Martial Law, the Financial Bailout, and War

by Peter Dale Scott - January 7, 2008

Paulson's Financial Bailout

It is becoming clear that the bailout measures of late 2008 may have consequences at least as grave for an open society as the response to 9/11 in 2001. Many members of Congress felt coerced into voting against their inclinations, and the normal procedures for orderly consideration of a bill were dispensed with.

The excuse for bypassing normal legislative procedures was the existence of an emergency. But one of the most reprehensible features of the legislation, that it allowed Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson to permit bailed-out institutions to use public money for exorbitant salaries and bonuses, was inserted by Paulson after the immediate crisis had passed.

According to Congressman Peter Welch (D-Vermont) the bailout bill originally called for a cap on executive salaries, but Paulson changed the requirement at the last minute. Welch and other members of Congress were enraged by "news that banks getting taxpayer-funded bailouts are still paying exorbitant salaries, bonuses, and other benefits." In addition, as AP reported in October, "Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y. questioned allowing banks that accept bailout bucks to continue paying dividends on their common stock. `There are far better uses of taxpayer dollars than continuing dividend payments to shareholders,' he said."

Even more reprehensible is the fact that since the bailouts, Paulson and the Treasury Department have refused to provide details of the Troubled Assets Relief Program spending of hundreds of billions of dollars, while the New York Federal Reserve has refused to provide information about its own bail-out (using government-backed loans) that amounts to trillions. This lack of transparency has been challenged by Fox TV in a FOIA suit against the Treasury Department, and a suit by Bloomberg News against the Fed.

The financial bailout legislation of September 2008 was only passed after members of both Congressional houses were warned that failure to act would threaten civil unrest and the imposition of martial law...

Continued...
http://911truth.org/article.php?story=20090108233407311

http://www.villagevoice.com/2008-12-24/columns/obama-s-black-widow/

Nat Hentoff
Obama's Black Widow
Thanks to Bush and Obama, the National Security Agency now knows more about you
By Nat Hentoff
Tuesday, December 23rd 2008 at 12:35pm
Most Popular

Barack Obama will be in charge of the biggest domestic and international spying operation in history. Its prime engine is the National Security Agency (NSA)—located and guarded at Fort Meade, Maryland, about 10 miles northeast of Washington, D.C. A brief glimpse of its ever-expanding capacity was provided on October 26 by The Baltimore Sun's national security correspondent, David Wood: "The NSA's colossal Cray supercomputer, code-named the 'Black Widow,' scans millions of domestic and international phone calls and e-mails every hour. . . . The Black Widow, performing hundreds of trillions of calculations per second, searches through and reassembles key words and patterns, across many languages."

In July, George W. Bush signed into law the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, which gives the NSA even more power to look for patterns that suggest terrorism links in Americans' telephone and Internet communications.

Conspiracy in Perry, Oklahoma
By Wendy S. Painting
January 7, 2009
(Perry, Oklahoma. Picture by Wendy S. Painting December 2008)

On December 27th while at the airport, returning from a research trip from Texas and Oklahoma, I received a call from a friend who said he had just turned on the television and saw something he thought would be of interest to me. He excitedly told me that the FBI had just released a surveillance tape, long held in secrecy, to the Oklahoma City National Memorial commemorating the 1995 bombing of the Murrah federal building which killed at least 168 people. For unknown reasons this video was never released to the public, was not allowed in the three bombing trials of Terry Nichols or Timothy McVeigh and remained in the sole custody of the FBI until now. A spokesperson for the memorial said that the video will help to tell the story of the bombing more completely. I had just returned from Perry, Oklahoma where the footage was taken, a few days before learning of the release of the tape. My reasons for going to Perry were also to tell the story of the Oklahoma City bombing more fully, and an exploration of Perry seemed to be one of the ways to do this.

A new President is coming to town. If you think I don't realize what he represents (the other side of the same coin), you would be sorely mistaken. However, he ran his campaign on the idea of "change," and it is very easy to hold his feet to the fire using his own words against him.

One of the things I've been thinking of doing, something I would hope the ENTIRE movement would take part in, is a phone call and fax campaign to the White House for 6 straight months. Clog up their phone lines. It couldn't be a half-assed effort. It would have to be an everyday/multiple times a day thing.

To my knowledge, such a concerted effort by this movement, as a whole, has never happened before. What would happen if we did it? All you have to do is dial a phone number, or send a fax. Everyday. A few times a day. And because he ran his slogan on the idea of "change," there are a multitude of things we could say.

"Telling us the truth about 9/11 would be a welcome change."

"Holding those responsible for the 9/11 attacks accountable would be a change I can believe in."