“The conservative "thinks of political policies as intended to preserve order, justice, and freedom. The ideologue, on the contrary, thinks of politics as a revolutionary instrument for transforming society and even transforming human nature. In his march toward Utopia, the ideologue is merciless.”
― Russell Kirk
Topic: My Op-Ed Regarding Islamic Terrorist, Communism and Barack Obama:
Ladies and gentlemen, I want to first begin this article by addressing from a personal eyeview the more than one-year of known insurgency of the federal government's encroachment first upon the American people's civil rights, civil liberties, and now the sole and most sacred duty every president must provide for our nation: national security, providing for the common defense.
You and I are abundantly aware simply what plagues America in her interior today: federal bureaucracies and the actual administration itself targeting conservative political action and interest groups, Christian charitable organizations and pro-Israeli Christian and Jewish organizations, who the administration labels as a private conduits for funneling money to Israel to use against the Palestinian Authority and Hamas. More damning than any of this is how each of these connects to our borders experiencing a deluge for an indeterminable period of time dating to at least 2012 of President Obama flying jetliners filled with illegal immigrants into our nation, where they now reside on welfare and vote undetected and uncounted. They pay no taxes, work low wage jobs, and because there are no income taxes taken out of their checks and they receive illegal benefits, they now earn higher incomes and lead better, more financially-secure quality of lives than the average middle class American. The Middle Class is not disappearing; the poverty is on the rise, all while the entertainment industry, Silicon Valley and mass media moguls grow exponentially wealthier as those residing on Main Street or our farmers, poets and sailors in America's Heartland grow that much poorer.
Class warfare still is waged, and waged more to our greater detriment as a people than ever before in our more than 407 years of Anglo-American settlements. Instead of targeting a war between the poor inner-city black communities, these issues have expanded into the Hispanic communities, not merely in Little Havana in Miami or the large cities in Texas, Southern California or Phoenix, but now with those pouring across our borders. For the first time, the same Democrats who long have sought to secularize and run out religious freedom by destroying its churches and synagogues from our amber waves of grain sea-to-shining sea now find it convenient to quote Hispanic pastors and priests insistent upon the federal government granting amnesty to what they insist upon calling the illegal immigrants "refugees" in order destroy all political opposition and ultimately manifest a one-party totalitarian state, dissolving once and for all a multi-party democratically-elected republican government.
Section I: Obama Doctrine of Foreign Policy in the Americas - Manifesting a Pan American State
The issue with the United Nations is most disturbing, and it will be a matter of one or both ways to which they enter into the foray of compromising the American people's democratic way of living. The issue with humanitarian border crises speaks for itself. The UN under General Secretary Ban Ki-moon is strongly urging President Obama to unilaterally declare all illegal immigrants refugees of foreign nations who in their homelands faced persecution. Why, though, did they face persecution, and why have the American read or watched so little regarding the information of further Latin American revolutions? It stands to reason that what little we have listened to on the Venezuelan Uprising of right-wing revolutionaries attempting to topple the socialist government of the successor to the late Hugo Chavez's dictatorial role, Nicolas Maduro, thus destroying the Bolivarian revolutionary spawn that Chavez manifested about a quarter century ago.
There are plenty of stories to corroborate with my contention that the president has ordered the funding of proxy wars to stir political unrest in Latin America and Ukraine. I first intend to address Latin American since I have multiple times discussed the oil entanglement the U.S. has with the Ukrainians. The first topic will expand upon the rioting in Caracas, Venezuela, where the following article will discuss this very real possibility of initiating a series of civil wars and revolutions in an entire region of the world not because of a communist threat nor today's westward geopolitical shift by Russia and China, but for the Obama administration to transform our nation into the Apartheid state governed beneath the yellow sickle and hammer, where all peoples are welcome except for WASP males:
OPINION AND ANALYSIS: INTERNATIONAL First Egypt, next Venezuela?
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By KIRAZ JANICKE & FEDERICO FUENTES - GREEN LEFT WEEKLY, February 27th 2011
As the wave of popular uprisings has spread across the Arab world, a flurry of articles have appeared suggesting Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez could be the next “dictator” to be overthrown.
Such arguments follow a pattern in the corporate media of slandering the Chavez government and the revolutionary process it leads.
They aim to conceal the real threat that haunts imperialism: that the Arab world may follow the example of Venezuela and other countries in Latin America — and break away from Western hegemony.
Particularly cynical were the comments by British foreign secretary William Hague, who falsely alleged Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi had fled to Venezuela on February 21. This triggered a spate of headlines tying Venezuela and Libya together — despite the fact the allegation was untrue.
A February 2 editorial by the Miami Herald claimed: “With dictators toppling like dominoes across the Middle East, Venezuela’s president-for-life, Hugo Chavez, is signaling worry about his own despotic rule.”
The article ignores the fact that Chavez was overwhelming elected as president in three elections supervised by numerous international observers. All up, pro-Chavez forces have won more than a dozen national elections, all verified as free and fair, since 1998.
With new elections set for 2012, Chavez maintains more than 50% support — even in polls commissioned by the US-funded opposition.
Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres went further when he listed Chavez along with Iranian leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as two despots corrupted by oil that must be eliminated.
“I believe the world should get rid of oil and tyranny, both of them together are dangerous,” Peres said, VoiceofAmerica.com reported on February 23.
Peres was at least more honest than most, adding that his reason was because Europe has to pay higher oil prices due to the “whims of some producer countries”.
The reality is that as US hegemony is being challenged by the popular uprisings in the Arab world, right-wing commentators and policy-makers are scrambling to spin the situation to their own advantage.
They are singling out governments outside of US control as possible targets for enforced “regime change” from outside.
Responding to the idea that Venezuela could be next, Chavez noted on February 18 that what was occurring in Egypt “started here a while ago. We have been in rebellion for a while now, in a revolutionary rebellion.”
Chavez said that rebellion began in Venezuela with the February 1989 popular uprising known as the Caracazo.
As a result of International Monetary Fund-imposed hikes in fuel prices, tens of thousands of Venezuelans poured onto the streets of Caracas and other major cities to protest against the neoliberal measure.
A brutal crackdown left thousands dead, according to some estimates, and temporarily quelled the rebellion.
However, the fervour continued in Venezuelan society, leading to Chavez’s election in 1998 on an anti-neoliberal platform.
Chavez said: “What happened in Egypt — and which has not finished — is a sudden awakening of people’s power. We have only seen the first waves.
“They are events that mark a new phase of history in the entire world.”
One of Chavez’s first moves by Chavez when he was elected was to strengthen Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and use it to negotiate a more just oil price for countries dependent on oil revenues.
Chavez also took back government control over Venezuela’s nominally state-run oil industry. These moves have allowed his government to pour much of the oil revenue into social programs.
These wide-ranging programs eradicated illiteracy and extended free education and healthcare to the most needy. They have also been crucial to the process of expanding community control over the running of their affairs.
The Chavez government has also used oil revenues to seek to develop other sectors of the economy to help break oil dependency.
Following the mainstream media, you would get the impression the Chavez government is working overtime to silence freedom of speech. The reality, however, is not one TV station or newspaper has been closed down — and the overwhelming majority are virulently anti-government.
On the other hand, hundreds of new community radio stations have flourishing in the impoverished barrios, extending free speech to those who have never had the opportunity to exercise it before.
The US-backed dictators in the Arab world have consistently placed relations with Israel above the interests of the Palestinian people — despite the popular sympathy for the Palestinian cause among Arab people.
In contrast, since December, nine South American countries have formally recognised a sovereign Palestinian state.
Chavez’s government, and Bolivia’s radical president Evo Morales, have gone further. They broke all diplomatic relations with Israel after its brutal onslaught against Gaza in 2009.
Andelfo Garcia, a former foreign minister of the most loyal US ally in the region, Colombia, said in the February 19 Miami Herald that this move is just one more sign that South American countries are no longer simply adopting US foreign policy as their own.
“It’s like a wave rolling through Latin America,” he said. “The region has its own vision and wants to play a larger role [on the world stage].”
Venezuela has been in the forefront of moves towards greater regional integration, and a shift away from traditional dependence on trade with the US — as well as greater trade and dialogue with other parts of the Third World, such as the Middle East.
The US and Israel are terrified of the threat of something similar occurring in the Arab world — should the democratic revolutions be successful and extend to exerting democratic control over oil and other resources.
It also helps explain why Chavez is hailed by so many in the Arab world as a hero.
However, as Santiago Alba Rico and Alma Allende said in a February 24 Rebelion article “From the Arab world to Latin America”, Venezuela and Cuba’s failure to condemn the brutal repression being carried out by the regime of Muammar Gaddafi’s against a popular revolt will have negative consequences for the anti-imperialist project in Latin America.
Venezuela and Cuba have called for a “peaceful resolution” to the violence in Libya and warned the West could use the bloody scenes as an excuse to intervene.
The Arab revolt represents both an “economic revolt” and a “democratic, nationalist and anti-colonial revolution”, they said, that “provides the socialist left and pan-Arabists in the region with an unexpected opportunity”.
They said: “the Arab people, who have returned to the world stage, need the support of their Latin American brothers”.
The pioneering processes of liberation in Latin America, is a symbol of hope for the global anti-imperialist struggle. Therefore, left-wing Latin American governments should unreservedly support the peoples of the Arab world.
This would pre-empt the strategy of the Western powers, which are trying to relegitimise themselves as champions of “human rights and democracy” and may seek to use Gaddafi’s crimes as an excuse to intervene militarily.
Ignoring the brutal reality of Gaddafi, who has been a friend in recent years of the West and its allied dictators, risks breaking ties with popular Arab movements, they pointed out.
It could also give legitimacy to the false accusations thrown at Venezuela and Cuba by imperialism.
They added: “Hopefully Gaddafi will fall — today better that tomorrow.”
They said the wave of revolts in the Arab world could connect with the revolutionary processes in Latin America. They wrote: “The opportunity is great and could be the last to definitively reverse the current balance of forces and isolate the imperialist powers in a new global framework.”
One thing is clear, just as the US has sought to prop up dictatorships in the Arab world, it will continue its struggle to defeat the popular revolutionary movements in Latin America.
Eva Golinger said in Correo del Orinoco International on February 18 that US President Barack Obama had requested US$5 million dollars in special funding from the US Congress special funding for anti-Chavez groups in the 2012 budget.
On February 18 Venezuelanalysis.com said that Venezuelan parliamentarians had condemned threats from Republican congressmen and the newly appointed chair of the House sub-committee on foreign affairs for the Western hemisphere, Connie Mack.
Mack, has called for a “full-scale economic embargo” against Venezuela.
The real threat to Venezuelan democracy, as across Latin America and the Arab world, comes from the US Empire.
[Kiraz Janicke and Federico Fuentes worked in the Green Left Weekly Caracas bureau from 2007-10.]
Source: Green Left Weekly
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Understand that I purposely chose to use an international news outlet and, by happenstance and to my great appreciation, a Far Left-leaning journalist whose article originated in another journal of the same theme. Hugo Chavez was still alive at the time this was written, and knew well what exactly was transpiring. And while the article subtly hinted how it neither cares nor does it advocate democracy or these states' respect for human rights, it did address the core problem we now see cross the Rio Grande in Texas:
"The US and Israel are terrified of the threat of something similar occurring in the Arab world — should the democratic revolutions be successful and extend to exerting democratic control over oil and other resources."
The irony is how the journalists Kiraz Janicke and Federico Fuentes are so intuitive to what used to be a very open and convenient reason to justify invading first Kuwait and then Iraq in 2003. And as I read the last line where the declaration stated the following:
"The real threat to Venezuelan democracy, as across Latin America and the Arab world, comes from the US Empire."
I cannot but help that the same traps America fell into with Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon B. Johnson are now occurring, with the GOP likely to take the fall for these measures as the administration has already initiated the processes for painting th party even more heartless and unconcerned with human rights and liberty for not funding these illegal immigrants' poverty that will only pile this total atop of so many scores of our own record totals. The phenomena comprised of the welfare-warfare cycle is alive, well and preparing to be accelerated into uncharted territory whereby capitalism will be dissolved and communism finally implemented as Obama followed to the exact specifications Marxist doctrine calling for the devolution of the industrial centers globally in order for the proletariat to topple their bourgeoisie masters to form a popular dictatorship. If you need ask why I say this, Rep. Joe Garcia (D - FL) stated as much in a webcam recording:
"We've proven communism works." He did so by citing El Paso, TX, which is again part of the state of Texas, not Mexico nor any other Pan American state. But like with the Soviet Union, communism knows no borders nor any true conditions for which it may spread like the plague. The large border city has lax gun laws and according to The Washington Examiner, defies the socialist logic that if the state takes away firearms, nearly all crime will disappear:
El Paso, America’s safest big city, undermines Chicago’s case for gun control
JOEL GEHRKE • | FEBRUARY 8, 2013 | 12:00 AM
TOPICS: BELTWAY CONFIDENTIAL JOEL GEHRKE
Correction: An earlier version of this story included a comment from an official in El Paso County, Colo. That county – not the city of El Paso, Texas — has defied President Obama’s acts on gun control.
Chicago, Ill., a city surrounded by the rural midwest, has tight gun laws. El Paso, Texas, has lax gun laws and neighbors one of the most violent cities in the world. Yet, El Paso is the safest big city in the U.S., whereas President Obama cites the murder rate in his hometown as a reason to implement his gun control agenda.
Gun violence isn’t much of an issue in El Paso, Texas, which is the safest city of its size in the country. “[T]his week, for the third year in a row, El Paso was ranked as the safest U.S. city with a population greater that 500,000 by CQ Press, which compiled FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports,” per Fox.El Paso has minimal gun control — “mostly due to gun-friendly state law,” Reason observes.
also neighbors one of the most dangerous cities in the world.
“This dusty desert city sits directly across the Mexican border from what has been widely labeled as one of the most dangerous cities in the world, Ciudad Juarez,” Fox noted. “The bloody drug war has claimed an estimated 10,000 lives in Juarez in the last five years.” Compare that to Chicago, which has very tight gun laws and city defenders who blame the violence their on the fact that the city is surrounded by rural areas that have less gun control. “We live in Chicago and one of the reasons we have such a huge problem is all around us are areas with weak laws and with very lax background checks and a lot of illegal guns flow into this city,” David Axelrod said on MSNBC last week, adding that the gang problem in the city also drives crime.
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How Garcia was ever elected to serve in the U.S. House of Representatives from his district in the Miami and Key West area of Florida baffles me considering the Latin American demographic is 73% Cuban, with 60% of the states' Hispanic population residing according to Pew Research Hispanic:
Venezuela, as a result of what you read about the startling growth of the Cuban population in Florida, is not at all exclusive from the rest of Latin America. It should be noted that the Obama administration has expressed interests in potentially lifting the Cuban embargo, but to date has not. And why? Well, read the following, because there is potentially another Bay of Pigs affair on America's hands, and the next humanitarian crisis may well entrench Floridians:
U.S. covertly sent Latin Americans to provoke political rebellion in Cuba
Beginning as early as October 2009, an Obama administration project sent Venezuelan, Costa Rican and Peruvian young people to Cuba to work undercover in hopes of ginning up rebellion.
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Monday, August 4, 2014, 8:42 AM
Cuban students exit Marta Abreu Central University in Santa Clara, Cuba, in July. Beginning as early as October 2009, the U.S. sent Venezuelan, Costa Rican and Peruvian nationals to Cuba to cultivate a new generation of political activists, it has been revealed.
WASHINGTON — An Obama administration program secretly dispatched young Latin Americans to Cuba using the cover of health and civic programs to provoke political change, a clandestine operation that put those foreigners in danger even after a U.S. contractor was hauled away to a Cuban jail.
Beginning as early as October 2009, a project overseen by the U.S. Agency for International Development sent Venezuelan, Costa Rican and Peruvian young people to Cuba in hopes of ginning up rebellion. The travelers worked undercover, often posing as tourists, and traveled around the island scouting for people they could turn into political activists.
In one case, the workers formed an HIV-prevention workshop that memos called "the perfect excuse" for the program's political goals — a gambit that could undermine America's efforts to improve health globally.
But their efforts were fraught with incompetence and risk, an Associated Press investigation found: Cuban authorities questioned who was bankrolling the travelers. The young workers nearly blew their mission to "identify potential social-change actors."
One said he got a paltry, 30-minute seminar on how to evade Cuban intelligence, and there appeared to be no safety net for the inexperienced workers if they were caught.
"Although there is never total certainty, trust that the authorities will not try to harm you physically, only frighten you," read a memo obtained by the AP. "Remember that the Cuban government prefers to avoid negative media reports abroad, so a beaten foreigner is not convenient for them."
In all, nearly a dozen Latin Americans served in the program in Cuba, for pay as low as $5.41 an hour.
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Health and civic programs to provoke political change? For who? Certainly it does not apply to the Castro regime in Havana since the U.S. contractor mentioned was hauled into prison. There is one line in the article, however, that is most curious and simultaneously disturbing:
"In one case, the workers formed an HIV-prevention workshop that memos called "the perfect excuse" for the program's political goals — a gambit that could undermine America's efforts to improve health globally."
As the diction implies that the president was intent upon undermining the American health system based upon examples pulled from Cuba, this is stage one of Rep. Garcia's contention that Obama is planning to achieve a communist state.
The poorer countries of the world continue to struggle with an enormous health burden from diseases that we have long had the capacity to eliminate. Similarly, the health systems of some countries, rich and poor alike, are fragmented and inefficient, leaving many population groups underserved and often without health care access entirely. Cuba represents an important alternative example where modest infrastructure investments combined with a well-developed public health strategy have generated health status measures comparable with those of industrialized countries. Areas of success include control of infectious diseases, reduction in infant mortality, establishment of a research and biotechnology industry, and progress in control of chronic diseases, among others. If the Cuban experience were generalized to other poor and middle-income countries human health would be transformed. Given current political alignments, however, the major public health advances in Cuba, and the underlying strategy that has guided its health gains, have been systematically ignored. Scientists make claims to objectivity and empiricism that are often used to support an argument that they make unique contributions to social welfare. To justify those claims in the arena of international health, an open discussion should take place on the potential lessons to be learned from the Cuban experience. Key words
Cuba remains an enigma to North Americans and Europeans alike. Two generations ago there was no society with the exception of Canada that was more tightly integrated into the US cultural and economic sphere.1⇓–3 After the revolution of 1959, however, Cuba acquired the pariah status of a wayward child and has been variously vilified in rhetoric, attacked militarily and economically, and consigned to cultural oblivion. Within the US academic community, Cuban dialogue has been maintained primarily by social scientists and historians, many of whom are second-generation Cubans.4⇓–6 Despite occasional ‘discovery pieces’ the biomedical literature in English has been almost entirely silent on the Cuban experience7⇓⇓–10 and US government policy temporarily forbade publication of articles from Cuba by US journals or their foreign subsidiaries.
The historical context that explains the absence of Cuba from the global conversation on public health and medicine is self-evident. This absence cannot be dismissed as passive acquiescence of the health professions to the demands of real politik, however. The raison d'etre of the health sciences is the discovery of new knowledge and the use of that knowledge to improve health. Both the professional and commercial reward structures within the discipline insure that evidence of a major advance will attract further sustained attention. This dynamic, however, is conspicuously absent from the debate on international health. While the undisputed priority in public health from a global perspective is the need to rescue the populations of poor countries from diseases we have been able to prevent or cure for many decades,11⇓–13 nothing is said of one of the most striking examples where that challenge has been most effectively met. This silence stands in stark contrast to the impassioned rhetoric of the many conferences, declarations, and gatherings of world leaders where the imperative to find solutions is so often reiterated.14⇓–16
The unwillingness to take account of the Cuban experience, or to even view it as an alternative route through which some societies can move toward the universal goal of health promotion, represents an important oversight. The achievements in Cuba thereby pose a challenge to the authority of the biomedical community in countries that define the scientific agenda. This assertion by no means rests exclusively on Cuba's success in climbing the vital statistics charts. In virtually every critical area of public health and medicine facing poor countries Cuba has achieved undeniable success; these include most prominently—creating a high quality primary care network and an unequaled public health system, educating a skilled work force, sustaining a local biomedical research infrastructure, controlling infectious diseases, achieving a decline in non-communicable diseases, and meeting the emergency health needs of less developed countries. In the following discussion, we attempt to substantiate these claims with evidence and speculate on some of the implications of having allowed the debate over the Cuban experience to be silenced.
Next SectionEconomic growth and the public health experience in Cuba
The public health experience in Cuba has several distinctive features. Although economic productivity is an important determinant of population health, Cuba does not conform to the expected relationship. International agencies like the World Bank have suggested that per capita income in Cuba is under $1000 per year; Cuban estimates, which take account of subsidies, are higher, in the range of $2–5000 per year.18 Using either measure, however, when health outcomes are correlated with GNP, Cuba clusters with North America on the former scale and countries like Bolivia on the latter (Figure 1). Abrupt economic disruptions also provide evidence on how social forces shape population health. The economic crisis which began in 1991 after the withdrawal of the Soviet Union wreaked havoc on many aspects of Cuban society. The impact on health indices was relatively modest and short-lived, however, further demonstrating that economic measures alone are poor predictors of physical well-being within a society. One potential explanation of this anomalous pattern may be the relative absence of extreme poverty, which is the most powerful economic correlate of ill health and can confound the effect of average GNP. Cuba has a high degree of income equality and lacks the marginalized slum populations of most of Latin America, although the growing dependence on the tourist economy and, to a lesser extent, foreign remittances has widened the income distribution.
Infant mortality and gross national product (GNP) in selected Latin American countries and the United States, 2003
While useful for descriptive purposes, correlations of social indicators among countries require strong assumptions about the accuracy and comparability of the measures. This device should therefore serve only to frame the question of Cuban exceptionalism. The most striking feature of the Cuban health experience has, in fact, been the broad range of successes, many of which would not be captured by vital statistics data (Table 1). A heavy investment in biotechnology or foreign assistance, for example, would not be expected to have any near-term impact on the health status of the domestic population. Progress across this range of disparate challenges reflects a broad policy initiative rather than a narrow, goal-oriented programme. Rather than viewing health as a product of economic development, the well-being of the population has provided the target against which to gauge achievements in economic and cultural development.
Table 1 Indicators of Cuba's accomplishments in public healthPrevious SectionNext SectionThe Cuban public health infrastructure
The 1959 Cuban revolution inherited a heterogeneous health sector. A single university hospital and medical school existed alongside a dominant private sector and a rudimentary public system.19⇓–21 Two-thirds of the 6300 physicians lived in Havana.21 ‘Mutual aid’ health facilities served employed groups, especially in the cities, while primary care for the poor and rural population was weak or non-existent.19⇓–21 By the mid-1960s 3000 physicians had left the island, primarily for the US, and the various elements of curative medicine and traditional public health were gradually incorporated into a single structure organized under the Ministry of Public Health.21 In the early stages emphasis was placed on basic public health improvements, such as sanitation and immunization, and medical care was extended to the rural areas.20 A system of regional polyclinics and hospitals subsequently evolved, complemented in the 1980s by a reorientation of the entire system toward primary care and the education of large numbers of family doctors. By the 1990s the strategic goal was reached whereby a team of a family physician and a nurse lived on every block and provided care for 120–160 families.19,20 At present there are 31 000 family physicians, with a total doctor:population ratio of 1 : 170.22
The most basic infrastructure requirement for progress in public health is a surveillance system that generates accurate and timely information. Some observers are skeptical of the Cuban data, suspecting that a political message is being transmitted in the vital statistics. In contrast to all other Caribbean and most Latin American countries Cuba has published extensive mortality and morbidity data by cause and province since 1970.22⇓–24 National data are presented promptly, currently within the first 3 months of the following year for some causes. High autopsy rates lend support to clinical diagnoses and the number of deaths attributed to ill-defined causes is very low (0.7%), an important indicator of incomplete or inaccurate vital statistics.22,25 Based on comparisons to demographic models that predict expected rates, under-reporting in other Caribbean countries generally ranges from 10 to 20%, yielding falsely low mortality estimates.26 Given the extensive vital statistics tables presented for Cuba by age, gender, cause, and region, manipulating the original counts while maintaining consistency across categories would be extremely difficult. In the case of the infant mortality statistics, for example, in 1965 only 54% of infant deaths were reported overall, and only 30% in the rural areas.20,21,24 At the present 99% of infant deaths are reported from hospitals on the day of occurrence.20,24 The patterns of variation for provincial and national estimates are what would be expected in a complex vital records system (i.e. counts and trends are consistent over time and region, subunits sum to the national rate, no excessive smoothing or discontinuities are observed, etc.).22
Cuba spends ∼16% of its GNP directly on the health system, roughly $320 per year per person. As would be expected, tertiary medical facilities lack both the amenities and the technology found in industrialized countries. A recent modernization campaign, however, has brought interventional cardiology and MRI, for example, to the 48 referral hospitals and ultrasound and endoscopy to polyclinics. Cost-effective interventions, like dialysis and organ transplantation, have been widely available for a number of years.27,28
In relative terms, Cuba has invested heavily in biotechnology, focusing on biopharmaceuticals.29⇓–31 With consistent state support, even during the collapse of the Soviet partnership, a robust local infrastructure has been created which now generates significant export income and has been characterized as ‘the envy of the developing world’.29Production of the first vaccine for meningitis B and a vaccine for Haemophilus influenzae type b, which for the first time incorporated a synthetic antigen, are two of the most important recent accomplishments.30 A recent initiative between a US corporation and the Center for Molecular Immunology in Havana to work jointly on a cancer vaccine reflects the growing international importance of this research.31 Linkage to an organized health system provides an efficient mechanism to conduct trials and assess clinical applications, further enhancing the productivity of the biotech sector.29Previous SectionNext SectionMaternal and child health
Established in 1970, the centralized Maternal–Child Programme (Programa Nacional de Atencion Materno-Infantil—PAMI) has the main responsibility for assuring the health of women of child-bearing age and their children. With PAMI's leadership, governmental sectors as well as community organizations work collaboratively to provide a supportive network of community-oriented services. The success of this approach can be evaluated against a series of key indicators. Cuba's statistical time series for infant mortality documents one of the most rapid declines ever recorded (Figure 2). Since 2002 Cuba has had the second lowest infant mortality in the Americas, 20% below the US rate for all ethnic groups and just below the rate for US whites (Figure 2; Table 2).22,32,33 The prevalence of low birth weight was 5.5% in 2004.22 Thirty-five per cent of the Cuban population is black or mulatto, yet the infant mortality rate is less than half of what is observed in US blacks (Table 2). National data are not systematically analysed by race; however, in a study from the province of Cienfuegos no differences in pre-term birth or mean birth weight were noted between blacks and whites.33 View larger version:
Table 2 Infant mortality in Cuba and selected countries in the Americas, 2004 International comparisons of infant mortality rates are potentially biased by definitions, reporting practices, and differential use of technology, thus the rank order of countries within a narrow range should be interpreted cautiously.35,36While Cuba adheres to WHO reporting recommendations and attempts to resuscitate all live births, the perinatal mortality rate is higher than is found in industrialized countries,22suggesting a potential shift in events from infant to fetal deaths. Even with careful attention to case definitions comparisons are difficult since technological interventions, particularly in the US, result in the live delivery of more very low birth weight babies.36⇓–38 However, the slope of the infant mortality decline is potentially less biased and by this measure Cuba compares favourably with societies with the best reproductive health records (e.g. Japan, Sweden, and Singapore). Although maternal deaths are rare events, the 2003 rate in Cuba was 39.5 per 100 000 live births; in Canada and the United States maternal mortality is 7–8 per 100 000 overall, and 20 among black women in the US.22,39,40
The resilience of Cuba's child health programmes was tested in 1991–94 when the collapse of the trading partnership with the Soviet Union and the tightening of the US embargo provoked the unprecedented economic crisis known as the ‘special period’.41⇓⇓–44 The economy contracted by 30% and access to foreign commodities—including everything from oil to pharmaceuticals and agricultural inputs—was virtually cut-off. An epidemic of optical and peripheral neuropathy, subsequently traced to a sharp decline in protein, vitamins, and some other micronutrients, afflicted 50 000 Cubans.42 During this period a modest increase in mortality from infectious diseases, particularly tuberculosis, was also observed.22 A variety of internally generated initiatives, like small-scale organic farming and return to the use of draft animals, allowed the society to regain food security and redirect the economy.45
As would be anticipated in a period of severe food shortage, the incidence of low birth weight increased, accompanied by a modest rise in infant mortality (Figure 3). While average calorie intake was reduced from 3000 to 1800 kcal/day,42,45supplemental food for pregnant women was available through cafeterias in work places and ‘maternity houses’. Within 2 years, well before the economy overall had recovered, the health of child-bearing age women and infants had experienced ‘catch-up’ and the trajectory of the decline in infant mortality was regained. Maintaining social cohesion and high public health standards while simultaneously undertaking a coordinated economic reorganization of that magnitude posed enormous technical and social challenges. View larger version:
Figure 3 Trends in low birth weight and infant mortality in Cuba, 1985–2003Previous SectionNext SectionCardiovascular disease and cancer
Considerable attention has been focused on the threat posed by non-communicable diseases in developing countries.46,47More than two-thirds of cardiovascular (CV) deaths are already occurring in poor countries of Asia, Africa, and South America, and risk factors are increasing rapidly, leading to dire predictions about the size of the coming epidemic.48,49Unfortunately, the epidemiologic data required for an accurate description of the trends in mortality and causal risk factors are not available for most countries in these regions, nor has evidence emerged to support prevention and control strategies that can be used effectively in low resource settings.
Cuba provides a unique opportunity to study the CV epidemic in the non-industrialized world because of its robust public health data system. CV diseases have been the leading cause of death since at least 197022,50 and within its resource limitations the medical care system has responded vigorously. For example, all major classes of anti-hypertensives are produced locally and the levels of treatment and control of hypertension are the highest reported for any country.51⇓–53 A sustained downward trend in coronary heart disease began in 1982 with a slope close to the maximum achieved in Europe and North America (∼ 1.5% per year) (Figure 4) and the cumulative reduction in age-adjusted mortality reached 45% by 2002.50 Acute care for myocardial infarction meets international standards and pre-hospital treatment units exist in most municipalities. Locally manufactured recombinant streptokinase is used routinely; at present, based on data from at least one province, the total thrombolysis rate is >60% and the ‘door-to-needle time’ is 30 min or less for >90% of all patients with ST elevation on the electrocardiogram.54 This experience demonstrates that non-industrialized countries can in fact move decisively to prevent and control CV diseases without accumulating the extraordinary medical technology and infrastructure of Europe and North America. View larger version:
Figure 4 Age-adjusted mortality from cardiovascular diseases, Cuba, 1970–2002
Less progress has been made in the control of cancer, consistent with the experience in industrialized countries. The age-adjusted death rate from all malignancies combined rose from 115.9 per 100 000 in 1988 to 125.6 in 2003.22 Lung and prostate are the two most common causes of cancer death, followed by breast and colorectal cancer.55,56 Some progress has been made against tobacco. Smoking rates fell by one-third over the past two decades—average per capita consumption of cigarettes was down from 2690 in 1970–72 to 2280 in 1990–92, and the prevalence of smokers declined from 53 to 36%—although serious obstacles remain.57 Prohibitions against smoking in public places, for example, are generally ignored and the limited success against smoking relative to other public health challenges probably reflects a lack of political will and Cuba's special historical relationship to tobacco. In fact Cuba has shown signs of ‘medicalizing’ the strategy to control chronic disease and will need to translate earlier lessons on the value of prevention into this new domain.50Previous SectionNext SectionInfectious diseases
The combination of high levels of community participation, access to primary care and an aggressive public health approach has made the Cuban campaign against epidemic infectious diseases particularly successful.58⇓–60 A number of common illnesses have been eliminated altogether, often for the first time in any country [poliomyelitis (1962), neonatal tetanus (1972), diphtheria (1979), measles (1993), pertussis (1994), rubella and mumps (1995)]. In 1962, against the advice of external health officials, ‘vaccination days’ were established with the goal of reaching the entire population. When this method quickly proved to be effective in eliminating polio it was subsequently adopted elsewhere as the primary strategy.58After dengue was introduced in 1981 Cuba adopted a campaign of community mobilization, focusing on elimination of mosquito breeding sites, which lead to prompt control.20,58,59
International attention for infectious disease control in Cuba has focused primarily on HIV/AIDS.10,20,61⇓–63 Among 300 000 military personnel returning from Africa in the 1980s 84 were found to be infected with the virus [Ref. (20), p. 85]. A nation-wide screening programme which began in 1987 reached 80% of the sexually active population (∼3.5 million people) and identified 268 HIV-positive individuals.20 In the initial phases, the Cuban HIV/AIDS strategy provoked controversy, some of which was negative.20,64 While assessing the public health impact of this unknown epidemic, persons infected with HIV were quarantined in health facilities where they received supplemental nutrition and available medical care.20,61,62Treatment is now provided in the outpatient setting; domestically produced triple therapy has been provided free to all paediatric patients since 1998 and to adults with HIV or AIDS since 2000.62 With the rapid increase in foreign tourists, and the development of a local sex trade, the HIV incidence has risen in the past 5 years, although it remains the lowest in the Americas.23 Increased integration into the global economy may continue to pose challenges which Cuban public health has not previously had to address.Previous SectionNext SectionCuba's role in global health assistance
Given its limited economic resources, Cuba can only rarely afford direct aid.20 Instead it has adopted a strategy that relies on human resources. First targeted to Africa, the programme has now placed physicians, nurses, dentists, and other professionals in 52 countries.20,65,66 The most prominent episodes involved sending doctors to post-apartheid South Africa, providing long-term care for Chernobyl victims, and giving disaster aid to Central America after hurricane Mitch. Cuban personnel also staffed a new hospital in Gonaives, Haiti, which had been constructed with the Japanese aid; this facility was subsequently destroyed during the anti-Aristide strife in 2004 although the Cuban physicians have remained.67
To move from emergency assistance to a sustainable programme, a multicountry collaborative plan has recently been developed to improve health services in poor Latin American countries.66 A medical school was established in Havana in 1999 and more than 6000 students, primarily from Africa and Latin America, are currently being given a medical education at no expense.7,68,69 In the past 3 years more than 14 000 physicians and dentists have been placed in slums and rural communities in Venezuela as part of the new the partnership between Cuba and the Chavez government, and this number is set to rise to 20 000.68 Cuba has also agreed to educate 40 000 new physicians for Venezuela over the next several years.69
Cuba's medical assistance campaign has a number of dimensions. Like all foreign aid programmes, it assumes that some political benefits will be forthcoming in return. However, most of the countries that have been assisted, for example, Ethiopia, The Gambia, and Haiti, have nothing to offer in return. Unlike many donor programmes, placing physicians where none have practiced before has been overwhelmingly well received by the local communities.69 Thus, while the arrangement with Venezuela has direct economic benefit to Cuba, it has also transformed the health system by giving large segments of the Venezuelan population access to modern medical care.69
The special character of health sector development in Cuba can perhaps be best appreciated by considering the challenge any other society would face if it tried to send tens of thousands of physicians to live in slum communities in a foreign country for 2 years. While a range of incentives and motivating factors unique to the Cuban social context are operating, these assignments are accepted as a professional obligation by the vast majority of the Cuban practitioners and they perform effectively in the host communities. Much like the experience of military personnel on long tours of duty, the Cuban programme of assistance does nonetheless require extraordinary sacrifice and the hardship is not always borne lightly. Furthermore, the mobilization for assistance to Venezuela has meant that many Cuban neighbourhoods must share facilities. These sacrifices must, of course, be balanced against the conditions of desperate need in the communities on the receiving end. Many of these countries, particularly in Africa, have watched helplessly as the majority of their health professionals emigrate to the US and Europe.70Offhand dismissal by observers in industrialized countries of the Cuban medical aid programme, which has such a powerful impact on these marginalized communities, is a clear indication of how perilously divided the discourse over global development has become.
Next SectionDoes Cuba's experience have broader significance?
The history of science is replete with stories of the delayed acceptance of unpopular or unfashionable ideas. The approach to improving global health taken by the donor community and academic medicine in rich countries is no exception. While criticisms of the basic approach are voiced—as in the recent assertion that the external measures of development have no meaning for the general population71,72—these critical voices have little influence on the practice of large international agencies. It is not the intent of this article, however, to summarize and make a judgment on economic assistance and progress in global public health. Instead, based on the weight of the evidence presented on the Cuban experience, we pose the following question: ‘Why has the debate on solving the most urgent challenges in public health in poor countries ignored the experience of success?’ Traditionally, whether the experience is derived from randomized trials, high survival rates in clinical series, or favourable trends in vital statistics, biomedicine embraces the winner and seeks to imitate it. Precisely the opposite has happened in this instance.
There is, of course, no shortage of historical and ideological reasons why a debate on the ‘Cuban question’ has never reached maturity. Blind optimism is thought to have discredited the sympathetic scholarship about the Soviet Union, and to a lesser extent China, in an earlier era.73⇓–75 Some observers are too concerned about putative restraints on civil liberties and the independent character of its foreign policy to develop any enthusiasm for the objectively more successful aspects of Cuban society. None of these concerns, however, undermine the force of the question, why have we ignored what works?
Before recommending components of the Cuban model for use in other settings, a thorough and balanced assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of those components would be required. That assessment would require a very different study of the health system's organization, capacity, and services. Our intent here is to demonstrate that sufficient cause exists to undertake that assessment. For an objective evaluation of the Cuban experience to succeed, an acceptance of certain ground rules would be required. First, this evaluation cannot be undertaken with the goal of winning a political argument. Although the trajectory of social development in Cuba over the past 50 years is both complex and controversial, as in all other countries, the public health experience should be subjected to judgment on the basis of the usual rules of science. Second, this judgment cannot be permanently postponed by skepticism about the validity of the data or concern over unrelated broader social questions. Ongoing, careful scrutiny of Cuban public health data is justified and to be welcomed; however, sufficient data now exist in several key areas to demonstrate that skepticism can no longer be the basis for a refusal to engage the question. Likewise, many societies embrace domestic and foreign policies that are questioned and even condemned by broad segments of the world community, yet the attempt to evaluate progress in improving the health of their populations is not thereby condemned as illegitimate or unnecessary. Third, the apparent successes recorded by Cuba should be seen as consequences of a well-defined strategy; the value of these underlying principles, not the accumulation of better numbers, is what holds implications for other poor countries, and not a few well-resourced societies.
Two aspects of the Cuban experience serve as reasonable demonstrations of the value of that strategic approach. In the area of infectious disease, for example, the operative principles are particularly straightforward: once a safe and effective vaccine becomes available the entire at-risk population is immunized; if a vaccine is not available, the susceptible population is screened and treated; where an arthropod vector can be identified, the transmission pathway is disrupted by mobilizing the local community which in turn requires effective neighbourhood organization and universal primary health care. The joint effect of these strategic activities will result in the elimination or control of virtually all serious epidemic infectious conditions. In terms of child survival, a ‘continuum of care’ that provides for the pre-conceptional health of women, prenatal care, skilled birth attendants, and a comprehensive well-baby programme can quickly reduce infant mortality to levels approaching the biological minimum. Many observers will regard these propositions as reasonable, yet hopelessly too ambitious for the poorer nations of the world. It must be recognized, however, that these principles have been successfully implemented in Cuba at a cost well within the reach of most middle-income countries.
Although other aspects of society, such as education and housing obviously make independent contributions to the success of public health campaigns, the Cuban strategy outlined here serves as a model that should be thoroughly evaluated. Needless to say, its implementation would face many challenges specific to the geography and politics of a region. Other models that dictate public health strategies face the same gamut of uncertainties and challenges, however, and none can be said to have met with similar success.76 The World Health Organization, for example, promulgated a set of principles in the Alma Ata ‘Health for All’ Declaration of 1978, many of which were incorporated into the Cuban approach.77 In recent years, however, international agencies have favoured privatization and reduction in state support for health systems.78 The record of achievement with privatized systems in poor countries has often been very limited.79 A debate which can use as a point of departure extensive empirical evidence of progress would provide a healthy reorientation in a discipline distracted by controversy and divided over political aims.
The health professions have little opportunity to intervene directly on historical events. However, in the conduct of our science we have both choice and responsibility. Challenging the acquiescence of the scientific community to ostracism of some of its members in an earlier era, Einstein remarked, ‘Political considerations, advanced with much solemnity, prevent… the purely objective ways of thinking without which our great aims must necessarily be frustrated’ [Ref. (80) p. 80]. If the accomplishments of Cuba could be reproduced across a broad range of poor and middle-income countries the health of the world's population would be transformed. This fact creates an obligation for health scientists. We should debate the merits of the principles embedded in the Cuban attempts to improve the health of populations.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/) which permits non-commercial reproduction and distribution of the work, in any medium, provided the original work is not altered or transformed in any way, and that the work is properly cited. For commercial re-use, please contact journals.permissions@oup.com
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Briefly, the article mentions Cuba's tendency to underreport health data, but aside from, it paints Cuba as the rosiest of the red communist states remaining globally while lamenting the choice for doctors in Africa to emigrate to the U.S. and Western Europe's movement to copy our health care system by moving towards their eventual privatization. But what I noted is not one word was ever written regarding choice nor life expectancy. And what are those? I refer to Global Politics UKto address these:
However, challenges remain. Healthcare may be free and available for all Cuban citizens but medication is not. Pharmacies are often very poorly stocked and rationing of supplies is minimal. 13 There are claims that hospitals are often in poor conditions and doctors have to bring in their own supplies and equipment to allow them to treat their patients. 10 Despite the production of medical supplies and technology, it seems very little of this actually remains in Cuba. Every year Cuba exports huge amounts of medical aid, mostly to other Latin American countries for purely financial returns. 22 For example, Venezuela provides much-needed oil to Cuba and in exchange receives Cuban doctors and medical supplies.14
Cuba’s dual economy has a lot to do with why such disparity exists. Medication and equipment is there and available but only to pay for in American dollars, of which the poor and middle classes of Cuba are very unlikely to have.23The ‘pesos pharmacies’ and local state hospitals are drastically under-stocked and thus access for the poor to needed medication is minimal, despite the service being free.
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If pharmacies and poorly stocked and supplies and medication are rationed minimally, how can any medical journal describe socialized medicine a success? As Obama continues to push the racial and class warfare scorecard in order to achieve an absolute dominance and hegemony over our nation's political and economic infrastructure, the same trend is again occurring as Obamacare continues to ravage the general public's capacity to afford any health insurance:
Mr. Obama not only has lied, but he in fact is achieving what has occurred in Cuba. He intends to grow his supporters in entertainment who produce dramatized accounts of his political agenda's propaganda. Under communism in Cuba, which the Castro regime has adopted a dual system of economics, the wealthy who support him are lavished with rewards while the remained of his proletariat comrades grow more impoverished, to the tune again of less than $1,000 per capita according to the World Bank rather than the state figures as high as $5,000. With medicine not free in Cuba and unaffordable for the masses which continue to grow poorer, the goal of the president it to enact an unprecedented trend as this under a national spoils system whereby those who donate to his campaigns or the Democratic Party in general will be richly reward with entertainment's continually growing tax breaks, subsidies and the same to be said with loopholes always being added for the wealthy. He promised not to add taxes to the bottom 2% of wage earners and, in fact, cut them for the very poorest, and did the opposite for all by hiking rates at by higher percentages for the poor and middle income wage earners than for the poor. The poor will not be able to afford the Obamacare insurance premiums, doctor visit co-pays, nor will the middle class, and they will face exorbitant confiscatory penalties in the form of more taxes. The wealthy and politicians in Washington despite GOP opposition will be exempt from the law in one manner of speaking or the other.
Inequities more damningly exist in the actual medical profession, as the education for many do not meet the same higher standards of others who attained better universities for their educational training:
Inequality exists also in the training of Cuba’s health professionals. The internationally acclaimed Latin American School of Medicine (ELAM) in Havana is one of the finest medical education institutes in the world. It provides a completely free education to students are sent from all over the world to train in medicine, however it is only available to international students. 6 Despite such an opportunity being deprived of potential Cuban health professionals this has not stopped a continued rise in the number of health professionals Cuba is able to produce. The current national health system has 70,594 physicians, 10,554 dentists and 25,022 with degrees in nursing amongst other health sector groups. 17 However, on graduation and completion of their training, students are under legal obligation to initially work for the Cuban government. Thus wherever the government decides they are to be sent- to a local polyclinic or abroad- they have no choice in the matter. 16 As a result many doctors end up defecting, due to the poor pay, conditions, and treatment in the developing countries to which they are sent. As for work in Cuba itself, the conditions (as previously outlined) and pay are often not much better. On average Cuban doctors are paid $15 a month of which is barely enough to support them. 12 This is a poor return for the restricted professional freedom of a Cuban doctor:
“Cuban doctors are not permitted to talk to foreign journalists or diplomats. They must seek permission to travel outside of their assigned municipalities, and doctors who have defected say Cuban and Venezuelan intelligence operatives kept close tabs on their whereabouts.” 24
In spite of this aspect the Cuban medical education is unique to any other in the world. Due to the emphasis on community integration in the primary healthcare sector, medical students are educated in a very holistic manner, learning about local cultures, indigenous medicines and effective community relations in practical conditions. This produces not just a professional adequate for providing healthcare but also a well rounded, valuable member of the local community.
Cuba’s Medical Diplomacy
Medical diplomacy, another key branch of the Cuban health care strategy, has not only improved Cuba’s relationship with other international governments but has also helped improve the health of millions of people. In 2005 Cuba was collaborating with 68 different countries15 and also accepting international medical students into Cuban education (as previously mentioned). For Cuban doctors being sent abroad, many to the US, they have the opportunity to seek a better life. Many people escape Cuba every year for this very reason and for doctors sent to places such as the US this gives them a much better chance of seeking a visa to stay than if they had entered the county as escapees like many of Miami’s Cuban residents. 25 However, considering Cuban doctors and health professionals back in Cuba, due to the vast numbers being sent abroad in the name of medical diplomacy, a doctor shortage might result in the future -- putting more pressure on those left to work in Cuban hospitals, clinics and polyclinics. 5
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Let us recap the following figures for Cuba's inequities in medical education in comparison to our nation:
Despite such an opportunity being deprived of potential Cuban health professionals this has not stopped a continued rise in the number of health professionals Cuba is able to produce. The current national health system has 70,594 physicians, 10,554 dentists and 25,022 with degrees in nursing amongst other health sector groups. 17 However, on graduation and completion of their training, students are under legal obligation to initially work for the Cuban government. Thus wherever the government decides they are to be sent- to a local polyclinic or abroad- they have no choice in the matter. 16 As a result many doctors end up defecting, due to the poor pay, conditions, and treatment in the developing countries to which they are sent. As for work in Cuba itself, the conditions (as previously outlined) and pay are often not much better. On average Cuban doctors are paid $15 a month of which is barely enough to support them. 12
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This is yet another trend growing under Obamacare's destruction of our national medical profession. The administration has forced the hands of medical professionals to engage in providing care for all who enter the offices, but as the market for health care grows and patients enter hospital emergency rooms for minor issues that a primary health care professional could provide, this very dangerous oversaturation of patients requires more doctors. The issue is most Americans are not intellectually-equipped to proficiently learn the anatomy of the human body or are mentally-sound enough to endure the stresses involved with extreme scholastic demands. Doctors are also resigning their positions en masse and ending their medical practices due to having their capacity to treat patients transferred to the non-medical professionals within the federal bureaucracies within the Department of Health and Human Services. As there will no doubt come time where the law of averages favors a natural increase in doctors and nurses simply due to the growth in our national population, supply even under socialism and its most extreme form, communism, leads pay rates to plummet as the state determines how it will pay for treatments, what treatments it is willing to fund and finally, if a patient is dying or elderly and ill, if their medical bills will be paid at all and therefore, be left to die to save money. These are the death panels we read about constantly, which Obama and his sycophants deny exist, and yet a little girl in Pennsylvania just two years ago nearly died when former Sec. of HHS Kathleen Sebelius initially blocked funding for her providing her with lungs to transplant in place of her failing ones. Public opinion forced Sebelius' hand, but this is the ugly fundamental truth Americans face under Obamacare.
The phenomena of health tourism for Cuba is rather intriguing, and why the president has studied through infiltrating its society with other Latinos from Central and South America to act in a spy capacity to study the atmosphere. Once this issue was recorded and detailed no doubt meticulously, Obama determined he had to engage in the same policy if he wanted to complete the final stages of his ultimate goal:
The revenues of Cuba’s healthcare system come largely from booming health tourism in the country. People travel from miles around for the quality service in Cuba, available to those paying in dollars. Cosmetic surgery is the most commonly provided service along with other tertiary health care practices such as heart surgery and radiology. 9
For the doctors, physicians and nurses working within this sector, working conditions are superb and access to medication and supplies is not a problem due to their availability to pay for with dollars. 26 Seeing as this is such a main source of revenue for the Cuban government, such hospitals and clinics are well stocked and well subsidized, which in.
Despite the perks of working within clinics tailored for the needs of the wealthy abroad, ethical standards and morality integral within the healthcare sector are again brought into play. Cuban healthcare should prioritize Cubans. In a country where its citizens are still resorting to illicit migration to seek a better quality of life in other countries such as the US, 27 the state efforts of improvement in Cuba itself, should ethically not be invested into luxury medical services for wealthier foreigners.
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Why indeed is Manuel Noriega filing a lawsuit from his country club style prison over an alleged depiction of his likeness in a Call of Duty game when he once was the dictator over a nation? This may not be a matter of socialized medicine granting him the right as a non-U.S. citizen to sue over a tort violation, but once Latin America inevitably merges into a Pan American empire with I assume all the power centralized in Washington, will these dictators having handed over their sovereignty to the president and the United Nations suddenly have the right as a non-documented civilian in principle to file a lawsuit as is Noriega right now? Already are we reading of illegal immigrants filing lawsuits over discrimination, medical malpractice and police brutality; they do not attend court proceedings in many cases. The law will favor Latinos and those already naturalized who do not comprise of the WASP male population which generally does not vote Democratic by a plurality. If Obama cannot complete scrap the Constitution on the surface, he will simply utilize public health opportunities through Obamacare to lure undocumented foreigners, including providing asylum for the terrorists he currently funds, stateside. The WASP male population will then be like the Jewish or other politically or ethnic undesirables in Hitler's Germany and be excluded from the state provisions of the rest of the population.
To conclude the British medical journal's account on Cuban public health, it also provides its final thoughts:
In reference to a concept often used to describe the relationship between healthcare distribution and the actual need for it, the inverse care law is one that could indeed apply to Cuba. Curtis writes: “…. the ‘inverse care-law’ has often been used to summarize an inequitable situation in which the relative level of provision of care for local communities is inversely proportional to their relative need for health care. This is the reverse of the objective of equity, or territorial justice.” 1 Although Cuba has achieved free access to healthcare for 100% of the population, the means by which health professionals have to diagnose and treat the Cuban population is minimal and still not adequate. Despite the well developed infrastructure of the Cuban healthcare system, which does deserve of the accolades given by governments from around the world, it is still far from equitable, not only for the patients, but for the professionals themselves.
We have yet to see if and how the Cuban healthcare system evolves under Raul Castro’s administration. Most information on Cuba’s health care system is often unreliable and reliant on anecdotal evidence. Cuba without question has managed to create a health care miracle relative to the resources available to it, but both practical and ethical challenges remain as Cuba undergoes new reforms in a changing global economy.
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Brilliantly summarized and objectively observed. It recognized how Cuba indeed achieved a public health miracle despite its limited resources. There again, though, is that reference to "limited resources", or how a centrally-planned economy cannot keep pace with the demands of rising price indexes or inflation without inducing fixed measures to artificially stifle inflation, which failed in the 1970s during the phenomenon of stagflation. The term free health care is the most misleading reference to any health care system globally; nothing is free because the Cuban people pay for their care out of their taxed wages which at one point were garnished from the checks. The means for diagnoses and treatment are still insufficient, the conditions would lead to these hospitals to be condemned here, and more attention to care for foreigners who are wealthy is observed by the Castro regime than for the proletariat residing within the slums of Havana or the countryside. If medical professionals globally rely upon spurious data or evidence reported by the state health ministry, it should be ashamed of itself for ever considering a communist state to be fully transparent or even slightly so. Like with the president regarding the economy, six months of 200,000 added jobs seems wonderful until one reads how many more in proportion left the labor force due to their inability to procure an adequate-paying position even if slightly less than what was previously earned. And as more naturalized Americans are receiving welfare benefits in both record totals as well as over those who are gainfully-employed taxpayers, the Obama Doctrine for the destruction of an economically-free America is well on course as an object to being met. And if you consider the following graph with regarding to the staffing disparities for medical professionals and office personnel to handle federal guidelines and for billing, you might be astounded:
Graph Tabulating the Growth of Physicians and Administrators, 1970-2009
Above you see the exorbitant rate of growth at an far higher pace exponentially than actual doctors due to growing federal regulations, as America is the most heavily-regulated medical system globally already. But below is the most troublesome of all since every nation below us has a state-funded socialized medical system:
And lastly, this:
Keep in mind how we do not have a socialized health care system. If I want to be sarcastic about this, I will simply refer to Wikipedia's slam at conservatives who oppose their more "politically correct" term of "universal coverage" by what that site referred to as the U.S.'s pejorative.
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I last intend to address for the Western Hemisphere imperialist expansion the following from International Policy Digest:
Amnesty and Guatemala’s Civil War
By Taylor Dibbert | December 29, 2011
Guatemala’s civil war was, by far, Latin America’s bloodiest—leaving approximately 200,000 people dead.
Álvaro Colom, former president of Guatemala with the current president of Guatemala, Otto Pérez Molina, in Caracas, Venezuela for the CELAC conference. Photo: Luis Echeverría
A United Nations-supported truth commission found that more than 90 percent of the human rights violations were committed by the military, including over 600 massacres in primarily indigenous villages. Since the conclusion of the war in 1996, the pursuit of accountability has not gone well. This past August, a Guatemala City judge sentenced four former soldiers to over 6,000 years in prison, for having participated in a massacre in 1982. This was a good thing, but it is nowhere near enough.
Earlier this month, human rights activist Jennifer Harbury (who has been outspoken on questions of accountability in Guatemala for decades), has cited that some people within Guatemala suspect former army personnel will attempt to turn amnesty into official policy.Harbury has said that, “within the next few weeks it is very likely that the army officers facing war crimes charges will push through a de facto amnesty, either by removing Claudia Paz, the amazing attorney general, an illegal congressional amnesty (‘punto final’), or through a court ruling canceling international human rights law.”
Since any of the three abovementioned developments would obviate the prospect of any former army official being held accountable for what was undoubtedly genocide, Harbury has implored people to act quickly. This includes her suggestion that people make “emergency” calls to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in the coming weeks. Whether such a plan is actually in the works is not clear; such a scheme certainly would not be surprising.
During his campaign, Otto Pérez intimated that he might sack Attorney General Paz if he were elected president. Although earlier this month, Pérez publicly reiterated that he would not remove Paz from her post once he became president. Was the president-elect being disingenuous? More recently, Paz has bravely been demanding that on-going Guatemalan genocide cases continue. Even though she is not necessarily an impartial analyst of Guatemalan politics, Harbury is both knowledgeable and well-sourced—so her claims should not be discounted.
Conversely, it seems unlikely that current president Álvaro Colom or incoming president Pérez would try to get rid of Attorney General Paz. A Paz Attorney Generalship fits in so nicely with Pérez’s firm anti-crime stance and his forthcoming battle against drug traffickers. She is probably not going anywhere. Pérez could reserve the right to remove her later for any number of reasons, like ineffectiveness or baseless allegations of corruption.
There is also a sad and bitter reality that the current dialogue about amnesty in Guatemala has missed: To a great extent, former Guatemalan security personnel have already won. In Guatemala, one rarely sees justice of any kind. About two months ago, a court ruled that erstwhile Guatemalan dictator Óscar Mejía was “too sick” to face charges of war crimes. Similar judicial decisions would not be surprising.
Like anywhere else, holding former military personnel accountable for past atrocities or violations of international humanitarian law poses enormous challenges. In spite of the progress Attorney General Claudia Paz y Paz has made, human rights supporters are going to be dissatisfied regarding Guatemalan war crimes trials and broader questions of accountability. Guatemala’s impunity-laced past only helps foment on-going human rights violations and pervasive lawlessness which outgoing president Álvaro Colom has done nothing to address. According to the US State Department, Guatemala’s current prosecution rate is somewhere between two and three percent. The current White House petition that Harbury and others are pushing could be a helpful awareness-raising exercise, although it is unlikely to have a significant impact on Guatemalan or US policy.
Few of Guatemala’s former military men will ever be brought to justice. The November election of former General Otto Pérez-Molina served as a rather sickening reminder of this. What could possibly further exemplify a resounding post-conflict “army victory” than an Otto Pérez presidency?
If Harbury is right and a push for amnesty is in the works, US intelligence assets in Guatemala would be well-aware of such a plan and would have probably already briefed the White House. President Obama should publicly denounce any move by Guatemalan army officers for amnesty related to war crimes. It is also important to remember that Guatemala’s civil war was not just a battle between a well-funded Latin American army and a leftist insurgency; that is an oversimplification. There were far more actors than that, including United States civilians and military personnel.
For starters and principally for ideological reasons that arose during the Cold War, the US had much to do with the Guatemalan military’s past “successes.” Through financial support, training, and other forms of assistance, President-elect Otto Pérez is a product of those mistakes. President Obama called Pérez to congratulate him on his electoral victory in late November, but only mundane talking points were released to the public. One would hope President Pérez receives a tepid response when he makes his first trip to Washington, even though history suggests otherwise.
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By "mundane talking points... released to the public", no doubt the journalist means the sycophant private sector mainstream mass media, the majority of which leans in favor of Far Left favoring socialism. No one can possibly suspect that there was not a soul in the media knew of their conversation or what exactly these talking point were. Like many other issues, one would have to Google foreign news agencies and state media outlets to find official answers to what foreigners are willing to provide in information. I do this because I know well that our media, even Fox News Channel, will not cover every issue either due to the political agendas risking being undermined or due to the volume of information. The BBC is a favorite of mine as well as any British publication, for instance, and Reuters is another.
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Section II: Obama Funds Qatar as the Chief Supporter of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas and ISIS
Evil often is not so apparent, and while Barack Obama has embarked upon several injurious policies domestically and echoing what for generations has been a Democratic Party planck to oppose Israel at all costs, there are far more dangerous, insidious activities afoot that are impeachable. By this, I mean how the president is sponsoring Qatar as the current guardians of several authority figures within the Muslim Brotherhood that were toppled, prosecuted and either imprisoned or executed, or fled Egypt in exile following the rise of the new government. There are further reports of the president sponsoring Hamas and ISIS, engaging in more of the latter to finish toppling the Assad regime in Syria. There are a few key news pieces I located in further global searches, and I choose to now address the controversial act of slipping some $11 billion into the Sheikh of Qatar's coffers, including the addition of another player that proves the impartiality of this global body that considers itself the international arbiter of peace.
Ban Ki-Moon Travelled to Mideast on Flight Financed by Hamas Backer Qatar
by TheTower.org Staff | 07.22.14 9:53 am
United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon flew to Cairo on a Qatari-chartered plane, Newsweek reported Monday.
Accepting the flight from Qatar, which sponsors the terrorist organization Hamas, puts Ban in a compromised position. Newsweek notes that when he condemned the Israeli efforts to defend itself from Hamas rockets on Sunday, it marked “the first time in two weeks that Ban did not mention rocket or other attacks against Israelis.”
Aside from coloring Ban’s statements, his coziness with Qatar also threatens his ability to arrange a long-term ceasefire that would effectively restrain Hamas.
Ban’s choice of Qatar as the first Middle East capital on his trip has raised eyebrows in the region. Egypt, in particular, has bitterly criticized what Cairo’s foreign minister, Sameh Shukri, has called Qatar’s “conspiring” — along with Hamas and its other regional ally, Turkey — against Egyptian attempts to broker a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas.
The US has made clear in recent days it sees Egypt as the only viable mediator, and toward that end Secretary of State John Kerry landed in Cairo Monday. Dujarric said that Ban, too, supports Egypt’s attempts to arrange the negotiations. “Obviously, I think the focus here is on supporting Egypt’s leadership in mediating a durable ceasefire,” he said. “No one is questioning Egypt’s leadership in this effort.”
Ban’s acceptance of the flight is one more in a series of scandals that calls into question the UN’s neutrality in the conflict between Israel and the Gaza-based terror organization. Last week it was reported that the United Nations Relief Works Agency (UNRWA) handed over twenty missiles it found near one of its schools back to Hamas. UNRWA spokesman Chris Gunness has a record of anti-Israel activism that prompted Israel’s ambassador to the UN, Ron Prosor, to demand his suspension.
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Oil-rich and blossoming tourist hub for the Middle East, Qatar enjoys the world's highest standard for living according to totals indicating per capita income. Some of the globe's wealthiest people reside there, particularly oil magnates. And while the wealth in the nation is apparently overflowing for some, it also holds the dubious distinctions for the world's highest percentages of citizens suffering from diabetes and obesity.
Qatar is a noted sponsor for Islamic terrorist cells and is likely to be safe from ISIS as it will no doubt either attempt to fund their conquest of Persia, Arabia, the Sinai Peninsula and North Africa or it already is bankrolling them. Regardless of the last issue, I have yet to Google for information regarding Qatar's relationship with the Taliban and al-Qaeda, their spawn in ISIS, but most especially in the Islamic world's most secretive and deadly historical sponsor for terror in Pakistan as it has always been dominated behind the scenes politically by the ISI (Inter-State Intelligence).
What is Qatar's relationship to the Muslim Brotherhood, and how do they both interact in funding Hamas? The Wilmington Examiner discusses the flight for Ban Ki-moon in further detail, the Sheikh of Qatar's relationship with the Muslim Brotherhood, but more detrimentally the president's slipping Qatar's government $11 billion in military arms and munitions supplemental funds:
Obama inks massive $11 billion weapons deal with Qatar
July 14, 2014
"The British-educated Sheikh is believed to be closer to the Muslim Brotherhood than many in the nation's current leadership..."
In the biggest arms deal so far this year, the Obama Administration finalized a multi-billion dollar weapons deal with the Persian Gulf nation of Qatar. As reported by the Agence France Presse via The Daily Star (of Beirut, Lebanon) on July 15, 2014 and also by the Reuters news service via The Fiscal Times, on July 14, 2014, some of the most advanced American military technology will soon be signed over to the Middle Eastern nation.
While the specifics of the sale were solidly under wraps by Department of Defense officials, the agreement itself was signed off by U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and Qatar’s defense minister, Hamad bin Ali al-Attiyah at the Pentagon. However, speaking on grounds of strict anonymity, an American official has verified to Agence France Presse that the Qataris have purchased "roughly" 10 batteries of Patriot missiles, as well as 24 of the cutting edge Apache attack helicopters and 500 Javelin anti-tank missiles.
A standard MIM-104 Patriot surface-to-air missile (SAM) battery can have up to 16 launchers with each launcher stocked with up to 16 PAC3 missiles per. At 256 missiles per battery, not counting however many extra purchased for reserve, the Gulf Arab nation will have at least 2,500 top-notch American missiles at their disposal. Along with the state of the art missiles comes the recently upgraded AN/MPQ-53 radar system, the "Phased Array Tracking Radar to Intercept On Target" or the acronym PATRIOT. Also standard equipment includes the AN/MSQ-104 Engagement Control Station (ECS) which serves as the nerve center of the Patriot firing battery.
With more letters than a pot of alphabet soup, the Federation of American Scientists notes that the Qataris will also be privy to "the main sub-components of the ECS are the Weapons Control Computer (WCC), the Data Link Terminal (DLT), the UHF communications array, the Routing Logic Radio Interface Unit (RLRIU), and the two manstations that serve as the system's man-to-machine interface. The ECS is air conditioned, pressurized (to resist chemical/biological attack), and shielded against electromagnetic pulse (EMP)."
Qatar has been in the American headlines recently as the nation that facilitated the release of five Taliban prisoners from the U.S. military detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in exchange for U.S. Army Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl, who is suspected of possibly deserting his unit in Afghanistan to defect to the Taliban. The Gitmo Five will remain for one year in Qatar essentially as guests of the Emir, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani. The British-educated Sheikh is believed to be closer to the Muslim Brotherhood than many in the nation's current leadership.
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There are many implications and consequences to this arrangement, plus one very peculiar issue which I long have wondered would transpire due to the now-severed relationship between Washington and Tel Aviv. First, did anyone ever ask among yourselves why Qatar was the chosen destination for the five Taliban terrorists knowing well their government had numerous ties to a multitude of terrorist organizations? If you did not, you should have. This would do far more than simply imply or infer that there is a warm or at least a cordial relationship between the Qataris and the Taliban, and therefore by association, al-Qaeda. Once this issue is reconciled, the picture is painted far more clearly: Obama was interested in potentially toppling the Karzai government in Kabul. Ironically, as the elections in Afghanistan were held, there was a very close vigil by U.S. military officers and their commanding officers, alongside the leaders running for office were reportedly friendly to the Obama administration. This will be touched upon later; right now, I am only interested in discussing Qatar's rather deadly webs of entanglements.
The second question I want to ask is why Ban Ki-moon bordered Sheikh Tamin bin Hamad Al Thani's private jet to fly to Cairo for negotiations for a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas? The issue of neutrality became nullified on July 21; Ban, having only placed fault with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the IDF for all deaths of innocent women and children while fully ignoring photographs of children being used as human shields and other dead from Hamas, joined in unison with Sec. of State John Kerry in demanding a full surrender of Israel to Hamas for all intends and purposes; thankfully, Netanyahu emphatically refused and is now poised to destroy all vestiges of Hamas if it takes such a vile act to prevent Israel's sovereignty and the lives of eight million civilians of differing faiths. And again, Qatar funds Hamas; this is obvious, and every news source globally will not hesitate to acknowledge this in their articles.
Lastly, why did Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel sign the transaction for $11 billion when in fact our military is being gutted and downsized to a pre-World War II level of 400,000 regular troops and our troops are being handed pink slips in Afghanistan even as they are fighting? It does not appear to make any sense superficially until you consider what smoke and mirrors appear to be hurled at the general public in the media. We know the president has been funding proxy warfare in Latin America and, in a rather benign manner comparatively, Cuba. The military through the Navy is shifting its geopolitical foci towards East Asia, officially stating it wants to protect American interests and to honor the treaties for defending Japan, Taiwan and the Philippines and Malaysia. Currently, even Vietnam is facing the prospect of armed conflict with the Chinese over border disputes and control of the rich oil resources and natural gas in the South China Sea and Gulf of Tonkin. Japan's current feud with Beijing over a series of what historically have been fishing islands called in Japanese Senkaku and in Chinese Diayu have concerned the Obama administration on the surface of the possibility that armed conflict will first break out between China and Japan. Of course, nothing ever is as it seems, because like the dispute between China and Japan happens to involve oil, our strategic trading partners in the two nations will be crucial to maintain as status quo due to their dominance of our markets as foreigners.
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There are more details necessitating further attention and global awareness. One is to examine Obama's chief diplomat, John Kerry, in how he was frisked and later that day handed a reported $47 million to a Hamas representative in Cairo. What has Hamas spent this money on? The Telegraph reveals that the unstable dictator of North Korea is providing the terrorist organization with arms and munitions:
Hamas and North Korea in secret arms deal
Exclusive: Hamas has paid North Korea for missiles and communications equipment in arms deal worth hundreds of thousands of dollars
Palestinian militants of the Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades, Hamas's armed wing, parade in Rafah, southern Gaza Strip Photo: AFP/GETTY
Con Coughlin By Con Coughlin, Defence Editor7:00PM BST 26 Jul 2014
Hamas militants are attempting to negotiate a new arms deal with North Korea for missiles and communications equipment that will allow them to maintain their offensive against Israel, according to Western security sources.
Security officials say the deal between Hamas and North Korea is worth hundreds of thousands of dollars and is being handled by a Lebanese-based trading company with close ties to the militant Palestinian organisation based in east Beirut.
Hamas officials are believed to have already made an initial cash down payment to secure the deal, and are now hoping that North Korea will soon begin shipping extra supplies of weapons to Gaza.
“Hamas is looking for ways to replenish its stocks of missiles because of the large numbers it has fired at Israel in recent weeks,” explained a security official. “North Korea is an obvious place to seek supplies because Pyongyang already has close ties with a number of militant Islamist groups in the Middle East.”
Using intermediaries based in Lebanon, Hamas officials are said to be intensifying their efforts to sign a new agreement with Pyongyang to provide hundreds of missiles together with communications equipment that will improve the ability of Hamas fighters to coordinate operations against Israeli forces.
Like other Islamist terror groups in the region such as Hizbollah, Hamas has forged close links with North Korea, which is keen to support groups that are opposed to Western interests in the region.
The relationship between Hamas and North Korea first became public in 2009 when 35 tons of arms, including surface-to-surface rockets and rocket-propelled grenades, were seized after a cargo plane carrying the equipment was forced to make an emergency landing at Bangkok airport. Investigators later confirmed that the arms cache has been destined for Iran, which then planned to smuggle the weapons to Hizbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza.
Following Israel’s latest military offensive against Hamas operatives based in Gaza, Western security officials say Hamas is now trying to persuade North Korea to provide fresh supplies of rockets to replace the thousands of missiles that have been fired at Israel since the commencement of hostilities two weeks ago.
Israeli military commanders supervising operations against Gaza believe North Korean experts have given Hamas advice on building the extensive network of tunnels in Gaza that has enabled fighters to move weapons without detection by Israeli drones, which maintain a constant monitoring operation over Gaza.
The North Koreans have one of the world’s most sophisticated network of tunnels running beneath the demilitarised zone with South Korea, and Israeli commanders believe Hamas has used this expertise to improve their own tunnel network.
The Hamas arsenal has become increasing sophisticated with foreign assistance and now boasts five variants of rockets and missiles. Its basic weapon is the Iranian-designed Qassam rocket with a range of less than ten miles but it also has a large stockpile of the 122mm Katyushas which boast a range of up to 30 miles.
The introduction of the M-75 and Syrian-made M0302 missiles means Hamas boast offensive weapons with a longer range of up to 100 miles and a much greater explosive impact.
Since the 2012 eight-day war, Hamas has increased the size and strength of its rocket arsenal. Israeli military intelligence puts its stockpile at around 10,000 rockets and mortars, including long-range rockets capable of reaching Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and the northern port city of Haifa.
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Ironically when it comes to waging jihad, Islamists are more than open to siding with atheist communist states in destroying those of Christian or Jew populations, or any other for that matter. Perhaps since communism is amoral and flexible due to adhering to no god, Islam somehow relates to this even though displaying a short memory of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. After all, the Soviet Union provided most Islamic states with weaponry and money during the Cold War. North Korea continually threatens nuclear warfare with the U.S. and Seoul, and having read in recent months of a possible attempt at the Koreas reunification first through Chinese state media and thereafter in South Korea's publications, something is most certainly afoot, especially upon considering Beijing recently militarized the Yalu River border with the North with some 100-150,000 Peoples Liberation Army troops.
Who gains from the increasing growth in the collective few who are enormously wealthy in the Palestine region, and how are they making their fortunes? Israel Online discusses this in some detail:
QUICK WATCH0:51
"Among the Palestinians, they tell you straight out, 'I want to get rich.'"
In recent days, various media have been publishing photographs of Hamas leaders in luxurious homes with fitness equipment, at luxury hotels around the world, etc. On the other hand, distressing pictures are being shown of the suffering of the Palestinian people in their rundown houses, whom Hamas says it represents.
One of the big mysteries is how much the Hamas leaders, the Arab world's new tycoons, are worth, and how they, born and raised in refugee camps, who raise aloft the cause of their people's welfare, have become so wealthy and reclusive.
Col. (res.) Dr. Moshe Elad, a lecturer in the Middle East Department of the Western Galilee Academic College, who served in senior positions in the territories for 30 years, is attempting to answer these questions.
"The vast majority of Hamas founders and leaders were refugees or second generation refugees, and some of them were the product of marriages between Egyptians and Palestinians. They had no money at all. When they and Hamas were just starting out, the organization (not in its own name) was nurtured by the Israeli military government, which fostered the Islamic associations working in the Gaza Strip as a counterweight to the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). Their phenomenal wealth started accumulating when they decided to disassociate themselves from Israel and search for alternative financing sources."
Elad explains that the money came from two directions: "Legacies from the deceased; money from charity funds; a donation called zaka, one of the six pillars of Islam; and donations from various countries. It started with Syria and Saudi Arabia, with Iran added later and becoming one of Hamas's biggest supporters, and ended with Qatar, which has now taken Iran's place."
Together with the donations from various countries, fundraisers began operating in the US to collect money for Hamas. Here, the Hamas leaders began to get their hands on some really big money. "One of those fundraisers was Dr. Musa Abu Marzook, the number 2 man in Hamas," Elad says. "At the beginning of the 1990s, he began a fundraising campaign in the US among wealthy Muslims, while at the same time founding several banking enterprises. He himself became a conglomerate of 10 financial enterprises giving loans and making financial investments. He's an amazing financier."
The US administration ordered Marzook's arrest in 1995 on charges of supporting terrorism. After he spent two years in a US prison, it was decided to expel him without trial. He kept the money. "When he was expelled from the US in 1997, he was already worth several million dollars," Elad says, adding, "Somehow he evaded the clutches of the US Internal Revenue Service and was not charged with financing terrorism. People in the know say he probably became connected to the administration and cooperated with it. There is no proof, but it's hard to think of any other reason why he escaped punishment for such serious offenses. In 2001, in the investigation of the September 11 events, it turned out that he had extensive financial connections with Al Qaeda, including the transfer of funds to the 21 Al Qaeda operatives accused of the attacks."
Today, Marzook is considered one of Hamas's wealthiest billionaires. "Arab sources estimate his wealth at $2-3 billion," Elad says.
Another Hamas leader-turned-tycoon is Khaled Mashaal. "Estimates around the world are that Mashaal is currently worth $2.6 billion, but the numbers mentioned by the Arab commentators (based on their many sources) are much higher, varying from $2-5 billion invested in Egyptian and Persian Gulf banks, and some in real estate projects in the Persian Gulf countries," Elad adds.
The next tycoon on the list is Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh. "He is a scion of a family from the Al-Shati refugee camp, and his capital is estimated at $4 million," Elad says, adding, "He registered most of his assets in the Gaza Strip in the name of his son-in-law, Nabil, and in the name of a dozen of his sons and daughters and a few less well known Hamas leaders. They all have homes in good neighborhoods in the Gaza Strip, where the value of every home is at least $1 million."
Another wealthy Hamas official - Iman Taha - is not on the organization's highest levels, but he, too, (and other junior managers) is feeding from the trough. According to Elad, "He was a poor rebellious kid from the al-Borg refugee camp, but he recently built a home in central Gaza worth at least $1 million. He's responsible for coordination between oversea Hamas and Hamas in the Gaza Strip, and he's not even a leading figure, but he's already among the millionaires."
The question of where these officials got their money exposes the corrupt system used by Hamas through its control of the money pipelines in the Gaza Strip. They treated the money as their own personal possession. "Most of the money that went into the pockets of people in the Gaza Strip was obtained through tunnel deals and the creation of a flourishing smuggling market, which it is believed has created several hundred millionaires in the Gaza Strip, although most of the people there don't live like that. The man pulling the strings from Egypt with the tunnels is none other than the number two man in the Muslim Brotherhood, Khairat el-Shater. His connection with Hamas was ostensibly for Islamic religious purposes, but they actually built a prosperous business, which earned phenomenal profits," Elad says.
The Asharq Al-Awsat (Middle East) newspaper, one of the most prestigious in the Arab world, recently reported that at least 600 millionaires were living in the Gaza Strip - the same people sitting on the money pipelines there.
Elad describes how the system worked and to how much money (huge amounts) Hamas leaders were exposed: "Senior Hamas leaders charged a 25% 'tax' and $2,000 on every disassembled vehicle coming through the tunnels. There are hundreds of smuggling tunnels from Egypt to Gaza, and these are the types of tunnel Israel has been less busy in destroying, because Egypt has destroyed many of them. From June 2007 until 2010, $800 million in cash was transferred in tunnel deals (according to information from Hamas money traders). Hamas also taxes Gaza merchants on everything traded, from boxes of vegetables to luxury cars, and the leaders scoop the money into their pockets."
Another source of wealth for Hamas leaders was taking over land. "They took over land mainly near the sea in good areas, such as the former Gush Katif, then sold it. In effect, they are the cat guarding the cream - the land - so they were able to take over land and loot it for themselves," Elad explains.
In addition, there is a system in the Gaza Strip of fictitious recruitment of workers for Hamas for the purpose of obtaining pay slips from people overseas paying for it. "They get the payments from overseas according to the workers' names. It has recently been discovered that there are hundreds of fictitious names of soldiers and officials supposedly in Hamas. Actually, the leaders and officials put the money in their own pockets," Elad asserts.
According to various sources, some of Mashaal's money came from the "Syrian fund." Elad explains: "According to these accusations, following an investigation by the US federal authorities, Mashaal was accused of embezzling the entire Syrian fund. There was a separate fund in Syria for Hamas; Mashaal controlled all the movements in the fund when he lived there. As soon as he left Damascus, he took the Syrian fund, which was worth several billion dollars, and distributed it to himself and others. It is believed that Hamas had $1.5-2.5 billion in assets in Syria, which Mashaal took."
In summary, Elad says, "This is corruption at the highest level… What has united the Palestinian leaders all throughout the years is the saying, 'We have to get rich quick.' This is how the regime sees it. Their leaders have no shame. Shortly after they got power, they took control of fuel, communications, and any other profitable sectors in the country. There are get-rich-quick schemes and corruption in Western society, too, but there it's done sophisticatedly with envelopes of money and complex structures of bribery and the like. Among the Palestinians, they tell you straight out, 'I want to get rich.'"
Published by Globes [online], Israel business news - www.globes-online.com - on July 24, 2014
Ties to al-Qaeda and the September 11, 2001 attacks, tax evasion and corruption through embezzlement of Palestinian civilian taxes, and real estate, which in the Gaza Strip and along the Red Sea would imply that it is not so much Israel razing Gaza housing developments to the ground, but rather on word of good intelligence from Mossad, Tel Aviv is rooting out the sources for terrorist activity where several of these figure perhaps reside. And it appears the Clinton administration funded Hamas during time of the peace talks with Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat of the PLO. Rabin, you may recall, was assassinated November 4, 1995 when I was in 8th Grade, which was where I watched the news of this tragic event while working as a library aide. And according to documents, Rabin's assassin, a 25 year old Orthodox Jew and right-wing extremist named Yigal Amir, had contact with Hamas and Arafat at least five times, which Arafat revealed to the German news media Der Spiegel:
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Hamas and the Islamic Jihad, of course, would be involved; the latter terrorist cell, I must add, is one I have not heard about nor read of any major activities in many years. And as the Jewish terrorist organization Molodet evidently conspired with both organizations as led by Rechavam Zeevi to topple first the Rabin and then his successor and current out-going president, Shimon Peres, in favor of the Likud Party, which the center-right wing political party in Israel. As with other areas of the world, there are forces within Israel tolerant and even supportive of terrorism. As the successor for the late Rabin was Peres, why would he choose to assassinate the prime minister for the same purpose as Hamas and the Islamic Jihad? Zeevi's organization might have carried out the hit on Rabin, but let us be clear: he not only was involved in the conspiracy with the two terrorist cells in likely aiding in Amir's shooting the late prime minister, but was rather the conduit and not the prime conspirator. As Arafat stated, and he would know well this is true, nearly every Islamic state in the Arab League or the Persian Gulf funds radical Islamic terrorist organization; the depth of this conspiracy may never be known as such a chain serves as as very large form of the Mafia in Sicily and in America.
The Islamic Jihad movement of Palestine was formed by the Muslim Brotherhood. The Brotherhood is the oldest such organization in the region, founded in 1928, and in 1979 it initiated the process of forming the Islamic Jihad.
Why would Obama choose to associate closely with the Muslim Brotherhood as he supported its own coup d'etat to topple the government of dictator Hosni Mubarak? The following details might provide clues:
Per Wikipedia, a Brotherhood spokesman discussed what it is exactly the organization stands for:
We believe that the political reform is the true and natural gateway for all other kinds of reform. We have announced our acceptance of democracy that acknowledges political pluralism, the peaceful rotation of power and the fact that the nation is the source of all powers. As we see it, political reform includes the termination of the state of emergency, restoring public freedoms, including the right to establish political parties, whatever their tendencies may be, and the freedom of the press, freedom of criticism and thought, freedom of peaceful demonstrations, freedom of assembly, etc. It also includes the dismantling of all exceptional courts and the annulment of all exceptional laws, establishing the independence of the judiciary, enabling the judiciary to fully and truly supervise general elections so as to ensure that they authentically express people's will, removing all obstacles that restrict the functioning of civil society organizations, etc.
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The language is at best vague, but most political mission statements are, unfortunately. What this does remind me a great deal of is the immortal line from Jean Jacques Rousseau's The Social Contract (1762) which serves as the most broadly interpreted in the modern history of political philosophical literature in the West:
7. The Sovereign
THIS formula shows us that the act of association comprises a mutual undertaking between the public and the individuals, and that each individual, in making a contract, as we may say, with himself, is bound in a double capacity; as a member of the Sovereign he is bound to the individuals, and as a member of the State to the Sovereign. But the maxim of civil right, that no one is bound by undertakings made to himself, does not apply in this case; for there is a great difference between incurring an obligation to yourself and incurring one to a whole of which you form a part.
Attention must further be called to the fact that public deliberation, while competent to bind all the subjects to the Sovereign, because of the two different capacities in which each of them may be regarded, cannot, for the opposite reason, bind the Sovereign to itself; and that it is consequently against the nature of the body politic for the Sovereign to impose on itself a law which it cannot infringe. Being able to regard itself in only one capacity, it is in the position of an individual who makes a contract with himself; and this makes it clear that there neither is nor can be any kind of fundamental law binding on the body of the people — not even the social contract itself. This does not mean that the body politic cannot enter into undertakings with others, provided the contract is not infringed by them; for in relation to what is external to it, it becomes a simple being, an individual.
But the body politic or the Sovereign, drawing its being wholly from the sanctity of the contract, can never bind itself, even to an outsider, to do anything derogatory to the original act, for instance, to alienate any part of itself, or to submit to another Sovereign. Violation of the act by which it exists would be self-annihilation; and that which is itself nothing can create nothing.
As soon as this multitude is so united in one body, it is impossible to offend against one of the members without attacking the body, and still more to offend against the body without the members resenting it. Duty and interest therefore equally oblige the two contracting parties to give each other help; and the same men should seek to combine, in their double capacity, all the advantages dependent upon that capacity.
Again, the Sovereign, being formed wholly of the individuals who compose it, neither has nor can have any interest contrary to theirs; and consequently the sovereign power need give no guarantee to its subjects, because it is impossible for the body to wish to hurt all its members. We shall also see later on that it cannot hurt any in particular. The Sovereign, merely by virtue of what it is, is always what it should be.
This, however, is not the case with the relation of the subjects to the Sovereign, which, despite the common interest, would have no security that they would fulfil their undertakings, unless it found means to assure itself of their fidelity.
In fact, each individual, as a man, may have a particular will contrary or dissimilar to the general will which he has as a citizen. His particular interest may speak to him quite differently from the common interest: his absolute and naturally independent existence may make him look upon what he owes to the common cause as a gratuitous contribution, the loss of which will do less harm to others than the payment of it is burdensome to himself; and, regarding the moral person which constitutes the State as a persona ficta, because not a man, he may wish to enjoy the rights of citizenship without being ready to fulfil the duties of a subject. The continuance of such an injustice could not but prove the undoing of the body politic.
In order then that the social compact may not be an empty formula, it tacitly includes the undertaking, which alone can give force to the rest, that whoever refuses to obey the general will shall be compelled to do so by the whole body. This means nothing less than that he will be forced to be free; for this is the condition which, by giving each citizen to his country, secures him against all personal dependence. In this lies the key to the working of the political machine; this alone legitimises civil undertakings, which, without it, would be absurd, tyrannical, and liable to the most frightful abuses.
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The issue with delegating the power to monitor elections to the judiciary as establishing the independence of the judiciary, enabling the judiciary "to fully and truly supervise general elections so as to ensure that they authentically express people's will, removing all obstacles that restrict the functioning of civil society organizations, etc." only tells me that the organization will supervise an election to ensure the Brotherhood's mark and authenticate its results to where the government of Mohammed Morsi, for example, could never lose while he was briefly in power. Hence, the very Rousseauan imprint in forcing freedom upon an electorate, which has happened in Chicago and other areas domestically. The greatest issue, however, is that democracy and the Brotherhood's means for deriving a rule of law - Sharia - are mutually exclusive. The following mottos of the party will collaborate with this assertion:
"Islam is the Solution" (الإسلام هو الح)
"Allah is our objective. The Prophet is our leader. The Qur'an is our law. Jihad is our way. Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope. Allahu akbar!”
وَأَعِدُّواْ ("And prepare") - taken from sūrat l-anfāl ("spoils of war", the 8th "chapter" of the Quran).
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There are as many interpretations of the word democracy as there are those for peace. For example, Mao Zedong stated the following regarding this in his work On New Democracy:
If the capitalist road of bourgeois dictatorship is out of the question, then is it possible to take the socialist road of proletarian dictatorship?
No, that is not possible either.
Without a doubt, the present revolution is the first step, which will develop into the second step, that of socialism, at a later date. And China will attain true happiness only when she enters the socialist era. But today is not yet the time to introduce socialism. The present task of the revolution in China is to fight imperialism and feudalism, and socialism is out of the question until this task is completed. The Chinese revolution cannot avoid taking the two steps, first of New Democracy and then of socialism. Moreover, the first step will need quite a long time and cannot be accomplished overnight. We are not utopians and cannot divorce ourselves from the actual conditions confronting us.
What to Mao was this New Democracy? He discussed this in the second portion of his pamphlet:
What, then, are the new politics and the new economy of the Chinese nation, and what is its new culture?
In the course of its history the Chinese revolution must go through two stages, first, the democratic revolution, and second, the socialist revolution, and by their very nature they are two different revolutionary processes. Here democracy does not belong to the old category-- it is not the old democracy, but belongs to the new category--it is New Democracy.
It can thus be affirmed that China's new politics are the politics of New Democracy, that China's new economy is the economy of New Democracy and that China's new culture is the culture of New Democracy.
Such are the historical characteristics of the Chinese revolution at the present time. Any political party, group or person taking part in the Chinese revolution that fails to understand this will not be able to direct the revolution and lead it to victory, but will be cast aside by the people and left to grieve out in the cold.
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For the president, he has observed that the first revolution in U.S. history led to a democratic-republican form of constitutional government. Beginning in 1890 with the arrival of socialists and other forms of Far Left Wing political subversives and anarchists, the shift from free democracy towards socialism was launched. As the advent of mass industrialization, the housing of the employees in tenant homes and working conditions being as poor as they were, industrialization had indeed entrenched the great American experiment in popular democracy during the post-Civil War era in class warfare, unprecedented aside from the abolitionists and pro-slavery defiance. As Progressives like Theodore Roosevelt initiated reforms to bust monopolies (T.R.'s nickname, or at least one, was "Trust Buster") and improve working conditions, they also expanded the concept of an American manifest destiny from sea to shining sea to a imperial power, as it had been since 1872 the world's largest economy. To bribe civilians for their votes, presidents granted them social subsidies as the underlying reward for expanding the military and, as a result, transforming America the conclusion of World War II as the globe's most powerful military and economic superpower - the arsenal for democracy. And while on the surface our president appears to be slicing apart the defense budget, I personally do not believe this is actually occurring as news spread over the past two days how $619 billion in our budget is now unaccounted for, according to USA Today:
Gregory Korte, USA TODAY 6:59 p.m. EDT August 5, 2014
WASHINGTON — A government website intended to make federal spending more transparent was missing at least $619 billion from 302 federal programs, a government audit has found.
And the data that does exist is wildly inaccurate, according to the Government Accountability Office, which looked at 2012 spending data. Only 2% to 7% of spending data on USASpending.gov is "fully consistent with agencies' records," according to the report.
Among the data missing from the 6-year-old federal website:
• The Department of Health and Human Services failed to report nearly $544 billion, mostly in direct assistance programs like Medicare. The department admitted that it should have reported aggregate numbers of spending on those programs.
• The Department of the Interior did not report spending for 163 of its 265 assistance programs because, the department said, its accounting systems were not compatible with the data formats required by USASpending.gov. The result: $5.3 billion in spending missing from the website.
• The White House itself failed to report any of the programs it's directly responsible for. At the Office of National Drug Control Policy, which is part of the White House, officials said they thought HHS was responsible for reporting their spending.
For more than 22% of federal awards, the spending website literally doesn't know where the money went. The "place of performance" of federal contracts was most likely to be wrong.
That's a problem, said Sen. Tom Carper, D-Del., the chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee.
"We live in a world in which information drives decisions," Carper said. "And, given the budget constraints that our government faces, we need reliable information on how and where our money is being spent."
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What exactly did you read?Is the money actually missing, or is it being illegally funneled to Hamas and ISIS, or the Latin American dictators who continually cooperated with President Obama in flying or shipping in illegal immigrants by the thousands per week now for over two years? We know $11 billion was handed to Qatar around July 21 at nearly the same point where Ban Ki-moon flew to Cairo aboard the state-terrorist sponsor's private jet from Kuwait; Sec. of State John Kerry paid $57 million to Hamas directly while in Cairo last month. The United Nations used our funding to not only provide additional funding to arm the terrorist group, but did so alongside hiding stashes of rockets and others arms and munitions in UN school building in the Gaza Strip. These weapons have been used in concert with taking hostage women and children to hold as human shields and to fight Israelis in door-to-door combat in the Gaza Strip's villages. Earlier in this article, the president was reported to have been funding subversion in Latin America dating to 2009, his first year in office. This has been planned before he became president. Hillary Clinton, for all her prestige as a former First Lady, U.S. Senator from New York and the Obama Secretary of State during his first term, has been used as a scapegoat; she may have ignored warnings by her staff of raucous neighbors who were the terrorists behind the Benghazi U.S. Embassy raid, but she followed the president's orders. She did not plan that raid by al-Qaeda nor exactly how to handle situation; she certainly did not serve as the final word to delay military aid, nor will she dare admit just how much or little a role she played.
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Over the weekend, it was made official that the president has been bankrolling Hamas with at least $400 million of the taxpayers' money. The Inquistrhas more. I attempted access The Wall Street Journal, but I have no paid subscription to the service:
Posted in: Politics Posted: August 3, 2014
President Barack Obama Funding Terrorist Group Hamas $400 Million In Taxpayer Dollars?
The Israel and Palestine conflict has become the new line in the sand on where Americans stand. If one were to go to most Evangelical communities, especially online, most of them support Israel. As a matter of fact, Psalm 122:6 in the Holy Bible calls for Christ followers to pray for the peace for the land given to the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. On the other hand, we reported numerous demonstrations in which support for Palestine and the Hamas were conducted here on American soil. This includes the large rally inChicagoas well as yesterday’s (August 2, 2014) pro-Palestine rally in Washington D.C led by the ANSWER Coalition.
Now there are reports coming in showing which side of the line President Barack Obama and the government in general are on, and it reported to be on the side of the Hamas by funding them $400 million in American taxpayer dollars.
According to the initial article by theWall Street Journal, the American taxpayer may soon become an indirect party to the enterprise of supporting the terrorist group known as the Hamas. For those who know their political history, this shouldn’t be possible because back in 1997, the U.S. law forbids taxpayer support of any group heavily influenced by Hamas. It was also at that time the State Department recognized Hamas as a Foreign Terrorist Organization too. In that case, how is it Americans are funding the Hamas with their tax dollars? Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, shines some light on his televised remarks earlier this week:
“Today, we declare the end of the split and regaining the unity of the homeland.”
The split Abbas was talking about was between his Fatah faction and the Hamas. That’s right, the Palestinian Authority is uniting with the Hamas. Take into account, once again, that we don’t support “foreign terrorist organizations”. However, the U.S. does support the Palestinian Authority, in the tune of $400 million per year. Think about that! $400 million of collective tax dollars that you, your family, your co-workers, and your friends might be going to the Hamas!
Conservative Tribune followed up on the initial article in which they report that President Barack Obama has refused to cut off funding to the Palestinians, because Hamas has installed into its government supporters from Gaza who – though agreed-upon by the terrorist organization – have “no obvious link” to it. In short, Obama still funds Palestine because even though they are merged with the Hamas, they have no direct link to each other’s activities.
The article also states that Barack Obama has no intention of recognizing the Palestinian Authority as a terrorist-supporting organization because it would be in violation against the statute passed back in 1997. Now the only obstacle in the way of this becoming a reality is Congress. They are the only ones who can block funding for the Palestinians until the country proves capable of governing themselves as something other than a terrorist enterprise.
What are your opinions on this situation in which the Palestine Authority and Hamas are uniting? Is it truly a progressive step forward for the peace of the Palestinian people or is it something else entirely? Let us know in the comments below.
[Image via Bing] __________________________
Through proxy warfare and other means, the U.S. historically has funded rebel and contra alliances to topple communist regimes. Recall how after the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979, Jimmy Carter initiated military aid to be distributed through CIA informants to the mujahideen, of which Osama bin Laden was a part. However, the group led by the bin Laden faction was not declared a terrorist organization at that point, and though the sole blame to socialists is shifted to Ronald Reagan, the plan worked because the Soviets evacuated the nation following its disastrous ten years of futile fighting against guerilla warriors, a style the Red Army was not accustomed to combating. The issue with Afghani anarchism did not initiate until after Reagan left office in January 1989 during the presidency of George H.W. Bush. The organization which played a crucial role in the conspiracy to assassinate Yitzhak Rabin is now being funded by President Obama through legal channels.
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What about ISIS? Obama has been funding them for over a year, beginning with its initial presence in Syria:
Syrian Rebels to Shift to Southern Strategy
Members of the Jund Allah Brigades, part of the Free Syrian Army, hold their weapons as they pose for a photograph in Deir al-Zor, eastern Syria February 18, 2014.
Free Syrian Army Appoints New Commander
UN Syria Aid Resolution Possible in Days, Russia Says
Syrian Artist Shows Trauma of War in Charcoal Sketches
Jamie Dettmer
February 21, 2014 10:44 AM
CAIRO— Syria’s Western and Gulf-backed rebels are likely to try to adjust their military axis in the coming weeks to re-focus more on the south of the country in their three-year-long struggle against President Bashar al-Assad in a shift that analysts say is a bid to strengthen the moderate armed opposition at the expense of hard-line Islamists.
The goal of the readjustment, if it can be pulled off by leaders of the highly fractious rebels, would be to help the Western-favored rebels bypass insurgent infighting in the north that has seen a loose coalition of some of the biggest moderate and Islamist brigades battle for weeks against an al-Qaida offshoot.
More than 2000 have died in the internecine struggle that erupted in rebel-held areas across northern and eastern Syria last month.
The attempt to effect a strategic refocus coincides with a reappraisal by Saudi Arabian and U.S. officials of the best ways to provide support for the rebellion while trying to ensure that additional arms supplied go directly to rebels favored by the Saudis and Washington DC and don’t leak to jihadist groups and other Islamist hard-liners, say U.S. and Gulf officials privately.
With no progress coming from Geneva peace talks, the Obama administration’s rhetoric has sharpened in recent days.
Shift is due in part to failure of Geneva talks
In meetings with U.S. lawmakers Secretary of State John Kerry signaled there would be a renewed effort to bolster moderate rebels, and earlier this week he publicly cautioned that the United States and its allies would soon have to make critical decisions on how to respond to the failed peace talks in Geneva, the second round of which concluded amid bitter recriminations last week.
The planned shift to focus militarily more on the south was reportedly discussed last week at a meeting in Washington DC of intelligence chiefs from the U.S., Gulf countries, Turkey and Jordan. But it is already facing its first major hurdle – getting all moderate rebel commanders to sign on.
Some commanders are objecting to the appointment on February 16 of a new overall leader of the moderate Free Syrian Army to oversee the shift in military focus. The official commanders of the FSA’s five battlefield fronts are resisting the sacking of Gen. Salim Idris and his replacement Brig. Gen. Abdul-Illah al-Bachir, who defected from the Syrian army last year, saying that the change is being made at the bidding of Saudi Arabia and the U.S.. Al-Bachir is based in Quneitra on Syria’s southern border.
A southern military strategy using Jordan rather than Turkey as the main arms supply route for the rebellion could inject new vigor into the uprising and allow the Western-backed moderates to escape the rebel infighting in the north, says Aram Nerguizian, a military expert at the Washington DC-based think the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
“It is the only frontline left – and it isn’t clear for how long – where elements of the more mainstream armed opposition have relative operational mobility,” he said. But he warns disunity even among the moderate rebels will make it hard to shift the strategic axis or “find a stable resolution to their own internal problems” and disputes.
Moderates stronger in the south
The uprising against President Assad has been marked by rebel disarray and disagreement on tactics and over ideology and has seen in the past year the rise of al-Qaida offshoots. In November, the FSA suffered a major reversal when some of the largest brigades broke way to form their own hard-line Islamist coalition.
Moderate rebel forces are stronger in the south than the north and are reportedly being reinforced with about 200 new fighters a month freshly trained in American-sponsored training camps in Jordan say U.S. officials privately.
Says Charles Lister, a Mideast expert with the think tank the Brookings Institution: “Moderate forces are in a more advantageous position in southern Syria as compared to other regions of the country. Rebel operations have already increased in intensity in southern Syria over recent weeks. The appointment of Al-Bachir suggests the rebels’ Supreme Military Council and its external state backers have made a strategic decision to re-focus on southern Syria as the key bulwark of the moderate armed opposition.”
He adds though: “It would be naive to present the south as free of hard-line Islamists and extremist groups. They retain a considerable presence in southern Syria and they are involved in almost all key strategic offensives. As such, a bolstering of moderates in the south is entirely feasible, but any sophisticated weapons provided to moderate forces are highly likely to be shared or eventually passed onto more hard-line groups.”
Jordan was a key zone for the provision of arms from foreign backers in early 2013 but rebels say there was a petering out of supplies when it became clear that there was considerable leakage to jihadists earmarked for moderates.
Analyst Nerguizian says the window of opportunity for the rebels of using the south more is narrowing quickly. Assad forces have pursued strong offensives close by along the Lebanese border that would impact seriously a southern strategy. “The regime and its allies have really shifted a great deal of the momentum in their favor, especially near and around Damascus and along the frontier with Lebanon. I do not see the opposition reversing that,” he says.
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ISIS was born of the breakaway from the Free Syria Army. They are also an offshoot of al-Qaeda. And as Britain's The Telegraph explains, Iran played coyly with the U.S. in how it support Syrian rebels, including ISIS:
Iran boosts support to Syria
Analyst says that without military support from the Islamic Republic, the Syrian army "would have collapsed"
By Ruth Sherlock, Beirut 3:44PM GMT 21 Feb 2014
Iran is boosting its support for President Bashar al-Assad, sending top military advisers to Damascus to gather intelligence and train Syrian troops, sources with knowledge of the movements have said.
The increase in assistance from Syria's long standing ally reportedly coincided with the peace talks at Geneva II, allowing the government to attend the negotiations with sufficient confidence in its military capability that it did not feel the need to make concessions.
Several "hundred" military specialists, including senior commanders from the Quds Force, the elite foreign-operations wing of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) have been to deployed to Syria in recent months, Iranian sources and security experts have said.
A recently retired senior IRGC commander told Reuters there are now at least 60 to 70 Quds force commanders on the ground in Syria at any given time.
The primary role of these forces is to gather intelligence and manage the logistics of battle for the Syrian regime as it approaches its fourth year of fighting a rebel insurgency.
"They are there pulling strings in the background," said an Iran analyst with Five Dimensions Consultant. "Well placed sources tell me 'the syrian army by now is a joke, they are in charge of the minor things. Without the Iranian they would have collapsed by now'."
Even prior to the Syrian war, Iran had between 2,000 and 3,000 IRGC officers stationed in Syria, helping to train local troops and managing supply routes of arms and money to neighbouring Lebanon.
That number has dramatically increased throughout the war, and by December of last year Iran was thought to have approximately 10,000 operatives in Syria, the analyst said. This includes thousands of Iranian paramilitary Basij fighters as well as Arabic speakers including Shi'ites from Iraq.
This recent surge of support was in part a decision strongly promoted by Qasem Suleimani, the head of the Quds force, to exploit the outbreak of infighting between rebel fighters and the al-Qaeda inspired Islamic State of Iraq and Sham (ISIS).
"Soleimani saw a perfect window of opportunity to send in more forces and clean up once and for all," the analyst said. "This caused disagreement between Hassan Rohani, the president, who was concerned a boost in Iranian support to Syria would damage the unfolding nuclear deal with the United States."
So the two schools of thought compromised, sending in a significant, but smaller number of troops than Mr Soleimani originally envisioned.
Iran sees the survival of the Syrian government as being crucial to it longevity of its own regime.
It's only consistent ally since the 1979 Islamic revolution, Syria provides a crucial thoroughfare to Hizbollah, who it sees as first line of defence against Israel. Iranian leaders have cited Syria as being Iran's "35th province", with President Bashar al-Assad's Alawite minority led regime being a crucial buffer against the influence of Saudi Arabia and the United States.
The boost coincides with an increase in the number of Shia volunteers in neighbouring Lebanon signing up to fight in Syria with the Iranian backed militia Hizbollah.
Hizbollah commanders and residents in the stronghold town of Hermel in the Bekaa valley have told The Telegraph there have been a surge in recruits entering Syria, particularly to fight rebel groups in the strategically important town of Yabroud, close to the border with Lebanon.
Iran is estimated to have spent several billion dollars already in supporting the regime in Syria, despite suffering from biting economic sanctions.
In the summer of last year Syrian officials said that Iran was to provide $3.6 billion in financial aid, on top of a $1 billion credit facility that it had provided in January.
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Recall this article was written and published in February. A month earlier, the following article by CSISwas published:
Syria, Geneva II, and the Era of "Least Bad Options"
By Anthony H. Cordesman
JAN 22, 2014
It does not take much by way of prophecy to predict that the Geneva II conference will not achieve any of its stated goals. Assad will not step down, the opposition will remain divided and continue to become more extreme, and outside states will be as divided in their goals as before the meeting.
Excluded states like Iran will – if anything – pursue their own self-interests in supporting Assad with even more dedication. Key Arab Gulf states – Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE – will continue to fund violent Sunni Islamist factions,and truly dangerous extreme movements like Al Qaeda and ISIS will continue to gain funding and volunteers. The spillover of violence into Lebanon and Iraq will continue, and likely will expand.
The maxim that any dialogue is better than no dialogue – “to jaw-jaw is always better than to war-war” – may produce some benefit, although there are times when better understanding does lead to even more hostility. There may be some token humanitarian pledges and concessions, but neither the Assad regime nor much of its opponents will stop funneling or blocking aid to their own respective advantages. Moreover, the sheer scale of the human tragedy in Syria – with more than 20% of its population displaced or refugees – will still present internal problems in a war zone that cannot be solved, and cause problems in neighboring states that cannot adequately cope with the added challenges.
This mix of pressures makes it equally easy to predict the conference will be a failure even if it does produce some kind of cosmetic declaration or agreement, as so many such conferences do. It also makes it easy to criticize the United States for lack of leadership. Additionally, in today’s bitterly partisan environment, there will be plenty of Americans who will also miss no opportunity to criticize the Obama Administration. Such action is fair game in any democracy; a system of government where even the greatest success can be described as failure by the opposition.
The Broader Message of the Crisis in Syria
The situation in Syria does, however, send a much broader message. As Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Bahrain, Iraq, Somalia, the Sudan, and all too many other cases show, there is only so much the United States and other powers can do. It is still all too possible, that the United States could have played a decisive role if it had decisively backed moderate rebel factions in Syria earlier in the crisis, at the time these groups were gaining momentum both politically and militarily. That window of opportunity, however, has long slammed shut.
Now, the rebel factions that have real power are increasingly extreme, violent, and committed to Salafi goals that most Syrians do not support or want. Assad and his supporters are even more committed to authoritarian rule and violence, tied to Iran, and linked to Hezbollah.The United States has no good options in Syria. It has no allies capable and willing to join it in taking meaningful action to replace Assad, and no idea of what would replace Assad, or the ability to shape a post-Assad Syria.
The real issue is what can the United States credibly do in cases like Syria – and cases like Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Bahrain, Iraq, Somalia, and the Sudan? Each is sharply different in many ways, but each case presents the fundamental problem that its current politics, stability, and security are driven by internal power struggles that are existential to the point of making politics a “blood sport” for all of the factions involved.
In every case, the power struggles that have emerged from a failed authoritarian system have left leaders with minimal real experience in peaceful politics and practical governance. Most opposition movements were suppressed, conspiratorial, ideological/religious, and sometimes violent. Political parties were weak, the tolerated tools of the regime, or did not exist. The state abused and bypassed an ineffective rule of law, and either controlled most resources or used crony capitalism to benefit its own supporters and as a political tool.
Worse, in most cases, authoritarianism and repression had put a cap on deep sectarian, ethnic, tribal, and regional tensions in states where population pressures forced hyper-urbanization and the break up or weakening of traditional structures of social accommodation and stability. This happened at a time when cell phones, the internet, and other social media made it increasingly impossible to limit extremist ideologies and conspiratorial politics just as much – if not more – than it encouraged a real interest in moderate reform, practical politics and development.
There was no practical basis for democracy in the majority of cases, and elections became a means of exposing a given nation’s divisions and lack of effective leadership. The end result was that post-authoritarian politics threatened to be a grim repetition of the post-colonial period’s history of making democracy into an authoritarian end game of “one man, one vote, one time.”
In almost every case, massive population growth and real and disguised unemployment had grown steadily in spite of a growing GDP. Youth unemployment had reached a destabilizing crisis level. Income distribution had become steadily less equal. Government investment had failed to keep up with population growth in education, health, infrastructure and other services – crippling structural issues documented all too well in the series of Arab Development Reports issued by the UN Development Program (UNDP).
Afghanistan and Iraq have shown all too clearly that even de facto U.S. military occupation cannot cope with these internal pressures. The United States cannot bribe the competing factions in any given case with aid to become moderate and work together. It cannot use force to somehow unify them on a lasting basis. It has some political, economic, and military leverage in each case, but this leverage is still remarkably weak when it comes down to a given faction and leader’s survival. Moreover, the deeper forces at work will shape a given nation’s politics, economics, and stability. Even the worst politics and internal violence are as much the symptom as the disease.
The Lessons of Syria, Geneva II -- Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Bahrain, Iraq, Somalia, the Sudan – and Others to Come
These are not reasons to avoid conferences like Geneva II, even if they do fail to meet every stated goal. As noted earlier, international dialogue and setting clear U.S. goals can serve a purpose. Even clarifying divisions, problems, and the lack of consensus can help lay the groundwork for more realistic and limited action in the future.
They are, however, good reasons to back away from taking unrealistic goals seriously, and from the kind of absurd political expectations that far too many raised when the massive political upheavals in the Middle East were called the “Arab Spring.” They are good reasons not to demand instant U.S. political success on a partisan or ideological basis, and see the failure to win that success as a failure in U.S. leadership, some measure of U.S. unwillingness to act, or a symptom of U.S. decline.
While every case is different, none presents good options, predictable patterns to try to influence, or any near-term probability of leaping from the present mix of tensions and problems to some form of stability and success. For at least the next decade – and probably far longer in several cases – each U.S. Administration will be confronted with the need to deal with ongoing political instability, deep internal structural problems, and uncertainty.
There will be no “good side” with the power to act, and no “good options” that have predictable mid and long-term results. The United States will have no more ability to suddenly deal with deep internal political instability in states with radically different cultures, critical internal problems, and a lack of any history of stable democratic politics than it did in Vietnam, Angola, the Congo, Central America, Iran, Cuba, and case after other case during the Cold War. No amount of letting hope overcome experience, or forgetting history, will give any Administration a magic wand. No amount of think tank and NGO good intentions and bright ideas will be a substitute for reality.
None of this, however, means the United States cannot act or play a major role over time. The fact the United States has limited influence in the short term, and limited resources and options, does not mean it should abandon its efforts to help other states over the long term, and serve its own interests in the process.
There is a good case for honestly stating the limitations to what the United States can do, for dialing back expectation to what the United States can actually achieve, and for accepting that uncertainty and the levels of problems mean that failure will often be the price of any given U.S. policy and action. Limiting U.S. domestic and foreign expectations to the art of the possible within real-world limits is not just the starting point for more effective policies; it is a necessary step in defusing criticism of the United States for failing to do what it cannot do and winning support for what it can.
The United States will need to focus on each national case, accepting just how different each nation state really is. In most cases, it will have to find the best approach it can to a regime or mix of factions that have many faults and uncertain abilities to achieve or stay in power. The “least bad option” may often mean encouraging regimes with many flaws to evolve and reform, rather than betting on instant democracy or assuming some kind of liberal or middle class dissent or uprising can bring a better outcome than strategic patience. A focus will be needed on the overall welfare and security of the people of a given country, rather than the high level politics of power.
The United States will need to focus on achieving good results in five to ten years, rather than bad results in a few months. Success means persistent and well-tailored efforts by the U.S. country teams over a period of years. It means using the limited levels of influence the United States actually has in the areas where the United States can do the most good over time, and working with mixes of regime and opposition elements that often have as many flaws as merits. To the extent possible, it also means bipartisan acceptance of time, uncertainty, limited progress, and the possibility of failure. It means risk taking at the embassy and military advisory level, and taking casualties without demanding scapegoats.
It also means accepting the fact that no state will somehow evolve to become a copy of the United States, and an acceptance of different goals and values. It means working with the UN and institutions like the World Bank to achieve results over time, as well as working with both allies and other states to find credible “least bad options” rather than focusing on doing it our way quickly in ways that can do more harm than good.
Finally, it means working with the regimes that have not collapsed, particularly partners like Morocco, Jordan, Lebanon, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE. All face major challenges, and all have different political systems and values – as well as somewhat different strategic objectives. But, all are states where U.S. action may well be able to help a regime and a nation evolve peacefully over time in ways that do far more to benefit its people than any repetition of the political upheavals that began in 2011, or calls for instant progress in becoming a copy of the United States. It does not take much realism to suggest that working with a partner – for all the compromises and differences involved – is better than working with an unstable mess.
Anthony H. Cordesman holds the Arleigh A. Burke Chair in Strategy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C.
Commentary is produced by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a private, tax-exempt institution focusing on international public policy issues. Its research is nonpartisan and nonproprietary. CSIS does not take specific policy positions. Accordingly, all views, positions, and conclusions expressed in this publication should be understood to be solely those of the author(s).
Two observations may be immediately derived: one, Cordesman stated in this article that America has lost her exceptionalism, no longer possessing the clout it once did due to inner political turmoil. It was not at all clear as to whether this article blamed Obama or George W. Bush. That much is known to be true since for at least 14 years, the political divide domestically is at its worst point in history. The final point is how Cordesman calls for appeasement through more proxy warfare. His illogical approach to fixing a bad policy is to engage in the definition of insanity, or enacting the same failed measures as before and believing two wrongs will manifest a final favorable solution. And this is exactly what President Obama has done, and achieved beautifully. He has been funding ISIS and Hamas in more than simply proxy warfare. He has contributed to the formation by ISIS of a new caliphate, with Hamas poised to join them if it succeeds in destroying the IDF in Gaza and, by way of such a monumental victory, the entire Jewish state of Israel too.
If there is one thing the American people have learned as of recent, it is that there is the truth, and then there is the administration’s version of the truth. And the most recent truth is that the government is continuing to fund terrorist groups to fuel their own agenda.
We’ve been told that we have been funding ‘rebels’ in Syria. What we are not told is what this actually means.
What President Obama and his administration has been doing is actually funding ISIS, the same terrorist organization that has been causing major devastation in Iraq. Of course, skeptics assume that the president is hoping that the funding eventually makes more money on the back end.
Watch the video below and let us know what you think:
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Another Iraqi politician confirms such a claim as the one above in The Gateway Pundit:
ISIS terrorists move into Iraq
Posted by Jim Hoft on Saturday, June 14, 2014, 10:44 AM
Ayad Jamal Al-din is a prominent Iraqi intellectual, politician and religious cleric and former member of the Iraqi parliament.
This week Ayad Jamal Al-din spoke out against the Obama administration’s hypocrisy in supporting
Ayad Jamal Al-Din: I was very surprised by the American statement, which pledged to support Iraq in keeping with the strategic agreement. On the same day, the U.S. declared that it would weaken… The war in Syria and the war in Iraq are one and the same – both in Syria and in Iraq, it is a war against ISIS. The U.S. strives to weaken the Syrian regime, and this benefits ISIS, but in Baghdad, it supports the regime against ISIS. This is suspicious and perplexing, to tell you the truth.
As for the collapse of the Iraqi army in Mosul – the army is a reflection of its commander. It is Nouri Al-Maliki, the prime minister and general commander of the armed forces, who should be placed on trial for high treason. The military personnel are not responsible for the collapse in Mosul and elsewhere. It is the general commander who should be held accountable and stand trial.
The ISIS problem is an old one. It was not born today. It is inappropriate to justify ISIS. In the past two hours, I’ve heard several commentators here on Al-Arabiya TV, saying that the Iraqi Sunnis are persecuted and are denied their rights, and that that is why ISIS has managed to gain a foothold in the country.
ISIS is composed of the same terrorists who are fighting in Libya, in Somalia, in Syria, in Afghanistan, in Nigeria, and elsewhere. The names of the organizations may vary, but their terrorism is one and the same.
Commentators should avoid justifying this terrorism. Terrorism is terrorism, and its confrontation should be the same everywhere. It is PM Nouri Al-Maliki himself who should be held accountable. I believe that if there was a parliament of decent human beings in Iraq, Al-Maliki would be voted out of office and would face trial for high treason for bringing about this military collapse – either because he failed or due to his collaboration with the terrorists…
…Interviewer: How do you view the [American] support for the military operation and Washington’s offer to help resolve this crisis?
Ayad Jamal Al-Din: I welcome it. We await this support, but it must extend to all the areas where ISIS may be found. The pressure on the Syrian regime, which is fighting ISIS, must be lifted. They should not try to strengthen the feeble Free Syrian Army [FSA]. There is no FSA. There is ISIS in Syria and Iraq. You cannot fight ISIS in Iraq, yet support it in Syria. There is one war and one enemy.
The U.S. should give up its hypocrisy. People are not brainless. How can it be that a State Department spokesperson talks about Iraq, and then a White House spokesman says: “We must pressure the [Syrian] regime so that it surrenders”? Surrenders to whom? To ISIS. Where is the FSA? There is no such thing. The war is one and the same. Support should be extended to both Iraq and Syria. The U.S. should pressure the countries that sponsor ISIS.
An hour ago, when I entered this studio, Al-Jazeera TV was still calling ISIS “the tribal rebels.” This is a deception, a lie. These are no tribal rebels. The tribal rebels have fled to Kurdistan. The Sunnis were vanquished by ISIS. These are criminals, murderers, and terrorists.
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The White House is indeed playing both sides against each other. Publicly, the administration appears to be appease, but they are not at all doing this. Rather, that smoke billowing into our clouds overhead was started by a fire, and the source for this fire is Barack Hussein Obama.
Lastly, the American people have read and heard rumors of the president's connection to be an enormous authority figure of the Muslim Brotherhood. Well, according to Al Jazeera, which quoted an Egyptian news outlet, he is a part of the organization:
Egyptian media says Obama is a Muslim Brotherhood member
Last modified: 2 Sep 2013 10:45
Director of Research at the Brookings Doha Center, Shadi Hamid, tweets out about the Egyptian media depicting Obama as a member of the Muslim Brotherhood.
Newspaper also claims that son of MB leader threatened Obama w- release of "papers" revealing his MB membership: pic.twitter.com/x4lV2JdS91
Conclusion: Barack Obama has Learned More from Karl Marx and Islamic Verses Preaching Lying in Waging Jihad than All Other Marxist Dictators and Thinkers in History
I pray to God all of this is simply conjecture, just my honing my inner Alex Jones or Matt Drudge. However, in what one friend employed by the federal government said, I remind him of the late Andrew Breitbart. Breitbart is, of course, deceased, and speculation persists that the president ordered his death. Regardless, I remain today, tomorrow and forevermore as I have always: a patriot devoted to defend American liberty and republican virtue.
My traditional purpose for using Rousseau's commentary is not necessarily because I agree with his plancks, but because he manufactured the first treatise in The Social Contract for sowing the seeds for a socialist state. His following comments continue to haunt the world today:
1. That Sovereignty is Inalienable
THE first and most important deduction from the principles we have so far laid down is that the general will alone can direct the State according to the object for which it was instituted, i.e., the common good: for if the clashing of particular interests made the establishment of societies necessary, the agreement of these very interests made it possible. The common element in these different interests is what forms the social tie; and, were there no point of agreement between them all, no society could exist.It is solely on the basis of this common interest that every society should be governed.
I hold then that Sovereignty, being nothing less than the exercise of the general will, can never be alienated, and that the Sovereign, who is no less than a collective being, cannot be represented except by himself: the power indeed may be transmitted, but not the will.
In reality, if it is not impossible for a particular will to agree on some point with the general will, it is at least impossible for the agreement to be lasting and constant; for the particular will tends, by its very nature, to partiality, while the general will tends to equality. It is even more impossible to have any guarantee of this agreement; for even if it should always exist, it would be the effect not of art, but of chance. The Sovereign may indeed say: "I now will actually what this man wills, or at least what he says he wills"; but it cannot say: "What he wills tomorrow, I too shall will" because it is absurd for the will to bind itself for the future, nor is it incumbent on any will to consent to anything that is not for the good of the being who wills.If then the people promises simply to obey, by that very act it dissolves itself and loses what makes it a people; the moment a master exists, there is no longer a Sovereign, and from that moment the body politic has ceased to exist.
This does not mean that the commands of the rulers cannot pass for general wills, so long as the Sovereign, being free to oppose them, offers no opposition.In such a case, universal silence is taken to imply the consent of the people. This will be explained later on.
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Edward R. Murrow once stated that a nation of sheep will beget a government of wolves. So too do we have this here, achieved not always directly by the federal government, but by the mass media, private, but friendly to the passes; and through out public education system. Censoring vital details to new policies or accentuating certain details in events lend credence to this fact.
Rousseau disparagingly but in a most correct manner explains why a truly Christian state cannot survive, which might stand to reason how Europe is secular now, and America is only a matter of two generations from this as well:
There remains therefore the religion of man or Christianity — not the Christianity of to-day, but that of the Gospel, which is entirely different. By means of this holy, sublime, and real religion all men, being children of one God, recognise one another as brothers, and the society that unites them is not dissolved even at death.
But this religion, having no particular relation to the body politic, leaves the laws in possession of the force they have in themselves without making any addition to it; and thus one of the great bonds that unite society considered in severally fails to operate. Nay, more, so far from binding the hearts of the citizens to the State, it has the effect of taking them away from all earthly things. I know of nothing more contrary to the social spirit.
We are told that a people of true Christians would form the most perfect society imaginable. I see in this supposition only one great difficulty: that a society of true Christians would not be a society of men.
I say further that such a society, with all its perfection, would be neither the strongest nor the most lasting: the very fact that it was perfect would rob it of its bond of union;the flaw that would destroy it would lie in its very perfection.
Every one would do his duty; the people would be law-abiding, the rulers just and temperate; the magistrates upright and incorruptible; the soldiers would scorn death; there would be neither vanity nor luxury. So far, so good; but let us hear more.
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Rousseau just acknowledge how Christianity, the relationship between mankind and our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, is the perfect religion. He again is more disparaging:
Christianity as a religion is entirely spiritual, occupied solely with heavenly things; the country of the Christian is not of this world. He does his duty, indeed, but does it with profound indifference to the good or ill success of his cares. Provided he has nothing to reproach himself with, it matters little to him whether things go well or ill here on earth. If the State is prosperous, he hardly dares to share in the public happiness, for fear he may grow proud of his country's glory;if the State is languishing, he blesses the hand of God that is hard upon His people.
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Rousseau is intent upon humanizing the role of The Sovereignty, but never once mentions how the general will affects the role of God in a democratic society. He, however, generalizes a common mistruth still echoing loudly: in America, the true patriot counts his or her blessings for being an America as a result of God's hand in its manifestation, not upon human designs. He continues, however:
For the State to be peaceable and for harmony to be maintained, all the citizens without exception would have to be good Christians; if by ill hap there should be a single self-seeker or hypocrite, a Catiline or a Cromwell, for instance, he would certainly get the better of his pious compatriots. Christian charity does not readily allow a man to think hardly of his neighbours. As soon as, by some trick, he has discovered the art of imposing on them and getting hold of a share in the public authority, you have a man established in dignity; it is the will of God that he be respected: very soon you have a power; it is God's will that it be obeyed: and if the power is abused by him who wields it, it is the scourge wherewith God punishes His children.There would be scruples about driving out the usurper: public tranquillity would have to be disturbed, violence would have to be employed, and blood spilt;all this accords ill with Christian meekness; and after all, in this vale of sorrows, what does it matter whether we are free men or serfs? The essential thing is to get to heaven, and resignation is only an additional means of doing so.
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Most egregiously and so reflective of more than a century of socialism and its more extreme cousin, communism, is the following:
But I am mistaken in speaking of a Christian republic; the terms are mutually exclusive. Christianity preaches only servitude and dependence.Its spirit is so favourable to tyranny that it always profits by such a régime. True Christians are made to be slaves, and they know it and do not much mind: this short life counts for too little in their eyes.
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In concluding my mentioning of Obama's extraordinarily psychological influence upon Rousseau's work, the latter stated the following, acknowledging Judaism and Islam as acceptable and concrete foundations for civil societies, but never Christianity:
The great soul of the legislator is the only miracle that can prove his mission. Any man may grave tablets of stone, or buy an oracle, or feign secret intercourse with some divinity, or train a bird to whisper in his ear, or find other vulgar ways of imposing on the people. He whose knowledge goes no further may perhaps gather round him a band of fools; but he will never found an empire, and his extravagances will quickly perish with him. Idle tricks form a passing tie; only wisdom can make it lasting. The Judaic law, which still subsists, and that of the child of Ishmael, which, for ten centuries, has ruled half the world, still proclaim the great men who laid them down; and, while the pride of philosophy or the blind spirit of faction sees in them no more than lucky impostures, the true political theorist admires, in the institutions they set up, the great and powerful genius which presides over things made to endure.
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Through revising an inconvenient truth, Rousseau advocates secularism, atheism, and instead does not credit God or for Islam, Allah, for the manifestation of codified laws for ethical behavior, but rather the finite figures we as human beings, never living into the 20th Century to see the failures of communism nor even to witness the disasters of the French Revolution. Faith in Christ can only be philosophical if the Christian casts aside his relationship with Him. The Trinity is love, and it can only be love since Jesus died to ensure that our sins and imperfections do not engulf us all. As such, Rousseau, as is Obama, engages in writing of a social contract predicated upon human perfection. As brilliant as he was, ideological giants historically have been among the most ruinous and murderous dictators in world history. Rousseau never met the American farmers, the poet residing on Main Street nor the sailor to God's stars in evangelical delight to spread word of this last bastion of hope on Earth. He influenced the French Revolution, which instead equated consensus and liberty with the world's first experiment in totalitarianism. The Sovereign is not a supernatural god, but rather a megalomaniac narcissist bent upon forming his own cult of leadership through social veneration and worship.
***
As for what Obama has learned, he has mastered Marxism to its very specific specifications down to how exactly he needed to forcibly destroy more than 400 years of Anglo-American cultural normatives and values which diffused into future settlers of a unestablished land and the undiscovered country in the New World. He is a more astute student of history and constitutional law than he will let on even as the public knows well he taught constitutional laws courses at Harvard University many years ago. When watching him deliver speeches or his subordinates within his Cabinet give press conferences of his policies they are enforcing, that blase countenance is not at all what it appears, but rather it is a smoke and mirrors approaches to deception, to committing treason through the most secretive mean of espionage and subterfuge. He preaches democracy, of why the American people demand that he completely toss Congress to the curb so he may credit laws and enforce them using his pen and phone for subverting the democratic processes for our republican government. When the GOP pundits cry foul at his denying the will of the American people, it is they who are wrong, who are grossly misleading the public that we the people have not granted Obama his legitimacy to do as has, or why Sen. Harry Reid (D - NV) continues to keep House-passed legislation on his desk to the tune of more than 300 passed pieces of legislation; he most recently did so with obstructing the Senate's even being permitted to take up what the House passed on shutting down our border and destroying all support within the GOP for amnesty for good. Legitmacy to government is a double-edge sword. While the House of Representatives is controlled by the GOP, both the presidency and the Senate remain firmly socialist. While Obama almost never refers to Congress for any reason today and simply fills out executive orders illegally and with complete impunity, he is sly enough to sell his policies as a bilateral attempt to pressing polity on the House of Representatives to pass exactly his proposals; if they do not, he will simply create the law and enforce it himself. Obama is still the legitimate head of state and government in America because he was voted twice to do as he is today. If Democracy is a popular movement, Mao Zedong was most certainly profoundly wise to note revolution as the ultimate democratic process for not voting into power anyone since that would entitle convincing the mob which provided Obama his mandate that another choice could be preferable.
Nineteenth Century Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard stated once that if you take away paradox from the thinker, you instead have a professor. The president is a former constitutional law professor tell us what the rule of law is from his perspective. There sadly is a dire lack of paradox within the vast majority of our general public. And while his opposition and his more informed voters within the socialist intelligentsia see this as an obvious fundamental truth, the ones who are not or who are employed in Hollywood are recipients of tax exemptions and subsidies will smile and wave that red flag with the yellow sickle and hammer proudly so long as they control the social conscience and capacity for Main Street U.S.A. to survive without them.
Commentary: Is Nancy Pelosi Suffering from Mental Illness?
Is Nancy Pelosi mentally-ill or a part of a cult espousing socialism as operated by DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz?
The world we individuals living with the unknown quantity of mental illness(es) is one most will never fully comprehend. When in August of 2000 I left the University of Tennessee following three days of class in what was supposed to be my first semester of college at age 19 following issues within the School of Music and the Pride of the Southland Marching Band growing to difficult with my feet being practically deformed which made it nearly impossible for me to march per the band's standards, and receiving a rather politically-laced screw job by the band directors and the man who would have been my trombone professor, the fact I was still required to open my life in higher education with an eight-class schedule for only 14 hours became far too overwhelming to continue, and after much soul searching and the warmth of my parents' advice, I transferred to a local community college, where I would spend five very miserable years essentially as a fallen leaf, brown and crunchy when stepped upon, "blowing in the wind" as Bob Dylan would say. The first year and as half of college at this community college saw myself mired in a deep depression, apathetic towards the dynamics of the world, clueless and aimless as to what I was to do next. My great-uncle, who was a World War II and Korean conflict veteran, passed away the night prior to my last final exam in my Spanish course, and that was indeed the beginning of a very stressful summer with clearing out his very cluttered apartment in a very ritzy portion of Knoxville. Among the items we located were his Purple Heart for his sustained injuries from shrapnel pieces from a German shell at the Battle of the Bulge and in Korea, the frostbite suffered due to extreme frigid temperatures north of the 38th Parallel. Once his apartment was cleared, my family and I were of course exhausted, but then had to prepare for a summer of two mass family visits by my father's family to rummage through the "bullion" of Uncle Junior's military and credentials and achievements from when he was a career civil engineer. And like Uncle Junior, my late grandmother who passed away in January 1968 from a return bout with breast cancer or my great-aunts in Atlanta and the Shenandoah Valley region of Virginia all suffered from mental illnesses as did my great-grandmother and her youngest brother, Mutt. The stories of Uncle Mutt were particularly interesting, but as I need to keep the ship moving in order to cover as much vital information and material as possible, I will digress beyond this introductory paragraph.
Announcement Regarding those Supporting Hamas and ISIS Committing Genocide Versus Christians and Jews:
In one announcement to my fellow readers who are invested in their interests in the current Israeli/Hamas war in the Gaza Strip, this was what I posted over Facebook which I believe will resonate loudly and clear to all who know me:
If there is anyone at all who read my posts in support of the genocide being committed against Christians and Jews, I have nothing further to ask other than to stop reading this blog or if you do, to be prepared for a backlash from either other readers or myself when during the week I am able to devote some time to answer your replies as I find them filtering into my Gmail box. I often never see these E-mails which inform me someone is posting a reply, and I apologize for this; if there is anyone who knows how I may organize my mailbox to filter those informing me of who replies so that I may know when I need to check and answer as best I can each one of you, please let me know; I would greatly appreciate your input. I prefer that if you contact me to do so at the following E-mail address, not at my Gmail account, which I only use for my two blogs: Dagan81@aol.com
The Peculiar Troubles with Nancy Pelosi:
In 2007, Nancy Pelosi became the most powerful female politician in American history when the Democratic Party was victorious during the midterm elections in November 2006. As I was during that period of my life in my mid-20s where virtual apathy was most demonstrable within my political activity other than my regular voting patterns for GOP candidates, I had become grossly disenchanted with processes and the continued war in Iraq that at the time, appeared to either be being waged due to George W. Bush's vendetta over his father's original involvement in the Gulf War and perhaps for Saddam Hussein's attempt to assassinate George H.W. Bush, or as a means to use Iraq for oil and a base for operations in the Persian Gulf region. In both June and July, the Democratic Party and myself even were proven wrong with the location of large stockpiles of chemical and biological warfare agents and last, nuclear weapons and the technology to build variety of many others. As it now is clear that President Obama is funding not just Hamas but ISIS in its quest to expand the Islamic State beyond the present borders of Iraq, Syria and Lebanon, few Democrats seem to be divergent with the president's foreign policy in collusion with Secretary of State John Kerry. For instance, California Congresswoman Maxine Waters announced her honest observation that Hamas in 2012 in San Francisco, which you may watch in a 12 minute video:
I can barely stomach what this woman just stated, much less her voice, as is true with the president and the subject of this article, Nancy Pelosi. The contradictions involved are scary; for a lady who as a socialist insisting upon nationalizing America's oil companies to support women's rights and then say this regarding her commitment to ushering in Sharia law into America is beyond ignorant or even scary, but conspiratorial with the White House and with the Muslim Brotherhood. One thing has always been abundantly clear regarding the Democratic Party: Each politician within it will do everything in his or her power to be elected, including support funding for a so-called "zombie apocalypse".
For Barbara Lee who is another California Democrat, which you will have read in the previous article declared how she is "ashamed to be an American", she stated the following in a televised interview:
This was the source of a debate that ended with a "parting of the ways" last week, though I will say I last saw the guy about eight or nine years ago. Nevertheless, what is defined as American apparently is in agreement with Stephen King, who is deranged in his own right depending upon who you ask.
And Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, the Chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee? Well, she does not appear to be too swift in intellect, in having a sound mind or perhaps she is mentally disturbed. Watch this clip at her incomprehensible response which contradict former Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius:
Al Gore has never accepted the Bush v. Gore ruling in 2000, and neither have Democrats; all you need to do is listen to Joe Biden to confirm this:
Joe Biden insisted upon arresting and filing criminal charges versus George W. Bush, but aside from the issue of the election from 2000, it was over the PATRIOT Act! Sen. Biden voted for the PATRIOT Act in 2001! Not only did Biden and Hillary Clinton vote for it, Biden actually was involved with Sec. of State Colin Powell and his associate Richard Armitage and Florida U.S. Ben Nelson, a Democrat also, in constructing the foundation in principle with Pakistani officials to wage "the war on terror" beginning SEPTEMBER 11, 2001! Biden is guilty of conspiring against the American people in committing treason in a bipartisan effort to engage in warfare in Afghanistan. This is covered at great length in my previous blog of my Great American Betrayal series. I will provide for you the excerpt with citations:
The relationship between the US and the ISI is hard to fathom. On September 4, 2001, ISI Director Mahmood Ahmed arrived in Washington, D.C. On September 10, a Pakistani newspaper reported on the visit, saying that it had “triggered speculation about the agenda of his mysterious meetings at the Pentagon and National Security Council” as well as meetings with CIA Director George Tenet, unspecified officials at the White House and the Pentagon, and his “most important meeting” with Marc Grossman, US Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs. The article suggested that “of course, Osama bin Laden” was the focus of some discussions. Prophetically, the article added, “What added interest to his visit is the history of such visits. Last time [his] predecessor was here, the domestic [Pakistani] politics turned topsy-turvy within days. That this is not the first visit by Mahmood in the last three months shows the urgency of the ongoing parleys.” [Karachi News, 9/10/01] In May 2001, both CIA Director George Tenet and Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage had visited South Asia. It’s not known if they met with Mahmood or anyone else in the ISI, but according to credible news reports, Tenet had “unusually long” consultations with President Musharraf. It is also worth noting that Armitage is known for his “large circle of friends in the Pakistani military and ISI” [SAPRA, 5/22/01] as well as his connections to the Iran-Contra affair.
Of course everyone knows that politics did turn very “topsy-turvy” one day after the Karachi News article on September 10. But what many don’t know is that on the morning of September 11, Lt. Gen. Mahmood was at a breakfast meeting at the Capitol with the chairmen of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees, Senator Bob Graham (D) and Representative Porter Goss (R). The meeting was said to have lasted at least until the second plane hit the World Trade Center. Goss is a self-admitted 10-year veteran of the CIA’s clandestine operations wing. [Washington Post, 5/18/02] Goss and Graham were later the heads of the joint House-Senate investigation into the September 11 attacks, and Goss in particular made headlines for saying there was no “smoking gun” indicating that the government had sufficient foreknowledge to prevent the September 11 attacks. [Washington Post, 7/11/02] Also present at the meeting were Senator John Kyl (R) and the Pakistani ambassador to the US, Maleeha Lodhi (note that all or virtually all of the people in this meeting also met Lt. Gen. Mahmood in Pakistan a few weeks earlier [Salon, 9/14/01]). Senator Graham later said of the meeting: “We were talking about terrorism, specifically terrorism generated from Afghanistan,” and the New York Times mentioned that bin Laden was specifically being discussed. [Vero Beach Press Journal, 9/12/01, Salon, 9/14/01, New York Times, 6/3/02] The fact that these people were meeting at the time of the attacks is a strange coincidence at the very least, not to mention the topic of their conversation!
On September 12 and 13, Lt. Gen. Mahmood met with Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, Senator Joseph Biden, the Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and Secretary of State Colin Powell. An agreement on Pakistan’s collaboration in the new “war on terror” was negotiated between Mahmood and Armitage. [Miami Herald, 9/16/01] All these meetings coordinated Pakistan’s response to September 11. [New York Times, 9/13/01, Reuters, 9/13/01, Associated Press, 9/13/01] Isn’t it strange that the terms of Pakistan’s commitment to fight al-Qaeda were negotiated with the man who may have given orders to send $100,000 to the September 11 hijackers?
What would happen if Saeed told all that he knew?
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As nowhere in this document was ever stated that George W. Bush was directly involved, did the president actually give any directives regarding this or did these men conspire against him to force him to bend to their will to wage war or face political suicide? Lastly, was this the means by which Biden co-sponsored the PATRIOT Act? Well, he drafted it on May 1995 during the Clinton administration, introducing it on February 10, 1995, months before the Oklahoma City Bombing on April 19, 1995. Is this a coincidence, or were Terry Nichols and Timothy McVeigh "aided" somehow by the federal government? There are documents according to Western Journalism linking your favorite Attorney General Eric Holder to the bombing due at some point to be made available to the public regarding Operation: PATCON in connecting Waco, Oklahoma City and Operation: Fast and Furious. When I learn they are available - IF they are ever declassified - I will access them and provide you with full details.
Back to Pelosi. To watch her homage to our Founders in claiming they wrote in the Declaration of Independence how Americans had the right to health care is laughable: Bill Summary & Status - 104th Congress (1995 - 1996) - S.390 - THOMAS (Library of Congress)
S.390 Latest Title: Omnibus Counterterrorism Act of 1995
Sponsor: Sen Biden, Joseph R., Jr. [DE]
(by request) (introduced 2/10/1995)
Cosponsors (7)
Related Bills:H.R.896 Latest Major Action: 5/4/1995
Senate committee/subcommittee actions. Status: Subcommittee on Terrorism, Technology, Government. Hearings held.
Bill Summary & Status - 104th Congress (1995 - 1996) - S.390 - THOMAS (Library of Congress)
Ironically, for a lady who despise religion despite proclaiming to being a pro-abortionist Roman Catholic, she is singing the tune of faith as the primary reason for supporting the passing of the bill to close the borders and, effectively, destroyed all GOP support that had still been in Congress of supporting amnesty. And because Rep. Marino called her on the carpet for attempting to shame the GOP for not supporting faith-based initiatives to strike from the legal record the United States of America as a nation without borders, she threatened him, chased Rep. Marino around the chamber, and while doing so insulted him for being "insignificant". And at the least of the Democratic Party's problems with the consistent merry-go-round of daily revelations of Obama-centered scandals and treasonous, criminal activities, the leader of the Far Left party just admitted that the rule of law no longer applies to anyone except for naturalized white males. Essentially, what Nancy Pelosi just admitted and did not intend to was she is committed to manifesting another South African state here, on our soil. Nancy Pelosi, in concert with President Obama, is intent upon manufacturing an American Apartheid state.
But even mentally-ill political leaders can be lucid enough to make policies, albeit they usually are disastrous and can lead to destroying nations, and I need not refer to anyone else than Nero, Caligula nor Adolf Hitler, or perhaps Pelosi and the president's ideological equal in North Korea, Kim Jong-Un.
And speaking of Kim Jong-Un, when I happened to notice the president's Facebook page on the site, one of his apparent friends suggested to me was the following:
I suppose North Korea's brand of communism called juche is more influential for him than I ever thought!
***
But really, in all seriousness, what do you as my regular readers make of Nancy Pelosi's recent behavior? Have you never asked after watching footage of her speeches or to look at her face as she says these things how either the Democratic Party has become a quasi-religious cult or if she is indeed mentally-ill? You just watched her rather hypocritical speech of appealing to Christians to do their religious duty in practically accepting these illegal immigrants into their home, shaming all conservative who of the Christian Right comprising of the strongest majority and voice of the faith, oppose these measures because they would in fact place the in danger since it is intended that they remain largely undocumented; I need not go further than to reference the recent scores of absent illegal immigrants at child custody court proceedings or for adults at their own subpoenaed dates due yet again to the Obama administration's intent to effective complete the official dissolution of our Constitution, to tear down all borders and to declare anyone who cross over as a "political refugee", which then will allow him to effectively hand over America's sovereignty to United Nations (UN) General Secretary Ban Ki-moon as the nation suddenly becomes one major humanitarian crisis when including Detroit and now Toledo, OH. But, this is an issue to be dealt with in another blog.
Pelosi either is naive or disingenuous. More likely, however, she is mentally-disturbed due to her impetuous reactions to all issues before her. This is perhaps the most (in)famous clip of a Democratic Party politician in recent memory:
Her reference to the Affordable Care Act ("Obamacare") as being mandated by the Declaration of Independence and was constitutionally-sound was further laughable, as she discouraged celebrating the Fourth of July as Independence Day from Great Britain to instead serve as "Health Care Independence" that our Founding Father fought for and achieved within the actual Constitution:
The vacant countenance on Pelosi's face is rather deceptive. Because she is not at all mentally-ill or insane. Socialism, which guides the Democratic Party more egregiously than ever before, is like a cult. Their ideological giants in Lenin, Stalin and Mao would still attest to this right now if they were still alive.
Conclusion: Nancy Pelosi is NOT Mentally-Ill:
Insanity is perhaps the most misunderstood and misrepresented of all human conditions because there are no two people demonstrating the same characteristics nor even so much as a facial countenance that would suggest otherwise. I would know this since I suffer from the most severe form of bipolar disorder as well as OCD; this is the reason why I have not regularly blogged since I did not feel well at all for over a year. Few people can look at me and by judging my appearance, state unequivocally that I am mentally-ill. I can easily tell another bipolar patient like myself from across the aisle at a drugstore or walking along the streets based upon observing their body language and behavior, and of course when we might speak, from what they tell me and how they speak as in very fast speech or racing thoughts rapidly leading from one subject to another completely opposite. When I befriended a gentleman the last time I was hospitalized in March 2011 who had signed himself in to detox from his drug addictions, I never felt so much pride in a person for how he had taken the initiative to improve his life and become a more productive and functionable member of our society. One moment was particularly poignant and yet, fundamentally sad. While conversing with him, he looked at me and stated how he was experiencing a major craving for cocaine on the tip of his tongue. My emotions, as stated, were mixed, but I understood then that this man was fighting the good fight. A person may become addicted to illicit, illegal drugs, but this never at all implies nor infers that he or she is a terrible human being, and this man was not. Likewise, another lady who had a very young child and had graduated with her Masters in Biology was in the hospital for the same reason, and she had the most awe-inspiring reason for doing so: it was not because she wanted to save herself alone, but to ensure that she would live and serve as the best mother she could be for her child. It was indeed a wonderful experience in terms of the associations I made, even if that week I was so extraordinarily depressed that I barely left my hospital room where two roommates slept at night, even missing several meals.
Nancy Pelosi, again, is not mentally-ill, nor is she "sort-of" disturbed. What you are witnessing not only in Pelosi's face but in Reps. Lee and Waters is a quality that is one and the same within the Far Left socialist fringe. Socialism is a cult just like libertarianism; it can be nothing more nor less. The same individuals at the University of Tennessee where I am an alumnus who were major Far Left activists as feminists or environmentalists often sported t-shirts of Che Guevara and even in a few cases, Mao Zedong. Professors and Lecturers who instructed many of my classes often behaved in similar manners; one years ago stated her firm conviction that the Democratic Party is not close to be far enough to the Left. She and I had it out even as I was 19 years old over this topic, but after a time or two of debating her, I chose to simply let her speak her peace as she in the end was the figure who would be determining my grades. A Sociology professor for two different courses required in class that we view the two Michael Moore films Roger and Me and Bowling for Columbine. He also required us for one class period to view a videotape where it only displayed Israel's bulldozing of selected settlements presumably in the Gaza Strip and likely the Golan Heights. I befriended the Sociology professor and he always found it fascinating to speak with me; he also was very supportive of my fight against bipolar disorder and OCD and always reassured me to come to him if I ever needed assistance or moral support. One other professor in the Sociology department I had also befriended stated that he considered himself a Communist, which did not surprise me. And it was not until the past year or so that I began cutting ties with many of my socialist acquaintances from my lifetime since it became abundantly clear that aging from childhood into our adult lifestyles caused us all to diverge in values and opinions too.
Pelosi's face often is reminiscent of another prominent Californian who was the leader of a major cult. You and I know him as Charles Manson. His vacant countenance and capacity to charm the world as Pelosi can do well are very similar to one another. Let me provide you a photograph of each side-by-side to demonstrate what it is I mean:
There is only one difference I will note between the two. While both are practically aligned with the stars as cultists or have cult-like personalities, Manson really is insane since it is true that Satanic emblems were often left behind when slaughter his victims with his gang. Pelosi, however, is a blind adherent to socialism and has mastered the craft of first passing legislation which enables its legal implementation, and then changing the rules within the Democratic Party's bylaws of attempting to secularize or implement Sharia law in America in order to acquire totalitarian power by democratically eliminating all political dissenters. To do as she does well in terms of deceiving the public into thinking she is perhaps on the cusp of senility simply provides her ammunition with what she wants. She wants the people to be apologists and to feel compassion - and there again I just stated that one word she among so many other Democrats are infamous for resorting to as a reason for shaming conservatives into voting or supporting her politics and the policies she champions. And the fact that she is willing to sell out her staunch radical feminist supporters in order to legally install Sharia law into our national law books is most disturbing, as I will provide you in closing the following video where she declares Hamas is a "humanitarian organization":
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