Filed under: 2008 Election, Daily Show, Fox News Debate, New Hampshire, Republican Debate, Ron Paul, Rudy Giuliani, jon stewart, new hampshire primaries
Filed under: 9/11, 9/11 Families, 9/11 Firefighters, 9/11 Truth, 9/11 workers, 93 bombing, Ground Zero, New York, Rudy Giuliani, World Trade Center, scandal
Giuliani: New York City Survived 9/11 Attacks Because Of Me
Think Progress
January 9, 2008
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=StE_Xa6TiQU
In a Wall Street Journal op-ed today on homeland security, Rudy Giuliani references September 11 nine separate times. In one of those instances, he claims he prepared New York City well to “withstand the 9/11 attack“:
One reason New York City was able to withstand the 9/11 attack was that we were prepared to meet 21st-century security threats. … And while we didn’t anticipate the specific scenario of 9/11, the constant practice, and the relentless follow-up from actual emergencies, certainly helped in its aftermath.
Jim Riches, a deputy New York City fire chief who lost a son at the Trade Center, has a very different perspective:
“Lives were lost because of the lack of preparation and (Giuliani’s) lack of leadership,” said Riches, who spent 16 days in a coma after the attacks due to respiratory failure. “All he did was run that day, and get on TV and provide a calming influence for the United States of America. And they made him a hero.”
Because of Giuliani’s failures, first responders were forced to use old radio equipment on 9/11 that prevented them from hearing evacuation orders when the World Trade Center buildings were about to collapse. The radios had malfunctioned eight years earlier, during the 1993 attacks on the WTC.
Giuliani claimed last month, “It would have been impossible for me to have those radios ready.” It would not have been impossible. After the 1993 incident, Giuliani gave Motorola a $14-million no-bid contract to produce faulty radios that had to be taken out of service in March 2001. Brave New Films released this web video detailing the negative impact Giuliani’s no-bid decision had on firefighters on 9/11.
http://www.huffingtonpost.co..onfr_n_79917.html
Filed under: 2008 Election, 9/11, 9/11 Truth, 9/11 whistleblowers, False Flag, Fox News, Fox News Debate, New Hampshire, Ron Paul, We Are Change, inside job, jack blood, meet the press, neocons, new hampshire primaries, republican primaries, tim russert
Filed under: Amero, CAFTA, CFR, Condoleezza Rice, Congress, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Globalism, Honduras, Illegal Immigration, Mexican Trucks, Mexico, NAFTA, NAFTA Superhighway, New World Order, Nicaragua, North American Union, Peru, TTC, Vicente Fox, columbia, european union, global elite, guatemala, i-35, panama, single currency

U.S. Plans Outline a Subsidized Pan-American Highway
Jones Report
January 8, 2008
U.S. Title Code TITLE 23 > CHAPTER 2 > § 212 provides for the construction and maintenance of the Inter-American Highway program in cooperation with the Governments of the American Republics in Central America (i.e. Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua and Panama).
“Title 23 of the US Code as currently published by the US Government reflects the laws passed by Congress as of Jan. 2, 2006.”
Under the code, the United States essentially pays for up to one-third of the total construction costs (depending on each nation’s wealth):
(a) Not to exceed one-third of the appropriation authorized for each fiscal year may be expended without requiring the country or countries in which such funds may be expended to match any part thereof, if the Secretary of State shall find that the cost of constructing said highway in such country or countries will be beyond their reasonable capacity to bear.
The U.S. also agrees to provide all the maintenance costs:
(5) will provide for the maintenance of said highway after its completion in condition adequately to serve the needs of present and future traffic.
The U.S. has cooperated with Latin America on highway systems since the first Pan American Highway Congress in Buenos Aires in 1925, but footing all the costs for infrastructure can’t be a good sign for expanded globalization to come.
This acceleration of hemispheric-consolidation only correlates with the passage CAFTA in the Central American States and the passage of ‘free trade’ agreements with Panama, Peru and Columbia during 2007. Further, Condoleezza Rice and President Bush have hailed the significant steps towards the broader ‘vision’ of a Pan-American Community.
“The founding ideal of our Pan-American Community, borne across many centuries and carried by us still, is the hope that life in the hemisphere would signify a break with the Old World, and a new beginning for all mankind,” Secretary Rice told the C.F.R. and the Organization of American States in October 2007.
“We now have the potential to create an unbroken chain of trading partners from Tierra del Fuego to the Arctic Circle,” Rice said to the OAS.
Vicente Fox has also advocated not only the North American Union, but hinted at a unified currency throughout the Americas sometime in the future during an appearance on Larry King Live.
An unbroken chain of trading partners– under ever-expanding ‘free trade’ blocs (yes, an oxymoron)– would certainly go hand-in-hand with an inter-connected, well-maintained highway– but subsidizing the expenses is no route to equal or independent nations inside a community, but rather a formula for guaranteeing centralized regional control.
That’s not to say that free travel and reasonably safe and convenient travel is not a worthwhile goal, but certainly many are concerned about the implications such a smaller hemisphere would mean for employment and wages. Even Mexican farmers are now protesting free trade, illegal immigration and the effects of NAFTA, a position American farmers likely never steered from.
Meanwhile, Mexico has already announced its intention to microchip migrant workers coming from Central and South America and other places.
L. Ronald Scheman, founder of the Pan American Development foundation and Senior Advisor to Kissinger McLarty Associates proposes that opportunities to harmonize the Americas can lead to long-term integration along the same route taken by the E.U.– early on, the E.U. was nothing more than a Coal and Steel Community which eventually solidified unification:
“To him, the strategy was clear. ‘This proposal [for a coal and steel community] has an essential political objective: to make a breach in the ramparts of national sovereignty, which will be narrow enough to secure consent — but deep enough to open the way toward the unity that is essential to peace [and we might add, for our purposes in the Americas, for development].’”
http://www.jonesreport.com/article/01_08/090108_ttc_conspiracy.html
NAFTA Jeopardizes Mexican Sugar Industry
http://www.plenglish.com/Article.asp?…EFD4%7D&language=EN
White House OKs Mexican Truck Program
http://www.rawstory.com/news/moc…_truck_progr_01042008.html
Filed under: 2nd Amendment, Congress, George Bush, Gun Control, NRA, US Constitution, Veterans Disarmament Act, anti gun, brady bill, mental health screening, veterans, virginia tech
Bush Kills Second Amendment for Veterans
LA Times
January 9, 2008
A rare piece of gun legislation finds the National Rifle Association and the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence on the same side, and President Bush signed such a bill Tuesday.
The measure, Congress’ response to last year’s Virginia Tech shootings, is the first significant federal legislation in years aimed at tightening gun laws. It seeks to expand the federal database used to screen gun buyers to include the estimated 2 million-plus people, including felons and mentally ill individuals, who are ineligible to buy firearms.
Filed under: Alan Greenspan, Credit Crisis, DEBT, Economic Collapse, Economy, Federal Reserve, Goldman Sachs, Great Depression, Greenback, Inflation, Lehman Brothers, Martin Feldstein, Merrill Lynch, Stock Market, US Economy, US Treasury, economic depression, interest rate cuts, jim rogers, rate cut

Goldman Sachs sees recession in 2008
Reuters
January 9, 2008
Goldman Sachs on Wednesday said it expects the U.S. economy to drop into recession this year, prompting the Federal Reserve to slash benchmark lending rates to 2.5 percent by the third quarter.
In a note to clients, Goldman said real gross domestic product would contract by 1 percent on an annualized basis in both the second and third quarters. For all of 2008, the investment bank said GDP would rise by 0.8 percent.
The unemployment rate will rise to 6.5 percent in 2009 from the current 5 percent, it said.
The weakening economy will force the Fed to lower policy rates by an additional 1.75 percentage points from the current 4.25 percent. Starting in September, the Fed cut rates at the last three meetings of the Federal Open Market Committee, reducing the target rate on loans between banks by 1 percentage point from 5.25 percent.
Merrill Lynch: Recession “Has Arrived”
BBC
January 8, 2008
The feared recession in the US economy has already arrived, according to a report from Merrill Lynch.
It said that Friday’s employment report, which sent shares tumbling worldwide, confirmed that the US is in the first month of a recession.
Its view is controversial, with banks such as Lehman Brothers disagreeing.
An official ruling on whether the US is in recession is made by the National Bureau of Economic Research, but this decision may not come for two years.
The NBER defines a recession as “a significant decline in economic activity spread across the economy, lasting more than a few months”.
It bases its assessment on final figures on employment, personal income, industrial production and sales activity in the manufacturing and retail sectors.
Merrill Lynch said that the figures showing the jobless rate hitting 5% in December were the final piece in that puzzle.
“According to our analysis, this isn’t even a forecast any more but is a present day reality,” the report said.
It added that the current consensus view on Wall Street that there is a good chance of avoiding a recession is “in denial”.
It also objected to the use of euphemistic terms for the state of the economy.
“To say that the backdrop is ‘recession like’ is akin to an obstetrician telling a woman that she is ‘sort of pregnant’,” the report said.
National Bureau of Economic Research: “Odds Of Recession More Than 50%”
Bloomberg
January 7, 2008
Harvard University economist Martin Feldstein, head of the group that dates U.S. economic cycles, said the odds of a recession have risen to more than 50 percent after a report showing unemployment jumped in December.
“We are now talking about more likely than not,” Feldstein, president of the National Bureau of Economic Research, said in an interview in New Orleans two days ago. “I have been saying about 50 percent. This now pushes it up a bit above that.”
The jobless rate rose to 5 percent in December, the highest in two years, from 4.7 percent in November, a government report showed last week. Payrolls rose by 18,000, the least since August 2003.
The U.S. economic expansion is cooling after a third- quarter surge as the housing slump enters its third year and consumer spending slows. Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan and ex-Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers are among those raising the prospect of a recession.
The increase in unemployment will hurt consumer confidence, Feldstein said in the interview. He was in New Orleans to speak at an economics panel discussion on productivity that was part of the annual meeting of the Allied Social Science Associations.
“Consumers, with essentially no growth in jobs in December, are going to be more nervous about the future,” said Feldstein, 68. “They are going to be a little more reluctant to spend, and that is going to put a further drag on growth in 2008.”
Jim Rogers Says U.S. to Have Worst Recession `in a While’
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/..sid=ayq29JCsf65c&refer=home



