Link to source: http://home.clara.net/heureka/gaia/du.htm

July 2001

Don't be misled by the term 'depleted uranium'. Like spent fuel' from civilian reactors, depleted uranium is highly toxic and carcinogenic and has a half life of some 4.4 billion years. -- Alice Slater

NATO is trying to save Kosovars, but if they leave Kosovo filled with depleted uranium, it's not a happy situation. They [would be] poisoning them. If you are going to use depleted uranium in warfare, it's better to drop an atom bomb and kill 30,000 people instantaneously rather than killing them over 20 or 30 years. -- Hari Sharma

Desert Storm veterans along with the people of Iraq and Kuwait were victims of one of the latest military experiments on human beings. I believe that the ignorance was culpable and criminal. -- Rosalie Bertell

We came across a lot of destroyed vehicles and dead bodies as we moved up through Kuwait. Nobody ever told us to stay away from the vehicles that might have been contaminated with depleted uranium. -- Victor Suell, radio operator, US Marines

In Iraq in 1997, I discovered monstrous births of deformed babies and old men who, amid the wreckage which the Allies had blasted with our uranium shells, told me of daughters with breast and liver cancer. -- Robert Fisk

There is now overwhelming evidence that use of depleted uranium is killing peacekeepers from Allied countries now based in the Balkans. It is killing the soldiers who went into the Balkans when the Serbs withdrew, and it is killing the people there who we went to war to supposedly protect. It is also killing the ordinary people of Iraq who have to suffer the triple pressures of a despotic regime, international sanctions, and death from depleted uranium. Using depleted uranium is clearly immoral, but it is also against international law and UN conventions which prohibit the use of weapons which cause indiscriminate deaths and injury. -- Caroline Lucas MEP

In the Navajo creation story, the people were warned not to touch a yellow substance called 'cledge', to leave it in the ground. 'Cledge', now known to be uranium, was from the underworld. The Navajo people had a choice, yellow 'cledge' or yellow corn pollen. The yellow corn pollen posses the positive elements of life, if 'cledge' were to be released from the ground it would bring forth the serpent. The serpent would bring into the world evil, death, and destruction.

Link to source: http://www.counterpunch.org/stclair07042003.html

July 4, 2003

The war on Iraq couldn't have come at a more dire time for Iraq's beleaguered farmers. Spring is harvest time in the barley and wheat fields of the Tigris River valley and planting time in the vast vegetable plantations of southern Iraq.

The war is over, but the situation in the fields of Iraq continues to rapidly deteriorate. The banks, which provide credit and cash, have been looted, irrigation systems destroyed, road travel restricted, markets closed, warehouses and grain silos pillaged.

To harvest the grain before it rots in the fields Iraqi farmers need more than eight million gallons of diesel fuel to power Iraq's corroding armada of combines and harvesters. But most of the fuel depots were incinerated by US bombing strikes. There's no easy way to get the fuel that remains to the farmers who need it most and no desire to do so by the US forces of occupations.

Link to source: http://obrag.org/?p=18322

Tens of thousands of Californians will join protests all around the country on Thursday, March 4th to protest budget cuts in education and social services.

Six regional protests in California are scheduled, including events in the San Fernando Valley, Los Angeles, San Francisco, the East Bay, Sacramento and San Diego. Additional actions include walkouts, teach-ins, picketing and rallies at dozens of campuses around the State.

Following rallies at UCSD, SDSU, and City College, area protesters will gather at the east side of Balboa Park (near Central Cultural) at 3 pm for a short rally (yours truly has been asked to speak), followed by a march through downtown to the local offices of the Governor. The protests are expected to last into the evening.

Demands that will be voiced for San Diego’s Day of Action on March 4th include:

** A halt to layoffs and pay cuts and restoration of full funding to education with a guarantee of free access to all citizens and non-citizens, k-12 up to graduate level.

**Stop the privatization of education and increase public participation in decision-making processes through the democratic election of teachers, parents, and students to run institutions in the interests of society as a whole.

**Progressive taxation on corporations and the wealthy to fully fund social services that sustain community, including the right to health care and living wages for California’s workers.

**Tax payer money for education, not for prisons, wars, and corporate bailouts.

The March 4th actions are just the beginning of what promises to be the biggest spring of protest since the early 1970’s.

Link to source: http://dissidentvoice.org/2010/02/pentagon%E2%80%99s-full-spectrum-dominance-facing-headwinds/

According to Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, who has derided European contributions to NATO in the past, the public and political oppositions in Europe to military action represent an impediment to operations in Afghanistan and, as the New York Times referred to the policy of which Afghanistan is a small part, “the alliance’s broader security goals.”¹

(From Wikipedia): Full spectrum dominance refers to an open Pentagon policy, whereby a joint military complex strives to control all elements of the battle space using land, air, maritime and space based assets. Full-spectrum dominance encompasses air, surface and sub-surface, as well as the electromagnetic spectrum and information space. Control implies the subordination of all opposition forces, rendering their ability to confront the Pentagon and its allies wholly inhibited.

Harold Pinter referred to the policy as he accepted the 2005 Nobel Prize award:

I have said earlier that the United States is now totally frank about putting its cards on the table. That is the case. Its official declared policy is now defined as ‘full spectrum dominance’. That is not my term, it is theirs. ‘Full spectrum dominance’ means control of land, sea, air and space and all attendant resources.

“The demilitarization of Europe—where large swaths of the general public and political class are averse to military force and the risks that go with it—has gone from a blessing in the 20th century to an impediment to achieving real security and lasting peace in the 21st century,” Gates told NATO officers and officials in a speech at the National Defense University, a graduate school, financed by the Defense Department, for military officers and diplomats.

Link to source: http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=BRO20100302&articleId=17881

In addition to mandatory private health insurance premiums, we may soon be hit with a “mandatory savings” tax and other belt-tightening measures urged by the President’s new budget task force.  These radical austerity measures are not only unnecessary, however, but will actually make matters worse.  The push for “fiscal responsibility” is based on bad economics.

When billionaires pledge a billion dollars to educate people to the evils of something, it is always good to peer closely at what they are up to.  Hedge fund magnate Peter G. Peterson was formerly Chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations and head of the New York Federal Reserve.  He is now senior chairman of Blackstone Group, which is in charge of dispersing government funds in the controversial AIG bailout, widely criticized as a government giveaway to banks.  Peterson is also founder of the Peter Peterson Foundation, which has adopted the cause of imposing “fiscal responsibility” on Congress.  He hired David M. Walker, former head of the Government Accounting Office, to spearhead a massive campaign to reduce the runaway federal debt, which the Peterson/Walker team blames on reckless government and consumer spending.  The Foundation funded the movie “I.O.U.S.A.” to amass popular support for their cause, which largely revolves around dismantling Social Security and Medicare benefits as a way to cut costs and return to “fiscal responsibility.”

Link to source: http://sjlendman.blogspot.com/2010/03/funding-israeli-militarism-belligerence.html

From birth, Israel was a regional menace until America became its benefactor in the late 1960s. Now it's a global one, powerful with a large standing army and the latest weapons and technology, nuclear armed and ready to use them. It's belligerent on the slightest pretext or none at all, and a threat to world peace and security because US administrations since Lyndon Johnson supported a nation of 5.6 million Jews in an area the size of New Jersey, partnering in its worst crimes and abuses.

It's due largely to the Israeli Lobby's influence, or as John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt wrote in their book, "The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy," America's Middle East policy is driven "almost entirely (by) US domestic politics, and especially (because of) the (Lobby's) activities....This situation has no equal in American political history."

In his book, "The Power of Israel in the United States," James Petras documented its enormous influence, explaining its roots throughout government, the business community, the dominant media, academia, the clergy, and powerful wealthy Jewish families. Broad support comes from thousands of dedicated activists, including doctors, lawyers, accountants, other professionals, philanthropists, and journalists given special prominence and benefits for their unwavering pro-Israeli reporting, suppressing decades of its militarism, belligerence, and illegal occupation while vilifying Israel's enemies.

As a result, Israel receives enormous benefits, including billions in annual aid, the latest weapons and technology, unrestricted US market access, and free entry of its immigrants. Its imperial wars, illegal occupation, and crimes of war and against humanity are supported. Harmful Security Council resolutions are vetoed and General Assembly ones ignored. As a result, it operates freely, including spying in America by covertly penetrating US military bases, the FBI, CIA, IRS, DHS and many other government agencies, remaining unaccountable for its actions.

Israel is unique as America's largest aid recipient, on the most favorable terms, and virtually anything more requested, given openly or covertly, in violation of the 1961 US Foreign Assistance Act (as amended), stipulating that no aid be provided to governments that engage:

"in a consistent pattern of gross violations of internationally recognized human rights, including torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment, prolonged detention without charges, causing the disappearance of persons by the abduction and clandestine detention of those persons, or other flagrant denial of the right to life, liberty, and the security of person, unless such assistance will directly benefit the needy people in such country."

In 2004, the amended Act let the president provide aid to treat orphans, other vulnerable children, those with HIV/AIDS, and to set up schools and other supportive programs.

US Aid to Israel

In November 2008, Shirl McArthur of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs (WRMEA) used Congressional Research Report (CRS) data for a "Conservative Estimate of Total Direct US Aid to Israel" since 1949, saying it's almost $114 billion, but explaining that determining the exact figure is impossible since parts are buried in various agency budgets, mostly the Defense Department's (DOD) or in forms not easily quantifiable.

He states:

"It must be emphasized that this analysis is a conservative, defensible accounting of US direct aid to Israel, NOT of Israel's cost to the US or the American taxpayer, not of the benefits to Israel of US aid. The distinction is important, because the indirect or consequential costs suffered by the US as a result of its blind support for Israel exceed by many times the substantial amount of direct aid" provided.

Besides Afghanistan and other Middle East conflicts, excluded from McArthur's data, is the mounting Iraq invasion and occupation cost, estimated by Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes to be $3 trillion in their book titled, "The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict."

They include an extra $2 trillion national debt, ad infinitum interest on it, veterans' healthcare and disability payments, the economic impact of lives lost and jobs interrupted, the higher cost of oil, the long-term economic impact, and numerous intangibles such as global anti-American sentiment, the near universal Arab world view that Washington attacked Iraq for Israel, and the US's reduced capability to respond to other global crises and address vital homeland needs.

Link to source: http://www.wsws.org/articles/2010/mar2010/wsjo-m02.shtml

In an editorial published Monday, “A Tale of Two Quakes,” the Wall Street Journal compares the outcome of the massive earthquake that hit Chile on Saturday with the dimensions of the human disaster that has unfolded in Haiti.

Citing the far greater scale of death and destruction in Haiti, the newspaper praises the comparatively higher level of preparedness for such a disaster in Chile, and writes: “But such preparation is also the luxury of a prosperous country, in contrast to destitute and ill-governed Haiti. Chile has benefited enormously in recent decades from the free-market reforms it passed in the 1970s under dictator Augusto Pinochet.”

One wants to respond, to coin a phrase, “Lie, but at least make sense.”

The Haitian people live in dire misery above all because the small island has been under the direct thumb of the US for a century, having experienced military occupations, some lasting for decades, on several occasions. The US propped up the regimes of the hated and brutal Duvaliers, father and son, for thirty years, from 1957 to 1986.

In the most recent period, Washington and the global financial community have imposed “free market” policies on Haiti—precisely the policies that the Journal claims saved Chile from a massive loss of life in its earthquake—with disastrous consequences for the Haitian population. The small farmers in Haiti have been ruined and crowded into Port-au-Prince’s horrific slums, the worst in the Western hemisphere. Whatever infrastructure and social fabric previously existed have been devastated, compounding the toll of death and destruction from the January 12 quake.

Chile’s historical and social development is different. It won independence from Spain in 1818, and although the social structure remained largely intact and the population enjoyed few benefits from independence, the country did not experience the direct domination of the US as Haiti did.

In any event, Chile can be said to be “prosperous” only if one focuses on the conditions of the wealthy. The CIA-backed military dictatorship that took power in September 1973, overthrowing the Allende “Popular Unity” government, killed tens of thousands of political opponents, torturing an equal or larger number in the most barbaric fashion. This is the regime the Journal holds up as a model

Link to source: http://sjlendman.blogspot.com/2010/03/americas-permanent-war-agenda.html

Post-9/11, Dick Cheney warned of wars that won't end in our lifetime. Former CIA Director James Woolsey said America "is engaged in World War IV, and it could continue for years....This fourth world war, I think, will last considerably longer than either World Wars I or II did for us." GHW Bush called it a "New World Order" in his September 11, 1990 address to a joint session of Congress as he prepared the public for Operation Desert Storm.

The Pentagon called it the "long war" in its 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR), what past administrations waged every year without exception since the republic's birth, at home and abroad. Obama is just the latest of America's warrior presidents that included Washington, Madison, Jackson, Lincoln, T. Roosevelt, Wilson, F. Roosevelt, Truman, Johnson, Nixon, Reagan, GHW Bush, Clinton, and GW Bush preceding him.

Link to source: http://www.wsws.org/articles/2010/mar2010/pers-m01.shtml

Inaction by the US Senate last week will result in the cutoff of extended unemployment benefits and COBRA health care coverage to more than one million workers. The cutoff, which began to take effect Sunday night, demonstrates the unbridgeable social gulf between the working class and the denizens of Capitol Hill, both Democrats and Republicans.

The bill to extend unemployment benefits and COBRA coverage was blocked by Republican Senator Jim Bunning, an arch-reactionary from Kentucky who took advantage of a Senate rule requiring unanimous consent to bring the legislation to a vote before the weekend.

Bunning, who is not running for reelection, was contemptuous of the suffering that he was helping inflict on more than one million workers, including an estimated 60,000 from his home state. He demanded that Senate Democrats agree to pay for the extended benefits without creating new debt, and declared that his actions were intended “to send a message to the American people.”

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Majority Whip Richard Durbin repeatedly called the bill up for a vote. Each time it was blocked by Bunning’s voiced objection. But the Democratic Senate leaders declined to declare his action a filibuster and invoke cloture, although the required 60-vote majority would have been easily attainable.

Link to source:  http://liberalpro.blogspot.com/2010/02/tea-parties-and-progressives-maybe-we.html

I’m watching the Tea-Partiers, Glenn Beck and Alex Jones with interest, you see me and people like me are exactly the ones they profess to hate, Liberal Progressives. It makes me chuckle when I hear their complaints. Allow me to bring up some of their major complaints so we are all on the same page here.

One of their chief complaints according to The New York Times article written by veteran investigative journalist David Barstow’s “Tea Party Lights Fuse for Rebellion on Right” is an all-powerful Federal Government that tramples on the people’s rights by spying on citizen’s, reading their e-mails and accessing their computers with no oversight. Well, gee folks, seems like this Liberal Progressive has been writing about this very same set of circumstances since the Patriot Acts were imposed by the Federal Government in their phony war on terrorism. It seems that the war is on us; the very citizen’s that the government is supposed to protect.

I hear the Republicans trying to co-opt the Tea Party movement by trying to ingratiate themselves at every opportunity. I just want to remind those in the Tea Party that these are the same people that brought you The Global War on Terrorism and have managed to obtain almost 800 military bases, a new Navy Fleet South America and have gotten us into two wars in the Mid-East and promulgating the largest Federal Jobs Program that was ever invented in the Free World, the defense budget of the United States of America.

Link to source:  http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=17732

While bank bailouts fatten Wall Street, states continue to battle the credit crisis.  In the search for innovative solutions, some political candidates are proposing that states generate their own credit by setting up their own banks.

State budgets for 2010 face the largest shortfalls on record, totaling $194 billion or 28 percent of state budgets; and 2011 is expected to be worse.  Unemployment has already officially hit 10 percent, and many economists expect it to rise higher. Continued high unemployment will keep state income tax receipts at low levels and increase demand for Medicaid and other essential services states provide.  The existing alternatives are spending cuts or tax increases, but both will just serve to make the downturn deeper.  When states cut spending, they lay off employees, cancel contracts with vendors, eliminate or lower payments to businesses and nonprofit organizations that provide direct services, and cut benefit payments to individuals. The result is a reduction in overall demand.  Tax increases also remove demand, by reducing the amount of money people have to spend.

Link to source: http://www.wsws.org/articles/2010/feb2010/pers-f27.shtml

Thursday’s televised health care summit in Washington ended without any agreement on the part of congressional Republicans to support Obama’s health care proposals. Whatever the wrangling between the two parties, however, all sections of the political establishment are committed to two basic propositions: (1) It is necessary to cut government spending on health care programs that benefit millions of people; and (2) health care services for millions more must be rationed so as to reduce the costs to the corporate-financial elite.

A socialist solution to the crisis—taking the profit out of heath care—is excluded from the official debate, which is based instead on the premise that people’s health should be subordinated to the accumulation of private wealth. This is what makes all of the intricate and mind-numbing schemes being cooked up by White House advisers and corporate lobbyists so irrational and backward.

In an editorial published Friday on the previous day’s summit, the Wall Street Journal taunted the Democrats for the right-wing character of their health plan, writing, “To listen to President Obama and his closest Democratic allies, you’d think John McCain had won the election and their bill had been drafted by [Republicans] Paul Ryan, Tom Coburn and the scholars at the American Enterprise Institute.

“In his opening statement, Mr. Obama said the key issue is ‘figuring out how we can control the huge expansion of entitlements,’ especially ‘the exploding costs of Medicare.’”

Link to source: http://www.wsws.org/articles/2010/feb2010/nbre-f27.shtml

The following is the opening report delivered by Nick Beams, national secretary of the Socialist Equality Party (Australia), to the SEP’s founding congress held in Sydney on January 21–25 (see: “Socialist Equality Party (Australia) holds founding Congress”).

Link to source: http://www.joebageant.com/joe/2010/02/round-midnight.html

Near midnight and I am making tortillas on an iron skillet over a gas flame. Some three thousand miles to the north, my wife and dog nestle in sleep in the wake of a 34-inch snowstorm, while the dogs of Ajijic are barking at the witching hour and roosters crow all too early for the dawn. While my good Mexican neighbors along Zaragoza Street sleep.

Yet here I am awake and patting out tortillas, haunted by the empire that I have called home most of my life.

I like to think that, for the most part, I no longer live up there in the U.S., but southward of its ticking social, political and economic bombs. Because the US debt bomb has not yet gone off, Social Security still exists, and the occasional royalty check or book advance still comes in, allowing me to remain here. And so long as America's perverse commodities economy keeps stumbling along and making lifelike noises, so long as the American people accept permanent debt subjugation -- I can drink, think and burn tortillas. Believe me, I take no smugness in this irony.

There is a terrible science fiction-like awe in the autonomous American economic monolith, in the way that it provides for us, feeds on us and keeps us as its both its lavish pets and slaves. The commodity economy long ago enslaved Americans and other "developed" capitalist societies. But Americans in particular. The most profound slavery must be that in which the slaves can conceive of no other possible or better world than their bondage. Inescapable, global, all permeating, the commodities economy rules so thoroughly most cannot imagine any other possible kind of economy.

Link to source: http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=ROZ20100226&articleId=17825

With the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) on the Reduction and Limitation of Strategic Offensive Arms expiring last December 5 and its successor held up almost three months in large part because of U.S. missile shield provocations in recent weeks, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization is forging ahead with the formulation and implementation of a new Strategic Concept.

On February 5 Russia unveiled its new military doctrine, which identified further NATO expansion eastward to its frontier and American and NATO interceptor missile deployments on and near its borders as the “main external threats of war.” [1]

On February 23 NATO held its fourth seminar on the new – 21st century – Strategic Concept decided upon at the sixtieth anniversary summit in April of 2009 in Strasbourg, France and Kehl, Germany. After previous meetings in Luxembourg, Slovenia and Norway, the final – and far most important – meeting was held in Washington, DC. Entitled Strategic Concept Seminar on Transformation and Capabilities, it was conducted at the National Defense University in the nation’s capital.

The Strategic Concept endorses expansion of the bloc deeper into the Balkans and the former Soviet Union, broadening global partnerships outside the Euro-Atlantic zone and consolidating an interceptor missile system to cover all of Europe as a joint U.S. and NATO project.

Russian concerns and NATO designs are at complete loggerheads, which accounts for among other problems a new START agreement remaining in limbo. And for Russia’s new military doctrine.

The results of the four seminars, masked as deliberative proceedings and even public information forums when in fact all important matters were decided years in advance, will be presented to NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen on May 1 and formally adopted at the NATO summit in Lisbon, Portugal this November.

Link to source: http://sjlendman.blogspot.com/2010/02/americas-supremes-court-over.html

On October 13, 1932, in laying the Supreme Court Building's cornerstone, Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes said: "The Republic endures and this is the symbol of its faith." The words "Equal Justice Under Law" adorn its west facade. Facing east is the motto "Justice, the Guardian of Liberty." Since the Court's 1789 establishment, these words belie its decisions, arguments, and "supreme" allegiance to power, not "We the people."

Since its founding, privilege always counted most in America. The prevailing fiction then and now is that constitutional checks and balances restrain government, the founders having created an egalitarian country free from wealth and poverty extremes common most elsewhere.

Like today, wealthy 18th century colonialists had vastly disproportional land holdings; controlled banking, commerce and industry; assured its own ran the government and courts; and the supreme law of the land, then and now, deters no president, sitting government, or Supreme Court from doing what they wish.

Link to source: http://axisoflogic.com/artman/publish/Article_58654.shtml

Apparently, the corporate media doesn't consider it to be newsworthy: the confession to a Colombian prosecutor of 30,000 murders by paramilitaries who are linked to the Alvaro Uribe regime. To date, Associated Press, Reuters and their contracted media outlets remain silent on this latest news. If it had taken place in Somalia, China, Syria, North Korea, Iran or any of Washington's perceived enemies, we would be seeing it on a CNN special report, backed up on the front pages of the New York Times and Washington Post. The last prominent NYT article reporting in January, 2007 on Colombian paramilitary death squads provided President Uribe with cover, stating:

"Senior members of Mr. Uribe’s government and Mr. Uribe himself have said that anyone shown to have had illegal ties to the paramilitaries, which terrorized Colombian cities and the countryside in the nation’s internal war, which has gone on for decades, and made fortunes in cocaine trafficking, should be prosecuted in courts of law...

"Many Colombians credit Mr. Uribe for declining levels of murders and kidnappings and robust economic growth."

Link to source: http://sjlendman.blogspot.com/2010/02/global-sweatshop-wage-slavery.html

In its mission statement, the National Labor Committee (NLC) highlights the problem stating:

"Transnational corporations (TNCs) now roam the world to find the cheapest and most vulnerable workers." They're mostly young women in poor countries like China, India, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Indonesia, Nicaragua, Haiti, and many others working up to 14 or more hours a day for sub-poverty wages under horrific conditions.

Because TNCs are unaccountable, a dehumanized global workforce is ruthlessly exploited, denied their civil liberties, a living wage, and the right to work in dignity in healthy safe environments. NLC conducts "popular campaigns based on (its) original research to promote worker rights and pressure companies to end human and labor abuses. (It) views worker rights in the global economy as indivisible and inalienable human rights and (believes) now is the time to secure them for all on the planet."

Link to source: http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=17770

In Washington each new day brings a fresh call to “reform entitlement programs” — Social Security, Medicare, etc., (in Congress, the word “reform” now means to eliminate, or drastically reduce).  Tackling Social Security has been on the to-do list of the corporate elite for years, and they’re not waiting any longer.  After years of promoting this cause, conservative think tanks have now garnered solid support from the political establishment as a whole, which includes the Republican and Democratic parties.

The newest liberal recruit to the destruction of Social Security is Thomas Friedman, the influential columnist for The New York Times, who wrote recently:

“The president needs to persuade the country to invest in the future and pay for the past... We have to pay for more new schools and infrastructure than ever, while accepting more entitlement cuts than ever [Social Security, Medicare, etc.] when public trust in government is lower than ever.”  (February 20, 2010).

The nonchalance which Friedman calls for cutting Social Security is indicative of the climate inWashington, where the last remnants of liberalism have been suffocated under the heavy demands of profit-hungry corporations, especially financial institutions and big banks.  For political hacks like Friedman — and there are thousands of them — the ONLY solution to curing the U.S. deficit is cutting social services in general, while specifically targeting Social Security and Medicare.

Source: https://backup.filesanywhere.com/fs/v.aspx?v=916e638e6166b6b670ae

"Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power."
----- Benito Mussolini

The Rev. (Diamond-Dealing) Pat Robinson unwittingly or (more accurately) dimwittedly exposed the fact that the Enslaved Haitian People making a deal with The Devil was an extremely intelligent and logical choice.  

You see, The Devil was the only God with-out a long-term contract:  “Jesus the Christ” was making big-ducks in service to the Pope(s) who Blessed (in His name) the genocide, enslavement, rape, exploitation and plunder: with absolution thrown in as a bonus, that morphed into the forgiveness racket - Mr. Brit Humes.

The God of the Jews was out of the question - because He hates and wants to kill or subjugate all Non-Jews.  Besides - protecting the Jewish monopoly in the enormously profitable Banking, Insurance, Shipping - Sugar/Rum/EnSlavement Trade was a task that even Jesus couldn’t have managed…but the God of the Jews did.   

The God of the Arab’s was a non-starter, because many enslaved Haitian’s remembered stories of the East Afrikan Arab EnSlave Trade which was in full flower, long before The Protégées wanted in on the action.  

The Devil, according to Pat Robinson, kept his end of the bargain (a better performance record then all the European Gods - put together) it might behoove the Haitian People and all The Wretched of The Earth to remember this, because the other Gods including the New One’s like, like the God of the Chinese, and the Indian Subcontinent, have never stopped delivering – too and for the benefit, of their client’s.   

All European States to this day mete out punishment, retribution and revenge, in concert on the Haitian People - for their temerity - to cook the goose that laid the golden eggs.  They, feel cheated by The Revolution1804, that halted the economic model based (till this day) on the exploitation and the enslavement of Afrikan People.  Even the wealthy Slave holding Mulatto’s intrigued with their father’s, as they sought liberation for themselves, according to C. L. R. James in The Black Jacobins (on page 111) …”were strong supporters of slavery” – as they remain to this day.