Islam's war on freedom - a notoriously one-sided view of free speech

This is an older video, but what he is saying needs to be heard over and over agains so people don't become complacent to what's happening around them.
Rees

YOU'VE BEEN WARNED!...

from Breitbart.com
by Derek Broes
April 4, 2009

Over the past three months we have witnessed some truly amazing movements by the Obama administration.

- He has proposed more spending than all Presidents in history combined;
- He has trampled the Constitution by allowing the Treasury to take on a dictator style infringement on private companies, and now the democratically lead Congress has proposed the “Pay for Performance Act” which passed Thursday with even some Republican Congressman voted for it.

This bill essentially allows the Treasury to define “fair pay” for all employees, at any level. Worse, the Treasury would like to be able to take over any company it deemed as important enough to take over regardless of whether or not it had accepted bailout funds.

Worse still, the Serve Act proposes to make volunteering for the government mandatory (with pay, of course). Last time I looked, working for pay was called A JOB.

The scariest part of the bill is that while you’re serving as a “volunteer,” you’re prohibited from participating in worship and church activities, political rallies and being involved in a union. In short, your essential freedoms are gone. I keep hearing about Obama being a socialist but, I have to disagree. Based on these measures he appears to more like a person pursuing Communism or Fascism.

Let’s face it; if you wanted to tear down the Republic and install a Communist Oligarchy you would first have to take over all major industries where corporate power resides, then you must get the wealth away from the rich — but how would you do that? Well, you create an even larger economic crisis so the country thinks your massive debt spending is a way to help the country when your real plan is to incur so much debt that the only way to prevent the country from bankruptcy is to impose a tax system that depletes the wealth of the top 1% until we’re all equally “wealthy.” …Well, except for those wealthy people who helped you get there. You know the ones I’m talking about. I don’t mean to HARPO on the subject, but we seemed to have forgotten what we’re protecting. What about the Republic? Is it already gone?

When the government ignores legal contractual obligations because they judge someone’s bonus as unfair the law has been ignored, which means it was violated and this violation occurred at the highest level of government. I’m not saying the AIG bonuses weren’t excessive. My point is, we don’t know what these people did to deserve or NOT to deserve them because this was never mentioned or examined. Maybe some of those people brought in a billion dollars of business and their bonuses were based? Maybe the CEO is the main reason the company is failing? Does that mean that some guy who worked hard to bring in that billion dollars in business shouldn’t be rewarded? But Obama needs a way to regulate pay and the bill proposed doesn’t even stop at executives, it doesn’t even stop at dollar amounts. In fact, it has no specification whatsoever.

So we can all look forward to government cars, government jobs, paid civilian volunteers who watch our every move and the the loss of our ability to reach for our dreams. The sad part is that Obama told us exactly what he was going to do and 52% of you refused to hear what he said. In fact many of you cheered at these things. Let’s remember just of few of the things he said.

1. The Constitution is fundamentally flawed. It only protects the rights of the people but does not allow the government to do anything on your behalf.
2. He wants a civilian Army as large as our military, and as well funded ($650 billion annually).
3. He wants to “spread the wealth.” Oh, don’t pretend you don’t remember Joe the Plumber.

And let’s not forget good ole Reverend Wright whose teachings about America being evil and unequal ring in Obama’s ears. Funny … It’s equality that got Obama elected. Change? Oh yes, there’s change and if we don’t act soon the meaning of hope will have a very different meaning.

Click to read the article and comments

The Quiet Coup

Image credit: Jim Bourg/Reuters

from The Atlantic

One thing you learn rather quickly when working at the International Monetary Fund is that no one is ever very happy to see you. Typically, your “clients” come in only after private capital has abandoned them, after regional trading-bloc partners have been unable to throw a strong enough lifeline, after last-ditch attempts to borrow from powerful friends like China or the European Union have fallen through. You’re never at the top of anyone’s dance card.

The reason, of course, is that the IMF specializes in telling its clients what they don’t want to hear. I should know; I pressed painful changes on many foreign officials during my time there as chief economist in 2007 and 2008. And I felt the effects of IMF pressure, at least indirectly, when I worked with governments in Eastern Europe as they struggled after 1989, and with the private sector in Asia and Latin America during the crises of the late 1990s and early 2000s. Over that time, from every vantage point, I saw firsthand the steady flow of officials—from Ukraine, Russia, Thailand, Indonesia, South Korea, and elsewhere—trudging to the fund when circumstances were dire and all else had failed.

Every crisis is different, of course. Ukraine faced hyperinflation in 1994; Russia desperately needed help when its short-term-debt rollover scheme exploded in the summer of 1998; the Indonesian rupiah plunged in 1997, nearly leveling the corporate economy; that same year, South Korea’s 30-year economic miracle ground to a halt when foreign banks suddenly refused to extend new credit.

But I must tell you, to IMF officials, all of these crises looked depressingly similar. Each country, of course, needed a loan, but more than that, each needed to make big changes so that the loan could really work. Almost always, countries in crisis need to learn to live within their means after a period of excess—exports must be increased, and imports cut—and the goal is to do this without the most horrible of recessions. Naturally, the fund’s economists spend time figuring out the policies—budget, money supply, and the like—that make sense in this context. Yet the economic solution is seldom very hard to work out.

No, the real concern of the fund’s senior staff, and the biggest obstacle to recovery, is almost invariably the politics of countries in crisis.

Typically, these countries are in a desperate economic situation for one simple reason—the powerful elites within them overreached in good times and took too many risks. Emerging-market governments and their private-sector allies commonly form a tight-knit—and, most of the time, genteel—oligarchy, running the country rather like a profit-seeking company in which they are the controlling shareholders

Click to read the rest