Investigation into allegations that a secret church directive, issued by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger before he became Pope Benedict XVI, is being used to silence the victims of child sex abuse by Roman Catholic priests. Colm O'Gorman, who was raped as a 14-year-old boy by his local parish priest in Ireland, travels to America, Brazil and the Vatican City to uncover more...
By Darshak M. Sanghavi | New York Times
Published October 17, 2006
Parents often think their children grow up too quickly, but few are prepared for the problem that Dr. Michael Dedekian and his colleagues at the University of Massachusetts Medical School reported recently.
At the annual Pediatric Academic Society meeting in May in San Francisco, they presented a report that described how a preschool-age girl, and then her kindergarten-age brother, mysteriously began growing pubic hair. These cases were not isolated; in 2004, pediatric endocrinologists from San Diego reported a similar cluster of five children.
It turns out that there have been clusters of cases in which children have prematurely developed signs of puberty, outbreaks similar to epidemics of influenza or environmental poisonings. In 1979, the medical journal The Lancet described an outbreak of breast enlargement among hundreds of Italian schoolchildren, probably caused by estrogen contamination of beef and poultry. Similar epidemics in Puerto Rico and Haiti were tracked by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the 1980s.
Increasingly though the science is still far from definitive and the precise number of such cases is highly speculative some physicians worry that children are at higher risk of early puberty as a result of the increasing prevalence of certain drugs, cosmetics and environmental contaminants, called endocrine disruptors, that can cause breast growth, pubic hair development and other symptoms of puberty.
Most commonly, outbreaks of puberty in children are traced to accidental drug exposures from products that are used incorrectly.
Dr. Dedekians first patient was evaluated for possible genetic endocrine problems and a rare brain tumor before the cause of her puberty was discovered. It turned out that her testosterone level was almost 100 times normal, in the range of an adult man. The same problem affected her brother.
The doctors realized that the girls father was using a concentrated testosterone skin cream bought from an Internet compounding pharmacy for cosmetic and sexual performance purposes. From normal skin contact with their father, the children absorbed the testosterone, which caused pubic hair growth and genital enlargement. The boy, in particular, also developed some aggressive behavior problems.
Sex hormones are potent because they are easily absorbed through the skin and resist degradation better than many other hormones. Unlike protein-based hormones like insulin, sex hormones like testosterone and estrogen are technically steroids, meaning they are derived from cholesterol.
Primarily made by the liver, cholesterol begins with tiny pieces of sugar that are joined, twisted and oxidized in a dizzying series to make an end product that resembles the interlinked rings of the Olympic emblem. Dr. Joseph L. Goldstein, Nobel Laureate and a biochemist in Texas, once called it the most highly decorated small molecule in biology, because 13 Nobel Prizes have been awarded for its study.
Through further processing, primarily in the gonads and adrenal glands, cholesterol is converted into sex hormones like estrogen and testosterone. Kenneth Lee Jones, the former chief of pediatrics at the University of California, San Diego, noted pediatric cases similar to those described by Dr. Dedekian in a 2004 report in the journal Pediatrics.
At that time, unregulated prohormones like Andro, famously used by Mark McGwire, the former St. Louis Cardinals power hitter, and banned by federal law in 2005, were available as topical sprays used to enhance libido. Dr. Jones said the sprays used by adults in some households permeated the childrens bedsheets, and the early puberty stopped only when the adults stopped using the sprays and also discarded old sheets.
Testosterone-containing products are not the only trigger of disordered puberty in children.
In a 1998 paper in the journal Clinical Pediatrics, Dr. Chandra Tiwary, the former chief of pediatric endocrinology at Brook Army Medical Center in Texas, reported an outbreak of early breast development in four young African-American girls who used shampoos that contained estrogen and placental extract. The early puberty reversed once the shampoo was stopped.
In the tradition of previous physicians who deliberately exposed themselves to possible pathogens, Dr. Tiwary tried the shampoos on himself. He carefully measured his own levels of various male and female sex hormones to establish his baseline, used the shampoos for a few days, then repeated the tests.
While Dr. Tiwary is quick to admit that his unpublished findings must be interpreted with great caution, some of his sex hormone levels changed by almost 40 percent after he used the shampoos. In some cases, substances other than sex steroids may also disrupt normal sexual development. In Boston at the annual Endocrine Society meeting in June, Clifford Bloch of the University of Colorado School of Medicine presented several cases of young men who had developed marked breast enlargement from using shampoos containing lavender and tea tree oils, which are widely used essential oil additives that present no problem for adults. (Unlike Dr. Dedekians cases, these cases were not a result of passive transfer from parents. The boys themselves used the shampoos.)
Dr. Bloch collaborated with scientists at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences in North Carolina to test the oils on human breast cells grown in test tubes. Lavender and tea tree oil had the same effect on the cells as estrogen.
Dr. Bloch speculates that the findings, which he is submitting for publication in a peer-reviewed journal, may explain the boys breast growth. He noted, however, that cells in a test tube are a far cry from humans, so the relationship of the essential oil to breast growth remains hypothetical.
While pediatric endocrinologists have implicated pharmaceutical or personal care products for causing pubertal problems in children, some environmental scientists also claim that some widespread industrial and pharmaceutical pollutants harm the normal sexual development of fish and animals. By extension, they may also contribute to earlier or disrupted puberty in children, these scientists contend. Robert Havelock, a senior reproductive toxicologist at the Environmental Protection Agency, said these concerns caused a shift in worry from cancer to noncancer effects of environmental pollution over the past decade.
In 1994, scientists found that estrogen-like chemicals from plastics manufacturing plants that had contaminated sewers in England caused genetically male fish to develop into females. In the early 1980s, major spills of the DDT-like pesticide dicofol in Florida led to the feminization of the reproductive tracts of male alligators.
Robert Cooper, the chief of endocrinology at the reproductive toxicology division of the Environmental Protection Agency, says various sources of endocrine disruptors, like manufacturing chemicals, may be leaching into the environment. While their relation to pubertal problems in children remains highly speculative, he believes further study is needed.
Past epidemiological evidence, however, does worry Dr. Cooper, because some chemical exposures have been associated with early puberty. In 1973, thousands of Michigan residents ate food contaminated by a flame retardant, PBB, which was later correlated with earlier menstruation in girls. In Puerto Rico, which has some of the worlds highest rates of early puberty, the condition was linked to higher levels of a plasticizer called phthalate in affected children.
Governmental efforts to create a systematic method to assess possible endocrine disruptors from environmental sources have stalled.
In 1996, Congress directed the E.P.A. to develop a comprehensive screening program for possible endocrine disruptors within three years. Dr. Cooper says no such program has begun operation, a failure he attributed largely to stonewalling by chemical industry representatives who serve on an advisory committee for the program. Now the proposed rollout is December 2007, but Dr. Cooper said, They may be dreaming. Critics cite the programs high potential costs and lack of reliable laboratory tests.
Protecting children from endocrine disrupters in cosmetics and prescription drugs may also be difficult in the near future.
In 1989, the Food and Drug Administration proposed allowing up to 10,000 units of estrogen per ounce of cosmetic, the approximate oral daily dose of hormone replacement therapy for postmenopausal women. Dr. Tiwary said that in the early 1990s he filed an adverse drug report with the agency about hormone-containing shampoos but that to his knowledge, it never came to anything.
Reached by e-mail, a spokeswoman for the F.D.A. said that the agency was aware of some reports describing premature sexual devolepment with shampoos but that it had concluded that there is no reason for consumers to be concerned.
At this time, placental materials are neither prohibited by cosmetic regulations nor restricted by the F.D.A., she wrote.
Dr. Dedekian said that while prohormones like Andro are no longer commercially available, lax regulation of so-called compounding pharmacies allows the manufacture and sale of concentrated testosterone creams, like the one affecting his patient, without government oversight.
Topical lotions and creams containing testosterone may become more common. In 2000, Solvay Pharmaceuticals secured F.D.A. approval for Androgel, a lotion to treat a syndrome the company calls low T, referring to low testosterone. According to the companys Web site, the condition affects 13 million men over 45. From 2000 to 2004, the number of testosterone prescriptions doubled to over 2.4 million a year.
Solvay Pharmaceuticals referred questions on Androgels possible risks to Natan Bar-Chama, an associate professor of urology at Mount Sinai School of Medicine.
Dr. Bar-Chama acknowledged the theoretical risks of transfer of the hormone through skin contact with children, but he said he had never seen a case among the hundreds of men he has treated. He added, however, that it was prudent to take precautions when using the product, including hand-washing after handling the gel and wearing clothing to avoid skin-to-skin contact with others.
In 2003, an Institute of Medicine report stated, There has been increasing concern about the increase in the number of men using testosterone and the lack of scientific data on the benefits and risks of this therapy.
Dr. Dan Blazer, a psychiatrist at Duke who was chairman of the committee, said, In no way did we find a condition that we defined as low T.
The major clinical trial of Androgels effectiveness for low T, published in The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism in 2000, included neither a placebo group (patients who received an inactive dummy lotion) nor a control group (patients who did not have low T) for comparison.
Dr. Ronald Swerdloff, the chief of endocrinology at Harbor-U.C.L.A. Medical Center in Torrance, Calif., and a consultant for Solvay, who ran the study, said the trial was limited in scope since it examined a new route of administration for an already established drug.
A Jewish rabbi goes on Fox news to declare that under Judaism, Jews are not meant to have a state and therefore Israel should not exist.
Watch the interview with the Rabbi
By MATT CRENSON | AP News
AUSTIN, Texas - David M. Walker sure talks like he's running for office. "This is about the future of our country, our kids and grandkids," the comptroller general of the United States warns a packed hall at Austin's historic Driskill Hotel. "We the people have to rise up to make sure things get changed."
But Walker doesn't want, or need, your vote this November. He already has a job as head of the Government Accountability Office, an investigative arm of Congress that audits and evaluates the performance of the federal government.
Basically, that makes Walker the nation's accountant-in-chief. And the accountant-in-chief's professional opinion is that the American public needs to tell Washington it's time to steer the nation off the path to financial ruin.
From the hustings and the airwaves this campaign season, America's political class can be heard debating Capitol Hill sex scandals, the wisdom of the war in Iraq and which party is tougher on terror. Democrats and Republicans talk of cutting taxes to make life easier for the American people.
What they don't talk about is a dirty little secret everyone in Washington knows, or at least should. The vast majority of economists and budget analysts agree: The ship of state is on a disastrous course, and will founder on the reefs of economic disaster if nothing is done to correct it.
There's a good reason politicians don't like to talk about the nation's long-term fiscal prospects. The subject is short on political theatrics and long on complicated economics, scary graphs and very big numbers. It reveals serious problems and offers no easy solutions. Anybody who wanted to deal with it seriously would have to talk about raising taxes and cutting benefits, nasty nostrums that might doom any candidate who prescribed them.
"There's no sexiness to it," laments Leita Hart-Fanta, an accountant who has just heard Walker's pitch. She suggests recruiting a trusted celebrity — maybe Oprah — to sell fiscal responsibility to the American people.
Walker doesn't want to make balancing the federal government's books sexy — he just wants to make it politically palatable. He has committed to touring the nation through the 2008 elections, talking to anybody who will listen about the fiscal black hole Washington has dug itself, the "demographic tsunami" that will come when the baby boom generation begins retiring and the recklessness of borrowing money from foreign lenders to pay for the operation of the U.S. government.
"He can speak forthrightly and independently because his job is not in jeopardy if he tells the truth," said Isabel V. Sawhill, a senior fellow in economic studies at the Brookings Institution.
Walker can talk in public about the nation's impending fiscal crisis because he has one of the most secure jobs in Washington. As comptroller general of the United States — basically, the government's chief accountant — he is serving a 15-year term that runs through 2013.
This year Walker has spoken to the Union League Club of Chicago and the Rotary Club of Atlanta, the Sons of the American Revolution and the World Future Society. But the backbone of his campaign has been the Fiscal Wake-up Tour, a traveling roadshow of economists and budget analysts who share Walker's concern for the nation's budgetary future.
"You can't solve a problem until the majority of the people believe you have a problem that needs to be solved," Walker says.
Polls suggest that Americans have only a vague sense of their government's long-term fiscal prospects. When pollsters ask Americans to name the most important problem facing America today — as a CBS News/New York Times poll of 1,131 Americans did in September — issues such as the war in Iraq, terrorism, jobs and the economy are most frequently mentioned. The deficit doesn't even crack the top 10.
Yet on the rare occasions that pollsters ask directly about the deficit, at least some people appear to recognize it as a problem. In a survey of 807 Americans last year by the Pew Center for the People and the Press, 42 percent of respondents said reducing the deficit should be a top priority; another 38 percent said it was important but a lower priority.
So the majority of the public appears to agree with Walker that the deficit is a serious problem, but only when they're made to think about it. Walker's challenge is to get people not just to think about it, but to pressure politicians to make the hard choices that are needed to keep the situation from spiraling out of control.
To show that the looming fiscal crisis is not a partisan issue, he brings along economists and budget analysts from across the political spectrum. In Austin, he's accompanied by Diane Lim Rogers, a liberal economist from the Brookings Institution, and Alison Acosta Fraser, director of the Roe Institute for Economic Policy Studies at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank.
"We all agree on what the choices are and what the numbers are," Fraser says.
Their basic message is this: If the United States government conducts business as usual over the next few decades, a national debt that is already $8.5 trillion could reach $46 trillion or more, adjusted for inflation. That's almost as much as the total net worth of every person in America — Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and those Google guys included.
A hole that big could paralyze the U.S. economy; according to some projections, just the interest payments on a debt that big would be as much as all the taxes the government collects today.
And every year that nothing is done about it, Walker says, the problem grows by $2 trillion to $3 trillion.
People who remember Ross Perot's rants in the 1992 presidential election may think of the federal debt as a problem of the past. But it never really went away after Perot made it an issue, it only took a breather. The federal government actually produced a surplus for a few years during the 1990s, thanks to a booming economy and fiscal restraint imposed by laws that were passed early in the decade. And though the federal debt has grown in dollar terms since 2001, it hasn't grown dramatically relative to the size of the economy.
But that's about to change, thanks to the country's three big entitlement programs — Social Security, Medicaid and especially Medicare. Medicaid and Medicare have grown progressively more expensive as the cost of health care has dramatically outpaced inflation over the past 30 years, a trend that is expected to continue for at least another decade or two.
And with the first baby boomers becoming eligible for Social Security in 2008 and for Medicare in 2011, the expenses of those two programs are about to increase dramatically due to demographic pressures. People are also living longer, which makes any program that provides benefits to retirees more expensive.
Medicare already costs four times as much as it did in 1970, measured as a percentage of the nation's gross domestic product. It currently comprises 13 percent of federal spending; by 2030, the Congressional Budget Office projects it will consume nearly a quarter of the budget.
Economists Jagadeesh Gokhale of the American Enterprise Institute and Kent Smetters of the University of Pennsylvania have an even scarier way of looking at Medicare. Their method calculates the program's long-term fiscal shortfall — the annual difference between its dedicated revenues and costs — over time.
By 2030 they calculate Medicare will be about $5 trillion in the hole, measured in 2004 dollars. By 2080, the fiscal imbalance will have risen to $25 trillion. And when you project the gap out to an infinite time horizon, it reaches $60 trillion.
Medicare so dominates the nation's fiscal future that some economists believe health care reform, rather than budget measures, is the best way to attack the problem.
"Obviously health care is a mess," says Dean Baker, a liberal economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a Washington think tank. "No one's been willing to touch it, but that's what I see as front and center."
Social Security is a much less serious problem. The program currently pays for itself with a 12.4 percent payroll tax, and even produces a surplus that the government raids every year to pay other bills. But Social Security will begin to run deficits during the next century, and ultimately would need an infusion of $8 trillion if the government planned to keep its promises to every beneficiary.
Calculations by Boston University economist Lawrence Kotlikoff indicate that closing those gaps — $8 trillion for Social Security, many times that for Medicare — and paying off the existing deficit would require either an immediate doubling of personal and corporate income taxes, a two-thirds cut in Social Security and Medicare benefits, or some combination of the two.
Why is America so fiscally unprepared for the next century? Like many of its citizens, the United States has spent the last few years racking up debt instead of saving for the future. Foreign lenders — primarily the central banks of China, Japan and other big U.S. trading partners — have been eager to lend the government money at low interest rates, making the current $8.5-trillion deficit about as painful as a big balance on a zero-percent credit card.
In her part of the fiscal wake-up tour presentation, Rogers tries to explain why that's a bad thing. For one thing, even when rates are low a bigger deficit means a greater portion of each tax dollar goes to interest payments rather than useful programs. And because foreigners now hold so much of the federal government's debt, those interest payments increasingly go overseas rather than to U.S. investors.
More serious is the possibility that foreign lenders might lose their enthusiasm for lending money to the United States. Because treasury bills are sold at auction, that would mean paying higher interest rates in the future. And it wouldn't just be the government's problem. All interest rates would rise, making mortgages, car payments and student loans costlier, too.
A modest rise in interest rates wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing, Rogers said. America's consumers have as much of a borrowing problem as their government does, so higher rates could moderate overconsumption and encourage consumer saving. But a big jump in interest rates could cause economic catastrophe. Some economists even predict the government would resort to printing money to pay off its debt, a risky strategy that could lead to runaway inflation.
Macroeconomic meltdown is probably preventable, says Anjan Thakor, a professor of finance at Washington University in St. Louis. But to keep it at bay, he said, the government is essentially going to have to renegotiate some of the promises it has made to its citizens, probably by some combination of tax increases and benefit cuts.
But there's no way to avoid what Rogers considers the worst result of racking up a big deficit — the outrage of making our children and grandchildren repay the debts of their elders.
"It's an unfair burden for future generations," she says.
You'd think young people would be riled up over this issue, since they're the ones who will foot the bill when they're out in the working world. But students take more interest in issues like the Iraq war and gay marriage than the federal government's finances, says Emma Vernon, a member of the University of Texas Young Democrats.
"It's not something that can fire people up," she says.
The current political climate doesn't help. Washington tends to keep its fiscal house in better order when one party controls Congress and the other is in the White House, says Sawhill.
"It's kind of a paradoxical result. Your commonsense logic would tell you if one party is in control of everything they should be able to take action," Sawhill says.
But the last six years of Republican rule have produced tax cuts, record spending increases and a Medicare prescription drug plan that has been widely criticized as fiscally unsound. When President Clinton faced a Republican Congress during the 1990s, spending limits and other legislative tools helped produce a surplus.
So maybe a solution is at hand.
"We're likely to have at least partially divided government again," Sawhill said, referring to predictions that the Democrats will capture the House, and possibly the Senate, in next month's elections.
But Walker isn't optimistic that the government will be able to tackle its fiscal challenges so soon.
"Realistically what we hope to accomplish through the fiscal wake-up tour is ensure that any serious candidate for the presidency in 2008 will be forced to deal with the issue," he says. "The best we're going to get in the next couple of years is to slow the bleeding."
I stumbled upon a couple of interesting videos on this subject lately. The first is an in-depth analysis of the incidents surrounding the bombing of the Murrah building. The people interviewed discus the bombs that were placed in the building by the ATF, John Doe II, the non-existant blast crater that the feds erected a plywood covering over; the list goes on and on....Overview of the OKC Bombing case created by State Representative Charles Key.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3272698624135234456
The second video is a collection of news reports indicating that there were at least 3 bombs in the Murrah building.http://youtube.com/watch?v=JMBvX3P8IjE
Disinformation: After the bombing, while the rescue attempts were going on, the Oklahoma TV News stations were reporting that the police and ATF officials were saying that there were more undetonated bombs found in the building. The TV newsmen kept reporting this for hours. Police logs confirmed undetonated bombs were found, and so did FEMA reports. Even Oklahoma Governor Frank Keating, on the morning of the bombing, said, "The reports I have is that one device was deactivated, and apparently, there's another device." But since then the government has claimed that all these reports and sightings of other bombs were wrong. That there was only the one McVeigh truck bomb. Does that make sense? Do you believe that?
Charles Key: Yes, the information is just very strong, and to me it's too strong to be able to try to discount it. We have affidavits in our report from paramedics and other rescuers at the scene who say they heard law enforcement people stating there were other bombs found in the building. And then you had bomb experts who had time to drive to a TV station, and sit there, and talk about the un-detonated bombs they had, bombs that were found in the building. You know, it's just too much competent information that can't be reasoned away as mistakes.
Disinformation: In that same TV interview, Governor Keating, who is an ex-FBI agent, said, ". . . obviously, whatever did the damage to the Murrah Building was a tremendous, very sophisticated explosive device." But explosives experts have made it clear that an ANFO bomb is an extremely rudimentary bomb. If someone blew up the building by placing charges on different columns inside the buildings, then that would take a sophisticated knowledge of explosives, right?
Charles Key: Yes. Authorities have said that an ANFO bomb is a very simple, crude bomb.
Disinformation: What might be the most intriguing information you put out in your Final Report is that the most preeminent experts on explosives--people like Sam Cohen and General Partin--have said an ANFO truck bomb could not have possibly done the damage to the Murrah Building. You've said that the Oklahoma Bombing Investigation Committee tried very hard to find an expert or authority who would say that an ANFO bomb could have done the damage, but you weren't able to, right?
Charles Key: That's true. Yes. We couldn't find anybody who would put their name, put their opinion in writing, that an ANFO truck bomb could have done this. If somebody wants to claim that it could have been done, then they need to put in writing, show how it could work, and give examples of that. And nobody I know of has been able to do that. Not even the witnesses the government used in the trial could do it. They didn't do it...
My impression of the situation is that they wanted to blame a U.S. citizen for the incident because war was not in their plans at this juncture; instead they wanted to pass the legislation which created the secret FISA courts, legislation they would not have been able to pass without a shocking event involving a U.S. citizen in a terrost plot.
We know that Bush Jr. was funded, ever since Arbusto Energy, by the Bin Laden family; perhaps they were involved in the OKC bombing as part of the larger agenda. I certainly wouldn't rule out Israeli involvement in one way or another either; those dirty little fucks seem to be involved in anything that destroys freedom and promotes tyrrany.
I think that the OKC Bombing was a miserable failure on the part of the FBI and ATF, since it appears that their intention was to blow the building sky high and it failed to do so, leaving survivors, wittnesses and most importantly, a standing structure for investigators to examine and determine the impossibility of the official story being true.
It also allowed the people investigating the seismic anomalies to get confirmation of their suspicion of two large explosions, since they were able to study the effects of the final demolition of the crippled building.
They fucked up and didn't manage to detonate several of the bombs that were in the building; therefore they had to get the local rescue workers out of the building, saying that there were other bombs in the building (and there were, though they denied this later), after which they removed the bombs; bombs which were planted in the building by the ATF agents themselves. The FBI then took over and barred anyone but FEDS from the scene, so that the cover-up could be ensured.
The undetonated bombs helped to screw up their cover story, since the local media reported, and several federal officials admitted, that there were at least two other devices in the building. The national news, however, blacked out this information and lead the people to believe that it was just a Ryder truck.
If the building had completely collapsed, as did the WTC towers, it would have been far more difficult to determine that the Ryder truck could not have destroyed the building. But alas, the whole thing was blown open by a few patriotic individuals who were willing to stand up to the government terrorists however they were able.
Andrew Cohen | CBS News
Suddenly, the most sacred text in America is under attack from all sides. The Constitution was never meant to be a "suicide pact," says eminent judge and author Richard Posner. It's "undemocratic," says University of Texas law professor Sanford Levinson. In this time of terror we need a new one — an "emergency Constitution" — says Yale Law School guru Bruce Ackerman. And Richard Labunski, in his fine and timely book about James Madison, pretty much destroys the myth that the Founding Fathers were motivated solely by noble impulses when they crafted the new government's guiding light.
These unsettling theses are a measured distance from the roiling debate in legal circles these days over the Constitution's "original intent" and whether it alone should guide constitutional interpretation. That debate is over how the document should be construed by modern jurists. The debate entered into by the literary firm of Posner, Levinson, Ackerman and Labunski is all about whether and to what extent the document itself deserves the legal and political reverence it receives today. During a time of terror, when writers write lofty words about the need for a strong Constitution, the bright men identified above are talking about taking it apart.
7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Richard A. Posner, a Reagan appointee, argues in "Not a Suicide Pact: the Constitution in a Time of National Emergency" (Oxford 2006) that in a terrorism-induced choice between individual freedoms and collective security, the Constitution was never intended to side with the first at the expense of the second. Maybe it's Judge Posner's bitter reaction to what he perceives as judicial overreaching in constitutional decisions. Or maybe it's his professed disdain for "civil libertarians" whom, he says "are not always careful about history." Whatever the case, Judge Posner is ready to make malleable the protections contained in the Constitution; he's ready to have bedrock individual rights and protections ebb and flow along a sliding scale depending upon the scope of the crisis.
But at least the good judge is not calling our sacred text "undemocratic," which is as far as Professor Levinson is willing to go. In his new book, "Our Undemocratic Constitution: Where the Constitution Goes Wrong" (Oxford 2006), Levinson argues that it's time for us all to convene another constitutional convention (this time, with air conditioning) to undertake wholesale changes to what he says is an unworkable Constitution. "If I am correct," Levinson writes, "that the Constitution is both insufficiently democratic in a country that professes to believe in democracy, and (emphasis added) significantly dysfunctional, in terms of the quality of government that we receive, then it follows that we should no longer express our blind devotion to it." Them's fighting words!
Professor Ackerman, the Yalie, also doesn't want to be "blindly devoted" to the document we all are taught in public school to be blindly devoted to. All he argues for, in his new book "Before the Next Attack: Preserving Civil Liberties in an Age of Terrorism" (Yale 2006), is that we come up with an "emergency" Constitution (really a series of new constitutional provisions) that will help guide us when the next terrorism attack surely comes. We need a new baseline law, Ackerman writes, "that allows for effective short-term measures that will do everything plausible to stop a second strike — but which firmly draws the line against permanent restrictions." Our existing Constitution isn't good enough for Ackerman because it is so vulnerable to cynical manipulation by our politicians and to neglect by average Americans.
Which brings me to the best book of them all — and the only one of the four worth remembering — and that is Labunski's unheralded "James Madison and the Struggle for the Bill of Rights" (Oxford 2006). The University of Kentucky journalism professor offers in mind-numbing detail Madison's efforts first to prevent a bill of rights from being incorporated into the text of the Constitution, and then his real politic realization that the Constitution itself only would be accepted by his fellow Founders if in the end it did include a bill of particularized rights and freedoms. To absorb the Madison book is to understand that the Constitution is neither the Ark of the Covenant (as Thomas Jefferson once famously said) nor a mere legal guidepost along the American way that ought to be dispensed with in difficult times.
It is instead, as Labunski laboriously points out, a document conceived and drafted by rich white men during the political moment of their lives; a document brilliant mostly for its ambiguities and its ability (thanks to generations of judges as polished and as responsible for our rule of law as any of Madison's gang) to foresee the potential, indeed, the destiny, of a changed and changing world. The Constitution is not an undemocratic document — indeed, it is as schizophrenically and unsatisfactorily democratic as the rebels were then and as we are now. It does not need to be replaced, even temporarily, by an "emergency" document that would leave to far lesser men (and women) the task that Madison achieved. And it certainly deserves better than to be manipulated, by zealous and unchecked executive branch actors, in the name of "national security."
I blast modern-day politicians all the time for lazily enacting vague and ambiguous legislation — essentially pawning off the most difficult policy choices upon judges, who then are criticized for making the policy choices that our legislators were supposed to make in the first place. But Madison and Company purposely, and I think with great forethought, pushed through an often vague and ambiguous Constitution and then a Bill of Rights not just because it was the best they could do given the political conflicts of the era but also because they had a certain faith that those of us living in future generations would manage the document with wisdom and care.
Their faith has been rewarded many times before, in eras darker than our own. It is important for esteemed scholars to try to scale mountains, even ones as high and mighty as the Constitution itself. And clearly the document isn't nearly as perfect or as ideal as we all have been taught to think it is. But it usually works. And if we were to suddenly discard it or its core principles now, literally under the gun, we'd be conceding a huge battle in the war against the terrorists. Now is not the time to attack the Constitution. Now is the time to defend it.
Freeman talks about his life and his experiences travelling around the country. He has some truly fascinating experiences and ideas to share.
Steve Watson & Alex Jones / Infowars.net | October 25 2006
In 1913 America was a free country. Then a band of powerful bankers achieved their fathers' and great grandfathers' goal. America has never been the same. Soon the world will not be the same.
Aaron Russo expertly exposes the traitorous Federal Reserve Act and the fact that there is no law that stipulates American citizens have to pay income taxes. The ratification of the 16th amendment, also known as the "Tax amendment", represents a fundamental undermining of Constitutional law in America. It is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated against the American people by the elite private banking institutions that have usurped government as an arm of their overall control mechanism.
Russo presents interviews with an impressive range of government officials, IRS special agents , FBI officers, Politicians and tax attorneys who have researched and subsequently campaigned against the Federal Reserve Act and thus reveals why the IRS is an illegal foundation.
The income tax does not meet either criteria of Constitutionally legal taxation in America, that is direct apportioned tax or indirect uniform tax. The IRS claims that the 16th Amendment allowed for a third form of taxation, however, the Supreme court ruling on the amendment states that it allows for no new forms of taxation. More supreme court cases in the same period confirm the same conclusion. The 16th Amendment did not allow the Federal Government to levy a new tax, thus there is no Constitutional basis for the income tax.
The findings of the Grace Commission, a Blue-Ribbon panel appointed by President Ronald Reagan found that:
"One hundred percent of what is collected is absorbed solely by interest on the federal debt. All individual income tax revenues are gone before one nickel is spent on the services taxpayers expect from government."
Education, health and community up keep is paid for out of state and local property taxes, gas taxes, liquor taxes, you name it. Proceeds from the income tax do not pay for these things.The income tax money goes to pay for defense and the expansion of corporate America. In essence everyday American people are funding expansionist wars and the playboy lifestyle of the financial institutions that then further profit from that activity and become ever more powerful.
The income tax is the tool of totalitarianism. It is the means by which the corporate controlled government manipulates the people on a mass scale and locks them into servitude. If the people do not know what their rights are then an agency that knowingly breaks the law is not going to tell them.
The banks now control America. They print the currency and tell the people what it's worth. They have the legal right to counterfeit money. This coup d'etat of benign open and accountable government by elitist private interest represents the tipping point from freedom and the long slide towards fascism. Since the government's primary goal stopped being the welfare of the people it has ceased to exist as a legal entity.
This is exactly what Thomas Jefferson warned the American people may happen. Jefferson said:
"If the American people ever allow the banks to control the issuance of their currency...the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all property, until their children wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered."
Russo, the award winning filmmaker who produced "The Rose" and "Trading Places", confronts the IRS in Washington and is quickly reprimanded by Homeland Security. He discovers that those who have stood up to the income tax slave system and simply asked the question "where is the law?" have been slandered and personally attacked because to reduce the issue to a rational debate would immediately expose the truth behind the entire scam.
Russo discovers that this has not come about by accident it is a planned and coordinated agenda. The younger generations have no concept that they have been drawn into a trap from which they cannot escape. The middle class is being systematically and purposefully wiped out, leaving behind a population on the brink of serfdom. The purchasing power of the dollar has been destroyed BY DESIGN, leaving behind a cost of living only affordable to those who profit from the system.
New laws passed through Congress seek to further enslave people by making it harder to declare bankruptcy while at the same time allowing the banks to charge huge amounts of interest. thus both parties, working with the banks, legally enslave the nation.
The people of America are being fed upon by the elite and devoured alive and they barely even recognize it. It is the perfect crime, the pinnacle of criminal capitalism
It is with this in mind that Russo delves deep into the big brother control agenda and places it succinctly within the context it needs to be understood in. What is being sold to the American people today as patriotism is fascism, and it is part of the same overall agenda to rape the people financially, spiritually and mentally. This is the only place to go to get more out of America. If you can literally control the movements people make and the actions they take then you own their world.
You need to see this film now. In one hour and forty nine minutes Aaron Russo spells out what is at stake and what happened when the American people stopped questioning and started trusting their government.
Terrorstorm explains how the terror attacks of the past few decades have all been connected to western governments. The video is growing in popularity on Google Video.
Recently, Terrorstorm fell out of the top 100, but watching it can help get it back in. This is important information that needs to be seen by as many as possible. Please help spread the word, more than 15,000 people watched this yesterday!
Free American, November 1998, p. 42
Walter Burien is responsible for bringing the very existence of the CAFR to our attention. Almost every city, county and state publish these reports.
Few people know about them and the media does not reveal them. unlike the Budget Reports, which tell how much money goes toward operating governments, the CAFR is a separate report that details where the money, collected from pension funds, toll roads and other money-producing endeavors, is invested.
These funds and the dividends they produce are controlled by a handful of people; fund managers, and major brokerage houses, who then use these funds to manipulate the stock market in their favor. The combined funds invested are more than enough to pay off the Federal Debt and eliminate the need for an income tax, if the people were the beneficiaries. Walter has given us the key to our salvation. TFA by Walter Burien
Revolution has been in effect since 4000 years ago. The people vs. The Sharp Little Crackers. These Sharp Little Crackers have and want to line their pockets from the peoples gullibility or fear to allow them to take over the wealth available, un-opposed.
Well they have done so and are getting a "little" too greedy.
A "little" is like saying all the sands of the beaches of the world could make my kitchen floor gritty. The public is choking on the sand. Those Sharp Little Cracker's greed and empire building...
Each of us, by ourselves, is a little nervous that we may get stepped on like a bug and smashed. Well, the fact is a bug usually does get stepped on and smashed when it runs across the floor, and is seen.
NOW FOR THE REALITY CHECK.... We are not bugs.
WE ARE... "hopefully" human beings with the ability to kick ass, protect ourselves, unify others in a fight, and protect our god {the creator} given rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
The sharp Little Crackers who have inflated their pockets and egos have one little problem, there is only a few thousand of them and a few million of us.
What we have allowed from our own ignorance, (NOTE: they have spent billions of dollars to keep us that way), is When you qualify the forst, in reality the citizens are charged to walk through the forest never being allowed to truly own one leaf. Only rental of a leaf at a substantial tariff, with and when the permission of the care takers of the forest, is allowed.
This is not right and it's about to change in a dramatic fashion through full and complete comprehensive disclosure to the citizens of this country.
Disclosure is in process and will exponentially grow until the final objective of making the citizen the primary beneficiary of the wealth being an unparalleled and unanimous conclusion. As in the movie Braveheart, when they faced the British in full force for the first time and the Scottish nobles rode off to kiss ass, Wallace rode off after them and was asked by a friend, where are you going and he responded, "I'm going to pick a fight."
It is time to pick such a fight.
History has proven time and time again that WHEN the people finally get a wake up call un unity and a common purpose those Sharp Little Crackers pulling everyone's strings in government and the media (U.S. Pravda) are on borrowed timne. It's not a question of if, it's a question of when...
When you boil down the major media's income, it ranges from 18% to 64%, mostly from discretionary moneys on the part of the composite government. If you look at those media people who now have plush government positions but still exercise control over prior media contacts, the percentage is very high. In order to perpetuate empre building in which the public would strongly object to, especially with the use of their money, to the tune of trillions of composite government dollars, it requires participation by the media to perpetuate non-disclosure. Fact is, sadly, the structure is in place today.
We started the project for national public comprehension 14 weeks ago for national disclosure of the CAFRs and the structures behind them.
After viewing The Comprehensive Annual Financial Reports (CAFR) and the structures behind them you will realize what is needed is the establishment of a Citizens Trust Investment Account, whereby 25% of government will be down sized by emergency special initiative passed on the City, County and State level by the citizens of this country: The now 25% re-appropriated revenue will be deposited into the Citizens Trust Investent Account annually in which the citizen, based on his or her participation within the syustem as a taxpaying citizen will after 12 years have no tax liability base on the interest and pay out from the Citizens Trust Investment Account, and from that point forward he or she will receive an annual dividend check that will exponentially grow each year on top of having no tax liability.
You want to see how closely the millions of all citizens watch where the money is spent, invested and moved when we are the beneficiaries of a dividend check each year which will have our tax liability wiped out after
8-12 years participation in the system. It is evident that the billions/trillions going to special intesests and for payoffs will virtually disappear with 340 million citizens looking over the shoulders of the "boys"
responsible for effecting and controlling the pay-out from the Citizens Trust Investment Account to the citizens of this country.
The power structure becomes We The People and those Sharp Little Crackers can directly benefit We The People or they can crawl back into their holes with a strong kick from We The People. I think the founding fathers of this country would be happy with this structure in place...
Who knows we may even fire a few of them if they are not doing a good job because our dividend check is too small for the year.
QUALIFY WHAT THE FOREST IS. FOCUS ON THE PRINCIPLE OF OPERATION
Get a team together and bring in a friend or two that are CPAs. Don't forget to look at other cities, counties and states CAFRs for comparison.
Add up the totals. Cities, County, State and Federal ownership within your State.
You will be learning from scratch one.. I have looked at composite totals of government (States, Counties, Cities and Federal) for 10 years now and here is what I have totaled:
1. Stock ownership, composite totals....... to: $32 Trillion+.
2. Insurance Company equity participation....... to: $8 Trillion + 3. Bond surety investment accounts........ to: $5.5 Trillion + 4. Totals from all liquid investment funds....... to: $60 Trillion +
The personal income from everyone in the U.S.A. (pre tax 1996) is = to 6.5 Trillion.
In other words if every person living in this country gave every cent they made to government for 10 years, it would equal what composite government has amassed in their investment accounts, as of TODAY.. Have You Gotten Your Wake Up Call...???
The corruption feeds on the revenue. Expose the revenue structure and the bease dies of starvation. There is only a few thousand of them compared to many millions of us. Rip the head off the corruption and the body dies...
The Equivalent of the Comprehensive Annual Financial Report (CAFR) for the composite total s of the majority of Federal Government agencies is called the Federal Government Combined Financial Statement.
To download the US Federal Government Combined Financial Statements for 1997, 96 & 95 go to this Internet site http://www.ustreas.gov/cfs/index.html.
Read the last page first, it shows what agencies are included in the combined statement and those that are excluded., You will see the ones excluded from the report as being the primary cash and investment agencies.
Are they worried that if they were included that the balance sheet would show positive assets in the trillions ?? hmmm...
To see the Federal Regulation submitted in 1979 requiring local governments (City, County and States) not already having a CAFR to prepare a CAFR report go to this Internet site To get some of the CAFR reports, available for downloading go to this Internet site
If your State or County is not listed, send an E-Mail to a neighboring State saying that you have their State CAFR report and you would like to do a comparison study of your State's CAFR report and would they please E-Mail you back with the department, telephone number and contact name in YOUR State - Counties - large Cities to get their CAFR report. The States all share each others CAFR reports for comparison.
The foundation of the Corruption is starting to quiver based on the fact that the word is getting out quickly... as to "The biggest game in town"
....
Both the Organized News Media and the Government are to be held accountable for their cooperative unconstitutional, treasonous and criminal effort covering up span of 40 years which has allowed for the total financial takeover of the wealth of this country from its citizens.
Both the News Media and Government's dilemma here, that will clearly expose them, is that the citizens are not looking for the needle in the haystack, but the haystack sitting on the needle. Qualify what the forest is and stop looking at the leaves in the forest.. What is important here is understanding the principle of operation that has led to this financial takeover. When seen you will understand the motives and propaganda that is rammed down your throadt by the News Media and Government which keeps you looking in right field as they conduct their criminal bvusiness as usual activities in left field.
This project will require solid fuel in the tank to attempt to shift the wealth of this country back to its rightful owners, the citizens of this country. Those that can or those that know of some one who has the abilito to help jump start this movement financially giving it the teeth necessary for the goal of true justice and victory, pass the word and make it happen.
The faster the revenue comes in, the faster the gears for the structure of the movement will turn.
The "CAFRs" shows the created- through- restriction- by- statute revenue structure which allows the wolves to walk among the sheep in obscurity, as they devour the sheep, fulfilling their appetite in an orgy of neo-capitalistic gluttony. With the surviving sheep saying "what happened", "who were they", "is something wrong", "there is a problem here but we just can't put our finger on it" ...
To date, I have been contacted by many from across the Land who now have been unified through disclosure for one common purpose: "making the citizen the beneficiary of the wealth" not those "Sharp Little Crackers".
I have received phone calls from across the country and have briefed, 7 running for congress, 3 running for senate, 3 running for governor of their state. All were not aware of the composite structure. They now have their own Wake up Call....
Yours Truly, Walter J. Burien, Jr.
P.O. Box 11444 Prescott, Arizona 86304.
E-Mail: cevi2000@aol.com
The colour purple has, for centuries, often been associated with power, royalty, wealth, and strength. Engineers have a time-tested tradition of soaking themselves with purple dye. This is done to comemorate the honorable engineer Kahotep.
An ancient Egyptian story tells that Kahotep was an Egyptian scholar who is estimated to have lived around 3500 B.C. By today's standards, he would have been considered to be a mineral engineer, as he built wells in amny town not directly along the Nile. One time he was summoned to the small town of El-Amarna to investigate a problem with a well he built there. The people of the town were complaining that the water they brought up was not clear, and had a low purple hue. Upon investigation, Kahotep discovered that it was caused by a large deposit of lapis lazuli, saturated in the water. Lapis lazuli was a valuable gem thought only to be found in ancient Mesopotamia at the that time. Kahotep informed the nobles of this find and he was commissioned, along with dozens of men, to find more deposits. Because of his dicovery and the immense success of his mining operations, Egypt quickly flourished to become a leading economic power, particularly due to its trade in jewelry. Today, engineers all over the world dye themselves purple, symbolizing the purple water that was discovered in Egypt. We remember the huge impact that engineers have on society through our discoveries and inventions.
The Day America Died
The following congressmen voted for the Military Commissions Act of 2006 (a.k.a. The Detainee Bill, a.k.a. The Torture Bill, a.k.a. The Death of the Great Writ of Habeas Corpus):
REPUBLICANS (HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES)
Robert Aderholt,
DEMOCRATS (HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES)
Robert Andrews,
REPUBLICANS (SENATE)
Lamar Alexander,
DEMOCRATS (SENATE)
Thomas Carper,
