Dangerous new pesticide coming to the produce aisle - HELP YOURSELF TO HEALTH
Think strawberries are expensive now? Wait until they start costing people their lives!
California is about to sign off on an insane plan that would allow farmers to use one of the world's most dangerous chemicals as a pesticide on strawberry plants.
It's called methyl iodide, and even some chemists won't go near it. It's such a powerful and reliable carcinogen that researchers use it to induce cancer in lab animals.
But go ahead, take a bite. California says it's OK -- and never mind the five Nobel-winning chemists and dozens of other experts who've written a letter begging the EPA to keep this poison out of strawberry fields, forever.
Who do you believe -- a roomful of Nobel winners and their trusted colleagues, or a bunch of politically motivated bureaucrats?
This toxic monster has been linked to thyroid tumors, nerve damage, and brain and lung problems. It's also been known to cause miscarriages in lab animals -- when it's not being used to give them cancer.
No wonder it's such a great pesticide -- it can destroy just about anything. The pests don't stand a chance... and neither do you if you get too close to this poison.
Experts say a good breeze can even send methyl iodide airborne... and if you think U.S. groundwater is bad now, wait until this junk starts seeping in.
Think I'm exaggerating? I'm the last person to give in to pesticide fears -- because in many cases, those fears have been either exaggerated or completely unfounded.
Just look at DDT, an innocent victim of left-wing fearmongering. If it hadn't been banned due to some trumped-up nonsense over birdlife, we wouldn't be having these debates over newer and more powerful chemicals today... because we wouldn't need them!
But instead, the Frankenstein labs of the chemical industry have been working overtime, churning out new and more frightening creations -- and methyl iodide is their crowning achievement.
From poisoned fruit to contaminated water where you'd least expect it.
By William Campbell Douglass II, M.D.
Friday, July 2, 2010
Banks Financing Mexico Gangs Admitted in Wells Fargo Deal - Bloomberg
Banks Financing Mexico Gangs Admitted in Wells Fargo Deal - Bloomberg
This was no isolated incident. Wachovia, it turns out, had made a habit of helping move money for Mexican drug smugglers. Wells Fargo & Co., which bought Wachovia in 2008, has admitted in court that its unit failed to monitor and report suspected money laundering by narcotics traffickers -- including the cash used to buy four planes that shipped a total of 22 tons of cocaine.
The admission came in an agreement that Charlotte, North Carolina-based Wachovia struck with federal prosecutors in March, and it sheds light on the largely undocumented role of U.S. banks in contributing to the violent drug trade that has convulsed Mexico for the past four years.
‘Blatant Disregard’
Wachovia admitted it didn’t do enough to spot illicit funds in handling $378.4 billion for Mexican-currency-exchange houses from 2004 to 2007. That’s the largest violation of the Bank Secrecy Act, an anti-money-laundering law, in U.S. history -- a sum equal to one-third of Mexico’s current gross domestic product.
“Wachovia’s blatant disregard for our banking laws gave international cocaine cartels a virtual carte blanche to finance their operations,” says Jeffrey Sloman, the federal prosecutor who handled the case.
Since 2006, more than 22,000 people have been killed in drug-related battles that have raged mostly along the 2,000-mile (3,200-kilometer) border that Mexico shares with the U.S. In the Mexican city of Ciudad Juarez, just across the border from El Paso, Texas, 700 people had been murdered this year as of mid- June. Six Juarez police officers were slaughtered by automatic weapons fire in a midday ambush in April.
Rondolfo Torre, the leading candidate for governor in the Mexican border state of Tamaulipas, was gunned down yesterday, less than a week before elections in which violence related to drug trafficking was a central issue.
45,000 Troops
Mexican President Felipe Calderon vowed to crush the drug cartels when he took office in December 2006, and he’s since deployed 45,000 troops to fight the cartels. They’ve had little success.
Among the dead are police, soldiers, journalists and ordinary citizens. The U.S. has pledged Mexico $1.1 billion in the past two years to aid in the fight against narcotics cartels.
In May, President Barack Obama said he’d send 1,200 National Guard troops, adding to the 17,400 agents on the U.S. side of the border to help stem drug traffic and illegal immigration.
Behind the carnage in Mexico is an industry that supplies hundreds of tons of cocaine, heroin, marijuana and methamphetamines to Americans. The cartels have built a network of dealers in 231 U.S. cities from coast to coast, taking in about $39 billion in sales annually, according to the Justice Department.
‘You’re Missing the Point’
Twenty million people in the U.S. regularly use illegal drugs, spurring street crime and wrecking families. Narcotics cost the U.S. economy $215 billion a year -- enough to cover health care for 30.9 million Americans -- in overburdened courts, prisons and hospitals and lost productivity, the department says.
“It’s the banks laundering money for the cartels that finances the tragedy,” says Martin Woods, director of Wachovia’s anti-money-laundering unit in London from 2006 to 2009. Woods says he quit the bank in disgust after executives ignored his documentation that drug dealers were funneling money through Wachovia’s branch network.
“If you don’t see the correlation between the money laundering by banks and the 22,000 people killed in Mexico, you’re missing the point,” Woods says.
Cleansing Dirty Cash
Wachovia is just one of the U.S. and European banks that have been used for drug money laundering. For the past two decades, Latin American drug traffickers have gone to U.S. banks to cleanse their dirty cash, says Paul Campo, head of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration’s financial crimes unit.
Miami-based American Express Bank International paid fines in both 1994 and 2007 after admitting it had failed to spot and report drug dealers laundering money through its accounts. Drug traffickers used accounts at Bank of America in Oklahoma City to buy three planes that carried 10 tons of cocaine, according to Mexican court filings.
Federal agents caught people who work for Mexican cartels depositing illicit funds in Bank of America accounts in Atlanta, Chicago and Brownsville, Texas, from 2002 to 2009. Mexican drug dealers used shell companies to open accounts at London-based HSBC Holdings Plc, Europe’s biggest bank by assets, an investigation by the Mexican Finance Ministry found.
Following Rules
Those two banks weren’t accused of wrongdoing. Bank of America spokeswoman Shirley Norton and HSBC spokesman Roy Caple say laws bar them from discussing specific clients. They say their banks strictly follow the government rules.
“Bank of America takes its anti-money-laundering responsibilities very seriously,” Norton says.
A Mexican judge on Jan. 22 accused the owners of six centros cambiarios, or money changers, in Culiacan and Tijuana of laundering drug funds through their accounts at the Mexican units of Banco Santander SA, Citigroup Inc. and HSBC, according to court documents filed in the case.
The money changers are in jail while being tried. Citigroup, HSBC and Santander, which is the largest Spanish bank by assets, weren’t accused of any wrongdoing. The three banks say Mexican law bars them from commenting on the case, adding that they each carefully enforce anti-money-laundering programs.
HSBC has stopped accepting dollar deposits in Mexico, and Citigroup no longer allows noncustomers to change dollars there. Citigroup detected suspicious activity in the Tijuana accounts, reported it to regulators and closed the accounts, Citigroup spokesman Paulo Carreno says.
Criminal Empires
On June 15, the Mexican Finance Ministry announced it would set limits for banks on cash deposits in dollars.
Mexico’s drug cartels have become multinational criminal enterprises.
Some of the gangs have delved into other illegal activities such as gunrunning, kidnapping and smuggling people across the border, as well as into seemingly legitimate areas such as trucking, travel services and air cargo transport, according to the Justice Department’s National Drug Intelligence Center.
These criminal empires have no choice but to use the global banking system to finance their businesses, Mexican Senator Felipe Gonzalez says.
“With so much cash, the only way to move this money is through the banks,” says Gonzalez, who represents a central Mexican state and chairs the senate public safety committee.
Gonzalez, a member of Calderon’s National Action Party, carries a .38 revolver for personal protection.
“I know this won’t stop the narcos when they come through that door with machine guns,” he says, pointing to the entrance to his office. “But at least I’ll take one with me.”
Subprime Losses
No bank has been more closely connected with Mexican money laundering than Wachovia. Founded in 1879, Wachovia became the largest bank by assets in the southeastern U.S. by 1900. After the Great Depression, some people in North Carolina called the bank “Walk-Over-Ya” because it had foreclosed on farms in the region.
By 2008, Wachovia was the sixth-largest U.S. lender, and it faced $26 billion in losses from subprime mortgage loans. That cost Wachovia Chief Executive Officer Kennedy Thompson his job in June 2008.
Six months later, San Francisco-based Wells Fargo, which dates from 1852, bought Wachovia for $12.7 billion, creating the largest network of bank branches in the U.S. Thompson, who now works for private-equity firm Aquiline Capital Partners LLC in New York, declined to comment.
As Wachovia’s balance sheet was bleeding, its legal woes were mounting. In the three years leading up to Wachovia’s agreement with the Justice Department, grand juries served the bank with 6,700 subpoenas requesting information.
Not Quick Enough
The bank didn’t react quickly enough to the prosecutors’ requests and failed to hire enough investigators, the U.S. Treasury Department said in March. After a 22-month investigation, the Justice Department on March 12 charged Wachovia with violating the Bank Secrecy Act by failing to run an effective anti-money-laundering program.
Five days later, Wells Fargo promised in a Miami federal courtroom to revamp its detection systems. Wachovia’s new owner paid $160 million in fines and penalties, less than 2 percent of its $12.3 billion profit in 2009.
If Wells Fargo keeps its pledge, the U.S. government will, according to the agreement, drop all charges against the bank in March 2011.
Wells Fargo regrets that some of Wachovia’s former anti- money-laundering efforts fell short, spokeswoman Mary Eshet says. Wells Fargo has invested $42 million in the past three years to improve its anti-money-laundering program and has been working with regulators, she says.
‘Significantly Upgraded’
“We have substantially increased the caliber and number of staff in our international investigations group, and we also significantly upgraded the monitoring software,” Eshet says. The agreement bars the bank from contesting or contradicting the facts in its admission.
The bank declined to answer specific questions, including how much it made by handling $378.4 billion -- including $4 billion of cash-from Mexican exchange companies.
The 1970 Bank Secrecy Act requires banks to report all cash transactions above $10,000 to regulators and to tell the government about other suspected money-laundering activity. Big banks employ hundreds of investigators and spend millions of dollars on software programs to scour accounts.
No big U.S. bank -- Wells Fargo included -- has ever been indicted for violating the Bank Secrecy Act or any other federal law. Instead, the Justice Department settles criminal charges by using deferred-prosecution agreements, in which a bank pays a fine and promises not to break the law again.
‘No Capacity to Regulate’
Large banks are protected from indictments by a variant of the too-big-to-fail theory.
Indicting a big bank could trigger a mad dash by investors to dump shares and cause panic in financial markets, says Jack Blum, a U.S. Senate investigator for 14 years and a consultant to international banks and brokerage firms on money laundering.
The theory is like a get-out-of-jail-free card for big banks, Blum says.
“There’s no capacity to regulate or punish them because they’re too big to be threatened with failure,” Blum says. “They seem to be willing to do anything that improves their bottom line, until they’re caught.”
Wachovia’s run-in with federal prosecutors hasn’t troubled investors. Wells Fargo’s stock traded at $30.86 on March 24, up 1 percent in the week after the March 17 agreement was announced.
Moving money is central to the drug trade -- from the cash that people tape to their bodies as they cross the U.S.-Mexican border to the $100,000 wire transfers they send from Mexican exchange houses to big U.S. banks.
‘Doesn’t Stop Anyone’
In Tijuana, 15 miles south of San Diego, Gustavo Rojas has lived for a quarter of a century in a shack in the shadow of the 10-foot-high (3-meter-high) steel border fence that separates the U.S. and Mexico there. He points to holes burrowed under the barrier.
“They go across with drugs and come back with cash,” Rojas, 75, says. “This fence doesn’t stop anyone.”
Drug money moves back and forth across the border in an endless cycle. In the U.S., couriers take the cash from drug sales to Mexico -- as much as $29 billion a year, according to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. That would be about 319 tons of $100 bills.
They hide it in cars and trucks to smuggle into Mexico. There, cartels pay people to deposit some of the cash into Mexican banks and branches of international banks. The narcos launder much of what’s left through money changers.
The Money Changers
Anyone who has been to Mexico is familiar with these street-corner money changers; Mexican regulators say there are at least 3,000 of them from Tijuana to Cancun, usually displaying large signs advertising the day’s dollar-peso exchange rate.
Mexican banks are regulated by the National Banking and Securities Commission, which has an anti-money-laundering unit; the money changers are policed by Mexico’s Tax Service Administration, which has no such unit.
By law, the money changers have to demand identification from anyone exchanging more than $500. They also have to report transactions higher than $5,000 to regulators.
The cartels get around these requirements by employing legions of individuals -- including relatives, maids and gardeners -- to convert small amounts of dollars into pesos or to make deposits in local banks. After that, cartels wire the money to a multinational bank.
The Smurfs
The people making the small money exchanges are known as Smurfs, after the cartoon characters.
“They can use an army of people like Smurfs and go through $1 million before lunchtime,” says Jerry Robinette, who oversees U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations along the border in east Texas.
The U.S. Treasury has been warning banks about big Mexican- currency-exchange firms laundering drug money since 1996. By 2004, many U.S. banks had closed their accounts with these companies, which are known as casas de cambio.
Wachovia ignored warnings by regulators and police, according to the deferred-prosecution agreement.
“As early as 2004, Wachovia understood the risk,” the bank admitted in court. “Despite these warnings, Wachovia remained in the business.”
One customer that Wachovia took on in 2004 was Casa de Cambio Puebla SA, a Puebla, Mexico-based currency-exchange company. Pedro Alatorre, who ran a Puebla branch in Mexico City, had created front companies for cartels, according to a pending Mexican criminal case against him.
Federal Indictment
A federal grand jury in Miami indicted Puebla, Alatorre and three other executives in February 2008 for drug trafficking and money laundering. In May 2008, the Justice Department sought extradition of the suspects, saying they used shell firms to launder $720 million through U.S. banks.
Alatorre has been in a Mexican jail for 2 1/2 years. He denies any wrongdoing, his lawyer Mauricio Moreno says. Alatorre has made no court-filed responses in the U.S.
During the period in which Wachovia admitted to moving money out of Mexico for Puebla, couriers carrying clear plastic bags stuffed with cash went to the branch Alatorre ran at the Mexico City airport, according to surveillance reports by Mexican police.
Alatorre opened accounts at HSBC on behalf of front companies, Mexican investigators found.
Puebla executives used the stolen identities of 74 people to launder money through Wachovia accounts, Mexican prosecutors say in court-filed reports.
‘Never Reported’
“Wachovia handled all the transfers, and they never reported any as suspicious,” says Jose Luis Marmolejo, a former head of the Mexican attorney general’s financial crimes unit who is now in private practice.
In November 2005 and January 2006, Wachovia transferred a total of $300,000 from Puebla to a Bank of America account in Oklahoma City, according to information in the Alatorre cases in the U.S. and Mexico.
Drug smugglers used the funds to buy the DC-9 through Oklahoma City aircraft broker U.S. Aircraft Titles Inc., according to financial records cited in the Mexican criminal case. U.S. Aircraft Titles President Sue White declined to comment.
On April 5, 2006, a pilot flew the plane from St. Petersburg, Florida, to Caracas to pick up the cocaine, according to the DEA. Five days later, troops seized the plane in Ciudad del Carmen and burned the drugs at a nearby army base.
‘Wachovia Knew’
“I am sure Wachovia knew what was going on,” says Marmolejo, who oversaw the criminal investigation into Wachovia’s customers. “It went on too long and they made too much money not to have known.”
At Wachovia’s anti-money-laundering unit in London, Woods and his colleague Jim DeFazio, in Charlotte, say they suspected that drug dealers were using the bank to move funds.
Woods, a former Scotland Yard investigator, spotted illegible signatures and other suspicious markings on traveler’s checks from Mexican exchange companies, he said in a September 2008 letter to the U.K. Financial Services Authority. He sent copies of the letter to the DEA and Treasury Department in the U.S.
Woods, 45, says his bosses instructed him to keep quiet and tried to have him fired, according to his letter to the FSA. In one meeting, a bank official insisted Woods shouldn’t have filed suspicious activity reports to the government, as both U.S. and U.K. laws require.
‘I Was Shocked’
“I was shocked by the content and outcome of the meeting and genuinely traumatized,” Woods wrote.
In the U.S., DeFazio, who had been a Federal Bureau of Investigation agent for 21 years, says he told bank executives in 2005 that the DEA was probing the transfers through Wachovia to buy the planes.
Bank executives spurned recommendations to close suspicious accounts, DeFazio, 63, says.
“I think they looked at the money and said, ‘The hell with it. We’re going to bring it in, and look at all the money we’ll make,’” DeFazio says.
DeFazio retired in 2008.
“I didn’t want anything from them,” he says. “I just wanted to get out.”
Woods, who resigned from Wachovia in May 2009, now advises banks on how to combat money laundering. He declined to discuss details of Wachovia’s actions.
U.S. Comptroller of the Currency John Dugan told Woods in a March 19 letter his efforts had helped the U.S. build its case against Wachovia.
‘Great Courage’
“You demonstrated great courage and integrity by speaking up when you saw problems,” Dugan wrote.
It was the Puebla investigation that led U.S. authorities to the broader probe of Wachovia. On May 16, 2007, DEA agents conducted a raid of Wachovia’s international banking offices in Miami. They had a court order to seize Puebla’s accounts.
U.S. prosecutors and investigators then scrutinized the bank’s dealings with Mexican-currency-exchange firms. That led to the March deferred-prosecution agreement.
With Puebla’s Wachovia accounts seized, Alatorre and his partners shifted their laundering scheme to HSBC, according to financial documents cited in the Mexican criminal case against Alatorre.
In the three weeks after the DEA raided Wachovia, two of Alatorre’s front companies, Grupo ETPB SA and Grupo Rahero SC, made 12 cash deposits totaling $1 million at an HSBC Mexican branch, Mexican investigators found.
Another Drug Plane
The funds financed a Beechcraft King Air 200 plane that police seized on Dec. 29, 2007, in Cuernavaca, 50 miles south of Mexico City, according to information in the case against Alatorre.
For years, federal authorities watched as the wife and daughter of Oscar Oropeza, a drug smuggler working for the Matamoros-based Gulf Cartel, deposited stacks of cash at a Bank of America branch on Boca Chica Boulevard in Brownsville, Texas, less than 3 miles from the border.
Investigator Robinette sits in his pickup truck across the street from that branch. It’s a one-story, tan stucco building next to a Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet. Robinette discusses the Oropeza case with Tom Salazar, an agent who investigated the family.
“Everybody in there knew who they were -- the tellers, everyone,” Salazar says. “The bank never came to us, though.”
New Meaning
The Oropeza case gives a new, literal meaning to the term money laundering. Oropeza’s wife, Tina Marie, and daughter Paulina Marie deposited stashes of $20 bills several times a day into Bank of America accounts, Salazar says. Bank employees got to know the Oropezas by the smell of their money.
“I asked the tellers what they were talking about, and they said the money had this sweet smell like Bounce, those sheets you throw into the dryer,” Salazar says. “They told me that when they opened the vault, the smell of Bounce just poured out.”
Oropeza, 48, was arrested 820 miles from Brownsville. On May 31, 2007, police in Saraland, Alabama, stopped him on a traffic violation. Checking his record, they learned of the investigation in Texas.
They searched the van and discovered 84 kilograms (185 pounds) of cocaine hidden under a false floor. That allowed federal agents to freeze Oropeza’s bank accounts and search his marble-floored home in Brownsville, Robinette says. Inside, investigators found a supply of Bounce alongside the clothes dryer.
Guilty Pleas
All three Oropezas pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court in Brownsville to drug and money-laundering charges in March and April 2008. Oscar Oropeza was sentenced to 15 years in prison; his wife was ordered to serve 10 months and his daughter got 6 months.
Bank of America’s Norton says, “We not only fulfilled our regulatory obligation, but we proactively worked with law enforcement on these matters.”
Prosecutors have tried to halt money laundering at American Express Bank International twice. In 1994, the bank, then a subsidiary of New York-based American Express Co., pledged not to allow money laundering again after two employees were convicted in a criminal case involving drug trafficker Juan Garcia Abrego.
In 1994, the bank paid $14 million to settle. Five years later, drug money again flowed through American Express Bank. Between 1999 and 2004, the bank failed to stop clients from laundering $55 million of narcotics funds, the bank admitted in a deferred-prosecution agreement in August 2007.
Western Union
It paid $65 million to the U.S. and promised not to break the law again. The government dismissed the criminal charge a year later. American Express sold the bank to London-based Standard Chartered PLC in February 2008 for $823 million.
Banks aren’t the only financial institutions that have turned a blind eye to drug cartels in moving illicit funds. Western Union Co., the world’s largest money transfer firm, agreed to pay $94 million in February 2010 to settle civil and criminal investigations by the Arizona attorney general’s office.
Undercover state police posing as drug dealers bribed Western Union employees to illegally transfer money, says Cameron Holmes, an assistant attorney general.
“Their allegiance was to the smugglers,” Holmes says. “What they thought about during work was ‘How may I please my highest- spending customers the most?’”
Smudged Fingerprints
Workers in more than 20 Western Union offices allowed the customers to use multiple names, pass fictitious identifications and smudge their fingerprints on documents, investigators say in court records.
“In all the time we did undercover operations, we never once had a bribe turned down,” says Holmes, citing court affidavits.
Western Union has made significant improvements, it complies with anti-money-laundering laws and works closely with regulators and police, spokesman Tom Fitzgerald says.
For four years, Mexican authorities have been fighting a losing battle against the cartels. The police are often two steps behind the criminals. Near the southeastern corner of Texas, in Matamoros, more than 50 combat troops surround a police station.
Officers take two suspected drug traffickers inside for questioning. Nearby, two young men wearing white T-shirts and baggy pants watch and whisper into radios. These are los halcones (the falcons), whose job is to let the cartel bosses know what the police are doing.
‘Only Way’
While the police are outmaneuvered and outgunned, ordinary Mexicans live in fear. Rojas, the man who lives in the Tijuana slum near the border fence, recalls cowering in his home as smugglers shot it out with the police.
“The only way to survive is to stay out of the way and hope the violence, the bullets, don’t come for you,” Rojas says.
To make their criminal enterprises work, the drug cartels of Mexico need to move billions of dollars across borders. That’s how they finance the purchase of drugs, planes, weapons and safe houses, Senator Gonzalez says.
“They are multinational businesses, after all,” says Gonzalez, as he slowly loads his revolver at his desk in his Mexico City office. “And they cannot work without a bank.”
This was no isolated incident. Wachovia, it turns out, had made a habit of helping move money for Mexican drug smugglers. Wells Fargo & Co., which bought Wachovia in 2008, has admitted in court that its unit failed to monitor and report suspected money laundering by narcotics traffickers -- including the cash used to buy four planes that shipped a total of 22 tons of cocaine.
The admission came in an agreement that Charlotte, North Carolina-based Wachovia struck with federal prosecutors in March, and it sheds light on the largely undocumented role of U.S. banks in contributing to the violent drug trade that has convulsed Mexico for the past four years.
‘Blatant Disregard’
Wachovia admitted it didn’t do enough to spot illicit funds in handling $378.4 billion for Mexican-currency-exchange houses from 2004 to 2007. That’s the largest violation of the Bank Secrecy Act, an anti-money-laundering law, in U.S. history -- a sum equal to one-third of Mexico’s current gross domestic product.
“Wachovia’s blatant disregard for our banking laws gave international cocaine cartels a virtual carte blanche to finance their operations,” says Jeffrey Sloman, the federal prosecutor who handled the case.
Since 2006, more than 22,000 people have been killed in drug-related battles that have raged mostly along the 2,000-mile (3,200-kilometer) border that Mexico shares with the U.S. In the Mexican city of Ciudad Juarez, just across the border from El Paso, Texas, 700 people had been murdered this year as of mid- June. Six Juarez police officers were slaughtered by automatic weapons fire in a midday ambush in April.
Rondolfo Torre, the leading candidate for governor in the Mexican border state of Tamaulipas, was gunned down yesterday, less than a week before elections in which violence related to drug trafficking was a central issue.
45,000 Troops
Mexican President Felipe Calderon vowed to crush the drug cartels when he took office in December 2006, and he’s since deployed 45,000 troops to fight the cartels. They’ve had little success.
Among the dead are police, soldiers, journalists and ordinary citizens. The U.S. has pledged Mexico $1.1 billion in the past two years to aid in the fight against narcotics cartels.
In May, President Barack Obama said he’d send 1,200 National Guard troops, adding to the 17,400 agents on the U.S. side of the border to help stem drug traffic and illegal immigration.
Behind the carnage in Mexico is an industry that supplies hundreds of tons of cocaine, heroin, marijuana and methamphetamines to Americans. The cartels have built a network of dealers in 231 U.S. cities from coast to coast, taking in about $39 billion in sales annually, according to the Justice Department.
‘You’re Missing the Point’
Twenty million people in the U.S. regularly use illegal drugs, spurring street crime and wrecking families. Narcotics cost the U.S. economy $215 billion a year -- enough to cover health care for 30.9 million Americans -- in overburdened courts, prisons and hospitals and lost productivity, the department says.
“It’s the banks laundering money for the cartels that finances the tragedy,” says Martin Woods, director of Wachovia’s anti-money-laundering unit in London from 2006 to 2009. Woods says he quit the bank in disgust after executives ignored his documentation that drug dealers were funneling money through Wachovia’s branch network.
“If you don’t see the correlation between the money laundering by banks and the 22,000 people killed in Mexico, you’re missing the point,” Woods says.
Cleansing Dirty Cash
Wachovia is just one of the U.S. and European banks that have been used for drug money laundering. For the past two decades, Latin American drug traffickers have gone to U.S. banks to cleanse their dirty cash, says Paul Campo, head of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration’s financial crimes unit.
Miami-based American Express Bank International paid fines in both 1994 and 2007 after admitting it had failed to spot and report drug dealers laundering money through its accounts. Drug traffickers used accounts at Bank of America in Oklahoma City to buy three planes that carried 10 tons of cocaine, according to Mexican court filings.
Federal agents caught people who work for Mexican cartels depositing illicit funds in Bank of America accounts in Atlanta, Chicago and Brownsville, Texas, from 2002 to 2009. Mexican drug dealers used shell companies to open accounts at London-based HSBC Holdings Plc, Europe’s biggest bank by assets, an investigation by the Mexican Finance Ministry found.
Following Rules
Those two banks weren’t accused of wrongdoing. Bank of America spokeswoman Shirley Norton and HSBC spokesman Roy Caple say laws bar them from discussing specific clients. They say their banks strictly follow the government rules.
“Bank of America takes its anti-money-laundering responsibilities very seriously,” Norton says.
A Mexican judge on Jan. 22 accused the owners of six centros cambiarios, or money changers, in Culiacan and Tijuana of laundering drug funds through their accounts at the Mexican units of Banco Santander SA, Citigroup Inc. and HSBC, according to court documents filed in the case.
The money changers are in jail while being tried. Citigroup, HSBC and Santander, which is the largest Spanish bank by assets, weren’t accused of any wrongdoing. The three banks say Mexican law bars them from commenting on the case, adding that they each carefully enforce anti-money-laundering programs.
HSBC has stopped accepting dollar deposits in Mexico, and Citigroup no longer allows noncustomers to change dollars there. Citigroup detected suspicious activity in the Tijuana accounts, reported it to regulators and closed the accounts, Citigroup spokesman Paulo Carreno says.
Criminal Empires
On June 15, the Mexican Finance Ministry announced it would set limits for banks on cash deposits in dollars.
Mexico’s drug cartels have become multinational criminal enterprises.
Some of the gangs have delved into other illegal activities such as gunrunning, kidnapping and smuggling people across the border, as well as into seemingly legitimate areas such as trucking, travel services and air cargo transport, according to the Justice Department’s National Drug Intelligence Center.
These criminal empires have no choice but to use the global banking system to finance their businesses, Mexican Senator Felipe Gonzalez says.
“With so much cash, the only way to move this money is through the banks,” says Gonzalez, who represents a central Mexican state and chairs the senate public safety committee.
Gonzalez, a member of Calderon’s National Action Party, carries a .38 revolver for personal protection.
“I know this won’t stop the narcos when they come through that door with machine guns,” he says, pointing to the entrance to his office. “But at least I’ll take one with me.”
Subprime Losses
No bank has been more closely connected with Mexican money laundering than Wachovia. Founded in 1879, Wachovia became the largest bank by assets in the southeastern U.S. by 1900. After the Great Depression, some people in North Carolina called the bank “Walk-Over-Ya” because it had foreclosed on farms in the region.
By 2008, Wachovia was the sixth-largest U.S. lender, and it faced $26 billion in losses from subprime mortgage loans. That cost Wachovia Chief Executive Officer Kennedy Thompson his job in June 2008.
Six months later, San Francisco-based Wells Fargo, which dates from 1852, bought Wachovia for $12.7 billion, creating the largest network of bank branches in the U.S. Thompson, who now works for private-equity firm Aquiline Capital Partners LLC in New York, declined to comment.
As Wachovia’s balance sheet was bleeding, its legal woes were mounting. In the three years leading up to Wachovia’s agreement with the Justice Department, grand juries served the bank with 6,700 subpoenas requesting information.
Not Quick Enough
The bank didn’t react quickly enough to the prosecutors’ requests and failed to hire enough investigators, the U.S. Treasury Department said in March. After a 22-month investigation, the Justice Department on March 12 charged Wachovia with violating the Bank Secrecy Act by failing to run an effective anti-money-laundering program.
Five days later, Wells Fargo promised in a Miami federal courtroom to revamp its detection systems. Wachovia’s new owner paid $160 million in fines and penalties, less than 2 percent of its $12.3 billion profit in 2009.
If Wells Fargo keeps its pledge, the U.S. government will, according to the agreement, drop all charges against the bank in March 2011.
Wells Fargo regrets that some of Wachovia’s former anti- money-laundering efforts fell short, spokeswoman Mary Eshet says. Wells Fargo has invested $42 million in the past three years to improve its anti-money-laundering program and has been working with regulators, she says.
‘Significantly Upgraded’
“We have substantially increased the caliber and number of staff in our international investigations group, and we also significantly upgraded the monitoring software,” Eshet says. The agreement bars the bank from contesting or contradicting the facts in its admission.
The bank declined to answer specific questions, including how much it made by handling $378.4 billion -- including $4 billion of cash-from Mexican exchange companies.
The 1970 Bank Secrecy Act requires banks to report all cash transactions above $10,000 to regulators and to tell the government about other suspected money-laundering activity. Big banks employ hundreds of investigators and spend millions of dollars on software programs to scour accounts.
No big U.S. bank -- Wells Fargo included -- has ever been indicted for violating the Bank Secrecy Act or any other federal law. Instead, the Justice Department settles criminal charges by using deferred-prosecution agreements, in which a bank pays a fine and promises not to break the law again.
‘No Capacity to Regulate’
Large banks are protected from indictments by a variant of the too-big-to-fail theory.
Indicting a big bank could trigger a mad dash by investors to dump shares and cause panic in financial markets, says Jack Blum, a U.S. Senate investigator for 14 years and a consultant to international banks and brokerage firms on money laundering.
The theory is like a get-out-of-jail-free card for big banks, Blum says.
“There’s no capacity to regulate or punish them because they’re too big to be threatened with failure,” Blum says. “They seem to be willing to do anything that improves their bottom line, until they’re caught.”
Wachovia’s run-in with federal prosecutors hasn’t troubled investors. Wells Fargo’s stock traded at $30.86 on March 24, up 1 percent in the week after the March 17 agreement was announced.
Moving money is central to the drug trade -- from the cash that people tape to their bodies as they cross the U.S.-Mexican border to the $100,000 wire transfers they send from Mexican exchange houses to big U.S. banks.
‘Doesn’t Stop Anyone’
In Tijuana, 15 miles south of San Diego, Gustavo Rojas has lived for a quarter of a century in a shack in the shadow of the 10-foot-high (3-meter-high) steel border fence that separates the U.S. and Mexico there. He points to holes burrowed under the barrier.
“They go across with drugs and come back with cash,” Rojas, 75, says. “This fence doesn’t stop anyone.”
Drug money moves back and forth across the border in an endless cycle. In the U.S., couriers take the cash from drug sales to Mexico -- as much as $29 billion a year, according to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. That would be about 319 tons of $100 bills.
They hide it in cars and trucks to smuggle into Mexico. There, cartels pay people to deposit some of the cash into Mexican banks and branches of international banks. The narcos launder much of what’s left through money changers.
The Money Changers
Anyone who has been to Mexico is familiar with these street-corner money changers; Mexican regulators say there are at least 3,000 of them from Tijuana to Cancun, usually displaying large signs advertising the day’s dollar-peso exchange rate.
Mexican banks are regulated by the National Banking and Securities Commission, which has an anti-money-laundering unit; the money changers are policed by Mexico’s Tax Service Administration, which has no such unit.
By law, the money changers have to demand identification from anyone exchanging more than $500. They also have to report transactions higher than $5,000 to regulators.
The cartels get around these requirements by employing legions of individuals -- including relatives, maids and gardeners -- to convert small amounts of dollars into pesos or to make deposits in local banks. After that, cartels wire the money to a multinational bank.
The Smurfs
The people making the small money exchanges are known as Smurfs, after the cartoon characters.
“They can use an army of people like Smurfs and go through $1 million before lunchtime,” says Jerry Robinette, who oversees U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations along the border in east Texas.
The U.S. Treasury has been warning banks about big Mexican- currency-exchange firms laundering drug money since 1996. By 2004, many U.S. banks had closed their accounts with these companies, which are known as casas de cambio.
Wachovia ignored warnings by regulators and police, according to the deferred-prosecution agreement.
“As early as 2004, Wachovia understood the risk,” the bank admitted in court. “Despite these warnings, Wachovia remained in the business.”
One customer that Wachovia took on in 2004 was Casa de Cambio Puebla SA, a Puebla, Mexico-based currency-exchange company. Pedro Alatorre, who ran a Puebla branch in Mexico City, had created front companies for cartels, according to a pending Mexican criminal case against him.
Federal Indictment
A federal grand jury in Miami indicted Puebla, Alatorre and three other executives in February 2008 for drug trafficking and money laundering. In May 2008, the Justice Department sought extradition of the suspects, saying they used shell firms to launder $720 million through U.S. banks.
Alatorre has been in a Mexican jail for 2 1/2 years. He denies any wrongdoing, his lawyer Mauricio Moreno says. Alatorre has made no court-filed responses in the U.S.
During the period in which Wachovia admitted to moving money out of Mexico for Puebla, couriers carrying clear plastic bags stuffed with cash went to the branch Alatorre ran at the Mexico City airport, according to surveillance reports by Mexican police.
Alatorre opened accounts at HSBC on behalf of front companies, Mexican investigators found.
Puebla executives used the stolen identities of 74 people to launder money through Wachovia accounts, Mexican prosecutors say in court-filed reports.
‘Never Reported’
“Wachovia handled all the transfers, and they never reported any as suspicious,” says Jose Luis Marmolejo, a former head of the Mexican attorney general’s financial crimes unit who is now in private practice.
In November 2005 and January 2006, Wachovia transferred a total of $300,000 from Puebla to a Bank of America account in Oklahoma City, according to information in the Alatorre cases in the U.S. and Mexico.
Drug smugglers used the funds to buy the DC-9 through Oklahoma City aircraft broker U.S. Aircraft Titles Inc., according to financial records cited in the Mexican criminal case. U.S. Aircraft Titles President Sue White declined to comment.
On April 5, 2006, a pilot flew the plane from St. Petersburg, Florida, to Caracas to pick up the cocaine, according to the DEA. Five days later, troops seized the plane in Ciudad del Carmen and burned the drugs at a nearby army base.
‘Wachovia Knew’
“I am sure Wachovia knew what was going on,” says Marmolejo, who oversaw the criminal investigation into Wachovia’s customers. “It went on too long and they made too much money not to have known.”
At Wachovia’s anti-money-laundering unit in London, Woods and his colleague Jim DeFazio, in Charlotte, say they suspected that drug dealers were using the bank to move funds.
Woods, a former Scotland Yard investigator, spotted illegible signatures and other suspicious markings on traveler’s checks from Mexican exchange companies, he said in a September 2008 letter to the U.K. Financial Services Authority. He sent copies of the letter to the DEA and Treasury Department in the U.S.
Woods, 45, says his bosses instructed him to keep quiet and tried to have him fired, according to his letter to the FSA. In one meeting, a bank official insisted Woods shouldn’t have filed suspicious activity reports to the government, as both U.S. and U.K. laws require.
‘I Was Shocked’
“I was shocked by the content and outcome of the meeting and genuinely traumatized,” Woods wrote.
In the U.S., DeFazio, who had been a Federal Bureau of Investigation agent for 21 years, says he told bank executives in 2005 that the DEA was probing the transfers through Wachovia to buy the planes.
Bank executives spurned recommendations to close suspicious accounts, DeFazio, 63, says.
“I think they looked at the money and said, ‘The hell with it. We’re going to bring it in, and look at all the money we’ll make,’” DeFazio says.
DeFazio retired in 2008.
“I didn’t want anything from them,” he says. “I just wanted to get out.”
Woods, who resigned from Wachovia in May 2009, now advises banks on how to combat money laundering. He declined to discuss details of Wachovia’s actions.
U.S. Comptroller of the Currency John Dugan told Woods in a March 19 letter his efforts had helped the U.S. build its case against Wachovia.
‘Great Courage’
“You demonstrated great courage and integrity by speaking up when you saw problems,” Dugan wrote.
It was the Puebla investigation that led U.S. authorities to the broader probe of Wachovia. On May 16, 2007, DEA agents conducted a raid of Wachovia’s international banking offices in Miami. They had a court order to seize Puebla’s accounts.
U.S. prosecutors and investigators then scrutinized the bank’s dealings with Mexican-currency-exchange firms. That led to the March deferred-prosecution agreement.
With Puebla’s Wachovia accounts seized, Alatorre and his partners shifted their laundering scheme to HSBC, according to financial documents cited in the Mexican criminal case against Alatorre.
In the three weeks after the DEA raided Wachovia, two of Alatorre’s front companies, Grupo ETPB SA and Grupo Rahero SC, made 12 cash deposits totaling $1 million at an HSBC Mexican branch, Mexican investigators found.
Another Drug Plane
The funds financed a Beechcraft King Air 200 plane that police seized on Dec. 29, 2007, in Cuernavaca, 50 miles south of Mexico City, according to information in the case against Alatorre.
For years, federal authorities watched as the wife and daughter of Oscar Oropeza, a drug smuggler working for the Matamoros-based Gulf Cartel, deposited stacks of cash at a Bank of America branch on Boca Chica Boulevard in Brownsville, Texas, less than 3 miles from the border.
Investigator Robinette sits in his pickup truck across the street from that branch. It’s a one-story, tan stucco building next to a Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet. Robinette discusses the Oropeza case with Tom Salazar, an agent who investigated the family.
“Everybody in there knew who they were -- the tellers, everyone,” Salazar says. “The bank never came to us, though.”
New Meaning
The Oropeza case gives a new, literal meaning to the term money laundering. Oropeza’s wife, Tina Marie, and daughter Paulina Marie deposited stashes of $20 bills several times a day into Bank of America accounts, Salazar says. Bank employees got to know the Oropezas by the smell of their money.
“I asked the tellers what they were talking about, and they said the money had this sweet smell like Bounce, those sheets you throw into the dryer,” Salazar says. “They told me that when they opened the vault, the smell of Bounce just poured out.”
Oropeza, 48, was arrested 820 miles from Brownsville. On May 31, 2007, police in Saraland, Alabama, stopped him on a traffic violation. Checking his record, they learned of the investigation in Texas.
They searched the van and discovered 84 kilograms (185 pounds) of cocaine hidden under a false floor. That allowed federal agents to freeze Oropeza’s bank accounts and search his marble-floored home in Brownsville, Robinette says. Inside, investigators found a supply of Bounce alongside the clothes dryer.
Guilty Pleas
All three Oropezas pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court in Brownsville to drug and money-laundering charges in March and April 2008. Oscar Oropeza was sentenced to 15 years in prison; his wife was ordered to serve 10 months and his daughter got 6 months.
Bank of America’s Norton says, “We not only fulfilled our regulatory obligation, but we proactively worked with law enforcement on these matters.”
Prosecutors have tried to halt money laundering at American Express Bank International twice. In 1994, the bank, then a subsidiary of New York-based American Express Co., pledged not to allow money laundering again after two employees were convicted in a criminal case involving drug trafficker Juan Garcia Abrego.
In 1994, the bank paid $14 million to settle. Five years later, drug money again flowed through American Express Bank. Between 1999 and 2004, the bank failed to stop clients from laundering $55 million of narcotics funds, the bank admitted in a deferred-prosecution agreement in August 2007.
Western Union
It paid $65 million to the U.S. and promised not to break the law again. The government dismissed the criminal charge a year later. American Express sold the bank to London-based Standard Chartered PLC in February 2008 for $823 million.
Banks aren’t the only financial institutions that have turned a blind eye to drug cartels in moving illicit funds. Western Union Co., the world’s largest money transfer firm, agreed to pay $94 million in February 2010 to settle civil and criminal investigations by the Arizona attorney general’s office.
Undercover state police posing as drug dealers bribed Western Union employees to illegally transfer money, says Cameron Holmes, an assistant attorney general.
“Their allegiance was to the smugglers,” Holmes says. “What they thought about during work was ‘How may I please my highest- spending customers the most?’”
Smudged Fingerprints
Workers in more than 20 Western Union offices allowed the customers to use multiple names, pass fictitious identifications and smudge their fingerprints on documents, investigators say in court records.
“In all the time we did undercover operations, we never once had a bribe turned down,” says Holmes, citing court affidavits.
Western Union has made significant improvements, it complies with anti-money-laundering laws and works closely with regulators and police, spokesman Tom Fitzgerald says.
For four years, Mexican authorities have been fighting a losing battle against the cartels. The police are often two steps behind the criminals. Near the southeastern corner of Texas, in Matamoros, more than 50 combat troops surround a police station.
Officers take two suspected drug traffickers inside for questioning. Nearby, two young men wearing white T-shirts and baggy pants watch and whisper into radios. These are los halcones (the falcons), whose job is to let the cartel bosses know what the police are doing.
‘Only Way’
While the police are outmaneuvered and outgunned, ordinary Mexicans live in fear. Rojas, the man who lives in the Tijuana slum near the border fence, recalls cowering in his home as smugglers shot it out with the police.
“The only way to survive is to stay out of the way and hope the violence, the bullets, don’t come for you,” Rojas says.
To make their criminal enterprises work, the drug cartels of Mexico need to move billions of dollars across borders. That’s how they finance the purchase of drugs, planes, weapons and safe houses, Senator Gonzalez says.
“They are multinational businesses, after all,” says Gonzalez, as he slowly loads his revolver at his desk in his Mexico City office. “And they cannot work without a bank.”
Popular Music Is The Babylon System
Popular Music Is The Babylon System
Dumbed-down, amoral, nihilistic drivel from the likes of Gaga and Katy Perry serves to keep the masses in a state of spiritual decay.
Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Friday, July 2, 2010
It has never been more apparent to those who have awakened from the slumber imposed upon them by popular culture that the establishment music industry now pumps out the most dumbed-down, monotonous, garbage which actually serves to induce depression and despair in those who are enlightened and aware, while providing hypnotizing bread and circuses for those still transfixed by the babylon system.
If the readers of this website sat down and watched MTV for an hour, they’d probably come away feeling dazed, confused, and disgusted at the parade of sickness, idolatry and worship of everything that’s wrong in our society. Love of money, the evisceration of morality, the exaltation of post-modern nihilism, the attack on the family, the normalization of the bizarre, the sick and the twisted.
Mainstream popular culture is nothing more than a tool which the elite use to make us feel worthless, pathetic, powerless and hopeless. They want us to believe that the most significant thing we can ever achieve in life is to look cool and garner the approval of our peers by wearing the uniform of whatever cult we are mandated to belong to, and that we can only accomplish this by mimicking the retarded behavior of the people we see in music videos. This is why legions of young people, whatever color they are or background they come from, walk around trying to look like and imitate rappers who wear their pants half way down their legs, can barely talk, and only live for getting smashed out of their skulls and having meaningless random sex with women who they objectify as instruments of carnal pleasure.
Easily the biggest stumbling block in trying to educate people as to why they are depressed, leading increasingly insular and emotionally unstable, unhealthy lives with declining living standards is dragging them away from the very distractions that contribute to their downfall.
The power of entertainment as an opiate of the masses has never been stronger, and with the widespread rollout of 3D technology, the tools of hypnotism are only becoming more and more potent.
A London Guardian report entitled “Lady Gaga and the New World Order” gives serious credence to a website that not only discusses how popular music is used to keep people downtrodden and distracted, but how it is replete with messages and symbolism bragging about how the elite are using entertainment to keep the masses enslaved.
The Vigilant Citizen has a good claim to be the world’s most distinctive music critic. On his website, vigilantcitizen.com, he describes himself as a graduate in communications and politics and a producer for “some fairly well-known ‘urban’ artists”. He has spent five years researching “Theosophy, Freemasonry, Rosicrucianism, the Bavarian Illuminati and Western Occultism”. All of these interests converge in his insanely detailed analyses of the symbolism of pop videos and lyrics. Thus Pink’s MTV awards performance mimics a Masonic initiation; Jay-Z’s Run This Town trumpets the coming of the New World Order (NWO); and the video for Black Eyed Peas’ Imma Be Rocking That Body advances “the transhumanist and police state agenda”.
What’s surprising is the methodical, matter-of-fact, occasionally humorous tone of his essays. He does not write like a swivel-eyed loon rambling about Obamunism (although, inevitably, there’s an unsavoury fascination with Jewish influence). To those who don’t study occult symbolism, he concedes, it might all seem “totally far-fetched and ridiculous”, but for those in the know “I was simply stating the obvious”. His examinations are certainly exhaustive. Scrolling down his densely illustrated posts, you may find yourself thinking, “Say, Lady Gaga really does very often cover up one eye. And a lot of pop stars really do pretend to be robots.”
Although the Vigilant Citizen insists he is neither a political conservative nor a religious fundamentalist, he is heir to such off-piste 60s pop critics as the Reverend David A Noebel, author of Communism, Hypnotism and the Beatles, and Gary Allen, who theorised that post-Rubber Soul Beatles material was so technically sophisticated that it must have been “put together by behavioural scientists in some think tank”. Leftwing thinkers at the time had their own take on pop as mind control. Peter Watkins’ 1967 movie Privilege starred Manfred Mann’s Paul Jones as a puppet of the state, pacifying the populace with catchy patriotic tunes. In such analysis, the villains may change but the mechanisms remain the same.
The fact that the Guardian writer seriously discusses how popular music is littered with elitist symbolism without sneering the whole thing off as a conspiranoid delusion is an example of how abundantly clear this process is becoming.
This kind of subject matter is no longer “out there,” it’s no longer considered wild to simply point out that popular culture and particularly popular music is exercising an undue and insidious influence on the moral, societal, and spiritual development of younger generations and humanity in general.
Nowhere was it more obvious than during a recent Beyonce performance where she was surrounded by dancing riot cops. As the vigilant citizen website explains, this is about indoctrinating people to accept “the “robotization” of the human body and the gradual introduction of a virtual police state”.
In other essays, Gaga’s habit of covering one eye is explained as her rejection of God and her induction as a Luciferian priestess.
Notice how people like Christina Aguilera copy Gaga’s symbolism of humans as soulless robots.
The one-eyed Luciferian theme is also seen here with Rihanna.
While the website sometimes uses too broad a brush with which to identify servants of the babylon system, for example, a Bob Dylan clip is misconstrued as him saying he sold his sold to the devil, when in fact as any Dylan fan will know, in the late 70’s he became a Christian and started releasing gospel music, it does an excellent job in pointing the finger at those who really have metaphorically sold their souls - people like Katy Perry – to be used as tools with which to keep the masses in a perpetual state of disorder and spiritual decay.
Tearing down the facade of this babylon system and dragging people away from the constant hypnotic distractions of sports, dumbed-down music, fashion and every other sideshow offered up to turn our heads from our true spiritual development is as if not more important than educating people about the political aspects of the new world order agenda.
We need to make it “cool” to be informed about what is happening to our world and how we can change its course. This process has accelerated over the past decade and many music artists have incorporated this awakening into their work. Bands like Muse and the Foo Fighters, rappers like Paris and Eminem, are pushing back against the tide of zombie brainwashing being fostered on us by the likes of Gaga and Katy Perry.
There’s no better way to conclude than with Bob Marley’s “Babylon System” song, which perfectly illustrates everything we are up against in this battle.
Dumbed-down, amoral, nihilistic drivel from the likes of Gaga and Katy Perry serves to keep the masses in a state of spiritual decay.
Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Friday, July 2, 2010
It has never been more apparent to those who have awakened from the slumber imposed upon them by popular culture that the establishment music industry now pumps out the most dumbed-down, monotonous, garbage which actually serves to induce depression and despair in those who are enlightened and aware, while providing hypnotizing bread and circuses for those still transfixed by the babylon system.
If the readers of this website sat down and watched MTV for an hour, they’d probably come away feeling dazed, confused, and disgusted at the parade of sickness, idolatry and worship of everything that’s wrong in our society. Love of money, the evisceration of morality, the exaltation of post-modern nihilism, the attack on the family, the normalization of the bizarre, the sick and the twisted.
Mainstream popular culture is nothing more than a tool which the elite use to make us feel worthless, pathetic, powerless and hopeless. They want us to believe that the most significant thing we can ever achieve in life is to look cool and garner the approval of our peers by wearing the uniform of whatever cult we are mandated to belong to, and that we can only accomplish this by mimicking the retarded behavior of the people we see in music videos. This is why legions of young people, whatever color they are or background they come from, walk around trying to look like and imitate rappers who wear their pants half way down their legs, can barely talk, and only live for getting smashed out of their skulls and having meaningless random sex with women who they objectify as instruments of carnal pleasure.
Easily the biggest stumbling block in trying to educate people as to why they are depressed, leading increasingly insular and emotionally unstable, unhealthy lives with declining living standards is dragging them away from the very distractions that contribute to their downfall.
The power of entertainment as an opiate of the masses has never been stronger, and with the widespread rollout of 3D technology, the tools of hypnotism are only becoming more and more potent.
A London Guardian report entitled “Lady Gaga and the New World Order” gives serious credence to a website that not only discusses how popular music is used to keep people downtrodden and distracted, but how it is replete with messages and symbolism bragging about how the elite are using entertainment to keep the masses enslaved.
The Vigilant Citizen has a good claim to be the world’s most distinctive music critic. On his website, vigilantcitizen.com, he describes himself as a graduate in communications and politics and a producer for “some fairly well-known ‘urban’ artists”. He has spent five years researching “Theosophy, Freemasonry, Rosicrucianism, the Bavarian Illuminati and Western Occultism”. All of these interests converge in his insanely detailed analyses of the symbolism of pop videos and lyrics. Thus Pink’s MTV awards performance mimics a Masonic initiation; Jay-Z’s Run This Town trumpets the coming of the New World Order (NWO); and the video for Black Eyed Peas’ Imma Be Rocking That Body advances “the transhumanist and police state agenda”.
What’s surprising is the methodical, matter-of-fact, occasionally humorous tone of his essays. He does not write like a swivel-eyed loon rambling about Obamunism (although, inevitably, there’s an unsavoury fascination with Jewish influence). To those who don’t study occult symbolism, he concedes, it might all seem “totally far-fetched and ridiculous”, but for those in the know “I was simply stating the obvious”. His examinations are certainly exhaustive. Scrolling down his densely illustrated posts, you may find yourself thinking, “Say, Lady Gaga really does very often cover up one eye. And a lot of pop stars really do pretend to be robots.”
Although the Vigilant Citizen insists he is neither a political conservative nor a religious fundamentalist, he is heir to such off-piste 60s pop critics as the Reverend David A Noebel, author of Communism, Hypnotism and the Beatles, and Gary Allen, who theorised that post-Rubber Soul Beatles material was so technically sophisticated that it must have been “put together by behavioural scientists in some think tank”. Leftwing thinkers at the time had their own take on pop as mind control. Peter Watkins’ 1967 movie Privilege starred Manfred Mann’s Paul Jones as a puppet of the state, pacifying the populace with catchy patriotic tunes. In such analysis, the villains may change but the mechanisms remain the same.
The fact that the Guardian writer seriously discusses how popular music is littered with elitist symbolism without sneering the whole thing off as a conspiranoid delusion is an example of how abundantly clear this process is becoming.
This kind of subject matter is no longer “out there,” it’s no longer considered wild to simply point out that popular culture and particularly popular music is exercising an undue and insidious influence on the moral, societal, and spiritual development of younger generations and humanity in general.
Nowhere was it more obvious than during a recent Beyonce performance where she was surrounded by dancing riot cops. As the vigilant citizen website explains, this is about indoctrinating people to accept “the “robotization” of the human body and the gradual introduction of a virtual police state”.
In other essays, Gaga’s habit of covering one eye is explained as her rejection of God and her induction as a Luciferian priestess.
Notice how people like Christina Aguilera copy Gaga’s symbolism of humans as soulless robots.
The one-eyed Luciferian theme is also seen here with Rihanna.
While the website sometimes uses too broad a brush with which to identify servants of the babylon system, for example, a Bob Dylan clip is misconstrued as him saying he sold his sold to the devil, when in fact as any Dylan fan will know, in the late 70’s he became a Christian and started releasing gospel music, it does an excellent job in pointing the finger at those who really have metaphorically sold their souls - people like Katy Perry – to be used as tools with which to keep the masses in a perpetual state of disorder and spiritual decay.
Tearing down the facade of this babylon system and dragging people away from the constant hypnotic distractions of sports, dumbed-down music, fashion and every other sideshow offered up to turn our heads from our true spiritual development is as if not more important than educating people about the political aspects of the new world order agenda.
We need to make it “cool” to be informed about what is happening to our world and how we can change its course. This process has accelerated over the past decade and many music artists have incorporated this awakening into their work. Bands like Muse and the Foo Fighters, rappers like Paris and Eminem, are pushing back against the tide of zombie brainwashing being fostered on us by the likes of Gaga and Katy Perry.
There’s no better way to conclude than with Bob Marley’s “Babylon System” song, which perfectly illustrates everything we are up against in this battle.
50 Random Facts That Make You Wonder What In The World Has Happened To America
50 Random Facts That Make You Wonder What In The World Has Happened To America
The Economic Collapse
July 2, 2010
Our world is changing at a pace that is so staggering these days that it can be really hard to fully grasp the significance of what we are witnessing. Hopefully the collection of random facts below will help you to “connect the dots” just a little bit. On one level, the facts below may not seem related. However, what they all do have in common is that they show just how much the United States has fundamentally changed. Do you ever just sit back and wonder what in the world has happened to America? The truth is that the America that so many of us once loved so much has been shattered into a thousand pieces. The “land of the free and the home of the brave” has been transformed into a socialized Big Brother nanny state that is oozing with corruption and has accumulated the biggest mountain of debt in the history of the world. The greatest economic machine that the world has ever seen is falling apart before our very eyes, and even when our politicians actually try to do something right (which is quite rare) the end result is still a bunch of garbage. For those who still love this land (and there are a lot of us) it is heartbreaking to watch America slowly die.
The following are 50 random facts that show just how dramatically America has changed….
#50) A new report released by the United Nations is publicly calling for the establishment of a world currency and none of the major news networks are even covering it.
#49) Arnold Schwarzenegger has ordered California State Controller John Chiang to reduce state worker pay for July to the federal minimum allowed by law — $7.25 an hour for most state workers.
#48) A police officer in Oklahoma recently tasered an 86-year-old disabled grandma in her bed and stepped on her oxygen hose until she couldn’t breathe because they considered her to be a “threat”.
#47) In early 2009, U.S. net national savings as a percentage of GDP went negative for the first time since 1952, and it has continued its downward trend since then.
#46) Corexit 9500 is so incredibly toxic that the UK’s Marine Management Organization has completely banned it, so if there was a major oil spill in the North Sea, BP would not be able to use it. And yet BP has dumped over a million gallons of dispersants such as Corexit 9500 into the Gulf of Mexico.
#45) For the first time in U.S. history, more than 40 million Americans are on food stamps, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture projects that number will go up to 43 million Americans in 2011.
#44) It has come out that one employee used a Federal Emergency Management Agency credit card to buy $4,318 in “Happy Birthday” gift cards. Two other FEMA officials charged the cost of 360 golf umbrellas ($9,000) to the taxpayers.
#43) Researchers at the State University of New York at Buffalo received $389,000 from the U.S. government to pay 100 residents of Buffalo $45 each to record how much malt liquor they drink and how much pot they smoke each day.
#42) The average duration of unemployment in the United States has risen to an all-time high.
#41) The bottom 40 percent of all income earners in the United States now collectively own less than 1 percent of the nation’s wealth.
#40) In the U.S., the average federal worker now earns about twice as much as the average worker in the private sector.
#39) Back in 1950 each retiree’s Social Security benefit was paid for by 16 workers. Today, each retiree’s Social Security benefit is paid for by approximately 3.3 workers. By 2025 it is projected that there will be approximately two workers for each retiree.
#38) According to a U.S. Treasury Department report to Congress, the U.S. national debt will top $13.6 trillion this year and climb to an estimated $19.6 trillion by 2015.
#37) The federal government actually has the gall to ask for online donations that will supposedly go towards paying off the national debt.
#36) The Cactus Bug Project at the University Of Florida was allocated $325,394 in economic stimulus funds to study the mating decisions of cactus bugs.
#35) A dinner cruise company in Chicago got nearly $1 million in economic stimulus funds to combat terrorism.
#34) It is being reported that a 6-year-old girl from Ohio is on the “no fly” list maintained by U.S. Homeland Security.
#33) During the first quarter of 2010, the total number of loans that are at least three months past due in the United States increased for the 16th consecutive quarter.
#32) According to a new report, Americans spend twice as much as residents of other developed countries on healthcare, but get lower quality and far less efficiency.
#31) Some experts are warning that the cost of bailing out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac could reach as high as $1 trillion.
#30) The FDA has announced that the offspring of cloned animals could be in our food supply right now and that there is nothing that they can do about it.
#29) In May, sales of new homes in the United States dropped to the lowest level ever recorded.
#28) In 1950, the ratio of the average executive’s paycheck to the average worker’s paycheck was about 30 to 1. Since the year 2000, that ratio has ranged between 300 to 500 to one.
#27) Federal border officials recently said that Mexican drug cartels have not only set up shop on American soil, they are actually maintaining lookout bases in strategic locations in the hills of southern Arizona.
#26) The U.S. government has declared some parts of Arizona off limits to U.S. citizens because of the threat of violence from Mexican drug smugglers.
#25) According to the credit card repayment calculator, if you owe $6000 on a credit card with a 20 percent interest rate and only pay the minimum payment each time, it will take you 54 years to pay off that credit card. During those 54 years you will pay $26,168 in interest rate charges in addition to the $6000 in principal that you are required to pay back.
#24) According to prepared testimony by Goldman Sachs Chief Operating Officer Gary Cohn, Goldman Sachs shorted roughly $615 million of the collateralized debt obligations and residential mortgage-backed securities the firm underwrote since late 2006.
#23) The six biggest banks in the United States now possess assets equivalent to 60 percent of America’s gross national product.
#22) Four of the biggest U.S. banks (Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Citigroup) had a “perfect quarter” with zero days of trading losses during the first quarter of 2010.
#21) 1.41 million Americans filed for personal bankruptcy in 2009 – a 32 percent increase over 2008.
#20) BP has hired private security contractors to keep the American people away from oil cleanup sites and nobody seems to care.
#19) Barack Obama is calling for a “civilian expeditionary force” to be sent to Afghanistan and Iraq to help overburdened military troops build infrastructure.
#18) On June 18th, two Christians decided that they would peacefully pass out copies of the gospel of John on a public sidewalk outside a public Arab festival in Dearborn, Michigan and within 3 minutes 8 policemen surrounded them and placed them under arrest.
#17) It is being reported that sales of foreclosed homes in Florida made up nearly 40 percent of all home purchases in the first part of this year.
#16) During a recent interview with Larry King, former first lady Laura Bush revealed to the world that she is actually in favor of legalized gay marriage and a woman’s “right” to abortion.
#15) Scientists at Columbia University are warning that the dose of radiation from the new full body security scanners going into airports all over the United States could be up to 20 times higher than originally estimated.
#14) 43 percent of Americans have less than $10,000 saved for retirement.
#13) The FDIC’s deposit insurance fund now has negative 20.7 billion dollars in it, which represents a slight improvement from the end of 2009.
#12) The judge that BP is pushing for to hear an estimated 200 lawsuits on the Gulf of Mexico oil disaster gets tens of thousands of dollars a year in oil royalties and is paid travel expenses to industry conferences.
#11) In recent years the U.S. government has spent $2.6 million tax dollars to study the drinking habits of Chinese prostitutes and $400,000 tax dollars to pay researchers to cruise six bars in Buenos Aires, Argentina to find out why gay men engage in risky sexual behavior when drunk.
#10) U.S. officials say that more than three billion dollars in cash (much of it aid money paid for by U.S. taxpayers) has been stolen by corrupt officials in Afghanistan and flown out of Kabul International Airport in recent years.
#9) According to a report by the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Bureau of Transportation Statistics, the baggage check fees collected by U.S. airlines shot up 33% in the first quarter of 2010 to $769 million.
#8) Three California high school students are fighting for their right to show their American patriotism - even on a Mexican holiday - after they were forced to remove their American flag T-shirts on Cinco de Mayo.
#7) Right now, interest on the U.S. national debt and spending on entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare are somewhere in the neighborhood of 10 to 15 percent of GDP. By 2080, they are projected to eat up approximately 50 percent of GDP.
#6) The total of all government, corporate and consumer debt in the United States is now about 360 percent of GDP.
#5) A 6-year-old girl was recently handcuffed and sent to a mental facility after throwing temper tantrums at her elementary school.
#4) In Florida, students have been arrested by police for things as simple as bringing a plastic butter knife to school, throwing an eraser, and drawing a picture of a gun.
#3) School officials in one town in Massachusetts are refusing to allow students to recite the Pledge of Allegiance.
#2) According to one new study, approximately 21 percent of children in the United States are living below the poverty line in 2010.
#1) Since 1973, more than 50 million babies have been murdered in abortion facilities across the United States.
The Economic Collapse
July 2, 2010
Our world is changing at a pace that is so staggering these days that it can be really hard to fully grasp the significance of what we are witnessing. Hopefully the collection of random facts below will help you to “connect the dots” just a little bit. On one level, the facts below may not seem related. However, what they all do have in common is that they show just how much the United States has fundamentally changed. Do you ever just sit back and wonder what in the world has happened to America? The truth is that the America that so many of us once loved so much has been shattered into a thousand pieces. The “land of the free and the home of the brave” has been transformed into a socialized Big Brother nanny state that is oozing with corruption and has accumulated the biggest mountain of debt in the history of the world. The greatest economic machine that the world has ever seen is falling apart before our very eyes, and even when our politicians actually try to do something right (which is quite rare) the end result is still a bunch of garbage. For those who still love this land (and there are a lot of us) it is heartbreaking to watch America slowly die.
The following are 50 random facts that show just how dramatically America has changed….
#50) A new report released by the United Nations is publicly calling for the establishment of a world currency and none of the major news networks are even covering it.
#49) Arnold Schwarzenegger has ordered California State Controller John Chiang to reduce state worker pay for July to the federal minimum allowed by law — $7.25 an hour for most state workers.
#48) A police officer in Oklahoma recently tasered an 86-year-old disabled grandma in her bed and stepped on her oxygen hose until she couldn’t breathe because they considered her to be a “threat”.
#47) In early 2009, U.S. net national savings as a percentage of GDP went negative for the first time since 1952, and it has continued its downward trend since then.
#46) Corexit 9500 is so incredibly toxic that the UK’s Marine Management Organization has completely banned it, so if there was a major oil spill in the North Sea, BP would not be able to use it. And yet BP has dumped over a million gallons of dispersants such as Corexit 9500 into the Gulf of Mexico.
#45) For the first time in U.S. history, more than 40 million Americans are on food stamps, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture projects that number will go up to 43 million Americans in 2011.
#44) It has come out that one employee used a Federal Emergency Management Agency credit card to buy $4,318 in “Happy Birthday” gift cards. Two other FEMA officials charged the cost of 360 golf umbrellas ($9,000) to the taxpayers.
#43) Researchers at the State University of New York at Buffalo received $389,000 from the U.S. government to pay 100 residents of Buffalo $45 each to record how much malt liquor they drink and how much pot they smoke each day.
#42) The average duration of unemployment in the United States has risen to an all-time high.
#41) The bottom 40 percent of all income earners in the United States now collectively own less than 1 percent of the nation’s wealth.
#40) In the U.S., the average federal worker now earns about twice as much as the average worker in the private sector.
#39) Back in 1950 each retiree’s Social Security benefit was paid for by 16 workers. Today, each retiree’s Social Security benefit is paid for by approximately 3.3 workers. By 2025 it is projected that there will be approximately two workers for each retiree.
#38) According to a U.S. Treasury Department report to Congress, the U.S. national debt will top $13.6 trillion this year and climb to an estimated $19.6 trillion by 2015.
#37) The federal government actually has the gall to ask for online donations that will supposedly go towards paying off the national debt.
#36) The Cactus Bug Project at the University Of Florida was allocated $325,394 in economic stimulus funds to study the mating decisions of cactus bugs.
#35) A dinner cruise company in Chicago got nearly $1 million in economic stimulus funds to combat terrorism.
#34) It is being reported that a 6-year-old girl from Ohio is on the “no fly” list maintained by U.S. Homeland Security.
#33) During the first quarter of 2010, the total number of loans that are at least three months past due in the United States increased for the 16th consecutive quarter.
#32) According to a new report, Americans spend twice as much as residents of other developed countries on healthcare, but get lower quality and far less efficiency.
#31) Some experts are warning that the cost of bailing out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac could reach as high as $1 trillion.
#30) The FDA has announced that the offspring of cloned animals could be in our food supply right now and that there is nothing that they can do about it.
#29) In May, sales of new homes in the United States dropped to the lowest level ever recorded.
#28) In 1950, the ratio of the average executive’s paycheck to the average worker’s paycheck was about 30 to 1. Since the year 2000, that ratio has ranged between 300 to 500 to one.
#27) Federal border officials recently said that Mexican drug cartels have not only set up shop on American soil, they are actually maintaining lookout bases in strategic locations in the hills of southern Arizona.
#26) The U.S. government has declared some parts of Arizona off limits to U.S. citizens because of the threat of violence from Mexican drug smugglers.
#25) According to the credit card repayment calculator, if you owe $6000 on a credit card with a 20 percent interest rate and only pay the minimum payment each time, it will take you 54 years to pay off that credit card. During those 54 years you will pay $26,168 in interest rate charges in addition to the $6000 in principal that you are required to pay back.
#24) According to prepared testimony by Goldman Sachs Chief Operating Officer Gary Cohn, Goldman Sachs shorted roughly $615 million of the collateralized debt obligations and residential mortgage-backed securities the firm underwrote since late 2006.
#23) The six biggest banks in the United States now possess assets equivalent to 60 percent of America’s gross national product.
#22) Four of the biggest U.S. banks (Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Citigroup) had a “perfect quarter” with zero days of trading losses during the first quarter of 2010.
#21) 1.41 million Americans filed for personal bankruptcy in 2009 – a 32 percent increase over 2008.
#20) BP has hired private security contractors to keep the American people away from oil cleanup sites and nobody seems to care.
#19) Barack Obama is calling for a “civilian expeditionary force” to be sent to Afghanistan and Iraq to help overburdened military troops build infrastructure.
#18) On June 18th, two Christians decided that they would peacefully pass out copies of the gospel of John on a public sidewalk outside a public Arab festival in Dearborn, Michigan and within 3 minutes 8 policemen surrounded them and placed them under arrest.
#17) It is being reported that sales of foreclosed homes in Florida made up nearly 40 percent of all home purchases in the first part of this year.
#16) During a recent interview with Larry King, former first lady Laura Bush revealed to the world that she is actually in favor of legalized gay marriage and a woman’s “right” to abortion.
#15) Scientists at Columbia University are warning that the dose of radiation from the new full body security scanners going into airports all over the United States could be up to 20 times higher than originally estimated.
#14) 43 percent of Americans have less than $10,000 saved for retirement.
#13) The FDIC’s deposit insurance fund now has negative 20.7 billion dollars in it, which represents a slight improvement from the end of 2009.
#12) The judge that BP is pushing for to hear an estimated 200 lawsuits on the Gulf of Mexico oil disaster gets tens of thousands of dollars a year in oil royalties and is paid travel expenses to industry conferences.
#11) In recent years the U.S. government has spent $2.6 million tax dollars to study the drinking habits of Chinese prostitutes and $400,000 tax dollars to pay researchers to cruise six bars in Buenos Aires, Argentina to find out why gay men engage in risky sexual behavior when drunk.
#10) U.S. officials say that more than three billion dollars in cash (much of it aid money paid for by U.S. taxpayers) has been stolen by corrupt officials in Afghanistan and flown out of Kabul International Airport in recent years.
#9) According to a report by the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Bureau of Transportation Statistics, the baggage check fees collected by U.S. airlines shot up 33% in the first quarter of 2010 to $769 million.
#8) Three California high school students are fighting for their right to show their American patriotism - even on a Mexican holiday - after they were forced to remove their American flag T-shirts on Cinco de Mayo.
#7) Right now, interest on the U.S. national debt and spending on entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare are somewhere in the neighborhood of 10 to 15 percent of GDP. By 2080, they are projected to eat up approximately 50 percent of GDP.
#6) The total of all government, corporate and consumer debt in the United States is now about 360 percent of GDP.
#5) A 6-year-old girl was recently handcuffed and sent to a mental facility after throwing temper tantrums at her elementary school.
#4) In Florida, students have been arrested by police for things as simple as bringing a plastic butter knife to school, throwing an eraser, and drawing a picture of a gun.
#3) School officials in one town in Massachusetts are refusing to allow students to recite the Pledge of Allegiance.
#2) According to one new study, approximately 21 percent of children in the United States are living below the poverty line in 2010.
#1) Since 1973, more than 50 million babies have been murdered in abortion facilities across the United States.
Thursday, July 1, 2010
DEBKAfile, Political Analysis, Espionage, Terrorism, Security
DEBKAfile, Political Analysis, Espionage, Terrorism, Security
USS Nassau: More US naval-air-marine muscle off Irandebkafile's military sources report that Washington has posted a third carrier opposite Iran's shores. It is supported by amphibious assault ships and up to 4,000 Navy and Marine Corps personnel, bringing the total US strength in these waters to three carriers and 10,000 combat personnel.
The USS Nassau (LHA-4) Amphibious Ready Group 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit, tasked with supporting the Bahrain-based 5th Fleet area of operations, is cruising around the Bab al-Mandeb Straits where the Gulf of Aden flows into the Red Sea. Its presence there accounts for Tehran announcing Sunday, June 27 that its "aid ship for Gaza" had been called off, for fear an American military boarding party would intercept the vessel and search it. This would be permissible under the latest UN sanctions punishing the Islamic Republic for its nuclear program.
The third US carrier group to reach waters around Iran consists of three vessels:
1. The USS Nassau Amphibious Assault ship is not just an enormous landing craft for the 3,000 Marines aboard; its decks carry 6 vertical take-off AV-HB Harrier attack plans; four AH-1W Super Cobra, twelve CH-46 Sea Knight and CH-53 Sea Stallion helicopters, as well choppers convertible to fast V-22 Osprey airplanes capable of landing in any conditions.
This vast warship has 1,400 cabinets for sleeping the entire Marine-24th Marine Expeditionary Unit aboard.
2. The amphibious transport dock ship USS Mesa Verde which carries 800 Marines equipped for instantaneous landing.
3. The amphibious dock landing ship USS Ashland which carries 400 Marines and 102 commandos trained for special operations behind enemy lines.
debkafile adds: The USS Ashland was the target of an al Qaeda Katyusha rocket attack in 2005 when it was docked in Jordan's Aqaba port next door to the Israeli port of Eilat. One of the rockets exploded in Eilat airport. The ship exited harbor in time to escape harm.
These new arrivals are a massive injection of naval, air and marine muscle to the strength Washington has deployed in the Persian Gulf-Red Sea-Indian Ocean arena in recent months. The USS Harry S. Truman Carrier Strike Group consisting of twelve warships is cruising in the Arabian Sea opposite Chah Bahar, the Iranian Revolutionary Guards biggest naval base not far from the Iranian-Pakistan border. It is there that most of Iran's special commando units are housed.
Also posted in the Arabian Sea, further to the west, is the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower Strike Group.
USS Nassau: More US naval-air-marine muscle off Irandebkafile's military sources report that Washington has posted a third carrier opposite Iran's shores. It is supported by amphibious assault ships and up to 4,000 Navy and Marine Corps personnel, bringing the total US strength in these waters to three carriers and 10,000 combat personnel.
The USS Nassau (LHA-4) Amphibious Ready Group 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit, tasked with supporting the Bahrain-based 5th Fleet area of operations, is cruising around the Bab al-Mandeb Straits where the Gulf of Aden flows into the Red Sea. Its presence there accounts for Tehran announcing Sunday, June 27 that its "aid ship for Gaza" had been called off, for fear an American military boarding party would intercept the vessel and search it. This would be permissible under the latest UN sanctions punishing the Islamic Republic for its nuclear program.
The third US carrier group to reach waters around Iran consists of three vessels:
1. The USS Nassau Amphibious Assault ship is not just an enormous landing craft for the 3,000 Marines aboard; its decks carry 6 vertical take-off AV-HB Harrier attack plans; four AH-1W Super Cobra, twelve CH-46 Sea Knight and CH-53 Sea Stallion helicopters, as well choppers convertible to fast V-22 Osprey airplanes capable of landing in any conditions.
This vast warship has 1,400 cabinets for sleeping the entire Marine-24th Marine Expeditionary Unit aboard.
2. The amphibious transport dock ship USS Mesa Verde which carries 800 Marines equipped for instantaneous landing.
3. The amphibious dock landing ship USS Ashland which carries 400 Marines and 102 commandos trained for special operations behind enemy lines.
debkafile adds: The USS Ashland was the target of an al Qaeda Katyusha rocket attack in 2005 when it was docked in Jordan's Aqaba port next door to the Israeli port of Eilat. One of the rockets exploded in Eilat airport. The ship exited harbor in time to escape harm.
These new arrivals are a massive injection of naval, air and marine muscle to the strength Washington has deployed in the Persian Gulf-Red Sea-Indian Ocean arena in recent months. The USS Harry S. Truman Carrier Strike Group consisting of twelve warships is cruising in the Arabian Sea opposite Chah Bahar, the Iranian Revolutionary Guards biggest naval base not far from the Iranian-Pakistan border. It is there that most of Iran's special commando units are housed.
Also posted in the Arabian Sea, further to the west, is the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower Strike Group.
Lower IQs found in disease-rife countries, scientists claim | Science | The Guardian
Lower IQs found in disease-rife countries, scientists claim | Science | The Guardian
Three babies with severe malaria receive blood transfusions in Kenya: US scientists claim that people have lower IQs in countries where disease is more prevalent. Photograph: Karel Prinsloo/AP
People who live in countries where disease is rife may have lower IQs because they have to divert energy away from brain development to fight infections, scientists in the US claim.
The controversial idea might help explain why national IQ scores differ around the world, and are lower in some warmer countries where debilitating parasites such as malaria are widespread, they say.
Researchers behind the theory claim the impact of disease on IQ scores has been under-appreciated, and believe it ranks alongside education and wealth as a major factor that influences cognitive ability.
Attempts to measure intelligence around the world are fraught with difficulty and many researchers doubt that IQ tests are a suitable tool for the job. The average intelligence of a nation is likely to be governed by a complex web of interwoven factors.
The latest theory, put forward by Randy Thornhill and others at the University of New Mexico, adds disease to a long list of environmental and other issues that may all play a role in determining intelligence. Thornhill made the news in 2000, when he coauthored a provocative book called A Natural History of Rape in which he argues that sexual coercion emerged as an evolutionary adaptation.
Writing in the journal, Proceedings of the Royal Society, Thornhill and his colleagues explain that children under five devote much of their energy to brain development. When the body has to fight infections, it may have to sacrifice brain development, they say.
To test the idea, Thornhill's group used three published surveys of global IQ scores and compared them with data from the World Health Organisation (WHO) on how badly infectious diseases affect different countries. The list included common infections, such as malaria, tetanus and tuberculosis.
The scientists found that the level of infectious disease in a country was closely linked to the average national IQ. The heavier the burden of disease, the lower the nation's IQ scores. Thornhill believes that nations who have lived with diseases for long periods may have adapted, by developing better immune systems at the expense of brain function.
"The effect of infectious disease on IQ is bigger than any other single factor we looked at," said Chris Eppig, lead author on the paper. "Disease is a major sap on the body's energy, and the brain takes a lot of energy to build. If you don't have enough, you can't do it properly."
"The consequence of this, if we're right, is that the IQ of a nation will be largely unaffected until you can lift the burden of disease," Eppig added.
"It's an interesting and provocative finding," said Geraint Rees, director of the UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience. "It explains about 50 to 60% of the variability in IQ scores and appears to be independent of some other factors such as overall GDP."
"The authors suggest that more infectious disease could lead to lower IQ scores through an impact on brain development. This is an interesting speculation, but the data don't prove it one way or the other," he said. "A bigger problem is that it might be driven by a third factor, that affects both infectious disease prevalence and IQ test scores."
For reasons that are unclear, IQ scores are generally rising around the world. Thornhill suggests monitoring rates of infectious diseases in nations as they develop, to see if they decline and IQ tests scores rise.
Richard Lynn, professor of psychology at Ulster University, and author of the 2002 book, IQ and the Wealth of Nations, said disease and IQ is a two-way relationship, with low national IQs being partly responsible for widespread infectious diseases.
"In recent decades, HIV has been a serious infectious disease, and it has a high infection rate in low IQ countries, especially in southern Africa, where it is present in around 30% of the population … This is attributable to the low IQ of the population who do not understand the way the infection is contracted, and have erroneous beliefs about how to prevent infection."
Three babies with severe malaria receive blood transfusions in Kenya: US scientists claim that people have lower IQs in countries where disease is more prevalent. Photograph: Karel Prinsloo/AP
People who live in countries where disease is rife may have lower IQs because they have to divert energy away from brain development to fight infections, scientists in the US claim.
The controversial idea might help explain why national IQ scores differ around the world, and are lower in some warmer countries where debilitating parasites such as malaria are widespread, they say.
Researchers behind the theory claim the impact of disease on IQ scores has been under-appreciated, and believe it ranks alongside education and wealth as a major factor that influences cognitive ability.
Attempts to measure intelligence around the world are fraught with difficulty and many researchers doubt that IQ tests are a suitable tool for the job. The average intelligence of a nation is likely to be governed by a complex web of interwoven factors.
The latest theory, put forward by Randy Thornhill and others at the University of New Mexico, adds disease to a long list of environmental and other issues that may all play a role in determining intelligence. Thornhill made the news in 2000, when he coauthored a provocative book called A Natural History of Rape in which he argues that sexual coercion emerged as an evolutionary adaptation.
Writing in the journal, Proceedings of the Royal Society, Thornhill and his colleagues explain that children under five devote much of their energy to brain development. When the body has to fight infections, it may have to sacrifice brain development, they say.
To test the idea, Thornhill's group used three published surveys of global IQ scores and compared them with data from the World Health Organisation (WHO) on how badly infectious diseases affect different countries. The list included common infections, such as malaria, tetanus and tuberculosis.
The scientists found that the level of infectious disease in a country was closely linked to the average national IQ. The heavier the burden of disease, the lower the nation's IQ scores. Thornhill believes that nations who have lived with diseases for long periods may have adapted, by developing better immune systems at the expense of brain function.
"The effect of infectious disease on IQ is bigger than any other single factor we looked at," said Chris Eppig, lead author on the paper. "Disease is a major sap on the body's energy, and the brain takes a lot of energy to build. If you don't have enough, you can't do it properly."
"The consequence of this, if we're right, is that the IQ of a nation will be largely unaffected until you can lift the burden of disease," Eppig added.
"It's an interesting and provocative finding," said Geraint Rees, director of the UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience. "It explains about 50 to 60% of the variability in IQ scores and appears to be independent of some other factors such as overall GDP."
"The authors suggest that more infectious disease could lead to lower IQ scores through an impact on brain development. This is an interesting speculation, but the data don't prove it one way or the other," he said. "A bigger problem is that it might be driven by a third factor, that affects both infectious disease prevalence and IQ test scores."
For reasons that are unclear, IQ scores are generally rising around the world. Thornhill suggests monitoring rates of infectious diseases in nations as they develop, to see if they decline and IQ tests scores rise.
Richard Lynn, professor of psychology at Ulster University, and author of the 2002 book, IQ and the Wealth of Nations, said disease and IQ is a two-way relationship, with low national IQs being partly responsible for widespread infectious diseases.
"In recent decades, HIV has been a serious infectious disease, and it has a high infection rate in low IQ countries, especially in southern Africa, where it is present in around 30% of the population … This is attributable to the low IQ of the population who do not understand the way the infection is contracted, and have erroneous beliefs about how to prevent infection."
One million protest against Italy's austerity cuts - The Irish Times - Sat, Jun 26, 2010
One million protest against Italy's austerity cuts - The Irish Times - Sat, Jun 26, 2010
One million protest against Italy's austerity cuts
ROME – Italians marched through cities and towns yesterday in a general strike protesting an austerity budget they say bleeds workers but spares the rich.
The left-leaning CGIL union called the strike in an effort to force prime minister Silvio Berlusconi’s government to redraft a €25 billion austerity package he says is an
essential part of European efforts to save the currency.
The website of the CGIL, Italy’s largest union, said more than one million people took part in various demonstrations in large and small cities around the country.
About 100,000 people, according to union estimates, demonstrated in the central city of Bologna, capital of a traditionally leftist area with a strong labour movement.
In Rome, a long line of protesters blowing whistles and waving red CGIL flags snaked past the Colosseum.
Organisers put the turnout at 40,000 people.
In Milan, the CGIL said 80,000 attended a rally, but police estimated the figure at 35,000.
Many of Friday’s marchers also bore placards against car maker Fiat, which is wrangling with unions over plans to improve labour productivity at a plant in southern Italy.
“We say No to this budget. It is wrong, unjust, it stunts growth, it does not kick-start production, it doesn’t touch the rich and it punishes workers,” said union leader Fulvio Mammoni to a crowd of tens of thousands in Naples.
After months of telling Italians they were immune to a Greek-style debt crisis, Mr Berlusconi’s cabinet in May approved an austerity plan, including cuts to funding for municipalities and freezing of public sector salaries.
The government said a random poll of 30 per cent of state workers showed that fewer than 3 per cent of them had heeded the strike call as of early yesterday afternoon.
Support for the stoppage seemed mixed in some areas, despite the union’s judgment that adherence was “massive”. Several bus and metro services in Rome still ran.
The strike was a test of strength for Mr Berlusconi, whose poll ratings have sunk to new lows as unemployment has risen and the euro zone’s third largest economy has struggled to emerge from its worst post-second World War recession.
The strike has split Italy’s trade union movement, which is divided along political lines. The other two main unions have asked their members to stay on the job.– (Reuters)
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/world/2010/
0626/1224273365966.html
One million protest against Italy's austerity cuts
ROME – Italians marched through cities and towns yesterday in a general strike protesting an austerity budget they say bleeds workers but spares the rich.
The left-leaning CGIL union called the strike in an effort to force prime minister Silvio Berlusconi’s government to redraft a €25 billion austerity package he says is an
essential part of European efforts to save the currency.
The website of the CGIL, Italy’s largest union, said more than one million people took part in various demonstrations in large and small cities around the country.
About 100,000 people, according to union estimates, demonstrated in the central city of Bologna, capital of a traditionally leftist area with a strong labour movement.
In Rome, a long line of protesters blowing whistles and waving red CGIL flags snaked past the Colosseum.
Organisers put the turnout at 40,000 people.
In Milan, the CGIL said 80,000 attended a rally, but police estimated the figure at 35,000.
Many of Friday’s marchers also bore placards against car maker Fiat, which is wrangling with unions over plans to improve labour productivity at a plant in southern Italy.
“We say No to this budget. It is wrong, unjust, it stunts growth, it does not kick-start production, it doesn’t touch the rich and it punishes workers,” said union leader Fulvio Mammoni to a crowd of tens of thousands in Naples.
After months of telling Italians they were immune to a Greek-style debt crisis, Mr Berlusconi’s cabinet in May approved an austerity plan, including cuts to funding for municipalities and freezing of public sector salaries.
The government said a random poll of 30 per cent of state workers showed that fewer than 3 per cent of them had heeded the strike call as of early yesterday afternoon.
Support for the stoppage seemed mixed in some areas, despite the union’s judgment that adherence was “massive”. Several bus and metro services in Rome still ran.
The strike was a test of strength for Mr Berlusconi, whose poll ratings have sunk to new lows as unemployment has risen and the euro zone’s third largest economy has struggled to emerge from its worst post-second World War recession.
The strike has split Italy’s trade union movement, which is divided along political lines. The other two main unions have asked their members to stay on the job.– (Reuters)
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/world/2010/
0626/1224273365966.html
W.Va. Extends Containment Area For Wasting Disease
W.Va. Extends Containment Area For Wasting Disease
W.Va. Extends Containment Area For Wasting Disease
All of Hampshire County is now designated as a chronic wasting disease containment area.
Reporter: Associated Press
Romney, W.Va. (AP) -- All of Hampshire County is now designated as a chronic wasting disease containment area.
The West ..Virginia.. Division of Natural Resources said Monday that 12 deer tested in the county in the spring tested positive for the disease.
Another 15 deer killed during the fall 2009 hunting season also tested positive.
Chronic wasting disease affects the brains and nervous systems of deer and elk.
A total 74 deer have tested positive for the disease since the first case was confirmed in 2005.
All the cases have been in Hampshire County.
http://www.wtap.com/news/headlines/97381194.html
W.Va. Extends Containment Area For Wasting Disease
All of Hampshire County is now designated as a chronic wasting disease containment area.
Reporter: Associated Press
Romney, W.Va. (AP) -- All of Hampshire County is now designated as a chronic wasting disease containment area.
The West ..Virginia.. Division of Natural Resources said Monday that 12 deer tested in the county in the spring tested positive for the disease.
Another 15 deer killed during the fall 2009 hunting season also tested positive.
Chronic wasting disease affects the brains and nervous systems of deer and elk.
A total 74 deer have tested positive for the disease since the first case was confirmed in 2005.
All the cases have been in Hampshire County.
http://www.wtap.com/news/headlines/97381194.html
FEMA Workers Ran Up $247,100 in ‘Improper Purchases’ on Government Credit Cards–Including $4,318 in ‘Happy Birthday’ Cards
FEMA Workers Ran Up $247,100 in ‘Improper Purchases’ on Government Credit Cards–Including $4,318 in ‘Happy Birthday’ Cards
Fred Lucas
CNS News
July 1, 2010
One employee used a Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) credit card to buy $4,318 in “Happy Birthday” gift cards. Two other FEMA officials charged the cost of 360 golf umbrellas — $9,000 — to the taxpayers. Other FEMA officials used funds allocated for disaster relief in Oklahoma to buy 19 portable ceramic heaters for the office at a cost of $1,098.
In all, $247,100 in “improper” expenses was made to FEMA credit cards, according to a report by the Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General.
“Disaster purchase cards can be used only for disaster needs, using disaster funding, and are the preferred method to pay for disaster-related micro-purchases,” the IG report says. “With more effective internal controls, FEMA could have prevented more than $247,100 of improper purchases or detected them more quickly.”
Between October 2007 and June 2009, the time period in which the OIG reviewed the credit card purchases, the office found a total of 280 people holding disaster-purchase cards spent more than $14.1 million. Office supplies were the most common purchase, but fit within authorized expenses.
Full article here
Fred Lucas
CNS News
July 1, 2010
One employee used a Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) credit card to buy $4,318 in “Happy Birthday” gift cards. Two other FEMA officials charged the cost of 360 golf umbrellas — $9,000 — to the taxpayers. Other FEMA officials used funds allocated for disaster relief in Oklahoma to buy 19 portable ceramic heaters for the office at a cost of $1,098.
In all, $247,100 in “improper” expenses was made to FEMA credit cards, according to a report by the Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General.
“Disaster purchase cards can be used only for disaster needs, using disaster funding, and are the preferred method to pay for disaster-related micro-purchases,” the IG report says. “With more effective internal controls, FEMA could have prevented more than $247,100 of improper purchases or detected them more quickly.”
Between October 2007 and June 2009, the time period in which the OIG reviewed the credit card purchases, the office found a total of 280 people holding disaster-purchase cards spent more than $14.1 million. Office supplies were the most common purchase, but fit within authorized expenses.
Full article here
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