http://earthhopenetwork.net/forum/ Tue, 13 May 2008 23:46:30 -0400 MyBB http://earthhopenetwork.net/forum/showthread.php?tid=713 Tue, 13 May 2008 20:53:56 -0400 http://earthhopenetwork.net/forum/showthread.php?tid=713 by Emily Dugan UK Independent May 13, 2008



Olav Mathias-Eira is a reindeer-herder. So was his father. And his father's father. He is a member of the Sami community, one of the largest indigenous groups remaining in Europe, and his family have been herding reindeer in the same stretch of the Norwegian Arctic since the 1400s.

But, because of climate change, their lifestyle, unchanged for centuries, is now at risk. So Mr Mathias-Eira, 50, has travelled to Britain to issue an urgent plea in the hope that his people and livelihood can be saved.

The atmosphere in the Arctic is warming twice as fast as anywhere else in the world, putting Mr Mathias-Eira and the Sami in the front line of global climate change.

"Climate change is threatening our economy as reindeer herders," he said. "Because this is part of our traditional way of life, if the economy goes, probably the entire Sami culture would go with it.

"Everything about climate change is happening too fast, much faster than we predicted. The [weather] is so unpredictable, so unusual. It can rain in the winter when it usually didn't rain before. The actions need to be fast too. World participation is most important now, but also our voices are not heard, and that's a pity. "

Interview with reindeer-herder Olav Mathias-Eira



The heavy winter rains and storms, previously unheard of, are making their ancient ice-roads treacherous. Because these thinning pathways are necessary to reach their reindeer, they turn herding into a life-threatening experience. Now only 10 per cent of the remaining Samis are herding reindeer, which means that a cornerstone of their traditional way of life is in jeopardy. "The reindeer [weighs] about 80kg, and it needs a good, solid ice when you are moving the herd," said Mr Mathias-Eira. "But traditional knowledge is no good any more, we just can't trust the ice."

Two of his nephews were nearly killed after falling through while herding. "It was minus-30 degrees that day, and they were more than 100km from home," he said. "It was very scary. They managed to a phone and get shelter where they could get a fire, but they were lucky." The unseasonal rain caused by climate change also means an additional layer of ice forms over the snow, so reindeer cannot reach food. Mr Mathias-Eira has about 500 reindeer, but many herders have seen up to 90 per cent of their stock starve to death.

Mr Mathias-Eira, who is married with three children, added: "To Gordon Brown I say, 'Cut the emissions, but also be aware that your ways of acting against climate change also affects indigenous people through the world'. We're paying a double price because we suffer all the climate change and also we're going to suffer all the actions Western states take to tackle it."

In another threat, wind turbines and hydroelectric dams have sprung up in reindeer herding areas that had been protected, cutting grazing and forcing the Sami off their traditional land.

The Sami live across northern Europe, in Norway, Finland, Sweden and Russia. There are believed to be only 100,000 left.

Sami culture

There are about 100,000 Sami remaining in northern Europe
Sami have lived in the same northern region of Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia for more than 2,500 years
Their traditional livelihoods include fishing, trapping for fur and reinder herding
The Sami were previously known around the world as "Lapps", or Laplanders


Source: UK Independent]]> by Emily Dugan UK Independent May 13, 2008



Olav Mathias-Eira is a reindeer-herder. So was his father. And his father's father. He is a member of the Sami community, one of the largest indigenous groups remaining in Europe, and his family have been herding reindeer in the same stretch of the Norwegian Arctic since the 1400s.

But, because of climate change, their lifestyle, unchanged for centuries, is now at risk. So Mr Mathias-Eira, 50, has travelled to Britain to issue an urgent plea in the hope that his people and livelihood can be saved.

The atmosphere in the Arctic is warming twice as fast as anywhere else in the world, putting Mr Mathias-Eira and the Sami in the front line of global climate change.

"Climate change is threatening our economy as reindeer herders," he said. "Because this is part of our traditional way of life, if the economy goes, probably the entire Sami culture would go with it.

"Everything about climate change is happening too fast, much faster than we predicted. The [weather] is so unpredictable, so unusual. It can rain in the winter when it usually didn't rain before. The actions need to be fast too. World participation is most important now, but also our voices are not heard, and that's a pity. "

Interview with reindeer-herder Olav Mathias-Eira



The heavy winter rains and storms, previously unheard of, are making their ancient ice-roads treacherous. Because these thinning pathways are necessary to reach their reindeer, they turn herding into a life-threatening experience. Now only 10 per cent of the remaining Samis are herding reindeer, which means that a cornerstone of their traditional way of life is in jeopardy. "The reindeer [weighs] about 80kg, and it needs a good, solid ice when you are moving the herd," said Mr Mathias-Eira. "But traditional knowledge is no good any more, we just can't trust the ice."

Two of his nephews were nearly killed after falling through while herding. "It was minus-30 degrees that day, and they were more than 100km from home," he said. "It was very scary. They managed to a phone and get shelter where they could get a fire, but they were lucky." The unseasonal rain caused by climate change also means an additional layer of ice forms over the snow, so reindeer cannot reach food. Mr Mathias-Eira has about 500 reindeer, but many herders have seen up to 90 per cent of their stock starve to death.

Mr Mathias-Eira, who is married with three children, added: "To Gordon Brown I say, 'Cut the emissions, but also be aware that your ways of acting against climate change also affects indigenous people through the world'. We're paying a double price because we suffer all the climate change and also we're going to suffer all the actions Western states take to tackle it."

In another threat, wind turbines and hydroelectric dams have sprung up in reindeer herding areas that had been protected, cutting grazing and forcing the Sami off their traditional land.

The Sami live across northern Europe, in Norway, Finland, Sweden and Russia. There are believed to be only 100,000 left.

Sami culture

There are about 100,000 Sami remaining in northern Europe
Sami have lived in the same northern region of Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia for more than 2,500 years
Their traditional livelihoods include fishing, trapping for fur and reinder herding
The Sami were previously known around the world as "Lapps", or Laplanders


Source: UK Independent]]> http://earthhopenetwork.net/forum/showthread.php?tid=712 Tue, 13 May 2008 12:11:18 -0400 http://earthhopenetwork.net/forum/showthread.php?tid=712 by Paul Joseph Watson Infowars May 13, 2008



Fox News has been caught flashing up a subliminal image of presidential candidate John McCain during its TV intro sequence in what appears to be a deliberate, criminal, and underhanded propaganda ploy.

Blink and you’ll miss it, but the image of a smiling John McCain and his wife Cindy is sure to register in your subconscious as it flashes up behind the logo of Fox 5 News, a Fox News affiliate.



Neo-Cons are obviously denying reality again by claiming the image is accidental, but this isn’t a "bleed image" from a roll of Kodak, it’s state of the art digital editing. It is impossible for an image to be placed there unless its done deliberately.

"I think you people are getting ahead of yourselves," claims one debunker, "the fox guy working the computer prolly just got lazy and used a clip from a previous show, calm down. There are such things as lazy people."

If he merely used a clip from a previous show then why on earth does the McCain image flash up for only a matter of milliseconds? If the image was inserted for a genuine reason then why would it appear for less time than the conscious mind could register it?

The story following the intro is not about John McCain, so that excuse is out of the window too. Again - the image flashes up too quickly to be recognized consciously.

The fact that Fox News is engaging in this stunt may be unsurprising to some, but the most disturbing aspect of using subliminal advertising is that it has been proven successful.

James Vicary’s infamous 1957 claim that he could get New Jersey movie-goers to buy more popcorn and drink coca-cola by flashing the words "Drink Coca-Cola" and "Hungry? Eat popcorn" for 1/3000 of a second at five-second intervals during a film is the subject of much controversy. Vicary asserted that sales of popcorn and Coke in that New Jersey theater increased 57.8 percent and 18.1 percent respectively, but the accuracy of the results has long been disputed.

However, a 2006 New Scientist investigation concluded that "Researchers have shown that if the conditions are right, subliminal advertising to promote a brand can be made to work."

23-millisecond subliminal messages for "Lipton Ice" resulted in 80% of subjects choosing Lipton Ice Tea over other drinks brands in an experiment conducted by Johan Karremans at the University of Nijmegen in the Netherlands.

An investigation needs to be conducted into how the image appeared during the Fox News intro sequence and if a deliberate motivation to engage in mass public deception is found, authorities should consider revoking Fox 5’s broadcast license or at least handing out a gargantuan fine.

The use of subliminal advertising in the UK, Australia and the US is a criminal offence.

It is the mandate of the FCC to clamp down on such an egregious attempt to sway public opinion by means of subliminal psychological influence, especially when the brand being pushed is not merely a soft drink, but a presidential candidate.

Source: Infowars]]> by Paul Joseph Watson Infowars May 13, 2008



Fox News has been caught flashing up a subliminal image of presidential candidate John McCain during its TV intro sequence in what appears to be a deliberate, criminal, and underhanded propaganda ploy.

Blink and you’ll miss it, but the image of a smiling John McCain and his wife Cindy is sure to register in your subconscious as it flashes up behind the logo of Fox 5 News, a Fox News affiliate.



Neo-Cons are obviously denying reality again by claiming the image is accidental, but this isn’t a "bleed image" from a roll of Kodak, it’s state of the art digital editing. It is impossible for an image to be placed there unless its done deliberately.

"I think you people are getting ahead of yourselves," claims one debunker, "the fox guy working the computer prolly just got lazy and used a clip from a previous show, calm down. There are such things as lazy people."

If he merely used a clip from a previous show then why on earth does the McCain image flash up for only a matter of milliseconds? If the image was inserted for a genuine reason then why would it appear for less time than the conscious mind could register it?

The story following the intro is not about John McCain, so that excuse is out of the window too. Again - the image flashes up too quickly to be recognized consciously.

The fact that Fox News is engaging in this stunt may be unsurprising to some, but the most disturbing aspect of using subliminal advertising is that it has been proven successful.

James Vicary’s infamous 1957 claim that he could get New Jersey movie-goers to buy more popcorn and drink coca-cola by flashing the words "Drink Coca-Cola" and "Hungry? Eat popcorn" for 1/3000 of a second at five-second intervals during a film is the subject of much controversy. Vicary asserted that sales of popcorn and Coke in that New Jersey theater increased 57.8 percent and 18.1 percent respectively, but the accuracy of the results has long been disputed.

However, a 2006 New Scientist investigation concluded that "Researchers have shown that if the conditions are right, subliminal advertising to promote a brand can be made to work."

23-millisecond subliminal messages for "Lipton Ice" resulted in 80% of subjects choosing Lipton Ice Tea over other drinks brands in an experiment conducted by Johan Karremans at the University of Nijmegen in the Netherlands.

An investigation needs to be conducted into how the image appeared during the Fox News intro sequence and if a deliberate motivation to engage in mass public deception is found, authorities should consider revoking Fox 5’s broadcast license or at least handing out a gargantuan fine.

The use of subliminal advertising in the UK, Australia and the US is a criminal offence.

It is the mandate of the FCC to clamp down on such an egregious attempt to sway public opinion by means of subliminal psychological influence, especially when the brand being pushed is not merely a soft drink, but a presidential candidate.

Source: Infowars]]> http://earthhopenetwork.net/forum/showthread.php?tid=711 Tue, 13 May 2008 11:53:16 -0400 http://earthhopenetwork.net/forum/showthread.php?tid=711 Pro Libertate May 13, 2008


Havin’ a good time, guys? SWAT operators wearing Nazi-style bucket-head
helmets enjoy a mirthful moment on the YZF Ranch as child "protection"
workers prepare to kidnap the FLDS community’s children.

What stuck in the minds of these men who had become murderers was simply the notion of being involved in something historic, grandiose, unique ("a great task that occurs once in two thousand years"), which must therefore be difficult to bear. This was important, because the murderers were not sadists or killers by nature; on the contrary, a systematic effort was made to weed out all those who derived physical pleasure from what they did….



Hence the problem was how to overcome not so much their conscience as the animal pity by which all normal men are affected in the presence of physical suffering. The trick used by Himmler — who apparently was rather strongly afflicted by these instinctive reactions himself — was very simple and probably very effective; it consisted in turning these instincts around, as it were, in directing them toward the self. So that instead of saying: What horrible things I did to people!, the murderers would be able to say: What horrible things I had to watch in the pursuance of my duties, how heavily the task weighed upon my shoulders!


The unremarkable face of unspeakable evil: A Sheriff’s Deputy stands
ready to use whatever force may be required to compel an FLDS mother
to surrender her children to the State.

Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil

Most of the harm in the world is done by good people, and not by accident, lapse, or omission. It is the result of their deliberate actions, long persevered in, which they hold to be motivated by high ideals toward virtuous ends… In periods when millions are slaughtered, when torture is practiced, starvation enforced, oppression made a policy, as at present over a large part of the world, and as it has often been in the past, it must be at the behest of very many good people, and even by their direct action, for what they consider a worthy object.

Isabel Patterson, “The Humanitarian With the Guillotine,” from The God of the Machine, 1943

Terry Secrest, a 54-year-old social worker from Austin, Texas, is having a hard time sleeping at night. Many of her professional associates share that affliction, and for the same reason: Like Secrest, they have been assigned or have volunteered to work with mothers from the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (FLDS) whose children have been stolen from them at gunpoint.


Terry Secrest

Mrs. Secrest and her colleagues and, from all indications, essentially decent people. The same is probably true of the hundreds of people mobilized by the State of Texas to carry out this scheme of mass child abduction under the color of "compassionate" care.

Stipulating that all of us are fallen, flawed, sinful people, it’s still true that, as Isabel Patterson pointed out decades ago, there just aren’t that many genuinely wretched and vicious people in the world (in proportionate terms, of course).

It’s likely that nearly every individual involved in the seizure of the FLDS children — from those who passed along what was, in all likelihood, known to be a bogus phone call from a "victim" of domestic abuse at the FYZ ranch, to the overgrown adolescents in SWAT regalia a who participated in the paramilitary assault on the religious community, to the CPS workers who used threats, lies, manipulation, and finally brute force to steal more than 400 children from mothers who loved them — believed himself or herself to be animated by the purest motives on behalf of a worthy object.

And yet, at least some of them are now suffering long-deferred misgivings about their actions.



"Experts" — ah, yes, those emissaries from some transcendent realm — "say many of those professionals [working with FLDS mothers and children] may be suffering from secondary traumatic stress, a condition that affects people working with victims of trauma," reports the Austin American-Statesman. "Symptoms include anxiety, sleeplessness, nightmares and intrusive thoughts."

One source of this unexpected emotional turmoil is found in the fact that while social workers generally can offer at least a plausible explanation for the seizure of children from their homes, in this case "they didn’t know the details of the investigation or what led up to the mass removals," explains Vicki Hansen, executive director of the Texas chapter for the National Association of Social Workers.

"These workers are used to going into homes where things are really bad and feeling good about moving children from risk and danger," Hansen continues. "This situation is completely different. To look at the mothers and children, you would see love and affection and bonds, plus children who appear to be in good physical condition. It was wrenching to pull children away from their mothers."

Not surprisingly, at least some of the FLDS mothers are "showing signs of post-traumatic stress disorder, such as having flashbacks of the raid on their ranch," as well as increasing anxiety over the prospect of never seeing their children again.

For the suffering of the mothers — entirely understandable, given the criminal violence inflicted on their families — there is little official sympathy. Most of it has been directed, Himmler-style, at those who committed that criminal violence, or who have been required to clean up the mess once the deed was done.

This spectacle of inverted sympathy is both familiar and disgusting. It must be said, however, that beneath the emotional contrivances there is an elemental truth — the irrepressible human conscience. At least some of those involved in this massive crime are suffering because the capacity to identify good and evil has yet to be seared from their souls.


Handiwork of the "rescuers": A ruined safe, its contents seized by the
armed "law enforcement" officers who raided the FLDS religious community,
lies discarded on the floor. Elsewhere kids’ rooms were ransacked and their
private possessions rifled by the raiders. Odd, isn’t it, how often "law
enforcement" actions resemble acts of routine criminal thuggery?

Once this is understood, the key question becomes: Why didn’t anybody do something to stop this crime, before it was consummated?

Of the hundreds, or thousands, of people implicated in this crime, there must be at least a few dozen as decent as Mrs. Secrest appears to be. Why were they silent?

What might have happened if only one of the many people called upon to executive the raid on YFZ ranch have said, "I’m sorry — but this just isn’t right"? Granted, there were probably many others willing to take the place of anybody who suffered a sudden attack of conscience. Still, under the right circumstances, the refusal to carry out patently illegal orders can become contagious. Unfortunately, although Mrs. Secrest and some other social workers display all the symptoms of coming down with a painful case of decent shame, the people who ordered and carried out the raid and abduction seem to have developed an immunity.

There is at least one other group of people who tried to do something to stop the criminal assault on the FLDS mothers and children while it was in progress — and the treatment they received reveals a great deal about the mechanisms of organized evil that carried out this abominable act.

After the FLDS children were seized at gunpoint from their eccentric but loving mothers, they were confined — imprisoned, really — in temporary shelters under the control of the Texas Department of Child Protective Services. Employees of the Hill Country Community Mental Health-Mental Retardation Center (MHMR) were assigned to help the CPS see to the needs of the abducted children and their mothers.

As medical professionals bound by an exacting ethical code, the MHMR personnel understood their task to be to look out for the best interests of the children as individuals. The CPS officials, by way of contrast, work for the State, which meant that their prime directive was to uphold the interests of that monstrosity. If in doing so their actions were to the benefit of the children and mothers of YFZ ranch, so much the better; if not, those under CPS control would simply have to suffer in the interests of the "greater good" — as defined by the State, naturally.

These conflicting visions resulted in predictable tensions between the humanitarians of the MHMR, and the collectivists from the CPS, and those tensions were resolved in predictable fashion: The State officials first forced the mental health workers to sign non-disclosure agreements, and then threatened to have the state’s hired thugs arrest any medical professionals accused of "interfering" with the CPS officials.

Oh my stars and garters! Who would ever want to "interfere" with the CPS — that cadre of self-sacrificing public servants, pure of motive and overflowing with supernal compassion?

At least nine of the MHMR employees assigned to help CPS care for the FLDS children, that’s who.

They described the needless and illegal seizure of the FLDS children as an atrocity, and the treatment of the children in CPS custody as an exercise in gratuitous cruelty.

Notes the Houston Chronicle: "All nine reports [from MHMR staffers] expressed varying degrees of anger toward the state’s child welfare agency for removing the children from their communit, separating them from their mothers or for the way CPS workers conducted themselves at the shelter."

"I have worked in Domestic Violence/Sexual Abuse programming for over 20 years and have never seen women and children treated this poorly, not to mention their civil rights being disregarded in this manner," wrote one MHMR worker. Others described how CPS employees routinely and deliberately lied to the mothers in order to make it easier to consummate the plan to kidnap the children. Several of the mental health professionals reported that CPS denied the mothers access to legal counsel.

Anybody familiar with conditions in a day-care center knows how they quickly become incubators for sickness. So it’s not surprising that cramming several hundred children (even exceptionally clean and healthy children) into a makeshift shelter in a sports stadium resulted in an outbreak of chicken pox and upper respiratory infections.

It’s tempting to think that this demonstrates the "good enough for government work" ineptitude of Texas CPS — but some MHMR workers believe that the CPS deliberately created these conditions as a form of low-intensity biological warfare: "The more uncomfortable [the children were]," one mental health professional wrote in disgust, "the more CPS thought they would talk" about the abuse they had supposedly suffered.

Had a parent deliberately exposed his children to highly communicable childhood diseases as a psychological manipulation tactic, the children would be seized from him and he would probably wind up in prison. But the Texas CPS saw nothing amiss in torturing other people’s children — having just recently nursed three of my children through severe bouts of the chicken pox, I think the word "torture" applies here — and they wouldn’t countenance any criticism of their methods. One report pointed out that "The entire MH support staff was `fired’ the second week; we were sent home due to being `too compassionate.’"

Referring to the reports from MHMR staff, submitted anonymously because of the non-disclosure agreement, hospital board chairman John Kite remarked: "We were literally astounded at what they told us. They are trampling all over human decency and those people’s civil rights…. We should not just sit here and watch it happen."

To the considerable credit of the MHMR staffers, they were more than merely passive witnesses to acts of surpassing viciousness. But unless something is done, very soon, to return these children to their mothers and punish those responsible for conceiving and carrying out this crime, the outrage expressed by Mr. Kite and the anonymous whistle-blowers will quickly dissipate without leaving so much as a stain on the drab, gray edifice of the official child "protection" bureaucracy.

When one thinks of it, the official color of collectivist evil is not Marxist red or fascist black; it is bureaucratic gray. Evil makes plentiful use of banners drenched in red or saturated in black, of course. But its real work is carried out within the warrens of official bureaucracy, with the eager help of normal, upstanding people who crave the safe anonymity of cooperation, and don’t have the courage to make themselves conspicuous by naming officially approved evil for what it is.


A symbol of obvious evil — But it was the phlegmatic evil of Senator
Palpatine, not the flamboyant evil of Darth Maul, that was the real Menace.

Our conditioned expectations of evil lead us to look for the lurid and obvious, rather than the mundane and unexceptional. We are taught to expect evil to come in the guise of the Bizarre Outsider — a visibly deranged dictator with an odd haircut, or people from a socially isolated sect who wear funny clothes and eschew popular culture.

But wrapping our expectations about evil in such convenient packaging can be deadly. Yes, there are times when Evil gives us due notice by following the accepted blueprint, and incarnating itself in the frothing tyrant or the dead-eyed cult leader.

But a figure of that sort is a mere catalyst for the evil that coalesces out of the collective efforts of common people — many of whom are otherwise decent people who believe in the principle of absolution through mass conformity. It’s because we expect that Evil will always materialize as a leering apparition that we become blind to the ordinary face of everyday evil.

Photos courtesy of captivefldschildren.org

Source: Pro Libertate]]> Pro Libertate May 13, 2008


Havin’ a good time, guys? SWAT operators wearing Nazi-style bucket-head
helmets enjoy a mirthful moment on the YZF Ranch as child "protection"
workers prepare to kidnap the FLDS community’s children.

What stuck in the minds of these men who had become murderers was simply the notion of being involved in something historic, grandiose, unique ("a great task that occurs once in two thousand years"), which must therefore be difficult to bear. This was important, because the murderers were not sadists or killers by nature; on the contrary, a systematic effort was made to weed out all those who derived physical pleasure from what they did….



Hence the problem was how to overcome not so much their conscience as the animal pity by which all normal men are affected in the presence of physical suffering. The trick used by Himmler — who apparently was rather strongly afflicted by these instinctive reactions himself — was very simple and probably very effective; it consisted in turning these instincts around, as it were, in directing them toward the self. So that instead of saying: What horrible things I did to people!, the murderers would be able to say: What horrible things I had to watch in the pursuance of my duties, how heavily the task weighed upon my shoulders!


The unremarkable face of unspeakable evil: A Sheriff’s Deputy stands
ready to use whatever force may be required to compel an FLDS mother
to surrender her children to the State.

Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil

Most of the harm in the world is done by good people, and not by accident, lapse, or omission. It is the result of their deliberate actions, long persevered in, which they hold to be motivated by high ideals toward virtuous ends… In periods when millions are slaughtered, when torture is practiced, starvation enforced, oppression made a policy, as at present over a large part of the world, and as it has often been in the past, it must be at the behest of very many good people, and even by their direct action, for what they consider a worthy object.

Isabel Patterson, “The Humanitarian With the Guillotine,” from The God of the Machine, 1943

Terry Secrest, a 54-year-old social worker from Austin, Texas, is having a hard time sleeping at night. Many of her professional associates share that affliction, and for the same reason: Like Secrest, they have been assigned or have volunteered to work with mothers from the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (FLDS) whose children have been stolen from them at gunpoint.


Terry Secrest

Mrs. Secrest and her colleagues and, from all indications, essentially decent people. The same is probably true of the hundreds of people mobilized by the State of Texas to carry out this scheme of mass child abduction under the color of "compassionate" care.

Stipulating that all of us are fallen, flawed, sinful people, it’s still true that, as Isabel Patterson pointed out decades ago, there just aren’t that many genuinely wretched and vicious people in the world (in proportionate terms, of course).

It’s likely that nearly every individual involved in the seizure of the FLDS children — from those who passed along what was, in all likelihood, known to be a bogus phone call from a "victim" of domestic abuse at the FYZ ranch, to the overgrown adolescents in SWAT regalia a who participated in the paramilitary assault on the religious community, to the CPS workers who used threats, lies, manipulation, and finally brute force to steal more than 400 children from mothers who loved them — believed himself or herself to be animated by the purest motives on behalf of a worthy object.

And yet, at least some of them are now suffering long-deferred misgivings about their actions.



"Experts" — ah, yes, those emissaries from some transcendent realm — "say many of those professionals [working with FLDS mothers and children] may be suffering from secondary traumatic stress, a condition that affects people working with victims of trauma," reports the Austin American-Statesman. "Symptoms include anxiety, sleeplessness, nightmares and intrusive thoughts."

One source of this unexpected emotional turmoil is found in the fact that while social workers generally can offer at least a plausible explanation for the seizure of children from their homes, in this case "they didn’t know the details of the investigation or what led up to the mass removals," explains Vicki Hansen, executive director of the Texas chapter for the National Association of Social Workers.

"These workers are used to going into homes where things are really bad and feeling good about moving children from risk and danger," Hansen continues. "This situation is completely different. To look at the mothers and children, you would see love and affection and bonds, plus children who appear to be in good physical condition. It was wrenching to pull children away from their mothers."

Not surprisingly, at least some of the FLDS mothers are "showing signs of post-traumatic stress disorder, such as having flashbacks of the raid on their ranch," as well as increasing anxiety over the prospect of never seeing their children again.

For the suffering of the mothers — entirely understandable, given the criminal violence inflicted on their families — there is little official sympathy. Most of it has been directed, Himmler-style, at those who committed that criminal violence, or who have been required to clean up the mess once the deed was done.

This spectacle of inverted sympathy is both familiar and disgusting. It must be said, however, that beneath the emotional contrivances there is an elemental truth — the irrepressible human conscience. At least some of those involved in this massive crime are suffering because the capacity to identify good and evil has yet to be seared from their souls.


Handiwork of the "rescuers": A ruined safe, its contents seized by the
armed "law enforcement" officers who raided the FLDS religious community,
lies discarded on the floor. Elsewhere kids’ rooms were ransacked and their
private possessions rifled by the raiders. Odd, isn’t it, how often "law
enforcement" actions resemble acts of routine criminal thuggery?

Once this is understood, the key question becomes: Why didn’t anybody do something to stop this crime, before it was consummated?

Of the hundreds, or thousands, of people implicated in this crime, there must be at least a few dozen as decent as Mrs. Secrest appears to be. Why were they silent?

What might have happened if only one of the many people called upon to executive the raid on YFZ ranch have said, "I’m sorry — but this just isn’t right"? Granted, there were probably many others willing to take the place of anybody who suffered a sudden attack of conscience. Still, under the right circumstances, the refusal to carry out patently illegal orders can become contagious. Unfortunately, although Mrs. Secrest and some other social workers display all the symptoms of coming down with a painful case of decent shame, the people who ordered and carried out the raid and abduction seem to have developed an immunity.

There is at least one other group of people who tried to do something to stop the criminal assault on the FLDS mothers and children while it was in progress — and the treatment they received reveals a great deal about the mechanisms of organized evil that carried out this abominable act.

After the FLDS children were seized at gunpoint from their eccentric but loving mothers, they were confined — imprisoned, really — in temporary shelters under the control of the Texas Department of Child Protective Services. Employees of the Hill Country Community Mental Health-Mental Retardation Center (MHMR) were assigned to help the CPS see to the needs of the abducted children and their mothers.

As medical professionals bound by an exacting ethical code, the MHMR personnel understood their task to be to look out for the best interests of the children as individuals. The CPS officials, by way of contrast, work for the State, which meant that their prime directive was to uphold the interests of that monstrosity. If in doing so their actions were to the benefit of the children and mothers of YFZ ranch, so much the better; if not, those under CPS control would simply have to suffer in the interests of the "greater good" — as defined by the State, naturally.

These conflicting visions resulted in predictable tensions between the humanitarians of the MHMR, and the collectivists from the CPS, and those tensions were resolved in predictable fashion: The State officials first forced the mental health workers to sign non-disclosure agreements, and then threatened to have the state’s hired thugs arrest any medical professionals accused of "interfering" with the CPS officials.

Oh my stars and garters! Who would ever want to "interfere" with the CPS — that cadre of self-sacrificing public servants, pure of motive and overflowing with supernal compassion?

At least nine of the MHMR employees assigned to help CPS care for the FLDS children, that’s who.

They described the needless and illegal seizure of the FLDS children as an atrocity, and the treatment of the children in CPS custody as an exercise in gratuitous cruelty.

Notes the Houston Chronicle: "All nine reports [from MHMR staffers] expressed varying degrees of anger toward the state’s child welfare agency for removing the children from their communit, separating them from their mothers or for the way CPS workers conducted themselves at the shelter."

"I have worked in Domestic Violence/Sexual Abuse programming for over 20 years and have never seen women and children treated this poorly, not to mention their civil rights being disregarded in this manner," wrote one MHMR worker. Others described how CPS employees routinely and deliberately lied to the mothers in order to make it easier to consummate the plan to kidnap the children. Several of the mental health professionals reported that CPS denied the mothers access to legal counsel.

Anybody familiar with conditions in a day-care center knows how they quickly become incubators for sickness. So it’s not surprising that cramming several hundred children (even exceptionally clean and healthy children) into a makeshift shelter in a sports stadium resulted in an outbreak of chicken pox and upper respiratory infections.

It’s tempting to think that this demonstrates the "good enough for government work" ineptitude of Texas CPS — but some MHMR workers believe that the CPS deliberately created these conditions as a form of low-intensity biological warfare: "The more uncomfortable [the children were]," one mental health professional wrote in disgust, "the more CPS thought they would talk" about the abuse they had supposedly suffered.

Had a parent deliberately exposed his children to highly communicable childhood diseases as a psychological manipulation tactic, the children would be seized from him and he would probably wind up in prison. But the Texas CPS saw nothing amiss in torturing other people’s children — having just recently nursed three of my children through severe bouts of the chicken pox, I think the word "torture" applies here — and they wouldn’t countenance any criticism of their methods. One report pointed out that "The entire MH support staff was `fired’ the second week; we were sent home due to being `too compassionate.’"

Referring to the reports from MHMR staff, submitted anonymously because of the non-disclosure agreement, hospital board chairman John Kite remarked: "We were literally astounded at what they told us. They are trampling all over human decency and those people’s civil rights…. We should not just sit here and watch it happen."

To the considerable credit of the MHMR staffers, they were more than merely passive witnesses to acts of surpassing viciousness. But unless something is done, very soon, to return these children to their mothers and punish those responsible for conceiving and carrying out this crime, the outrage expressed by Mr. Kite and the anonymous whistle-blowers will quickly dissipate without leaving so much as a stain on the drab, gray edifice of the official child "protection" bureaucracy.

When one thinks of it, the official color of collectivist evil is not Marxist red or fascist black; it is bureaucratic gray. Evil makes plentiful use of banners drenched in red or saturated in black, of course. But its real work is carried out within the warrens of official bureaucracy, with the eager help of normal, upstanding people who crave the safe anonymity of cooperation, and don’t have the courage to make themselves conspicuous by naming officially approved evil for what it is.


A symbol of obvious evil — But it was the phlegmatic evil of Senator
Palpatine, not the flamboyant evil of Darth Maul, that was the real Menace.

Our conditioned expectations of evil lead us to look for the lurid and obvious, rather than the mundane and unexceptional. We are taught to expect evil to come in the guise of the Bizarre Outsider — a visibly deranged dictator with an odd haircut, or people from a socially isolated sect who wear funny clothes and eschew popular culture.

But wrapping our expectations about evil in such convenient packaging can be deadly. Yes, there are times when Evil gives us due notice by following the accepted blueprint, and incarnating itself in the frothing tyrant or the dead-eyed cult leader.

But a figure of that sort is a mere catalyst for the evil that coalesces out of the collective efforts of common people — many of whom are otherwise decent people who believe in the principle of absolution through mass conformity. It’s because we expect that Evil will always materialize as a leering apparition that we become blind to the ordinary face of everyday evil.

Photos courtesy of captivefldschildren.org

Source: Pro Libertate]]> http://earthhopenetwork.net/forum/showthread.php?tid=710 Mon, 12 May 2008 19:39:20 -0400 http://earthhopenetwork.net/forum/showthread.php?tid=710 by Kurt Nimmo Infowars May 12, 2008



On the Alex Jones Show today, a bible student at a large Christian college in Mount Vernon, Texas, related a story of intimidation as Department of Homeland Security goons dressed in black accused him of engaging in terrorism for teaching a group of Boy Scouts about the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

The student and interim pastor, going by the name “Jeff,” told Alex Jones he was assigned last September the task of talking to a group of Boy Scouts, specifically concerning “Americanism” in higher education. Jeff told the boys they need to “reorient” themselves to the Constitution because such knowledge will “make or break the country.”

After tutoring the boys, Jeff was called into the university president’s office. There he was confronted by a “man in black” wearing sunglasses from the Department of Homeland Security who was accompanied by another federal official in a gray suit. In addition, state police were present during the interrogation and Jeff was told the FBI were also involved. Jeff was informed “every word” of his conversation with the Boy Scouts was recorded and he had a transcript of the conversation. Jeff’s talk was, the DHS official in a gray suit declared, “terror and espionage” and if he continued to engage in such behavior he would be arrested and “we can have your head on a silver platter.” Moreover, the feds threatened to intervene in the process of the college’s accreditation, a threat that apparently disturbed a “high level university official,” who was so “agitated” he was shaking.

Alex referenced a Phoenix Federal Bureau of Investigation flyer, created during Clinton’s reign, “asking the recipients to help them fight domestic terrorism,” according to Angel Shamaya, writing for the Keep and Bear Arms website. The putatively “anti-terrorism” flyer was created by the FBI and the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office as part of “a disinformation campaign to paint at least a few groups of Real Americans as domestic terrorists.” According to the flyer, if recipients encounter “defenders of the US Constitution against [the] federal government and the UN,” they are to contact the FBI’s the Joint Terrorism Task Force immediately. Apparently, people who make “numerous references to the US Constitution” and attempt “to police the police” are to be considered terrorists, according to the FBI.

“According to Terry Chapman of the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office — whose name is on the flyer as the MCSO contact — the FBI created the flyer and printed the MCSO [Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office] and Attorney’s Office before the text was approved. He said it was created as a full color brochure to hand out to officers, not for the general public — and that as soon as he saw it, he urged them not to use it, knowing it had some problems,” writes Shamaya.



As an example of how the police are now trained to consider constitutionalists dangerous terrorists or at least common criminals, consider the case of Abby Newman, a Virginia woman who refused to show her driver’s license to a state trooper at an illegal traffic checkpoint. Newman did not give the police permission to search her car and thus violate her Fourth Amendment right and when they did the cops discovered a pocket Constitution. So brainwashed an ignorant were the cops, they had a discussion on the legality of the pocket Constitution, labeling it “contraband,” and unsure if they should arrest Newman for possessing the book.

“Abby Newman was arrested for not showing ID in August 2000 and fell victim to an illegal vehicle search in which police found items of subversive literature, including a ‘pocket Constitution,’” write Aaron Dykes and Alex Jones. “One officer asked the other ‘Is this legal?,” an “[e]gregious misinterpretation and abuse perpetrated by the very members of society supposedly in place to guarantee our freedoms.”

Of course, these “members of society supposedly in place to guarantee our freedoms” are in place to do the bidding of the ruling elite, a gaggle of one-world globalists determined to not only decimate the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, eradicate the national sovereignty of the United States, but also inculcate and brainwash the public to believe such “quaint” freedoms and the very prospect of liberty are dangerous, the treasonous vocabulary of “lone wolves” and “Super Patriots.”

Considering the reaction of the “high level university official” mentioned above, agitated because a student dared teach Boy Scouts about the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, it may be too late.

Listen to Alex’s interview.

Source: Infowars]]> by Kurt Nimmo Infowars May 12, 2008



On the Alex Jones Show today, a bible student at a large Christian college in Mount Vernon, Texas, related a story of intimidation as Department of Homeland Security goons dressed in black accused him of engaging in terrorism for teaching a group of Boy Scouts about the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

The student and interim pastor, going by the name “Jeff,” told Alex Jones he was assigned last September the task of talking to a group of Boy Scouts, specifically concerning “Americanism” in higher education. Jeff told the boys they need to “reorient” themselves to the Constitution because such knowledge will “make or break the country.”

After tutoring the boys, Jeff was called into the university president’s office. There he was confronted by a “man in black” wearing sunglasses from the Department of Homeland Security who was accompanied by another federal official in a gray suit. In addition, state police were present during the interrogation and Jeff was told the FBI were also involved. Jeff was informed “every word” of his conversation with the Boy Scouts was recorded and he had a transcript of the conversation. Jeff’s talk was, the DHS official in a gray suit declared, “terror and espionage” and if he continued to engage in such behavior he would be arrested and “we can have your head on a silver platter.” Moreover, the feds threatened to intervene in the process of the college’s accreditation, a threat that apparently disturbed a “high level university official,” who was so “agitated” he was shaking.

Alex referenced a Phoenix Federal Bureau of Investigation flyer, created during Clinton’s reign, “asking the recipients to help them fight domestic terrorism,” according to Angel Shamaya, writing for the Keep and Bear Arms website. The putatively “anti-terrorism” flyer was created by the FBI and the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office as part of “a disinformation campaign to paint at least a few groups of Real Americans as domestic terrorists.” According to the flyer, if recipients encounter “defenders of the US Constitution against [the] federal government and the UN,” they are to contact the FBI’s the Joint Terrorism Task Force immediately. Apparently, people who make “numerous references to the US Constitution” and attempt “to police the police” are to be considered terrorists, according to the FBI.

“According to Terry Chapman of the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office — whose name is on the flyer as the MCSO contact — the FBI created the flyer and printed the MCSO [Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office] and Attorney’s Office before the text was approved. He said it was created as a full color brochure to hand out to officers, not for the general public — and that as soon as he saw it, he urged them not to use it, knowing it had some problems,” writes Shamaya.



As an example of how the police are now trained to consider constitutionalists dangerous terrorists or at least common criminals, consider the case of Abby Newman, a Virginia woman who refused to show her driver’s license to a state trooper at an illegal traffic checkpoint. Newman did not give the police permission to search her car and thus violate her Fourth Amendment right and when they did the cops discovered a pocket Constitution. So brainwashed an ignorant were the cops, they had a discussion on the legality of the pocket Constitution, labeling it “contraband,” and unsure if they should arrest Newman for possessing the book.

“Abby Newman was arrested for not showing ID in August 2000 and fell victim to an illegal vehicle search in which police found items of subversive literature, including a ‘pocket Constitution,’” write Aaron Dykes and Alex Jones. “One officer asked the other ‘Is this legal?,” an “[e]gregious misinterpretation and abuse perpetrated by the very members of society supposedly in place to guarantee our freedoms.”

Of course, these “members of society supposedly in place to guarantee our freedoms” are in place to do the bidding of the ruling elite, a gaggle of one-world globalists determined to not only decimate the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, eradicate the national sovereignty of the United States, but also inculcate and brainwash the public to believe such “quaint” freedoms and the very prospect of liberty are dangerous, the treasonous vocabulary of “lone wolves” and “Super Patriots.”

Considering the reaction of the “high level university official” mentioned above, agitated because a student dared teach Boy Scouts about the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, it may be too late.

Listen to Alex’s interview.

Source: Infowars]]> http://earthhopenetwork.net/forum/showthread.php?tid=709 Mon, 12 May 2008 17:30:49 -0400 http://earthhopenetwork.net/forum/showthread.php?tid=709 by James Tozer UK Daily Mail May 12, 2008



He only popped out to run a couple of errands for his disabled wife.

But Keith Hirst ended up spending the night in a police cell after being accused of dropping an apple core.

Despite strenuously denying the allegation, the former plumber, who has a heart condition, was taken into custody by up to five uniformed officers and had his DNA and fingerprints taken.

By then his worried family were calling hospitals, fearing he had been in an accident.

It wasn't until nearly 11pm that he was able to ring them and explain what had happened.

He was finally released after 18 hours behind bars.

Mr Hirst, 54, said yesterday he would fight to clear his name in a case which could leave him with a criminal record and cost taxpayers thousands of pounds.

"The way I was treated you would have thought I had robbed a bank," he said.

"My family are law-abiding people and I would help if I saw a gang of yobs attacking a police officer.

"This kind of incident does not help in improving relations between the community and police."

Mr Hirst had just come out of a post office near his home in Swinton, Greater Manchester, and was heading for the chemists to collect his wife's prescription when a community support officer accused him of littering.

He said the officer wanted to issue him with a £50 on-the-spot fine for littering.

"There was a chap there in a fluorescent jacket, big sunglasses, and a baseball cap, on a bike, with a wad of tickets and a pen. He said, 'Why did you drop that apple core?' and I told him I didn't drop an apple core.

"He then said he wanted my name and address. He was an over-zealous young lad, baying to give me a ticket.

"I told him I was on my way to the shops but would be walking back that way if he wanted to speak to me later."

Mr Hirst says that when he emerged from the chemists he claimed he was surrounded by five uniformed officers.

"I said I had done nothing wrong and so was not telling them who I was," he said.

He was taken to the police station, where his belongings were taken and his DNA and finger-prints recorded before being locked in the cells overnight.

He twice had to be seen by a doctor after complaining of dizziness and chest pains.

After being charged with littering and obstructing a police officer, the following morning he was handcuffed to a security guard to appear before local magistrates.

His wife, whose disability is due to a back problem, said: "The first I knew about it was when Keith called at 10.45pm.

"He'd gone to the Post Office at lunchtime. We did not know where he was and my daughter had been ringing hospitals. The whole case is ridiculous."

A police source claimed Mr Hirst had flung the apple core across the road, almost hitting someone.

The source added that Mr Hirst refused to give his details to a single officer called in by the PCSO as back-up after he behaved rudely and aggressively. This officer requested two more officers to arrest him.

If he had provided his address he would have been released from custody, the source added.

The obstruction charge was subsequently dropped but Mr Hirst is due to face trial before a district judge for the alleged littering offence last month.

He could face a £2,500 fine or up to six months in prison.

Superintendent Ian Palmer, of Greater Manchester Police, said: "Littering is an offence. We work tirelessly to ensure the streets are not only safe but also clean."

Earlier this year, the Daily Mail told how Kate Badger, 25, from Wolverhampton, was taken to court after being accused of throwing an apple core from her car.

The case, which dragged on for a year at a cost of at least £2,800, was later dropped.

Last month, Sarah Davies, 20, was fined £75 after dropping a piece of sausage roll she was feeding to her four-year-old daughter in Hull.

Source: UK Daily Mail]]> by James Tozer UK Daily Mail May 12, 2008



He only popped out to run a couple of errands for his disabled wife.

But Keith Hirst ended up spending the night in a police cell after being accused of dropping an apple core.

Despite strenuously denying the allegation, the former plumber, who has a heart condition, was taken into custody by up to five uniformed officers and had his DNA and fingerprints taken.

By then his worried family were calling hospitals, fearing he had been in an accident.

It wasn't until nearly 11pm that he was able to ring them and explain what had happened.

He was finally released after 18 hours behind bars.

Mr Hirst, 54, said yesterday he would fight to clear his name in a case which could leave him with a criminal record and cost taxpayers thousands of pounds.

"The way I was treated you would have thought I had robbed a bank," he said.

"My family are law-abiding people and I would help if I saw a gang of yobs attacking a police officer.

"This kind of incident does not help in improving relations between the community and police."

Mr Hirst had just come out of a post office near his home in Swinton, Greater Manchester, and was heading for the chemists to collect his wife's prescription when a community support officer accused him of littering.

He said the officer wanted to issue him with a £50 on-the-spot fine for littering.

"There was a chap there in a fluorescent jacket, big sunglasses, and a baseball cap, on a bike, with a wad of tickets and a pen. He said, 'Why did you drop that apple core?' and I told him I didn't drop an apple core.

"He then said he wanted my name and address. He was an over-zealous young lad, baying to give me a ticket.

"I told him I was on my way to the shops but would be walking back that way if he wanted to speak to me later."

Mr Hirst says that when he emerged from the chemists he claimed he was surrounded by five uniformed officers.

"I said I had done nothing wrong and so was not telling them who I was," he said.

He was taken to the police station, where his belongings were taken and his DNA and finger-prints recorded before being locked in the cells overnight.

He twice had to be seen by a doctor after complaining of dizziness and chest pains.

After being charged with littering and obstructing a police officer, the following morning he was handcuffed to a security guard to appear before local magistrates.

His wife, whose disability is due to a back problem, said: "The first I knew about it was when Keith called at 10.45pm.

"He'd gone to the Post Office at lunchtime. We did not know where he was and my daughter had been ringing hospitals. The whole case is ridiculous."

A police source claimed Mr Hirst had flung the apple core across the road, almost hitting someone.

The source added that Mr Hirst refused to give his details to a single officer called in by the PCSO as back-up after he behaved rudely and aggressively. This officer requested two more officers to arrest him.

If he had provided his address he would have been released from custody, the source added.

The obstruction charge was subsequently dropped but Mr Hirst is due to face trial before a district judge for the alleged littering offence last month.

He could face a £2,500 fine or up to six months in prison.

Superintendent Ian Palmer, of Greater Manchester Police, said: "Littering is an offence. We work tirelessly to ensure the streets are not only safe but also clean."

Earlier this year, the Daily Mail told how Kate Badger, 25, from Wolverhampton, was taken to court after being accused of throwing an apple core from her car.

The case, which dragged on for a year at a cost of at least £2,800, was later dropped.

Last month, Sarah Davies, 20, was fined £75 after dropping a piece of sausage roll she was feeding to her four-year-old daughter in Hull.

Source: UK Daily Mail]]> http://earthhopenetwork.net/forum/showthread.php?tid=708 Mon, 12 May 2008 14:03:33 -0400 http://earthhopenetwork.net/forum/showthread.php?tid=708 by Mark Gillispie Cleveland Metro May 12, 2008



One of the biggest crime waves in the last decade had nothing to do with guns or drugs or gangs.

The criminal tools were houses and lousy loans. The ringleaders, critics contend, earned seven-figure salaries and hatched their plots from inside well-appointed boardrooms.

The crime was mortgage fraud. The damage it created is still being calculated.

There are estimates that at least $7 billion in fraudulent loans were originated nationally in 2007. Ohio, according to an index that tracks mortgage fraud cases, has one of the worst fraud rates in the country.

Cleveland alone may have seen several hundred million dollars' worth of mortgage fraud during the subprime lending boom that began in 2002 and ended in 2006.

A Plain Dealer analysis shows that nearly half of the subprime loans written in Cleveland in 2005 by five of the country's biggest subprime lenders resulted in a foreclosure filing.

This was no victimless crime. Taxpayers will bear much of the cost of Wall Street bailouts and elimination of blight that mortgage fraud created.

If the implosion of the subprime lending market last year and subsequent credit crisis is responsible for the current economic downturn, then mortgage fraud deserves much of the blame.

But the national economy is likely to recover faster than will Cleveland, where fraud-induced foreclosures and their byproduct, vacant and boarded-up homes, have devastated some neighborhoods.

All kinds of people were in on the scam, from buyers and sellers of real estate to the mortgage brokers, appraisers and title officials who facilitated this massive fraud.

But there is a growing belief that the real masterminds behind all this fraudulent activity worked for companies that have called themselves victims - subprime mortgage originators and the banks that provided them with capital.

"This was actual fraud at the highest levels," said Anthony Accetta, a former federal prosecutor. "It wasn't an accident. It was not a failure of oversight. It was actual fraud, and we're not doing anything about it."

In the 1970s, Accetta prosecuted what was then the largest mortgage fraud case in U.S. history. He later worked as a private attorney for investment banks and then started a private investigative firm that works in the financial sector.

He said the subprime-lending business model worked like a Ponzi scheme. These lenders made loans that they sold to investment banks, which turned them into bonds sold to investors. Banks took their fees and commissions and lent money to mortgage originators so they could write more loans.

The scheme ground to a halt, Accetta said, when investment banks could no longer cover up the billions in losses that bad lending created. Too many people had stopped making their mortgage payments, which meant not enough money was coming in to pay investors.

"This is a national catastrophe, and the perpetrators [on Wall Street] are not being prosecuted," Accetta said. "It's one of the easiest cases to prove because there are plenty of witnesses and plenty of evidence out there."

Eric Forster, a Los Angeles-based consultant for mortgage fraud litigation, said the entire subprime mortgage industry was "fraught with fraud."

"What makes this crime wave unique is that, in most cases, the banks cooperated with the perpetrators," Forster said. "Once they discovered they could securitize loans and transfer the risk to some investors in China or Europe, there was no reason to underwrite the loans any longer."

Bankruptcy no bar to $505,000 loan

Subprime loans were advertised as helping to fulfill the American Dream of homeownership by extending credit to people with poor or incomplete credit histories.

But there is evidence that quantity outstripped quality in the subprime business model. People who might have trouble getting a conventional loan from a bank found themselves able to obtain multiple mortgages from subprime originators.

That's what happened in the case of Cleveland resident Myra Clarke.

Clarke, 48, had just gotten divorced, had just lost her home at a sheriff's sale and had just gone through a bankruptcy to shed $38,000 in debt. But that didn't stop Long Beach Mortgage, a subsidiary of banking giant Washington Mutual, from lending her $505,000 to buy six Cleveland rental properties in 2005.

In conventional mortgage lending, borrowers meet face-to-face with employees of the companies doing the lending. Borrowers provide tax returns along with income and bank statements to prove they can afford a loan. The lenders use trusted appraisers to obtain an honest assessment of a property's worth.

In the world of subprime lending, the application process and the hiring of appraisers is the responsibility of independent brokers who are paid only when loans are originated.

The proliferation of stated-income loans, known pejoratively in the industry as "liar's loans," meant that borrowers did not have to provide much documentation beyond a credit report and a Social Security number to obtain a mortgage.

A study that compared 100 stated-income loans with IRS data showed that 90 percent of the loans overstated actual income by at least 5 percent. Sixty percent of those stated-income loans exaggerated income amounts by at least 50 percent.

Subprime originators were happy to fund these risky loans as a tradeoff for the higher fees and interest rates they could charge. And the more loans these companies sold, the higher the bonuses that everyone from account executives to corporate officers received.

Perhaps this explains why Clarke, who has not been accused of any crimes, got those loans for the six rental properties. Her bankruptcy file showed she was a nurse making less than $40,000 a year. Escrow documents included in the foreclosure lawsuits filed against her show she provided $96,000 to cover down payments and closing costs.

Those foreclosures were filed on Clarke's six houses within eight months of her buying them, which indicates that she made few, if any, payments on her loans.

Clarke, through a family member, declined to comment. A Washington Mutual spokesman also declined to comment.

All of the properties were sold to Clarke by Amazing Investments, a Warrensville Heights company owned by Timothy Holman. Property records show that Amazing Investments sold 16 houses in Cleveland in 2005 and 2006. All 16 resulted in foreclosures.

The mortgage broker, Buckeye Lending, collected $20,000 in fees on Clarke's purchases. One of the Buckeye Lending loan officers was Timothy Holman's brother, Stephen.

Buckeye Lending owner Ted Calkins and Stephen Holman were indicted last year in two different mortgage fraud cases. Calkins received probation in a plea deal. Stephen Holman has pleaded not guilty and has a September trial date.

Attempts to reach the Holmans through their attorney and a family member were unsuccessful.

28 percent of mortgages originated by 5 companies

The Plain Dealer compiled a list of the loans made by the top five subprime lenders in Cleveland during 2005. Records show that 48 percent of those loans to purchase or refinance Cleveland houses have resulted in a foreclosure lawsuit.

The five companies - Argent Mortgage, Long Beach Mortgage, New Century Mortgage, Aegis Funding and People's Choice Home Loans - originated 28 percent of the 15,000 mortgages sold in the city of Cleveland during 2005. All five lenders have since been absorbed by other companies or have gone out of business.

There is no accurate way to determine what percentage of subprime mortgage loans were fraudulent.

Robert Ruckstuhl is a Newbury Township mortgage broker and appraiser who has become a consultant for attorneys in foreclosure cases. Ruckstuhl did not mention any specific companies, but said that based on the hundreds of files that he has reviewed, he guesses that at least 25 percent of subprime loans written in Cleveland between 2002 and 2006 contained an element of fraud that should have stopped the loan from being funded.

There were about $1.75 billion in subprime loans written in Cleveland during that five-year period. Even if just 10 percent of those loans had fraudulent misrepresentations, the amount of fraud would be substantial.

It's impossible, Ruckstuhl said, for lenders not to have known they were originating large numbers of fraudulent loans.

"It's a matter of what they wanted to acknowledge," he said.

Kathleen Engel, a professor at the Cleveland-Marshall College of Law at Cleveland State University, said assigning criminal liability to executives at mortgage origination companies and investment banks could prove difficult.

A prosecutor would need to prove that executives intentionally participated in the fraud. Part of the genius of subprime lending, Engel said, was how lenders and investment banks insulated themselves from potential liability.

"The reason we saw such huge growth in independent brokers was because they wanted brokers to do the dirty work," Engel said. "They were able to put a shield between themselves and liability for wrongdoing."

Prosecutor indicts 171 for fraud

Mortgage fraud has not been ignored locally. The Ohio attorney general has funded a task force here. The Cuyahoga County prosecutor's office has indicted 171 people for $41.5 million in fraudulent loans since 2007.

The Cleveland FBI field office works with the task force and has its own caseload.

Nationally, the FBI and Securities and Exchange Commission have 19 separate investigations of mortgage lenders, investment banks and rating agencies. Those investigations are focused on accounting fraud and insider trading.

The Ohio attorney general's office has been using its subpoena powers to gather documents from investment banks and lending companies in anticipation of a lawsuit.

Attorney General Marc Dann said recently that it's becoming clearer that some corporate executives knew their companies were selling or securitizing large numbers of fraudulent loans.

Industry insiders say lower-echelon employees of companies like Argent actively participated in fraud.

Several former loan officers for local mortgage brokers said account executives for subprime lenders coached them on how to assemble loan packages to ensure their approval.

Ruckstuhl, the Newbury Township mortgage broker, said an account executive tried to show one of his loan officers how to create false income statements.

Jacqulyn Fishwick worked for more than two years at an Argent loan-processing center near Chicago as an underwriter and account manager.

Fishwick said some Argent employees played fast and loose with the rules.

"I personally saw some stuff I didn't agree with," she said.

Fishwick said she saw account managers remove documents from files and create documents by cutting and pasting them.

An Argent spokesman declined to comment.

Former Argent Vice President Orson Benn and account executive Constance Golder were indicted in Florida earlier this year on racketeering charges in connection with a mortgage fraud scheme that involved 280 properties and $34 million in loans. Benn and another former Argent employee were indicted for a separate Florida scheme last year.

None of this surprises Accetta, the former federal prosecutor. He says the trail of evidence is clearly marked and ends inside the executive suites of Wall Street's most powerful investment banks.

Accetta said Wall Street created an environment ripe for fraud. After the high-tech bubble burst in the late 1990s, banks partnered with or founded their own mortgage companies and made billions, Accetta said.

Executives of these banks knew they were selling and securitizing large amounts of fraudulent loans because they had inside information on borrowers and mortgage default rates.

"They were more than happy to absorb hundreds of million in losses that occurred during that process," Accetta said, "until it became too much and they couldn't cover it any more and the losses became public."

Despite the FBI and SEC investigations, Accetta said he doesn't think the U.S. Justice Department "has the stomach" to prosecute these companies, out of fear it would undermine confidence in those financial institutions and our capital structure.

"So you're left with prosecuting individuals," Accetta said. "This was systemic. It had nothing to do with this individual or that individual. There was no individual in any of the investment banks who could have stopped it even if they wanted to."

Investigator accuses New Century Financial of ignoring the warnings

An investigator hired to examine issues surrounding the bankruptcy of New Century Financial Corp. said senior management ignored ample evidence of rising default and foreclosure rates while allowing the company to write riskier loans.

New Century, one of the largest subprime lenders in the country, was the biggest source of these higher-cost mortgages in Cleveland and Cuyahoga County in 2006.

"The increasingly risky nature of New Century's loan originations created a ticking time bomb that detonated in 2007," wrote the Delaware bankruptcy court examiner, attorney Michael Missal, in a report publicly released in March.

California-based New Century filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in April 2007 after the company revealed that it needed to restate its earnings for the first three quarters of 2006.

The report accuses New Century's outside auditing firm, KPMG, of allowing or ignoring accounting fraud inside the company. KPMG, which resigned as the company's auditing firm, has denied wrongdoing in its work for New Century.

The collapse of New Century has been blamed for triggering the implosion of the subprime mortgage market and subsequent credit crisis.

The report said there was plenty of evidence that New Century's corporate officers were aware of rising default rates in 2004. About 7 percent of the loans originated by New Century in 2004 - or about $1.8 billion - defaulted after borrowers made three or fewer payments. That compares with $312 million in early-payment defaults in 2003.

An internal review of the company's nine operating centers in 2004 graded the performance of seven centers as unsatisfactory and two as needing improvement.

A senior New Century official afterward questioned whether the auditing teams needed to change their policies rather than have the operating centers "clean up their act."

Despite the signals of deteriorating loan quality, the percentage of early-payment defaults and kickouts - loans rejected by investors - continued to rise in 2005 and 2006.

Early-payment defaults reached 16 percent by December 2006.

The report said New Century had finally taken substantive steps to improve loan quality in late 2006, but that those measures proved too little too late.

New Century announced on March 8, 2007, that it had stopped accepting mortgage loan applications. The next day, company officials disclosed that New Century was the subject of a criminal investigation.

The New York Stock Exchange soon removed New Century from its listings while the company's sources of capital demanded immediate payment on loans made to the company.

Mortgage fraud pdf

Source: Cleveland Metro]]> by Mark Gillispie Cleveland Metro May 12, 2008



One of the biggest crime waves in the last decade had nothing to do with guns or drugs or gangs.

The criminal tools were houses and lousy loans. The ringleaders, critics contend, earned seven-figure salaries and hatched their plots from inside well-appointed boardrooms.

The crime was mortgage fraud. The damage it created is still being calculated.

There are estimates that at least $7 billion in fraudulent loans were originated nationally in 2007. Ohio, according to an index that tracks mortgage fraud cases, has one of the worst fraud rates in the country.

Cleveland alone may have seen several hundred million dollars' worth of mortgage fraud during the subprime lending boom that began in 2002 and ended in 2006.

A Plain Dealer analysis shows that nearly half of the subprime loans written in Cleveland in 2005 by five of the country's biggest subprime lenders resulted in a foreclosure filing.

This was no victimless crime. Taxpayers will bear much of the cost of Wall Street bailouts and elimination of blight that mortgage fraud created.

If the implosion of the subprime lending market last year and subsequent credit crisis is responsible for the current economic downturn, then mortgage fraud deserves much of the blame.

But the national economy is likely to recover faster than will Cleveland, where fraud-induced foreclosures and their byproduct, vacant and boarded-up homes, have devastated some neighborhoods.

All kinds of people were in on the scam, from buyers and sellers of real estate to the mortgage brokers, appraisers and title officials who facilitated this massive fraud.

But there is a growing belief that the real masterminds behind all this fraudulent activity worked for companies that have called themselves victims - subprime mortgage originators and the banks that provided them with capital.

"This was actual fraud at the highest levels," said Anthony Accetta, a former federal prosecutor. "It wasn't an accident. It was not a failure of oversight. It was actual fraud, and we're not doing anything about it."

In the 1970s, Accetta prosecuted what was then the largest mortgage fraud case in U.S. history. He later worked as a private attorney for investment banks and then started a private investigative firm that works in the financial sector.

He said the subprime-lending business model worked like a Ponzi scheme. These lenders made loans that they sold to investment banks, which turned them into bonds sold to investors. Banks took their fees and commissions and lent money to mortgage originators so they could write more loans.

The scheme ground to a halt, Accetta said, when investment banks could no longer cover up the billions in losses that bad lending created. Too many people had stopped making their mortgage payments, which meant not enough money was coming in to pay investors.

"This is a national catastrophe, and the perpetrators [on Wall Street] are not being prosecuted," Accetta said. "It's one of the easiest cases to prove because there are plenty of witnesses and plenty of evidence out there."

Eric Forster, a Los Angeles-based consultant for mortgage fraud litigation, said the entire subprime mortgage industry was "fraught with fraud."

"What makes this crime wave unique is that, in most cases, the banks cooperated with the perpetrators," Forster said. "Once they discovered they could securitize loans and transfer the risk to some investors in China or Europe, there was no reason to underwrite the loans any longer."

Bankruptcy no bar to $505,000 loan

Subprime loans were advertised as helping to fulfill the American Dream of homeownership by extending credit to people with poor or incomplete credit histories.

But there is evidence that quantity outstripped quality in the subprime business model. People who might have trouble getting a conventional loan from a bank found themselves able to obtain multiple mortgages from subprime originators.

That's what happened in the case of Cleveland resident Myra Clarke.

Clarke, 48, had just gotten divorced, had just lost her home at a sheriff's sale and had just gone through a bankruptcy to shed $38,000 in debt. But that didn't stop Long Beach Mortgage, a subsidiary of banking giant Washington Mutual, from lending her $505,000 to buy six Cleveland rental properties in 2005.

In conventional mortgage lending, borrowers meet face-to-face with employees of the companies doing the lending. Borrowers provide tax returns along with income and bank statements to prove they can afford a loan. The lenders use trusted appraisers to obtain an honest assessment of a property's worth.

In the world of subprime lending, the application process and the hiring of appraisers is the responsibility of independent brokers who are paid only when loans are originated.

The proliferation of stated-income loans, known pejoratively in the industry as "liar's loans," meant that borrowers did not have to provide much documentation beyond a credit report and a Social Security number to obtain a mortgage.

A study that compared 100 stated-income loans with IRS data showed that 90 percent of the loans overstated actual income by at least 5 percent. Sixty percent of those stated-income loans exaggerated income amounts by at least 50 percent.

Subprime originators were happy to fund these risky loans as a tradeoff for the higher fees and interest rates they could charge. And the more loans these companies sold, the higher the bonuses that everyone from account executives to corporate officers received.

Perhaps this explains why Clarke, who has not been accused of any crimes, got those loans for the six rental properties. Her bankruptcy file showed she was a nurse making less than $40,000 a year. Escrow documents included in the foreclosure lawsuits filed against her show she provided $96,000 to cover down payments and closing costs.

Those foreclosures were filed on Clarke's six houses within eight months of her buying them, which indicates that she made few, if any, payments on her loans.

Clarke, through a family member, declined to comment. A Washington Mutual spokesman also declined to comment.

All of the properties were sold to Clarke by Amazing Investments, a Warrensville Heights company owned by Timothy Holman. Property records show that Amazing Investments sold 16 houses in Cleveland in 2005 and 2006. All 16 resulted in foreclosures.

The mortgage broker, Buckeye Lending, collected $20,000 in fees on Clarke's purchases. One of the Buckeye Lending loan officers was Timothy Holman's brother, Stephen.

Buckeye Lending owner Ted Calkins and Stephen Holman were indicted last year in two different mortgage fraud cases. Calkins received probation in a plea deal. Stephen Holman has pleaded not guilty and has a September trial date.

Attempts to reach the Holmans through their attorney and a family member were unsuccessful.

28 percent of mortgages originated by 5 companies

The Plain Dealer compiled a list of the loans made by the top five subprime lenders in Cleveland during 2005. Records show that 48 percent of those loans to purchase or refinance Cleveland houses have resulted in a foreclosure lawsuit.

The five companies - Argent Mortgage, Long Beach Mortgage, New Century Mortgage, Aegis Funding and People's Choice Home Loans - originated 28 percent of the 15,000 mortgages sold in the city of Cleveland during 2005. All five lenders have since been absorbed by other companies or have gone out of business.

There is no accurate way to determine what percentage of subprime mortgage loans were fraudulent.

Robert Ruckstuhl is a Newbury Township mortgage broker and appraiser who has become a consultant for attorneys in foreclosure cases. Ruckstuhl did not mention any specific companies, but said that based on the hundreds of files that he has reviewed, he guesses that at least 25 percent of subprime loans written in Cleveland between 2002 and 2006 contained an element of fraud that should have stopped the loan from being funded.

There were about $1.75 billion in subprime loans written in Cleveland during that five-year period. Even if just 10 percent of those loans had fraudulent misrepresentations, the amount of fraud would be substantial.

It's impossible, Ruckstuhl said, for lenders not to have known they were originating large numbers of fraudulent loans.

"It's a matter of what they wanted to acknowledge," he said.

Kathleen Engel, a professor at the Cleveland-Marshall College of Law at Cleveland State University, said assigning criminal liability to executives at mortgage origination companies and investment banks could prove difficult.

A prosecutor would need to prove that executives intentionally participated in the fraud. Part of the genius of subprime lending, Engel said, was how lenders and investment banks insulated themselves from potential liability.

"The reason we saw such huge growth in independent brokers was because they wanted brokers to do the dirty work," Engel said. "They were able to put a shield between themselves and liability for wrongdoing."

Prosecutor indicts 171 for fraud

Mortgage fraud has not been ignored locally. The Ohio attorney general has funded a task force here. The Cuyahoga County prosecutor's office has indicted 171 people for $41.5 million in fraudulent loans since 2007.

The Cleveland FBI field office works with the task force and has its own caseload.

Nationally, the FBI and Securities and Exchange Commission have 19 separate investigations of mortgage lenders, investment banks and rating agencies. Those investigations are focused on accounting fraud and insider trading.

The Ohio attorney general's office has been using its subpoena powers to gather documents from investment banks and lending companies in anticipation of a lawsuit.

Attorney General Marc Dann said recently that it's becoming clearer that some corporate executives knew their companies were selling or securitizing large numbers of fraudulent loans.

Industry insiders say lower-echelon employees of companies like Argent actively participated in fraud.

Several former loan officers for local mortgage brokers said account executives for subprime lenders coached them on how to assemble loan packages to ensure their approval.

Ruckstuhl, the Newbury Township mortgage broker, said an account executive tried to show one of his loan officers how to create false income statements.

Jacqulyn Fishwick worked for more than two years at an Argent loan-processing center near Chicago as an underwriter and account manager.

Fishwick said some Argent employees played fast and loose with the rules.

"I personally saw some stuff I didn't agree with," she said.

Fishwick said she saw account managers remove documents from files and create documents by cutting and pasting them.

An Argent spokesman declined to comment.

Former Argent Vice President Orson Benn and account executive Constance Golder were indicted in Florida earlier this year on racketeering charges in connection with a mortgage fraud scheme that involved 280 properties and $34 million in loans. Benn and another former Argent employee were indicted for a separate Florida scheme last year.

None of this surprises Accetta, the former federal prosecutor. He says the trail of evidence is clearly marked and ends inside the executive suites of Wall Street's most powerful investment banks.

Accetta said Wall Street created an environment ripe for fraud. After the high-tech bubble burst in the late 1990s, banks partnered with or founded their own mortgage companies and made billions, Accetta said.

Executives of these banks knew they were selling and securitizing large amounts of fraudulent loans because they had inside information on borrowers and mortgage default rates.

"They were more than happy to absorb hundreds of million in losses that occurred during that process," Accetta said, "until it became too much and they couldn't cover it any more and the losses became public."

Despite the FBI and SEC investigations, Accetta said he doesn't think the U.S. Justice Department "has the stomach" to prosecute these companies, out of fear it would undermine confidence in those financial institutions and our capital structure.

"So you're left with prosecuting individuals," Accetta said. "This was systemic. It had nothing to do with this individual or that individual. There was no individual in any of the investment banks who could have stopped it even if they wanted to."

Investigator accuses New Century Financial of ignoring the warnings

An investigator hired to examine issues surrounding the bankruptcy of New Century Financial Corp. said senior management ignored ample evidence of rising default and foreclosure rates while allowing the company to write riskier loans.

New Century, one of the largest subprime lenders in the country, was the biggest source of these higher-cost mortgages in Cleveland and Cuyahoga County in 2006.

"The increasingly risky nature of New Century's loan originations created a ticking time bomb that detonated in 2007," wrote the Delaware bankruptcy court examiner, attorney Michael Missal, in a report publicly released in March.

California-based New Century filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in April 2007 after the company revealed that it needed to restate its earnings for the first three quarters of 2006.

The report accuses New Century's outside auditing firm, KPMG, of allowing or ignoring accounting fraud inside the company. KPMG, which resigned as the company's auditing firm, has denied wrongdoing in its work for New Century.

The collapse of New Century has been blamed for triggering the implosion of the subprime mortgage market and subsequent credit crisis.

The report said there was plenty of evidence that New Century's corporate officers were aware of rising default rates in 2004. About 7 percent of the loans originated by New Century in 2004 - or about $1.8 billion - defaulted after borrowers made three or fewer payments. That compares with $312 million in early-payment defaults in 2003.

An internal review of the company's nine operating centers in 2004 graded the performance of seven centers as unsatisfactory and two as needing improvement.

A senior New Century official afterward questioned whether the auditing teams needed to change their policies rather than have the operating centers "clean up their act."

Despite the signals of deteriorating loan quality, the percentage of early-payment defaults and kickouts - loans rejected by investors - continued to rise in 2005 and 2006.

Early-payment defaults reached 16 percent by December 2006.

The report said New Century had finally taken substantive steps to improve loan quality in late 2006, but that those measures proved too little too late.

New Century announced on March 8, 2007, that it had stopped accepting mortgage loan applications. The next day, company officials disclosed that New Century was the subject of a criminal investigation.

The New York Stock Exchange soon removed New Century from its listings while the company's sources of capital demanded immediate payment on loans made to the company.

Mortgage fraud pdf

Source: Cleveland Metro]]> http://earthhopenetwork.net/forum/showthread.php?tid=707 Mon, 12 May 2008 12:57:17 -0400 http://earthhopenetwork.net/forum/showthread.php?tid=707 by Nelson Hernandez, Michael Alison Chandler and Theola Labbé Washington Post via Infowars May 12, 2008



The problem of truancy has drawn widespread attention this year, prompting some area lawmakers to call for tough measures to keep track of the most habitual offenders and leading school officials to crack down on those who constantly skip class.

In its recently concluded session, the Maryland General Assembly passed a measure that would make it possible to deny driver's licenses to students who have too many unexcused absences. Gov. Martin O'Malley (D) is expected to sign it.

During the same session, some lawmakers in Prince George's proposed strapping ankle bracelets on students to electronically monitor the whereabouts of those who constantly skip school. That bill did not advance. But the county's police announced April 11 that they had caught 425 truants in a crackdown that began in February.

At Rockville High School, officials led a crackdown of their own when they suspended 26 students after they were caught skipping class to attend a party at the house of two students whose parents were not home.

But it's not just Maryland with a problem. The District and Virginia also struggle to keep students from cutting classes.

David Rathbun, one of 15 attendance officers for Fairfax County public schools, said he handles hundreds of cases each year. "When they don't go to school," he said, "they just hang out at home. Malls are always a draw."

Rathbun said a small percentage of students leaves campus during the day. Often, those who try to walk out are stopped by school security officers.

Why do kids do it?

"One of the most common problems I hear from students is that they can't get up early enough," Rathbun said. "School starts at 7:20, and they have to be at the bus stop by 6 sometimes. Adolescents have problems with that."

Another common reason Rathbun hears: "Straight out, I don't like school."

Definitions of truancy vary. D.C. officials say any school-age child who misses at least 15 days of class without a valid excuse is truant. Maryland calls students habitually truant if they are unlawfully absent from school for 20 percent or more of school days when they have been enrolled for more than half a school year. Virginia says a student with repeated unexcused absences is a "child in need of supervision" and prescribes steps that school systems and juvenile courts should take to fix the problem.

Because of these variations, the extent of truancy troubles school administrators face is difficult to pin down.

Source: Washington Post]]> by Nelson Hernandez, Michael Alison Chandler and Theola Labbé Washington Post via Infowars May 12, 2008



The problem of truancy has drawn widespread attention this year, prompting some area lawmakers to call for tough measures to keep track of the most habitual offenders and leading school officials to crack down on those who constantly skip class.

In its recently concluded session, the Maryland General Assembly passed a measure that would make it possible to deny driver's licenses to students who have too many unexcused absences. Gov. Martin O'Malley (D) is expected to sign it.

During the same session, some lawmakers in Prince George's proposed strapping ankle bracelets on students to electronically monitor the whereabouts of those who constantly skip school. That bill did not advance. But the county's police announced April 11 that they had caught 425 truants in a crackdown that began in February.

At Rockville High School, officials led a crackdown of their own when they suspended 26 students after they were caught skipping class to attend a party at the house of two students whose parents were not home.

But it's not just Maryland with a problem. The District and Virginia also struggle to keep students from cutting classes.

David Rathbun, one of 15 attendance officers for Fairfax County public schools, said he handles hundreds of cases each year. "When they don't go to school," he said, "they just hang out at home. Malls are always a draw."

Rathbun said a small percentage of students leaves campus during the day. Often, those who try to walk out are stopped by school security officers.

Why do kids do it?

"One of the most common problems I hear from students is that they can't get up early enough," Rathbun said. "School starts at 7:20, and they have to be at the bus stop by 6 sometimes. Adolescents have problems with that."

Another common reason Rathbun hears: "Straight out, I don't like school."

Definitions of truancy vary. D.C. officials say any school-age child who misses at least 15 days of class without a valid excuse is truant. Maryland calls students habitually truant if they are unlawfully absent from school for 20 percent or more of school days when they have been enrolled for more than half a school year. Virginia says a student with repeated unexcused absences is a "child in need of supervision" and prescribes steps that school systems and juvenile courts should take to fix the problem.

Because of these variations, the extent of truancy troubles school administrators face is difficult to pin down.

Source: Washington Post]]> http://earthhopenetwork.net/forum/showthread.php?tid=706 Mon, 12 May 2008 12:19:47 -0400 http://earthhopenetwork.net/forum/showthread.php?tid=706 by Sarah-Kate Templeton London Times May 12, 2008



Scientists have created what is believed to be the first genetically modified (GM) human embryo.

A team from Cornell University in New York produced the GM embryo to study how early cells and diseases develop. It was destroyed after five days.

The British regulator, the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA), has warned that such controversial experiments cause “large ethical and public interest issues”.

News of the development comes days before MPs are to debate legislation that would allow scientists to use similar techniques in this country.

The effects of changing an embryo would be permanent. Genes added to embryos or reproductive cells, such as sperm, will affect all cells in the body and will be passed on to future generations.

The technology could potentially be used to correct genes which cause diseases such as cystic fibrosis, haemophilia and even cancer. In theory, any gene that has been identified could be added to embryos.

Ethicists warn that genetically modifying embryos could lead to the addition of genes for desirable traits such as height, intelligence and hair colour.

The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill, which will have its second reading this week, will make it legal to create GM embryos in Britain.

The bill will allow GM embryos to be created only for research and will ban implantation in the womb. Ethicists, however, say that the legislation could be relaxed in the future.

The HFEA has said that it is preparing for scientists to apply for licences to create GM embryos. A paper, published by the authority, states: “The bill has taken away all inhibitions on genetically altering human embryos for research. The Science and Clinical Advances Group [of the HFEA] thought there were large ethical and public interest issues and that these should be referred for debate.”

The Cornell team, led by Nikica Zaninovic, used a virus to add a gene, a green fluorescent protein, to an embryo left over from in vitro fertilisation.

The research was presented at a meeting of the American Society of Reproductive Medicine last year but details have emerged only after the HFEA highlighted the work in a review of the technology.

Zaninovic pointed out that in order to be sure that the new gene had been inserted and the embryo had been genetically modified, scientists would ideally need to grow the embryo and carry out further tests.

The Cornell team did not have permission to allow the embryo to progress, however.

Scientists argue that the embryos could be used to study how diseases develop. They also say GM embryos could be more efficient in generating stem cells.

However, Dr David King, director of Human Genetics Alert, warned: “This is the first step on the road that will lead to the nightmare of designer babies and a new eugenics. The HFEA is right to say that the creation and legalisation of GM embryos raises ‘large ethical and public interest issues’ but neglects to mention that these have not been debated at all.”

He added: “I have been speaking to MPs all week and no one knows that the government is legalising GM embryos. The public has had enough of scientists sneaking these things through and then presenting us with a fait accompli.”

Source: London Times]]> by Sarah-Kate Templeton London Times May 12, 2008



Scientists have created what is believed to be the first genetically modified (GM) human embryo.

A team from Cornell University in New York produced the GM embryo to study how early cells and diseases develop. It was destroyed after five days.

The British regulator, the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA), has warned that such controversial experiments cause “large ethical and public interest issues”.

News of the development comes days before MPs are to debate legislation that would allow scientists to use similar techniques in this country.

The effects of changing an embryo would be permanent. Genes added to embryos or reproductive cells, such as sperm, will affect all cells in the body and will be passed on to future generations.

The technology could potentially be used to correct genes which cause diseases such as cystic fibrosis, haemophilia and even cancer. In theory, any gene that has been identified could be added to embryos.

Ethicists warn that genetically modifying embryos could lead to the addition of genes for desirable traits such as height, intelligence and hair colour.

The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill, which will have its second reading this week, will make it legal to create GM embryos in Britain.

The bill will allow GM embryos to be created only for research and will ban implantation in the womb. Ethicists, however, say that the legislation could be relaxed in the future.

The HFEA has said that it is preparing for scientists to apply for licences to create GM embryos. A paper, published by the authority, states: “The bill has taken away all inhibitions on genetically altering human embryos for research. The Science and Clinical Advances Group [of the HFEA] thought there were large ethical and public interest issues and that these should be referred for debate.”

The Cornell team, led by Nikica Zaninovic, used a virus to add a gene, a green fluorescent protein, to an embryo left over from in vitro fertilisation.

The research was presented at a meeting of the American Society of Reproductive Medicine last year but details have emerged only after the HFEA highlighted the work in a review of the technology.

Zaninovic pointed out that in order to be sure that the new gene had been inserted and the embryo had been genetically modified, scientists would ideally need to grow the embryo and carry out further tests.

The Cornell team did not have permission to allow the embryo to progress, however.

Scientists argue that the embryos could be used to study how diseases develop. They also say GM embryos could be more efficient in generating stem cells.

However, Dr David King, director of Human Genetics Alert, warned: “This is the first step on the road that will lead to the nightmare of designer babies and a new eugenics. The HFEA is right to say that the creation and legalisation of GM embryos raises ‘large ethical and public interest issues’ but neglects to mention that these have not been debated at all.”

He added: “I have been speaking to MPs all week and no one knows that the government is legalising GM embryos. The public has had enough of scientists sneaking these things through and then presenting us with a fait accompli.”

Source: London Times]]> http://earthhopenetwork.net/forum/showthread.php?tid=705 Mon, 12 May 2008 11:58:07 -0400 http://earthhopenetwork.net/forum/showthread.php?tid=705 by Aaron Glantz Lew Rockwell May 12, 2008


Fred Swallow, an Iraq veteran who was diagnosed with a traumatic brain injury,
said the VA should be doing more for those living in rural areas.
(Globe Staff Photo / Bill Greene)

Eighteen American war veterans kill themselves every day. One thousand former soldiers receiving care from the Department of Veterans Affairs attempt suicide every month. More veterans are committing suicide than are dying in combat overseas.

These are statistics that most Americans don't know, because the Bush administration has refused to tell them. Since the start of the Iraq War, the government has tried to present it as a war without casualties.

In fact, they never would have come to light were it not for a class action lawsuit brought by Veterans for Common Sense and Veterans United for Truth on behalf of the 1.7 million Americans who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan. The two groups allege the Department of Veterans Affairs has systematically denied mental health care and disability benefits to veterans returning from the conflict zones.

The case, officially known as Veterans for Common Sense vs. Peake, went to trial last month at a Federal Courthouse in San Francisco. The two sides are still filing briefs until May 19 and waiting for a ruling from Judge Samuel Conti, but the case is already having an impact.
"Shh!"

That's because over the course of the two-week trial, the VA was compelled to produce a series of documents that show the extent of the crisis affecting wounded soldiers.

"Shh!" begins one e-mail from Dr. Ira Katz, the head of the VA's Mental Health Division, advising a media spokesperson not to tell CBS News that 1,000 veterans receiving care at the VA try to kill themselves every month.

"Our suicide prevention coordinators are identifying about 1,000 suicide attempts per month among the veterans we see in our medical facilities. Is this something we should (carefully) address ourselves in some sort of release before someone stumbles on it?" the e-mail concludes.

Leading Democrats on the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee immediately called for Katz's resignation. On May 6, the Chair of the House Committee on Veterans Affairs, Bob Filner (D-CA) convened a hearing titled "The Truth About Veteran's Suicides" and called Katz and VA Secretary James Peake to testify.

"That e-mail was in poor tone but the content was part of a dialogue about what we should do about new information," Katz said in response to Filner's questions. "The e-mail represents a healthy dialogue among members of VA staff about when it's appropriate to disclose and make public information early in the process."

Filner was nonplused and accused Katz and Peake of a "cover-up."

"We should all be angry about what has gone on here," Filner said. "This is a matter of life and death for the veterans that we are responsible for and I think there was criminal negligence in the way this was handled. If we do not admit, assume or know then the problem will continue and people will die. If that's not criminal negligence, I don't know what is."
A Pattern

It's also part of a pattern. The high number of veteran suicides weren't the only government statistics the Bush Administration was forced to reveal because of the class action lawsuit.

Another set of documents presented in court showed that in the six months leading up to March 31, a total of 1,467 veterans died waiting to learn if their disability claim would be approved by the government. A third set of documents showed that veterans who appeal a VA decision to deny their disability claim have to wait an average of 1,608 days, or nearly four and a half years, for their answer.

Other casualty statistics are not directly concealed, but are also not revealed on a regular basis. For example, the Pentagon regularly reports on the numbers of American troops "wounded" in Iraq (currently at 31,948) but neglects to mention that it has two other categories "injured" (10,180) and "ill" (28,451). All three of these categories represent soldiers who are so damaged physically they have to be medically evacuated to Germany for treatment, but by splitting the numbers up the sense of casualties down the public consciousness.

Here's another number that we don't often hear discussed in the media: 287,790. That's the number of returning Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans who had filed a disability claim with the Veterans Administration as of March 25th. That figure was not announced to the public at a news conference, but obtained by Veterans for Common Sense using the Freedom of Information Act.

Why all the secrecy? Why is it so hard to get accurate casualty figures out of our government? Because the Bush Administration knows if Americans woke up to the real, human costs of this war they would fight harder to oppose it.
Some 'Cakewalk'

Think back to 2002, before the invasion of Iraq, when leading neo-conservative thinker and Donald Rumsfeld aide Ken Adelman predicted the war would be a "cakewalk."

Or consider this statement from Vice President Dick Cheney. Two days before the invasion, Cheney told NBC's Tim Russert the war would "go relatively quickly…(ending in) weeks rather than months."

Today, those comments are gone but the motivation behind them remains. This is why the VA's head of mental health wrote "Shh!" telling a spokesperson not to respond to a reporters' inquiry.

But all the shhing in the world cannot stop the horrible pain that's mounting after five years of war in Iraq and nearly seven years of war in Afghanistan.
Unpleasant Facts

According to an April 2008 study by the Rand Corporation, 300,000 Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans currently suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder or major depression. Another 320,000 suffer from traumatic brain injury, physical brain damage. A majority are not receiving help from the Pentagon and VA system which are more concerned with concealing unpleasant facts than they are with providing care.

In its study, the RAND Corporation wrote that the federal government fails to care for war veterans at its own peril – noting post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injury "can have far-reaching and damaging consequences."

"Individuals afflicted with these conditions face higher risks for other psychological problems and for attempting suicide. They have higher rates of unhealthy behaviors – such as smoking, overeating, and unsafe sex – and higher rates of physical health problems and mortality. Individuals with these conditions also tend to miss more work or report being less productive," the report said. "These conditions can impair relationships, disrupt marriages, aggravate the difficulties of parenting, and cause problems in children that may extend the consequences of combat trauma across generations."

"These consequences can have a high economic toll," RAND said. "However, most attempts to measure the costs of these conditions focus only on medical costs to the government. Yet, direct costs of treatment are only a fraction of the total costs related to mental health and cognitive conditions. Far higher are the long-term individual and societal costs stemming from lost productivity, reduced quality of life, homelessness, domestic violence, the strain on families, and suicide. Delivering effective care and restoring veterans to full mental health have the potential to reduce these longer-term costs significantly."

Bush and Congress have the power to stop this problem before it gets worse. It's not too late to extend needed mental health care to our returning Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans; it's not too late to begin properly screening and treating returning servicemen and women who've experienced a traumatic brain injury; and it is not too late to simplify the disability claims process so that wounded veterans do not die waiting for their check. As the Rand study shows, this isn't only in the best interest of veterans, it's in the best interest of our country in the long run.

To start with, the Bush Administration needs to give us some honest information about the true human costs of the Iraq War.

Reprinted courtesy of Foreign Policy in Focus.

Aaron Glantz [send him mail] is the author of two upcoming books on Iraq: The War Comes Home: Washington's Battle Against America's Veterans (UC Press) and Winter Soldier Iraq and Afghanistan: Eyewitness Accounts of the Occupations (Haymarket). He edits the website WarComesHome.org.

Source: Lew Rockwell]]> by Aaron Glantz Lew Rockwell May 12, 2008


Fred Swallow, an Iraq veteran who was diagnosed with a traumatic brain injury,
said the VA should be doing more for those living in rural areas.
(Globe Staff Photo / Bill Greene)

Eighteen American war veterans kill themselves every day. One thousand former soldiers receiving care from the Department of Veterans Affairs attempt suicide every month. More veterans are committing suicide than are dying in combat overseas.

These are statistics that most Americans don't know, because the Bush administration has refused to tell them. Since the start of the Iraq War, the government has tried to present it as a war without casualties.

In fact, they never would have come to light were it not for a class action lawsuit brought by Veterans for Common Sense and Veterans United for Truth on behalf of the 1.7 million Americans who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan. The two groups allege the Department of Veterans Affairs has systematically denied mental health care and disability benefits to veterans returning from the conflict zones.

The case, officially known as Veterans for Common Sense vs. Peake, went to trial last month at a Federal Courthouse in San Francisco. The two sides are still filing briefs until May 19 and waiting for a ruling from Judge Samuel Conti, but the case is already having an impact.
"Shh!"

That's because over the course of the two-week trial, the VA was compelled to produce a series of documents that show the extent of the crisis affecting wounded soldiers.

"Shh!" begins one e-mail from Dr. Ira Katz, the head of the VA's Mental Health Division, advising a media spokesperson not to tell CBS News that 1,000 veterans receiving care at the VA try to kill themselves every month.

"Our suicide prevention coordinators are identifying about 1,000 suicide attempts per month among the veterans we see in our medical facilities. Is this something we should (carefully) address ourselves in some sort of release before someone stumbles on it?" the e-mail concludes.

Leading Democrats on the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee immediately called for Katz's resignation. On May 6, the Chair of the House Committee on Veterans Affairs, Bob Filner (D-CA) convened a hearing titled "The Truth About Veteran's Suicides" and called Katz and VA Secretary James Peake to testify.

"That e-mail was in poor tone but the content was part of a dialogue about what we should do about new information," Katz said in response to Filner's questions. "The e-mail represents a healthy dialogue among members of VA staff about when it's appropriate to disclose and make public information early in the process."

Filner was nonplused and accused Katz and Peake of a "cover-up."

"We should all be angry about what has gone on here," Filner said. "This is a matter of life and death for the veterans that we are responsible for and I think there was criminal negligence in the way this was handled. If we do not admit, assume or know then the problem will continue and people will die. If that's not criminal negligence, I don't know what is."
A Pattern

It's also part of a pattern. The high number of veteran suicides weren't the only government statistics the Bush Administration was forced to reveal because of the class action lawsuit.

Another set of documents presented in court showed that in the six months leading up to March 31, a total of 1,467 veterans died waiting to learn if their disability claim would be approved by the government. A third set of documents showed that veterans who appeal a VA decision to deny their disability claim have to wait an average of 1,608 days, or nearly four and a half years, for their answer.

Other casualty statistics are not directly concealed, but are also not revealed on a regular basis. For example, the Pentagon regularly reports on the numbers of American troops "wounded" in Iraq (currently at 31,948) but neglects to mention that it has two other categories "injured" (10,180) and "ill" (28,451). All three of these categories represent soldiers who are so damaged physically they have to be medically evacuated to Germany for treatment, but by splitting the numbers up the sense of casualties down the public consciousness.

Here's another number that we don't often hear discussed in the media: 287,790. That's the number of returning Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans who had filed a disability claim with the Veterans Administration as of March 25th. That figure was not announced to the public at a news conference, but obtained by Veterans for Common Sense using the Freedom of Information Act.

Why all the secrecy? Why is it so hard to get accurate casualty figures out of our government? Because the Bush Administration knows if Americans woke up to the real, human costs of this war they would fight harder to oppose it.
Some 'Cakewalk'

Think back to 2002, before the invasion of Iraq, when leading neo-conservative thinker and Donald Rumsfeld aide Ken Adelman predicted the war would be a "cakewalk."

Or consider this statement from Vice President Dick Cheney. Two days before the invasion, Cheney told NBC's Tim Russert the war would "go relatively quickly…(ending in) weeks rather than months."

Today, those comments are gone but the motivation behind them remains. This is why the VA's head of mental health wrote "Shh!" telling a spokesperson not to respond to a reporters' inquiry.

But all the shhing in the world cannot stop the horrible pain that's mounting after five years of war in Iraq and nearly seven years of war in Afghanistan.
Unpleasant Facts

According to an April 2008 study by the Rand Corporation, 300,000 Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans currently suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder or major depression. Another 320,000 suffer from traumatic brain injury, physical brain damage. A majority are not receiving help from the Pentagon and VA system which are more concerned with concealing unpleasant facts than they are with providing care.

In its study, the RAND Corporation wrote that the federal government fails to care for war veterans at its own peril – noting post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injury "can have far-reaching and damaging consequences."

"Individuals afflicted with these conditions face higher risks for other psychological problems and for attempting suicide. They have higher rates of unhealthy behaviors – such as smoking, overeating, and unsafe sex – and higher rates of physical health problems and mortality. Individuals with these conditions also tend to miss more work or report being less productive," the report said. "These conditions can impair relationships, disrupt marriages, aggravate the difficulties of parenting, and cause problems in children that may extend the consequences of combat trauma across generations."

"These consequences can have a high economic toll," RAND said. "However, most attempts to measure the costs of these conditions focus only on medical costs to the government. Yet, direct costs of treatment are only a fraction of the total costs related to mental health and cognitive conditions. Far higher are the long-term individual and societal costs stemming from lost productivity, reduced quality of life, homelessness, domestic violence, the strain on families, and suicide. Delivering effective care and restoring veterans to full mental health have the potential to reduce these longer-term costs significantly."

Bush and Congress have the power to stop this problem before it gets worse. It's not too late to extend needed mental health care to our returning Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans; it's not too late to begin properly screening and treating returning servicemen and women who've experienced a traumatic brain injury; and it is not too late to simplify the disability claims process so that wounded veterans do not die waiting for their check. As the Rand study shows, this isn't only in the best interest of veterans, it's in the best interest of our country in the long run.

To start with, the Bush Administration needs to give us some honest information about the true human costs of the Iraq War.

Reprinted courtesy of Foreign Policy in Focus.

Aaron Glantz [send him mail] is the author of two upcoming books on Iraq: The War Comes Home: Washington's Battle Against America's Veterans (UC Press) and Winter Soldier Iraq and Afghanistan: Eyewitness Accounts of the Occupations (Haymarket). He edits the website WarComesHome.org.

Source: Lew Rockwell]]> http://earthhopenetwork.net/forum/showthread.php?tid=704 Mon, 12 May 2008 10:50:35 -0400 http://earthhopenetwork.net/forum/showthread.php?tid=704
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