Archive for the ‘IT MAKES SENSE’ Category

Marine Cpl. Megan Leavey served with her four-legged partner Sgt. Rex through two tours in Iraq, completing hundreds of missions searching for roadside bombs until an insurgent explosion took them both out of service.

More than five years later, Leavey, 28, is fighting to adopt the dog she handled since her earliest days as a Marine before the German shepherd is put to sleep.

“Rex is my partner, I love him,” Leavey, who lives with her father in Rockport, N.Y. and works as a dog handler, told MSNBC. “We have been through so much together…I’ve spent day and night with this dog. It’s a very strong bond.”

Leavey was discharged in Dec. 2007, but Rex — considered a valuable work dog — was put back in service after he recovered from his injuries. That was until a month ago, when he was diagnosed with a kind of nerve paralysis that left him unable to serve, the Westchester Journal News reported.

It’s now a race against the clock as Leavey struggles to cut through military red tape and adopt Rex before he is put down.

“As a safety precaution, they don’t give all dogs away,” she told the Journal News. She said Rex, a strong “alpha dog,” never hurt anyone he wasn’t supposed to.

“The dilemma with me is the minute they say he can’t be adopted, because he‘s sick and because he can’t work, they’d have to put him to sleep,” she said. “Not because he’s too sick to live a good life, but because they can‘t utilize him so it wouldn’t make sense for them to keep a dog they’re not going to work at the kennels. I don’t want to let that happen.”

But time is ticking, she said.

“This is not [the Marines'] first priority,” Leavey told New York Fox affiliate WNYW-TV. “A lot of times it gets lost in the shuffle.”

To help speed the process up, she reached out to veteran’s organizations and to Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), who sent a letter to Air Force Secretary Michael Donley, who oversees military service dog training. In the letter, Schumer detailed the relationship Leavey and Rex had and credited them with saving countless lives, according to the Journal News.

If Leavey’s request is granted, Rex will enjoy a sizable home with a fenced-in yard. Until she hears more, all she can do is wait.

“It’s a partnership,” Leavey told the newspaper. “I feel like I know Rex so well. I’m so looking forward to seeing him again.”

Source

“WE HAVE TO START SOMEWHERE”

by JB Williams, ©2011

(Oct. 20, 2011) — On October 5, 2011, the following national call was released to the public –

“An undisclosed number of American Veterans and former service members have come together to prepare and present this Call-to-Action on behalf of the U.S. Constitution, the Republic, the Rule of Law and equal justice for all freedom loving citizens of the United States of America. Acting together as one, via The Veteran Defenders of America, co-sponsored by civilian patriot group The Unites States Patriots Union, LLC – we issue the following CALL for peaceful disobedience.

We CALL upon every member of federal, state and local government, legislative, judicial, law enforcement and military, who have taken an oath to protect and defend the Constitutional Republic from all enemies, foreign and domestic, to act upon those oaths for the stated purpose of restoring the Constitutional Republic.

We CALL upon ALL veterans and veteran organizations in America, who still believe in their oath to protect and defend, to unite with us at once – in this Declaration to Restore the Constitutional Republic.

We CALL for ALL citizens who still desire freedom and liberty, to stand with us in peaceful protest, and carry our demands to right the wrongs against our nation in the preservation of freedom, liberty, justice and the rule of law.”

(The full Call-to-Action is available here.)

This National Call-to-Action for Veterans Day, November 11, 2011 in Washington D.C. is scheduled for 0600 EST at the Washington Monument.

The call is led by MG Paul Vallely, Col. James Harding and Col. Harry Riley of Veteran Defenders of America (VDA), a service member division of The United States Patriots Union. Both are member-only organizations formed and funded by an undisclosed number of members.

The Veterans organization focuses on matters of national security and defense of the US Constitution, freedom and liberty. Patriots Union is an advanced patriot group focused on tangible strategies for reclaiming the republic, ending corruption and tyranny in government and returning the power to the American people.

Together, they prepared and launched a nation-wide Call-to-Action to ALL freedom loving Americans willing to fight for their right to live free from government tyranny. But they also issued a Code of Conduct for their event in D.C. scheduled on 11.11.11…

The Call-to-Action has gone viral on the internet, thanks to vital coverage by conservative news outlets like World Net Daily, Canada Free Press and Post & Email. Veterans, patriots and groups have been joining the Call-to-Action since and it’s beginning to look like patriots across the country are finally ready to join forces for real solutions.

In any movement, there are two types of participants, active and passive. Over the last hundred years, as our constitution and nation was being systematically destroyed, only a relative few were active participants in the destruction.

But most Americans were indeed passive participants in that destruction, sitting silent as the destruction took place, thereby passively participating by default, via their inaction.

Today, a Call-to-Action has been issued that requires active participation from people who are passive by nature. The average American may be angry about what is happening in their country, but how many are truly ready to do whatever it might take to end the madness?

When asked who is supporting this Call-to-Action, VDA’s Col. Harding responded as follows – “Every red blooded American we reach is on board, except those who will never be on board.”

Harding went on to explain – “it is much easier to list who is not on board at this point.” – “leftists who have a very anti-American vision for America, people who have not yet accepted that there is no political solution now and those who have a seat at the table of corruption, are not on board.” – “Everyone else we reach is on board…”

The Code of Conduct clearly indicates that the group’s call is for peaceful resistance on 11.11.11. The likelihood that Obama & Co. will resign on request is zero. The odds that members of congress will do the right thing and impeach are also slim. So, what is the real goal of the 11.11.11 event?

Co-Founder of Patriots Union Timothy Harrington explains – “We have to start somewhere. We are hoping to show D.C. insiders that the people have had enough. That the time for talking has passed and the time for serious action to save this nation has arrived.”

“Every member of every branch of government has taken an oath to uphold and protect the constitution and the people of the United States and it’s high time we see which of them is ready to live up to that oath.” – said Harrington.

The event calls upon all freedom loving citizens fed up with the corruption and tyranny in D.C. to take a stand with their veterans at the Washington Monument on November 11, 2011. Additional information is being released at the organizations web sites as available.

House Republicans have offered an economic recovery plan that will create twice the jobs at half the cost for hard working Americans. The House GOP plan does not include wasteful pet projects and it ensures that the funding immediately goes into effect. No waste, just jobs.
We want to hear what you have to say about this important issue. Please join us in a conversation by leaving your comments below and signing up to join the Whip Team.

House Republican Economic Recovery Plan
House Republicans are proposing:
Immediate Tax Relief for Working Families:
Rather than a refundable credit based on payroll taxes, House Republicans propose reducing the lowest individual tax rates from 15% to 10% and from 10% to 5%. As a result every taxpaying-family in America will see an immediate increase in their income with an average benefit of $500 in tax relief from the drop in the 10% bracket and $1,200 for the drop in the 15% bracket. A married couple filing jointly could save up to $3,200 a year in taxes.
Help for America’s Small Businesses:
Small businesses (those employing less than 500 individuals) employ about half of all Americans, yet they can be subject to tax rates that siphon away one-third or more of their income. House Republicans propose to allow small business to take a tax deduction equal to 20% of their income. This will immediately free up funds for small businesses to retain and hire new employees.
No Tax Increases to Pay for Spending:
The stimulus proposal pending in Congress includes record levels of government spending that will substantially increase the current deficit. House Republicans are concerned that this level of spending will result in some proposing near-term tax increases on American families. House Republicans are insisting that any stimulus package include a provision precluding any tax increases now or in the future to pay for this new spending. House Republicans believe that any stimulus spending should be paid for by reducing other government spending, not raising taxes.
Assistance for the Unemployed:
Incredibly, the Federal Government actually imposes income taxes on an individual receiving unemployment benefits. House Republicans propose to make unemployment benefits tax free so that those individuals between jobs can focus on providing for their families. The plan would also extend unemployment benefits from March to December, 2009.
Stabilizing Home Values:
The real-estate market is paralyzed as potential buyers wait on the sidelines waiting for prices to fall even further. This is becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. In order to encourage responsible buyers to enter the market and stabilize prices, House Republicans propose a home-buyers credit of $7,500 for those buyers who can make a minimum down-payment of 5%.

The light of freedom is fading in America with the darkness of socialism inexorably overtaking us. With each passing day we move further and further from freedom … the question is can we still find our way back?

Reagan inherited economic problems and fixed them. Obama’s strategy is to blame Bush and Standard & Poor’s.

The Wall Street Journal     August 8, 2011 

By American Vision.org

We have seen now how America was originally settled with nearly all governmental sovereignty vested at the local level. This was the legacy of Christian culture, and the better part of it. Early Americans did not have to worry about their wealth and freedom being voted away by alleged representatives far removed by hundreds of miles and two or three levels of government. We have also seen that this ideal of freedom has been lost gradually over time at many junctures, and always in the name of something like “the common good”; but more importantly, we have seen that these several creeping tyrannies were enabled and empowered by that one main instance of centralizing power, force, and money at the federal level—the Constitution of 1787. Nevertheless, whatever the causes are ultimately, it is easy to see that we today have nowhere near the freedom of our ancestors. The question, now, is how to get back to that level of freedom.

In this section, I intent to discuss the new mindset we need, some hurdles to overcome, and some practical actions to take toward restoring local freedom and local sovereignty. By “local sovereignty” I mean freedom of local governments from the dictates of higher levels of government. We must return to local control, and free local institutions from the bands and shackles of the federal and state machineries that entrap locals with grant money, encroachments on power and local decisions, licensing, and regulations. By the similar phrase “local freedom” I mean freedom of individuals from the same encroachments and impositions by their own local governments.

First, there are many hurdles in the way of gaining this freedom. The enemies of freedom have always been those who stand to profit from the public coercive systems. These people—either for the sake of some form of prestige or money (or both)—will consistently scheme and legislate to benefit themselves. These lusts exist at every level of government, but also in the hearts of individuals. So, the remedy for restoring freedom to the local level will mean confronting the many, many ways in which both individuals and government leaders have entrenched themselves in public funding based on taxation. Whether this manifests in publicly-funded construction contracts, public education, exorbitant pensions for public employees, union privileges, grants from higher governmental agencies, or a myriad of other versions of the same evil, the path to freedom means stopping these appropriations and redistributions of money, and derailing the long train of abuses of individual freedoms resulting from the alliance of the plunderers who want the money and the elites who think they can plan our lives better than we can and that they have a right to do so.

The problem ultimately is as much personal and individual as it is political. In this regard, the local and state levels are microcosms of the larger plundering going on in Washington, D.C. right now (with the exception that state and local governments have the formal inconvenience of having to balance their budgets); but local government themselves are a reflection of the lusts and corruption that local individuals choose to allow. Local governments often suffer under corrupt officials, constantly seeking to borrow more money, and constantly seeking grants from State and federal governments. But often the people themselves either agree with taking, taxing, or borrowing more money, or they are oblivious to it and don’t care.

So here’s the hard truth: if you agree with the appropriations (but perhaps you say “only at the local level”), then you’re complicit in a corrupt system that stretches all the way to Washington. Don’t talk about freedom and fiscal responsibility when you make multi-million dollar exceptions for yourself, your business, your industry, your union, your police and fire, or your local schools. Obama’s not the problem; you’re the problem. Until you address this problem, you have no moral authority in regard to people doing way over your head. On the other hand, if you are merely oblivious to the problem or don’t care, then you’re still culpable and complicit by your complacency—and you can bet that the liberals and statists just love you for it, for it helps them get their scheme across with less opposition. It’s been said that the only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing. I agree, although I would add that anyone who sits there and does nothing can’t be considered a good person to begin with. We need to confront both corruption and complacency, which is to say we need to wake up and take responsibility, take action.

Knowing that the problem begins with the individual heart and stretches all the way up to Washington, we’ll need to confront all levels at the same time. But we must concentrate our energy and focus on the areas in which we’ll have the greatest effect—ourselves and our local governments. We have already addressed vitally-needed personal lifestyle adjustments in education and the welfare State. We have emphasized the “don’t take the cheese” principle in those areas for individuals. Now it is time to focus on that concept at the level of local government. We must work to avert all public expenditure, debt, and taxation in local government, as well as all accepting of grants from higher governmental bodies. This is the first step in returning to anything like true local sovereignty to America—her counties must be free of strings attached to all higher agencies. But since that level of freedom does not yet exist, nor will it exist completely for the duration of the process of arriving at it, we must still attend as need be to State and national politics until we reach the desired position locally. We can’t take the chance of complacency at the back door where the Feds can creep in while we’re distracted with only local matters. Even when we achieve the goal locally, however, we cannot rest until surrounding counties, and then the vast majority of counties in the State have reached a similar level of understanding and practice of local sovereignty—for until a majority of counties exist that are willing to assert their freedom simultaneously against higher governments, the few that arrive at near local autonomy will always be exposed to the weaknesses attending their tiny-minority status. In other words, we’ll need a lot of free counties voicing their “nullifications” and independences at the same time, or else the federal government could simply ignore it and squash it with little repercussion. We need mass decentralized (yet legitimate) resistance so that no central authority can easily or effectively answer it. So, until we reach a time in which a growing number of America’s 3000+ counties care more about freedom than State and Federal aid, we must be vigilant in guarding our work and prayers toward that goal—for they are never safe from the threats of violence, force, defamation, and theft from above.

In short, anyone wishing to start a truly grass-roots, bottom-up movement for restoring local sovereignty is going to face multiple levels of opposition—from the higher levels of government, from the vast mainstream media leftist-propaganda machines, from entrenched Statism even in local media such as newspapers, corporate forces that use government to stop comeptition, and also from corrupt local officials. We must be prepared to meet all of this with truth, unwavering commitment to freedom, courage, and yet calmness, confidence, and kindness.

Second, we need to affirm this new vision of decentralized power. This vision must be deep and we must commit to it thoroughly. The vision of mass decentralization was actually voiced in this country at a crucial time by the famous economist F. A. Hayek. Nearing the end of World War II, he noted that western civilization was going to need to be rebuilt, and that this task would have to be done amidst an atmosphere in which Communism thrived as a powerful force, the forces and ideas behind National Socialism and fascism were still very strong, and academia was (as it still is) strongly socialist or even communist throughout the West. Hayek argued in his famous book, The Road to Serfdom, that any attempts at rebuilding along the lines of any large socialized, nationalized State would be doomed to failure sooner or later. His important conclusion was this:

We shall not rebuild civilization on the large scale. It is no accident that on the whole there was more beauty and decency to be found in the life of the small peoples, and that among the large ones there was more happiness and content in proportion as they had avoided the deadly blight of centralization. . . Nowhere has democracy ever worked well without a great measure of local self-government . . .Where the scope of the political measures becomes so large that the necessary knowledge is almost exclusively possessed by the bureaucracy, the creative impulses of the private person must flag. I believe that here the experience of the small countries like Holland and Switzerland contains much from which even the most fortunate larger countries like Great Britain can learn.  We shall all be the gainers if we can create a world fit for small states to live in.[said, “The purpose of meetings is not to record events, it is to protect people.” Go for everything you can find or have a desire to get.

Second, then start a blog or website dedicated to making your local government as public and transparent as possible. You can be as detailed or selective as necessary, as long as it’s honest and open. Post everything you can. Show any clear connections, show every cent that is taxed, how it is assessed and collected, how it is spent; show every cent borrowed and who profits from borrowing against future taxation, and who holds the bond. Show how much elected officials and public employees of all sorts are paid, and what their public pension benefits look like. This is all perfectly legal. WordPress and Blogger are absolutely free and easy to use. It would be great to have at least one such website dedicated to ultimate transparency in each of America’s 3000+ counties. It would better to have several in each county. Variety, choice, and competition will make them better and more effective. These would make fabulous projects for students; but really, anyone could do this, and everyone should.

Then, add video. This can be done merely on a YouTube or other video site’s channel, or better yet, embedded in a website. Record meetings, obtain interviews with officials whenever possible. Some local governments already record their meetings and post them themselves. The point is to have a clear and open public record, and get the word out to as many people, and make everything about local government as accessible and understandable to as many people as possible. This will lead, eventually, to the election of board members, judges, sheriffs, assessors, collectors, etc., who better represent a greater percentage of the population, and better represent local values; it will increase accountability; and it will help end corruption, self-serving, and waste. Taxes will decrease in many localities, choices will open up, people will be freer.

You should know that these ideas and these tactics are being upheld and implemented already with success. Some counties are beginning to assert local sovereignty against State and federal encroachments. For example, the local town of Sedgwick, Maine, recently declared absolute sovereignty over its local food supply. They were tired of state and federal regulations of local meat, raw milk, etc. So they declared their right and determination to be free of the tyranny: their new ordinance says, “[O]ur right to a local food system requires us to assert our inherent right to self-government. We recognize the authority to protect that right as belonging to the town of Sedgwick.” They considered State and federal regulations as “usurpation of our citizens’ right,” and went on to declare, “It shall be unlawful for any law or regulation adopted by the state or federal government to interfere with the rights recognized by this Ordinance.” This was applied also for “any corporation” that would try to interfere. The town argued that these claims to local sovereignty are supported by the Declaration of Independence, the Maine State Constitution, and other Maine statutes. They reserved the right even to secede completely if necessary in the face of a contest.

That Sedgwick, Maine ordinance is currently being used as a model to resist federal regulation in many other municipalities. These will certainly lead to court battles and possibly intimidation from higher governments, but the fact that they exist and people are advancing them shows that the vision for local sovereignty is growing and can be implemented. The fight is only begun, but it has begun.

This is true in other areas as well, as some local counties and even States have declared that they will not honor Obama’s Health Care Act, but have declared it null within their jurisdictions. Some States have declared all federal firearm laws null and void within their boundaries, for guns or ammo manufactured there. There are at least a dozen or more areas in which States currently are nullifying Federal laws. And as this precedent becomes more prevalent in States, it will only make moral sense to extend it to counties. Local sovereignty, county sovereignty, will grow more viable as well.

This is, after all, the foundation of American freedom: the first American declaration of independence was not that of 1776, but was written by a single county. Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, formally declared independence from Great-Britain on May 31, 1775, saying that “the Authority of the King or Parliament, are annulled and vacated.” They proceeded to set up an interim government all by their lonesome, until (as they expected) the rest of the Colonies should catch up.

Cases of local freedom—individuals asserting control over corrupt local officials—are occurring as well. In one case, a small town council in South Carolina had very quietly been paying itself an extremely rich pension package. When a few local business owners found out, they were outraged. At least one council member was opposed, and the businessmen approached him with a plan. They then showed up impromptu at a council meeting with video camera running. They got them members to confirm the terms of the rich package, and then asked for a show of hands on the council of all those who disapproved of it. The lone honest member of the council jetted his hand high, and the rest were caught on video exposed. The businessmen then simply thanked the council and left with the video. The council was so scared that it called a recess and chased the inquirers into the parking lot, trembling, asking what there were going to do with the video! They knew good and well.

In a similar case, a seventeen year-old kid exposed the appointment of a school superintendant whom a school board tried to rush through because he would be a big spender on behalf of the district. By simply showing up at both the interview process and the board meetings with a digital recorder, the corrupt thugs were caught, and were trembling in fear.

Another local contact of mine has been fighting these kind of battles for several years. He’s watched his community deteriorate with a combination of Federal Section 8 housing and corrupt local investment trusts, much of which came about only after an influx of “free school lunch” programs and Title 1 status gained for local public schools to receive massive federal aid. There is much to discern and sort out here, but the bottom line is corrupt local fat cat officials using government grants to empower and enrich themselves. And they are protected by liberal politicians above them, for several reasons. My contact said he started attending board meetings to record what was said. Very early on, one of these fat cats approached him with suspicious questioning and threatening demeanor—essentially threatening to wreck his career. The man is now very paranoid, because he has seen how deeply the corruption goes in his area, and how serious some of the insiders are about keeping it that way. There is work to be done here.

Another man wrote me telling how he won a seat on his local commission because the local conservatives were raising taxes and spending like crazy. He simply took a strong “TEA-party” stand against spending and corruption, and he was elected—despite overwhelming opposition from the local papers, labor unions, and even the local Chamber of Commerce. The local Chamber opposed him because it was dominated by big businesses that favor big-government for their corporate welfare. In other words, the local Chamber itself was corrupted by the forces of wealth redistribution. It had taken the cheese, and was now entrapped. My friend won the election nevertheless, but still faces an uphill fight against complacent and complicit officials, and, as he put it, “the grip that federal grants place on local units.”

There are some successes out there. But there are currently many challenges. One of the good things about seeing how deep and real the challenges are is that we realize how much more entrenched, powerful, and worse it must be at the higher levels, certainly in Washington, D.C. The nature of the problem is exactly the same; it’s just magnified at the national level. If we can’t dismantle tyranny locally, you can forget it happening in D.C. But this is what is encouraging about the successes we’re seeing: we in fact can have an effect locally, and many people are. There is a lot of work to do, and a lot of hill to climb. It will take time. But remember, we are planning for our grandchildren. It is time to start, get busy, and get a steady pace of reform.

It begins with people caring about the problem. It advances when people get focused, study, and explain the problem. It succeeds when they take action on the problem. This is county rights in action. It will only work when you get involved. For people can only be free if they will be responsible and courageous.

At a recent gathering, a dyed-in-the-wool liberal thought she was complimenting me by saying, “you’re my favorite Republican.” She was surprised when I replied, “I not a republican, I’m a conservative.” I don’t think she understood the difference, and nervously asked me, “well, you’re not a Tea Party member, are you”? I said, “I am.” The conversation ended there.

She’s a woman I like and respect. I think she feels the same about me, or least she did before that conversation. She’s not stupid or uneducated. She’s a professional with a Masters degree. In fact, she’s like most liberals I know. The typical liberal has a stereotypical view of what defines conservatives, republicans and Tea Party members. To liberals, they’re all the same and represent everything they stand against, or at least they think so until they’re asked some direct questions. They’re usually astonished to learn they’re not as liberal as they thought they were. Quite often, they actually turn out to be conservatives, they just didn’t know it.

Here’s some questions to ask them:

1. Do you believe the U.S. Constitution is the supreme law of the land?
2. Do you believe America is a nation of laws, and everyone should be held to the same standard, regardless of class, race or religion? Or, do you believe some in our society deserve special treatment under the law because they’re rich, poor, politically connected, black, white, Hispanic, etc?
3. Do you believe as our founders did that our rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness come from our creator? Or, do you believe our rights come from the government?
4. Do you believe as our founders did that the purpose of the government is limited to the preservation of the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness and the other powers granted to it by the people in the constitution? Or, do you believe the government can vote itself any power it deems appropriate no matter what the constitution says?
5. Do you believe the money you earn from your job or business belongs to you, as well as the property you buy with the money you earn? Or, do you believe the government has the right to your money and property, and someone in Washington should decide how much of it you should keep based on the adage made famous by Karl Marx, “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need?
6. Do you believe that as long as you earn your money honestly and break no laws, there should be no limit on the amount of money you make? Or, do you believe as President Obama said, “at some point, you’ve made enough money?”
7. Do you believe all Americans should have an equal opportunity to succeed or fail based on their individual ability, intellect and work ethic? Or, do you believe all Americans should have equal outcomes regardless of their ability, intellect or work ethic, and the government should redistribute the wealth of those who succeed to those who don’t in order to level the playing field?
8. Do you believe America is a sovereign nation with borders, and we as a nation should decide which foreign nationals to let in and who we deny access? Or, do you believe there should be no borders and anyone who wants to enter our country is welcome, with or without permission?
9. Do you believe the government should spend no more money than it takes in? Or do you believe we can just continue to borrow money from other countries without worrying about the National Debt?
10. Do you believe the government spends too much money? Or, do you believe Americans are taxed too little?

You’ll find most liberals who answer these questions honestly will find themselves on the conservative side of most of these questions, usually anywhere from 7 – 9 of them.

So why do they think Republicans are sub-human, conservatives are Neanderthals and Tea Party members are a bunch of racists and crazies? Because that’s what the mainstream media has been selling as objective news coverage. Most people are busy earning a living and taking care of their families. They don’t have the time or interest to dig very far for the truth, so they read the New York Times and watch Katie Couric and think they’re getting unbiased news coverage. They have to look further to find out they’re not getting objective reporting, and too many people are not willing to take the time.

But have faith, my fellow conservatives, things are changing. Recent polls have shown less and less people are getting their news from network television and the main stream newspapers. More and more people are getting their news from cable and the Internet, and the cable news they’re watching and trusting more than any other is Fox News, and it’s not even close.

So print this post and keep it in your pocket and the next time you’re at a family gathering or discussing the world with some liberal friends, whip this little quiz out and put some people to the test. You may not change them into conservatives overnight, but at least you can shine some light on who they really are. They might even learn something!

From new roads to wise leadership,

sound financials and five-year plans,

Beijing has the winning approach.

The Wall Street Journal  July 9, 2011

Tunisia has undergone increasing economic liberalization over the last decade: In the 2010-2011 World Economic Forum’s Global Competitiveness Report, it was ranked as the most competitive country in Africa, as well as the 32nd most economically competitive country globally.   North Africa’s large Muslim populations are a vast business opportunity for Islamic banking and other businesses.

Jacob Rothschild, senior member of the British branch of the Rothschild dynasty

Contrary to popular belief, the world’s finances are controlled by privately-owned “central banks” masquerading as federal government banks in nearly every country in the world  [The U.S. Court of Appeals, Ninth Circuit, ruled that The Federal Reserve (U.S.' central bank) was privately owned in 680 F.2d 1239, LEWIS v. UNITED STATES of America, No. 80-5905].

Though it is a carefully guarded secret, the Rothschilds and their associates own most the shares in the central banks (Federal Reserve Directors: A Study of Corporate and Banking Influence, Committee on Banking, Currency and Housing, House of Representatives, 1976, Charts 1-5) (Mullins, Eustice  Secrets of the Federal Reserve 1983).   With extremely little government input, the economies of Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Jordan, and Algeria are strictly controlled by the Rothschild’s central banks and their International Monetary Fund.

————————————————————————————————————————–

THE MOTIVE: FOLLOW THE MONEY

Islamic banks have been eating into Rothschild profits in the Middle East because: they don’t charge interest (Shariah Law), they are growing very rapidly among the world’s exploding Muslim populations, and (in these catastrophic economic times) they are more stable than western banks.

While it is a very good thing that people are freed from the tyranny of dictators, they also need to be freed from the tyranny of economic control and serfdom.  The relevant moral question is: Do the means justify the end?.

Ben Ali’s son-in-law El Materi at the opening of his Zitouna Bank, North Africa’s first Islamic bank, last May

Deposed Tunisian President Ben Ali’s son-in-law, Sakher El Materi, opened Tunisia’s first Islamic bank, Zitouna Bank, on May 26, 2010.   Zitouna Bank is the first Islamic bank in the Maghreb region[North Africa].   The bank was a first step toward Ben Ali’s new program of extensive reforms, “Tunisia, a Pole for Banking Services and a Regional Financial Centre”, which would have undermined the power and the profits of the Central Bank of Tunisia (privately-owned by the Rothschilds and their associates).

Tunis Financial Harbour opened last October 19. Its the first offshore finance centre in North Africa.

The Telegraph (October 19 2010) reported on the opening of the megaproject Tunis Financial Harbour –President Ben Ali’s bid to make Tunisia the regional financial centre of North Africa and beyond: “Islamic investment bank Gulf Finance House (GFH) and the Tunisian government have created the first offshore finance centre in North Africa.  The centre will be part of Tunis Financial Harbour, a $3 billion waterfront development in Tunis . . .  GFH, which is based in Bahrain, hopes the centre will allow Tunisia to take advantage of its strategic position on the Mediterranean sea, and operate as a bridge between the EU and the rapidly growing economies of North Africa [and subSaharan Africa].”

“However, despite the current poor climate, the potential for Islamic banking in Egypt is huge, and one should expect more moves from Abu Dhabi Islamic Bank into Egypt, possibly in the form of a buyout,”  Executive Magazine (Feb 8 2011) reports, “A recent Middle East Business Intelligence report said it best, when it opined, ‘If Abu Dhabi Islamic Bank can make a success of offering Islamic products, the whole market will open up. We have already seen some of the local banks start to advertise their Islamic products in view of the competition for customers they see about to begin.’

“Clearly Islamic banks in the Gulf are already anticipating the day when their home markets are saturated. And it appears that Egypt will be on the next front-line in the development of regional Islamic banking and finance.”

“African countries such as Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Morocco, Tunisia and Sudan are keen on future sukuk exercises (issuing Islamic bonds). Gambia debuted with a US$166m sukuk deal, privately sold in the US in 2006.”  [International Finance Review (Reuters), 2008]

The New York Times article “Islamic banking rises on oil wealth, drawing non-Muslims” ( November 22, 2007) reported:   “Rising oil wealth is lifting Islamic banking – which adheres to the laws of the Koran and its prohibition against charging interest – into the financial mainstream. . . . In addition to Islamic loans, there are Islamic bonds, Islamic credit cards . . . Loans and bonds that conform to the Koran are already available in the United States. . . .

“’This is an industry on its way from a niche industry to becoming a truly global industry,’ said Khawaja Mohammad Salman Younis, the managing director for operations in Malaysia for Kuwait Finance House, the world’s second-largest Islamic bank.  ‘In the next three to five years you’ll see Islamic banks coming out in Australia, China, Japan and other parts of the world.’

“In Islamic banking, financiers are required to share borrowers’ risks, meaning that depositors are treated more like shareholders, earning a portion of profits.  Financing deals resemble lease-to-own arrangements, layaway plans, joint purchase and sale agreements, or partnerships.

“The stampede into Islamic finance is mostly an effort to tap an estimated $1.5 trillion of funds sloshing around the Middle East, largely from higher oil prices.  . . .Those investments have helped ignite an economic revival throughout the Muslim world at a time of increasing religious conservatism among Islam’s 1.6 billion faithful.  A result is expanding demand for financial services that adhere to Islamic law  . . .

“And while the biggest Islamic banks are in the wealthy Gulf states, the most attractive potential markets are in Turkey and North Africa (emphasis added) and among European Muslims. . . .

“. . . even non-Muslims are taking advantage of a growing range of Islamic products offering competitive returns.  For instance, David Ong-Yeoh, a public relations executive tired of fretting over the rising interest rate on his adjustable rate mortgage, refinanced to a 30-year fixed loan from an Islamic financial institution. Now, he pays regular installments that include a predetermined profit margin for the bank.

“’The terms are better than on conventional loans,’ said Ong-Yeoh, 41.

“Islamic finance also avoids other prohibited practices.  Shariah-compliant bankers cannot receive or provide funds for anything involving alcohol, gambling, pornography, tobacco, weapons or pork.  Proponents of Islamic banking say these are limits any socially conscious investor can support, Muslim or not. They also envision wider appeal for Islamic banking’s ban on interest, which stems from the Koran’s prohibition against usury.

“This is a view that has a long religious and historical tradition.  Interest is repeatedly condemned in the Bible. Aristotle denounced it, the Romans limited it, and the early Christian church prohibited it. . . .

“The belief that all interest charges are unjust now underpins Islamic finance. . . .Hoarding is frowned upon in the Koran, so savings earn no return unless put to productive use.

“’Money should be used for creating better value in the country or the economy,’ Maraj said. ‘Money cannot generate money.’

“Nor can Islamic banks simply trade money.  ‘In the Islamic finance model, the banks are supposed to mobilize funds through a fund management concept,’ said Rafe Haneef, head of Islamic banking in Asia for Citigroup.

“Indeed, Islamic banking is supposed to function more like private equity firms than conventional banking. ‘Private equity is an Islamic concept,’ Haneef said.

“Industry proponents say this risk-sharing requirement helps reduce the kind of abuses that led to the subprime mortgage mess in the United States. Scholars consider it un-Islamic to overload a customer with debt or invest in a company with excessive debt.”

The Washington Post, “Islamic Banking: Steady In Shaky Times” (Oct 31 2008), reported:  “As big Western financial institutions have teetered one after the other in the crisis of recent weeks, another financial sector is gaining new confidence: Islamic banking.  Proponents of the ancient practice, which looks to sharia law for guidance and bans interest and trading in debt, have been promoting Islamic finance as a cure for the global financial meltdown.

“This week, Kuwait’s commerce minister, Ahmad Baqer, was quoted as saying that the global crisis will prompt more countries to use Islamic principles in running their economies. U.S. Deputy Treasury Secretary Robert M. Kimmet, visiting Jiddah, said experts at his agency have been learning the features of Islamic banking.

“Though the trillion-dollar Islamic banking industry faces challenges with the slump in real estate and stock prices, advocates say the system has built-in protection from the kind of runaway collapse that has afflicted so many institutions. For one thing, the use of financial instruments such as derivatives, blamed for the downfall of banking, insurance and investment giants, is banned. So is excessive risk-taking.

“’The beauty of Islamic banking and the reason it can be used as a replacement for the current market is that you only promise what you own [contrast to western banks fractional reserve system].  Islamic banks are not protected if the economy goes down — they suffer — but you don’t lose your shirt,’ said Majed al-Refaie, who heads Bahrain-based Unicorn Investment Bank.

“The theological underpinning of Islamic banking is scripture that declares that collection of interest is a form of usury, which is banned in Islam. In the modern world, that translates into an attitude toward money that is different from that found in the West: Money cannot just sit and generate more money. To grow, it must be invested in productive enterprises.

“’In Islamic finance you cannot make money out of thin air,’ said Amr al-Faisal, a board member of Dar al-Mal al-Islami, a holding company that owns several Islamic banks and financial institutions. ‘Our dealings have to be tied to actual economic activity, like an asset or a service. You cannot make money off of money. You have to have a building that was actually purchased, a service actually rendered, or a good that was actually sold.’

“Islamic bankers describe depositors as akin to partners — their money is invested, and they share in the profits or, theoretically, the losses that result. (In interviews, bankers couldn’t recall a case in which depositors actually lost money; this shows that banks put such funds only in very low-risk investments, they said.)”

It is easy to see why the Rothschilds and their network of conventional western banks would be threatened by competition from the more appealing, more conservative Islamic banks.

Late in 2008, French Finance Minister Christine Lagarde announced France’s intention to make Paris “the capital of Islamic finance” and said several Islamic banks would open branches in the French capital in 2009.  French sources estimate this area of the financial market is worth from 500 to 600 billion dollars and could grow by an average 11 percent a year.

John Sandwick, managing director of Swiss asset management firm Encore Management, characterized the opening of several Swiss Islamic banks as, “the race to control the rich prize: which today is worth hundreds of billions, but in the future will be trillions of dollars of Islamic wealth.”

“According to Standard and Poor’s, Islamic banking assets reached about $400 billion throughout the world in 2009. In November 2010, The Banker published its latest authoritative list of the Top 500 Islamic Finance Institutions with Iran topping the list. Seven out of ten top Islamic banks in the world are Iranian according to the list.” (iStockAnalyst, Feb 8, 2011)

BEN ALI’S SON OPENS FIRST ISLAMIC BANK IN ATTRACTIVE NORTH AFRICAN MARKET

Commenting on the opening of Zitouna (Islamic) Bank, International Business Times (May 28 2010) reported, “North Africa has begun to embrace Islamic finance after years watching from the sidelines, partly to channel more Arab Gulf petrodollars into the region. . . .Tunisia has one of the most open economies in the region and attracts substantial investment from the European Union, something that is expected to accelerate after 2014, when the government has said it will make the currency (the Tunisian dinar) fully convertible.”

Global Islamic Finance News (May 31, 2010) reported, “Zitouna Bank also seeks to impart a regional dimension on its activities, particularly in the Maghreb region [North Africa], all the more so that it is the first specialised bank not belonging to a foreign banking group,” and went on to add, “The Bank will also seek to forge strong relations with the Maghreb and Mediterranean banks to ensure needed flow of financial operations for its customers.  The bank officials stressed that the financial institution has established relations with 12 Islamic banks in collaboration with the Institute of Islamic banks in Bahrain.

Zitouna bank’s formation had been announced earlier in the Official Gazette of the Republic of Tunisia on 10 September 2009.   Tunisia and Morocco authorized Islamic finance in 2007, partly to channel more investment into their fast-growing tourism and real estate industries.

Due to his being the son-in-law of President Ben Ali, El Materi’s Zitouna Bank was expanding in Tunisia to the level of monopoly.   El Materi had built a powerful business empire:  he ran businesses in News and Media, Banking and Financial Services, Automotive, Shipping and Cruises, Real Estate and Agriculture, Pharmaceuticals and last November 22 he  bought a 50% stake in Orascom Telecom for 0.2 billion.

The newly-opened Tunis Financial Harbour was on the brink of becoming the regional financial centre of North Africa and, with its strategic position on the Mediterranean sea, becoming a bridge between the EU and the rapidly growing economies of North Africa and subSaharan Africa.

On January 20 2011, ZItouna Bank, Tunisia’s first Islamic bank was seized by the Central Bank of Tunisia (Rothschilds).  The bank owned by Sakher El Materi, the thirty-year-old son-in-law of deposed Tunisian leader Zine El Abidine Ben Ali has been placed under “the control” of the central bank.    Materi is presently in Dubai.  The move came a day after 33 of Ben Ali’s clan were arrested for crimes against the nation.  State television showed what it said was seized gold and jewellery.  Switzerland has also frozen Ben Ali’s family assets.

EGYPT’S ISLAMIC BANKS THREATENED BY ROTHSCHILD REVOLUTION:  OLD MAN POTTER VS HARRY BAILEY

A still from the film “It’s A Wonderful Life”

The following scenario is right out of the 1946, Frank Capra film It’s a Wonderful Life with Old Man Potter (Rothschild) creating a run on Harry Bailey’s traditional Savings and Loans (Islamic bank):

Islamic (halal) banking products have not made significant inroads in North Africa yet, except in Egypt.   “. . . There are several Islamic banks operating in Egypt: Faisal Islamic Bank, Al Baraka Egypt (Al Ahram Bank) and Abu Dhabi Islamic Bank NBD . . .  There may be others as well,” says Blake Goud, an expert on Islamic Finance (The Review – Middle East, Jan 31 2011), “. . . and the risks of a run on the bank should concern those interested in Islamic banking around the world because it could provide a test of how resilient Islamic banks really are to crisis.

“What I mean is that the Egyptian situation, which could be a fantastic opportunity for the Egyptian people, could expose a weakness within the Islamic banking industry if it is problematic. The main risk to any bank is that there is a run and the bank cannot meet depositor withdrawals with the cash available on hand. This forces the bank to raise cash from other means. In most cases, it can either get an inter-bank loan from another bank overnight that allows it to handle withdrawals. If other banks are hesitant to lend to a given bank because of fears of asset quality, then the bank will usually have access to an overnight borrowing facility with the central bank, which operates as the lender of last resort.

“The key for Islamic banks is that they are not able to take advantage of the inter-bank lending market, nor are they able to borrow from (or lend to) the central bank (emphasis added) because those loans are interest-bearing. The only alternative is to find other banks (mostly Islamic banks) willing to extend Shari’ah-compliant, bilateral loans often using commodity murabaha. In a country like Egypt where the Islamic banking industry is a small portion of the total banking system, it does not create a systemic risk if Islamic banks fail, but it does matter a lot to the depositors of other Islamic banks in the country and globally. If there is the potential that a run on an Islamic bank will not be stopped by someone; whether that is a foreign bank, a multi-lateral bank like the Islamic Development Bank or the central bank of Egypt (through emergency measures), then it could hurt confidence in Islamic banks.

“If neither of these options are available, the bank will have to try to raise funds by selling its assets, most of which (loans) are illiquid in the short run. It will have to take a loss on the sale to realize the cash it needs to meet withdrawals. If this continues and the bank sells enough assets at a discount to the value they are held on the balance sheet, the bank’s equity will be negative (the value of assets minus liabilities) and it will become insolvent (having earlier only been illiquid). This is the fundamental danger in banking from a financial stability perspective. If enough banks face runs and have to sell assets, the run could become self-sustaining and contagious. Even a healthy bank facing a run can become insolvent.

“The loss of confidence is more than just a reputational hit and a hit on the egos of Islamic bankers.  It would make it more difficult for Islamic banks to attract and retain depositors and it could raise the cost at which it can attract depositors. This would make the bank, all other things equal, less profitable (it makes profit of the spread between the return on invested funds and the cost of funds borrowed from depositors).  Lower profitability will lower the attractiveness of Islamic banks to equity investors limiting their ability to increase capital through equity offerings (or at least increasing the dilution to current shareholders). It will lower the amount available to supplement capital as well as pay dividends to its shareholders.

“Therefore, it is important that the Islamic banks in Egypt make it through the ‘run’ that is predicted if it materializes, not just for those banks’ shareholders, but also for the Islamic banking industry.”

In contrast, Bloomberg reports, “Egypt’s banks may risk a surge in customer withdrawals when they open for business, placing them among companies worst hit by the nationwide uprising against President Hosni Mubarak. … Central Bank Governor Farouk El-Okdah said in a telephone interview Jan. 29 that his bank has $36 billion in reserves, enough to accommodate investors should they wish to withdraw funds. His deputy, Hisham Ramez, said interbank lending “will function properly” when banks are reopened. He said the security situation will determine when that is possible.

“Asked about the risk of a bank run, Mohamed Barakat, chairman of state-run Banque Misr and head of the country’s banking association, said in a telephone interview that Egyptian lenders are ‘very liquid,’” with average loan-to-deposit ratios of 53 percent. […] “The Egyptian interbank offered rate, the rate banks charge to lend to each other, is at a 16-month high of 8.5 percent.”

THE MEANS: SPONSOR PRO-DEMOCRACY ACTIVISTS

These Rothschild revolutions are done under the pretense of bringing democracy and deposing despots, but the real aim is to initially create chaos and a leadership vacuum, then quickly offer a solution: install a puppet that will do the economic bidding of the Rothschilds.   The citizens gain freedom of speech and association, but become economic serfs.

These revolutions are most likely coordinated at the highest levels by the Rothschild’s International Crisis Group.  Mohamed ElBaradei is already being touted as a new leader for Egypt. ElBaradei is a trustee of the International Crisis Group.  Another board member of this group is Zbigniew Brzezinski.  George Soros sits on the executive committee.  The later two are ubiquitous front men for the Rothschilds.

The revolutions are from the same playbook as the fairly nonviolent “color revolutions”.  These revolutions have been successful in Serbia (especially the Bulldozer Revolution (2000), in Georgia’s Rose Revolution (2003), in Ukraine’s Orange Revolution (2004), in Lebanon’s Cedar Revolution and (though more violent than the previous ones) in Kyrgyzstan’s Tulip Revolution (2005), and Tunisia’s Jasmine Revolution.    Iran’s Green Revolution (2009) was unsuccessful.

Billionaire George Soros funded training of activists in North Africa.

The Guardian reported (Nov 26, 2004) that the following were “directly involved” in organizing the colour revolutions:  George Soros’ Open Society Foundation, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the International Republican Institute, and Freedom House.   The Washington Post and the New York Times also reported substantial Western involvement in some of these events.

Activists from Otpor in Serbia  have said that publications and training they received from the US based Albert Einstein Institution staff have been instrumental in the formation of their strategies.   The Albert Einstein Institution is funded by the Soros Foundation and NED. (Wikipedia)

In the article, “Georgia revolt carried mark of Soros” (November 26, 2003), theGlobe & Mail reported, “[Soros' Open Society Institute] sent a 31-year-old Tbilisi activist named Giga Bokeria to Serbia to meet with members of the Otpor (Resistance) movement and learn how they used street demonstrations to topple dictator Slobodan Milosevic. Then, in the summer, Mr. Soros’s foundation paid for a return trip to Georgia by Otpor activists, who ran three-day courses teaching more than 1,000 students how to stage a peaceful revolution.”

Egyptian activists wearing Otpor shirts. Otpor was started by Soros in Serbia and has trained activists in other colour revolutions

Several protest organizers on the streets in Egypt last week were wearing Otpor t-shirts.   These t-shirts are given out by Otpor at training sessions.  This is only to say that there may be a link here, between Soros and Tunisian protesters.

In 2007-08, Freedom House [funded by Soros and the Middle Eastern Partnership Initiative (MEPI)] ran the following program: “New Generation of Advocates, a MEPI-funded program that supports young civil society activists working for peaceful political change in the Middle East and North Africa, spearheaded the “Lawyers against Corruption” campaign in Tunisia.”(Freedom House website).  The group of “journalists, lawyers, and other activists who advocate for democratic reform” had a meeting with then Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, on a trip to Washington on International Human Rights Day, December 10, 2008.  In May 2009, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton met with the group of activist/dissidents.  Freedom House reported on their website that the group also visited “U.S. government officials, members of Congress, media outlets and think tanks . . . After returning to Egypt, the fellows received small grants to implement innovative initiatives such as advocating for political reform through Facebook and SMS messaging.”(emphasis added)

And also from the Freedom House website: “From February 27 to March 13 [2010], Freedom House hosted 11 bloggers from the Middle East and North Africa for a two-week Advanced New Media Study Tour in Washington, D.C.”

In 2010, Soros’ Open Society Institute funded a grant called ‘Can It Tweet its way to Democracy? The promise of Participatory Media in Africa’ described on the OSI website as “. . . . Ethiopia and Egypt have been the current focus of the research programme; the OSI funding will allow the project to be expanded to include: Uganda, Zimbabwe, Tunisia, Eritrea and Rwanda. . . . it is hoped that it will contribute to the understanding of the new media in Africa and its links to democratization.  It is also intended that the study will be used as a source material for future research.”

Facebook and Twitter were the primary means of organizing the revolution in Egypt:  “Activists from Egypt’s Kifaya (Enough) movement – a coalition of government opponents – and the 6th of April Youth Movement organized the protests on the Facebook and Twitter . . . .” (Voice of America)

In the Foreign Policy Journal, Dr. D.K. Bolton (Jan 19 2011) writes, “NED [National Endowment for Democracy] and Soros work in tandem, targeting the same regimes and using the same methods. . . . At least ten of the twenty-two directors of NED are also members of the plutocratic think tank, the Council on Foreign Relations . . . .” (The Council of Foreign Relations is the American sister of the Rothschild’s Royal Institute of International Affairs in Britain: both are instruments of plutocratic control hiding in plain sight.

The following is a partial list of grants from the NED website for 2009 (the latest year available):

In Tunisia the focus was on training youth activists:

“Al-Jahedh Forum for Free Thought $131,000 To strengthen the capacity and build a democratic culture among Tunisian youth activists.

“Mohamed Ali Center for Research, Studies and Training $33,500 To train a core group of Tunisian youth activists on leadership and organizational skills to encourage their involvement in public life.  [MACRST] will conduct a four-day intensive training of trainers program for a core group of 10 young Tunisian civic activists on leadership and organizational skills; train 50 male and female activists aged 20 to 40 on leadership and empowered decision-making; and work with the trained activists through 50 on-site visits to their respective organizations.

“Association for the Promotion of Education $27,000 To strengthen the capacity of Tunisian high school teachers to promote democratic and civic values in their classrooms. APES will conduct a training-of-trainers workshop for 10 university professors and school inspectors, and hold three two-day capacity building seminars for 120 high school teachers . . . .”

The above organizations and others have been recipients of ongoing NED grants in Tunisia, as the following list from previous years indicates:

2008:  Al-Jahedh Forum for Free Thought received $57,000 to train Tunisian activists;   Mohamed Ali Centre for Research got $37,800;  Tunisian Arab Civitas Institute, $43,000 for training teachers in “civic values” and  the Center for International Private Enterprise, $163,205 “to inculcate free enterprise doctrines among Tunisian businessmen, which reflects what NED is really aiming for in its promotion of “democracy and civil values”: globalization” (Bolton, 2011)

2007:  AJFFT received $45,000 to develop Tunisian Activists;  The Arab Institute for Human Rights got $43,900;  The Center for International Private Enterprise (CIPE) $175, 818;  The Mohamed Ali Center for Research, Studies, and Training $38,500; Moroccan Organization for Human Rights $60,000 “To strengthen a group of young Tunisian attorneys as they mobilize citizens on reform issues.”

In Egypt, the number of NED grants doubled in 2009 to 33 democracy projects totaling $1.4 million and the focus changed from promoting private enterprise to training young human-rights lawyers, and identifying and training youth activists.   It will be interesting to see when (if?) NED publishes its 2010 grants.  From the NED website—a sample of the grants for 2009:

Egyptian Union of Liberal Youth (EULY) $33,300 To expand the use of new media among youth activists for the promotion of democratic ideas and values. EULY will train 60 youth activists to use filmmaking for the dissemination of democratic ideas and values. The Union will lead a total of four two-month long training workshops in Cairo to build the political knowledge and technical filmmaking skills of participating youth involved in NGOs.

Andalus Institute for Tolerance and Anti-Violence Studies (AITAS) $48,900 To strengthen youth understanding of the Egyptian parliament and enhance regional activists’ use of new technologies as accountability tools. AITAS will conduct a series of workshops for 300 university students to raise their awareness of parliament’s functions and engage them in monitoring parliamentary committees. AITAS will also host 8 month-long internships for youth activists from the Middle East and North Africa to share its experiences using web-based technologies in monitoring efforts.

Bridge Center for Dialogue and Development (BTRD) $25,000 To promote youth expression and engagement in community issues through new media. BTRD will train youth between the ages of 16 and 26 in the use of new and traditional media tools to report on issues facing their communities. BRTD will also create a website for human rights videos and new media campaigns in Egypt.

Egyptian Democracy Institute (EDI) $48,900 To promote accountability and transparency in parliament through public participation, and to build legislative capacity. EDI will produce quarterly monitoring reports and hold seminars to discuss the overall performance of Parliament and offer recommendations on legislation proposed in the People’s Assembly. EDI will monitor, collect, and document evidence of corruption in Cairo and Alexandria

Lawyers Union for Democratic and Legal Studies (LUDLS) $20,000 To support freedom of association by strengthening young activists’ ability to express and organize themselves peacefully within the bounds of the law. LUDLS will train 250 youth activists on peaceful assembly and dispute resolution

Our Hands for Comprehensive Development  $19,200 To engage Minya youth in civic activism and encourage youth-led initiatives and volunteerism. Our Hands will hold two public meetings for local youth to discuss challenges and to identify youth leaders who would benefit from additional training courses. Participants will produce a short film on youth political participation, and develop and implement action plans for resolving problems facing youth in the governorate. Our Hands will also provide Minya youth an opportunity to learn from the experience of and network with Cairo-based activists and NGOs.

“Youth Forum  $19,000 To expand and maintain a network of youth activists on Egyptian university campuses and to encourage the participation of university students in student union elections and civic activities on campus. . . .”

NED and Soros have been injecting millions of dollars into the training of North African, pro-democracy teachers, lawyers, journalists and youth activists.  In 2009 they more than doubled their training efforts.  Why, at this time, has the 30-year support of these dictators been undermined?  The prize is the rapidly-rising economies of North Africa.  It coincides with the efforts of Ben Ali to make Tunisia the financial center of North Africa and to promote Islamic banking.  The Rothschilds want North African Muslims to borrow from Rothschild banks and pay interest at rates the Rothschild central bank decides:  they do not want them to be able to borrow from Islamic banks and not pay any interest.  The Rothschilds want Muslims to trade their present political oppression at the hands of brutal dictators for future economic serfdom under the control of banker Lord Rothschild.

Posted by Shawn Tully

The House budget chairman’s vision of bringing the market to Medicare isn’t perfect, but it’s the best choice in a world of poor alternatives.
FORTUNE — By far the most significant — and revolutionary — proposal in Congressman Paul Ryan’s 2012 budget is its blueprint for taming Medicare. According to the Congressional Budget Office’s analysis, issued on April 5th, the Ryan plan would totally reverse the course of recent fiscal history by lowering federal health care spending from 8% of GDP today to just 5% by 2050. If we remain on the current course, the spending would jump to 14% in that time frame.
The centerpiece of the Ryan manifesto is the radical new math it applies to Medicare benefits. In short, Ryan (R-Wis), chairman of the House Budget Committee, would transform the program for Americans ages 65 and older from an open-ended entitlement that threatens to swamp the budget into a system that makes fixed payments to participants each year — payments that would rise at a predetermined, predictable rate. In concept, it’s similar to the defined contribution plans most Americans now depend on for retirement: The government would provide a set dollar payment towards your health care premium, and you’d cover the balance of your health care costs, just as most Americans need to take extra savings from their paychecks for retirement.
But while you can pretty well predict what your 401K will be worth in 30 years if you invest conservatively, the outlook for tomorrow’s Medicare enrollees is far less predictable. The Ryan budget tells us how fast federal spending on Medicare will rise — far more slowly than in the past — but can’t predict how high our medical costs will be 20 years from now, and since the government’s contribution would be capped, how much of those costs we’ll need to pay for ourselves.
In effect, Ryan is asking Americans to make a historic leap of faith. He projects that the newly cost-conscious customers, who’ll inevitably be spending more of their own money, will shop far more carefully for health care. The pressure from those bargain-hunters, and the end to a regime that pays for as many tests as doctors can order, will force physician groups and hospitals to become far more efficient, and offer better prices.
“It’s very speculative how the new system would work,” says Robert Moffitt, a health care policy expert at the conservative Heritage Foundation. “But we know for sure that the Ryan plan would force private providers to compete ferociously for business, and that would introduce a degree of competition into Medicare that’s totally absent today.”
Planning for an uncertain future
Ryan’s vision of bringing the market to Medicare is the best choice in a world of poor alternatives. It’s crucial to understand how his plan differs from his previous proposals, chiefly by eliminating cost-savings from early years and imposing extraordinary limits on payments in future decades. So let’s examine Ryan’s new formula for Medicare.
Here’s a brief overview of how Medicare currently works: On average, the annual cost for its 46 million enrollees is roughly $13,000. The recipients pay total premiums of $1,326 a year for hospital visits and zero for physician services, and can purchase supplementary private Medigap policies that cover virtually all deductibles and co-pays for another $1,500 a year. So the enrollees pay a total of around $3,000, or 23% of the total $13,000 cost. Taxpayers cover the balance of $10,000.
For future retirees and budget-watchers, what matters most is how fast that $13,000 cost number rises, compared with the increase in the $10,000 that the government now pays. Ryan has a solution to the former. The latter is far harder to forecast. The gap between the two will grow, and chart what future retirees will need to pay for their own health care.
For many years, Medicare costs have been growing at between 2 and 2.5 percentage points faster than GDP, a ruinous, unsustainable rate. Even in today’s weak economy, the total Medicare bill is waxing at over 7%.
In two previous proposals, “A Roadmap for America’s Future” and a plan he co-authored with former Clinton administration budget director Alice Rivlin, Ryan recommended replacing the system of covering Medicare’s ever-expanding costs, no matter how fast they grew, with fixed contributions, in about a decade. All of the plans, including the one in the new budget, state that everyone who’s 55 and above will be allowed to remain under the existing Medicare rules when they reach 65. After the program is in place — the starting date in the budget plan is January 1st, 2022 — all Americans would be required to join once they turn 65.
Voucher replacement
In all the Ryan proposals, enrollees in the new regime would use the government’s contribution to shop from a broad array of private insurance plans offered by a Medicare exchange. That system is modeled on the highly successful Federal Employee Health Benefits Program, where government workers choose from a wide variety of offerings, from deluxe fee-for-service plans to basic high-deductible programs.
But beyond the basics, the proposal in the budget is starkly different from Ryan’s previous plans, a feature that’s mainly overlooked by the press and pundits. In the Roadmap for America, Ryan advocated a voucher system. Under that radical proposal, enrollees would receive a fixed payment of, say, $10,000 a year, in cash. If the senior bought a $7,000 plan, he or she could roll the extra $3,000 into a Medical Savings Account to pay for deductibles and co-pays.
The 2012 budget replaces the voucher concept with “premium support payments” — once again, modeled on the federal employees system — that the government would pay directly to the insurance plan the enrollee chooses. The seniors wouldn’t get to keep any cash that’s left over for out-of-pocket expenses.
The current blueprint is also substantially different from the one Ryan outlined with Alice Rivlin in November. The big change is that the new plan eliminates reforms that would have saved billions before the new regime begins in 2022. Instead, it tightens cost controls once it’s in place.
Rivlin and Ryan proposed a formula that would have imposed a tight cap on the starting contribution a decade in the future. Here’s how it worked: Take today’s average cost to the government of around $10,000 and allow it to grow at GDP plus one point. That’s far less than current growth of GDP plus two percent or more. So the Rivlin-Ryan plan would have notched large savings over the ten years before the program begins by starting with a premium support payment far smaller than the subsidy Medicare would probably be providing by that date.
But in the current budget proposal, Ryan drops that provision. Instead, the new plan would start with whatever subsidy Medicare is providing in 2022, rather than following the restrictive formula in the Rivlin-Ryan plan. The budget contains other important changes. Rivlin-Ryan recommended raising deductibles for doctor visits over the next decade to make patients more price conscious, and mandating that Medigap plans impose far higher deductibles and co-pays — another effort to get enrollees to shop for better deals. The only major change is medical malpractice reform.
Tiered benefits
The 2012 budget proposal also excludes those requirements. It essentially makes no changes to Medicare until 2022. The transformation is even more draconian than in the previous proposals. The budget plan limits growth of the government’s contribution to inflation, measured by the Consumer Price Index, and also adjusts the payments by the age of the recipient. It is by tying those premium support payments to an index that’s growing far more slowly than current medical inflation that Ryan manages to drive medical spending to just 5% of GDP in four decades.
The plan has other important features. It raises the age for eligibility from 65 to 67 between 2022 and 2033. It also provides sharply reduced subsidies for the wealthy: The top 2% of Medicare earners starting in 2022 would get just 30% of the average payment, and the next 6% would get half the average support payment. The program provides generous cash accounts of over $6,000 to poor patients to fully cover deductible and co-pays.
The big issue is how fast costs grow for the enrollees. With the inflation and age adjustment, the premium support payments will increase at a rate far below today’s relentless escalation of 7% or so a year. The success of the Federal Employees plan is highly encouraging. Its costs are growing at a rate that’s 2% lower than medical inflation in the private sector.
Even if the Ryan plan matches that success, Americans will no longer get more than 70% of their Medicare costs paid by the government. Retirees are bound to pay a much bigger share of their own medical costs. More and more seniors will choose high deductible plans, and HMO or PPO-style programs that limit choices of doctors.
Still, the rise in costs for the elderly could prove far less than the giant annual increases we’re experiencing today. We’ve simply never seen a competitive environment like the one in the Ryan blueprint. “The Obama plan is all about price controls,” says Joseph Antos, an economist at the American Enterprise Institute. “Ryan’s is all about unleashing the market.”
The Ryan plan has another major strength: It will stop heaping a bigger and bigger Medicare burden onto younger taxpayers. Ryan is making a bold, wrenching choice that wins because it’s less painful than all the others.

Liberals seem delighted that Paul Ryan and the GOP have decided to charge the fixed bayonets of Medicare reform, denouncing the new House budget as a crime against senior’s humanity, and so on.

Republicans are taking a huge political risk, but they are now setting the reform agenda, and their honesty may even oblige a national debate about the future of an entitlement state that can’t sur­vive in its current form.

Mr. Ryan’s core insight is that Medicare needs to be modernized if it is to survive. The federal insurance program for the elderly has barely changed since 1965, several health-care revolutions and trillions of misspent tax dol­lars ago. The GOP plan—known as premium support—would rationalize Medicare’s bur­den on taxpayers, while introducing market competition to control costs. As Democrats build their re-election bids around Medicare demagoguery, they’re pre­tending that the choice is between “privatiza­tion” and a free lunch. Mr. Ryan has done a ser­vice in exposing this illusion. Nothing will sooner finish off “Medicare as we know it” than to continue its present march into insol­vency. His is the first credible plan endorsed by either party for preserving the safety net.

Today traditional Medicare is the largest buyer of health care in America. It is also the worst buyer. The government sets prices for thousands of services, and then pays nearly any doctor or hospital that a patient visits. The same arbitrary fee schedule applies to the best hospital and the worst hospital, regardless of the quality or value of the care delivered, and the bills are sent to taxpayers.

This deliberate suppression of the price mechanism has helped to turbocharge U.S. health costs. Providers who find ways to de­liver better medicine at a lower cost aren’t re­warded, as they would be in any other industry.

Medicare spending is growing at a 7.2% annual clip, far faster than the economy. Spending is due to double over the next decade, feeding on more and more of the federal fisc and national wealth. (See the nearby chart.)

The 45 million Medicare beneficia­ries enjoy the security of “free” health care and its no-questions asked payments. Still, the entitlement is stuck in a Great Soci­ety time warp. It offers no protection against catastrophic expenses, the most basic function of insurance. Coverage doesn’t keep up with medical progress; prescription drugs weren’t added until 2003. Seniors are docked a $1,000 deductible for a single hospital stay, though nine of 10 people buy medigap coverage to backfill these and other holes. Where else do people buy insurance for their insurance?

Under the Ryan premium support model, seniors would instead choose from a menu of guaranteed private insurance options of the kind younger, private-sector workers have come to expect. These plans would be subsi­dized by a “defined contribution,” roughly equal to what the government now spends per person. This subsidy, about $15,000, would grow over time with consumer prices, but se­niors who wanted more expensive plans would pay the difference out of pocket.

Premium support would create a market reward for the services that consumer’s value. Because seniors would be chipping in at the margin, only above the fixed-dollar subsidy, most would favor lower premiums. Insurers would compete to supply them, and providers in turn would have a reason to innovate in health-care delivery and improve what has been their negative productivity rate.

Premium support would not cure all of America’s health ailments, and missing in ac­tion in the House budget is a comparable re­form for the rest of the market. But Medicare is so big that if it doesn’t change, nothing else can. Simply unwinding Medicare’s price con­trols would be an historic achievement.

That said, Granny will not be turned loose unsupervised into the market wilds.  The subsidies   will flow through Medicare, only to regulated insurers and government-approved plans. It does not go as far as Mr. Ryan’s previous “roadmap,” which offered direct cash vouch­ers for individuals who preferred to buy insur­ance themselves. The subsidies are means-tested, so the poor would receive more sup­port, as will sicker and chronically ill patients. They wouldn’t kick in until 2022, more than enough time for people to adapt and exempt­ing everyone older than 55 if they wished.

Mr. Ryan moderated his ambitions not merely because the fiscal crisis is so urgent, but because reforms of this order are so un­usual. Seniors and other voters may be un­nerved, especially when AARP and politicians beat the Medicare drums. As they inspect the details, however, seniors may be sur­prised to learn that premium support is not an untested idea. It is even routine in parts of Medicare itself.

Traditional Medicare would look a lot like Medicare Advantage, which gives almost one of four senior’s today private alternatives. Pre­mium support forms the architecture of the Medicare drug benefit too, and as a result it has cost 30% less than almost anyone pre­dicted.

The same concept governs the Federal Em­ployee Health Benefits Program, which insures everyone from postal workers to Members of Congress. The same is true for several large university systems and Calpers, the benefits program for public workers in California. None are known as incubators for the pitiless ideol­ogy that Democrats impute to Mr. Ryan. Despite this experience, one common criticism is that the subsi­dies wouldn’t keep pace with the rising health costs that medicare now promotes.

But medicine has always proven adept at reorganizing itself when the incentives change, and costs would fail over time if more patients were demanding their money’s worth.

Health care’s lack of accountability to consumers helps explain why Medicare’s unfunded   liabilities

over the next 75 years are about $31 trillion.

That number is beyond human comprehension and among the reasons that creating one more new entitlement in ObamaCare was so reck­less. Keeping Medicare’s generational prom­ise—that children assent to be taxed to pay for their grandparents’ health care so that their grandkids can one day pay for theirs—would mean under current trends that every income tax rate, in every bracket, would need to more than double.

The brutal arithmetic is that total federal health spending is about 10% of GDP today and on pace to hit 15% in 20 years. The liberal re­sponse is more central planning and eventu­ally the political rationing of care, even as taxes continue to climb. The alternative that Mr. Ryan has offered, including Obamacare repeal and a conversion of Medicaid into block grants to states, would bring that share down to 6% as premium support began to limit Medicare’s open-ended spending.

The reality that Mr. Ryan has recognized is that Medicare can’t be fixed with nips and tucks. Premium support is easily as important an advance as the shift from defined-benefit pensions to 401(k)s, and the transition could be as smooth. Major changes to the social compact must be grounded in some rough public consensus, and Republicans now have an obligation to persuade the country that their reform is the only one with a chance of saving Medicare for future generations.

Ideas from our readers on food and raising farm output

1.) Large tractors and combines have transformed agriculture in the developed world, enabling far more land to be cultivated and crops to be harvested at speed, which reduces the loss caused by weather. Sixty years ago my father needed six men to grow 100 acres (40 hectares) of crops. Today my son can farm 1,000 acres with one man.

Agriculture in the devel­oping world could also be transformed by this existing technology, but there needs to be fewer and bigger farms to make use of large equipment and to raise the collateral to invest. That means far fewer rural workers, and contro­versial social consequences.

New technology, such as satellite mapping, will enable farmers to identify wide varia­tions of soil quality across every field and to adjust their equipment to apply their seeds, fertilisers and chemicals precisely at varying rates, depending on the fertility across the field. This makes great economic and environ­mental sense.

2.) No solution to farming is viable unless we tackle the issue of consumption. In order to achieve a fairer balance in the world it would help if people in rich countries cut their meat and dairy consump­tion (which is also healthier). Crops should be used for feeding people, not for animal feed or biofuels. Research by the Potsdam Institute and the Alp en Adria University, in a study called “Eating the Planet”, proposes feeding the world by 2050 using humane and sustainable farming with­out a big change in land use, but only if meat consumption is moderated.

3.) Producing animal pro­tein is costly in terms of land and water use. A cow needs up to ten kilograms of feed to produce one kilogram of meat. A pig needs around five kilos and a chicken around three. The best part of the world’s maize and soyabean crops goes to feeding animals.

Separately, before poor farmers start buying seeds from big Western seed compa­nies they should try some basic technologies such as crop rotation, green fertilisers and agroforestry. Those tech­niques, which are being imple­mented in many African coun­tries, have the potential to increase yields and do much more to preserve the environ­ment than planting large areas with one or two hybrid seeds.

4.) Why not provide in­centives for countries to curb excess consumption using phased-in tradable quotas? Countries failing to bring average consumption to below 3,000 calories a day could buy entitlements from grossly under-consuming countries, which could invest the pro­ceeds in targeted grants aimed at eradicating the hunger that needlessly afflicts a billion people.

5.) 1 was disappointed that your leader on food so readily dismissed the role of specu­lation in driving up food prices, alluding to Milton Friedman’s old argument that “for every buy, there is a sell” (“Crisis prevention”, February 26th). It is particularly surpris­ing as TheEconomisthas writ­ten repeatedly about the role of asset-price bubbles in exac­erbating the financial crisis. Since Friedman’s work more than 50 years ago, economists have developed strong theoret­ical foundations showing how rational asset-price bubbles can inflate for long periods of time; certainly long enough for a family to starve.

Moreover, there is consider- able evidence that speculation in assets linked to commodity prices had an important role in driving up prices in the last food-price crisis in 2008. It is right, therefore, that the G20 should seek appropriate forms of regulation to discourage the formation of commodity-price bubbles, in addition to addressing the trade and agricultural policy issues you rightly mentioned.

6.) In rich and poor coun­tries alike, the principal un­derlying cause of wasted food is the lack of appropriate pack­aging. In poorer countries most wastage occurs from farm to shop; around half of all agri­cultural produce is spoiled before it reaches consumers. Foods spoil handled in bulk, without any protective packag­ing. Grains are infested by vermin, fruit and vegetables get bruised, meats are attacked by flies and maggots, eggs break and milk goes sour.

In rich countries, packaging and handling has vastly re­duced this sort of waste. In those countries most of the waste is caused by consumers throwing away perfectly good food, in large part because grandma’s taste-and-snifTtest of food that is past its best-by date has fallen out of favour. High-tech packaging that changes colour to indicate the degree of rotting in food is becoming available. It reas­sures consumers and helps them reduce wastage.

In rich and poor countries alike, ensuring that adequate packaging is available will go a long way to feeding the world.

7.) You were wrong to claim that traditional and organic farming methods cannot feed the world. Scientific evidence has implicated intensive farm­ing in the rise of two serious superbugs: a new strain of methicillin-resistant Staphylo­coccus aureus (mrs a) in farm animals, which is spreading rapidly and transferring to humans; and a new and almost untreatable type of E.coli that is causing a large number of deaths in Britain and elsewhere.

Evidence is mounting too of the problems that gm crops are causing for farmers. Weeds resistance to glyphosate have become a big problem in gm herbicide-tolerant crops in North and South America, while the cost of gm seeds cuts into farmers’ incomes.

8.) gm crops are the answer for many African farmers. It is the cruel propaganda of Euro­pean activists, sadly swal­lowed by the ruling African urban class, that prevents poor farmers from access to this lifeline, gm seeds are offered free to African farmers by Monsanto. And yet, out of fear or a neocolonial mindset, farmers refuse to take up the offer, lest they offend their European masters.

I see my neighbors, small landholders, desperately trying to extend their acreage and continually being pushed back to their one hectare. They see weeds smothering their maize and forcing them to abandon the rest of their field to return to the part that they already weeded but where more weeds are coming up.

These are a few of our reader’s remarks on food and food supply from our articles on food. We welcome all your thoughts and letters – send to – the meister@itmakessenseblog.com

Congress Go Home You are Worthless. Soros Commands, Obama Decrees and We Pay

The U.S. Should Reject the U.N. George Soros “Responsibility to Protect” Doctrine and Stop The WAR IN LIBYA

The “responsibility to protect” (R2P) doctrine outlines the conditions in which a communistic idea in which the the international community is obligated to intervene in another country, militarily if necessary, to prevent genocide, ethnic cleansing, and other atrocities. Despite its noble goals, the United States should treat the R2P doctrine with extreme caution.

Adopting a George Soros doctrine that compels the United States to act to prevent atrocities occurring in other countries would be risky and imprudent. U.S. independence — hard won by the Founders and successive generations of Americans — would be compromised if the United States consented to be legally bound by the R2P doctrine. The United States needs to preserve its national sovereignty by maintaining a monopoly on the decision to deploy diplomatic pressure, economic sanctions, political coercion, and especially its military forces.

There are ongoing efforts to legitimize the R2P George Soros one world doctrine within the United Nations and other international forums. The R2P doctrine is being advocated by certain wonderful sounding, but evil organizations that do not necessarily consider the best interests of the United States as a priority. International organizations such as the United Nations and international nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) such as the World Federalist Movement and the Open Society Institute promote R2P in the interest of a nebulous “international community,” not in the interests of the United States or its citizens.

If the United States intervenes in the affairs of another nation, that decision should be based on U.S. national interest, not on any other criteria such as those set forth by the R2P doctrine or any other international “test.”

Origins of the R2P Doctrine
Military intervention by one sovereign nation into another for humanitarian purposes has long been a controversial topic. In the wake of the tragedies in Rwanda and Srebrenica during the mid-1990s, the Canadian government — at the urging of then-U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan — launched an initiative to set forth principles for when and under what conditions such an intervention would be justified. To this end, Canada announced in September 2000 the formation of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS) to “foster a global political consensus” for preventing and responding to future incidents of mass killing and ethnic cleansing.

The ICISS Report. In December 2001, the ICISS issued a comprehensive report, The Responsibility to Protect.[1] Its two key provisions may be summarized as follows:
1. National governments are responsible for preventing large-scale losses of life and ethnic cleansing in their own populations.
2. In the event that a national government is unable or unwilling to prevent such atrocities, the international community, acting through the United Nations, has a responsibility to act and protect the suffering population, with or without the consent of the recalcitrant government.
The first of these provisions is already widely accepted. To date, 140 nations have pledged to protect their respective populations from genocide under the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide: “The Contracting Parties confirm that genocide, whether committed in time of peace or in time of war, is a crime under international law which they undertake to prevent and to punish.” If a national government fails to protect its own population from genocide or other atrocities, the R2P doctrine holds that the government effectively forfeits its sovereignty and negates its ability to raise the principle of nonintervention to prevent other nations from intervening to protect the vulnerable population.

The second key provision of the ICISS report purports to create an obligation for nations to act to prevent atrocities not only within their own borders, but also in other nations. Specifically, the report states that the international community has a responsibility to intervene in another country with military force to stop:
1. “large scale loss of life, actual or apprehended, with genocidal intent or not, which is the product either of deliberate state action, or state neglect or inability to act, or a failed state situation” or
2. “large scale ‘ethnic cleansing,’ actual or apprehended, whether carried out by killing, forced expulsion, acts of terror or rape.”
3.
A New “International Norm.” The R2P doctrine is the latest example of an attempt by certain actors in the international community to create new “international norms” to comport with their particular view of how nations should behave. Often, when there is a perceived need for a new international norm, certain members of the international community — usually international NGOs, government representatives, U.N. officials, and other activists — will gather at a conference for the purpose of “discovering” and/or developing the new norm. These groupings meet to determine what the new norm should entail, write reports, convene conferences, and build networks. They may ultimately call for a convention of national governments to draft a multilateral treaty to memorialize the new norm.

The activities of the ICISS and certain NGOs clearly fit this pattern of norm-creating behavior. The ICISS report announces the discovery of a new “emerging guiding principle” that military intervention to thwart humanitarian atrocities should be recognized as an obligation of the international community:
While there is not yet a sufficiently strong basis to claim the emergence of a new principle of customary international law, growing state and regional organization practice as well as Security Council precedent suggest an emerging guiding principle — which in the Commission’s view could properly be termed “the responsibility to protect.”
The report continues:
[F]or present purposes the point is simply that there is a large and accumulating body of law and practice which supports the notion that, whatever form the exercise of that responsibility may properly take, members of the broad international community of states do have a responsibility to protect both their own citizens and those of other states as well.

Proponents of the R2P doctrine will likely not be satisfied if the international community merely recognizes R2P as a “guiding principle.” The long-term effort is to build consensus within the international community that the guiding principle is worthy of official recognition as a norm that should be memorialized in a multilateral treaty. Proponents may posit that the new norm should be anointed by the “international legal community” as recognized customary international law — a status that would legally bind the nations of the world to behave in a certain manner even in the absence of a treaty.
Indeed, R2P advocates point to existing international law as the basis for creating the R2P doctrine. Specifically, the ICISS report claims that the R2P norm is contemplated — if not already recognized and legitimized — by several existing international agreements and treaties, including:
fundamental natural law principles; the human rights provisions of the UN Charter; the Universal Declaration of Human Rights together with the Genocide Conventions and Additional Protocols on international humanitarian law; the statute of the International Criminal Court [ICC]; and a number of other international human rights and human protection agreements and covenants.
Ironically, the fact that many nations have not ratified these particular agreements appears unimportant to the ICISS. For example, the United States has ratified neither the statute of the International Criminal Court nor the Additional Protocols on international humanitarian law. Yet R2P advocates apparently expect the United States to recognize and adopt a new international norm that is partially based on these treaties and protocols that it has already rejected

Legitimizing R2P Within the International Community
Once activists have agreed on the proper framework and content for a “new” norm, they often set about to legitimize the norm throughout the international community. In the years since December 2001, when the ICISS report was released, R2P proponents have successfully integrated the doctrine into key U.N. documentation and have established coalitions and networks of international NGOs to pursue recognition of the doctrine.

Recognition of R2P at the United Nations. In September 2005, the world’s leaders met at the United Nations for a “world summit” to make commitments to one another in the fields of development, collective security, human rights, and U.N. reform. The principles agreed upon by the world leaders, including the United States, were set forth in the 2005 World Summit Outcome Document.

R2P advocates successfully inserted the two key provisions of the ICISS report into the text of the Outcome Document. Thus, by accepting the Outcome Document, the international community has made the following commitments regarding the R2P doctrine:
Each individual State has the responsibility to protect its populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. This responsibility entails the prevention of such crimes, including their incitement, through appropriate and necessary means. We accept that responsibility and will act in accordance with it….
The international community, through the United Nations, also has the responsibility to use appropriate diplomatic, humanitarian and other peaceful means…to help protect populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. In this context, we are prepared to take collective action, in a timely and decisive manner, through the Security Council, in accordance with the [U.N.]Charter, including Chapter VII [the basis for the use of military force]…should peaceful means be inadequate and national authorities are manifestly failing to protect their populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity.

In sum, the international community’s current position, as set forth in the Outcome Document, is that all nations have a collective responsibility to protect the populations of other nations against acts of genocide, ethnic cleansing, and other atrocities. Moreover, the international community, especially the nations that sit on the U.N. Security Council, “are prepared” to use military force, pursuant to Chapter VII of the U.N. Charter, to end those atrocities. For its part, the Security Council subsequently reaffirmed the R2P principles set forth in the Outcome Document in a 2006 resolution dealing with the protection of civilian populations during armed conflict.

Advancing new norms at the United Nations is also accomplished by creating special U.N. working groups and offices dedicated to the development of the norm. U.N. special advisers, special envoys, and other “special” offices have been created in the past to develop issues and norms ranging from climate change to “sport for development and peace.”

The R2P doctrine is traveling along the same path. On December 12, 2007, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon created a new assistant secretary-general position, Special Adviser on the Responsibility to Protect, and appointed Professor Edward Luck of Columbia University to fill it. As the special adviser, Luck’s primary responsibility “will be conceptual development and consensus building, to assist the General Assembly to continue consideration” of the R2P doctrine. Luck will help the Secretary-General “develop proposals, through a broad consultative process, to be considered by the United Nations membership.”

Notably, only three paragraphs of almost 180 paragraphs and 40 pages of the Outcome Document address the R2P doctrine. Yet it was deemed necessary to create a new assistant secretary-general position for the sole purpose of promoting the R2P doctrine.

Advocacy in the International NGO Community. R2P advocates have launched a worldwide effort to convince the international community to recognize and accept R2P as a universally accepted doctrine.
For example, in February 2008, a coalition of international NGOs that includes Human Rights Watch and the World Federalist Movement teamed with such sponsors as George Soros’s Open Society Institute and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation to launch the Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect at the City University of New York. The Global Centre will “serve [as] a catalyst for moving the responsibility to protect from principle to practice.” It “will conduct, coordinate, and publish research on refining and applying the R2P concept” and “serve as an information clearing house and resource for governments, international institutions, and non-governmental organizations leading the fight against mass atrocities.”

Several other international groups have networked with the Global Centre to advocate for R2P around the world, including the Asia–Pacific Centre for Responsibility to Protect in Thailand, the Kofi Annan International Peacekeeping Training Centre in Ghana, the Norwegian Institute for International Affairs, and the Fundación para las Relaciones Internacionales y el Diálogo Exterior in Spain.
Another group — the R2P Coalition — focuses on advocating R2P in the United States. Based in Illinois, the coalition’s mission is:
 “To convince the American people and its leaders to embrace the norm of the responsibility to protect as a domestic and foreign policy priority,”
 “To convince our political leadership that the U.S. must join the ICC,” and
 “To convince our political leadership to empower the UN and the ICC with a legitimate and effective deterrent and enforcement mechanism — an International Marshals Service — a standing international police force to arrest atrocity crimes indictees.”
The R2P Coalition hosted a series of conferences in 2007 and convinced several local governmental entities — such as the City and County of San Francisco — to pass resolutions endorsing the R2P doctrine.

The World Federalist Movement. Perhaps the most active R2P proponent on an international scale is the World Federalist Movement (WFM). The WFM is an international NGO that “seek[s] to invest legal and political authority in world institutions to deal with problems which can only be treated adequately at the global level.” The WFM launched Responsibility to Protect– Engaging Civil Society (R2PCS) to “raise awareness of [the ICISS report] and to build a network of non-governmental organizations…that support these principles and subsequently seek their adoption by governments and regional and international organizations.”

The WFM devotes a Web site to describing its efforts — supposedly taken at the request of the Canadian government — to reach out to the global NGO community to promote the R2P doctrine. For instance, the WFM promoted the R2P doctrine at the 2003 meeting of the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil. The World Social Forum is a summit of tens of thousands of anti–free market and anti-globalization NGOs that are collectively “opposed to neoliberalism and to domination of the world by capital and any form of imperialism, and are committed to building a planetary society directed towards fruitful relationships among Humankind and between it and the Earth.” Its annual meetings are scheduled specifically to counter the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
At the 2003 World Social Forum, the WFM “held a seminar on the Responsibility to Protect, distributed thousands of copies of basic information materials and the ICISS Report, took advantage of speaking opportunities on other panels to discuss the Report, and mentioned it from the floor of many seminars.”

U.S. Policy and the R2P Doctrine
If wholly accepted as official U.S. policy, the R2P doctrine would greatly expand U.S. obligations to prevent acts of genocide around the world. More important, adoption of R2P would effectively cede U.S. national sovereignty and decision-making power over key components of national security and foreign policy and subject them to the whims of the international community.
The U.S. government, as a party to the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (the Genocide Convention), is currently obligated to prevent acts of genocide that occur within U.S. territory. The Genocide Convention Implementation Act of 1987 (the Proxmire Act), the legislation implementing the Genocide Convention, was signed into law by President Ronald Reagan in 1988. The Proxmire Act defined the crime of genocide as an act committed “with the specific intent to destroy, in whole or in substantial part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group.” The new law even criminalized the act of inciting another person to commit an act of genocide. Importantly, U.S. enforcement of these criminal offenses was limited to acts committed in the United States.

However, adoption of the R2P norm would obligate the United States to prevent all acts of genocide, ethnic cleansing, and war crimes even if they occur outside of the U.S. Such an obligation would impose unique responsibilities. As the world’s preeminent military force, the United States would have to bear a disproportionate share of the R2P international commitment. In the event that acts of genocide and ethnic cleansing occur, the vast majority of nations in the international community could reasonably plead military inferiority on each such occasion, leaving the United States to bear the brunt of any intervention. Most members of the international community could also plead poverty, again leaving the United States to fund the intervention. Even if the intervention is funded through the United Nations system, the United States would still pay an unequal share of the cost.

Current U.S. Policy. The current U.S. position on the R2P doctrine was set forth in a letter from former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton to other members of the international community in the run-up to the 2005 World Summit. Ambassador Bolton’s letter made it clear that the United States was skeptical of creating a legal obligation requiring one nation to intervene in another:
[W]e note that the [U.N.] Charter has never been interpreted as creating a legal obligation for Security Council members to support enforcement action in various cases involving serious breaches of international peace. Accordingly, we believe just as strongly that a determination as to what particular measures to adopt in specific cases cannot be predetermined in the abstract but should remain a decision within the purview of the Security Council.

With reference to the R2P text that was included in the Outcome Document, Ambassador Bolton stated:
[W]e would like to make changes to make clear that the obligation/responsibility discussed in the text is not of a legal character…. We do not accept that either the United Nations as a whole, or the Security Council, or individual states, have an obligation to intervene under international law.
Notwithstanding that position, Ambassador Bolton’s letter made the following statement regarding what the United States was willing to commit to in relation to the R2P doctrine:
For its part, the United States stands ready to take collective action, in a timely and decisive manner, through the Security Council under Chapter VII of the UN Charter and, as appropriate, in co-operation with relevant regional organizations, should peaceful means be inadequate and national authorities be unwilling or unable to protect their populations.

The current position of the United States, therefore, is that, while it “stands ready” to take collective action to prevent genocide and ethnic cleansing in another nation, it rejects the notion that it is legally obligated to intervene to prevent such atrocities. This position is in harmony with the U.S. commitment in the Outcome Document in which the United States, as a member of the world community, agreed that it was “prepared to take collective action” to protect vulnerable populations. While hardly a renunciation of the R2P doctrine, the current U.S. position falls well short of committing to a legal obligation to act.
Future U.S. Policy. Of course, this is no guarantee that the U.S. position will not change when a new Administration comes to power in January 2009. Of the three remaining presidential candidates, all have made statements in favor of humanitarian intervention in general or the R2P doctrine specifically.

For example, when asked in a presidential candidate questionnaire about R2P, Senator Hillary Clinton responded that the United Nations should take steps to “operationalize” the R2P doctrine and stated:
As President I will adopt a policy that recognizes the prevention of mass atrocities as an important national security interest of the United States, not just a humanitarian goal. I will develop a government-wide strategy to support this policy, including a strategy for working with other leading democracies, the United Nations, and regional organizations.
Senator Barack Obama was more circumspect in his answer to the same questionnaire, stating only that “[t]he Responsibility to Protect is an important and developing concept in international affairs and one which my Administration will closely monitor.”
Senator John McCain , while not specifically mentioning R2P, has repeatedly stated a willingness to use military force to prevent atrocities in other countries:

I supported humanitarian intervention in order to stop genocide in Kosovo. I wish that the U.S. had acted — with force if necessary — to stop genocide in Rwanda. In neither of these places were America’s vital national security interests at stake, though our national values were. Murder in Kosovo and genocide in Rwanda demanded intervention.
Senator McCain also stated:
Africa continues to offer the most compelling case for humanitarian intervention. With respect to the Darfur region of Sudan, I fear that the United States is once again repeating the mistakes it made in Bosnia and Rwanda…. My administration will consider the use of all elements of American power to stop the outrageous acts of human destruction that have unfolded there.

While neither Senator McCain nor Senator Clinton has explicitly recognized the existence of a legal obligation to intervene in another country where atrocities are occurring, both have characterized the prevention of genocide as a U.S. national interest, although they apparently disagree on whether or not it constitutes a national security interest.
While genocide, war crimes, and other atrocities will always be incompatible with American values, the McCain and Clinton statements raise the issue of whether preventing genocide and ethnic cleansing would necessarily constitute a vital U.S. national interest. In some situations, acts of large-scale ethnic cleansing in some remote nation may indeed affect U.S. national interests.
However, the real question is whether or not the United States should obligate itself through an international compact to use its military forces as the rest of the world sees fit in cases of genocide and ethnic cleansing. Accepting such an obligation would arguably empower other nations to judge whether U.S. national interests or national values are at stake. That begs the question of who will decide whether the United States must commit its limited resources — including its military forces — to prevent atrocities occurring in a foreign land. The R2P doctrine is designed to take decision making on these crucial issues out of the hands of the United States and place it in the hands of the international community, operating through the United Nations.
If the United States consented to such a doctrine, it would effectively surrender its authority to exercise an essential, sovereign power.

First Principles and National Sovereignty
The United States must not surrender its independence and sovereignty cavalierly. The Founding Fathers and subsequent generations of Americans paid a high price to achieve America’s sovereignty and secure the unalienable rights of U.S. citizens. The government formed by the Founders to safeguard American independence and protect individual rights derives its powers from the consent of the governed, not from any other nation or group of nations.
Having achieved its independence by fighting a costly war, America’s Founders approached permanent alliances and foreign entanglements with a fair degree of skepticism. President George Washington, in his 1796 farewell address, favored extending America’s commercial relations with other nations but warned against extensive political connections. Washington well understood that legitimate governments are formed only through gaining the consent of the people. He therefore placed a high value on the independence that the United States had achieved and was rightfully dubious about involvement in European intrigues.

Integral to national sovereignty is the right to make authoritative decisions on foreign policy and national resources, particularly the use of the nation’s military forces. Many of the reasons why America fought the War of Independence against Great Britain revolved around Britain’s taxation of the American people without their consent and its practice of “declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.” Once America gained control of its revenue, natural resources, and industry and had formed a government separate and apart from any other, the Founders would not have compromised or delegated its prerogatives to any other nation or group of nations. Washington rightly warned his countrymen to “steer clear” of such foreign influence and instead to rely on “temporary alliances for extraordinary emergencies.”

The R2P doctrine strikes at the heart of the Founders’ notion of national sovereignty. The Founders would have deplored the idea that the United States would cede control — any control — of its armed forces to the caprice of the world community without the consent of the American people. Washington stated that the decision to go to war is a key element of national sovereignty that should be exercised at the discretion of the American government:
Our detached and distant situation invites and enables us to pursue a different course. If we remain one people under an efficient government, the period is not far off…when we may choose peace or war, as our interest, guided by justice, shall counsel

The U.S. interest, guided by justice and exercised with the consent of the American people, must remain the standard for making decisions of war and peace. The interest of the international community, which is guided by its own collective notion of justice and without the consent of the American people, should not serve as America’s barometer, especially when placing the lives of U.S. military men and women in jeopardy. The United States cannot rely on world opinion, as expressed through an emerging international norm such as R2P, to set the proper criteria for the use of U.S. military force. The commitment to use force must be made exclusively by the U.S. government acting as an independent, sovereign nation based on its own criteria for military intervention.
In sum, the R2P doctrine does not harmonize with the first principles of the United States. Adopting a doctrine that binds the United States to scores of other nations and dictates how it must act to prevent atrocities is the very sort of foreign entanglement against which Washington warned us. The United States would betray the Founding Fathers’ achievement of independence and sovereignty if it wholly acceded to the R2P doctrine.

Additional R2P Impracticalities
In addition to the corrosive effect that the R2P norm, if wholly adopted, would have on U.S. national sovereignty, other aspects of R2P are impractical and collectively fatal to the doctrine.
Under the R2P doctrine, if the United States decides on its own that acts of genocide or ethnic cleansing require intervention, the procedural hoops set forth by the R2P doctrine would prevent the U.S. from acting expeditiously. Additionally, the “precautionary principles” scattered throughout the R2P doctrine would significantly hinder the combat operations of any U.S. armed force ultimately committed to such a mission.
Assignment of Authority to the United Nations. When a crisis or other major world event endangers a U.S. national interest, the United States must have the ability to take action as it sees fit. In the event that the United States determines that atrocities in a foreign land must be stopped, the R2P doctrine would restrict the ability of U.S. armed forces to respond swiftly by requiring the United States to clear a series of barriers and defer to the judgment of multilateral bodies.
Specifically, the R2P doctrine requires the United States or any other nation seeking to end genocide to ask the U.N. Security Council for permission to intervene. Indeed, the ICISS report states that the Security Council should be the “first port of call” and that there is “absolutely no doubt that there is no better or more appropriate body than the Security Council to deal with military intervention issues for human protection purposes.”[49] The Security Council’s failure to act in Rwanda and Srebrenica — the very situations that gave rise to the ICISS effort — is apparently of little consequence.
Moreover, even if the Security Council fails to act, the R2P doctrine does not free the United States or any other nation to act. Instead, it suggests that authority for military intervention must be sought either from the U.N. General Assembly or from regional or sub-regional organizations.

The U.S. national interest — not the U.N. Security Council, the U.N. General Assembly, or any other regional organization — should dictate the use of U.S. military force as well as the imposition of economic, political, and diplomatic sanctions. Whether that interest is best pursued through the U.N. Security Council, through NATO, in ad hoc “coalitions of the willing,” or completely alone is for the President, the Congress, and the American people to decide. History shows that most nations decide to use their military forces based, first, on their own interests; second, on the interests of their close allies; and last, if at all, on the interests of an undefined “international community.” The United States should not submit to a doctrine that would make it the perennial exception to that historical trend.

Operational Flexibility vs. Precautionary Principles. Even if surrendering control of America’s armed forces to the will of the world community were acceptable, the U.S. military could not operate effectively under the R2P doctrine.
Once committed to a military operation with all of its attendant risks, U.S. armed forces must be allowed the operational freedom to create the conditions to succeed. However, the R2P doctrine espouses a “proportional means” limitation to the rules of engagement that would likely hinder the success of a military intervention. Specifically, the ICISS report suggests that the “scale, duration and intensity of the planned military intervention should be the minimum necessary to secure the humanitarian objective in question.” In other words, any intervening armed force may act only to end genocidal acts and ethnic cleansing — and go no further.
However, a combat environment is rarely so predictable. Some situations would require the total destruction of the forces perpetrating the genocide or the overthrow of the government providing command and control. Yet the ICISS report states that “[t]he effect on the political system of the country targeted should be limited…to what is strictly necessary to accomplish the purpose of the intervention.” Several instances of genocide and ethnic cleansing in recent history have occurred with the complicity and active involvement of a national government and its armed forces. It is unrealistic to mandate that a military intervention limit its effect on the political system and its leadership while stopping genocidal crimes. It is likewise naïve to believe that government forces that are complicit in genocidal acts would cease and desist from committing atrocities after a military intervention has ended and the intervening troops are withdrawn.
In addition, the R2P doctrine demands that “all the rules of international humanitarian law should be strictly observed” in the event of a military intervention. There is, however, widespread debate over certain crucial aspects of that law. For example, there are major differences of opinion regarding the classification, treatment, confinement, and trial of certain classes of enemy combatants. The use of certain weapons, such as cluster bombs and land mines, is also disputed. The R2P’s requirement of strict observance of the law of armed conflict is therefore unachievable because there is broad disagreement on what “strict observance” would entail.

Protecting American Sovereignty
Given the recognition of the responsibility to protect doctrine in the 2005 World Summit Outcome Document, as well as the continuing efforts by certain actors in the international community to promote and operationalize R2P, the United States should clarify its position on its national sovereignty and the criteria for the use of its armed forces.
To that end, the United States should:
 Maintain its current official position, as set forth in Ambassador Bolton’s letter regarding the 2005 World Summit Outcome Document, that the R2P doctrine does not create a binding legal obligation on the United States to intervene in another nation for any purpose.
 Affirm that the United States need not seek authorization from the U.N. Security Council, the U.N. General Assembly, the international community, or any other international organization to use its military forces to prevent acts of genocide, ethnic cleansing, or other atrocities occurring in another country.
 Base its decisions to intervene in the affairs of other nations — including punitive economic, diplomatic, political, and military measures — on U.S. national interests, not on criteria set forth by the R2P doctrine or any other international “test.”
 Scrutinize ongoing efforts by certain actors within the international community to operationalize and otherwise promote the R2P doctrine in the United States, the United Nations, the international NGO community, and other international forums.
 Reject the notion that the R2P doctrine is an established international norm.
Conclusion
The United States should take no comfort from the fact that, as a party to the 2005 World Summit Outcome Document, it has committed itself only to being “prepared to take collective action” to end atrocities or that the ICISS report represents the obligation to prevent atrocities as a mere “responsibility.” R2P advocates are attempting to achieve worldwide consensus that the international community has an obligation to intervene, with military force if necessary, in another country to prevent acts of genocide, ethnic cleansing, and other atrocities. R2P proponents may not be satisfied with anything less than a multilateral treaty — a United Nations Convention on the Responsibility to Protect — that creates binding legal obligations on its signatories.
The United States should therefore continue to treat the responsibility to protect doctrine with grave skepticism. The independence won by the Founders and defended by subsequent generations of Americans should not be squandered, but rather should be safeguarded from furtive encroachments by the international community.
Only by maintaining a monopoly on the deployment of diplomatic pressure, economic sanctions, political coercion, and military forces will the United States preserve its national sovereignty. Acceding to a set of criteria such as those set forth by the R2P doctrine would be a dangerous and unnecessary step toward bolstering the authority of the United Nations and the international community and would compromise the consent of the American people.

Steven Groves is Bernard and Barbara Lomas Fellow in the Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom, a division of the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Institute for International Studies, at The Heritage Foundation.

By Trevor Loudon

Why Did U.S. President Barack Obama order a military attack on Libya? Why did he seek the permission of the United Nations Security Council, but not that of the U.S. Congress – as he is constitutionally obliged to do? Glenn Beck has explained President Obama’s decision to attack Libya in terms of the United Nations’ “Responsibility to Protect Doctrine”
Mr Beck is right.

According to Radio Free Europe
Those who justify the Libyan intervention on humanitarian grounds draw much of their logic from a concept which has dramatically gained ground over recent decades. The concept is known as “R2P,” shorthand for the world’s “Responsibility to Protect” civilians.
But what does this catchy little phrase mean? Where did it come from? What are its implications?

The United Nations reported in July 2009;
The Obama administration is supporting moves to implement a U.N. doctrine calling for collective military action to halt genocide. In a week-long debate on implementing theResponsibility to Protect Doctrine, the U.S. joined a majority of U.N. countries, including Russia and China, in supporting implementation of the policy. The doctrine itself was approved in 2005 by more than 150 states including the U.S.

The doctrine specifies that diplomatic options such as internal conflict resolution, sanctions and prosecution by the International Criminal Court, should be used first. If they don’t work, then a multi-national force approved by the Security Council would be deployed.
In other words, if the United Nations does not approve of a certain government’s behavior, and that government’s leaders will not respond to sanctions and the threat of prosecution, they will be attacked militarily.

The U.S. organization supporting this concept, named unsurprisingly Responsibility to Protect is affiliated to a financial planning firm, General Welfare Group LLC, based in Oak Brook Illinois.
According to the Responsibility to Protect website:
The doctrine of the responsibility to protect was first elaborated in 2001 by a group of prominent international human rights leaders comprising the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty. Under their mandate, the Commission sought to undertake the two-fold challenge of reconciling the international community’s responsibility to address massive violations of humanitarian norms and ensuring respect for the sovereign rights of nation states.

Led by Gareth Evans, former Foreign Minister of Australia, and Mohamed Sahnoun, Special Advisor to the UN Secretary-General, the Commission issued its report in December 2001. Focusing on the “right of humanitarian intervention,” this report examined when, if ever, it is appropriate for states to take coercive – and in particular military – action, against another state for the purpose of protecting populations at risk. In essence, the group concluded that when a group (or groups) of people is suffering from egregious acts of violence resulting from internal war, insurgency, repression or state failure, and the state where these crimes are taking place is unable or unwilling to act to prevent or protect its peoples, the international community has a moral duty to intervene to avert or halt these atrocities from occurring.Gareth Evans, an Australian Fabian Socialist and Mohamed Sahnoun both worked with leftist financier George Soros in the highly influential International Crisis Group.

The “responsibility to protect” doctrine received renewed emphasis in 2004 when the United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan created the High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change. The Panel was established to “identify major threats facing the international community in the broad field of peace and security and to generate new ideas about policies and institutions aimed at preventing or confronting these challenges.”

Barack Obama’s adoption of the “Responsibility to Protect” justification for bombing Libya will create problems. Not only will this lead — and has led to attacks against Israel and calls for international intervention in the conflict between Palestinians and Israelis — but it also has the potential of being applied in a form of lawfare against America.
When we engage militarily in other nations, civilian casualties are inevitable, especially since terrorists hide among civilian populations. There is one influential group that has been in the forefront of efforts to promote the idea that the international community is obligated to take measures (including military ones) to protect civilians. That group is the Global Center for the Responsibility to Protect. Lo and behold! George Soros’s Open Society Institute is one of the two foundations that bankroll this advocacy group (the other, the John D. and Catherine MacArthur Foundation – a group that has, over the years, become known not just for its Genius Awards but also for its funding of left-leaning groups. It is headed by a former State Department official and we know how many of those diplomats think).
Soros, as I have also pointed out , has ties to Samantha Power-Obama’s influential foreign policy adviser and one of the key people responsible for Obama’s decision to attack Libya under the Responsibility to Protect rationale.
President Obama sought the approval of the Arab League and the international community before launching military attacks on Libya. He did not seek Congressional approval. This chronology illustrates his pattern of outsourcing our foreign policy to other nations and multilateral groups (as if the bowing, the abject apology for America’s past actions, his praise for Europe, and other actions had not already indicated his ideology and likely future policies).
Soros, as always, is trying to weaken American sovereignty, harm Israel, and empower the so-called international community (as if the Arab League is not filled with tyrants).
And he has friends in the White House.

The Wall Street Journal   MARCH 30, 2011   By MARCO RUBIO

Everyone in Washington knows how to cut spending. The time to start is now.

Americans have built the single greatest nation in all of human history. But America’s exceptionalism was not preordained. Every generation has had to confront and solve serious challenges and, because they did, each has left the next better off. Until now.

Our generation’s greatest challenge is an economy that isn’t growing, alongside a national debt that is. If we fail to confront this, our children will be the first Americans ever to inherit a country worse off than the one their parents were given.

Current federal policies make it harder for job creators to start and grow businesses. Taxes on individuals are complicated and set to rise in less than two years. Corporate taxes will soon be the highest in the industrialized world. Federal agencies torment job creators with an endless string of rules and regulations.

On top of all this, we have an unsustainable national debt. Leaders of both parties have grown our government for decades by spending money we didn’t have. To pay for it, they borrowed $4 billion a day, leaving us with today’s $14 trillion debt. Half of that debt is held by foreign investors, mostly China. And there is no plan to stop. In fact, President Obama’s latest budget request spends more than $46 trillion over the next decade. Under this plan, public debt will equal 87% of our economy in less than 10 years. This will scare away job creators and lead to higher taxes, higher interest rates and greater inflation.

Betting on America used to be a sure thing, but job creators see the warning signs that our leaders ignore. Even the world’s largest bond fund, PIMCO, recently dumped its holdings of U.S. debt.

We’re therefore at a defining moment in American history. In a few weeks, we will once again reach our legal limit for borrowing, the so-called debt ceiling. The president and others want to raise this limit. They say it is the mature, responsible thing to do.

In fact, it’s nothing more than putting off the tough decisions until after the next election. We cannot afford to continue waiting. This may be our last chance to force Washington to tackle the central economic issue of our time.

“Raising America’s debt limit is a sign of leadership failure.” So said then-Sen. Obama in 2006, when he voted against raising the debt ceiling by less than $800 billion to a new limit of $8.965 trillion. As America’s debt now approaches its current $14.29 trillion limit, we are witnessing leadership failure of epic proportions.

I will vote to defeat an increase in the debt limit unless it is the last one we ever authorize and is accompanied by a plan for fundamental tax reform, an overhaul of our regulatory structure, a cut to discretionary spending, a balanced-budget amendment, and reforms to save Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.
There is still time to accomplish all this. Rep. Dave Camp has already introduced proposals to lower and simplify our tax rates, close loopholes, and make permanent low rates on capital gains and dividends. Even Mr. Obama has endorsed the idea of lowering our corporate tax rate. Sen. Rand Paul, meanwhile, has a bill that would require an up-or-down vote on “major” regulations, those that cost the economy $100 million or more. And the House has already passed a spending plan this year that lowered discretionary spending by $862 billion over 10 years.

Such reductions are important, but nondefense discretionary spending is a mere 19% of the budget. Focusing on this alone would lead to draconian cuts to essential and legitimate programs. To get our debt under control, we must reform and save our entitlement programs.

No changes should be made to Medicare and Social Security for people who are currently in the system, like my mother. But people decades away from retirement, like me, must accept that reforms are necessary if we want Social Security and Medicare to exist at all by the time we are eligible for them.

Finally, instead of simply raising the debt limit, we should reassure job creators by setting a firm statutory cap on our public debt-to-GDP ratio. A comprehensive plan would wind down our debt to sustainable levels of approximately 60% within a decade and no more than half of the economy shortly thereafter. If Congress fails to meet these debt targets, automatic across-the-board spending reductions should be triggered to close the gap. These public debt caps could go in tandem with a Constitutional balanced budget amendment.

Some say we will go into default if we don’t increase the debt limit. But if we simply raise it once again, without a real plan to bring spending under control and get our economy growing, America faces the very real danger of a catastrophic economic crisis.

I know that by writing this, I am inviting political attack. When I proposed reforms to Social Security during my campaign, my opponent spent millions on attack ads designed to frighten seniors. But demagoguery is the last refuge of the spineless politician willing to do anything to win the next election.

Whether they admit it or not, everyone in Washington knows how to solve these problems. What is missing is the political will to do it. I ran for the U.S. Senate because I want my children to inherit what I inherited: the greatest nation in human history. It’s not too late. The 21st century can also be the American Century. Our people are ready. Now it’s time for their leaders to join them.

Mr. Rubio, a Republican, is a U.S. senator from Florida.

Tuesday, 08 Mar 2011 07:34 PM By David A. Patten

An undercover video that captured National Public Radio’s top fundraising executive disparaging Republicans, Christians, evangelicals, tea-party members, gun owners, Jews, and Americans lacking elite educational backgrounds has touched off a strong backlash across the cultural and political spectrum, fueling renewed calls for Congress to yank NPR’s $90 million in annual taxpayer funding.

Conservatives issued new demands for NPR’s defunding, after the secret video emerged that showed Ron Schiller, who was NPR Foundation president and vice president for development of NPR when the video was recorded Feb. 22, making remarks that various groups found to be offensive.

The video came from conservative muckraking activist James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas. O’Keefe is the same activist whose undercover video of ACORN spurred Congress to defund that group.

In the new video, recorded Feb. 22, Schiller is heard telling two men posing as Muslim donors with extremist ties that the Republican Party has been “hijacked” by the grass-roots tea party movement.

Schiller tells them the current GOP is “not just Islamaphobic, but really xenophobic. I mean basically they are, they believe in sort of white, middle-America gun-toting. I mean, it’s scary. They’re seriously racist, racist people.”

The remarks appeared to confirm the worst fears of many conservatives that taxpayer-supported NPR harbors a deep bias against the values of fly-over country Americans.

In his meeting with the two undercover activists trained by O’Keefe, who said they were Muslims looking to distribute $5 million, Schiller traces many of the nation’s problems back to the fact that “the educated, so-called elite of this country is too small a percentage of the population.”

He also states that he perceives Zionist, or pro-Israeli, bias in American newspapers.

“I mean it’s there in those who own newspapers, obviously,” he tells his potential benefactors. “But no one owns NPR.”

Schiller, who was accompanied at the meeting by another high-level NPR fund-raiser, described himself as “very proud” of NPR’s controversial firing of news commentator Juan Williams, despite the fact that NPR CEO Vivian Schiller — no relation to Ron Schiller – apologized for how the Williams matter was handled.

Also in the video, Schiller remarked: “The tea party is fanatically involved in people’s personal lives and very fundamental Christian — I wouldn’t even call it Christian. It’s this weird evangelical kind of move.”

The timing of the video’s emergence could hardly be worse for NPR. It already faces a tea-party-led push to yank its taxpayer funding, in part due to perceived left-wing bias. NPR quickly released a statement Tuesday saying it was “appalled” by Schiller’s statements.

According to NPR, Schiller announced last week that he was leaving the organization to join the Aspen Institute, a seminar and think-tank closer to his Colorado home.

That did not mollify Catholic League president Bill Donohue, who blasted Schiller’s remarks Tuesday and urged that all taxpayer funding of NPR be eliminated.

“This guy, he not only tolerates Jew-baiting, he expresses animus against Christians, he sides with the Muslim Brotherhood… He’s very proud that Juan Williams has been fired, yet at the end of the day, he considers liberals to be better educated and fairer than conservatives. That says it all in my mind,” Donohue told Newsmax.

Regarding Schiller’s suggestion that evangelicals are not to be called Christians, Donohue protested: “He must have thought they were like another species. I mean, I’m Catholic, and I consider evangelicals my brothers.”
In one of the most striking passages in the videotape, Schiller appears to suggest NPR would be better off without taxpayer dollars.

“Frankly, it is very clear in the long run we’d be better off in the long run without federal funding,” Schiller says. “And the challenge right now is if we lost it all together we’d have a lot of stations go dark.”

Schiller nods in agreement during the video as one of his prospective patrons refers to the “radical, racist, Islamaphobic, tea party people.”
Schiller, then replies: “Exactly.”

Donohue told Newsmax that the controversy over the Williams firing, and now the remarks by Schiller, indicate a serious problem with NPR’s corporate culture.

“When patterns develop, when you see it over and over again, and it becomes part of the culture, then clearly you know there is something rotten from the top down,” he said.

Donohue added: “When you’re asking that taxpayers to pay this man’s salary, and any pretense they have of objectivity is totally blown away, that is the end of the story.”

Donohue had plenty of company Tuesday in expressing outrage over the NPR video:

• Family Research Council President Tony Perkins told Newsmax that while Schiller is free to express his opinion, NPR “facilitates the advancement of that stereotyping and that type of maligning of a large portion of the American public with taxpayer dollars.” He said Americans for years “have said we’re tired of their left-wing agenda that’s being promulgated and being promoted on the taxpayer dime. And that’s what it comes down to.”
• The video provoked a sharp rebuke from tea party leaders. “Mr. Schiller himself candidly admits in the video that NPR doesn’t need federal funding, and welcomes the opportunity to slant their reporting without the oversight of the taxpayer,” Mark Meckler, national coordinator for Tea Party Patriots, said in a statement. “…Let’s take his advice and pass legislation that would defund the clearly biased news organization that is out of touch with Americans across the country.”
• Tim Graham, media analyst for the conservative watchdog Media Research Council, told Newsmax: “This is the latest outrage that underlines how desperately this system needs to be removed from taxpayer funding. This system has so much contempt for the middle America taxpayer that pays their lavish salaries, it is time for this to be defunded. It is way past time.”
• Virginia Republican and House Majority Leader Eric Cantor sent an e-mail to The Daily Caller stating: “As we continue to identify ways to cut spending and save valuable resources, this disturbing video makes clear that taxpayer dollars should no longer be appropriated to NPR.”

Read more on Newsmax.com: Catholic League: Defund NPR