Paul Joseph Watson
GCN Live.com
Monday, May 21, 2012

Disturbing trend of Obama cult of personality in school system continues.

An audio recording of an exchange between a teacher and a student at North Rowan High School in North Carolina serves as a reminder that the school system is becoming a training ground for teaching kids to be subservient to the state while indoctrinating them into thinking that the First Amendment doesn’t exist.

The clip features a conversation in which teacher Tanya Dixon-Neely tells students that it is a criminal offense to criticize Barack Obama and that they could be “arrested” for doing so.

The discussion centers around a story about Mitt Romney bullying a kid five decades ago. A student responds by pointing out that Obama admits in his own book, Dreams from My Father, that he also bullied a girl when he was in school, and that both Obama and Romney are “just men.”

Dixon-Neely then begins yelling about how “disrespecting the President” is an arrestable offense.

“Let me tell you something, you will not disrespect the president of the United States in this classroom,” she says, adding, “Do you realize that people were arrested for saying things bad about Bush? Do you realize you are not supposed to slander the president?”

The student correctly dispels Dixon-Neely’s nonsense by pointing out that the First Amendment permits the most vigorous criticism of the President.

“You would have to say some pretty f’d up crap about him to be arrested,” says the student. “They cannot take away your right to have your opinion … They can’t take that away unless you threaten the president.”

When the student refuses to be intimidated into agreeing with the teacher, Dixon-Neely states, “OK, do I have to get my cane?”

“As a social studies teacher, I cannot allow you to slander any President,” she adds.

According to Breitbart News, “The student had asked his friend to record the discussion to “prove to his parents what he has been trying to tell them for some time. The teacher in this video has a long history of pushing a liberal agenda, by shouting down students. She is very intolerant of other points of view that she does not share. The atmosphere at this school is not very conducive to opposing views.”

The school reacted to the controversy by claiming it represented “a learning experience,” and failed to indicate whether it would take any action against Dixon-Neely for her blatantly misleading and downright dangerous teaching.

As we have previously documented, there are numerous examples where children are being made to chant songs worshipping Obama in schools, perform military-style parades in his honor, or watch propaganda videos about celebrities affirming their allegiance to him.

In September 2009, the White House announced it would stream an Obama speech directly into government schools. The speech was accompanied by lesson plans issued by the Department of Education which instructed teachers to ask children “Why is it important that we listen to the President and other elected officials.”

This was merely a continuation of the cult of personality that has been built up around Obama with the aid of the education system.

This creepy cult-like video showing celebrities pledging their “service” to the Obama government’s global warming agenda was shown in Utah schools.

This now infamous “Obama Youth” video shows students at a middle school in Missouri performing a military style drill while chanting slogans about Obama’s policies.

Children at Sand Hill Elementary School in Asheville, NC recite Obama campaign slogans.

A creepy video of young children in Illinois singing a Maoist-style homage to Obama’s government, chanting “Yes We Can.” A shockingly accurate comparison with the Hitler Youth is made at the end of the clip.

Teenagers in Toronto Canada perform a song for Obama in school.

Shocking video of a teacher forcing children to worship Obama. The kids look largely disinterested.

Black children mindlessly chant for Obama on a school bus.

Paul Joseph Watson is the editor and writer for Prison Planet.com. He is the author of Order Out Of Chaos. Watson is also a regular fill-in host for The Alex Jones Show and Infowars Nightly News.

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Ethan Bearman
Smoke-Filled World

We are losing the war on drugs.

Our country has made zero progress since President Nixon coined the term “war on drugs” in 1971. Yet, somehow, we have spent more than $1 trillion total.

Pres. Obama’s administration has stopped using the term “war on drugs,” but, obviously, it is still going on. And, said war is still happily bleeding our federal budget.

Clearly, throwing money at the problem isn’t helping.

It is time to figure out how to effectively legalize, tax, and regulate some of the illicit drugs, namely marijuana, just like we do with alcohol and tobacco.

Almost without exception, the drugs that are illegal are unhealthy and highly addictive. So why would I advocate ending the war?

Look at the huge, international criminal cartels the so-called “war on drugs” has created. Tens of thousands of people each year are dying brutal, horrible, violent deaths just across the border in Mexico and down into Central and South America.

Just this week, 49 mutilated bodies were found by the side of a highway near Monterrey, Mexico. The killings are thought to be drug-related.

And, they aren’t just killing rival cartel members. Innocent people are getting caught in the crossfire.

Do you think that might contribute to a surge in illegal immigration? People crossing our borders, desperate to get away from the atrocities happening in their homeland?

Our government also sends Drug Enforcement Agency agents to fight these cartels in foreign countries. As you may recall, a drug cartel member killed one of our immigration and customs-enforcement agents in Mexico last year.

The New York Times has an exposé that uncovers the fact that we are sending DEA commandos into Honduras where they are engaging in firefights with smugglers. Let’s not lose more American lives while killing locals in foreign countries.

In California, drug and arms cartels are destroying huge sections of state and national forests to cultivate the marijuana crop domestically instead of smuggling it across border. Oh yes, and if you happen to be hiking and you stumble across one of the fields, you are likely to be shot and killed by an armed guard.

And it isn’t just foreign criminals.

The United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world. In 2009 alone, of the 1.6 million criminal arrests, around one-sixth was for drug violations. Half of those arrests were marijuana-related – a drug many argue is far less harmful than alcohol.

What about drug use-rates in the past 20 years? Has the war made a difference?

According to the National Institute of Drug Abuse, eighth-graders and high school sophomores and seniors in the United States are using as much marijuana today as in the early 1980s.

The National Criminal Justice Reference Service claims an estimated 12.8 million Americans, about six percent of the household population aged 12 and older, use illegal drugs on a current basis (within the past 30 days).

As the saying goes, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Why are we acting insane and expecting different results after spending over $1 trillion?

Didn’t we learn anything from prohibition? Why do we continue to make the same mistakes?

As with alcohol, legalizing some drugs is the only thing that makes sense. Let’s start with marijuana and study the consequences. Then, we can decide a rational course of action and take it from there.

Ethan Bearman is the host of Ethan Bearman’s Smoke-Filled World, a weekly radio talk show that focuses on current events and features a variety of guests. He is a successful technology entrepreneur with more than two decades experience.

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Jim Brown
GCN Live.com

I drive each day by my local bank; it’s a Chase branch of J.P. Morgan.

I don’t have much to save, but I count on my bank to invest my money. Not bet my hard earned dollars, but invest it. If I want to gamble for winnings, I’ll take my chances on the red and the black at a casino. I don’t need or want my bank to lay down a bet on some complicated credit default swap or other exotic roll of the financial dice. But that’s exactly what Chase has been doing with my money. They have taken a big hit. And I’m not happy.

J. P. Morgan Chase & Co. put a lady named Ina Drew in charge as chief investment officer. They paid her $14 million a year to grow my small investment. And she had a team of highly paid executives to follow her lead and see that my small savings continue to grow. But she bungled her responsibility to me and millions of other Chase savers, and now she’s been fired. Good riddance.

She apparently bears the bulk of the responsibility for a $2 billion investment loss that involved complex derivatives that were not adequately insured. There was a “make the big bucks” mentality rather than a focus on the quality of the loans that were being made.

Now don’t lecture me about taking chances and how any investment can lose money. I certainly understand, as do most Chase’s investors, that a bank investment can go bad. Yes, there is the risk that the business will fail. However, any bank should go into an investment with the understanding that it is supplying funds to a borrower that will create value.

But a responsible bank will review the business plan, look for adequate collateral, and continue with due diligence throughout the life of the investment. If the investment is sound, then everybody wins. The bank makes a profit; the business is set on sound financial footing and my investment in J. P. Morgan Chase continues to grow. Value is created and, of course, that is good for the investors and for the economy as a whole.

But when J. P. Morgan Chase & Co. “bets” my money, there is a different end result. There are winners and there are losers. It’s called a zero sum game, and the whole point is to beat the odds and win the bet. No new value is created, and the whole transaction is simply shifting dollars from winner to loser. And that’s exactly what my bank was doing — betting my money instead of investing it.

Oh, but you say, J. P. Morgan Chase is awash with taxpayer-insured deposits, and my money is protected. That’s true, as far as the bank deposits themselves are involved. Not true for any investments I might have with J. P. Morgan as an investment entity. Extra fees on my Chase account as well as some of my tax dollars are charging me for the privilege of insuring my account. In other words, I’m having to pay, through higher bank fees and taxes, for the insurance to protect what savings I have at Chase. As far as my investments through J. P. Morgan, I’m on my own with no protection.

Jamie Dimon

My banker is a guy named Jamie Dimon. Well, I don’t know him, but he’s the top dog at J. P. Morgan Chase, so I consider him “my banker.” Bankers nationwide took major pay cuts last year because of the economic doldrums and lack of bank profits. Not my guy. He was paid $23 million and apparently is in line for a hefty pay raise this year. I don’t mind Dimon making the big bucks as long as he produces. But the buck stops with him, and he apparently knew about the questionable loan portfolio problems for a good while. And he sure does have a conflict of interest.

I was surprised to learn that Dimon sits on the board of the New York Federal Reserve Bank. This is the federal oversight board that regulates banks all over the east coast. So let me get this straight. Dimon sits on the federal board that regulates his own bank? You can’t get much more “insider” than that. How can Dimon be expected to regulate his own bank, which is regulated by the oversight board on which he sits, in the public interest?

Former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer puts it this way — “The Fed conflict is so obvious that it defies any possible rationalization or explanation. For a decade, the New York Fed has failed to pick up on any of the significant Wall Street threats: excess leverage, subprime fraud, dangerous concentration in ‘too big to fail’ entities. Maybe the reason is that the board is controlled by the very voices that have been at the root of the failure.”

The use of derivatives backed by credit default swaps are all part of the tangled web of J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. losses. This is the same tar pit that A.I.G. found itself in a few years back when insurance regulators allowed this insurance giant to take some $200 million in losses without properly regulating the company’s shenanigans. If J. P. Morgan Chase is allowed to continue down its current path of rolling the dice for wishful high returns, they will be following the AIG path and praying for a government bailout if the bet goes bad.

All this complicated financial gibberish is a smokescreen created by the likes of J. P. Morgan Chase and insurance companies like A.I.G. to make this financial mess too complex for the average Joe to understand. And for good reason. Literacy is power. Remember that it used to be a crime in the Deep South to teach slaves to read.

In an excellent summary of the financial and insurance regulatory bungling appearing in Rolling Stone Magazine, Matt Taibbi concludes that in the age of CDSs, most of us are financial illiterates. “By making an already too – complex economy even more complex, a historic revolutionary change has taken place in our political system – transforming democracy into a two-tiered state, one with plugged-in financial.

Despite J.P. Morgan Chase & Company’s $2 billion dollar bad bet, it is still not in deep financial trouble. But even with new and tougher regulations, the high waging, go for broke mentality points out how little has changed n Wall Street. After all, they are “too big to fail.” And they have this marvelous safety net protecting them no matter how irresponsible they might be. It’s called the American taxpayer—you and me. We continue to get stuck with the bill.

******

“I sincerely believe… that financial establishments are more dangerous than standing armies, and that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity under the name of funding is but swindling futurity on a large scale.”
– Thomas Jefferson

Peace and Justice
Jim Brown

Jim Brown is the host of Jim Brown’s Common Sense talk radio show, which airs on GCN Sundays 9:00am-11:00am Central Time. Listen to the show On Demand.

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GCN Live.com
Thursday, May 17, 2012

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta says the President has the authority to override Congress’ exclusive power to declare war, if some “vital interest” is at stake.

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Ethan Bearman
Smoke-Filled World

Airline Industry behemoth American Airlines is in serious trouble.

American’s parent company, AMR Corporation, which filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy last fall, could be facing a hostile takeover.

The bankruptcy was preceded by the majority of the competition, namely Delta and United, merging smaller competitors into bigger, stronger airlines with lower cost structures.

American claims its cost structure is too high and they need the reorganization opportunity to change contracts, thus lowering their costs.

The Transport Workers Union, which represents 26,000 ground workers, said on Tuesday that bargaining units made up of mechanics and stores clerks rejected AMR’s last and final contract offer.

Reducing those cost structures turns out to be not so easy, although the judge could impose a new, lower cost contract on the union.

With high fares, even American’s hyper-frequent fliers are taking it on the chin. Reports are circulating that American is rescinding the $250,000 – $3 million lifetime AAirpass. What’s more, purchasers are being singled out for potential violations.

Adding to the woes of high-paying, first-class customers are the stories from a now-former flight attendant who exposed an American practice of bumping first-class customers back to coach to make room for company executives. That can’t be good for attracting new business customers who provide the greatest margin.

As one who flies frequently on many airlines, my own anecdotal evidence shows that American Airlines employees are an unhappy group who reflect their own problems with management onto the paying customer. From grumpy agents, to lifeless flight attendants, to the unavailable service people at the baggage claim, they are an unhappy face to the world.

Worse yet, there are many strong competitors who fly to the same destinations as American. The always popular bus-in-the-sky Southwest Airlines, the upstart and stylish Virgin America, and the sublimely strong Delta Airlines, to name a few, are eager to pick up American’s slack.

I don’t know how American Airlines can pull out of this tailspin, but alienating the workforce, flying old planes, offering up poor service and making seemingly boneheaded management moves sure paints a bleak picture for future.

Ethan Bearman is the host of Ethan Bearman’s Smoke-Filled World, a weekly radio talk show that focuses on current events and features a variety of guests. He is a successful technology entrepreneur with more than two decades experience.

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