Tag Archives: Economy

06/12/15

Dubai-based Gulftainer and Its Terrorist Ties

By: Terresa Monroe-Hamilton


Gulftainer, a Middle East-based company, is opening its first American cargo terminal today at
Port Canaveral. The new terminal is expected to have a $630 million impact on the local economy.
(VIDEO STILL/Gulftainer)

Gulftainer Co. Ltd., an Emirati container terminal operator, opened its first US terminal today in Port Canaveral, Florida. A number of staunch conservatives showed up to protest the opening and with good cause.

The terminal, which has leased land at Port Canaveral for 35 years, marks the first significant containerized cargo operation there and has the potential to expand to other ports. With two gantry cranes and 20 acres of container storage space, Gulftainer estimates that terminal could handle up to 200,000 TEUs—or the equivalent of 200,000 20-foot-long shipping containers—each year.

Gulftainer hopes to capitalize on Central Florida’s growing role as a logistics hub, with inland warehouses, rail access to the Northeast and Midwest and land for infrastructure development. Periodically docked at Port Canaveral are nuclear assets for the US military and NATO, so this is also a national security issue.


PORT CANAVERAL, FL April 22, 1994 A port quarter view of the British nuclear-powered
ballistic missile submarine HMS Vanguard (SSBN-50) arriving in port. NASA’s giant Vehicle Assembly
Building (VAB) at the Kennedy Space Center and various space launch pads can be seen in the distance.
UAE’s Gulftainer is building an intermodal container terminal on the same side of the port as the
U.S. Navy submarine base. (Image credit: U.S. Navy/OS2 John Bourvia/Wikimedia Commons)


Map of Port Canaveral, Florida showing Gulftainer’s area of operations, US Navy Trident
submarine base and Canaveral Air Force Station.

Peter Richards, Gulftainer’s managing director, said he has been trying to bring Gulftainer, which operates container terminals in Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Russia, North Africa, Brazil and elsewhere, to the US for about two years. Founded in 1976, Gulftainer is a subsidiary of privately-held conglomerate, Crescent Enterprises, based in the United Arab Emirates. Notice that the countries where this company operates have terrorist ties and/or are hostile to the US. Since Dubai Ports World created a ruckus in 2005 when trying to take control of a number of US ports, Gulftainer has been hesitant to enter the market in the US. But with the Progressive/Marxist atmosphere of the Obama Administration and the blatant colluding with the Muslim Brotherhood here in our government, the time seemed just about right for allowing an Islamic entity to move in and control a major US port, I guess.

Gulftainer is a $100 million investment and simply put, should not be allowed. Since we are in military conflicts across the globe with radical Islamists and countries such as UAE and Qatar are known to have deep terrorist ties, this company should have been thoroughly vetted before allowing them in as an owner of a strategic port. Instead, few have looked into them and they are heralded as an outstanding company.

The promise of new jobs should not overshadow the fact that this company is a security risk. And with nuclear subs docking there, can we afford that kind of gamble? Port leaders expect the new business to create 2,000 jobs with an impact of more than $630 million on the local economy of Port Canaveral.

Perhaps we should listen to those there that are questioning the sanity of allowing a Middle Eastern company to control a port that is of huge significance to the US:

But some opponents, including a California congressman, have raised concerns that the company’s ties to [the] Middle East make it a bad choice to be located near the Kennedy Space Center, Cape Canaveral Air Force Station and other military installations.

“We’re not bad people as I try to emphasize,” said Peter Richards, Gulftainer’s managing director. “We’re good people here for the good of the community (and) the good of the port. And I think in the next six months, they’re going to see that. We’re going to actually generate Canaveral into a good logistics hub.”

Some bloggers have even claimed Gulftainer helped ship weapons to terrorist groups, but the company said that’s not true.

“The garbage that they put about us being linked to terrorist groups, where do they come off?” Richards said. “I don’t understand how anybody can do that. We’re trusted by 15 governments worldwide. We actually cooperate with your own military. We actually provide the logistics for the American forces in the Middle East.”

Port Canaveral leaders are coming to the defense of the company.

“We’ve selected them because they are good, quality people,” said John Walsh, CEO of Port Canaveral. “They are one of the best terminal operators in the world, and then to have members of our community say things that are inappropriate, racist and profiling. To me, that’s not OK.”

And exactly how do you know they are such ‘good’ people? And is it really racist to question the terrorist ties of a company moving into your community? Sounds like those so-called leaders are telling residents to just shut up and go away – that they should know their place and leave big business to the elites as it should be. I don’t think so. Must of been a lot of silver that crossed the palms of leaders and business icons there in Port Canaveral. They’ve been blinded by the shiny light of corruption.

Gulftainer is adjacent to a US Navy nuclear submarine base and NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. It has allegedly been shipping weapons through the Port of Umm Qasr to two Iranian-backed terrorist militia groups in Iraq, the Badr Brigades and Asaeib Ahl al-Haq (AAH), according to a leak from Iraq General Port Company officials in Basra to Iraqi media.

According to the 1776 Channel, who has done yeoman’s work on this subject, Port Canaveral is home to critical national security operations and infrastructure. A plethora of space and defense installations and programs, many of them highly classified, are situated either inside the port or within the immediate vicinity:

• NASA Kennedy Space Center and Visitor Complex
• Patrick Air Force Base
• Cape Canaveral Air Force Station
• US Navy Trident submarine base (Trident Turning Basin)
• Top secret Air Force space plane
• National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) spy satellites
• Department of Defense/Boeing GPS satellites
• SpaceX resupply missions to the International Space Station
• SpaceX Falcon 9 Rocket
• NASA Orion deep space capsule project and test launches
• United Launch Alliance Delta IV Heavy Rocket
• United Launch Alliance Atlas V Rocket
• Nuclear submarines resupply operations
• Lockheed Martin Fleet Ballistic Missile Eastern Ranger Operations
• Air Force Technical Applications Center (AFTAC) – Seismic, hydroacoustic and satellite monitoring of nuclear treaty signatory nations
• Air Force Space Command/45th Space Wing
• Air Force 920th Rescue Wing (Combat Search and Rescue)
• Craig Technologies Aerospace and Defense Manufacturing Center
• Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS)
• US Coast Guard Station Port Canaveral
• Department of Homeland Security – Customs and Border Protection
• Numerous defense contractors (too many too list)

This deal has actually alarmed the military and is raising the eyebrows of a number of security experts. It was approved by Treasury Secretary Jacob ‘Jack’ Lew, a former senior adviser to President Clinton. Gulftainer’s exclusive arrangement with Port Canaveral was negotiated in secret under the code name ‘Project Pelican.’ Evidently, you have to sign the deal before you can know what is in it there in Port Canaveral. Sound familiar? And when all else fails, pull the race card to shut people up.


THE RED SEA – MARCH 5, 2014 – IDF forces seized an Iranian weapons shipment intended for
terrorists in the Gaza Strip during the early morning hours of March 5, 2014. Israel Navy Commander
Maj. Gen. Ram Rothberg led the operation from aboard the Israeli ship and Chief of the General Staff
Lt. Gen. Benjamin “Benny” Gantz oversaw it from the Israel Navy operations room.
(Image credit: Wikimedia Commons/Flikr/Israel Defense Forces)

Gulftainer USA (GT USA) is a unit of UAE’s privately-held intermodal container terminal operator Gulftainer, which in turn is a unit of Crescent Enterprises, part of the Crescent Group conglomerate. The Jafar family owns both of these and has close ties to former President Bill Clinton. The UN is also tied to Gulftainer and just recently it was strongly suspected that Gulftainer was involved with Iran in shipping rockets to Gaza. The shipment were seized by Israel and the reports are classified, so it cannot be proven (yet) that this is the case. But there is an excellent chance that Gulftainer is involved in smuggling weapons and arms for and to terrorists.


The course of the Iranian weapons shipment. (Image credit: Israel Defense Forces)

It would seem that not only do we have people in the US in the highest levels of government that could not pass a background check to clean toilets… we also have Middle Eastern countries being waived into sensitive ports without so much as the most minor of security checks. That’s like sitting on a ticking time bomb and praying that it won’t blow up like a jihadist in a Palestinian work accident. It’s insane. Port Canaveral might want to consider their hasty decision before a nuclear weapon glides into that port that could be used against the US. Just sayin’.

There are brave folks in Florida standing up to this and protesting. I’d like to close with a few pictures from this morning, courtesy of Andrea Shea King of the Radio Patriot:

05/12/15

This one policy has correlated with higher unemployment, more bankruptcies and greater inequality. Can you guess what it is?

By: Benjamin Weingarten
TheBlaze

In a new book titled “The Floating Kilogram,” former long-time Wall Street Journal editor and founder of the New York Sun Seth Lipsky makes an impassioned, reasoned, common sense case for returning America to sound money in the form of the gold standard.

Much like Steve Forbes and Jim Grant with whom we have touched on this issue before, as Seth and I discussed during an in-depth interview, Lipsky believes there is significant economic and moral merit to backing currency with a tangible asset, with benefits for all Americans.

One of his more interesting and overlooked arguments concerns some of the devastating consequences for the country since we officially severed the link between the dollar and gold under President Nixon in 1971. Lipsky explains:

From 1947 when [the] Bretton Woods System really got operating to 1971, when the dollar was convertible into gold at a 35th of an ounce, unemployment in America averaged 4.7 percent. And then we got rid of the Bretton Woods system — we defaulted on it — we went to fiat money, and in the years from 1971 to today, unemployment has averaged significantly above 6 percent. Low unemployment: gold standard. High unemployment: fiat money.

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But it’s not just unemployment. The bankruptcy rate which Elizabeth Warren likes to focus on was one point something per thousand for years, and suddenly it shot up. When did it do that? The mid-1970s when we went off the gold standard and moved to the age of fiat money.

And you’ve no doubt read about this economic Thomas Piketty who likes to warn about the inequality rate. It was trending gently downward for years and suddenly it began to shoot up. That was the mid-1970s when we abandoned the gold standard and went to a system of fiat money.

So there are a lot of reasons to start looking at this and to see whether the absence of a sound dollar is the root cause of our system of growing inequality and high unemployment and lack of jobs and high bankruptcy rate, and to see whether something can be reformed so as to bring us back to a system of sound money. [Links ours]

The title for Lipsky’s book, “The Floating Kilogram,” reflects an editorial published in 2011 in his New York Sun, in which Lipsky asked the question, “Why don’t we let the kilogram float?” The implication is that if weights and measures are no longer defined, why shouldn’t the kilogram — a man-made measure which the New York Times noted may have been losing mass — fluctuate just as a dollar fluctuates in value. Lipsky wrote:

[H]ere in the modern age, the members of the Federal Reserve Board don’t worry about how many grains of silver or gold are behind the dollar. They couldn’t care less. And when the value of a dollar plunges at a dizzying rate, the chairman of Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke, goes up to Capitol Hill and, in testimony before the House, declares merely that he is “puzzled.” No “new urgency” to redefine the dollar for him. The fact is that we’ve long since ceased to define the dollar, and it can float not only against other currencies but against the 371 ¼ grains of pure silver.

So why not the kilogram? After all, when you go into the grocery to buy a pound of hamburger, why should you worry about how much hamburger you get — so long as it’s a pound’s worth. A pound is supposed to be .45359237 of a kilogram, of course. But if the Congress can permit Mr. Bernanke to use his judgment in deciding what a dollar is worth, why shouldn’t he — or some other PhD from Massachusetts Institute of Technology — be able to decide from day to day what a kilogram is worth?

During our interview which you can listen to in full below, we discuss the fundamental flaws in and immorality of floating fiat money and several other topics including:

Note: The link to the book in this post will give you an option to elect to donate a percentage of the proceeds from the sale to a charity of your choice. Mercury One, the charity founded by TheBlaze’s Glenn Beck, is one of the options. Donations to Mercury One go towards efforts such as disaster relief, support for education, support for Israel and support for veterans and our military. You can read more about Amazon Smile and Mercury One here.

05/12/15

Phony “Conservatives” and Britain’s Cultural Collapse

By: Cliff Kincaid
Accuracy in Media

The usually astute Heritage Foundation commentator Nile Gardiner calls the win by the Conservative Party in Britain a defeat for socialism. Yet, Conservative Party head David Cameron ran on a platform boasting that “we have protected the National Health Service, with 9,500 more doctors and 6,900 more nurses, and ensured generous rises in the State Pension.”

Based on this precedent, we can anticipate that Republican Party politicians here in America will one day run on a platform of making Obamacare more affordable, rather than seeking to abolish it. This, then, will be defined as the “conservative” position.

The coverage of the recent British elections has demonstrated that the term “conservative” has lost much of its meaning. It’s time to take a hard look at what the term has come to mean in Britain and how it is being distorted and transformed here.

In addition to the Conservative Party’s embrace of socialist programs, the Cameron government, which has ruled Britain for five years, has embraced Islamic immigration to Britain, going so far as to pay more deference to global Islam than traditional Christianity. Demonstrating this bias, the supposedly “conservative” government in Britain banned American anti-Jihad activists Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer from the country. Geller and Spencer had intended to rally opposition to the Islamization of the West. Spencer called Cameron, who has labeled Islam “a religion of peace,” as the “dhimmi appeaser.” The term means a non-Muslim who accepts Muslim dominance.

Cameron and his Conservative Party have also embraced the legalization of homosexual marriage. The Conservatives’ 2015 manifesto says: “Our historic introduction of gay marriage has helped drive forward equality and strengthened the institution of marriage. But there is still more to do, and we will continue to champion equality for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender people.”

We can easily anticipate the Republican Party going down this road in the United States. In fact, the publication Politico notes that GOP presidential candidate Jeb Bush is among those trying to “have it both ways” on homosexual marriage. “While he publicly maintains his opposition to same-sex marriage, reaffirmed over the weekend by a surrogate he sent to Iowa, Bush is sending signals that he may be more accepting of ‘marriage equality’—the strongest signal, perhaps, coming when he referred to the issue using that term favored by LGBT advocates—than he’s able to let on,” the publication reported.

It noted that Bush has hired a communications director, Tim Miller, who is openly gay, and his inner circle of staffers “have all expressed strong support for marriage equality, including Mike Murphy, hired to run his messaging shop, who wrote about the GOP’s need to evolve on policy following Romney’s defeat in 2012.”

Jeb Bush is shaping up as the David Cameron of the Republican Party.

In Britain the changes keep coming, now at an astounding rate. Andrea Williams of the British group Christian Concern says the Cameron government has not only “destroyed marriage” by redefining it to include homosexual couples, but it is also pursuing liberal policies in other areas. For example, she says the government has liberalized abortion and refused to outlaw abortions on the basis of the sex of the fetus. She says that in Britain nurses and teachers have been suspended for wearing Christian crosses, judges have been replaced for refusing to place children in homosexual relationships with two fathers or two mothers, and Christian street preachers are being jailed for “offensive” comments. “We have no leader at the helm of any of our main parties, whether it’s the Liberal Democrats, the Labor Party or the Conservative Party, who are speaking a moral vision,” she says.

Another British group, the Christian Institute, confirms these ominous trends and warns that “…here in the UK religious liberty is being increasingly challenged…Street preachers have been arrested. Christians have lost their jobs for answering questions about their faith or for taking an ethical stand. Christians in business have come into conflict with equality laws and faced fines for holding to the belief that marriage is between a man and a woman.”

Commentator Charles Moore had warned in March 2015: “Socially conservative moral views are now teetering on the edge of criminality, and are over the edge of disapproval by those who run modern Britain.”

In arguing that “Britain is at heart still a conservative country,” Gardiner of the Heritage Foundation was talking about a country that no longer exists. His only reference to Britain’s cultural collapse came in his observation that Cameron had “alienated many grassroots supporters with highly controversial ‘modernizing’ policies such as backing gay marriage and increasing spending on foreign aid, both deeply unpopular with the Conservative base.” In fact, as we have seen in the statements quoted above, the conservative base has been betrayed on a host of issues. Today, even free speech is at risk in Britain.

In the U.S., it appears that big money is driving the Republican Party to the left, along the same path taken by Britain. The Politico article quoted earlier noted the influence of hedge fund billionaire Paul Singer, who has decided that since his own son is gay, the Republican Party should embrace the homosexual lifestyle and homosexual marriage. The publication said that Bush is determined to win Singer’s personal support, and added that “other billionaire bundlers like Seth Klarman and Dan Loeb, another hedge funder known for asking any candidate who enters his office where they stand on gay rights,” are also looking for Republicans to finance and push their pet causes.

As these developments unfold, it will be up to conservatives in the media and the think tanks to shine a light on the attempted takeover of the Republican Party. That will be much harder to do if the conservative media become part of the problem and go AWOL on the need for a moral vision to save the country.

In this context, Guy Benson, the political editor of its conservative Townhall.com website, has announced that he is a practicing homosexual. Benson, a supporter of homosexual marriage, is a Fox News contributor who appeared on Megyn Kelly’s Fox News show to discuss coming out of the closet through a footnote in his new book. “I think it’s very brave,” Kelly told him.

Fox News has been a major financial backer of the National Lesbian & Gay Journalists Association, a group that featured a male stripper at its recent New York City fundraiser. However, Townhall.com’s parent company is a Christian firm, Salem Media Group, which has refused comment on whether Benson will retain his influential position within the company. The company describes its mission as “targeting audiences interested in Christian and family-themed content and conservative values.”

04/8/15

Obama’s “Potemkin Village”

By: T F Stern
T F Stern’s Rantings

Financial MarketsHistorians would recognize the term “Potemkin village” as it’s used to describe “any attempt to make others believe we are better than we really are”.   I first heard the unusual sounding combination of words this past Saturday evening as used by Dieter F. Uchtdorf in his General Conference talk, On Being Genuine, when he addressed the Priesthood Session.

He intended to emphasize the importance of actually being who you claim to be publicly as he explained the origins of this interesting terminology.

“In the late 18th century, Catherine the Great of Russia announced she would tour the southern part of her empire, accompanied by several foreign ambassadors. The governor of the area, Grigory Potemkin, desperately wanted to impress these visitors. And so he went to remarkable lengths to showcase the country’s accomplishments.

For part of the journey, Catherine floated down the Dnieper River, proudly pointing out to the ambassadors the thriving hamlets along the shore, filled with industrious and happy townspeople. There was only one problem: it was all for show. It is said that Potemkin had assembled pasteboard facades of shops and homes. He had even positioned busy-looking peasants to create the impression of a prosperous economy.”

As I listened my first thoughts turned immediately to Barrack Obama and his administration; lie after lie covered by smoke and mirrors, deception and stone walling to keep the public in the dark until such time as the truth didn’t matter anymore.

The health and safety of our nation has taken a back seat to how Obama and his administration appear in public; but I fear it is much worse than Grigory Potemkin’s slight of hand trick to make himself look good, Obama’s implementation of Marxist communism seems to be the driving force behind all this fakery.

An example of Obama’s questionable use of the presidency, and I’m being far too kind in calling it questionable; some might prefer treasonous…would be his entering into nuclear treaty talks with Iran.

Thomas Sowell wrote an article for the National Review,  Obama’s Iran ‘Agreement’ Is a Charade, in which he outlines the incredulity of forming any alliance with Iran and believing this band of terrorists might keep their word.  (I suppose the folks in Iran are saying the same thing about Obama and his administration; none are men of integrity.)

“By abandoning virtually all its demands for serious restrictions on Iran’s nuclear-bomb program, the Obama administration has apparently achieved the semblance of a preliminary introduction to the beginning of a tentative framework for a possible hope of an eventual agreement with Iran.

{…}

Why then all these negotiations? Because these charades protect Barack Obama politically, no matter how much danger they create for America and the world. The latest public-opinion polls show Obama’s approval rating rising. In political terms — the only terms that matter to him — his foreign policy has been a success.”

Sowell goes on to give a history lesson on Neville Chamberlain’s handling of a treaty made with NAZI Germany in an attempt to stave off war.  At no time did it appear that Chamberlain intended to set Great Britain up for the nasty ramifications of such poor judgment; but at the same time his actions did “throw a small country to the Nazi wolves in order to get a worthless agreement with Hitler”.

On the other hand, as Sowell points out, Obama’s worthless treaty giving Iran the ability to expand its nuclear program may well be throwing Israel to the wolves “for the sake of another worthless agreement”.

“If anyone examines the hard, cold facts about the Obama administration’s actions and inactions in the Middle East from the beginning, it is far more difficult to reconcile those actions and inactions with a belief that Obama was trying to stop Iran from getting nuclear weapons than it is to reconcile those facts with his trying to stop Israel from stopping Iran from getting nuclear weapons.”

If you consider the folks Obama has for his inner circle then his intentions become more troubling.

His senior advisor, Valerie Jarrett, has ties to the Muslim Brotherhood and openly stated she looks forward to using America’s ignorance and tolerance of all religions via the First Amendment to further advance Islam into our society in order to bring about an eventual Transformation to Islam here.

Obama has been steadily weakening our military while at the same time placing ‘questionable’ individuals who happen to be Muslim, not only Muslim… but individuals who have ties to radical jihadist groups in key positions of government.

“In 2002 Mohamed Elibiary founded the Freedom and Justice Foundation in Plano, Texas. Freedom and Justice is the political party of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. He was appointed a member of the Homeland Security advisory council which meant Elibiary had access to security documents. In October of 2011, it was reported he took sensitive reports from the Texas Department of Public Safety.”

Obama, Hillary and the Muslim BrotherhoodI almost wish I wasn’t aware of the loose ends, the shady deals, the outright lies and deception Obama and his administration have foisted off on the public, all the while claiming to be working for a better America.  It would seem the America Obama wants our constitutional republic Transformed into is under the flag of Islam.

America’s economic recovery… It’s all for show and major media outlets refuse to report the truth, instead they prefer building up Obama’s image as America’s first and greatest Black president.

I haven’t brought up job reports, unemployment or the disturbing fact that 63 million potential members of the workforce don’t have a job, some of them having quit looking long ago so they aren’t considered unemployed.  How’s that for another of Obama’s Potemkin Villages?

This article has been cross posted to The Moral Liberal, a publication whose banner reads, “Defending The Judeo-Christian Ethic, Limited Government, & The American Constitution”.

03/19/15

Senate Budget Committee Adopts Sessions Welfare Reform Amendment 15-8

BACKGROUND:

The U.S. currently administers around 80 welfare and poverty assistance programs across a fractured, disjointed, ineffectual bureaucracy. The costs of these programs add up to $1 trillion a year—about $750 billion federally, plus about $250 billion in state contributions. That means we could give each household in poverty a $30,000 check every year and still spend half of what we spend on these welfare programs each year. Senator Sessions offered an amendment that would establish welfare reform priorities designed to transition workers from dependency to independence—this would be accomplished not by cutting benefits but by prioritizing job placement. Only 1% of welfare funds currently go to job training; Sessions argued that welfare reform legislation should redirect a greater share of those funds towards job training and apprenticeships. Sessions also argued that companies looking for workers should go to the welfare office instead of the immigration office, and that benefits should be consolidated to improve oversight and efficiency.

03/6/15

Media Cheerleading for Obamacare Victory at Supreme Court

By: Roger Aronoff
Accuracy in Media

While the media continue to spin the King v. Burwell case as an existential threat to President Obama’s signature health care legislation, we at Accuracy in Media continue to expose how flawed those supposed “reforms” have been. Yet the media blindly and obstinately defend Obamacare as an administration success. A recent Washington Post editorial even suggests that the Supreme Court, which heard arguments for this case on March 4, should avoid tearing “apart a law that has slowly but surely found its footing.”

The idea that Obamacare—a job-killing law that is unaffordable and unworkable, coupled with more than 20,000 pages of added regulations causing perverse effects on the marketplace—has “surely found its footing” is part of a false narrative created jointly by pro-administration advocates and a media willing to justify the burdensome restrictions this has placed on the American people.

Now, we are being actively sold another false bill of goods: that the dispute over subsidies, and whether state or federal exchanges should be used for subsidies, threatens the many Americans who signed up for coverage under Obamacare. “Don’t be bamboozled by talk of disaster,” writes Betsy McCaughey for the New York Post. “Senate Republican leaders indicated on Monday that they’ll be ready to provide financial assistance to ‘help Americans keep the coverage they picked for a transitional period.’”

Yet Slate’s Eric Posner writes that “If the plaintiffs win, then most low-income people will drop out of the market because they cannot afford insurance without the subsidies.” In addition, Posner continues, “Only the sickest people will stay in, which will cause insurance companies to raise prices for everyone, causing more people to drop out and potentially throwing the insurance market into a spiral of death.”

Also, the media keep repeating that these six words, “an exchange established by the state,” were somehow thrown into the bill by mistake, or that it really meant something else. Except, according to Michael Carvin, attorney for the plaintiffs, the health care law contains “words limiting subsidies to ‘an exchange established by the state’ … 11 times,” reports NPR.

On March 4 Paul Kane devoted an entire Washington Post article to the idea that “Congress can sometimes be sloppy.” “If that’s the case, how did Congress end up writing such an ambiguous provision?” he asks. “And why hasn’t anyone on Capitol Hill fixed it?”

While D.C. politics are currently too fractious to fix this patently flawed law, “Losing in court will force the president to finally negotiate changes to his expensive, unworkable health law,” argues McCaughey. If the plaintiffs succeed, “Suddenly, the politically impossible—compromise on ObamaCare—will become politically inevitable.”

In fact, the law has already been altered on numerous occasions. While the standard line has been that the Republicans in the House have tried to repeal Obamacare more than 40 times, it has actually been altered at least 47 times, according to The Galen Institute. Of those, at least 28 were changes “that President Obama has made unilaterally, 17 that Congress has passed and the president has signed, and 2 by the Supreme Court.”

Currently, the Health and Human Services Secretary has signaled that the administration “does not have a backup plan to help those who could lose their insurance,” according to US News and World Report.

On Wednesday, the same day King v. Burwell was being argued at the Supreme Court, MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell introduced the subject, saying, “At issue is whether states that rely on the federal health care exchange can provide subsidies to make it more affordable. If the court rules against the White House, eight million people could lose their coverage and premiums for millions more would skyrocket, making the plan basically unsustainable.”

Mitchell’s “facts” are highly dubious. Eight million people could lose their coverage? This appears to be based on a RAND study which estimates, “that 8 million people would become uninsured, and many others would see their health premiums spike,” according to US News and World Report.

The administration claims that 11.4 million people are signed up for private health care under Obamacare, which they claim proves that Obamacare is “working,” and a success.

But Avik Roy, who has been writing about this for Forbes, pointed out that “once you unravel the spin, what the latest numbers show is that the pace of enrollment in Obamacare’s exchanges has slowed down by more than half. If previous trends hold, Obamacare exchanges have enrolled roughly 5 million previously uninsured individuals: a far cry from 11.4 million.”

And what about the 40 million uninsured we were told about during the dishonest selling of Obamacare? This month marks five years since the so-called Affordable Care Act became law.

While pundits argue over the success of Obamacare, and whether those six words—“an exchange established by the state”—were a mistake, or should be disregarded because they supposedly contradict the overall intent of the law, the decision should come down to this: It’s not just the plain-language meaning of the law, which is very clear. The law wouldn’t have passed without including that language. It was not a mistake, or a drafting error. Then-Senator Ben Nelson of Nebraska called it a “deal breaker,” according to Politico in 2010, two months before it became law.

In other words, without that incentive for the states to set up exchanges, he wouldn’t vote for it. The evidence is clear, as laid out in this American Spectator article, no longer available on their website.

And don’t forget Jonathan Gruber. He was one of the architects of Obamacare, and a close adviser to President Obama. He received millions of taxpayer dollars, from various states and the federal government. Gruber is the person who said that passing Obamacare depended “on the stupidity of the American voter,” and that it was “written in a tortured way” in order to deceive the voters about all the taxes they would have to pay. Regarding the subsidies being paid only to state exchanges, Gruber said that was “to squeeze the states to do it [to set up exchanges].”

One must ask also whether a family of four earning more than $90,000 per year should actually be subsidized by the government, or whether this is just a hook to get more and more people receiving government aid, and tie them to the political party most generously doling out these “discounts.” In this case, that would be the Democratic Party.

Mortimer Zuckerman, writing for The Wall Street Journal has also connected employers’ preference for part-time over full-time employees to the perverse effects of this law.

Betsy McCaughey is one of the few members of the media focusing on the positive outcomes that could result from plaintiffs winning this case—instead of claiming that disaster will strike. She argues these include benefits such as “relief for about 250,000 businesses” and “a system that lets people buy the health plans they want and work the hours they want.”

These potential benefits can only be understood in the light of the actual provisions of the law. If states agreed to establish exchanges, receiving in exchange subsidies for those signing up, “with the subsidies come something very important: the taxes and the penalties under the employer mandate penalty. So when 37 states decided not to set up exchanges, the administration tried to fix it with a rule, through the IRS, that subsidies would be issued in all 50 states, plus the employer mandate penalty,” asserted Scott Pruitt, the Oklahoma Attorney General on Fox’s On the Record with Greta Van Susteren. He is one of the attorneys general fighting to limit the damage from Obamacare.

Many pundits read into Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy’s remarks during oral arguments that a ruling against the White House position would result in states being effectively coerced into setting up exchanges, invoking a federalism argument. This was a hopeful sign to those wanting to see Obamacare survive. But Attorney General Pruitt pointed out in a Wall Street Journal column that states “are not children who must be protected by the federal government from making choices.” He said that when Oklahoma chose not to set up a state exchange, the state “knew the consequences of its decision but was not coerced into cooperating with implementation of the Affordable Care Act,” and still wouldn’t be.

Obamacare, except in a very few cases, has been an unmitigated disaster—no matter how Obama, the Democrats and the media try to sell it otherwise.

03/4/15

The Betrayal Papers, Part III of V: Obama’s Scandals and Assaults on Freedoms Explained

The Obama administration’s scandals and domestic policies are often directly linked to the Muslim Brotherhood and their goals for Islamic conquest.

The Betrayal Papers Part I – Under Obama: U.S. Captured by the Muslim Brotherhood, presented a picture of a conspiracy that is manipulating the American government. Part II – In Plain Sight: A National Security “Smoking Gun” named several people in the Obama administration who have documented associations to Muslim Brotherhood front groups and the State of Qatar. This article will explore the deliberate strategy of the Muslim Brotherhood and the Obama administration to cripple the middle class and to steer the American economy, as well as identify, to the extent possible, their role in many Obama scandals.

Introduction

What do Common Core, “comprehensive” immigration reform, and IRS targeting of conservatives groups have in common? They are just a few examples of Muslim Brotherhood-connected policy initiatives that are affecting the lives of Americans every day. Under Obama, many new domestic policies, as well as many scandals, can be traced back to, in varying degrees, the Muslim Brotherhood.

To understand why America no longer feels like America – why it seems that the government has its favorites and while others are targeted and even persecuted – it is important to understand two strong influences on the Muslim Brotherhood. The first is historical: the Nazi Party of Hitler’s Germany. The second is more contemporary: the strategy developed by Al Qaeda’s strategic mastermind, Abu Musab al-Suri.

“The Vampire Economy” and Economic Repression

In 1939, German economist Guenter Reimann published a study of the German economy under Hitler. The Vampire Economy described a corrupt, backwards economy that was not based on any economic logic, much less profit seeking, but instead on the politics of the Fuehrer (i.e., Leader), Adolf Hitler.

Like Communism, Nazism was a form of socialism. (The term Nazi is a contraction of the German word Nationalsozialismus, or National Socialism.)   Unlike Soviet Communism, which, at least theoretically, depended on shared ownership of capital to direct the economy, in Nazi Germany the shops, farms, and factories remained, nominally, in private hands.[i] Yet the outcome was basically the same in both Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany: total control over the economy by the Leader and the Party.

In Germany, the pseudo-legal rationale used by the Nazis was regulation, which was subject to change on a whim. If you stepped outside the regulations, you were punished with fines, political persecution, imprisonment, and possibly shipped off to a concentration camp. Sound familiar?

Yet pervasive corruption in the Third Reich ensured the rules applied differently to those in favor, and to those who opposed the Nazis. Specifically, in such an economy, there are party members in good standing, and there were dissidents. Party members can break rules with impunity, while dissidents face public character assassinations and blacklisting.

This calls to mind Obamacare’s implementation. Certain companies, approximately 1,200 in fact, received waivers from the law. Other businesses were forced to provide health coverage for abortions against the will and conscience of the business owners (though the Supreme Court later overruled this regulation). A similar comparison can be made for the fines and prosecutions unequally levied on banks for violating a myriad of complex and overlapping regulations.

Abu Musab Al-Suri’s Plan to Cripple the American Economy

Although most Americans know the name Osama bin Laden, very few know the name Abu Musab al-Suri. While bin Laden provided the charisma and wealth to found Al Qaeda, al-Suri, one of his top lieutenants, provided valuable strategic advice to the fledgling jihadi network. A member of the Muslim Brotherhood from the time he was a student, al-Suri rose to become a member of the Brotherhood’s military command in 1982.

Al-Suri was a calculating thinker, who recognized that to bring down America (and the West in general) would require something different than mass murders. He urged the targeting of high value targets, such as infrastructure, which would force the United States to incur significant economic costs. As an example of this strategy in practice, Al-Suri was the architect of the 2004 Madrid train bombings. There is a good case to be made that the World Trade Center was long in Al Qaeda’s sights precisely because it was a bastion of capitalism, an important hub of New York City’s communications network, and the home of many prominent companies.

Of course, there’s little sense in physically targeting an economy which has already been knuckled-down under onerous, impossible to keep-up-with regulations issued by Obama’s bureaucracies. Various sectors of the American economy have already been effectively taken over by the Muslim Brotherhood Obama administration, including: healthcare, banking, energy, agriculture (think EPA and FDA), and transportation. Last week, the Obama administration, without the consent of Congress or the people, seized untold new powers to regulate the internet.

Meanwhile, as the government unapologetically intrudes into every aspect of life and business, a case could be made that the middle class is being systematically bankrupted. Financial columnist Charles Ortel has shown that the economy is fundamentally as weak as it has been in a generation. Following the collapse in 2008, the government pumped in trillions of dollars to supposedly stabilize and jumpstart the economy (recall the misnamed “Stimulus”). But as of January 2015, there were fewer core jobs in the private sector economy than ten years earlier. Compounding this economic morass is national debt: in roughly the same period (2005-2014), debt has increased $16.5 trillion, to $58 trillion. Finally, information from 2012 and 2013 (the most recent data available), shows pre-tax incomes decreasing for high, middle, and low income earning households.

Abu Musab al-Suri had a terrorist superstar with Osama bin Laden. However, when it comes to economically knee-capping the American economy, Barack Hussein Obama has proved far more effective than the cave rat, Sheikh bin Laden.

U.S. Chamber of Commerce in Doha, Qatar – Bipartisan Influence by Muslim Brotherhood

What would be powerful enough to exert this influence over the American economy? What entity could be that pervasive as to reach into big business across the nation?

In February 2010, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce established their first legal Chamber in Doha, Qatar. Qatar, the reader should be reminded, is a prolific financier of terror. Qatar is also home to the spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, Yusuf al-Qaradawi, now an Interpol fugitive. The Chamber represents American business and also has an explicitly political and diplomatic mission. In the words of the Chamber’s Executive Vice President and COO, David Chavern, AmCham Qatar is “another concrete example of positive U.S. Engagement with the Muslim world.”

Among the companies and organizations which are premier sponsors of AmCham Qatar are ExxonMobil, The Boeing Corporation, Carnegie Mellon Qatar, Northwestern University in Qatar, and Fluor.   Moreover, the following companies have significant involvement with the State of Qatar: Lockheed Martin, Bloomberg, Bank of America, Miramax, among many more.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, with its close ties to Qatar, is by far the largest lobbying spender in Washington ($136.3 million in 2012). Business is a bipartisan pursuit, which means that money from Qatar – which is arguably today’s most prolific financial sponsor of Islamic terror – carries great weight in both Republican and Democrat circles.

Indeed, Republican Senator Lindsey Graham is on the record last year as saying, “I’m going to embrace being a Chamber of Commerce Republican.” He was part of a bipartisan Senate delegation to Qatar this January which also included Senators John McCain (R-AZ), Bob Corker (R-TN), John Barrasso (R-WY), Angus King (I-ME) and Tim Kaine (D-VA).

The Brotherhood’s Connections to Policies and Scandals of the Obama Administration

In June 2012, The Daily Caller reported that the CAIR, the Council on American Islamic Relations, had attended “hundreds” meetings with the Obama administration. CAIR, it will be recalled, is a Muslim Brotherhood front organization very closely tied to Hamas.

Why so many meetings? What incredible portfolio of business does CAIR have to discuss with an American administration? What follows is a snapshot of various policies and scandals that are linked, often directly, to Muslim Brotherhood individuals, organizations, and their goal of “civilization jihad.”

Militarization of the Department of Homeland Security: While running for President, Obama stated several times that America needed a civilian national security force that matched the might of the U.S. military. Candidate Obama stated in 2008, “We’ve got to have a civilian national security force that’s just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded.”

To many, this sounded like a call for a militarized federal police force. Given that DHS has been advised by such people as Mohammed Elibiary, Arif Alikhan, Eboo Patel, and Mohamed Magid, who each have documented ties with the Muslim Brotherhood, is it not possible that DHS has been weaponized as a force against the American by the Islamists?

Domestic Spying and Wiretapping: While journalists at AP and Fox News have been subjects of wiretapping ordered by Eric Holder’s misnamed Department of Justice, the NSA’s dragnet on regular Americans has been revealed to be broader than virtually anyone suspected.

Curiously, the spreadsheets that were leaked detailing the email tracking of Muslim American leaders stop in 2008. CAIR Director Nihad Awad is listed as a target, as is Faisal Gill, a Republican operative who held a top-secret security clearance with the Department of Homeland Security. The spreadsheets were leaked in 2014 by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

Purge of Military Officers and Christianity: Over the past several years, the U.S. military has been purged of hundreds of high ranking officers. Many of these dedicated military officers were dismissed based on trivial offenses. Occurring simultaneously is a purge of Christianity, indeed even Bibles, from the U.S. military.

Anti-Police Protests: In conjunction with the militarization of DHS, state and local law enforcement have been targets of the Obama administration and Eric Holder’s Department of Justice. This anti-police agenda culminated last summer with riots in Ferguson, Missouri and violent protests New York City. Among the most prominent groups involved in these protests was ANSWER, a pro-Palestinian group that had on its original steering committee the Muslim Students Association.

Finally, the NYC cop killer Ismaaiyl Abdullah Brinsley stated on his own Facebook page that he was previously an employee of the (Muslim Brotherhood) Islamic Society of North America (ISNA). At the time of the killing, the president of ISNA was Mohamed Magid, an advisor to Obama, DHS, and the National Security Council.

Immigration and Amnesty: Revealed in a recent editorial, “Between 2010 and 2013, the Obama administration imported almost 300,000 new immigrants from Muslim nations — more immigrants than the U.S. let in from Central America and Mexico combined over that period.” Given the paucity of background and security checks, as well as the high incidence of terrorism from such countries, it is any surprise that the FBI now admits that ISIS is active in all 50 states?

The Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC), another Muslim Brotherhood front organization operating in the United States, conveniently issued a policy paper in September 2013 calling for “comprehensive immigration reform.”

Moreover, in January the Obama appointed Fatima Noor, a veiled Muslim woman, to the position of “Special Assistant in the Office of the Director for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services in the Department of Homeland Security.” Other than her religion, her credentials are very thin.

It is hardly an exaggeration to state that the administration is taking gradual steps to eliminating the very concept of American citizenship. In fact, a recent White House conference call made it explicit that these new immigrants are not supposed to assimilate into American society, but instead establish their own ethnic communities within the United States. Does this remind anyone of Gaza, or the no-go zones in Europe?

Common Core: Even classroom education has not escaped the tentacles of the Muslim Brotherhood. The connection between Common Core and the international terror group is through, once again, Qatar. The Connect All Schools initiative is a program to promote “One World Education.” It is aligned to Common Core State Standards, and is funded by the Qatar Foundation International (QFI). The director of QFI’s Research Center for Islamic Legislation and Ethics is Tariq Ramadan, grandson of Muslim Brotherhood founder, Hassan al-Banna.

According to WND, in 2011 QFI “partnered with the Department of State and the U.S. Department of Education to facilitate matchmaking between classrooms in the U.S. and international schools through … the “Connect All Schools” project.” QFI explains on its own website that the initiative was founded in response to Obama’s infamous 2009 Cairo speech, during which Obama had the Muslim Brotherhood seated in the front row.

Participation of the Qatar Foundation International puts in proper context the ever more prevalent cases of Sharia (i.e. Islamic law) incursions into American schools, such as: girls forced to cover up like devout Muslims on school sponsored trips to mosques; Islamic vocabulary lessons in high school; the teaching of Islamic culture; teaching the five pillars of Islam and “A call to jihad;” and Qatar investing $5 million to teach Arabic in schools.

Finally, any treatment of Common Core would not be complete without mentioning the involvement of another one of Obama’s mentors, domestic terrorist Bill Ayers. Ayers received $49.2 million from Vartan Gregorian, a board member of Qatar Foundation who is also part of Obama’s White House Fellowships Commission. Gregorian is an integral part of Connect All Schools.

IRS Targeting of Conservative and Pro-Israel Groups: The targeting of Obama’s political enemies is reminiscent of the politicized bureaucracies of all tyrannies, from Nazism to Communism and everything in between. Among the persecuted by apparatchik Lois Lerner were: hundreds of conservative groups, Constitutional groups, groups that criticized Obama, 5 pro-Israel groups, and an 83 year old Nazi concentration camp survivor.

As usual, the pattern of targeting conservatives, Israel, and Jews in general is the trend of the Obama administration … and the Muslim Brotherhood. The IRS targeting nearly mirrors DHS’s profiling of “right wing sovereign citizens and extremist groups” as the primary terrorist threat facing the country, which was CAIR approved.

In addition to suppressing political enemies, the IRS has actually enabled the Muslim Brotherhood through Obama’s half-brother, Malik. In 2011, the IRS granted a 501(c)(3) statuses to two groups connected to Barack Obama’s half-brother, Malik Obama: the Barack H. Obama Foundation (BHOF), and Mama Sarah Obama Foundation (MSOF).

This would not be of particular concern, but for the fact that Malik Obama has documented associations with the Muslim Brotherhood, wanted terrorists, and terrorist organizations. These include Sudan’s Muslim Brotherhood leader Omar al-Bashir, the organizers of the infamous 2010 Gaza Flotilla, and Hamas. In fact, contravening all standard practices, the IRS granted the tax exempt status to BHOF retroactively, after it was learned that Malik was falsely and criminally representing his organization as a charity (which, at the time, it was not). A full report on these activities was produced by the Shoebat Foundation, and can be read here.

The George Soros Connection

In more than one of these instances, the fingerprints of billionaire investor (and breaker of nations and currencies) George Soros can be found. Soros operates a vast network of various “leftist” front organizations. In reality, these organizations are anything but liberal. They regularly attack capitalism, Israel, and fund the subversion of American society. It is not the intention here to dissect Soros’s network and political machinations, but to place him in context in the above scandals.

Combating “Islamophobia”: Soros has “donated” $10,117,186 to the Center for American Progress since 2000. One of the major initiatives of CAP is to combat “sharia hysteria” by the “religious right.”

Ferguson unrest: Soros’s Open Society Institute donated $33 million in one year to various activist groups in Ferguson who were active in the protests and subsequent destruction.

Immigration: Prominent Muslim American immigration lawyer Rabia Chaudry is employed by another Soros-controlled group, the New America Foundation. Previously Chaudry was Media Relations Director of CAIR-CT.

Common Core: A project of the Soros-funded Center for American Progress (CAP), Common Core was conceived under the direction of John Podesta, while he was President of CAP. Podesta is currently Counselor to Obama, and also a Visiting Professor at Georgetown University Law Center. (Note: Georgetown has a campus of their School of Foreign Service in Doha, Qatar. All campus costs are fully covered by a grant of the Qatar Foundation, which also funds aspects of Common Core.)

Net Neutrality Regulation: According to Washington Examiner, Soros funded “net neutrality” groups to the tune of $196 million. Net neutrality was adopted last week by a committee vote of the FCC, and is widely expected to be used to regulate content on the internet and television.

Conclusion

Tyranny, whatever name it’s given, has one recipe. It starts with a base of fear, it’s spiced with terror, and served with sides of persecution and intimidation. The poorer and more desperate the people become, the more readily they’ll meld into the pottage of political domination by their government.

Taken alone, none of these events would be of much concern in a country of 300+ million people. Even the general feeling of depression and oppression by government could be overlooked as a result of global economic conditions, many which are out of the control of even the President of the United States.

But viewed together through the lens of the Muslim Brotherhood’s plan to dominate America and bring her down from within, dismissing them as coincidence would be to ignore a carefully constructed plan. Whether attacks on cops, downright crazy immigration policies, the persecution of American citizens by the IRS, or the takeover of school curricula, there is a rhythm to all of these scandals that jives seamlessly with the song of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Evidence above suggests a bipartisan infection, a betrayal of the American people by the crony establishment in both parties. What will it take before the pundits, politicians, and regular Americans start to demand answers and accountability from the people in their own government who are each day plotting their demise, and will only be content when the American people are destitute and servile?

 

The Betrayal Papers is a collaborative effort by the Coalition of Concerned Citizens, which includes: Andrea Shea King, Dr. Ashraf Ramelah, Benjamin Smith, Bethany Blankley, Brent Parrish, Charles Ortel, Will Palumbo, Denise Simon, Dick Manasseri, Gary Kubiak, Gates of Vienna, IQ al Rassooli, Jeff Bayard, Leslie Burt, Marcus Kohan, Mary Fanning, General Paul E. Vallely, Regina Thomson, Scott Smith, Terresa Monroe-Hamilton, Colonel Thomas Snodgrass, Trevor Loudon, Wallace Bruschweiler, and William Palumbo.

[i] The nominal private ownership which was centrally directed by the Nazis was called Zwangswirtschaft, German for “compulsory economy.” Writes the famous economist Ludwig von Mises in Human Action, “The second pattern [of socialism] (we may call it the Hindenburg or German pattern) nominally and seemingly preserves private ownership of the means of production and keeps the appearance of ordinary market prices, wages, and interest rates. There are, however, no longer entrepreneurs, but only shop managers (Betriebfuehrer in the terminology of Nazi legislation). These shop managers are seemingly instrumental in the conduct of the enterprises entrusted to them; they buy and sell, hire and discharge workers and remunerate their services, contract debts and pay interest and amortization. But in all their activities they are bound to obey unconditionally the order issued by government’s supreme office of production management. This office… tells the shop managers what and how to produce, at what prices and from whom to buy, at what prices and to whom to sell. It assigns every worker to his job and fixes his wages. It decrees to whom and on what terms the capitalists must entrust their funds. Market exchange is merely a sham.”