Zeitgeist, The Movie

ZEITGEIST, The Movie - Remastered / Final Edition - Full Production. What does Christianity, 911 and The Federal Reserve all have in common?
A very interesting movie- a must see. The beginning of the movie may feel long, but it will be worth the wait.

Zeitgeist Homepage: Here you will also find a movie about the Banksters.

King: Life is bare bones on the Lakota reservation

August 14, 2009 

By John King
CNN Chief National Correspondent

Editor's note: On CNN's "State of the Union," host and Chief National Correspondent John King goes outside the Beltway to report on the issues affecting communities across the country.

CHERRY CREEK, South Dakota (CNN) -- The tiny one-room house rests on a hill; no electricity and no running water. A creaky metal cot and a rusting wood-burning stove is all the comfort Herbert Hale says he needs.

"All it is is logs, glue -- dirt and water put together -- then cement and the chicken string," Hale says of his home. "Long as the windows don't break, it's nice and warm in here."

The roof leaks a bit, and the floorboards are rotted in one corner, but Hale isn't one to complain.

"It's home," he says, almost under his breath, as he invites a visitor to have a look.

Firewood is stacked in one corner inside, and more outside as Hale uses the summer months to stockpile for prairie winters, where 20 below zero is not all that uncommon.

He also pulls bunches of long weeds in the prairie grass, to dry for use as a firestarter.

"I have to be careful," Hale says matter-of-factly as he pulls a few fistfuls. "Sometimes there are some snakes. Rattlesnakes. Nothing to mess around with."

He is 54 years old, a veteran of two Army combat tours in Vietnam, a member of the Lakota tribe and part of two stunning statistics, even as communities across America deal with the pain and challenges of recession:

The unemployment rate on his reservation runs higher than 80 percent;

Ziebach County, where he lives, is the nation's poorest, with just shy of 56 percent of its residents below the poverty line. Poverty among children in the county eclipses a staggering 70 percent. Read more here:

The Pentagon Wants Authority to Post Almost 400,000 Military Personnel in U.S.

By Matthew Rothschild, August 12, 2009

The Pentagon has approached Congress to grant the Secretary of Defense the authority to post almost 400,000 military personnel throughout the United States in times of emergency or a major disaster.

This request has already occasioned a dispute with the nation’s governors. And it raises the prospect of U.S. military personnel patrolling the streets of the United States, in conflict with the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878.

In June, the U.S. Northern Command distributed a “Congressional Fact Sheet” entitled “Legislative Proposal for Activation of Federal Reserve Forces for Disasters.” That proposal would amend current law, thereby “authorizing the Secretary of Defense to order any unit or member of the Army Reserve, Air Force Reserve, Navy Reserve, and the Marine Corps Reserve, to active duty for a major disaster or emergency.”

Taken together, these reserve units would amount to “more than 379,000 military personnel in thousands of communities across the United States,” explained

Paul Stockton, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Homeland Defense and America’s Security Affairs, in a letter to the National Governors Association, dated July 20.

The governors were not happy about this proposal, since they want to maintain control of their own National Guard forces, as well as military personnel acting in a domestic capacity in their states.

“We are concerned that the legislative proposal you discuss in your letter would invite confusion on critical command and control issues,” Governor James H. Douglas of Vermont and Governor Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, the president and vice president of the governors’ association, wrote in a letter back to Stockton on August 7. The governors asserted that they “must have tactical control over all . . . active duty and reserve military forces engaged in domestic operations within the governor’s state or territory.”

Read more here:

The Health Care Reform Debacle: Obama's Coming-Out

Michael Brenner

Senior Fellow, the Center for Transatlantic Relations

Posted: August 13, 2009 03:10 PM

Let's face the harsh reality -- Obama has blown health care reform, big time. The opportunity of a lifetime has been squandered. The mostrecent revelations about backroom deals with Pharma and the other vendors of medical services drops the curtain on any hope of serious change in our costly and inefficient non-system. This is a painful admission to make. Not only does the country remain handicapped by grossly sub-par arrangements for health delivery, we also are burdened with a president who has been discredited as a progressive dedicated to a betterment of how we conduct public business.

A quick review of what has survived an unbecoming process of deal making exposes the dismaying reality. For starters: no public plan; no wealth tax to help pay for cost incurred; no right for the government to bargain with Pharma on drug prices; no meaningful enforcement mechanisms to ensure that vested, for profit interests comply with whatever undertakings, explicit or tacit, that they have made. What do we gain? Not much. A commitment that everyone must be insured, yet with a much weakened employer mandate to accomplish it. An elimination of the most egregious practices of insurance companies re. e.g. pre-existing conditions, arbitrary termination of coverage. Some small subsidies for the working poor. These last are minimal. Someone earning $20,000 a year will get no subsidy unless insurance premiums reach $2,400 -- according to the Finance Committee bill. Good luck all you folks who work for $10 an hour -- you'll need it.

It is Barack Obama who is to blame for this. For months, he stayed aloof from the out-of-control Congressional maneuvering based on a strange belief in some kind of bipartisan collective will emerging by osmosis. He never leaned the weight of his person and his office to elements of reform that has been touting as candidate and then President. He deceived the country by pursuing secret talks with the very lobbies who are the heart of disgraceful national health care situation. He entered into deals that were weighted heavily in their selfish interest rather than the national interest. In short, we have gotten from him the antithesis of what we were promised and expected -- in the substance and process of policy both. We have instead a conventionally minded politician overly respectful of the status quo and deferential to those who control and profit from it, A man with no apparent fixed convictions.

Serious health care reform is gone with the wind. It cannot be retrieved. All other domestic issues pale in importance by comparison -- except for the financial crisis. On that front, Obama has behaved exactly as he now has done on the health care front. That is to say, viewing the world from the prejudicial perspective of the high and mighty while neglecting his duty to the citizenry and those who put their trust in him. The question: 'who really is Barack Obama?' is more compelling than ever. The answer looks to be more and more disheartening. Link:

The Collapse of State Economies is Now at Stage of Government Function Collapse

LaRouche Political Action Committee

Topics in this article Published August 12, 2009:

Payless, and Workless Workdays, Cuts in Public Health, Medical Care for the Poor.

Link:

Major U.S. Cities Are Resorting to Officially-Approved "Tent Cities" for the Homeless

August 12, 2009 (LPAC)—Cities all across the U.S. are in various stages of approving, and even supplying minimal services for tent cities of the homeless, because of the surge in unemployment and desperation. The sizable metropolitan areas with approved space for the homeless parking lots, campgrounds, riversides or other public areas include Nashville, Tennessee; Ontario, California; Lacey, Washington (near Olympia, the capital), and others.

Today in Tampa, Florida, city leaders planned a vote on whether to approve tent cities, a measure which was drawn into being an "Anti-Tent City" coalition as well. The local Catholic Charities want permission to create a homeless encampment of 200 people.

The numbers of dispossessed and out-of-work citizens everywhere, has put before local governments the apparent option of reversing standing vagrancy laws, and instead providing minimal services and some order to the desperate. There seems no other recourse under the "we are recovering" line from Washington. In Illinois, local ministers have asked the Champaign City Council to legalize homeless settlements of 50 people. In California, the City of Ventura in July revised its laws to permit homeless people to stay overnight in their cars in designated locations.

Nashville's Metropolitan Homeless Commission's Director, Clifton Harris stresses that there is nowhere else to put people, except in approved tent cities, because the shelters are all full, with waiting lines and lists. Nashville is now providing portable toilets, garbage collection and a mobile medical van. Link:

Mass job loss- Gerald Celente

August 12, 2009

Trends Forecaster Gerald Celente speaks with Russia Today about the real effects of the economic downturn under Obama– starting with mass job loss.

The Second Wave of The Depression: Hyperinflation Likely

Webster Tarpley responds to Ellen Brown’s article about hyperinflation in the July issue
By Webster Tarpley
July 15, 2009
The second wave of the world economic depression is coming soon. Larry Summers, the economics czar of the Wall Street puppet regime currently in power in Washington, recently confessed to the Financial Times in an unguarded moment: “I don’t think the worst is over ….” A few weeks earlier, Jacques Attali, who served in the 1980s as the main economics adviser to French President Mitterrand, told an audience at the International Economic and Financial Forum (FIEF) in Paris that the world might well soon face a planetary Weimar “in the form of a hyperinflationary depression similar to the German events of 1922 - 1923. Read more here:

Rise of the Natural Climate Cycle Deniers

July 29th, 2009 by Roy W. Spencer, Ph. D.

Those who promote the theory that mankind is responsible for global warming have been working for the past 20 years on a revisionist climate history. A history where climate was always in a harmonious state of balance until mankind came along and upset that balance.

The natural climate cycle deniers have tried their best to eliminate the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age from climate data records by constructing the uncritically acclaimed and infamous “hockey stick” of global temperature variations (or non-variations) over the last one- to two-thousand years.

Before being largely discredited by a National Academies review panel, this ‘poster child’ for global warming was heralded as proof of the static nature of the climate system, and that only humans had the power to alter it.

While the panel was careful to point out that the hockey stick might be correct, they said that the only thing science could say for sure is that it has been warmer lately than anytime in the last 400 years. Since most of those 400 years was during the Little Ice Age, I would say this is a good thing. It’s like saying this summer has been warmer than any period since…last fall.

These deniers claim that the Medieval Warm Period was only a regional phenomenon, restricted to Europe. Same for the Little Ice Age. Yet when a killer heat wave occurred in France in 2003, they hypocritically insisted that this event had global significance, caused by anthropogenic ‘global’ warming.

The strong warming that occurred up until 1940 is similarly a thorn in the side of the natural climate cycle deniers, since atmospheric carbon dioxide increases from fossil fuel burning before 1940 were too meager to have caused it. So, the ‘experts’ are now actively working on reducing the magnitude of that event by readjusting some ship measurements of ocean temperatures from that era. Read more here:

About Dr. Roy Spencer

Roy W. Spencer received his Ph.D. in meteorology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1981. Before becoming a Principal Research Scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville in 2001, he was a Senior Scientist for Climate Studies at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, where he and Dr. John Christy received NASA’s Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal for their global temperature monitoring work with satellites. Dr. Spencer’s work with NASA continues as the U.S. Science Team leader for the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer flying on NASA’s Aqua satellite. He has provided congressional testimony several times on the subject of global warming.

Dr. Spencer’s research has been entirely supported by U.S. government agencies: NASA, NOAA, and DOE. He has never been asked by any oil company to perform any kind of service. Not even Exxon-Mobil.

Dr. Spencer’s first popular book on global warming, Climate Confusion(Encounter Books), is now available at Amazon.com and BarnesAndNoble.com.

The Great Global Warming Swindle