by Jim Marrs
Only three days after the Senate stopped ACORN funds, the House followed suit, voting 345–75 (the “nays” being all Democrats) to deny the organization all federal funds. “ACORN has violated serious federal laws, and today the House voted to ensure that taxpayer dollars would no longer be used to fund this corrupt organization,” remarked Republican representative Eric Cantor of Virginia.
Most caring Americans agree that although it is noble to try to help the poorer segments of our society, it is counterproductive, even outrageous, to support groups with taxpayer money who commit corrupt and unlawful acts as well as preach hatred of the United States, causing further division within the nation. This division plays right into the hands of the globalist fascists who, through their control of the mass media and party politics, placed Obama in office and were using his supporters to advance their socialist agenda.
TIPS AND OTHER SNOOPS
OBAMA’S CIVILIAN ARMY SCHEME is only the latest in attempts to recruit Americans to spy on their fellow Americans. In midsummer 2002, a program called TIPS (Terrorism Information and Prevention System) was launched by President George W. Bush. The program was part of a larger program called the “Citizen Corps,” which was a program first created by President Bush to mobilize the nation’s citizenry against national security threats. On its website, TIPS describes itself as “a national system for concerned workers to report suspicious activity.” In published material, TIPS advocates said the program was to be administered by the Justice Department, coordinated by FEMA, and operated under the Homeland Security Department. It would involve “millions of American workers who, in the daily course of their work, are in a unique position to see potentially unusual or suspicious activity in public places.” This, of course, referred to postal carriers, meter readers, repair personnel, or anyone who might have an ax to grind against their neighbors. The program was quickly dropped, however, following public outrage, and after the U.S. Postal Service stated that it would not participate in the snitch program.
The U.S. Postal Service stated it had “been approached by Homeland Security regarding Operation TIPS; however, it was decided that the Postal Service and its letter carriers would not be participating in the program at this time.” Nothing was mentioned about whether or not individual carriers could join on their own or if “at this time” left open the possibility that the postal service may participate in TIPS in the future. Despite the postal service’s public reticence, some researchers believe that postal service employees may still be reporting suspicious behavior. It is just not done officially.
Other critics immediately compared the TIPS plan to the Nazi Gestapo, the former East German secret police service, and to Fidel Castro’s Committee for the Defense of the Revolution (CDR), an organization established by Castro on September 28, 1960. With the CDR, Cubans are encouraged to spy on and report any “counterrevolutionary” behavior by their neighbors. An estimated eight million Cubans belong to more than 121,000 committees in the CDR system.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and other public watchdog organizations reacted negatively to Operation TIPS, saying it would create an atmosphere in which Americans would be spying on one another. “The administration apparently wants to implement a program that will turn local cable or gas or electrical technicians into government-sanctioned Peeping Toms,” declared ACLU legislative counsel Rachel King. Of TIPS, Rutherford Institute executive director John Whitehead said, “This is George Orwell’s ‘1984.’ It is an absolutely horrible and very dangerous idea. It’s making Americans into government snoops. President Bush wants the average American to do what the FBI should be doing. In the end, though, nothing is going to prevent terrorists from crashing airplanes into buildings.”
Even former Homeland Security chief Tom Ridge was forced to back-pedal over the TIPS organization, saying, “The last thing we want is Americans spying on Americans.”
Although Ridge still vouched for the TIPS program, the Citizen Corps softened both its language and details about the program after it began to make a national stir.
In July 2002, the website stated Operation TIPS “will be a nationwide program giving millions of American truckers, letter carriers, train conductors, ship captains, utility employees and others a formal way to report suspicious terrorist activity. Operation TIPS, a project of the U.S. Department of Justice, will begin as a pilot program in 10 cities…. Operation TIPS, involving 1 million workers in the pilot stage, will be a national reporting system that allows workers, whose routines make them well-positioned to recognize unusual events, to report suspicious activity…. Everywhere in America, a concerned worker can call a toll-free number and be connected directly to a hotline routing calls to the proper law enforcement agency or other responder organizations when appropriate.”
In an Orwellian act of word changing, by early August 2002, the list of occupations that would participate in TIPS was dropped and the words “suspicious terrorist activity” and “unusual events…suspicious activity” were changed to “suspicious and potentially terrorist-related activity” and “Potentially unusual or suspicious activity in public places.”
The TIPS program was merely an official way for Americans to snoop, and further what author Jim Redden called modern society’s “snitch culture.” From the schoolkid Drug Abuse Resistance Education (DARE) program to professional finger pointers such as the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), more and more Americans were being encouraged to spy and report on one another. It’s one thing to keep an eye out for strangers in the neighborhood and quite another to constantly snoop on the activities of neighbors.
Many people believe that neighborhood snooping went out with Bush-era fearmongering. However, these people should know that the Major Cities Chiefs Association, which includes police chiefs from sixty-three of the largest departments in the United States and Canada, endorsed a program called iWATCH during an annual conference in Denver on October 3, 2009. Los Angeles police chief William Bratton, whose department developed the iWATCH program, called it “the 21st century version of Neighborhood Watch.” The program’s watchword is “If you see something, say something.”
As a policy counsel for the ACLU and a former FBI agent who worked terrorism cases, Mike German was unenthusiastic about iWATCH despite assurances that the program would not infringe on individual liberties. German told the Associated Press he suspects people will fall back on personal biases and stereotypes of what they think a terrorist should look like when deciding to report someone to the police. He said, “That just plays into the negative elements of society and doesn’t really help the situation.”
There have been many cases where innocent people have had their lives unsettled, ruined, or even lost due to egregious snitching. Although these stories are usually not played up in the corporate mass media, the purchase of “snitch” information continues to be a mainstay of federal law enforcement. In 1994, the DEA spent $31.7 million and Customs spent $16.5 million to pay thousands of informants.
Although accurate numbers are hard to come by, former Miami police supervisor and DEA special agent Dennis G. Fitzgerald’s book Informants and Undercover Investigations reported that a 2005 inspector general’s report revealed the DEA has about four thousand “confidential sources” at hand on any given day. They may be paid up to $100,000 a year for their information, although their paycheck must be approved by DEA headquarters.
The FBI can pay up to $25,000 to informants for information on serious crimes. Under a program called “Rewards for Justice,” both the U.S. State and Treasury departments can offer money to informants for information leading to the arrest and conviction of any terrorist or terrorist group. By September 2005, more than $50 million had been paid out from this fund. One can only imagine how the lure of $100,000 to a million dollars simply to find some sort of terrorist activity could highly induce a greedy person to make false claims.
ASSET FORFEITURE FUND
MUCH OF THE MONEY paid to governme
nt informants comes from the Asset Forfeiture Fund (AFF), a controversial program that confiscates real assets, such as property, homes, cars, aircraft, boats, jewelry, financial instruments, and even whole businesses, from those convicted of a crime. In 2005 alone, $614.5 million worth of assets were deposited into the AFF.
Under the AFF, there are two types of forfeiture—criminal and civil. In a criminal forfeiture case, the defendant is always innocent until proven guilty, and it is the responsibility of the prosecution to prove that the defendant should forfeit his or her property. In civil forfeiture proceedings, the court presumes the defendant is guilty and the property owner has the burden of proving the property was not involved in any wrongdoing. Critics have complained that the AFF can seize an innocent person’s property even if it is used by someone else to commit a crime without the owner’s permission or knowledge. Forfeiture laws have now been used by local law enforcement in connection with local issues, including unsafe housing, prostitution, and even drunk driving.
The AFF’s property seizures prompted chairman of the House Judiciary Committee Henry Hyde to state, “They don’t have to convict you. They don’t even have to charge you with a crime. But they have your property.” Bob Barr, a Libertarian Party presidential nominee in 2008, noted, “In many jurisdictions, it has become a monetary tail wagging the law enforcement dog.” The practice of confiscating property has prompted protests from civil libertarians and attorneys, but in today’s fearful society, the protests have not worked.
CHEMTRAILS
IN APRIL 2009, PRESIDENT Obama’s science adviser John P. Holdren stated publicly that the federal government was going to increase geoengineering, perhaps to include spraying “pollutants” into the upper atmosphere to retard global warming. Some suspicious researchers saw this as the first public acknowledgment of what many people believe is a controversial aerial spraying program known as Chemtrails. Holdren gave no details on what the “pollutant” particles might be, nor did he explain how they would be dispersed into the sky. Some scientists, including the late Dr. Edward Teller, the “father of the hydrogen bomb,” a founder of the “Star Wars” missile defense system, and the inspiration for the character Dr. Strangelove in Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 film of that name, have proposed using balloons or military aircraft to seed the sky with millions of tons of sulfur or heavy metals to create a cloud cover to deflect sun rays and prevent further heating of the Earth. Some scientists warned such a program would turn blue skies milky white and perhaps cause droughts and further ozone depletion.
Holdren conceded the possibility of “grave side effects,” but said, “We might get desperate enough to want to use it.”
Many researchers and bloggers believed that Holdren’s proposed program has been secretly under way since about 1997. “Reports of chemtrails, jet plumes emitted from planes that hang in the air for hours and do not dissipate like condensation trails, often blanketing the sky in criss-cross patterns, have increased dramatically over the last 10 years. Many have speculated that they are part of a government program to alter climate, inoculate humans against certain pathogens, or even to toxify humans as part of a population reduction agenda,” stated one such article entitled “Weather Wars and Chemtrails.” “The project is closely tied to an idea by Nobel Prize winner Paul Crutzen, who ‘proposed sending aircraft 747s to dump huge quantities of sulfur particles into the far-reaches of the stratosphere to cool down the atmosphere.’ Such programs merely scratch the surface of what is likely to be a gargantuan and overarching black-budget funded project to geo-engineer the planet, with little or no care for the unknown environmental consequences this could engender.”
Obama augmented this potential public hazard by appointing people to the Department of Agriculture who were fully aligned with genetic engineering, the use of fluoride, and the irradiation of food. As usual, this was done in the name of the public health.
GLOBAL SWARMING
ADDING TO CONTROVERSIES OVER the environment was the fact that the scientific community hasn’t even reached a consensus about whether or not the planet is warming. As it stands, scientists may be arguing forever. Contradicting reports further complicated the debate. In the spring of 2009, news headlines proclaimed, “Antarctic Ice Melting Faster Than Expected.” Only one week later, there were headlines reading, “Antarctic Ice Spreading.” Both events were blamed on an increase in man-made gases. Clearly something is happening to the planet, because data continue to indicate that something is quickly changing the planet’s Arctic regions. The latest satellite observations of sea ice in the Artic show the ice cover appears to be shrinking and the ice cap is getting smaller, and thinner as well. The ice has been receding more in the summers and not growing back to its previous size and thickness during the winters.
But what if it’s the case that politics, and not solid science, is behind the endless global warming debate? The debate intensified in 2006 with the release of former vice president Al Gore’s documentary An Inconvenient Truth. Since its release Gore has traveled the world forcefully arguing that human-generated carbon emissions from automobiles, aircrafts, and factories are the cause of the earth’s warming trend.
But Gore’s critics have pointed out that huge profits can be made from being a global warming alarmist and that Gore heads a firm that is in line to reap the benefits of Gore’s eco-conservatism. According to online reports, Gore helped found Generation Investment Management, which invests in solar, wind, and other projects that reduce energy consumption around the globe. Critics claim that as chairman of the firm, Gore stands to profit handsomely from his global environmental crusade.
With great irony, the Tennessee Center for Policy Research (TCPR) criticized Gore by pointing out that Gore’s Tennessee home used “Twenty times as much electricity as the average household nationwide.” Gore supporters pointed out that Gore’s “home” of twenty rooms needed special security measures and that the Gore family bought energy produced from renewable sources, such as wind and solar. However, the TCPR reported that, according to its analysis, the Gores still consumed 10 percent more yearly energy than before their home was equipped with eco-friendly energy-saving devices. Despite news reports on his home as an “energy hog” by Fox News and BusinessWeek, a Gore spokeswoman defended his lifestyle by countering that his investments in renewable energy compensated for his power consumption.
When Texas Republican representative Joe Barton tried to question Al Gore’s carbon emissions statistics during testimony before the House Energy and Commerce Committee, the former vice president compared scientists who question global warming to indicted stock swindler Bernie Madoff.
“It is important to look at sources of science you rely on,” Gore told Barton. “With all due respect, I believe you have relied on people you have trusted who have given you bad information. I don’t blame the investors who trusted Bernie Madoff but he gave them bad information.”
Confusion over the global warming issue’s legitimacy continued with the news that, in August 2009, the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (CRU) admitted it had destroyed the raw data for its global surface temperature research because of an alleged lack of storage space. CRU data served as the foundation for several major international studies claiming that the earth’s global warming crisis is a real issue. These studies were used to gain support for the cap-and-trade legislation passed by Congress in mid-2009, officially called the American Clean Air and Security Act. “CRU’s destruction of data, however, severely undercuts the credibility of those studies,” stated a news release from the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), a Washington-based public interest group dedicated to free enterprise and limited government.
In October 2009, the advocacy group petitioned the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to review its policies based on the CRU research. CEI general counsel Sam Kazman said, “EPA is resting its case on international studies that in turn relied on CRU data. But CRU’s suspicious destruction of its original d
ata, disclosed at this late date, makes that information totally unreliable. If EPA doesn’t reexamine the implications of this, it’s stumbling blindly into the most important regulatory issue we face.”
Some critics claim that Gore is operating on bad information as well and note that the current warming trend may include our entire solar system—polar caps on Mars are shrinking, ice is melting on the moons of Jupiter, and the outer planets appear more luminescent, which is an indication that they too are warming. Speculation over why the solar system is warming systemwide ranges from lack of sunspot activity to the approach of some celestial object.
If the entire solar system is warming, then this theory calls into question the idea that global warming on Earth is only induced by humans. On May 19, 2009, record low spring temperatures were recorded in twenty-eight states. “If there had been record warmth in 28 states, you would have seen ‘we’re-causing-global-warming’ headlines plastered across the front page of almost every newspaper in the country, and TV hosts would have gleefully announced the dire news…. But had you even heard about this?” asked author and attorney Alfred Lambremont Webre who, along with former Fairchild Industries corporate manager Dr. Carol Rosin, founded the Institute for Cooperation in Space.
Proponents on both sides of issues such as the global warming argument accuse each other of using fearmongering tactics to impose a police state on the public.
The federal EPA pointed to the combustion of fossil fuels in vehicles, gas and coal plants, and industry as the world’s largest source of carbon dioxide (CO2), or greenhouse gas, emissions. This conclusion remains controversial. In December 2009, the EPA went so far as to declare carbon dioxide—a product of normal human expiration (we all breath out CO2)—a health hazard, paving the way for more regulation of emissions. Adding to the argument that the government is using fearmongering to achieve control over a dumbed-down public, Richard S. Lindzen, a professor of atmospheric science at MIT, pointed out that CO2 is not a pollutant. “[I]t’s a product of every living creature’s breathing, it’s the product of all plant respiration, it is essential for plant life and photosynthesis, it’s a product of all industrial burning, it’s a product of driving—I mean, if you ever wanted a leverage point to control everything from exhalation to driving, this would be a dream. So it has a kind of fundamental attractiveness to bureaucratic mentality,” he said.