Copyright Martin Armstrong December 30th, 2012 All Rights Reserved
There is no longer any question that the US surveillance regime put in place by George Bush, Jr. has given birth to the most intrusive monitoring of society that has EVER existed in history. Sources on Capitol Hill explain they even feel victim because not even their personal emails are exempt. The USA is collecting data on everyone regardless who you are. This is not just Americans, but anyone anywhere to which they have a data source. All governments have money laundering surveillance departments that share info among themselves under the pretense of terrorism, but in reality it is all about taxes – money, money; who has the money! You now have to PROVE who you are and where the money comes from just to invest or open a bank account and that data is then available to government.
One story never reported in the US press, was a commercial airline traveling to South America from Europe non-stop had someone the US wanted for a drug prosecution. They sent two fighter jets to force the plane to land in Miami to arrest the individual. Money is never an object neither is health concerns. They know who is on an airplane when you take off and they run full checks of everyone. Anyone who flies near the USA or to the USA is monitored.
If you travel to the USA with some disease trying to enter the USA on your own, you will be quarantined. If the government wants to prosecute you for something health does not matter for the prosecutions always take priority. Forget a dirty bomb. All the real terrorist need do is to send someone in with the Black Death and government, like the Trojans, will bring them in on their own. This thirst for prosecution and retribution will be our undoing.
Today, government has collected more data eliminating any privacy more so than the Stasi ever did on East Germans. They have surpassed J. Edgar Hoover and his famous lists, as well as what Stalin had on Russians, Hitler had on German citizens, or any other government has ever had on its people throughout history. We have adopted laws like Hitler to make it in effect illegal/impossible to have money outside the USA or even do business if you are an American.
The question is why? There is always an issue regarding authority. Stanley Milgram’s book is very insightful in this regard. Someone writes some policy internally, and the masses of bureaucrats just follow blindly asking no questions and assuming the target is unpatriotic. You encounter genuinely friendly people traveling in every country at the border control – even in China. When you hit the US, the attitude is immediately abrasive looking at everyone as some sort of threat. This has been the mentality cultivated in the US and it is perfectly in line with Milgram’s studies. If one person stands on the street and looks at the sky, they assume he is crazy. Put five people out there and what happens is everyone stops to looking at what they see. The reason why German soldiers gassed Jews was not personal animosity, but as they said – they were just following orders. Milgram, who was Jewish, set out to see what ordinary people would do in torturing someone they did not know with electric shocks. They all did it even when it bothered them because they were told to do so, Hence, the title of his book – Obedience to Authority. So it is NOT that anyone who works for the government is evil. They are indeed just following orders. However, there is no security in that as the Jews discovered in Germany.
The US government is collecting and storing virtually every phone call, purchases, email, text message, internet searches, social media communications, health information, employment history, travel and student records, and virtually all other information of every American. The have facial recognition software and surveillance cameras in various places and they use the GPS in your cell phone to know where you are. Your smart phone sends your location information back to Apple or Google. Police have been able to use this to arrest people tracking where they are to go collect them. Even in your car there is a chip that records everywhere you went, how fast you have driven the car, and this is all now accessible as well. Police can shoot a gun to track your speed and call in your tags to see if you paid your registration all without having to get out of their car.
The New York Times published on July 8th, 2012, that the first public accounting of its kind that revealed cellphone carriers had reported that they responded to a startling 1.3 million demands for subscriber information last year from law enforcement agencies seeking text messages, caller locations and other information in the course of investigations. This is all done supposedly to protect us from terrorists. But they were just 19 guys and a camel. The requests are for anything but terrorism including taxes.
These reports emerged in response to a Congressional inquiry that documented a virtual eruption in cellphone surveillance in the last five years. The cellphone companies are turning over records thousands of times each and every day in response to police emergencies, court orders, law enforcement subpoenas and other requests that have nothing to do with terrorism. Perhaps you will recall Elliot Spitzer who was going after the NY banks. He was picked up for “strange” possible money laundering by writing several checks to his hooker. Writing several checks to stay below the surveillance threshold is called “structuring” for which you can get 5 years in prison. Those who wire $2,999 to stay under the $3,000 surveillance are still being picked up and if more than one check or wire is sent, well that is flagged for structuring.
The real shocker was that some of the requests for data appeared strange and at least one carrier even referred some inappropriate requests to the FBI. The problem is, one of these people can send a request on a neighbor that pissed him off. Power corrupts, but absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Member on the Hill were shocked. There is nothing off limits including their own personal emails, phone calls, and searches. Literally millions of Americans have been targeted and this is not for terrorism, while that makes a great cover. You can bet your ass they know every person who bought gold.
Congressman Edward J. Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat told the NY Times: “I never expected it to be this massive.” The cellphone companies made it clear that this was by no means limited to terrorism and that the requests cut across all levels of government — from run-of-the-mill street crimes handled by local police departments to financial crimes and intelligence investigations at the state and federal levels. There was no department of government that excluded.
If Hitler and his Nazi Government had what the USA has today, it is debatable whether any Jew would have survived. They take the DNA of anyone arrested for anything. That goes into a database supposedly to find rapists. However, it is not just that person they have in the database. This DNA technology has developed far beyond tracking just those who are arrested. DNA databases have allowed governments to search for genetic “near matches” and that means if anyone related to you is arrest for anything, you too are in the database. Siblings, parents, and offspring, can now be linked to any crime if any relative’s DNA closely resembles DNA found at a crime scene and that can be murder to sex crimes. Using DNA profiles, your entire family can be in a DNA Database available for searches by any government agency. DNA database searches can reveal the actual identity of an individual who is related to someone in the database. By no means is this just the USA. This investigative technique is most commonly used in the Britain. The problem is someone can take your hair and plant it at any type of crime and bingo – hey, you’re it! Rape involving the injection of fluid is one thing. Finding a hair sample at a bank robbery is altogether different.
(see DENVER’s description of how this is used: http://www.denverda.org/dna/Familial_DNA_Database_Searches.htm)
Can you imagine if Hitler got his hands on this kind of database? Forget the eavesdropping on every communication and reading every transaction of every citizen to follow where the money is hidden. With the DNA database, they could have exterminated the Jews and anyone who was half-Jewish. How is the IRS sending letters to Canadian’s who had one parent that was American demanding back taxes because they are also Americans for their entire life?
Stalin in Russia or the Stasi of Eastern Europe would have had a bonanza with this technology today; all because of 19 guys and a camel? Amazing! In truth, this is the END TIMES for society. Ben Laden was the excuse to get rid of human rights. This type of thirst to keep track of everyone ALWAYS emerges when government fears losing power. They then tighten the noose to the point all LIBERTY vanishes. This is, unfortunately, part of the cycle that NEVER ends well. This trend ALWAYS appears before the collapse of society from a governmental perspective. It is important to see this from this perspective to prepare for the storm that always erupts. It will do no good to write to Congressman or run to the capitol with protest signs. They will not listen. We have to crash and burn.
The other aspect which certainly emerges from the darkest side of our humanity, if you can call it that with any reverence whatsoever, is the complacency towards what is done to others. This can be summed up as “looking after number one” and to hell with everyone else. Here lies the seed of how civilization falls apart. The entire purpose of civilization is that people come in from the solitary life and realize that there is a synergy that is produced whereby the sum is indeed greater than the sum of the parts. Those who only are concerned about themselves and remain silent when things are done to others are in effect sowing the seeds of their own destruction. This was captured best during the Nazi era in the words of Martin Niemoller (1892-1984) who found eventually he was imprisoned as well and was not a Jew.
The celebrated historian Edward Gibbon (1737-1794) who wrote the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in 1776 noted this very same trait existed within Roman society. This provides teeth to Machiavelli who effectively said that history repeats because the passions of man never change.
“As long as the cruelty of Maximin[us I] was confined to the illustrious senators, or even to the bold adventurers, who in the court or army expose themselves to the caprice of fortune, the body of the people viewed their sufferings with indifference, or perhaps with pleasure. But the tyrant’s avarice, stimulated by the insatiate desires of the soldiers, at length attacked the public property. Every city of the empire was possessed of an independent revenue, destined to purchase corn for the multitude, and to supply the expenses of the games and entertainments. By a single act of authority, the whole mass of wealth was at once confiscated for the use of the Imperial treasury. The temples were stripped of their most valuable offerings of gold and silver, and the statues of gods, heroes, and emperors, were melted down and coined into money. These impious orders could not be executed without tumults and massacres, as in many places the people chose rather to die in the defence of their altars, than to behold in the midst of peace their cities exposed to the rapine and cruelty of war. The soldiers themselves, among whom this sacrilegious plunder was distributed, received it with a blush; and hardened as they were in acts of violence, they dreaded the just reproaches of their friends and relations. Throughout the Roman world a general cry of indignation was heard, imploring vengeance on the common enemy of human kind; and at length, by an act of private oppression, a peaceful and unarmed province was driven into rebellion against him.”
Id./ Vol. 1; Chapter VII
What Gibbon explains is precisely how government divides and conquers. To get the income tax in, they target only the “rich” who they defined as $500,000 in 1913 of almost $12 million in 2012. The rate was only 7%. So it did not appear burdensome and only the real “super-rich” paid. When World War I hit, the top bracket moved to $2 million ($35 million in 2012) with a staggering rate of 67%. The minimum tax threshold was $20,000 and that remained the same until it was lowered to $2,000 in 1917 while the minimum tax rate doubled from 1% to 2% in 1916. In 1918, the top bracket was lowered by 50% to $1 million and the rate went even higher to 77%, which was lowered to 73% the next year and down to 56% in 1922, 46% in 1924, and 25% in 1925. This helped the ‘20s to Roar no doubt. While the rate declined to 56% in 1922, so did the top bracket from $1 million to $200,000 and then it was raised for the elections of 1924 to $500,000, but right afterwards, it plunged to $100,000 with the 25% tax rate. Taxes were raised to 63% in 1932 but the amount was then raised to $1 million. It soared to 79% with a $5 million bracket in 1936 with the New Deal. The rate rose again to 81% in 1940, then 88% in 1932, 94% in 1944 which was the all-time record high.
At the same time, they have been raising the Minimum Tax threshold to create a base of people dependent upon extracting other people’s money to survive. The “Second New Deal” came in 1935–38 and included the Wagner Act to promote labor unions, the Works Progress Administration (WPA) relief program, which indeed made the federal government by far the largest single employer in the nation) at that time. Additionally, the Social Security Act was enacted and it was sold according to a 1936 pamphlet on the Social Security website, by telling the people that the federal government promised that the maximum level of taxation for Social Security starting in 1949, delayed by twelve years to make it salable, you and your employer would each pay just 3 cents on each dollar you earned up to $3,000 a year. That is the most you will ever pay they swore. However, according to the Social Security website, by the year 2008, the tax rate was 6.2% each for the employer and employee, and the maximum income level that was subject to the tax was $102,000 raising the bar to $6,324 for both employee and employer totaling $12,648. If a fund manager raised money and changed the terms unilaterally, it is a crime called fraud and you get 25 year for that in prison. On top of that, then throw the money in the same pocket and thus there never was a real forced savings for retirement since there is no pension fund managing the money. It is just spent with everything else.
World War II returned the nation to employment and then the Democrats brought in the withholding tax on wages which was introduced in 1943 and was instrumental in increasing the number of taxpayers to 60 million and tax collections to $43 billion by 1945. Today, government borrows from the poorest collecting wage taxes and returns it with a refund making the ignorant cheer while they are too stupid to understand that government is borrowing from them and does not have the decency to even bother to pay them interest!
Today, the IRS is doing the same thing as Maximinus I did turning people against each other for money. The IRS has the Whistleblower Informant Award. The IRS Whistleblower Office pays money to people who blow the whistle on persons who fail to pay the tax that they owe. If the IRS uses information provided by the whistleblower, it can award the whistleblower up to 30 percent of the additional tax, penalty and other amounts it collects!
Here is the “Mouth of Truth” program that emerged in Venice before its collapse. Anyone could report anonymously on anyone else. This divided society turning man against his brother until the freedom and liberty of man existed no more. This is what the Stasi did. They indoctrinated children to report on their parents if they heard them say anything against the government. Talking with East Germans, once they were free and renovated their houses, they discovered microphones hidden everywhere. The Stasi were obsessed with what you thought. Police files have surfaced showing friends you thought you had were telling the government what you were doing.
Even in the Roman Empire, such tyranny always emerged when an emperor feared losing power. Edward Gibbon wrote of Caracalla (180-192AD) with whom the beginning of the decline and fall of Rome is attributed:
“[Every] distinction of every kind soon became criminal. The possession of wealth stimulated the diligence of the informers; rigid virtue implied a tacit censure of the irregularities of Commodus; important services implied a dangerous superiority of merit; and the friendship of the father always insured the aversion of the son. Suspicion was equivalent to proof; trial to condemnation. The execution of a considerable senator was attended with the death of all who might lament or revenge his fate; and when Commodus had once tasted human blood, he became incapable of pity or remorse”
Those in government are simply indoctrinated with the idea that you are not to be trusted. They are providing a patriotic service for the country by simply following orders with no consideration of human rights. Due Process of law comes from Genesis in the Bible. Cain was the first human born and the first murderer, and his younger brother Abel was the first human to die. God knew what Cain had done yet still (1) summoned him, and (2) gave him an opportunity to be heard. The Lord said to Cain, “Where is your brother Abel?” Cain was thereby given Due Process and was permitted to explain his actions. “I don’t know,” Cain replied. “Am I my brother’s keeper?” The denial of the right to trial and the summary actions to extract guilty pleas are against every principle of the foundation of civilization. Stacking courts with former prosecutors who provide the government with 99% conviction rates even violates the principles of judgment that are the traditions of most religions. Yet governments claim to be righteous and their employees just follow orders in the Obedience to Authority syndrome like mindless drones.
Even the terrorists that actually do the acts are also indoctrinated and “believe” they are righteous. One actually escaped in the NY prison MCC but went to the top of the building expecting God to lift him into the air to save him. One must realize that those who actually carry out the act are true believers regardless of your belief system. They see their actions as righteous. Of course, there are the men behind the curtain pulling the strings and feeding them bullshit to act for the “good” for society. The Japanese kamikaze pilots were not terrorists. They too believed the emperor of Japan was really God. They would be the kamikaze, which was a typhoon that destroyed the invading Mongol army from China and saved Japan. Hence, the pilots would serve the same function as the kamikaze and wipe the invading ships from the sea.
BELIEF is a powerful weapon. As government fears losing power, they become very aggressive. Stalin sentenced Kondratieff to prison because his analysis showed that there was a cycle and communism would fail. When he served his sentence, they sentenced him again, then just took him out back and just killed him.
This is the cycle we are completing. What will appear on the other side is hard to say. We have extreme religious rights who belief government should be used to force their beliefs upon everyone else no different than the Taliban did in Afghanistan. Separation of Church and State is the cornerstone of LIBERTY. If everyone was created in God’s image, then he also knew what he was creating. Cycles are part of that process. It takes two opposites to always function. So stop trying to force everyone to be just one thing. That is Marxism at its best. It failed! Get over it. Because of the dominance of the religious right that cares more about two gays getting married than the nation surviving economically, for 2016, our computer has been projecting since 1995 that this will be the FIRST time a Third Party could take the White House if the winds of change blow in the right direction and inspire someone to run who thinks out of the box. The TIME is at last right.
