Editorial Columns - Year 2002

The folks who denuded the Constitution and chipped away some U.S. sovereignty with the World Trade Organization (WTO) and NAFTA are on the verge of extending these trade concepts to encompass more than 30 nations in the Western Hemisphere. They add new propaganda twists to their marketing techniques almost every day.

Trade is now being sold by President Bush and his establishment policy-makers in the name of morality and democracy, patriotism, peace, the economy and jobs, and you name it. Like the other two trade pacts, it is billed as a panacea for all ills.

Why it will even consider unemployment and environmental concerns for offending trade partners - consider -- and maybe invoke fines for such offenses, but it will not apply anything as harsh as sanctions. Heaven forbid!

In addition to the new twists, the same old tired arguments of the past are repeated over and over in the new sales pitches. The new trade pact like the old is supposed to cut poverty and benefit everyone with practically no limit to growth, education, better standards of living an on and on.

But some experts like Former Harvard Professor David C. Korten aren't buying the administration arguments. Korten points out, for example, that trade organizations such as the WTO hand down decisions allegedly in the interests of international trade but which ''are primarily the interests of transnational corporations,'' that take precedence over everything including local interests and local laws.

Benefits for corporations and other downside results are skipped over or played down in the grandiose free trade sales pitches. They include adverse effects on local communities, culture and sovereignty; establishment of corporate colonialism with responsibility to no one; nullification of anti-trust laws; reducing third world countries to hopeless debt and depriving the public of meaningful participation in global or hemispheric policies, and inhumane sweat shops, to name a few.

Korten has written a new book When Corporations Rule the World (Kumarian Press. And Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc.). He traces the recent trade pacts like WTO and NAFTA back to the Bretton Woods agreement of 1944 in which the IMF, World Bank, and GATT emerged. But the agreement was flawed from the beginning, he asserts in that it assumed that economic growth and enhanced world trade would benefit everyone, and that economic growth would not be constrained by the limits of the planet.

The result has been that the agreement ''…empowered the super rich to lay claim to the world's wealth at the expenses of other people, other species and the viability of the planet's ecosystem.''

The House by a one-vote margin has given Bush ''fast track'' approval to negotiate trade pacts with Pan-America. That means Congress cannot amend the pacts Bush negotiates but can only approve or disapprove them. The Constitution specifically gives Congress the power ''to regulate commerce with foreign nations…" So, this is more usurpation of power by the executive.

Will he or his successor be asking the Senate to forgo its constitutional obligation of ''advice and consent'' in approving treaties? Could happen.

House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.), who seems to be a rubber stamp for Bush programs, said a negative vote about negotiating trade authority would undermine Bush in war time. That's another twist to the argument. How many wars have been fought and won without fast trade authority? Hastert also backs Bush's stand on secret energy program negotiations.

But Trade Representative Robert Zoellick was just short of ballistic with an argument that compared a vote on the proposal to a test of patriotism. That drew prompt and harsh criticism from Rep. Charles Rangel (d-N. Y.) and a retreat by Zoellick. The president boarded the big, costly (to taxpayers) Air Force One plane at his disposal and took to the heartlands to lobby for the trade package.

He pushed it as a way out of the recession; said foreign countries wouldn't negotiate seriously without it; it would help farmers, and it would create more jobs. If Congress is ruled out of the decision-making process, then the question arises, why doesn't the president just call for chucking the Constitution and making the country an empire with him as emperor, of course.

The Dallas Morning News, which has gone about as extravagant as Zoellick on the issue, advised in an editorial that Bush should stress ''that trade offers the best hope of eliminating poverty…and that economic interdependence among nations promotes peace.''

These arguments won't wash, and are not supported by evidence. As for promoting peace hear what former Havard political scientist Samuel P. Huntington says about it in his The Clash of Civilizations. He points out, for example, that in 1913 international trade was at record highs just before nations began slaughtering each other in unprecedented numbers. ''If international commerce at that level could not prevent war, when can it?'' Huntington questioned. ''The evidence simply does not support the…assumption that commerce promotes peace,'' he adds.

Corporations, however, will be able to find cheap labor if the new Pan-American agreement is approved. President Bush, like Bill Clinton, is lobbying hard for it. After all, why should the American people's representatives in Congress be involved in such heady affairs? He and his establishment friends want total control, and the Senate appears ready to give it to him.

Bush has decided to print out the agreement for everybody to see, since some citizens protested the secrecy of the other pacts which few, even Congressmen, read and fewer understood. It will be like letting you read the fine print of your insurance policies or the U.S. tax code. Reading it will have nothing to do with the administration of it anyhow. That will be done behind closed doors. But it's better than nothing.

Politicians like Bush and Clinton have been cozying up to Latinos who have been crossing the U.S. border en mass and now are a political force and will soon outnumber whites. If you have a strong stomach you can hear the result of this development by tuning into some of Bush's Saturday morning radio broadcasts. He's doing them in both English and Spanish.

That may be an insult to a lot of Americans, but remember one-vote George doesn't want to become one-term George and is already running again. But if foreigners want to come to this country, why should they not learn the language? Why should taxpayers pay for having everything printed in Spanish as well as English? A large percentage of the Spanish-speaking people are in this country illegally anyway.

But politicians are not doing anything to stop them with enforceable immigration laws that are fair to all countries as well as U.S. taxpayers. There has been some added scrutiny since Sept. 11, but that also applies in several other areas as well as airports. As soon as many Mexicans cross the border mostly illegally, they start looking into the possibility of getting in on U.S. welfare benefits at the expense of U.S. taxpayers. Politicians get them registered so they can vote, and even churches get in the act.

How long will it be before the fast-growing Asian population also will want everything printed in Chinese or Japanese? And why are the Germans, French and other European groups being ignored in favor of Latinos? Could bloc voting have anything to do with it?

Just because Mexico is a border country does not qualify her for becoming the 51st state. It might be better to send foreign aid than to have unlimited border crossings, which is practically the case now. Despite the outcome of the battle of San Jacinto, the Mexicans are winning the country anyway by taking over southern states like Texas, California and Arizona while the political class tip toes around the illegal immigrant issue to amass votes.

Georgie Anne Geyer in a Dallas Morning News column on 1/20/02 quoted some startling immigration figures. There are 8 to 9 million illegal aliens in the country; 314,000 of which remained after being deported. Of the total 6,000 are Middle Easterners. Geyer criticizes the failure of our immigration system and liberals such as Sen. Edward Kennedy who were responsible for the 1965 reform law. But she also notes that just the week before Sept. 11, ''…the Bush administration was ready to declare amnesty for illegal aliens…''

The cry of the so-called Globalists is protectionism for anyone who wants fair trade or fair immigration policies that disagree with their agenda. It's comparable to being called a racist if you don't like Jesse Jackson, the hypocrite, (I don't) or disagree with the views of someone or organization that happens to have a different ethnicity. Bush is now alluding to new protectionism.

The old protectionism argument goes back to the Great Depression for which the liberals used as blame for the nation's economic downfall. But several historians outside the elite camp lay the blame for the economic disaster on a conspiracy of world bankers rather than protectionism.

Bush is a member of the establishment ruled by such organizations as the Order of Skull & Bones, to which he, his father and grand-father, belonged; and the Council on Foreign Relations; the Trilateral Commission; Bilderbergs and related groups. The propaganda emanating from Washington in favor of these trade agreements, which are a boon for corporations and a detriment to U.S. workers, the environment and sovereignty would make Paul Josef Goebbles look like an amateur in the heyday of his career.

The establishment dailies like The New York Times and The Dallas Morning News, to name a couple, are quick to spread the party line. The News writes editorials and slants its stories on the subject. As an example, Jim Landers, its trade reporter and a member of CFR, wrote in covering the recent meeting in Canada that the CFR was a nonpartisan organization research center.

Just because it bills itself as nonpartisan, reporters shouldn't take that at face value. Maybe Landers believes the People's Republic of China is truly a people's republic, or that the Federal Reserve Board is truly federal and has reserves. Maybe Landers should ponder that if the CFR is nonpartisan, why has it infiltrated government and run U.S. foreign policy for the past 80 or so years?

And why do all the establishment people like Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, Trade Rep Robert Zollic, Dick Chaney and other cabinet members belong to this so-called ''non-partisan'' organization. When did the CFR ever support anything but globalization and an infringement on U.S. sovereignty? The late historian, Carroll Quigley, called the Milner Group in England, from which the CFR originated, a conspiracy that almost destroyed Western Civilization. (For more on these organizations, click on ''Terms and Organizations.'')

Immigration, like trade, should also be enforced and be based on fairness and not be one-sided as our trade is with China, Japan and several other countries. Look at the U.S. trade deficit, and it will be hard to find any fair trade practices, especially with China and Japan where the United States runs its largest deficits.

In the name of brevity, I'll bust this opus into two parts and in the second part look a little more closely at the opposite side of some of the propaganda being used to promote trade as a panacea to cure all that's bad in the world.

President Bush and his one-world trade-cures-all-ills establishment friends cite NAFTA as the success story and prototype in selling the new trade initiative for nations in the Western Hemisphere.

From Bush and his Trade Representative Robert Zoellic and other proponents of the establishment party line nothing but plusses in the form of jobs, democracy, morality, poverty elimination and good will has emanated from NAFTA. The same will come from the new or Quebec agreement, the ceaseless propaganda goes. They never mention the benefits transnational corporations receive, or the downside effects of NAFTA.

They also never mentioned that the Business Rountable, whose members include the heads of the nation's largest corporations, banks, insurance, retail and transportation companies, set up a front organization (USA*NAFTA) to lobby for NAFTA early on. Just like the present sales pitch, they said in their propaganda barrage that NAFTA would provide better paying jobs, stop immigration from Mexico and raise environmental standards. Clearly, none of the above has happened.

This is the same crowd under a different party label that brought you the World Trade Organization (WTO), the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank. But before buying into the Quebec agreement a little closer look at these organizations and their influence on the world economic scene should be of concern.

So a good place to start is the Bretton Woods agreement in 1944 that grew out of 1939 discussions under the aegis of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) (click on Terms & Organizations for background on CFR). Out of Bretton Woods headed by then Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau came the International Monetary Fund, World Bank and the later creation of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), from which the World Trade Organization finally emerged.

The concept was flawed from the beginning claims David C. Korten, author and former Harvard Business School professor because Morgenthau stated ''that prosperity has no fixed limits,'' and assumed that economic growth and enhanced world trade would benefit everyone. Another assumption was that economic growth would not be constrained by the limits of the planet.

Korten reaches this conclusion about the policies advanced by the Bretton Woods institutions: ''They…have inexorably empowered the super rich to lay claim to the world's wealth at the expense of other people, other species, and the viability of the planet's ecosystem.'' He calls for dismantling these institutions.

In The Case Against the Global Economy (Sierra Club Books, San Francisco) 43 writers including Korten charge that free trade and economic globalization are producing opposite results from what had been promised, including harm to the environment and the effects on local communities, culture and sovereignty.

Take culture as an example. Who wants a homogenized world culture? When you go to some remote corner of the world, do you want to look for a MacDonald's, Wal-Mart or some other discount retail outfit that you can see at home, or do you want to see the natives in their natural habitat? If the Good Lord had wanted a homogenized world culture, surely he would have provided for a common language. But he didn't. Instead, he deliberately scrabbled the language at the Tower of Babble.

Here's some examples cited by Korten in his new book When Corporations Rule the World (Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc.) of what globalization, or ''globalony,'' as some wit probably aptly termed it,
has done to local cultures and people:

In Costa Rica the IMF and World bank shifted the economic incentives away from small farms toward large estates producing for export. Result, an increase in crime and dependency on imports to meet basic food requirements as well as an increase in foreign debt. The same strategy in Brazil displaced 28 million people in a 20-year span to 1980. And in India, Korten says large-scale development projects have displaced 20 million people over a forty-year period. In Thailand, ten million rural people face eviction from the land to make way for commercial tree farmers.

NAFTA, which the Bush Administration is touting as an example for success and a prototype for the new Quebec agreement, is displacing a million farm families in Mexico. As an example of how U.S. sovereignty is depleted in these trade pacts that favor transnational corporations, Jim Hightower, former Texas Agricultural Commissioner, cites a good one in his book If Gods had Meant us to Vote They Would Have Given us Candidates.

It involved a Mississippi funeral director whose business was damaged by the unscrupulous behavior of a large Canadian funeral home conglomerate and who was awarded $100 million in damages. Under Chapter 11 of NAFTA the Canadian group sued the U.S. Government, charging the Mississippi court system expropriated the assets of its investors and harmed their future profits. Hightower explains what this means:

A foreign corporation can come to your state, attempt to monopolize your market illegally
get caught and convicted, agree to a cash settlement - then, citing NATA, claim that the state court
has ''expropriated its investors' funds and therefore American taxpayers must pay the cost of the
settlement plus other financial setbacks it claims the court verdict caused.

One authority was quoted as saying a victory for the Canadian firm ''would completely undermine the American civil justice system.'' Numerous other cases in the WTO could do the same thing, and the new Quebec pact will not be immune to such sovereignty-busting cases.

David Morris one of the writers in The Case Against the Global Economy, satirizes one of the absurdities of free trade with a story about toothpicks and chopsticks. Japan, with little wood, became proficient at making toothpicks from imported wood and oil and shipped them to the United States. A Minnesota company produces a billion disposable chopsticks a year to sell to Japan. ''...I see two ships passing one another…one carries little pieces of Minnesota wood bound for Japan; the other carries little pieces of wood bound for Minnesota,'' writes Morris. '' Such is the logic of free trade.''

The Bush Administration is not only repeating the existing stale and faulty logic to sell global trade, he has introduced morality, democracy, patriotism and economic progress into the pitch. ''When we open trade, we open minds,'' Bush said in pushing normal trade relations with China despite its growing belligerency. That includes establishing two electronic listening posts in Cuba to gather intelligence from the United States and the shipment of explosives to the island nation on America's doorstep.

Robert Zoellick, the U.S. trade representative, visited China in June, 2001 to reach agreement on several issues that might hurt Beijing's entry into WTO. That communist nation is now a member thanks largely to U.S. efforts. And all this presents another question in logic. Why should free trade ''open minds'' and raise all economic boats and allegedly build democracy in China when it won't do the same in Cuba, Libya, Iran and Iraq, as examples? In those countries the U.S. applies sanctions while in Communist China it promotes trade at any cost.

And what is moral about trade that results in labor conditions of 12-hour days with no days off in some places where workers aren't even allowed to talk to each other; or arrangements akin to servitude in many locations around the globe and where child labor also is exploited? Did you ever look at the labels on clothing you see in most U.S. retail outlets that say ''made in'' Saipan, South Africa, China, Hondurous, Bangladish or India and why the companies had to go that far off shore to take advantage of destitute laborers?

And how about the enmity that accrues from trying to foist the affluent Western culture on remote third world countries with their own religions and mores? Some experts claim this was a factor in fomenting the hatred of the United States by radical Islamists like Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda network. How many other nations and groups have been offended by the cultural clash is not known, but upheavals in their normal way of life as a result of the all-out trade offensive is evident.

U.S. hegemony rooted in the policy of globalism that is anchored in cure-all trade expansion is resented by many countries and cultures, especially Islam, which considers it a threat to its security. In any event, the nation led by the same policy makers since at least the end of World War I have made a 180-degree turn from the advise given by the founding President George Washington to stay out of foreign entanglements.

It is time to consider some of the adverse effects of these cure-for-all-ills trade pitches, rather than take for granted the rosy propaganda being disseminated by the one-world elites who are running foreign policy. It wasn't long ago that they pulled out all the stops to get WTO and NAFTA approved with ex-presidents Bush I, Carter and Ford descending on the Clinton White House to lobby for the effort. It was followed by the big push of all these ex-president plus Bush II, then a candidate, to promote Permanent Normal Trade Relations (PNTR) with China.

U.S. trade with China and Japan is all in favor of those countries from a dollar standpoint and, many pundits submit, from a foreign policy standpoint as well. Consider the lost jobs and security in the form of high tech shipments, especially to China. The latest figures for November, 2002, show a one-month trade deficit with China of $7.75 billion and $5.87 billion for Japan, and these were down slightly because of the economic slump.

The policy makers told us that PNTR was supposed to promote democratization, human rights, free enterprise and the national interests of the country. The falsity of these claims have already been proved. Five will get you ten that more proof will be forthcoming, if any more is needed.

There is a major squabble raging in academy over the rules historians should follow in
chronicling the past. Too bad the academy doesn't get just as riled up over history being revised or not written at all because of the elite power structure that prohibits it.

Some historians charge their works can't get printed, or that they can't get to the proper sources to get the truth because of control by the historical establishment or tax-haven foundations that support selective research. One even charges that a former Harvard president approved an order to have his book burned in Germany.

The controversy arose over the failure of Stephen E. Ambrose to slap quotes around a source in a few passages of a book where he gives clear credit to the author. The criticism here is not that Ambrose shouldn't obey the academic rules like everyone else. It's just that the academicians have their priorities skewed.

Their guns should be aimed at the sources who distort, revise, finance, publish dictate what historians can write and report instead of academic rules, well-meaning guides that they may be.

Ambrose, you may recall, wrote a two-volume history of Eisenhower and a three-volume book on Nixon and D-Day and a book about soldiers in World War II that won him fame and money, among others. The former professor at the University of New Orleans began to churn out works at a fast clip and claims the fast pace and not plagiarism was responsible for any slight deviation from the rules.

He said he thought the material in his current best seller, The Wild Blue was properly footnoted if some passages may not have been quoted in the text. He promised to make corrections and to put quotes around ''anything that comes out of a secondary work, always,'' according to a story in The New York Times.

Another subject brought into the hassle was whether scholarly works with all their appendices, notes, quotes, references and footnotes can be interesting story telling or boring chronicling . Speaking of footnotes, Harry S. Truman who professed to be a historian and wrote a 376-page book on American history, eschewed them with a passion. He included one footnote in his entire book and admitted frankly, ''I'm not much on footnotes. I like to read right along when I'm reading a book and not keep dropping my eyes down eight or ten inches all the time.''

H.S.T.'s. footnote incidentally named the 48 men who signed the Declaration of Independence with some elaboration about them. As for his creditability as a historian, Gore Vidal, who has written several historical novels and is a pretty good historian himself, has some dialogue in his The Golden Age in which a senator says of Truman: ''He's ignorant. He reads one history book and thinks he understands history. Everything's like a cartoon to him.''

Often one finds more history in a good historical novel than in the formal and more-often-than-not, boring history or text books of college professors. And it's a lot more entertaining.

For absolute boredom and a cure for insomnia, I recommend histories written by almost any one from Oxford University. I site Millenium by Felipe Fernandez-Armesto as exhibit No. One. Any history by Paul Johnson whether about Christianity, Jews, the United States or whatever also fits this category. And Johnson with all the formality of academia doesn't always get his facts straight.

As an example in his A history of the American People, Johnson states that since the days of Andrew Jackson Fort Knox gold has been counted annually by the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR).

Since I had read that even congressmen have not been able to get this information, my interest was piqued. So I called the DAR and found out that it wasn't even founded until 1890 - more than half a century after Jackson's tenure as president from 1829 to 1837.

During his tenure as chairman of the House Banking Committee, Congressman Louis T. McFadden would love to have had the gold count, especially when he was charging the Federal Reserve Board with depleting U.S. gold reserves with shipments overseas to England and France. There was no DAR or any other public count. Specifically, Johnson wrote that Jackson, ''…inaugurated an American tradition which continues to this day; every year, the Daughters of the American Revolution send a committee of ladies to visit the vaults of Fort Knox, to ensure that America's gold is still there.''

And if one wants to learn about the machinations that went on in forming the Federal Reserve Board by a group of private bankers and other misdeeds during the Wilson Administration, he won't find the answer by reading Johnson's history. Nor did he cover the secret way FDR manipulated the nation into World War II when he promised to keep it out, ''except in case of attack.'' The question is, did Roosevelt's tactics deliberately goad Japan into attacking at the cost of American lives?

Johnson doesn't address the subject in his 976-page opus with 83 pages of source notes, which apparently comply with the history rules of academia but leaves readers with a blank in World War II history and gives FDR a better historical image. Incidentally, there is no source note for the DAR reference.

The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) has been involved in running American foreign policy for about 80 years, but Johnson makes no mention of it, or of its affiliation with the Milner or Rhodes group in England and its appeasement policies that led to World War II.

Now, for a good example of a work that follows the rules of Academy but offers little entertainment in an attempt to deliver an obfuscated message, I recommend Jihad vs. McWorld by Benjamin R. Barber, a political scientist at Rutgers University.

Here is a 300-page opus choked with academic verbiage and a plethora of references to other works and scholars, a couple of appendices, 78 pages of notes and a blatant display of pedantry. Barber's message is that democracy is being undermined today by multinational corporations exporting fast music, fast computers and fast food (western culture, or his term for consumer capitalism, McWorld) and by Jihad, the resentment (from mild protests to deadly force) of tribes or groups against it.

Barber contends only some version of global civil society can counter the two opposite forces neither of which promote or are conducive to democracy.

But back to some examples of distorted history and why academia should give it as much attention as the rules of research and writing.

Eustice Mullins describes in detail the problems he had getting a publisher for his book that details the scheming that went on to establish the Federal Reserve System that gave control of the nation's money and credit to private bankers. In The Secrets of the Federal Reserve, Mullins said 18 publishers turned down the original book and that one told him frankly he doubted it would ever get published.

He also relates that James B. Conant, then High Commissioner in Germany and former President of Harvard University, approved an order to have his book burned in Germany.

Gary Allen, who wrote None Dare Call it Conspiracy and The Rockefeller File also faced obstacles in getting his works published. Allen, a history major at Stanford University, noted the slanting and omissions of history through his independent research.

Any college graduate that has taken history and continued to have an interest in it and read it after graduation must be aware that he did not get the unadulterated facts while a student. The facts are available only through courageous writers who are willing to sacrifice their careers and be castigated for trying to set the record straight.

One such historian is Antony C. Sutton, former research Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University and former economics professor of California State University. He charges there is an Establishment history that dominates history textbooks, trade publishing, the media and library shelves.

''Woe betide any book or author that falls outside the official guidelines. Foundation support is not there. Publishers get cold feet. Distribution is hit and miss, or non-existent. He points out the Rockefeller Foundation paid for an official history of World War II to ensure the official line dominates.

Sutton's contract was not renewed at Stanford when he exposed the support given Communist Russia by the Rockefellers and other elite insiders. His book National Suicide details this with abundant facts.

Sutton wrote an in-depth study of the Order of Skull & Bones in a book that is critical of the presidency of George H. Bush and his father, Prescott Bush, both of whom belonged to Bones, as does George W. Bush, the president. Sutton claims Bones is the most powerful of the elite groups such as the Bilderbergs, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Trilateral Commission, all of which overlap in the elite establishment that rules the nation.

In his book, America's Secret Establishment, Sutton wrote. ''…It can be argued that our Western history is every bit as distorted, censored, and largely useless as that of Hitler's Germany or the Soviet Union or Communist China. No Western foundation (set up as tax havens for the wealthy) will award grants to investigate such topics, few Western academics can 'survive' by researching such theses and certainly no major publisher will easily accept manuscripts reflecting such arguments.''

And what has the George W. Bush Administration done to enhance truth-in-history? Placed roadblocks in the path of researchers and endorsed operating in secrecy, for openers. But then Sutton pointed out that Bones, or The Order, believes in more state power and not that the State exists to serve the individual. Bush's actions to date fit that philosophy.

As an example, he issued an executive order limiting the public disclosure of presidential papers even if former presidents want to make them public. The order permits presidents to keep their records locked up for as long as they want and effectively rescinds the 1978 Presidential Records Act, critics charge.

The order grew out of a decision by the Bush Administration to block certain Reagan Administration papers, some of which deal with officials who now have high-level posts in Bush's administration, as well as Bush's father who was vice president under Reagan. It also covers papers in his father's administration.

Bush also invoked executive privilege in rejecting a congressional subpoena for prosecutors' records related to the Clinton administration campaign finance investigation Rep. Dan Burton expressed the sentiments of several critics when he said ''This is not a monarchy.'' He pointed out ''The legislative branch has oversight responsibilities to make sure there is no corruption in the executive branch.''

Everyone is familiar now with the battle over records requested by Congress from Vice president Dick Cheney concerning the policy decisions on energy. Critics charge the administration may be hiding something given the oil background of several high administration officials, including Bush and Cheney, plus the input from Enron officials.

Other examples of Bush Administration incursions against constitutional individual rights include:

· The scuttling of the right of confidentiality between lawyers and clients in favor of eaves dropping if there is ''reasonable suspicions.''
· An attempt, killed in the test stage because of vehement protests, to plant false information in the foreign media as part of the war on terrorism.
· The use of secrecy and patriotism in the fight against terrorism, which Bush calls war even though he won't ask Congress to declare war. One of his critics - Sen. John Kerry (D., N. H.) - accused Republicans of hiding behind a ''false cloak of patriotism'' against those who question the expansion of the conflict to other nations.

If historians were able to get the facts and write history based on the facts rather than the establishment line, the families in the Order and other related, elite groups might be exposed for policies detrimental to the public welfare, rather than extolled and rewarded by being placed in high positions to control the nation's resources as well as its course.

Here's a few examples of subjects you won't find the truth about in the history texts in college or in the history sections of libraries.

· The secret government run by Woodrow Wilson's wife during his incapacitation from strokes, such as the critical decisions made by her and why Congress let the imperial presidency get away with it.
· The influence of the London Connection as represented by Wilson's bosom adviser, Col. Edward M. House of Texas.
· Details of the machinations of Frank Roosevelt and Wilson in leading the nation into World Wars I and II, respectively. As an example, did Roosevelt let Americans die and the obsolete battleships be sunk at Pearl Harbor in order to draw us into war? Was it co-incidental that the aircraft carriers were safe at sea?
· Who gave the order to destroy Charles A. Lindbergh's book Why is Your Country at War during Wilson's administration? Most of his book attacking the money trust was also destroyed. Who did it and why?
· Why did Thomas Jefferson try to bend the Constitution to hang Arron Burr who could probably have been president instead of Jefferson if he had challenged him in a tie-breaking election?
· The truth about events that led up to the duel between Burr and Alexander Hamilton as well as the duel itself. Gore Vidal has shed more light on this than the establishment historians.
· An account of the shadow government (not Bush's emergency shadow government) that has been running American foreign policy through organizations such as the order of Skull & Bones to which the Bushes belong; the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral commission and the Bilderbergs, all of which are related although some have more clout than others.
· The Clinton giveaway of American technology to Communist China and others, plus his campaign finance deals. In fact, a thorough investigation of his sorry administration despite Bush's executive order protecting Clinton documents.
· The list could go on and on to include the money given to Lenin and the Bolsheviks during the Russian Revolution by the Rockefellers and American banks; even the transfer, Sutton charges, of U.S. technology to Hitler's Germany.

The point is that history would be better served by attacking the establishment line and going after the truth rather than by worrying about quotation marks, dangling participles or formal English usage. The composer Bach is reported to have told one of his lady piano students, ''Madam if you hit the proper keys at the proper time, the instrument will play itself.''

If historians and journalists would get the facts, the stories would largely tell themselves, although this is not to imply that the rules should be scuttled. Just that the emphasis may be in the wrong place.

One way to skirt the foundations and the controlled publishers might be for honest historians to form their own independent organization and pool their resources and publish their own books. Maybe the public would support such a move.

Then we could just get the facts, ma'am, just the facts, as Joe Friday used to say. As it is, we're getting formally packaged pabulum.

For the second consecutive time, President Bush has skipped the Texas Republican convention and avoided any confrontation with the party’s ultra-conservative leadership whose positions are about as far from his as the elite eastern establishment’s are from the John Birch Society.

Bush’s absence is too obvious to be coincidental and clearly suggests he wants nothing to do with the Texas Republican Platform passed by more than 8,000 delegates.

The party, however, approved a resolution commending the president for his stewardship in leading the nation against terrorists, but it called on him to put down his pen and stop signing executive orders. Not only that but it also wanted him to rescind all existing executive orders including the ones he has signed to date.

It called on Bush not to bypass Congress in making executive decisions and using any power that is not explicitly granted him by the Constitution. It also directed the president to end all existing emergencies granted under laws that go back as far as the Roosevelt days and the Great Depression.

The party platform wants abolished the War Powers Act of 1973 that gives presidents broad authority to commit troops and military resources for up to 60 days without congressional oversight. The Constitution gives only Congress the authority to declare war, and Texas Republicans want Bush to go by the book in committing U.S. troops to fight on foreign soil.

But these planks are just the tip of the iceberg as far as the conservative platform goes. That should clear up any ambiguity as to why Bush stayed out of Texas on two occasions while the party met. After all, he boards Air Force One just about every day for some destination. On the opening day of the convention he was in Des Moines, Iowa, and after the weekend he was back on the big bird for a trip to Kansas City, and a week later in Florida to support brother Jeb for his rerun for governor. But he couldn’t make Texas except via of a video address from the Oval Office. He did show a week later in Houston for some fund-raising activity.

To get an idea of how far the president and the Texas GOP platform are apart, consider these planks that would:

Rescind U.S. membership in the United Nations – not only that but evict the organization from U.S. soil; stop funding the International Monetary Fund; support an amendment to the Constitution that any treaty that conflicts with it is null and void (presumably, that would include WTO and NAFTA); abolish the Internal Revenue Service and eliminate the income tax in favor of a national retail sales tax; abolish such governmental agencies as the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms; the Surgeon General’s Office, EPA, and the Departments of Energy, HUD, Education, Commerce and Labor; remove China from favored trade relations status until it stops transferring advanced technology to rogue states and removes its presence from the Panama Canal; re-establish U.S. control over the Panama Canal; and oppose any further ‘’amnesties’’ for illegal aliens and deportation of aliens not carrying the required ID.

The party reinstated its opposition to one world government organizations but did not name them as it has done before in naming the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and the Trilateral Commission (TC). In its 1998 and 1996 platforms it called for a Congressional investigation to determine if the CFR and the TC were promoting one-world government to the detriment of U.S. interests and sovereignty.

It first toned down this resolution by not mentioning organizations by name in 2000 and kept the wording intact in the 2002 platform which reads: ‘’A one world government is in direct opposition to the basic principles of the United States of America eroding our sovereignty and our goals for leadership in world affairs.’’

Scott Fisher, platform chairman, said the 2000 committee felt that calling for a Congressional investigation of the CFR and TC might lead to similar probes of conservative groups such as the Christian Coalition. So, references to specific organizations were eliminated. But the wording left little doubt who the platform was referring to, and the Bush Administration -- as were the Clinton, Bush I, Reagan and Carter Administrations -- is saturated with CFR members.

The Platform Committee repealed a couple of planks from two years before that would have the nation return to the gold standard and abolish the constitutionally questionable Federal Reserve Board. It also left out a 2000 plank that supported a congressional audit of the Fed as well as make minutes of its meetings public.

Democrats immediately pounced on the platform and apparently showed up for that specific purpose. Molly Beth Malcolm, Texas Democratic Chairwoman who was in town during the GOP convention, declared: ‘’This is an extreme party with an extreme platform that doesn’t sit well with most Texans.’’ Two years before, then President Clinton said a friend, whom he did not identify, told him the platform, which was similar to the new one, ‘’was so bad that you could get rid of every fascist tract in your library if you just had a copy of the Texas Republican platform.’’

Democrats continued to attack the platform a week later at their convention in El Paso with Malcolm claiming Republicans as a party of ‘’far-right extremists.’’

Republicans chided Democrats for keeping their national figures such as Tom Daschle, Ted Kennedy and Hillary Clinton out of Texas during their convention to avoid guilt by association. But then Republicans had no national figures at their convention either, except the state’s two senators – Phil Graham and Kay Bailey.

The race card entered the picture with Democrats charging no diversity with two whites – Gov. Rick Perry and John Cornyn – running for governor and senator, respectively, against businessman Tony Sanchez, a Hispanic, and former Dallas Mayor Ron Kirk who is black. Republicans countered that their overall ticket for offices is as diverse as that of the Democrats although not the top of the ticket.

How it plays in November may have a crucial bearing on how Bush, who will be in the state campaigning for Republican candidates, will fare in the 2004 presidential election. One Texas politician pointed out that in the 1998 gubernatorial election, Bush mustered only about 16 percent of eligible voters. Most voters stayed home as Democrats abandoned their gubernatorial nominee.

Some Republicans worried that without George W. Bush at the top of the ticket, new faces could be a liability to the party. But outspoken former Gov. Bill Clements advised them not to worry. He told a Dallas Morning News reporter ‘’The republican Party is not a party spelled B-U-S-H.

But the question remains, with new and diversified candidates will the Democrats be rejuvenated enough to capture the top of the ticket which they have not done since 1990 when Ann Richards was elected governor? And if they do, will it carry over to the 2004 presidential election?

Former President Bush and his son are fond of nick-names, we are told, and the elder Bush dubbed his son, Quincy after the only president to follow his father in office until George W. did so. Another appropriate nick-name might be One-Vote George since he was elected by one electoral vote and one Supreme Court vote. But Democrats would to hang another moniker on him: ONE-TERM GEORGE.

Other things the GOP Platform would do include: urging GOP candidates to support the platform and attest that they have read it and consider funding only those that support it; supports prayer in school and the right to display the Ten Commandments on public property; opposes abortion and homosexuality as an alternative life style; opposes ideologically enforced political correctness; would treat secular humanism and new age religion the same under the law as any other recognized religions and opposes a constitutional convention.

It is interesting that the platform supports English as the official language while Texas politicians are busy learning Spanish to appeal to Latino voters, including Gov. Rick Perry. Even President Bush has learned Spanish and used it in some of his Saturday radio broadcasts.

Ten score and 26 years ago on this July 4, 2002 our forefathers decided they had had enough of tyranny and decided they wanted to be free men and women. So, they drew up a document declaring that freedom and offered their lives, fortunes and sacred honor to defend it.

Sixteen months later the 13 original states formed Articles of Confederation to guide the new country, but the document came up short in providing national guidance in foreign affairs and sovereignty rights between the states as well as other jurisdictional disputes.

So, ten years later in the hot summer of 1787 when it became evident that a government with central powers overriding individual state authority was needed, 55 of the new nation’s brightest men with altruism, foresight and knowledge of the history of the forms of government that had been tried to that time met in Philadelphia to write a new Constitution.

Of the original 55 men that came to Philadelphia, 39 survived the contentious arguments through the sweltering summer and 38 of them signed the new document on September 17, 1787, 11 years after the Declaration of Independence was signed and 10 years after the Articles of Confederation.

The signers included Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and Benjamin Franklin. Oddly, George Washington, who presided over the meetings all summer, did not participate in the deliberations nor did he sign the document. Thomas Jefferson, who wrote the Declaration of Independence, was in Europe and also did not sign it, although he had signed the Declaration.

As an interesting aside, five men signed both the Declaration and the Constitution, and four of them were from Pennsylvania. The five were Roger Sherman, Connecticut, and Franklin, George Clymer, Gouverneur Morris and James Wilson, who later sat on the first Supreme Court, all from Pennsylvania.

What these men produced was a road map for free men to live by. It was written in brief terms and confined to the enunciation of basic, permanent principles in broad terms. It offered a framework that provided a balance between authority and individual liberty. But the Constitution was not fully certified until 1791 when the Bill of Rights was added. These rights spelled out the guarantees of individual liberty.

The United States Constitution is now the oldest existing national constitution and has been described in its original form as an almost perfect document. It may not have been perfect but like Solon, the ancient Greek lawgiver, said when asked if he had provided the Athenians the best laws: ‘’No, but the best they could receive’’ – that is, as Will Durant explained in Heroes of History, ‘’the best that the conflicting groups and interests of Athens could at that time be persuaded to accept. And that also is the way with the U.S. Constitution.

But from the time the ink dried on the U.S. Constitution special interests, greedy politicians and businessmen and men with sinister aims and a lust for power have directed assaults on it. The Scythian sage, Anacharsis, Solon’s friend and cynic, may have gotten it right more than 2500 years ago when he said, according to Durant, ‘’no lasting justice can be established for men, since the strong or clever will twist to their advantage any laws that are made…’’

When Franklin emerged from the constitutional convention he was asked what form of government the delegates had wrought. ‘’A republic, if you can keep it,’’ was his reputed reply. If YOU CAN KEEP IT!

Let us recall that in a republic the people are the masters and the government is subordinate to them. The Constitution was supposed to be the law of the people for control of the government.

Now let us consider what our answer would be today if Mr. Franklin could ask us if we have kept the country a republic and protected the Constitution?’’ Let’s look at some of the attacks made on the great document and consider some of the liberties the founding fathers gave us that we don’t have any more.

A simple place to start is to listen to the emotional, rendition of The Pledge of Allegiance by John Wayne backed by music and chorus.

‘’With liberty and justice for all’’ Wayne intones. But we know those who can afford the best legal counsel and mount the most political prestige or even, in some cases, slip the judge or a legislator a stipend, tend to get the best justice. We also know the elite political class is running things their own way at public expense and the dilution of our constitutional rights.

‘’A land of laws and checks and balances’’ Wayne adds. That’s the way the founders wanted it to be. But the balance has clearly shifted to the Executive Branch, and Congress has abdicated much of its constitutionally-granted power and has become a rubber stamp in major areas like war and foreign policy; and the Supreme Court legislates by fiat or refuses to review wrongfully decided cases after time lends credence and public apathy to them.

‘’A land where freedom of worship is the cornerstone of her being.’’ We know that is no longer the case. The Supreme Court has taken religion out of the public domain and out of the schools and made a mockery of the religion clauses in the Bill of Rights as well as the freedom of speech clause. Liberal groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union, People for the American Way and other organizations are waging a constant war against religion and consider the Constitution outmoded.

Probably the most damaging assault on the Constitution and the ideals of the founding fathers came with Franklin D. Roosevelt who apparently wanted to be and practically became a dictator. But Woodrow Wilson was on watch when the Federal Reserve System was created to give the nation’s money and credit to a group of private bankers – a move vigorously opposed by Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln through the years.

From the day December 23, 1913, that the central bank law was signed by Wilson, ‘’…the Constitution ceased to be the governing covenant of the American people, and our liberties were handed over to a small group of international bankers,’’ wrote Eustice Mullins in The Secrets of the Federal Reserve. Wilson also gave us the income tax and other socialist laws, and Roosevelt chipped in with the unconstitutional income tax withholding scheme in 1943.

What Roosevelt did was maneuver the states and Congress into granting him dictatorial war powers during peacetime thereby technically suspending the Constitution. In fact, Dr. Eugene Schroder contends most Americans today have never lived under a constitutional government since that legislation was passed on March 9, 1933, and he cites Senate report 93-549 to confirm it.

Roosevelt went to the states for the power he sought since he knew that Congress didn’t have the constitutional authority to grant it to him. The states did, however, under powers of the states granted in the 10^th Amendment.

So, Roosevelt called for a governor’s conference to meet March 6, 1933 – three days before Congress was to meet in emergency session – and after gaining the governor’s approval, issued a proclamation closing and seizing the nation’s banks.

Roosevelt declared a national peacetime emergency, citing war powers legislation of World War I. On March 9, Congress rubber stamped the action by passing the Emergency Banking Act Bill, part of which amended Section 5 (b) of the 1917 Trading With the Enemy Act, wrote Dr. Schroder in Constitution, Fact or Fiction. Schroder added:

‘’A full-blown peacetime emergency government was born—a constitutional horror.’’

It didn’t end there with Roosevelt who continued to experiment with socialistic and constitutionally questionable measures, some of which a conservative Supreme Court frowned upon. So, the would-be dictator launched an all-out effort to stack the court which failed. Ironically, he was able to stack the high court with his own rubber stamp liberals anyway as deaths opened vacancies.

As we celebrate more than two centuries of freedom this July 4, 2002, it is a good time to reflect on the kind of government Benjamin Franklin said the founding fathers gave us after emerging from the constitutional convention in 1787. ‘’A Republic if you can keep it,’’ Franklin is reputed to have replied to a questioner.

Here’s a brief look at some areas where we have gone wrong, in addition to those mentioned in the first part of this essay.

Since the days when Franklin D. Roosevelt stacked the Supreme Court with liberals who would rubber stamp his agenda, the High Court has been assaulting the Constitution to the point where Jurist Robert H. Bork called the Court ‘’ today anti-democratic’’ and ‘’despotic.’’ See Judge Bork’s Slouching Towards Gomorrah (p.119).

But it doesn’t take a legal scholar to know that the Constitution has been reduced to nothing more than a historic national relic, except when it just happens to back someone’s special interest.

As noted the courts and legislatures either chip at the Constitution or make wholesale changes such as the Marbury case (which established the court’s power to declare laws unconstitutional) ; the Dred Scott case (which read the right to own slaves into the Constitution); Brown v. Board of Education (which was the right decision but reached via the 14^th Amendment which is questionable, according to Judge Bork); and Roe V. Wade which wrongfully made abortion a constitutional right.

Chipping away includes a Supreme Court decision in 1997 that narrowed double jeopardy protection when it scaled back a standard set in 1989 for deciding when civil and criminal penalties for the same conduct are unlawful. The Court held three Oklahoma men could be prosecuted in a bank failure case even through they already had paid civil fines for their actions.

Another irritant is how the court turned the Civil Rights Act of 1964 from an anti-discrimination law into one that permits discrimination. How the Burger Court in a series of decisions changed the size and non-unanimous structure of juries and ruled the Constitution does not require a jury of 12. Americans have regarded the common law trial jury that came from England via the Vikings as one of the bulwarks of their liberty. But discretion has been given to states for six-man juries and less than unanimous decisions.

The O. J. Simpson trial opened up another can of worms that may lead to another assault on the jury system. That is the complexity of future criminal cases because of new scientific blood evidence such as DNA. Burger thought jurors couldn’t understand complex business issues, so how are they to understand complex scientific issues in this technological age? Why, let the judges take over and denude the Constitution a little more.

In a case decided in June 2002, the Court took back some power granted to judges in murder cases. It held that any factor that led to a sentence higher than the statutory maximum must be charged in the indictment and found beyond a reasonable doubt by the jury. Previously, judges alone could make factual determinations that subjected a convicted murder to death penalty.

But judges were still overactive in another case during the same month. The 9^th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco overturned a 1954 Congressional act that added ‘’under God’’ to the Pledge of Allegiance. It held the pledge was unconstitutional.

That led to loud protests in Congress, a defiant recitation of the pledge by lawmakers on the Capitol steps and the circulation of a memo by the House campaign organization of Republicans to call on school boards to ignore the appellate court’s decision.

Now, the plot thickens and gets serious when one branch of government calls for open disobedience of a court’s order, rather than correcting it by new legislation or a constitutional amendment. What happened to all the pronouncements that ‘’we are a nation of laws’’ used in the arguments to prevent impeachment of Bill Clinton? Maybe it means we are a nation of laws that appeal to us.

The High Court went off in left field during the last presidential election and the voting mess in Florida. Several books have been written about how it usurped the constitutional authority of Congress to determine who received the most valid electoral votes for president in Florida.

It entered a partisan political dispute where it had no authority to do so and by a 5-4 decision issued a stay of disputed vote counting and then in an unsigned opinion stopped the recount altogether. It cited the 14^th Amendment guarantee of equal protection while its stay , in effect, sealed the election of George W. Bush and disenfranchised thousands of voters.

‘’The Supreme court may have committed one of the biggest crimes in American history,’’ charged Vincent Bugliosi in The Betgrayal of America. The culprits were Chief Justice William Rehnquist and Justices Sandra Day O’Connor, Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy and Clarence Thomas, whom Bugliosi referred to as ‘’the pharaohs of farce,’’ and the ‘’felonious five.’’ Their decisions assured Bush the presidency regardless of how the votes would have determined it.

In its 2002 session the Court became even more brazen in overruling a previous 1973 decision by holding that it can be constitutional for public money to finance tuition at religious schools (vouchers). That lent even more credence to Judge Bork’s contention that ’We are increasingly governed not by law or elected representatives but by an un-elected, unrepresentative, unaccountable committee of lawyers applying no will but their own.

The Court voted 5-4 to uphold a school-voucher program in Cleveland. Dissenting Justice John Paul Stevens wrote: ‘’Whenever we remove a brick from the wall that was designed to separate religion and government, we increase the risk of religious strife and weaken the foundation of our democracy.’’

It would take much more space than can be used here to chronicle all the unconstitutional sins of the Supreme Court, Congress or the Executive Branch. But a brief elaboration on some points may fit here. And that would be more about the Banking Act of 1933 and the peacetime powers that led to the imperial presidency.

Some of the abuses under the act by FDR have already been noted, but Harry Truman continued the Act as have all presidents since. During the height of World War II Roosevelt advisers such as Alger Hiss and Harry Dexter White already were busy planning for a world government that would dilute U.S. sovereignty.

They got it when Truman continued Roosevelt’s plans, and the U.S. Senate in 1945 -- after only six days debate as opposed to 90 days and rejection for Wilson’s League of Nations – ratified the U.N. Charter approved by Truman. There were only three dissenters and they should be noted –Sens. William Langer (R-ND), Henrik Shipstead (R-MN) and Sen. Hiram Johnson (R-CA) who was in the hospital at the time.

Five years later in June 1950, Truman sent troops to Korea under that charter and not by the U.S. Constitution. Since that time presidents under the charter or through emergency powers granted by the 1933 Banking Act have committed troops to various campaigns overseas. They included Vietnam, the Persian Gulf War, Bosnia, Panama, Somalia, Haiti, Afghanistan and Southeast Asia.

Some critics refer to it as the ‘’overreaching presidency,’’ others ‘’the imperial presidency,’’ but however you term it the presidents have all by-passed Congress which has acquiesced or rubber-stamped their actions. President Bush asserted United Nations authority for his Gulf action and said he would like to have but didn’t need congressional approval. Clinton did the same in Haiti and Bosnia.

Louis Fisher, a constitutional authority, contends that executive initiatives come at the expense of congressional control and violate the Constitution. Congress made a feeble attempt to curb the presidential excesses in 1973 with the War Powers Resolution that President Nixon vetoed and ignored as have all presidents since.

At present we are in a new state of emergency as a result of 9/11 and individual liberties are seized by presidents in such times in the name of public interest. But like the powers granted Roosevelt in 1933 the authority is seldom given back. Government incursions on civil liberties will get worse before the emergency is over.

The president also is laying the ground work for a new policy of pre-emptive strikes against ‘’evil-axis’’ nations that export weapons of mass destruction. Those actions, too, will presumably by-pass Congress and be the result of the president’s decision alone.

Congress has had its share of constitutional abuses in passing World Trade legislation that few, if any read, and which took another chunk out of U.S. sovereignty as did NAFTA. It delegated its powers to control the nation’s money and credit when it created the unconstitutional Federal Reserve Board and handed that power to a group of private bankers back in 1910.

The Constitution in Article I, Section 8 specifically enumerates 17 powers of Congress and if you look at them you will see that the most important have been delegated. It did not authorize the creation of the many agencies around Washington that Congress has created and which encroach on individual liberties such as the Departments of Commerce, Labor, Transportation or OSHA.

But enough examples have been cited to show we have not maintained the Republic Mr. Franklin spoke of in Philadelphia. No, Mr. Franklin, we do not have the guts or the brains that you, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, Samuel and John Adams, Edward Rutledge, James Madison and your other brave cohorts had. In short, we have about lost the Republic but still could turn things around if we were only dedicated and as brave as you were.

But we will celebrate this July 4. We will fly the flag and shoot off some controlled fireworks as symbolic of the bombs bursting in air during the Revolutionary War, have a cookout, give lip service to liberty and meekly await the next developments.

It’s somewhat comparable to an old wild-west movie where the wagon train is under siege and the pioneers wonder if the cavalry has been notified and, if so, if it will get there in time to win the day. Only in this scenario we are the cavalry, and if we are to win we’d better get mounted.

In our celebration at this juncture, we will have to be careful not to mention the name of God in public; we will have to watch what we say in the interest of political correctness; but if anybody wants to burn a flag or bring along some pornography, that’s fine. It’s free speech, and we have to tolerate it.

But if we recite the Pledge of Allegiance with the phrase ‘’one nation under God ‘’in it, that’s a no no, and that goes for singing God Bless America, too. It may contaminate somebody’s child forever. The humanists and the atheists have told us so. They apparently would rather have the Pledge read ‘’One nation under anything goes with hedonism and promiscuity for all.’’

FOUNDATIONS

An essay

By Richard C. Sizemore

Corporations. and their disregard for their charters and the public interest from whence their reason for being comes, have been dominating the news this year with their executives’ misdeeds, but we seldom hear about what’s going on in the big foundations that are sitting on billions of dollars in tax-free money.

Both corporations and foundations are heavily involved in trying to influence the foreign and domestic policies of the nation with gifts and grants.

We’re getting a perfunctory response from the Bush Administration about the illegal acts of corporations, some pundits charge, including Paul Krugman of The New York Times. On 8/13/02 as the administration held a conference in Waco, Tx., ostensibly to find out where the economy was and where it was headed, Krugman pointed out its lack of vigor in clamping down on the corporate giants since Enron went belly up and other corporate frauds soon were exposed.

At this writing some of the Enron executives are under fire, and one has entered a guilty plea, but Chairman Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling, former chief executive, are still free from charges by the Securities & Exchange Commission and the Justice Department.

The president has been talking tough about punishing corporate shenanigans, but he himself was involved in some of the same tactics, as were his father and brothers, according to Al Martin, a retired naval officer who has written an expose about frauds that grew out of the Iran-Contra mess.

One other point before we get to foundations and some of the big ones that disregard their philanthropic reason for having a tax haven in favor of influencing the nation’s direction toward world government and socialism.

Bush was apparently taking a cue from his predecessors in the oval office as far back as the great depression when he called the economic conference.

Harvard Economist John Kenneth Galbraith noted in his book The Great Crash that Herbert Hoover held several of the what Galbraith termed ‘’no-business meetings’’ during the dark days of the depression. ‘’The no-business meeting was an almost perfect instrument for the situation in which President Hoover found himself in the autumn of 1929,’’ Galbraith wrote. He added:

‘’Even though nothing of importance is said or done, men of importance cannot meet without the occasion seeming important.’’ It gives the impression of something being done even if nothing is.

While Bush predicted a rebound in the ailing economy, and Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill said he saw many reasons to be positive, Alan Greenspan back in Washington was warning the economy is in danger of greater deterioration as he declined to maneuver interest rates.

Critics dismissed the pow-wow as a pep rally. Even Bush aides were reported to have cautioned that the meeting was not expected to generate any new policies, at least in the short term. But it offered the President a chance to take his message to the hinterlands on costly Air Force One, coupled with fund-raising rallies for Republicans. Wonder how much of the tab taxpayers will be picking up for these so-called working-political sojourns?

FOUNDATIONS

One reason we don’t hear too much about the influence the tax-free foundations foist on the people who pay higher taxes because of them is that they have too much money and clout to be attacked.

Look what happened the last time Congress back in the 1950s tried to pry into their secrets to see if they were aiding communism and socialism, which some of the top ones were, including the Rockefeller and Carnegie Foundations. In fact, the Cox Committee which preceded the Reese Committee, disclosed that almost 100 grants were made to leftists by foundations including those mentioned as well as The John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, The Russell Sage Foundation, The William C.Whitney Foundation and The Marshall Field Foundation.

Several other foundations were successfully penetrated or used by Communists, the Cox Committee found, according to Rene A. Wormser, in Foundations: Their Power and Influence. Wormser was general counsel to the Reese Committee, whose hearings had to be closed because of pressure and indignities from Congressman Wayne Hays who was supported by several foundations, including The Ford Foundation and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

The Federal Government has only one way to regulate foundations and that is by withholding their tax exemption. The only person who can sue a foundation outside of a family member is the attorney general of the state in which the foundation is located. Anybody that doesn’t want his political career destroyed will be reluctant to take that step, either at the federal or state level.

As this is written, however, the state attorney general in Texas is seeking $9 million from three persons connected with the King Foundation for allegedly overpaying themselves from 1989 to 2000. A relative initiated the investigation by hiring an attorney to probe how the foundation awarded scholarship money.

According the Dallas Morning News, the state charges Carl Yeckel, CEO of the Carl B. and Florence E. King Foundation with violating the Texas Nonprofit Corporation Act. It claims they failed to use the foundation’s assets for charity and not properly managing its assets. According to the News it also ‘’alleges they misappropriated charitable assets for their own or other’s use.’’

There are 2,335 foundations in the State of Texas, according to the Directory of Texas Foundations. If the attorneys general in Texas and other states investigated to see how the foundations’ money was being allocated, wonder what they would come up with? Remember, the case in Texas was initiated by a foundation relative and did not originate with the attorney general.

But occasionally a private study will pop up as was the case recently by Neal B. Freeman, founder and CEO of the Blackwell Corp., described as a tv production company with a broad range of client services. According to NewsMax.com, Freeman contends that the liberal establishment has control of major foundations and are driving their agendas.

‘’What you have…(is) the great fortunes of modern capitalism now turning to the service of anti-market initiatives,’’ NewsMax quoted Freeman as saying.

There is nothing new about that. In his book The New World Order, Eustice Mullins called many of the top foundations ‘’syndicates’’ that promote left wing causes such as the World Order. He listed the Brookings Institution, the Rand and Mitre Corps., the Ford, Carnegie and Rockefeller Foundations as examples of a powerful few.

In relation to their promotion of Communism, Wormser said: ‘’If one accepts the concept and principles of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution as expressions of the existing order, then any attempt to replace them with the concepts and principles of socialism must be considered ‘subversive’ and ‘un-American.’’’

Mullins in relation to foundations advocating a program of one world government through their bequests, said: ‘’not only is this tax fraud, because the foundations are granted tax exemptions solely to do charitable work, but it is criminal syndicalism, conspiracy to commit offenses against the United State.’’

PEOPLE’S POWER USURPED

People tend to forget that both corporations and foundations get their power from them. The people are supposed to be in control under our form of government, and not the other way round. But with money and clout, the foundations and corporations have usurped the power of the people by buying government and judicial influence.

There are more than 20,000 active foundations in the United States, and they are growing all the time. As an example there are 1,533 listed in the 2002 edition of The Foundation Directory that were not there a year ago.

The 10,000 largest grant-making foundations have combined assets of more than $434 billion, according to the Directory, and that is 90 percent of all foundation assets. They awarded grants totaling about $25 billion, or more than 90 percent of all foundation giving in the latest year of record, the Directory reports.

Almost 70 percent of the nation’s foundations have been founded since 1950. And some of the earliest – the Russell Sage Foundation (1907), the Carnegie Corp. (1911) and the Rockefeller foundation (1913) – are still among he largest and most active.

With this much money withheld from the U.S. Treasury, there needs to be some responsible oversight of what the foundations are doing and what agendas they are supporting, so the people will know if their philanthropic reason for being is justified.

Studies and investigations so far indicate that it is not for many of the foundations that are using the money just to avoid taxes and to promote their own agendas.

Top

RESOULUTION OR DECLARATION?

An essay

By Richard C. Sizemore

Where is it written that the sovereign nation of the United States of America must get rubber stamped resolutions from Congress or the United Nations, or form coalitions or alliances to go to war to protect its national interests? It isn’t.

The only constitutional way a president can take this nation to war is by having the Congress declare war. A resolution is all right to express the mood or co-operation of Congress, but it is not the way the Constitution spelled it out.

Congress, while by-passed in all but five of the approximate 200 conflicts of armed force this nation has faced in its history, still rubber stamps actions by whoever is president as it did in Korea, Vietnam, the Gulf War, Bosnia, Somalia, Haiti, Afghanistan and Southeast Asia. Remember when Clinton told us U.S. troops would be in Bosnia for only one year?

Bush I bypassed Congress and went to the United Nations in the Gulf War and stated openly that he didn’t need Congressional approval, which he got anyway from a rubber stamp Congress. Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson also bypassed Congress in the Korean and Vietnamese Wars, respectively. Truman set the U. N.-authority precedent in the Korean War.

Now, Bush not only wants a resolution from Congress to show the nation’s unity, even when he can’t get a consensus from his own advisers, he also wants a stronger resolution from the United Nations for arms inspections in Iraq, although the old ones, still in force, have never been enforced.

Bush II went to Congress and the U. N. with his mind made up and cited the previous U. N. and Congressional resolutions as authority he already had in addition to executive powers he claims to have for making war. His proposal to Congress was for a ‘’further’’ resolution on Iraq as he pointed to his previous authority. Down the road, he may be wanting a ‘’further, further’’ resolution.

The founding fathers were well aware of this problem. James Madison wrote: ‘’The Constitution supposes what the history of all governments demonstrates – that the executive is the branch of power most interested in war and most prone to it. It has accordingly and with studied care vested the question of war in the legislative’’ And George Washington said: ‘’…no offensive expedition of importance can be undertaken until after they (Congress) have deliberated upon the subject and authorized such a measure.’’

Asking the U. N. for strengthened authority was a bad idea from the start, and Former Secretary of States James Baker, who proposed it, should have know that from all the dissension among nations at the time it was made. His proposal, which Bush II reluctantly adopted, gave Russia, China and France a chance to switch their American support after Saddam Hussein relented and agreed to let inspectors back in.

That not only divided U. N. members but also gave Hussein time and more room to haggle and draw out the inspection process and apparently delay any invasion without the U. N. approval that the Bush Administration and one-world government advocates so eagerly pursue.

According to Congressman Ron Paul, Russia and France ‘’have made it known that they might be persuaded to support our war effort if the American government guarantees payment for commercial debts owed them by Iraq.’’ If the government uses taxpayers’ money to pay Saddam’s bills and buy support then foreign policy has stooped about as low as it can go.

All the unconstitutional wars and foreign entanglements the U.S. has entered since Korea have brought nothing but disaster. So, why can’t we stand on our own two sovereign feet? Because the one world government advocates such as Bush I and Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) that has infiltrated the government want to dismantle sovereignty in favor of nation-states in a world organization.

Bush called on the U. N. to show some backbone in dealing with Iraq. Perhaps if U.S. presidents, such as his father and Bill Clinton, had shown more backbone in dealing with Hussein we wouldn’t have this problem that has been lingering for more than a decade.

And speaking of backbone, U.S. presidents from indispensable FDR to Bush II, with the possible exception of Ronald Reagan, should have used it in upholding U.S. sovereignty and the Constitution which they swore to do when they took office, rather than seeking foreign agreements and alliances.

Even the Texas Republican Platform written by grass-roots Texans, which Bush ignores, calls for the United States to pull out of the United Nations and for the president not to use executive orders to take us to war. But the New World Order advocates would apparently rather see us as a nation-state than a sovereign nation.

On 2/23/02 President Bush in calling on the U. N. for a strong new disarming resolution against Iraq said if it did not act, it might be reduced to nothing more than a debating forum instead of a strong organization to control the peace. But if the U. N. becomes a strong world police organization, what does that do to the sovereignty of nations, ours in particular? It makes them nation-states in a one-world government.

SOVEREIGNTY

The historical system of sovereignty of nations was formulated in the 17th Century, the late Carroll Quigley noted in his book, Tragedy and Hope. The criteria for sovereignty was a nation’s ability to defend its boundaries against aggression and to maintain law and order inside its boundaries. But the cold war stand-off between the United States and Russia changed the system when both started luring nations big and small into their respective spheres, Quigley points out.

‘’By 1964,’’ he wrote, ‘’as a consequence of the power stalemate of the Cold War, dozens of ‘states’…which could perform neither of these actions were recognized as states by the Superpowers and their allies, and achieved this recognition in international law by being admitted to the United Nations.’’

If the cold War did indeed redefine sovereignty unrealistically through the simple step of being admitted to the United Nations, advocates of the New World Order want to take it to a point of no sovereignty for nations whatsoever.

And when the United States seeks approval from the United Nations to go to war it takes another giant step toward dismantling our sovereignty just a Bush I and other presidents have done. And as Congressman Paul wrote ‘’we give credibility to the terrible notion that American national security is a matter of international consensus.’’

Whether Saddam has weapons of mass destruction or nuclear capability or whether he harbors members of al-Qaeda or not -- and I believe he’s guilty on all counts -- is not the theme of this essay. It is the U.S. Constitution and sovereignty.

If all the answers to the questions are affirmative, does that pose a threat to America’s security? That’s another matter for the president to present to the Congress, and Congress should assume its constitutional duties and either declare or not declare war, and not be just a rubber stamp to a decision that’s already been made.

WAG THE DOG CHARGES

It has been suggested that Bush II may want to wag the dog of war for the Jewish vote to help his brother in the upcoming Florida election; to sway the November elections generally; for oil interests, and to avenge his father who apparently doesn’t want to be avenged even though he messed up the Gulf War both going in and getting out and is still defending his actions. Bush II also mentioned that Saddam tried to assassinate his father in the resolution he presented to Congress.

And here’s some more food for thought. On 9/16/02, according to NewsMax.com a story by Australia’s Sunday Herald quoted from a position paper for world domination that was presented to members of President Bush’s Cabinet just before he took office. The document was allegedly written by a secretive ‘’think tank’’ and titled ‘’Project for the New American Century.’’

It called for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf that transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Heussin. It also called for asserting that U.S. security requires that it tolerate no rivals to its global dominance. It is similar to a memorandum written by Paul Wolfowitz, now the hawkish deputy secretary of defense, which has been described as a plan to create a U.S. world empire.

The interesting thing about the report is that it not only calls for an attack on Iraq but outlines actions designed to created a ‘Pax Americana’’ into the foreseeable future.

Contrast this for the outlines for national security strategy that President bush presented to Congress on 9/20/02 which changes U.S. strategy to pre-eminent attacks. It also says ‘’Our forces will be strong enough to dissuade potential adversaries from pursuing a military build-up in hopes of surpassing, or equaling, the power of the United States.’’

If this is to come about U.S. politicians like Clinton and the Bushes had better safeguard the technology that taxpayers have paid for and stop taking money from China and other potential enemies for such technology. Even now the White House supports legislation that would allow his corporate friends to sell U.S. technology abroad that could be copied by or transferred to rogue states.

To avoid charges of a personal vendetta and political motives, all h as to do is hand the call to
Congress in the form of a war declaration and not a resolution, and keep the decision constitutional and the sovereignty of the United States intact.

So, why doesn’t the president do it the right way? Go to Congress and ask for a declaration of war, have the merits of war and the threat to our security debated and then if he gets or doesn’t get approval, he will have done his job. Remember, Bush is a one vote president without a consensus – one lamentable Supreme Court vote and one electoral vote in a disputed election in which thousands of voters were disenfranchised.

So, give congress the facts available, and let the people’s representatives decide the issue.

Top

IS AND WAS

an Essay
By Richard C. Sizemore

It wasn’t long ago we were having our intelligence insulted with what the meaning of is, is. I don’t know if we ever got beyond what we were taught in school that is is the present indicative, third person singular of be. But we’re moving ahead anyway, and we’re now working on was.

What WAS the fact about President Bush’s hefty profit from a low-interest loan he got from Harking Energy, on whose board he sat, while ordinary outside stockholders picked up the tab by suffering losses? WAS it a profitable insider manipulation all the way?

So far, we have two versions from the White House on what happened and an explanation that such transactions were all right then but would be disreputable today. The President even says he didn’t understand all the accounting in the deal, yet he outlined a program for preventing such activity in the future.

He stated that stiff penalties ought to be given for frauds like the ones he himself and his family were engaged in themselves, according to published sources. It turns off investors, and if you run a game, you’ve got to have players. So, the game at least has to have the appearance of honesty.

Sometimes one has to wonder if Lincoln shouldn’t have said to win you have to fool most of the people for some length of time. At least the latest misfits we’ve had in the White House have fooled enough people for the necessary amount of time to obtain the office and profit by it.

Bill Clinton topped them all when he had the gall to point his finger at the American people and tell them ‘’I did not have sex with that woman.’’ Of course, she had sex with him, and Bill coined a new definition of sex. Maybe these politicians are right in thinking we are all fools. At least they treat us as such and get away with it.

Now we come to George W. who is obfuscating on his explanation of the Harken affair but claiming a clean bill nevertheless. Could it possibly be that we have another president of questionable character in the oval office? I don’t want to believe that. Still, the accusations and facts keep coming, and the answers become murkier.

Bush has as some explaining to do about alleged fraudulent involvement because of the Harken Energy bonanza and other deals -- if a book available on the shelf at Barnes & Nobel is even half right in its expose of the Iran-Contra frauds and the Bush family’s alleged involvement in them.

THE BOOK

The book was written by a retired naval intelligence officer – Lt. Cmdr. Al Martin. He writes that he was in on several fraud deals with Jeb Bush and that the whole Bush clan including, no especially, the former president, were knee deep in fraud deals connected with infamous Iran-Contra government insiders.

The expose is titled: The Conspirators: Secrets of an Iran-Contra Insider. The author is in hiding because he says at least 400 people who knew too much have already been sent to untimely deaths and another 1,200 were jailed for what they knew.

The problem was Iran Contra, which has been publicized in the press, books and television, was a ruse from the beginning. It was a government-sanctioned fraud operation in which elite government insiders enriched themselves in the name of patriotism – that is illicit arms sales to Iran coupled with illicit weapons deals for Nicaragua, Martin claims.

‘’Operation Eagle’’ was the original brain child of former CIA Director Bill Casey and initiated by George H. Bush, Casey and Oliver North. When their plan of government-sanctioned fraud and drug smuggling was begun, Martin writes, ‘’they envisioned using 500 men to raise $35 billion.’’ They ended up using about 5,000 operatives and making more than $350 billion in covert revenues, he wrote

That caused a problem of raising enough money to cover up the deals, which Martin claims are going on to this day, and committing new fraud to pay for old fraud. The Bushes, according to Martin, were up to their eyeballs in these fraud operations, and even had their own specialties.

George W.’s, according to Martin, was insurance, security and oil fraud; Neil’s specialty was real estate (he was convicted and paid a measly $50,000 fine); Jeb’s was oil and gas; Prescott Bush, brother of the former president was good at banking fraud, Martin claims, and his son, Wally, was adept in securities fraud. The former president’s specialty was all of the above, according to Martin. But more about this later.

SKULL & BONES

In 2000 on this site (see columns 2000), I wrote an essay titled ‘’A Bush Dynasty.’’ In it, I
quoted extensively from Antony Sutton’s America’s Secret Establishment, an Introduction to the Order of Skull & Bones.’’ In this well researched book, Sutton, a former research fellow at Hoover Institution, Stanford University, claims members of the Order: ‘’...have created wars and revolutions, they have ransacked public treasuries, they have oppressed, they have pillaged, they have lied – even to their countrymen.’’

The Bushes, George H and his father, Prescott, and George W, all belong or belonged to the Order, which Sutton says is Chapter 322 of a German secret society. Members of the Order are sworn to secrecy and that poses the question of how Presidents can take an oath to support and uphold the Constitution and belong to societies that work in opposition to it

Sutton wrote a review of Martin’s book in which he commended him for naming the names and dotting the eyes in Iran-Contra – ‘’from Janet Reno to Oliver North to the Bush family, drug smuggling, real estate fraud, weapons smuggling – all in the name of the United States Government.’’

One other note about Martin’s book is a reference to ‘’Operation Orpheus,’’ the brain child of Ollie North, not Ollie as in Oliver and Hardy although it sounds like it, in which a plan is set up for a phony nuclear attack from Russia to convert the U. S. into a military dictatorship. The plan would have been triggered if Iran-Contra fell apart and everything became public. It would have been a silent coup against the U.S. Government, Martin reports.

Names of those convicted in Iran Contra who got light sentences, probations or pardons have been well publicized and include North, Richard Secord, Duane R. Claridge, Alan D. Fiers, Clair E. George, Elliott Abrams, and Caspar W. Weinberger. Two national security advisers in the Reagan Administration – Robert C. McFarlane and John M. Poindexter -- are
now back working quietly in the Bush II Administration.

Of course, Bush I pardoned Weinberger, Clarridge, George, Fiers, Abrams and McFarlane.
One reason the present administration can’t attack the Clinton pardons and other shenanigans is because the Bushes were involved in the same things, including taking money from China which wanted political influence to buy high technology weapons.

PUZZLING OBSERVATION

One puzzling observation about Martin’s book is that the regular White house press corp or others in the media have not confronted the president or Jeb Bush about the charges Martin makes. Nor, to my knowledge, and I read a lot of newspapers and magazines, has the mainline press reviewed Martin’s book.

News accounts out of Florida indicate Jeb Bush as the front runner in the November gubernatorial election. With all of the allegations about Jeb in Martin’s book, it would appear advantageous to his opponent to circulate the book or a synopsis of it about Jeb’s dealings. Janet Reno was so prominently mentioned in the book that it would have backfired on her had she won the democratic nomination..

There is no question that some publications have been fearful of attacking certain aspects of the sordid Iran-Contra story. So, the questions arises, are they afraid to review Martin’s book, or do they consider him a questionable source, or are they protecting the establishment? Historian Sutton says he ‘’dots the eyes and names the names’’ and commends the book to the reading public.

Some writers contradicting establishment history and policies have had trouble getting their works published or getting grants from foundations for research. That’s why I was surprised to see Martin’s book on the shelf at Barnes and Nobel. For the expose it is and the charges it levels with apparent facts and names, it has not gotten the attention one would expect.

Martin is organizing a new book which he will title One Nation Under Fraud and it will be a history of the Bushonian fraud, he says. It will concentrate on 30 top frauds he claims were committed by the Bushes out of a total of 536 in the past 60 years. These top 30 will include bank, security, insurance and gas and oil frauds, Martin reports on his web site.

Top

Columns on this page:

Ten score and 26 years ago on this July 4, 2002 our forefathers decided they had had enough of tyranny and decided they wanted to be free men and women. So, they drew up a document declaring that freedom and offered their lives, fortunes and sacred honor to defend it.