seekingalpha | Technically the U.S. left the gold standard in 1971, but in reality
we abandoned it in 1913 with the creation of the Fed. The two publicly
visible gold-standard slippages of the past century (FDR's repricing and
Nixon's cancellation) were merely necessary adjustments following
decades of gradually increasing gold-price inconsistency caused by
continuous inflation. Given this, it seems hard to imagine that the Fed
was created for any purpose other to create this inflation, i.e. to
effectively raise our taxes under the table.
This has enormous implications for today's long-term investor. Our most constant and
predictable financial reality is the continued inflationary policy of
the Fed. Given this, and assuming the U.S. is unlikely to pull another
rabbit out of the global hat as Nixon and Ford did with the petrodollar
in the early 70s, the dollar will almost certainly continue losing
purchasing power indefinitely, in terms of both commodities and other
currencies. And when the oil-producing nations finally agree to accept
payment in currencies other than the dollar, expect a precipitous drop.
Invest accordingly.
ohmksea | Hesychasm* constitutes the quintessence
of Orthodox tradition, having related itself to everything that the term
“Orthodoxy” embodies and expresses. Orthodoxy outside the Hesychastic
tradition is unthinkable and nonexistent. Besides, Hesychasm itself is
the “philosopher’s stone” by which one can recognize the genuine
Christian image. In the Orthodox tradition, the “divine charismas” are
acquired through fasting, vigils and prayer. And it should be clarified,
that Hesychasm is understood first of all as the course towards theosis
and the experience of theosis, and only secondly, as a (theological)
recording of this method of experience. In Christianity (the authentic
Christian conscience), we know that textual recordings are basically
pursuant to practice and that they comprise descriptions of that
practice; they do not however comprise a substitute. Saint Gregory
Palamas’ “successors” are not located in academic theology; they can
only be found in the continuance of his ascetic lifestyle.
«Hesychasm, as an ascetic
therapeutic treatment, was at the core of Orthodoxy, even from the time
of the Apostles, and it prevailed throughout the entire Roman kingdom,
in the East and in the West» (Fr. John Romanides). This was the
responsible verification of one of the most reliable researchers of
Hesychasm and of Saint Gregory Palamas, i.e., father John Romanides. In
the framework of a tradition that was spiritually uplifted by Hesychasm,
it is easy to understand and to interpret the national, social and
(even) political history of Romanity (Fr. John Romanides). It is
precisely within this framework that one can also properly evaluate the
contribution of Saint Gregory Palamas. “Being a continuation of the
ancient Fathers”, of the united and indivisible patristic tradition, he
“expressed –according to the venerable Geron, father Theocletos
Dionysiatis- the eternal spirit of the Orthodox Church, by reviving its
experiences, its practices, its teachings and its promises.» He
contributed decisively in this way, towards the preservation of the
Church’s overall identity.
digilander | Tracking the history of
the decline of authentic spirituality in the Roman Catholic Religious
Organization [RCRO] has many key events or points that cannot be all listed here
in a single post. The best thing is to enter this topic gradually. There is
method behind how topics are introduced.
Even the RCRO was at first highly critical of what was called "devotio
moderna" during the late medieval and early modern period. But since its own
authentically spiritual tradition was effectively dying (murdered by the RCRO
itself), there was a void that could not withstand the flood of modern
devotionalism. Modern devotionalism is the kind of emotionalism that the older
Spiritual Directors warned against. It was called enthusiasmos, mania, and
hysteria. It is a selfish, self-preoccupied, and auto-erotic narcissistic
concern for being right and correct, often in the eyes of others and oneself.
The very basic difference between spirituality and the pseudo-spirituality of
this emotionalism (that has deep ramifications to brought out later when we
discuss the differences between nous, dianoia, ethical and intellectual virtues,
and so on) is to be find in some of the older catechism "talks" some exceptional
Fathers had with adult converts who were recently Baptized/Chrismated
(originally, the instruction was the night after chrismation when the newly
chrismated stayed in the church with the Bishop or Father). In the talks that
have been recorded, there is a consistency from the 5th century to the 19th
century that reveals the catholicity of these instructions. So, I summarize
them.
The niptic Fathers teach that the type of emotionalism that characterizes the
western forms of modern devotion are to be avoided. It is true, for example,
that one is to try to pray with all one's thought, feeling, and attention
focussed on the prayer even at the stage of verbal prayer. But such as we
contra-naturally are, we do not have the power to attend fully and faithfully
(its a lost natural capacity that needs to be regained as a skilled habit), nor
the right attitude or feeling and any attempt on our part to emotionally try to
feel the right feeling is imagination. We must work solely with focussing our
thought (by stilling) and attention, and then, the prayer will teach us what to
feel, how to worship, and elicit the appropriate response from us if and only if
we are participating seriously in the ethical askesis and liturgical life of the
Church as prior and contextual conditioning, so to speak. Without these other
two, our soul's are not the previously furrowed or prepared "raw material" that
can be appropriately worked on towards transformation.
This is why the Church gives us formal prayers to "recite" and the Psalms. We
do not know what to feel or how to pray and need to be taught. In modern times,
even the praiseworthy attempt to be deeply attentive is misguided. The attempt
to attend takes the form as a concern with what to think, what to feel, and what
to imagine during prayers and Divine Services. This is precisely to be as
consumed, as distracted, and as dissipated in one's own self-preoccupied
fantasies of being a good worshipper as the fellow thinking about his meal, and
perhaps, football game and nap after the Liturgy.
Such a state of mind and its concerns is the exact opposite of the sober
wakefulness needed. Lets call it "self-meddling preoccupation with one's
attitude." One is just to attend to the prayers and Divine Services with a
certain fullness of presence. In the beginning, one may feel cold. One has no
feeling for these things. One is impatient. One's feet or back hurts. One's kids
are an irritating embarrassment and you hope others didn't notice. That puts you
in a bad mood of which you feel ashamed, and so, you do not try to make the
effort attend because you feel unworthy, and thus, don't FEEL like it. Again,
one falls into making it an issue of emotion. One is always catching oneself
distracted, irritated, and inattentive. One notices how this insight may also
lead one to forget again to try to just attend. To notice this is a first moment
of discrimination (diakrisis).
Fantasy begins when I try to search for a way to give myself or make myself
have the appropriate attitudes and feelings. Make no attempt to feel what one
thinks one should feel. That is the role of the Holy Spirit through the
Services, Psalms, Prayers, and Hymnography of the Church. Instead, noting one's
distraction, irritability, pain, (pseudo-spiritual) passional concern over what
to feel, and inattention, try again to just attend. Listen. This is the first
baby step in dispassion (apatheia).
By contrast, the emotionalism of modern devotionalism is passional quicksand.
Intensified, it can become refined into many fine shades of erotomania
(eroticism and mania - manic).
Although to describe in more detail how would
take us too far afield, all three traditions are pretty much in agreement about
the nature of the passions of the soul in its fallen, contra-natural, or
samsaric (Yoga and Buddhist term roughly equivalent to both "external man" and
"world" in St. John the Apostle's sense) state. All three would agree there are
two kinds of virtue: practical or ethical and intellectual or contemplative.
There is also some agreement about the nature of the ethical and intellectual
virtues of the soul (mind). Each tradition would recognize as a form of ethical
virtue what the others would regard as a form of virtue.
As indicated, there is agreement about the nature of the intellectual
faculties of the soul (mind) and about the nature of the intellectual virtues of
these two faculties in their higher forms of development, which we will not get
into detail now.
Spiritual Practice
Corresponding to the consensus about the various
powers of the soul and their developmental possibilities, it is no surprise that
there is a superficial agreement about the nature of their training within a
spiritual practice. According to both the Buddhist and Hindu tradition, the
Eightfold Path and the Eightfold Yoga of Patanjali are also described as the
threefold spiritual practice. In both these traditions, this threefold spiritual
practice is also seen as a twofold training mainly of the will (and its
affections) and of the mind, or, a training in the ethical virtues and in the
intellectual virtues.
In Buddhism and Yoga, the threefold practice is sila, prajna, and samadhi.
Sila is the training of the will and affections of the soul by the practice and
cultivation of the moral virtues. Prajna is the dianoetic training of the
reasoning, conceptualizing, logical part of the mind into its peak virtue. As
indicated, samadhi is the noetic training of the power of consciousness or pure
awareness to be increasingly intense degrees of self-concentrated states of
non-distraction and self-awareness.
The Hesychast tradition can be schematized along very similar lines. There is
a twofold training of the soul's capacities for ethical virtues or praxis, and
of the soul's powers for intellectual virtues or theoria. But praxis and theoria
can also be schematized as a threefold spiritual practice. The threefold
schematization of the Hesychast way is comprised of praxis, diakrisis/sophia,
and enstasis/hesychia. Again, praxis is the training of the will, affections of
the soul, and their cultivation into the ethical virtues. Diakrisis/sophia is
the training of the dianoia into virtuous form. Enstasis/hesychia is the
training of the nous into a self-lucent and self-concentrated state of wakeful
non-distraction.
There is also agreement between all three traditions about how these three
intially separate lines of training mutually interact with each other and
reinforce each other's development. So, while beginning as apparently three
separate lines of effortful developmental training, in more advanced phases
their mutual augmentation becomes increasingly effortless and spontaneous
unified way of being. But it is at this point that the really crucial
differences are made clear, and thereby, reveal the fundamental differences that
were there, under the surface, all along.
Differences
It is to these differences between Hesychasm, Buddhism, and
Hindu Yoga that I now turn.
To best understand why there are these vitally important differences and what
they mean, let us follow the Fathers of the Church, according to whom, there are
the following possible three states of human existence, of the soul, and all its
faculties. These three states are:
(1) the sub-natural or contra-natural state, also known as the "contrary to
nature" state, and fallen subsistence,
(2) the natural state, also known as the "according to nature" state, and
life as created in the Image, and -
(3) the supra-natural state, also known as the "beyond nature" or "according
to grace" state of ascending participation in the Uncreated Energies, and
deified eternal life after the Likeness.
There are two things to point out about these states. First, originally, we were created in the natural state in the divine Image but were meant to grow in synergy with the Uncreated Energies into the deified Likeness of God.
Second, we are in the contra-natural state. So, of course, it is the better
known state. The natural and supra-natural states are less well known, even to
the Fathers of the Church. Accordingly, there is more agreement between all
three traditions, not surprisingly, about the nature and problems of the
contra-natural state than there is about the natural state or about our ultimate
supra-natural destiny. As a result, while there is much agreement about the
nature and problems of the beginning stages of the spiritual life from the
contra-natural state to the natural state, this consensus rapidly disappears.
Despite the alleged superficial and deceptive similarities of the peak of the
spiritual life that has been created by those who engage in highly selective
quoting and juxtapositioning of bits and pieces of texts from various mystical
traditions in an effort to support the view that all religions are one at the
top, what we actually find is that both the nature and purpose of the more
advanced phases of the spiritual life are topics where there is an increasing
divergence of opinion. But as we can see with the Fathers, particularly in how
the Cappadocians treat and weigh what is true and of value in Greek philosophy,
and following their lead, especially with the Syrian Fathers dealing with what
was true and what was error in Buddhist practice (as represented in Bactria), even the agreement about the nature of the contra-natural state is more limited than is apparent at first sight. This is because you can only fully agree about exactly how the contra-natural state is contra-natural only if there is shared knowledge of what the original design plan of purpose of human life intended us to be.
Differing conceptions of the ultimate nature and purpose of human life
provide differing cures for the contra-natural disease we all suffer from. But
as the meaning of the Greek word "pharmakon" reveals in ancient Greek medicine,
depending on the exact nature of the disease as diagnosed in terms of some exact
conception of health, the very same substance or treatment can either serve as a
medicine (pharmakon) or poison (pharmakon). To be a medicine, a substance or
treatment has to be given in the right amount, at the right time, and under the
right conditions for a correctly diagnosed disease in order to have the right
effect. The same holds true for spiritual treatments, techniques, and cures. We
need to understand the vastly different purposes, serving different diagnoses of
what is wrong, based upon different views of what human life is supposed to be,
that similar, or even, exactly the same spiritual techniques are made to serve.
It is not similar techniques that we need to look at but their purpose, their
actual function within a larger operational context, and thus, their intended
effect.
Society is a hierarchical structure of vertical transactions enforced by the threat of coercive violence, which prescribes, proscribes and controls voluntary horizontal transactions as well.
Community is structured on horizontal voluntary interactions - only some of which
are transactions, none of which are backed by the threat of coercive violence.
zerohedge |Doing the “right thing” is usually political suicide for politicians. Cutting
expenditure to pay its bills to pay down the debt will make the economy
implode. Instead, the government in power continues its daily
activities and promotes new social programs to promote reelection.
Almost half of the spending done by the US government goes to
entitlements (Medicare, Medicaid, social security). If any cuts are
carried out in this sector, you can expect riots on the street
(approximately28%of the US population are baby boomers and 80% of investments and laws are carried out by this powerful demographic.) Cuts to entitlements are highly unlikely!
The continuous debate on raising the
debt ceiling is all about a government mismanaging its money and not
being able to control it–much like a child with no discipline. Since
debt is being mismanaged, it has caused many distortions in the markets,
and yet the debt is allowed to grow because of the US Congress. The
debt ceiling has been increased 10 times since 2001. If
the debt ceiling were actually a ceiling, the market and debt
distortions would have imploded the economy–an implosion necessary for
the economy to restore its equilibrium and liquidate all inefficiencies.
“Too big too fail” is absolute nonsense.
Paying back investors, costly wars,
entitlements and bailing out the “financial terrorists” (who caused the
crisis) all add to the national debt and to the dysfunctional economy
that continues to operate until its debt will cease to grow. The problem
with this system is that it created significantly more credit (someone
is the creditor to all the debt) than “cash” money (money in your
wallet). Every time debt expands, the credit supply also expands. (Read Fractional Reserve Lending on how money is created.)
According to the FED,
the Total Credit Market Debt Owed (TCMDO) is approximately 53$ trillion
and 2.4$ trillion in the true money supply (M1). In other words, cash
money is approximately 4.5% of credit (TCMDO/M1).
The result to our economy is that
“boom” periods are hardly driven by cash money, as cash money is
insignificant in relation to credit. Credit is what drives the
markets, and it is this same credit that “busts” the markets as well, in
times of credit contraction. In order for debt to expand, someone must
be lending the US this money. At the moment, the lenders are China,
Japan, and the OPEC countries.
But why do they continue to buy this debt?
Because they have too.
The US Dollar is the reserve currency
of the world. You need it to buy oil, a vital component of any economy.
Since other countries like China cannot print US dollars at their
leisure, they have to get it from somewhere. They get it from trade with
the US. The US buys products in Asia and the rest of the world with US
dollars, and in turn these same dollar surpluses are used to buy oil and
US bonds, creating a much needed artificial demand for US dollars.
finalcall | According to a Dec. 11, USA Today story, the British banking giant
Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation (HSBC) agreed to pay a record
$1.92 billion settlement after a broad investigation by U.S. federal
and state authorities found the bank violated federal laws by laundering
money from Mexican drug trafficking and processing banned transactions
on behalf of Iran, Libya, Sudan and Burma.
Between 2006 and 2010, Mexican drug traffickers laundered at least
$881 million in illegal proceeds through accounts in HSBC’s U.S. arm,
according to the story. The bank reportedly supplied a billion dollars
to a firm whose founder had ties to Al-Qaeda and shipped billions in
cash from Mexico to the United States, despite warnings the money was
coming from drug cartels. Earlier this year, a Senate investigation
concluded that HSBC provided a "gateway for terrorists to gain access to
U.S. dollars and the U.S. financial system."
However, unlike the fairytales shown to us on TV and in the movies,
no one involved with the bank has been indicted. When asked by Amy
Goodman on NPR’s Democracy Now! "What does the Justice Department, what
does the Obama administration, gain by not actually holding HSBC
accountable?" Matt Taibbi, author of the book Griftopia: A Story of
Bankers, Politicians, and the Most Audacious Power Grab in American
History, answered: "I really believe—and I think a lot of people believe
this—that the Obama administration sincerely accepts the rationale that
to aggressively prosecute crimes committed by this small group of
too-big-to-fail banks would undermine confidence in the global financial
system and that they therefore have to give them a pass on all sorts of
things …"
So because HSBC is "too big to fail," all of its managers are "too
big to jail." On the other hand, according to Mr. Taibbi, "There are
50,000 marijuana possession cases in New York City alone every year. And
here we have a bank that laundered $800 million of drug money, and they
can’t find a way to put anybody in jail for that."
When a Black man is caught with 28 grams of cocaine, he goes straight
to jail for five years and most of his citizenship rights are taken
from him, forever. Too bad "Honest Abe" overlooked the "fine print" in
the Thirteenth Amendment, which gave America the right to impose
involuntary servitude on any Black "convicted of a crime."
Without the dirty international bankers to launder the drug money,
drug trafficking on a large scale would cease. It is the HSBCs of the
world that finance the drug trade and the drugs that infest the Black
communities and ensnare our young Black males for the new prison
plantation system. So now the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan has to
bring the F.O.I. into drug-torn neighborhoods to clean up the mess
hatched by these international hoodlum bankers.
However, I must at least give Presidents Abraham Lincoln and John F.
Kennedy credit for going up against the International Bankers—but for
doing so, they were assassinated. And maybe that is why President Obama
is reluctant to take on Wall Street, the International Bankers and the
Federal Reserve System.
thestar | The idea that intelligence can be measured by a single number — your
IQ — is wrong, according to a recent study led by researchers at the
University of Western Ontario.
The study, published in the journal Neuron on Wednesday, involved
100,000 participants around the world taking 12 cognitive tests, with a
smaller sample of the group undergoing simultaneous brain-scan testing.
“When we looked at the data, the bottom line is the whole concept of
IQ — or of you having a higher IQ than me — is a myth,” said Dr. Adrian
Owen, the study’s senior investigator and the Canada Excellence Research
Chair in Cognitive Neuroscience and Imaging at the university’s Brain
and Mind Institute. “There is no such thing as a single measure of IQ or
a measure of general intelligence.”
Rather, the study determined three factors — reasoning, short-term
memory and verbal ability — that combined to create human intelligence
or “cognitive profile.”
IQ testing is used by many educators to measure intelligence, including in public schools in Ontario.
The researchers advertised their tests through New Scientist magazine
and on discovery.com. Word quickly spread around the world, far
surpassing the expectations of researchers, who expected only a few
thousand participants. It became the largest online study on
intelligence, allowing them to gather data across demographic, age and
gender lines.
The scientists also used brain-scanning (fMRIs) on some of the
subjects. “If there is something in the brain that is IQ, we should be
able to find it by scanning. But it turns out there is no one area in
the brain that accounts for people’s so-called IQ. In fact, there are
three completely different networks that respond — verbal abilities,
reasoning abilities and short-term memory abilities — that are in quite
different parts of the brain,” Owen said.
Among the study’s other findings:
While aging has a detrimental effect on reasoning and short-term memory, it leaves verbal abilities “completely unimpaired.”
Smoking has a negative impact on verbal abilities and short-term memory but does not affect reasoning skills.
People who play video games performed “significantly better” in terms of both reasoning and short-term memory.
Products that are advertised
to improve brain function aren’t effective. “People who ‘brain-train’
are no better at any of these three aspects of intelligence than people
who don’t,” Owen said.
lesacreduprintemps19 | Rushton’s (1985, 2000) r-K life history theory that Mongoloids are the most K evolved, Caucasoids somewhat less K evolved, and Negroids the least K evolved is examined and extended in an analysis of data for erect penis length and circumference in three new data sets. These new data extend Rushton’s theory by presenting disaggregated data for penis size for European and North African/South Asian Caucasoids; for East Asian and Southeast Asian Mongoloids; for Inuit and Amerindians and Mestizos, and for thirteen
mixed race samples. The results generally confirm and extend Rushton’s r-K life history theory.
Bigthink | On 02 October, J. Philippe Rushton passed away at an infuriatingly young age of 68.
I first learned of Phil’s work in 1999 when, as a then member of the Social Psychology Section of the American Sociological Association, I received a complimentary copy of the abridged edition of Race, Evolution and Behavior, which Phil had sent to all 600+ members of the Section at his personal expense. I read it right away, then I purchased and read the unabridged version.
When I met Phil in person for the first time the following year, I could not believe that a man so intensely hated in public (nearly always by idiots who did not know him personally and who did not know anything about science) could be so gentle, genial, and generous in person. His very kind and mild manners always impressed me, especially in stark contrast to how people thought and assumed he was.
Here’s one of my most favorite pictures in the world, which I call “The
four most hated men in science, and Jim Flynn.” The four most hated men
are, from left to right, J. Philippe Rushton, Helmuth Nyborg, Richard
Lynn, and yours truly, with James R. Flynn at the center. The picture
was taken at the 2007 conference of the International Society for
Intelligence Research, by a young intelligence researcher Jonathan Wai. I proudly display this picture in my office at LSE. My latest book The Intelligence Paradox: Why the Intelligent Choice Isn’t Always the Smart Oneis
partly dedicated to Phil, as well as to the other two most hated men in
the photo and other courageous pioneers in the field of intelligence
research. I can’t believe there can’t be any more pictures like this
with Phil.
Wired |Author’s note: Most people don’t realize that we knew in the
1920s that leaded gasoline was extremely dangerous. And in light of a Mother Jones
story this week that looks at the connection between leaded gasoline
and crime rates in the United States, I thought it might be worth
reviewing that history. The following is an updated version of an
earlier post based on information from my book about early 10th century
toxicology, The Poisoner’s Handbook.
In the fall of 1924, five bodies from New Jersey were delivered to
the New York City Medical Examiner’s Office. You might not expect those
out-of-state corpses to cause the chief medical examiner to worry about
the dirt blowing in Manhattan streets. But they did.
To understand why you need to know the story of those five dead men,
or at least the story of their exposure to a then mysterious industrial
poison.
The five men worked at the Standard Oil Refinery in
Bayway, New Jersey. All of them spent their days in what plant
employees nicknamed “the loony gas building”, a tidy brick structure
where workers seemed to sicken as they handled a new gasoline additive.
The additive’s technical name was tetraethyl lead
or, in industrial shorthand, TEL. It was developed by researchers at
General Motors as an anti-knock formula, with the assurance that it was
entirely safe to handle.
But, as I wrote in a previous post,
men working at the plant quickly gave it the “loony gas” tag because
anyone who spent much time handling the additive showed stunning signs
of mental deterioration, from memory loss to a stumbling loss of
coordination to sudden twitchy bursts of rage. And then in October of
1924, workers in the TEL building began collapsing, going into
convulsions, babbling deliriously. By the end of September, 32 of the 49
TEL workers were in the hospital; five of them were dead.
The problem, at that point, was that no one knew exactly why. Oh,
they knew – or should have known – that tetraethyl lead was dangerous.
As Charles Norris, chief medical examiner for New York City pointed out,
the compound had been banned in Europe for years due to its toxic
nature. But while U.S. corporations hurried TEL into production in the
1920s, they did not hurry to understand its medical or environmental
effects.
In 1922, the U.S. Public Health Service had asked Thomas Midgley, Jr. – the developer of the leaded gasoline process – for copies of all his research into the health consequences of tetraethyl lead (TEL).
Midgley, a scientist at General Motors, replied that no such research
existed. And two years later, even with bodies starting to pile up, he
had still not looked into the question. Although GM and Standard Oil
had formed a joint company to manufacture leaded gasoline – the Ethyl Gasoline Corporation -
its research had focused solely on improving the TEL formulas. The
companies disliked and frankly avoided the lead issue. They’d
deliberately left the word out of their new company name to avoid its
negative image.
In response to the worker health crisis at the Bayway plant, Standard
Oil suggested that the problem might simply be overwork. Unimpressed,
the state of New Jersey ordered a halt to TEL production. And because
the compound was so poorly understood, state health officials asked the
New York City Medical Examiner’s Office to find out what had happened. Fist tap Dale.
counterpunch | The aim of financial warfare is not merely to acquire
land, natural resources and key infrastructure rents as in military
warfare; it is to centralize creditor control over society. In contrast
to the promise of democratic reform nurturing a middle class a century
ago, we are witnessing a regression to a world of special privilege in
which one must inherit wealth in order to avoid debt and job dependency.
The emerging financial oligarchy seeks to shift taxes off banks and
their major customers (real estate, natural resources and monopolies)
onto labor. Given the need to win voter acquiescence, this aim is best
achieved by rolling back everyone’s taxes. The easiest way to do this is
to shrink government spending, headed by Social Security, Medicare and
Medicaid. Yet these are the programs that enjoy the strongest voter
support. This fact has inspired what may be called the Big Lie of our
epoch: the pretense that governments can only create money to pay the
financial sector, and that the beneficiaries of social programs should
be entirely responsible for paying for Social Security, Medicare and
Medicaid, not the wealthy. This Big Lie is used to reverse the concept
of progressive taxation, turning the tax system into a ploy of the
financial sector to levy tribute on the economy at large.
Financial lobbyists quickly discovered that the easiest ploy to shift
the cost of social programs onto labor is to conceal new taxes as user
fees, using the proceeds to cut taxes for the elite 1%. This fiscal
sleight-of-hand was the aim of the 1983 Greenspan Commission. It
confused people into thinking that government budgets are like family budgets,
concealing the fact that governments can finance their spending by
creating their own money. They do not have to borrow, or even to tax (at
least, not tax mainly the 99%).
The Greenspan tax shift played on the fact that most people see the
need to save for their own retirement. The carefully crafted and
well-subsidized deception at work is that Social Security requires a
similar pre-funding – by raising wage withholding. The trick is to
convince wage earners it is fair to tax them more to pay for government
social spending, yet not also to ask the banking sector to pay similar a
user fee to pre-save for the next time it itself will need bailouts to
cover its losses. Also asymmetrical is the fact that nobody suggests
that the government set up a fund to pay for future wars, so that future
adventures such as Iraq or Afghanistan will not “run a deficit” to
burden the budget. So the first deception is to treat only Social
Security and medical care as user fees. The second is to aggravate
matters by insisting that such fees be paid long in advance, by
pre-saving.
There is no inherent need to single out any particular area of public
spending as causing a budget deficit if it is not pre-funded. It is a
travesty of progressive tax policy to only oblige workers whose wages
are less than (at present) $105,000 to pay this FICA wage withholding,
exempting higher earnings, capital gains, rental income and profits. The
raison d’être for taxing the 99% for Social Security and
Medicare is simply to avoid taxing wealth, by falling on low wage income
at a much higher rate than that of the wealthy. This is not how the
original U.S. income tax was created at its inception in 1913. During
its early years only the wealthiest 1% of the population had to file a
return. There were few loopholes, and capital gains were taxed at the
same rate as earned income.
seekingalpha |The IRS was Conceived 100 Years Ago Next Month
On
February 3, 1913, Delaware became the 36th state to ratify the proposed
16th Amendment authorizing income taxes. With three-fourths of the 48
states backing the resolution, the 16th Amendment became an official
part of the U.S. Constitution on February 25, while Republican William
Taft was a lame duck President awaiting the inauguration of Democrat
Woodrow Wilson a week later on March 4, 1913.
Six months later,
the Revenue Act of 1913 was signed into law on October 13, 1913
authorizing tax rates ranging up to 7% for those earning $500,000 or
more. The lowest (1%) income tax rate kicked in for single taxpayers
making $3,000 per year or couples making $4,000 or more. Therefore,
fewer than 5% of U.S. workers were obligated to pay any income tax at
first. Businessmen, proud of their success, showed off their tax bill in
bars as if to say "I'm one of the top 5%," a badge of honor in a
capitalist economy.
World War I changed all that. By 1917, President Woodrow Wilson raised the top tax rates tenfold.
In
1916, President Wilson campaigned against joining the "war to end all
wars," but just one month after his second inauguration, he pushed us
into World War I and used the income tax to fund that war effort. In
1917, the top income tax rate grew nearly tenfold, from 7% to 67% on top
income earners. The new income tax tool was powerful enough to fund
America's first entry into a major European conflict.
Unlike most politicians, who tend to mask their views in patriotic
pieties, Wilson clearly stated the pragmatism of his politics much
earlier in his 1889 book The State:
We are not bound to adhere to the doctrines held by the signers of the Declaration of Independence … Government does now whatever experience permits or the times demand.
Wow! Those last 10 words form a chilling expression of raw unprincipled
power. They are also applicable to today's fiscal cliff debate:
"Whatever experience permits or the times demand" is a fair description
of raising tax rates to fund runaway spending needs.
The Federal Reserve was also Born a Century Ago, in 1913
In a parallel track, the Federal Reserve was conceived and born a century ago this year. On March 31, 1913, J.P.
Morgan, America's unofficial one-man central bank, died in his sleep in
Rome. Like any good banking man, he died at the closing day of a
financial quarter handing new President Woodrow Wilson the opening to
create a central bank. After a close call in the Panic of 1907, J.P. Morgan,
then entering his 70s, told the nation he was retiring from the central
banking business, saying that the next panic would sink him - and the
country - even if other syndicate members joined him (as they usually
did).
The death of J.P. Morgan almost nine months later led to the centralized solution everyone seemed to favor then. At 6:02 pm on December 23, 1913, The Federal Reserve Act,
authorizing the creation of the Federal Reserve, was signed into law by
President Woodrow Wilson using four golden pens in a lightly-attended
ceremony during the Christmas break. Like income taxes, the Fed quickly
grew quite powerful.
The Federal Reserve took shape in stages, throughout 1914, with an
official launch date of November 16, 1914. Ironically, the Fed was
formed for the express purpose of avoiding the financial panics so
painful in recent memory - 1893 and 1907 - but the Fed merely continued
the same kind of boom-bust cycle of panics, ranging from a short, sharp
shock in 1920-21, to the long-term Great Depression of 1929 to 1941.
In
particular, the Fed fueled a huge wave of inflation after providing
liquidity for World War I spending. That was followed by a sharp cutoff
in liquidity and a "flash" depression in 1920. The Fed then fueled too
much liquidity throughout the 1920s, leading to a real estate and stock
market crash, followed by a sharp (33%) cut in liquidity between 1929
and 1932. The Fed just couldn't seem to find a balance.
The early Fed was quite clear in its mission. In its 1923 Annual Report, the Federal Reserve described its role clearly:
The Federal Reserve banks are…the source to which the member banks turn when the demands of the business community have outrun their own unaided resources.
This is why the Fed increased credit 61% in the 1920s, from $45.3 billion on June 30, 1921 to over $73 billion in July 1929.
The
Fed's inflationary monetary policies led to a nearly 99% decline in the
purchasing power of the U.S. dollar in gold terms. In 1913, gold traded
for $20.67 per ounce vs. around $1,690 today. Our official cost of
living increase since 1913 is +2,261%, meaning that an item costing $1
in 1913 costs $23.61 now. The Fed's policies have also led to a series
of stock market booms and busts over the century, begging the question
of whether the Fed has been any more effective than J.P. Morgan and his big-banker syndicate.
The Money Power Controlled by International Investment Bankers Dominates Business and Government
In the various actions which increase or decrease the supply of money, governments, bankers, and industrialists have not always seen eye to eye. On the whole, in the period up to 1931, bankers, especially the Money Power controlled by the international investment bankers, were able to dominate both business and government. They could dominate business, especially in activities and in areas where industry could not finance its own needs for capital, because investment bankers had the ability to supply or refuse to supply such capital. Thus, Rothschild interests came to dominate many of the railroads of Europe, while Morgan dominated at least 26,000 miles of American railroads. Such bankers went further than this. In return for flotations of securities of industry, they took seats on the boards of directors of industrial firms, as they had already done on commercial banks, savings banks, insurance firms, and finance companies. From these lesser institutions they funneled capital to enterprises which yielded control and away from those who resisted. These firms were controlled through interlocking directorships, holding companies, and lesser banks. They engineered amalgamations and generally reduced competition, until by the early twentieth century many activities were so monopolized that they could raise their noncompetitive prices above costs to obtain sufficient profits to become self-financing and were thus able to eliminate the control of bankers. But before that stage was reached a relatively small number of bankers were in positions of immense influence in European and American economic life. As early as 1909, Walter Rathenau, who was in a position to know (since he had inherited from his father control of the German General Electric Company and held scores of directorships himself), said, "Three hundred men, all of whom know one another, direct the economic destiny of Europe and choose their successors from among themselves."
The Power of Investment Bankers Over Governments
The power of investment bankers over governments rests on a number of factors, of which the most significant, perhaps, is the need of governments to issue short-term treasury bills as well as long-term government bonds. Just as businessmen go to commercial banks for current capital advances to smooth over the discrepancies between their irregular and intermittent incomes and their periodic and persistent outgoes (such as monthly rents, annual mortgage payments, and weekly wages), so a government has to go to merchant bankers (or institutions controlled by them) to tide over the shallow places caused by irregular tax receipts. As experts in government bonds, the international bankers not only handled the necessary advances but provided advice to government officials and, on many occasions, placed their own members in official posts for varied periods to deal with special problems. This is so widely accepted even today that in 1961 a Republican investment banker became Secretary of the Treasury in a Democratic Administration in Washington without significant comment from any direction.
The Money Power Reigns Supreme and Unquestioned
Naturally, the influence of bankers over governments during the age of financial capitalism (roughly 1850-1931) was not something about which anyone talked freely, but it has been admitted frequently enough by those on the inside, especially in England. In 1852 Gladstone, chancellor of the Exchequer, declared, "The hinge of the whole situation was this: the government itself was not to be a substantive power in matters of Finance, but was to leave the Money Power supreme and unquestioned." On September 26, 1921, The Financial Times wrote, "Half a dozen men at the top of the Big Five Banks could upset the whole fabric of government finance by refraining from renewing Treasury Bills." In 1924 Sir Drummond Fraser, vice-president of the Institute of Bankers, stated, "The Governor of the Bank of England must be the autocrat who dictates the terms upon which alone the Government can obtain borrowed money."
Secrecy Is One of the Elements of the English Business and Financial Life
This element of secrecy is one of the outstanding features of English business and financial life. The weakest "right" an Englishman has is the "right to know," which is about as narrow as it is in American nuclear operations. Most duties, powers, and actions in business are controlled by customary procedures and conventions, not by explicit rules and regulations, and are often carried out by casual remarks between old friends. No record perpetuates such remarks, and they are generally regarded as private affairs which are no concern of others, even when they involve millions of pounds of the public's money. Although this situation is changing slowly, the inner circle of English financial life remains a matter of "whom one knows," rather than "what one knows." Jobs are still obtained by family, marriage, or school connections; character is considered far more important than knowledge or skill; and important positions, on this basis, are given to men who have no training, experience, or knowledge to qualify them.
The Core of English Financial Society Consists of 17 Private International Banking Firms
As part of this system and at the core of English financial life have been seventeen private firms of "merchant bankers" who find money for established and wealthy enterprises on either a long-term (investment) or a short-term ("acceptances") basis. These merchant bankers, with a total of less than a hundred active partners, include the firms of Baring Brothers, N. M. Rothschild, J. Henry Schroder, Morgan Grenfell, Hambros, and Lazard Brothers. These merchant bankers in the period of financial capitalism had a dominant position with the Bank of England and, strangely enough, still have retained some of this, despite the nationalization of the Bank by the Labour government in 1946. As late as 1961 a Baring (Lord Cromer) was named governor of the bank, and his board of directors, called the "Court" of the bank, included representatives of Lazard, of Hambros, and of Morgan Grenfell, as well as of an industrial firm (English Electric) controlled by these.
Money Power Exercises Its Influence through Interlocking Directorates and Direct Financial Controls
From this date onward, financial capitalism grew rapidly in Britain, without ever achieving the heights it did in the United States or Germany. Domestic concerns remained small, owner-managed, and relatively unprogressive (especially in the older lines like textiles, iron, coal, shipbuilding). One chief field of exploitation for British financial capitalism continued to be in foreign countries until the crash of 1931. Only after 1920 did it spread tentatively into newer fields like machinery, electrical goods, and chemicals, and in these it was superseded almost at once by monopoly capitalism.... In addition, its rule was relatively honest (in contrast to the United States but similar to Germany). It made little use of holding companies, exercising its influence by interlocking directorates and direct financial controls. It died relatively easily, yielding control of the economic system to the new organizations of monopoly capitalism constructed by men like William H. Lever, Viscount Leverhulme (1851-1925) or Alfred M. Mond, Lord Melchett (1868-1930). The former created a great international monopoly in vegetable oils centering upon Unilever, while the latter created the British chemical monopoly known as Imperial Chemical Industries.
Banking Control of Government throughout the World
Financial capitalism in Britain, as elsewhere, was marked not only by a growing financial control of industry but also by an increasing concentration of this control and by an increasing banking control of government. As we have seen, this influence of the Bank of England over the government was an almost unmitigated disaster for Britain. The power of the bank in business circles was never as complete as it was in government, because British businesses remained self-financing to a greater extent than those of other countries. This self-financing power of business in Britain depended on the advantage which it held because of the early arrival of industrialism in England. As other countries became industrialized, reducing Britain's advantage and her extraordinary profits, British business was forced to seek outside financial aid or reduce its creation of capital plant. Both methods were used, with the result that financial capitalism grew at the same time as considerable sections of Britain's capital plant became obsolete.
The Money Trust Became Increasingly Concentrated and Powerful in the Twentieth Century
The control of the Bank of England over business was exercised indirectly through the joint-stock banks. These banks became increasingly concentrated and increasingly powerful in the twentieth century. The number of such banks decreased through amalgamation from 109 in 1866 to 35 in 1919 and to 33 in 1933. This growth of a "money trust" in Britain led to an investigation by a Treasury Committee on Bank Amalgamations. In its report (Colwyn Report, 1919) this committee admitted the danger and called for government action. A bill was drawn up to prevent further concentration but was withdrawn when the bankers made a "gentlemen's agreement" to ask Treasury permission for future amalgamations. The net result was to protect the influence of the Bank of England, since this might have been reduced by complete monopolization of joint-stock banking, and the bank was always in a position to influence the Treasury's attitude on all questions. Of the 33 joint-stock banks existing in 1933, 9 were in Ireland and 8 in Scotland, leaving only 16 for England and Wales. The 33 together had over £2,500 million in deposits in April 1933, of which £1,773 million were in the so-called "Big Five" (Midland, Lloyds, Barclays, Westminster, and National Provincial). The Big Five controlled at least 7 of the other 28 (in one case by ownership of 98 percent of the stock).
Although competition among the Big Five was usually keen, all were subject to the powerful influence of the Bank of England, as exercised through the discount rate, interlocking directorships, and above all through the intangible influences of tradition, ambition, and prestige.
The Techniques of Finance Capitalism Reach Levels of Corruption into America Higher Than Any Country in the World
By the 1880's the techniques of financial capitalism were well developed in New York and northern New Jersey, and reached levels of corruption which were never approached in any European country. This corruption sought to cheat the ordinary investor by flotations and manipulations of securities for the benefit of "insiders." Success in this was its own justification, and the practitioners of these dishonesties were as socially acceptable as their wealth entitled them to be, without any animadversions on how that wealth had been obtained. Corrupt techniques, associated with the names of Daniel Drew or Jay Gould in the wildest days of railroad financial juggling, were also practiced by Morgan and others who became respectable from longer sustained success which allowed them to build up established firms.
Close Alliance of Wall Street with Two Major Parties
Any reform of Wall Street practices came from pressure from the hinterlands, especially from the farming West, and was long delayed by the close alliance of Wall Street with the two major political parties, which grew up in 1880-1900. In this alliance, by 1900, the influence of Morgan in the Republican Party was dominant, his chief rivalry coming from the influence of a monopoly capitalist, Rockefeller of Ohio. By 1900 Wall Street had largely abandoned the Democratic Party, a shift indicated by the passage of the Whitney family from the Democrats to the Republican inner circles, shortly after they established a family alliance with Morgan. In the same period, the Rockefeller family reversed the ordinary direction of development by shifting from the monopoly fields of petroleum to New York banking circles by way of the Chase National Bank. Soon family as well as financial alliances grew up among the Morgans, Whitneys, and Rockefellers, chiefly through Payne and Aldrich family connections.
Finance Capitalism in New York Resembles a Feudal Structure
For almost fifty years, from 1880 to 1930, financial capitalism approximated a feudal structure in which two great powers, centered in New York, dominated a number of lesser powers, both in New York and in provincial cities. No description of this structure as it existed in the 1920's can be given in a brief compass, since it infiltrated all aspects of American life and especially all branches of economic life. At the center were a group of less than a dozen investment banks, which were, at the height of their powers, still unincorporated private partnerships. These included J. P. Morgan; the Rockefeller family; Kuhn, Loeb and Company; Dillon, Read and Company; Brown Brothers and Harriman; and others. Each of these was linked in organizational or personal relationships with various banks, insurance companies, railroads, utilities, and industrial firms. The result was to form a number of webs of economic power of which the more important centered in New York, while other provincial groups allied with these were to be found in Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Chicago, and Boston.
J. P. Morgan Dominates Corporate America (Now known as JP Morgan Chase - Morgan-Rockefeller alliance)
J. P. Morgan worked in close relationship to a group of banks and insurance companies, including the First National Bank of New York, the Guaranty Trust Company, the Bankers Trust, the New York Trust Company, and the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company. The whole nexus dominated a network of business firms which included at least one-sixth of the two hundred largest nonfinancial corporations in American business. Among these were twelve utility companies, five or more railroad systems, thirteen industrial firms, and at least five of the fifty largest banks in the country. The combined assets of these firms were more than $30 billion. They included American Telephone and Telegraph Company, International Telephone and Telegraph, Consolidated Gas of New York, the groups of electrical utilities known as Electric Bond and Share and as the United Corporation Group (which included Commonwealth and Southern, Public Service of New Jersey, and Columbia Gas and Electric), the New York Central railway system, the Van Sweringen railway system (Allegheny) of nine lines (including Chesapeake and Ohio; Erie; Missouri Pacific; the Nickel Plate; and Pere Marquette); the Santa Fe; the Northern system of five great lines (Great Northern; Northern Pacific; Burlington; and others); the Southern Railway; General Electric Company; United States Steel; Phelps Dodge; Montgomery Ward; National Biscuit; Kennecott Copper; American Radiator and Standard Sanitary; Continental Oil; Reading Coal and Iron; Baldwin Locomotive; and others.
The Economic Power of the Money Trust in America Is Almost Beyond Imagination
The economic power represented by these figures is almost beyond imagination to grasp, and was increased by the active role which these financial titans took in politics. Morgan and Rockefeller together frequently dominated the national Republican Party, while Morgan occasionally had extensive influence in the national Democratic Party (three of the Morgan partners were usually Democrats). These two were also powerful on the state level, especially Morgan in New York and Rockefeller in Ohio. Mellon was a power in Pennsylvania and du Pont was obviously a political power in Delaware.
The Morgan Hierarchy
In the 1920's this system of economic and political power formed a hierarchy headed by the Morgan interests and played a principal role both in political and business life. Morgan, operating on the international level in cooperation with his allies abroad, especially in England, influenced the events of history to a degree which cannot be specified in detail but which certainly was tremendous....
TheAtlantic |The Yale Agrarian Studies completist is always an easy person to buy for, but his smile may slip a notch when he unwraps Every Twelve Seconds: Industrialized Slaughter and the Politics of Sight.
As if the title weren’t off-putting enough, the cover photograph shows a
faceless man in full-body rubber apron and rubber boots, the whole
getup spattered with fresh blood. Is that an elastic band on the slick
red floor, or a tapeworm? Mercifully, the book deals only in small part
with the actual killing of animals, being a firsthand account of various
kinds of slaughterhouse work. Liver hanger, cattle driver,
quality-control worker: in five months undercover, Timothy Pachirat did
it all.
The comprehensiveness of his experience makes Every Twelve Seconds
especially valuable, considering the meat industry’s campaign to stamp
out precisely this sort of research. Iowa and Utah have already passed
laws making it a crime to gain employment at a slaughterhouse for the
purpose of documenting abuses and code violations; similar “ag gag”
bills have been proposed in other states. It is easy to imagine the
uproar that would ensue if the restaurant industry, which is a model of
hygiene in comparison, were to demand comparable protection from
whistle-blowers. When it comes to the meat supply, however, America
appears none too troubled by the prospect of its blindfolding; the
nation would rather take its chances with E. coli than risk
channel-surfing into a slaughterhouse. Though “foodie” writers
occasionally show interest in the act of slaughter, they prefer to
witness it outdoors, on some idyllic farm, the better to stylize it into
a time-hallowed, mutually respectful communing of man and beast.
Readers are left to infer that their local meat factory is merely
maximizing the number of communings per minute; the media fuss over
Temple Grandin, a purportedly cow-loving consultant to Big Beef, has an
obvious role to play here. But all this wishful thinking fails at the
slaughterhouse door. Barring recourse to the inducements the animals
get, it would be hard to coax average Americans inside even for a
minute. As George Bataille once wrote, in a remark that leads off
Pachirat’s first chapter: “The slaughterhouse is cursed and quarantined
like a boat carrying cholera.”
And it always has been. We are sometimes told that urbanization has
made us all squeamish about something people used to regard with a
manly, no-nonsense spirit. The opposite is closer to the truth. As the
great psychoanalyst Otto Rank pointed out, cave paintings and ancient
myths indicate that primitive man—with whom our so-called hunters love
to claim kinship—felt worse about killing animals than killing his own
kind. (We find a similar attitude among the rugged Cossacks in
Sholokhov’s The Quiet Don: “You should not kill an animal unless
it is necessary, but destroy man!”) If our ancestors had had—as we now
do—full awareness of animals’ sentience, and the wherewithal to live
without red meat, and the knowledge that red meat is harmful in even the
smallest quantities, would they have gone on eating it? We will never
know the answer. What is certain is that long traditions of stigmatizing
the slaughtering class started fading only after the factory farm made
slaughter invisible, inaudible, and unsmellable to everyone outside that
class. Of course, everyone has a pretty good idea what goes on, so that
parents whose child wanted to be a cow-killer when he grew up (as
opposed to, say, a soldier) would probably get him psychological
counseling, but the bulk of mankind now has the luxury of forgetting how
meat is made.
The most interesting aspect of Pachirat’s book is its discovery that
our slaughterhouse workers are themselves deeply uneasy about the
cruelty they are forced to inflict. This runs counter to the PR line
according to which everything runs wonderfully humanely except when some
psychopath slips into the system. Evidently there is no uncruel way to
kill a large and terrified animal every 12 seconds, the pace now set by
industry greed. Just moving the cattle along the chutes leaves employees
feeling shaken and ashamed.
"As a result of this audit, we now know that the Federal Reserve provided more than $16 trillion in total financial assistance to some of the largest financial institutions and corporations in the United States and throughout the world," said Sanders. "This is a clear case of socialism for the rich and rugged, you're-on-your-own individualism for everyone else."
Among the investigation's key findings is that the Fed unilaterally provided trillions of dollars in financial assistance to foreign banks and corporations from South Korea to Scotland, according to the GAO report. "No agency of the United States government should be allowed to bailout a foreign bank or corporation without the direct approval of Congress and the president," Sanders said.
For example, the CEO of JP Morgan Chase served on the New York Fed's board of directors at the same time that his bank received more than $390 billion in financial assistance from the Fed. Moreover, JP Morgan Chase served as one of the clearing banks for the Fed's emergency lending programs.
In another disturbing finding, the GAO said that on Sept. 19, 2008, William Dudley, who is now the New York Fed president, was granted a waiver to let him keep investments in AIG and General Electric at the same time AIG and GE were given bailout funds. One reason the Fed did not make Dudley sell his holdings, according to the audit, was that it might have created the appearance of a conflict of interest.
To Sanders, the conclusion is simple. "No one who works for a firm receiving direct financial assistance from the Fed should be allowed to sit on the Fed's board of directors or be employed by the Fed," he said.
After 100 years ...we find that the FED is corrupt and out of control
we didn't authorize the Fed to bail out corporations and banks over seas with US tax dollars and they expect the American people to delay their Social Security and cut Medicaid and Medicare because of Feds policies
realitysandwich | Pot-smokers of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but your pipe dreams.
Marijuana legalization is a beginning, not an end.
When residents of Colorado and Washington voted to legalize the adult
use of cannabis, it felt like a momentary rush of sobriety in a country
dazed by decades of anti-marijuana hysteria. But what comes next?
The drug war edifice is cracking and the end of prohibition may be nigh.
Or may not be. The way things play out is not preordained. Major
strategic differences among legalization proponents are surfacing about
how to proceed. Some drug policy reform leaders, fearing an official
backlash, are urging a cautious, go-slow, approach: make it as easy as
possible for the Feds to back off and let the states do their thing.
Other voices, claiming a pro-pot electoral mandate, are calling for
bold, assertive moves to implement the will of the voters.
Some medical marijuana dispensary operators are celebrating the prospect
of expanding into adult sales, while others worry about getting
squeezed out as weaker players fold in an increasingly competitive,
multibillion-dollar industry. Mom and pop growers in the Emerald
Triangle of Northern California, America's cannabis bread basket, who've
paid their dues over the years, cringe when they hear of post-election
overtures to tobacco companies from single-issue obsessed, DC-based drug
policy reform lobbyists who presume to speak for tens of millions of
cannabis consumers.
The future of cannabis is up for grabs -- as much as anything can be in
our ailing, corporate-dominated culture. So why not think big? Here are
some ideas:
NYTimes | Marijuana is illegal in Israel, but farms like this one, at a secret location near the city of Safed, are at the cutting edge of the debate on the legality, benefits and risks of medicinal cannabis. Its staff members wear white lab coats, its growing facilities are fitted with state-of-the-art equipment for controlling light and humidity, and its grounds are protected by security cameras and guards.
But in addition to the high-tech atmosphere, there is a spiritual one. The plantation, Israel’s largest and most established medical marijuana farm — and now a thriving commercial enterprise — is imbued with a higher sense of purpose, reflected by the aura of Safed, an age-old center of Jewish mysticism, as well as by its name, Tikkun Olam, a reference to the Jewish concept of repairing or healing the world.
There is an on-site synagogue in a trailer, a sweet aroma of freshly harvested cannabis that infuses the atmosphere and, halfway up a wooded hillside overlooking the farm, a blue-domed tomb of a rabbinic sage and his wife.
In the United States, medical marijuana programsexist in 18 statesbut remain illegal under federal law. In Israel, the law defines marijuana as an illegal and dangerous drug, and there is still no legislation regulating its use for medicinal purposes.
Yet Israel’s Ministry of Health issues special licenses that allow thousands of patients to receive medical marijuana, and some government officials are now promoting the country’s advances in the field as an example of its pioneering and innovation.
“I hope we will overcome the legal obstacles for Tikkun Olam and other companies,” Yuli Edelstein, the minister of public diplomacy and diaspora affairs, told journalists during a recent government-sponsored tour of the farm, part of Israel’s effort to brand itself as something beyond a conflict zone. In addition to helping the sick, he said, the effort “could be helpful for explaining what we are about in this country.”
Israelis have been at the vanguard of research into the medicinal properties of cannabis for decades.
guardian | It was more sophisticated than we had imagined: new documents show
that the violent crackdown on Occupy last fall – so mystifying at the
time – was not just coordinated at the level of the FBI,
the Department of Homeland Security, and local police. The crackdown,
which involved, as you may recall, violent arrests, group disruption,
canister missiles to the skulls of protesters, people held in handcuffs
so tight they were injured, people held in bondage till they were forced
to wet or soil themselves –was coordinated with the big banks
themselves.
The Partnership for Civil Justice Fund, in a
groundbreaking scoop that should once more shame major US media outlets
(why are nonprofits now some of the only entities in America left
breaking major civil liberties news?), filed this request. The document –
reproduced here in an easily searchable format
– shows a terrifying network of coordinated DHS, FBI, police, regional
fusion center, and private-sector activity so completely merged into one
another that the monstrous whole is, in fact, one entity: in some
cases, bearing a single name, the Domestic Security Alliance Council.
And it reveals this merged entity to have one centrally planned, locally
executed mission. The documents, in short, show the cops and DHS
working for and with banks to target, arrest, and politically disable
peaceful American citizens.
The documents, released after long
delay in the week between Christmas and New Year, show a nationwide
meta-plot unfolding in city after city in an Orwellian world: six
American universities are sites where campus police funneled information
about students involved with OWS to the FBI, with the administrations'
knowledge (p51); banks sat down with FBI officials to pool information
about OWS protesters harvested by private security; plans to crush
Occupy events, planned for a month down the road, were made by the FBI –
and offered to the representatives of the same organizations that the
protests would target; and even threats of the assassination of OWS
leaders by sniper fire – by whom? Where? – now remain redacted and
undisclosed to those American citizens in danger, contrary to standard
FBI practice to inform the person concerned when there is a threat
against a political leader (p61).
"FBI
documents just obtained by the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund
(PCJF) … reveal that from its inception, the FBI treated the Occupy
movement as a potential criminal and terrorist threat … The PCJF has
obtained heavily redacted documents showing that FBI offices and agents
around the country were in high gear conducting surveillance
against the movement even as early as August 2011, a month prior to the
establishment of the OWS encampment in Zuccotti Park and other Occupy
actions around the country."
"This production [of documents],
which we believe is just the tip of the iceberg, is a window into the
nationwide scope of the FBI's surveillance, monitoring, and reporting on
peaceful protestors organizing with the Occupy movement … These
documents also show these federal agencies functioning as a de facto
intelligence arm of Wall Street and Corporate America."
The
documents show stunning range: in Denver, Colorado, that branch of the
FBI and a "Bank Fraud Working Group" met in November 2011 – during the
Occupy protests – to surveil the group. The Federal Reserve of Richmond,
Virginia had its own private security surveilling Occupy Tampa and
Tampa Veterans for Peace and passing privately-collected information on
activists back to the Richmond FBI, which, in turn, categorized
OWS activities under its "domestic terrorism" unit. The Anchorage,
Alaska "terrorism task force" was watching Occupy Anchorage. The
Jackson, Michigan "joint terrorism task force" was issuing a
"counterterrorism preparedness alert" about the ill-organized grandmas
and college sophomores in Occupy there. Also in Jackson, Michigan, the
FBI and the "Bank Security Group" – multiple private banks – met to
discuss the reaction to "National Bad Bank Sit-in Day" (the response was
violent, as you may recall). The Virginia FBI sent that state's Occupy
members' details to the Virginia terrorism fusion center. The Memphis
FBI tracked OWS under its "joint terrorism task force" aegis, too. And
so on, for over 100 pages. Fist tap Arnach.
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sciencemag | This spring, after days of flulike symptoms and fever, a man
arrived at the emergency room at the University of Vermont Medical Center.
He ...
