Two days before Christmas 1913, President Woodrow Wilson signed the Federal Reserve Act, creating America's latest and current central bank, the Federal Reserve System. It's a sobering thought that in the 100 years since the Fed's creation, the dollar has lost 95 percent of its value. Had the Fed never been created, America would be dotted with Nickel Stores (other things being equal) instead of Dollar Stores. But that is just the beginning of the sad tale.

The Fed was not America's first experience with banking regulations or a central bank. From the very beginning, the United States had substantial money and banking regulations at the state and national levels, even with a gold standard. There was no free market or free banking. But as the 19th century came to a close, the national banks, led by J.P. Morgan, were dissatisfied with the money and banking regime under the reigning National Banking system, and sought to regain their previous dominance. As Murray Rothbard wrote in The Case Against the Fed,

[The] banks desperately desired a Central Bank, not to place fetters on their own natural tendency to inflate, but, on the contrary, to enable them to inflate and expand together without incurring the penalties of market competition. As a lender of last resort, the Central Bank could permit and encourage them to inflate when they would ordinarily have to contract their loans in order to save themselves. In short, the real reason for the adoption of the Federal Reserve, and its promotion by the large banks, was the exact opposite of their loudly trumpeted motivations. Rather than create an institution to curb their own profits on behalf of the public interest, the banks sought a Central Bank to enhance their profits by permitting them to inflate far beyond the bounds set by free-market competition.

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) is under fire by Republicans and conservatives yet again. And for good reason.

First it was the "Fast and Furious" operation in Phoenix, where ATF agents allowed illegal gun sales that were believed to be ultimately for Mexican drug cartels in order to track the buyers and sellers. It resulted in about 1,300 weapons' being unaccounted for by the ATF. Two weapons linked to the operation turned up in connection with the murder of a U.S. border patrol agent, and U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder was cited for contempt of Congress.

Now it is Operation Fearless in Milwaukee. There the ATF covertly opened a store called "Fearless Distributing," which sold designer clothes, athletic shoes, jewelry, and drug paraphernalia. The undercover ATF agents working behind the counter of this storefront-sting operation "let it be known" that they were willing to buy guns and drugs. The sting operation resulted in the seizure of 145 guns, including some sawed-off shotguns, stolen guns, and guns with obliterated serial numbers. Charges were filed against about 30 people, mostly for low-level drug sales and gun-possession counts. ATF spokesman Special Agent Robert Schmidt said that "he is convinced the operation didn't bring crime to the neighborhood and instead made the streets of Milwaukee safer." "Our number-one responsibility is denying criminal access to firearms and that is what we are trying to do," he said. "It is our duty to purchase these firearms to protect the American public and citizens of Milwaukee." He "declined to say how much the sting operation cost."

The Bureau of Land Management says its 200-man armed siege of the Cliven Bundy ranch in Nevada is all about protecting an "endangered tortoise." But a Natural News investigation has found that BLM is actually in the business of raking in millions of dollars by leasing Nevada lands to energy companies that engage in fracking operations.

This document from the Nevada Bureau of Mines and Geology(1) shows significant exploratory drilling being conducted in precisely the same area where the Bundy family has been running cattle since the 1870′s. The "Gold Butte" area is indicated on the lower right corner of the document (see below), and it clearly shows numerous exploratory drilling operations have been conducted there.

What's also clear is that oil has been found in nearby areas and possibly even within the Gold Butte area itself.

We commend Secretary of State John Kerry's extraordinary efforts to renew Israeli-Palestinian talks and negotiations for a framework for a peace accord, and the strong support his initiative has received from President Barack Obama.

We believe these efforts, and the priority Kerry has assigned to them, have been fully justified. However, we also believe that the necessary confidentiality that Secretary Kerry imposed on the resumed negotiations should not preclude a far more forceful and public expression of certain fundamental U.S. positions:

Settlements: U.S. disapproval of continued settlement enlargement in the Occupied Territories by Israel's government as "illegitimate" and "unhelpful" does not begin to define the destructiveness of this activity. Nor does it dispel the impression that we have come to accept it despite our rhetorical objections. Halting the diplomatic process on a date certain until Israel complies with international law and previous agreements would help to stop this activity and clearly place the onus for the interruption where it belongs.

Amid the escalating conflict over the seizure of local government buildings by pro-Russian protesters in eastern Ukraine, US officials and the American media are hypocritically denouncing Russia for allegedly inciting the actions. These charges, presented as facts but without any substantiation, are part of an intensification of the imperialist offensive in Eastern Europe, the aim of which is to isolate, humiliate and ultimately dismember Russia. The logic of this reckless and aggressive policy, spearheaded by Washington, is war between the West and Russia, a nuclear power.

Ukrainian Interior Minister Arsen Avakov threatened yesterday to crush the protests in 48 hours, prompting the Russian Foreign Ministry to warn of "civil war" in Ukraine.

Washington responded by pushing for a crackdown and dismissing the protests as a Russian conspiracy to seize Ukraine. In an editorial yesterday calling for economic sanctions against Russia, the Washington Post denounced the protesters as "rent-a-mobs." The Post advised Washington and the European Union to "counter the Russian strategy in the short term by fully backing the Ukrainian government in taking the necessary measures to restore order."

The day before, Secretary of State John Kerry denounced the protests in testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, declaring: "Quite simply, what we see from Russia is an illegal and illegitimate effort to destabilize a sovereign state and create a contrived crisis with paid operatives across an international boundary."

The White House and State Department have engaged in brazen lying to EU governments regarding the ability of the US to supply more than enough natural gas to replace Russian gas deliveries. Recent statements by US President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry are so patently false that it betrays an incredible desperation in Washington over the situation in Ukraine versus Moscow. Or it suggests that Washington is so out of touch with any factual reality she simply doesn't care what she says. Either way, it suggests an unreliable diplomatic partner for the EU.

After his recent meeting with EU leaders Obama issued the incredible statement that the secret Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) that is being secretly negotiated behind closed doors by the major private multinational companies would make it easier for the United States to export gas to Europe and help it reduce its dependency on Russian energy: "Once we have a trade agreement in place, export licenses for projects for liquefied natural gas destined to Europe would be much easier, something that is obviously relevant in today's geopolitical environment," Obama stated.

That bit of political opportunism to try to push the stalled TTIP talks by playing on EU fears of Russian gas loss after the US-orchestrated Ukraine coup of February 22, ignores the fact that the problem in getting US shale gas to the EU does not lie in easier LNG licensing procedures in the USA and EU.

In other recent statements, referring to the recent boom in unconventional US shale gas, Obama and Kerry have both stated the US could more than replace all Russian gas to the EU, an outright lie based on physical realities. At his Brussels meeting Obama told EU leaders they should import shale gas from the US to replace Russian. There is a huge problem with that.

In letters to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and the Security Council, the Syrian Foreign Ministry criticized the world body's "continued silence" on the crimes perpetrated by foreign-backed terrorist groups against Syrians, SANA reported on Thursday.

"The government of Syrian Arab Republic calls on the Security Council to condemn that terrorist crime which claimed the lives of scores of Syrian innocents [as well as] other terrorist crimes that shed the Syrians' blood," said the letters.

The letters also said the Security Council should "punish" Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey for supporting the Takfiri terrorists operating against Syria and turning a blind eye to the UN body's resolutions on counterterrorism.

"There is a de facto redefinition of "the economy" when sharp contractions are gradually lost to standard measures. The unemployed who lose everything...easily fall off the edge of what is defined as "the economy" and counted as such. So do small shop and factory owners who lose everything and commit suicide. And so do the growing number of well-educated students and professionals who leave...all together. These trends redefine the space of the economy. They make it smaller and expel a good share of the unemployed and poor from standard measures. Such a redefinition makes "the economy" presentable, so to speak, allowing it to show a slight growth of GDP per capita.

The reality at the ground level is more akin to a kind of economic version of ethnic cleansing in which elements considered troublesome are dealt with by simply eliminating them. This shrinking and redefinition of economic space so that economies can be represented as being "back on track" holds for a growing number of economies in the European Union and elsewhere [like the United States]... One indication of a people's economic despair is a sharp rise in suicide. This trend is evident in several countries worldwide from India to the United States...

The channels for expulsion vary greatly. They include austerity policies that have helped shrink the economies of Greece and Spain, environmental policies that overlook toxic emissions from enormous mining operations in Norilsk, Russia and the American state of Montana...if our concern is environmental destruction rather that interstate politics, the fact that both these mining operations are heavy polluters matters more than the fact that one is in Russia and the other in the United States...The diverse processes and conditions I include under the notion of expulsion all share one aspect: they are acute. While the abjectly poor worldwide are the most extreme instance, I do include such diverse conditions as the impoverishment of the middle classes in rich countries, the evictions of millions of small farmers in poor countries...Then there are the countless displaced people warehoused in formal and informal refugee camps, the minoritized groups in rich countries who are warehoused in prisons and the able bodied unemployed men and women warehoused in ghettoes and slums...Some are new types of expulsions, such as the 9 million households in the United States whose homes were foreclosed..."

Saskia Sassen's forthcoming book Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy (Harvard-Belknap Press, May 2014) begins its sobering journey with an Introduction titled, "The Savage Sorting." The Savage Sorting seems destined to become the short-form description of 21^st Century to be remembered, if at all, in some distant future by a genetically reengineered humanity (and biosphere).

The headline over a presentation by Jews for Justice for Palestinians of the text of a talk given by Norman Finkelstein to a number of British universities in mid-March was The End of Palestine? It's time to sound an alarm. The purpose of this article is to do just that.

In his talk which analysed U.S. Secretary of State Kerry's peace initiative ("a sham"), Finkelstein explained at length that the Palestinians are on their own because the powers that be in the Western and Arab worlds want them to accept crumbs from Zionism's table and effectively surrender to Zionism's will. (I've been saying that for ages).

He also notes, and I agree, that the Palestinian cause is not as alive and well as it once was in the hearts and minds of the Arab masses, not least because they have troubles of their own.

Finkelstein's summing up included this:

The PA fantasizes that it can liberate Palestine via international diplomacy, while BDS fantasizes that it can liberate Palestine via international sanctions. But the only ones who can liberate Palestine are the Palestinian people themselves, principally those living under occupation. Only mass nonviolent civil resistance can catapult Palestine back on the international stage.

If a popular revolt, like the first intifada, erupts under the simple slogan Enforce the Law, and if the international solidarity movement does its part, it might be possible to mobilize public opinion - including sectors of liberal American Jewish opinion - and exert sufficient pressure on the international community such that Israel will be compelled to meet its legal obligations.

My purpose is to put some flesh on the bone of the statement that the Palestinians themselves must take the lead if their cause is not to become a lost one.

"Anything you can do, I can do better. I can do anything Better than you." - song from Annie Get Your Gun

The conventional wisdom is that democracy is the best form of government. As the imperialist demagogue Winston Churchill, put it, "It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others that have been tried." But such conventional wisdom comes by default. No one has ever offered any evidence in support of it. In fact, no one even knows what such evidence could be. No established criteria exist for the comparative adjectives worst, worse, bad, good, better, and best when they are applied to governments.

Furthermore, that democracy is the best form of government has not always even been the conventional wisdom. Plato, who founded his Academy in Athens around 400 BCE, where democracy is said to have originated, writes, "Dictatorship naturally arises out of democracy." And at least some of those who wrote the American Constitution in the 1700s were well aware of democracy's pitfalls and that no democracy had endured for any length of time. John Adams writes, "Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself." Despite their knowledge, the Constitution's writers persisted, believing that they could build a nation that avoided the faults that had destroyed earlier democracies. But they were wrong!

In fact, no genuine democracy has ever existed. The citizens of no nation have ever governed themselves. Lincoln's "of the people, by the people, and for the people" is pure bombast. What has passed for democracy has always been some form of representational oligarchy. But no one can represent two different ideologies at once. Even the word 'democracy' has never been adequately defined. If you read the Wikipedia article, you will find numerous different forms of government described, all of which are named democracies but differentiated by a qualifying word. There is representative democracy, constitutional democracy, people's democracy, etc. As George Orwell says, "It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it; consequently, the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using the word if it were tied down to any one meaning." Talk about an unqualified democracy is nonsense.