By Dr. Ellen Brown

Global Research, June 25, 2008

“If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all property until their children wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs.”

– Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Treasury Secretary Albert Gallatin (1802)

Jefferson had it right. More than 1.5 million homeowners are expected to enter foreclosure this year, and about half of them are expected to have their homes repossessed. If the dire consequences Jefferson warned of 200 years ago have been slow in coming, it is because they have been concealed by what Jerome a Paris calls the Anglo Disease – “the highly unequal economy whereby the rich and the financial sector . . . capture most of the income but hide it by providing cheap debt to the middle classes so that they can continue to spend.” He calls “finance” the “cannibalistic” sector in today’s economy. Writing in The European Tribune this month, he states:

“[O]ne of the more attractive features of the financial world, for its promoters, is its ability to concentrate huge fortunes in a small number of hands, and promote this as a good thing (these people are said to be creating wealth, rather than capturing it). . . . [O]f course, the reality is that such wealth concentration is created by squeezing the rest, as is obvious in the stagnation of incomes for most in the middle and lower rungs of society. This is not so much wealth creation as wealth redistribution, from the many to the few. But what has made this unequality . . . tolerable is that the financial world itself was able to provide a convenient smokescreen, in the form of cheap debt, provided in abundance to all. The wealthy used it to grab real assets in funny money, and the rest were kindly allowed to keep on spending by tapping their future income rather than their insufficient current one; in a nutshell, the debt bubble hid the class warfare waged by the rich against everybody else . . . .”1

Full article at:

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=9454

I checked her family’s bio. Her dad and his family is from Scranton, PA, he and one of Hillary’s brothers played football at Penn State, and her dad served in the navy during wwii rising to become a Chief Petty Officer(a senior NCO in other services). This goes over well with blue-collar men IMO. She’s been savvy to push this as far as she has from a political view. On ethnic politics on the other hand, maybe too far…

RE: Bill Clinton & the 1996 Elections

“… The Clinton sellout to Gingrich and the Republicans was the most selfish deal that William Jefferson Clinton has ever cut. It was selfish because its primary purpose was to guarantee Clinton a victory over a hapless opponent whom Clinton was going to destroy anyway. The deal did so not only by positioning Clinton further to the right with its tough approach to welfare and immigration, it did so by taking away criticism by Bob Dole that Clinton couldn’t work with a Republican Congress.
But the Clinton sellout was also shortsighted because it virtually guaranteed that Clinton would be a lame duck President thwarted by a Republican Congress for the rest of his tenure in office. Indeed, as history has already shown us, the Clinton-Gingrich compromise was not an example of good things to come under a working divided government–as it was so lavishly advertised at the time. Rather, it was simply an aberrant compromise struck in the heart of a campaign by two men– one desperate(Newt) and one selfish(Bill) who saw that deal in their own self-interest.
… Having gotten this off my chest, let me now turn to the other thing Bill Clinton did to virtually insure that the Democrats would not take back Congress from the GOP. This was to suck every available Democratic fund raising dollar–leaving nothing but crumbs for many critical House & Senate races….”

http://www.hipcast.com/export/P101b6233f1ed4af842be7c678c65619cbFh9S1REYmZ2.mp3

Very wide-ranging interview, including the Glass-Steagall Act, food politics, and more.

MODERATOR: Go here and read.

Oil goes up at least a dollar a day. Things are happening fast. Our work in Haiti could be in real trouble. But….we still got alot done this month and brought home 3 terribly sick kids, one of which we couldn’t get to eat. The one that wouldn’t eat was gender non-specific and had cleft pallet so bad it just had a hole in it’s face. I cite no gender because with cases like these you really don’t know (the doctors called the baby “Shim;” couldn’t tell whether a she or a him. Now I hear that this child will probably pass soon because no-one can get the child to eat significantly and a feeding tube or central line may not be possible. Speaking of “central line” in a different context, my wife says that this child has alot of central line problems, ie. spinal. Shouldn’t bore you all with this. The world is of course full, way too full, of such.

The New York Times lectured Haiti on April 18 that “Haiti, its agriculture industry in shambles, needs to better feed itself.” Unfortunately, the article did not talk at all about one of the main causes of the shortages — the fact that the U.S. and other international financial bodies destroyed Haitian rice farmers to create a major market for the heavily subsidized rice from U.S. farmers. This is not the only cause of hunger in Haiti and other poor countries, but it is a major force.

Thirty years ago, Haiti raised nearly all the rice it needed. What happened?

FULL

Corporate goes against small producers, via local ordinance.

And, there’s peak potash:

The magnitude and growth rate of demand from China still drives global commodity prices. But in the fertilizer sector, where China this month has had to agree to a price for potash more than double what it paid last year, the inflexibility of Chinese demand for food has made it difficult for the country’s negotiators to hang on to the commercial advantages they are accustomed to enjoying from being the world’s largest consumer.

FULL

Finally, there is China & Peak Oil

You yourselves recently repented and did what was right in my sight by proclaiming liberty to one another, and you made a covenant before me in the house that is called by my name; but then you turned around and profaned my name when each of you took back your male and female slaves, whom you had set free according to their desire, and you brought them again into subjection to be your slaves. Therefore, thus says the Lord: You have not obeyed me by granting a release to your neighbors and friends; I am going to grant a release to you, says the Lord–a release to the sword, to pestilence, and to famine.

- Jeremiah 34:15-17