One of the things that has crossed my mind a lot lately is that I might like to get out of the U.S.. There isn’t anything holding me here and I’ll probably do it as soon as I finish this website. There are a lot of what are referred to as intentional communities and other good ideas that are taking shape.

George Green, in his important Project Camelot interview Messages for the Ground Crew, refers to The Ground Crew as those who have a responsibility for the ongoing stewardship of the civilization on Planet Earth. He strongly suggests that members of the Ground Crew gather together, in communities, prepared to ride out possible future events for the next few years.

The timing for this, George says, is now.

Much has also been said by others about the need to group in communities. Dr Bill Deagle has spoken about this clearly in his important December 2006 Granada Forum Lecture,
and there’s a great deal of discussion and information on the websites of Steve Quayle and Stan Deyo. In addition, Michael St. Clair also addressed this in the recent Project Camelot Futuretalk II video conversation (links have changed so you’ll just have to look around).

Communities don’t necessarily need to be avant garde groups such as Findhorn or Damanhur. A village is a community – and so may be a street in a town. All that’s needed is a neighborhood in which there’s a strong, stable, mutually supportive connection between the people living there. Inner cities are to be avoided and rural areas are preferable for obvious reasons. The issues are security, water, food, power, transport and general self-sufficiency in a worst-case scenario.

For people living in countries where political, economic or possible earth changes are causing them to consider relocating, they may need to establish groups elsewhere. For example, due to the threat of war or loss of civil liberties, many are moving, or considering moving, to Costa Rica, Panama or Ecuador. There are aware groups of expats in all three countries, and also in some other Latin American countries such as Nicaragua, Bolivia and Brazil (note: this is not an exclusive list). Some, depending on their situations, are moving to Canada, Switzerland, Thailand, or Australia/ New Zealand. The financial commentator Al Martin even suggests relocating to China.

This is not a recommendation for citizens of any given country to leave certain areas where the situation has become difficult. Our intention is to inform. We know many people who are determined to ‘dig in’, take precautions, and ride out whatever happens in the country they love.

Aware people are starting these ventures on farmland in isolated locations all over the world, and it’s natural that those with similar concerns (and maybe complementary skills) will want to connect with one another. One of our roles is to assist in that process.

Has The New World Order Taken Over America’s Free Will, Leaving People Unable To Think For Themselves?

Alan Watt has been fighting to wake-up America for more than a decade, saying people need to understand history before ever having a grasp on what is happening in America today

By Greg Szymanski (www.arcticbeacon.com)

Alan Watt knows the New World Order has all the power and resources that money can buy.

He knows the rulers have been perfecting their system of dominance and control for centuries, using mind control and propaganda as a way to deceive the masses.

According to Watt, who has meticulously studied history to find the answers, the Illuminati’s main goal is to wipe away freewill and individualism, replacing it with the new socialist man, who is unable to think on his own and easily manipulated and controlled.

And if history be the guide, he understands the picture looks bleak for the America since the controllers of the New World Order have devised a program that usually works when they decide to takeover a country.

But like the ultimate free thinker, he feels the diabolical intentions of the rich and powerful, who have infiltrated all major governments and religions of the world, can be defeated once the American people again learn to think and reason on their own without relying on their government and media to do their thinking for them.

Watt’s wit, wisdom and scholarship are well known in a small circle of people who have not fallen victim to the New World Order’s propaganda machine, but he still remains a virtual unknown to the masses since the New World Order’s clamp down on free speech and free thought has reached epidemic proportions.

“There are always going to be a few people who can’t be brainwashed,” said Watt this week on Greg Szymanski’s radio show, the Investigative Journal. “But for the most part the masses remain in the dark, not having a clue how the New World Order plan works and how they really are.

“Everybody has to realize that this is their system, not ours. People have to realize they are led to believe they are free, but really they are not. Mind control is a big part of the New World Order takeover and they use religion as one of their main tools.

“People have to remember that this elitist system has been passed down for hundreds if not thousands of years. They work through secret societies, infiltrating governments and religions and using Freemasonry around the world as their tool.

“The people at the lower levels, of course, don’t understand what’s happening at the top and they provide a good cover for the top levels to carry out their plan of one government and one religion through war and genocide. We are put on this planet for a short time and must try to first understand what is happening by understanding history.”

Watt is known for his scholarship in ancient religions and secret societies, using his study of history as a way explain the problems facing the world today. But Watt is also quick point out, there are solutions.

Here is one answer he gave to an inquisitive emailer on his web site at www.cuttingthroughthematrix.com

“We’ve got to eliminate the crocodiles because apparently they’re running all over the place. Part of the solution again is to expose the control and the control techniques which includes psychological warfare, which has many people spinning into outer space. The solution is for each individual to decide. If the system is corrupt from top to bottom, how can you save it, and would you want to save it, or like most people do you want time to stop with everything you know intact and simply go no further?

“I’ve been deluged with New Agers who’ve swallowed every piece of candy on the bookshelves and their solution is to stare down holes like Mt. Shasta for an answer, try and make piece with the reptiles, or accepting the “fact” that the commoners are a lower slave made DNA type of reptile, therefore there’s nothing you can do. Meanwhile all the little unknown people who’ve been doing all the serious research have it spun into outer space and discredited by psychological warfare techniques.

“The oneness movement was put out there by the top of the establishment for the establishment’s sake. People are divided by all religions including the New Age Religion, the Space Age Religion and the Lord Of The Rings Religion. The only ones who have their names on documents regarding the New World Order and its agenda were conceived and born the same way as everybody else. Until the public demand a say in their own destiny and demand the associations to which every public servant belongs be made available, then these agendas will steamroll on.

“Why would anyone give power of law over one-self to someone or hundreds who’ve sworn allegiance to a secret agenda? Just like with the FTAA, NAFTA, GATT, SOA, the public know by the effects years after the deals have been signed into law. We are only now seeing the effects of the next stage. America is asleep. No one can argue they didn’t notice the unification of Europe and the subjugation of once national governments to that of minor provinces. Where were the people of America while all that was going on? And check the most popular books of that era. Yes, counter-intelligence works very well.”

Much has written about the origins of the New World Order as well as the culprits, but not much has been said about the stages people go through in waking up to the truth or why the waking up process fails to spread quickly through society.

Although Watt believes most people really do not want to know the truth, he provides a much deeper analysis in one of his three books under the main title of Cutting Through: Volumes I, II and III.
As a preface to understanding, I think it necessary to go through the standard phases of “waking up.”

1. An Individual vaguely perceives something is wrong in his/her life. This takes the form of fatigue at trying to “keep up” with real or imaginary crisis, encroachment of government into every aspect of life, increasing taxation and so on. Sometimes it takes the loss of work and the realization that the safety net they contributed to has a gaping hole in the middle.

2. The individual discovers that justice is a joke and that all control mechanisms go up like a pyramid, taking their property, taxes etc. with it. This wealth then is distributed to “help bail-out” or “prop-up” “failing” transnational corporations. Left-overs are channeled via Overseas Developement Corporations to “developing nations,” where the loot is pocketed by front-men and their bureaucrats. Crumbs filter down to social services, which, after being guzzled by directors and staff, leave little for the needy except bundles of forms, in triplicate, of course.

3. The individual looks around for others already exposing “the conspiracy.” These established champions inform him which “conspiracy” books to read. Having then done so, the individual begins to “expose” the corruption, first to friends, then when friendless, he either publishes what he has gleaned or becomes paranoid and withdraws from society altogether.

Why does the waking-up process fail to spread quickly through society?

1. He is terribly naive. He believes the massive corruption “just happened” to begin in his own lifetime, otherwise mummy or daddy or teacher would have warned him. It does not occur to him that his Parents, teachers etc. were as conditioned as he was.

2. Most people do not wish to know. They, like farm animals, have been domesticated. Wild animals (original) have natural instincts of self-preservation. They sense the evil intentions of predators and they survive by trusting their instincts. Wild herds do not “hang around” when one or more members drops dead. Specially bred sheep do.

3. Pavlovian conditioning/response indoctrination has been fed to every individual, through schooling. The media then takes over. Peoples’ opinions are simply sound-bites from news, talk-shows or quotes from glossy magazines.

4. Trust replaces the instinct of self-preservation. It over-rides memory and logic. Controllers and shepherds encourage trust.

5. When threatened with loss of possessions, property, access to health care, etc., people turn to government(predators) for help, or/and organized religion. Should an individual persist in pushing for his “rights,” he will be removed from society and placed in a psychiatric hospital or prison on any number of pretexts. The alternative is death by “accident,” or shot by police while ‘resisting arrest.’

Saying we are truly living in the age of destruction and chaos, Watt added:

“We are truly into the age of chaos, long in the planning and written about openly by the big movers and shakers who lord over us. Some of them, such as Brzezinski have described the coming effects on world-wide societies as akin to the vast population movements which occurred at the beginning of the industrial revolution.

“After the unification of Europe was to follow the unification of the Americas with the resulting clash of cultures and the initial mayhem produced. People slept while the Free Trade Agreement and the subsequent NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) were discussed with deliberate minimum coverage by the CFR (Council on Foreign Relations) controlled media. For those who wish to check, the publicly available censored version will see it has to do, in part, with THE FREE FLOW OF GOODS AND LABOR across traditional national boundaries. People are being encouraged to blame the effect (mass influx from south) and to completely forget the cause.

“Out of the mayhem will materialize, as if by magic, a new Constitution of the Americas. This will be presented as the only reasonable and logical direction to go if we are all to live in peace and security. Coupled with this will come the announcement that every citizen of the Americas must accept an INTERNATIONAL Identity Card under the guise that authorities will be able to track criminal elements moving northwards. The problem has been caused, the reaction is underway, and the solution will be presented. This is the standard Hegelian technique which never fails. Read “MILLENNIUM – Winners and Losers in the Coming World Order” by Jacques Attali who helped spearhead the European Union.”

Financial Crisis in Dubai: Towards a Nightmare Scenario?

By Mike Whitney

URL of this article: www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=16310

The default in Dubai is not the beginning of Financial Meltdown 2. Don’t look for dominoes here. Yes, it does raise serious questions about the vast debt-overhang in emerging economies–particularly East Europe. But, this is not a “sovereign default” in the strict sense, nor is there any great risk of contagion. Oil-rich Abu Dhabi is loaded with liquid assets, possibly as much as $800 billion. They could pay off Dubai World’s measly $60 billion debt without batting an eye. But Abu Dhabi wants to send its wastrel younger brother a wake-up-call by forcing Dubai to restructure its debt. That means that banks, bondholders and contractors will have to take a haircut, which is not surprising given the abysmal condition of the commercial real estate market.

Dubai World owners were caught up in the same heady debt-fueled commercial construction-binge that swept across the United States. The problem can be traced back to lax lending standards and low interest rates. Now demand has fallen off a cliff and credit is getting tighter. Dubai World can’t roll over its debt or meet its obligations. That’s what typically happens when credit bubbles burst.

On Thursday, Bank of America analysts issued a statement: “One cannot rule out — as a tail-risk — a case where this would escalate into a major sovereign default problem, which would then resonate across global emerging markets in the same way that Argentina did in the early 2000s or Russia in the late 1990s.”

This is nonsense. There will be no sovereign default. Abu Dhabi is not going to send global markets into a nosedive to save a few billion dollars. B of A is blowing smoke. Oil has already slipped $3 per barrel since the crisis began. There will probably be a tentative resolution by the time the markets open on Monday. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t important lessons to be learned from this latest financial calamity. There are.

First, it illustrates that the financial crisis is not over—households, businesses and countries are still de-leveraging. This ongoing process will slow spending and increase defaults, bankruptcies and foreclosures. Government guarantees and stimulus programs will not reverse prevailing trends. More incidents like Dubai World should be expected. These “credit events” will disrupt the recovery and spur greater risk-aversion which will push stocks downward.

Arnab Das of RGE Monitor sums it up like this: “We’re bound to see a rise in risk aversion. The Dubai situation signifies that although the major central banks around the world have stabilized the financial system, they can’t make all the excesses simply disappear. We still have to work out those balance sheet stresses. The recovery is proceeding, but significant challenges still lie ahead.” (Bloomberg News)

Second, when these incidents take place, there’s likely to considerable collateral damage from the unregulated insurance policies (credit default swaps) which underwrite the bonds. These CD derivatives are not sold on a public exchange so no one knows who holds them, in what amount, or whether the issuer has sufficient capital reserves to pay off claims. We should expect a repeat of AIG over and over again (although smaller) until the system is either regulated or CD’s are banned. The bottom line, is that the current financial architecture is not designed to work; it is designed to make a handful of speculators very rich. These speculators own congress, the White House and the financial media, which is why there has been no meaningful change in regulations.

Dubai is not Argentina. There will be a resolution and contractors will get paid, although not “in full.” There will be losses. Big losses. But no contagion.

News of Dubai’s payment “standstill” roiled global markets where investor confidence was already thin. The dollar and yen strengthened and US Treasury’s surged. The “flight to safety” is making it doubly hard for the Fed to reflate asset prices. Dubai-like credit events make investors jittery and they pull in their horns. That extends the slump and deepens the recession.

If the Dubai crisis drags on, the dollar will get stronger and the flourishing carry trade will crash. That means that the maxed-out banks (which are heavily invested in high-risk positions) will get clobbered once again. That’s the nightmare scenario.

The Fed has wrapped its arms around the financial system and provided unlimited guarantees on trillions of dollars of dodgy collateral. But that might not be enough.

“I know, and you know that the world is chalk full of good people, great minds and so on. Many of our greatest minds have been demonized, ostracized and locked up, their best ideas and inventions – burned. I would say the days of keeping to ourselves must be put behind us. Not only must we insist that the best people have a say in everything: Public policy, health, environment, social welfare etc., but we must be our best possible selves as well.

We can not remain isolated in our imaginations any longer. We must be voices. We must find a way to be heard lest our silence sentence us to servitude”. Wilson

The Rarity of Great Men
by, William Pfaff
http://www.williampfaff.com/

Alessandria, Italy, October 16 ,2009 – The world hungers for great men to liberate them from their griefs. They rarely arrive, and even more rarely are they appreciated at the time for what they are, usually being deprecated or opposed or mocked by their contemporaries, and left to the historians to rediscover. Gratitude, if it ever comes, ordinarily comes too late.

Or it comes prematurely, and inauspiciously. The Nobel Peace Prize given Barack Obama was a naive expression of that need for greatness. The American president, actively engaged in perpetuating the great war against terror and the Talibans — Mr. Obama has naïve dreams too – should have had the insight to decline the award politely, as inappropriate, as did Henry Kissinger’s North Vietnamese fellow-laureate, Le Duc Tho, when the two jointly were named for the 1973 Peace Prize.

The Europeans know that they will soon be badly in need of a great man of their own. They are at a critical point in their construction of European Union. It now seems reasonably sure that the Lisbon Treaty, reforming the terms of EU governance, will finally be put in place.

With Irish and Polish agreement to the Treaty during the past few days, and despite last-ditch opposition by the Czech president, confidence is justified that in the end a way will be found to appease or brush aside the uncooperative President Vaclav Klaus, whose public opinion does not follow him in his opposition to the treaty, and to save both the treaty and David Cameron, prospective prime minister if the Conservative Party wins the next election in Britain, from the Tory Europhobes.

When, and if, the treaty is ratified, Europe will be in need of its George Washington. It was the former French president, Valery Giscard d’Estaing who said that, head draftsman of the European Constitution that France and Holland voted down. (One may think that he had a certain candidate, himself, in mind.)

Europe will have a very hard time finding their George Washington – or his female counterpart. The reason is that Europe will then incorporate not the present 27 presidents of the member states, but at least 28 – so as to include its George Washington.

Europe’s president will like to see himself, and be seen elsewhere, as the leader of Europe. But he will be seen by the European national presidents as their creature, elected to do their bidding.

Neither the Chancellor of Germany, nor the leaders of Europe’s two nuclear powers and UN Security Council permanent members, France and Britain, regard their national interests adequately represented by a European president.

The great are hard to discern because the greatest of them do not act from ambition but from moral conviction, an infrequently encountered quality in political circles. My remarks in this column are inspired by where I am, which is a conference on the problems presented to the world in the twentieth-anniversary year of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

The sponsor is the World Political Forum, an organization founded by the man who caused the Berlin Wall to fall, Mikhail Gorbachev. President Gorbachev was not present, having been detained by the need to be in Moscow.

The group’s attention was mainly on what may follow in our world, in which Communism has collapsed and the Cold War is only embers (although some do blow on them).

Capitalism is in distress, and now widely distrusted in the form that it has assumed in recent years in the United States — and internationally as well, to the extent that the American form has been exported by means of American-promoted globalism. Many of the European participants seemed almost to assume U.S. capitalism as dead as Communism. The Americans present cautioned them.

Aside from the organizers, the one who did speak of President Gorbachev was, appropriately, a Russian academic and political figure, Grigori Yavlinsky, Founder of the liberal Yabloko party and a former presidential candidate in Russia.

What he said was simple and eloquent. It was that both we and history must not forget that this one man, on his own initiative, asking no one’s permission or approval, freed some 400 million people from a system of oppression that had cast a shadow over the lives lived within this political system, and under its influence, for some 70 years.

No one caused him to do this. Many opposed him, fearing the consequences of what he was doing. He did it because of his – and one would think, his wife’s — conviction that to do so was an urgent moral necessity and a moral obligation that rested upon himself as the individual in possession of the power to do so. He was thus a great man.

US builds up its bases in oil-rich South America

From the Caribbean to Brazil, political opposition to US plans for ‘full-spectrum operations’ is escalating rapidly

By Hugh O’Shaughnessy, www.independent.co.uk

The United States is massively building up its potential for nuclear and non-nuclear strikes in Latin America and the Caribbean by acquiring unprecedented freedom of action in seven new military, naval and air bases in Colombia. The development – and the reaction of Latin American leaders to it – is further exacerbating America’s already fractured relationship with much of the continent.

The new US push is part of an effort to counter the loss of influence it has suffered recently at the hands of a new generation of Latin American leaders no longer willing to accept Washington’s political and economic tutelage. President Rafael Correa, for instance, has refused to prolong the US armed presence in Ecuador, and US forces have to quit their base at the port of Manta by the end of next month.

So Washington turned to Colombia, which has not gone down well in the region. The country has received military aid worth $4.6bn (£2.8bn) from the US since 2000, despite its poor human rights record. Colombian forces regularly kill the country’s indigenous people and other civilians, and last year raided the territory of its southern neighbor, Ecuador, causing at least 17 deaths.

President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, who has not forgotten that US officers were present in government offices in Caracas in 2002 when he was briefly overthrown in a military putsch, warned this month that the bases agreement could mean the possibility of war with Colombia.

In August, President Evo Morales of Bolivia called for the outlawing of foreign military bases in the region. President Manuel Zelaya of Honduras, overthrown in a military coup d’état in June and initially exiled, has complained that US forces stationed at the Honduran base of Palmerola collaborated with Roberto Micheletti, the leader of the plotters and the man who claims to be president.

And, this being US foreign policy, a tell-tale trail of oil is evident. Brazil had already expressed its unhappiness at the presence of US naval vessels in its massive new offshore oilfields off Rio de Janeiro, destined soon to make Brazil a giant oil producer eligible for membership in Opec.

The fact that the US gets half its oil from Latin America was one of the reasons the US Fourth Fleet was re-established in the region’s waters in 2008. The fleet’s vessels can include Polaris nuclear-armed submarines – a deployment seen by some experts as a violation of the 1967 Tlatelolco Treaty, which bans nuclear weapons from the continent.

Indications of US willingness to envisage the stationing of nuclear weapons in Colombia are seen as an additional threat to the spirit of nuclear disarmament. After the establishment of the Tlatelolco Treaty in 1967, four more nuclear-weapon-free zones were set up in Africa, the South Pacific, South-east Asia and Central Asia. Between them, the five treaties cover nearly two-thirds of the countries of the world and almost all the southern hemisphere.

The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), the world’s leading think-tank about disarmament issues, has now expressed its worries about the US-Colombian arrangements.

With or without nuclear weapons, the bilateral agreement on the seven Colombian bases, signed on 30 October in Bogota, risks a costly new arms race in a region. SIPRI, which is funded by the Swedish government, said it was concerned about rising arms expenditure in Latin America draining resources from social programmes that the poor of the region need.

Much of the new US strategy was clearly set out in May in an enthusiastic US Air Force (USAF) proposal for its military construction programme for the fiscal year 2010. One Colombian air base, Palanquero, was, the proposal said, unique “in a critical sub-region of our hemisphere where security and stability is under constant threat from… anti-US governments”.

The proposal sets out a scheme to develop Palanquero which, the USAF says, offers an opportunity for conducting “full-spectrum operations throughout South America…. It also supports mobility missions by providing access to the entire continent, except the Cape Horn region, if fuel is available, and over half the continent if un-refuelled”. (“Full-spectrum operations” is the Pentagon’s jargon for its long-established goal of securing crushing military superiority with atomic and conventional weapons across the globe and in space.)

Palanquero could also be useful in ferrying arms and personnel to Africa via the British mid-Atlantic island of Ascension, French Guiana and Aruba, the Dutch island off Venezuela. The US has access to them all.

The USAF proposal contradicted the assurances constantly issued by US diplomats that the bases would not be used against third countries. These were repeated by the Colombian military to the Colombian congress on 29 July. That USAF proposal was hastily reissued this month after the signature of the agreement – but without the reference to “anti-US governments”. This has led to suggestions of either US government incompetence, or of a battle between a gung-ho USAF and a State Department conscious of the damage done to US relations with Latin America by its leaders’ strong objections to the proposal.

The Colombian forces, for many years notorious for atrocities inflicted on civilians, have cheekily suggested that with US help they could get into the lucrative business of “instructing” other armies about human rights. Civil strife in Colombia meant some 380,000 Colombians were forced from their homes last year, bringing the number of displaced since 1985 to 4.6 million, one in ten of the population. This little-known statistic indicates a much worse situation than the much-publicised one in Islamist-ruled Sudan where 2.7 million have fled from their homes.

Amnesty International said: “The Colombian government must urgently bring human rights violators to justice, to break the links between the armed forces and illegal paramilitary groups, and dismantle paramilitary organisations in line with repeated UN recommendations.”

Palanquero, which adjoins the town of Puerto Salgar on the broad Magdalena river north-west of the capital, Bogota, is one of the seven bases that the government of President Alvaro Uribe gave to Washington last month despite howls from many Colombians. Its hangars can take 100 aircraft and there is accommodation for 2,000 personnel. Its main runway was constructed in the 1980s after Colombia bought a force of Israeli Kfir warplanes. At 3,500 metres, it is 500 metres longer than the longest in Britain, the former US base outside Campbeltown, Scotland. The USAF is awaiting Barack Obama’s signature on a bill, already passed by the US Congress, to devote $46m to works at the base.

Many Colombians are upset at the agreement between the US and Colombia that governs – or, perhaps more accurately, fails to govern – US use of Palanquero and the other six bases. The Colombian Council of State, a non-partisan constitutional body with the duty to comment on legislation, has said that the agreements are unfair to Colombia since they put the US and not the host country in the driving seat, and that they should be redrafted in accordance with the Colombian constitution.

The immunities being granted to US soldiers are, the council adds, against the 1961 Vienna Convention; the agreement can be changed by future regulations which can totally transform it; and the permission given to the US to install satellite receivers for radio and television without the usual licences and fees is “without any valid reason”.

President Uribe, whose studies at St Antony’s College, Oxford, were subsidised by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, has chosen to disregard the Council of State.