they were worth a few hours before.

In this way Nathan Rothschild captured more in one afternoon than the combined forces of Napoleon and Wellington had captured in their entire lifetime.


THE ROTHSCHILDS (1743)
A goldsmith named Amshall Moses Bower opened a counting house in Frankfurt Germany in 1743. He placed a Roman eagle on a red shield over the door prompting people to call his shop the Red Shield Firm pronounced in German as "Rothschild".
His son later changed his name to Rothschild when he inherited the business. Loaning money to individuals was all well and good but he soon found it much more profitable loaning money to governments and Kings. It always involved much bigger amounts, always secured from public taxes.

The 19th century became known as the age of the Rothschild's when it was estimated they controlled half of the world's wealth. While their wealth continues to increase today, they have managed to blend into the background, giving an impression that their power has waned. They only apply the Rothschild name to a small fraction of the companies they actually control. Some authors claim that the Rothschild's had not only taken over the Bank of England but they had also in 1816 backed a new privately owned Central Bank in America called The Second Bank of The United States, causing huge problems to the American president.


ANDREW JACKSON (1828 - 1836)
When the American congress voted to renew the charter of The Second Bank of The United States, Jackson responded by using his veto to prevent the renewal bill from passing. His response gives us an interesting insight. "It is not our own citizens only who are to receive the bounty of our government. More than eight millions of the stock of this bank are held by foreigners... is there no danger to our liberty and independence in a bank that in its nature has so little to bind it to our country?... Controlling our currency, receiving our public moneys, and holding thousands of our citizens in dependence... would be more formidable and dangerous than a military power of the enemy."

The Second Banks head, Nicholas Biddle was quite candid about the power and intention of the bank when he openly threatened to cause a depression if the bank was not re-chartered, we quote. "Nothing but widespread suffering will produce any effect on Congress... Our only safety is in pursuing a steady course of firm restriction - and I have no doubt that such a course will ultimately lead to restoration of the currency and the re-charter of the bank." Nicholas Biddle 1836 By calling in existing loans and refusing to issue new loans he did cause a massive depression, but in 1836 when the charter ran out, the Second Bank ceased to function.

It was then Andrew Jackson made these two famous statements: "The Bank is trying to kill me - but I will kill it!" and later "If the American people only understood the rank injustice of our money and banking system - there would be a revolution before morning..."

Andrew Jackson When asked what he felt was the greatest achievement of his career Andrew Jackson replied without hesitation "I killed the bank!"


ABRAHAM LINCOLN AND THE CIVIL WAR (1861 - 1865)
When people lose their homes someone else wins them for a fraction of their worth. Depression is good news to the lender; but war causes even more debt and dependency than anything else, so if the money changers couldn't have their Central Bank with a license to print money, a war it would have to be. We can see from this quote of the then chancellor of Germany that slavery was not the only cause for the American Civil War. "The division of the United States into federations of equal force was decided long before the Civil War by the high financial powers of Europe. These bankers were afraid that the US, if they remained as one block, and as one nation, would attain economic and financial independence, which would upset their financial domination over the world."

Lincoln, needing money to finance his war effort, went with his secretary of the treasury to New York to apply for the necessary loans. The money changers wishing the Union to fail offered loans at 24% to 36%. Lincoln declined the offer. An old friend of Lincoln's, Colonel Dick Taylor of Chicago was put in charge of solving the problem of how to finance the war. His solution is recorded as this. "Just get Congress to pass a bill authorising the printing of full legal tender treasury notes... and pay your soldiers with them and go ahead and win your war with them also."

Colonel Dick Taylor When Lincoln asked if the people of America would accept the notes Taylor said. "The people or anyone else will not have any choice in the matter, if you make them full legal tender. They will have the full sanction of the government and be just as good as any money; as Congress is given that express right by the Constitution." Colonel Dick Taylor

Lincoln agreed to try this solution and printed 450 million dollars worth of the new bills using green ink on the back to distinguish them from other notes.

The solution worked so well Lincoln was seriously considering adopting this emergency measure as a permanent policy.But in 1863 Lincoln needed just a bit more money to win the war, and seeing him in this vulnerable state, and knowing that the president could not get the congressional authority to issue more greenbacks, the money changers proposed the passing of the National Bank Act. The act went through. From this point on the entire US money supply would be created out of debt by bankers buying US government bonds and issuing them from reserves for bank notes.

In numerous years following the war, the Federal Government ran a heavy surplus. It could not (however) pay off its debt, retire its securities, because to do so meant there would be no bonds to back the national bank notes. To pay off the debt was to destroy the money supply.

With an election coming up the next year, Lincoln himself would wait for renewed public support before reversing the National Bank Act he had been pressured into approving during the war. Lincoln's opposition to the central banks financial control and a proposed return to the gold standard is well documented. He would certainly have killed off the national banks monopoly had he not been killed himself only 41 days after being re-elected. The money changers were pressing for a gold standard because gold was scarce and easier to have a monopoly over. Much of this was already waiting in their hands and each gold merchant was well aware that what they really had could be easily made to seem like much much more. Silver would only widen the field and lower the share so they pressed for...

THE RETURN OF THE GOLD STANDARD (1866 - 1881)
On April 12th in 1866, the American congress passed the Contraction Act, allowing the treasury to call in and retire some of Lincoln's greenbacks, With only the banks standing to gain from this, it's not hard to work out the source of this action.

They would then spread the word through the media they largely controlled that the lack of a single gold standard was the cause of the hardship which ensued, while all this time using the Contraction Act to lower the amount of money in circulation.

By 1872 the American public was beginning to feel the squeeze, so the Bank of England, scheming in the back rooms, sent Ernest Seyd, with lots of money to bribe congress into demonetising silver. Ernest drafted the legislation himself, which came into law with the passing of the Coinage Act, effectively stopping the minting of silver that year.

James Garfield became President in 1881 with a firm grasp of where the problem lay. "Whosoever controls the volume of money in any country is absolute master of all industry and commerce... And when you realise that the entire system is very easily controlled, one way or another, by a few powerful men at the top, you will not have to be told how periods of inflation and depression originate." James Garfield 1881 Within weeks of releasing this statement President Garfield was assassinated.


WORLD WAR I (1914-1918)
The Germans borrowed money from the German Rothschilds bank, the British from the British Rothschilds bank, and the French from the French Rothschilds.

American super banker J.P. Morgan was amongst other things also a sales agent for war materials. Six months into the war his spending of $10 million a day made him the largest consumer on the planet. The Rockefeller's and the head of president Willson's War Industries Board, Bernard Baruch each made some 200 million dollars while families contributed their sons to the bloody front lines, but profit was not the only motive for involvement.

Russia had spoiled the money changers plan to split America in two, and remained the last major country not to have its own central bank. However, three years after the start of the war the entire Russian Royal Family was killed and Communism began. You might find it strange to learn that the Russian Revolution was also fuelled with British money.

Rep. Louis T. McFadden, chairman of the House Banking and Currency Committee throughout the 1920-30s explained it this way.
"The course of Russian history has, indeed, been greatly affected by the operations of international bankers... The Soviet Government has been given United States Treasury funds by the Federal Reserve Board... acting through the Chase Bank. ... England has drawn money from us through the Federal Reserve Banks and has re-lent it at high rates of interest to the Soviet Government... The Dnieperstory Dam was built with funds unlawfully taken from the United States Treasury by the corrupt and dishonest Federal Reserve Board and the Federal Reserve Banks." Rep. Louis T.McFadden (D-PA)

If politicians really were being controlled, you would think at least one would break ranks and cry out against it. Many did. One was no less than former New York City Mayor John Haylan

"These international bankers and Rockefeller-Standard Oil interests control the majority of the newspapers and magazines in this country. They use the columns of these papers to club into submission or drive out of office public officials who refuse to do the bidding of the powerful corrupt cliques which compose the invisible government....
The warning of Theodore Roosevelt has much timeliness today, for the real menace of our republic is this invisible government which like a giant octopus sprawls its slimy length over City, State, and nation...
It seizes in its long and powerful tentacles our executive officers, our legislative bodies, our schools, our courts, our newspapers, and every agency created for the public protection...

To depart from mere generalisations, let me say that at the head of this octopus are the Rockefeller-Standard Oil interest and a small group of powerful banking houses generally referred to as the international bankers. The little coterie of powerful international bankers virtually run the United States government for their own selfish purposes. They practically control both parties, write political platforms, make catspaws of party leaders, use the leading men of private organisations, and resort to every device to place in nomination for high public office only such candidates as will be amenable to the dictates of corrupt big business...

These international bankers and Rockefeller-Standard Oil interests control the majority of newspapers and magazines in this country." John Hylan, Mayor of New York 1927


DEPRESSION IN 1929
Stack in front of you the biographies of all the Wall Street giants, J.P. Morgan, Joe F. Kennedy, J.D Rockefeller, Bernard Baruch, and you'll find they all marvel at how they got out of the stock market and put their assets in gold just before the crash. None mention a secret directive, since revealed, sent by the father of the Federal Reserve, Paul Warburg, warning of the coming collapse and depression. With control of the press and the education system, few Americans are aware that the Fed caused the depression. It is however a well known fact among leading top economists.

"The Federal Reserve definitely caused the Great depression by contracting the amount of currency in circulation by one-third from 1929 to 1933." Milton Friedman, Nobel Prize winning economist

"It was not accidental. It was a carefully contrived occurrence...
The international bankers sought to bring about a condition of despair here so that they might emerge as rulers of us all." Rep. Louis T.McFadden (D-PA) "

I think it can hardly be disputed that the statesmen and financiers of Europe are ready to take almost any means to re-acquire rapidly the gold stock which Europe lost to America as the result of World War I." Rep. Louis T.McFadden (D-PA)

40 billion dollars somehow vanished in the crash. It didn't really vanish, it simply shifted into the hands of the money changers. This is how Joe Kennedy went from having 4 million dollars in 1929 to having over 100 million in 1935. During this time the Fed caused a 33% reduction of the money supply, causing deeper depression.


ADOLF'S BANKERS
Most all will be aware of Hitler's rise to power. What they probably don't know is that he was almost completely financed by money drawn from the privately owned American Federal Reserve. "

After WWI, Germany fell into the hands of the international bankers. Those bankers bought her and they now own her, lock, stock, and barrel. They have purchased her industries, they have mortgages on her soil, they control her production, they control all her public utilities.

The international German bankers have subsidised the present Government of Germany and they have also supplied every dollar of the money Adolph Hitler has used in his lavish campaign to build up threat to the government of Bruening. When Bruening fails to obey the orders of the German International Bankers, Hitler is brought forth to scare the Germans into submission...

Through the Federal Reserve Board over $30 billion of American money has been pumped into Germany. You have all heard of the spending that has taken place in Germany...

Modernistic dwellings, her great planetariums, her gymnasiums, her swimming pools, her fine public highways, her perfect factories. All this was done on our money. All this was given to Germany through the Federal Reserve Board. The Federal Reserve Board has pumped so many billions of dollars into Germany that they dare not name the total." Congressman Louis T.McFadden (D-PA)


FORT KNOX
In 1933 new President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed a bill forcing all the American people, to hand over all their gold at base rate. With the exception of rare coins.

He disowned himself from the bill claiming to not have read it and his secretary of the treasury claimed this was "what the experts wanted". Bought at bargain basement price with money produced from nothing by the Federal Reserve, the gold was melted down and stacked in the newly built bullion depository called Fort Knox.

Once collected in 1935 the price of gold was raised from $20.66 up to $35 per ounce, but only non American gold qualified to be sold. This meant those who had avoided the crash by investing in gold they had shipped to London could now nearly double their money while the rest of America starved.

By the end of WWII Fort Knox did hold 70% of the world's gold, but over the years it was sold off to the European money changers while a public audit of Fort Knox reserves was repeatedly denied. Rumours spread about missing gold.

"Allegations of missing gold from our Fort Knox vaults are being widely discussed in European circles. But what is puzzling is that the Administration is not hastening to demonstrate conclusively that there is no cause for concern over our gold treasure - if indeed it is in a position to do so." Edith Roosevelt

All the Fort Knox gold remaining is now being held as collateral by the Federal Reserve against the national debt. Using credits made from nothing. The Fed had robbed the largest treasure of gold on earth.

Even when Communism collapsed in the Soviet Union, Boris Yeltsin revealed that most of the foreign aid was ending up, we quote. "straight back into the coffers of western banks in debt service."

With Russia down the money changers now had control of every major national economy.

The Federal Reserve Act allowing the creation of Federal Reserve notes is mirrored by the IMF's authority to produce money called Special Drawing Rights (SDR's). It is estimated the IMF has produced $30 billion dollars worth of SDR's so far. In the United States SDR's are already accepted as legal money, and all other member nations are being pressured to follow suit.

With SDR's being partially backed by gold, a world gold standard is sneaking its way in through the back door, which comes with no objection from the money changers who now hold two-thirds of the worlds gold and can use this to structure the worlds economy to their further advantage.

We have gone from the goldsmith's fraud being reproduced on a national scale through the Bank of England and the Federal Reserve, to a Global level with the IMF and the World Bank.

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