Category Archives: government fraud spending collusion

Beware, See Who Barack Obama Really is

Posted on by

With more than six years in the White House, it is time to look once again at who Barack Obama really is. There are a handful of months left to his administration and the additional damage waged by his regime will likely be epic. To forecast what is to come, a review of his history must have a second look.
The Betrayal Papers: Part V – Who is Barack Hussein Obama?

Introduction

The Betrayal Papers have thus far investigated and explained the Obama administration and their alliance with the international terrorist organization, the Muslim Brotherhood. The articles analyzed several aspects of White House policy, foreign and domestic, and compared them to the objectives of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Parts V and VI will explore the personal ties that bind Obama, as well as the progressive American left, to the Muslim Brotherhood.

This is a portrait of a conspiracy that has reached unprecedented heights of global control.

“A riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma”

Has there ever been a president whose personal history is so murky, so questionable, and so baffling? All one must do is recall the allegations, still open for debate and research, that checker Obama’s background. Laid out below are some of these allegations, not to be proved or disproved, but to remind the reader that Obama’s personal history is replete with question marks.

• A 1991 promotional literary pamphlet featured a short biographical sketch of Obama, and claimed he was “born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia and Hawaii.”

• What is his actual name? The only publicly available school record for Obama lists him as an Indonesian citizen named Barry Soetoro.

• Moreover, on an immigration document from 1965, Obama’s mother included the name “Soebarkah” under Barack Hussein Obama. This is likely a name given to him by the Islamic cult of Subud, to which his mother proudly and openly belonged.

• For a reason yet to be explained, Obama’s Social Security number begins with the prefix 042, which corresponds to Connecticut, a state in which Obama has never lived.

• Regarding his academic records, recall that Obama attended three universities: Occidental College, Columbia University, and Harvard University (his admission to which coincides with a $25 million dollar donation from the Saudi’s to the Harvard Law School). His academic records with these three institutions have never been revealed, despite efforts by investigative reporters. The student body president at Columbia University during Obama’s time there, Wayne Allen Root (once the Libertarian Party Vice Presidential candidate), has stated publicly that he never met or even heard of Obama while at Columbia, and cannot find any classmates of his who remember him either. Root, like Obama, was a political science major.

• While campaigning for President, candidate Obama presented himself as a “Professor” of Constitutional Law while at the University of Chicago. Yet this turned out to be untrue. In fact, he was a “Senior Lecturer,” a title and position significantly less prestigious than Professor.

• Finally, the best known and most researched of these allegations is the issue of Obama’s birth certificate. From his days as a candidate in the Democrat primary, the place of Obama’s birth has been in contention. While Obama has insisted he was born in Honolulu, Hawaii in 1961, there are others who claim he was born in Mombasa, Kenya; there’s even a copy of his purported Kenyan birth certificate. Moreover, apparently trustworthy sources swear that the Long Form Birth Certificate is a forgery.

All these questions leave the investigator with only one choice: to define Obama not by his inconsistent biographical details, but by his associations and actions.

The Communist Prelude: Frank Marshall Davis, Obama’s Mentor

As documented extensively in Paul Kengor’s book The Communist, Davis ranks high among Obama’s early life influences. A literal card carrying member of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA), Davis was considered by the FBI an enemy of the state.

• Frank Marshall Davis, a known Soviet Communist and admirer of Josef Stalin and Adolf Hitler, was a friend of Obama’s mother’s father, Stanley Dunham.
• The Communist Davis lived in both Hawaii and in Chicago. He was Barack Obama’s mentor through the 1970s, until his departure for Occidental College in 1979.
• Davis was also a pornographer. In his book Sex Rebel, he wrote excitedly about having sex with minors. Pedophilia was unusual for Communists of the era: Harry Hay, another Communist and associate of Davis, was reportedly an advocate of NAMBLA, the National Man-Boy Love Association.
• In 1995, in a broadcast on Cambridge Municipal Television, Barack Obama described Davis as “a close friend of my maternal grandfather, a close friend of gramps” and “fairly a well-known poet.”

Irrespective of the publicly accepted, sanitized biography of young Obama, the historical facts establish that his primary political mentor was a Soviet Communist sex offender, introduced to him by his mother’s family.

Tell me who your friends are, and I’ll tell you who you are

George Soros

George Soros, aka György Schwartz, is the Hungarian-born billionaire investor and financier behind a tangled constellation of progressive front organizations. Among these front organizations are: The Open Society Foundation/Institute, ACORN, Think Progress, the Center for American Progress, Code Pink, Occupy Wall Street, National Council of La Raza, the Tides Foundation, MoveOn.org, the New America Foundation, and the International Crisis Group. As one writer wrote succinctly in 2011, “Essentially, the entire leftist wing of the Democrat party, including the President can be tied to George Soros in some way.”

• Soros was born in 1930 in Budapest, Hungary, to a Jewish family. He grew up in wartime Hungary and was an admitted Nazi collaborator who turned other Jews over to the Nazi authorities. To this day, he has stated that he has no remorse for his actions of turning in Jews to the Nazis and having their property confiscated. As Soros said to 60 Minutes reporter Steve Kroft it was “the happiest time of my life.”
• Soros is a financial manipulator and breaker of currencies. In 1992, Soros crashed the British pound when he made a bet it would correct against the Deutschemark.
• Soros has a history of using government influence for personal gain. In 1999, (Bill Clinton’s) Secretary of State Madeline Albright blocked a $500 million loan by the U.S. Import-Export Bank to the Russian oil company Tyumen. Tyumen planned to use this money to acquire one of Soros’ companies and a Siberian oil field, and apparently Soros felt his deal wasn’t sweet enough. A few months later, Albright did indeed approve the loan, but only after Soros was guaranteed additional protections for his interests at the expense of Tyumen.
• This pattern repeated in 2009, when the U.S. Import-Export Bank announced a “preliminary commitment” to loan $2 billion to the Brazilian oil giant Petrobras. This caused the shares in the company to rise 27.9% from April 2009-August 2009 (the time of the announcement). Soros, a major shareholder in the company, profited handsomely.
• In 2002, French authorities prosecuted Soros for insider trading. In 2012, the government of Russia issued an arrest warrant for Soros for violating Basel II financial regulations.
• Obama’s foreign policy and the Arab Spring are intertwined with Soros interests. In 2008 the International Crisis Group (aka ICG, a Soros front), issued a paper that urged the Egyptian government to allow the Muslim Brotherhood to form a political party. Anyone with knowledge of the Muslim Brotherhood’s activities in Egypt from the 1940s onward, which include assassinations and terrorism, understands the necessity of the Egyptian government’s hard line on the terror group.
• Interestingly, ICG is also home to Ambassador Thomas Pickering, the Obama administration’s lead investigator for Benghazi, as well as Robert Malley, who was recently appointed by Obama to a prominent position to lead Middle East policy, despite a history of connections to Hamas.
• In a 2011 op-ed for the Washington Post, Soros himself referred to Israel – not Hamas – as the “stumbling block” in Middle East peace. In the same piece, Soros encouraged the Muslim Brotherhood to be given a seat at the table in Egyptian political life, and urged Obama to support the Arab Spring overthrow of ally Mubarak.

Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn

Of all the nefarious personal relationships of Barack Hussein Obama, the bloodthirsty couple of Bill Ayers and wife Bernadine Dorhn are the most unsettling. In the 1960s, Ayers and Dohrn were notorious radicals, anarchists, and terrorists – declared enemies of American society.

Ayers and Dorhn hosted a meet-and-greet and fundraiser for candidate Obama when he first ran for public office. Indeed, Obama’s political career was launched from the couple’s living room in Hyde Park.

• Bill Ayers’ father was Tom Ayers, President of Commonwealth Edison (the power company of Chicago) from 1964-1980, and Chairman from 1973-1980. The Ayers family was close to the corrupt Daley political machine and involved in various philanthropic causes, and Bill was a son of considerable privilege. The Ayers family connection to power production is important to note in connection with the Chicago Climate Exchange, which will be detailed in Part VI.
• Despite his mainstream upbringing, Ayers gravitated to terrorism and revolution. In 1969, he, Dorhn, and other radicals founded the Weather Underground. From its inception until the early 1980s, this group of nihilist anarchists would claim responsibility for targets that included police, an R.O.T.C building, the home of a judge, New York City Police Headquarters, and The Pentagon.
• Dorhn and Ayers lived for a time as fugitives together, and eventually married. But due to legal technicalities neither Ayers nor Dorhn ever served time for their crimes.
• The couple has two sons. Both were, curiously, given Islamic names: Zayd and Malik.
• Ayers has admitted not once, but twice that he is author of the Obama’s memoir, Dreams of my Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, published in 1995.
• On September 11, 2001, a review of an upcoming book by Bill Ayers appeared in the New York Times. In the memoir Fugitive Days, Ayers recounted his time on the lam. Wrote Ayers in the book, the lines which were reprinted in the Times the morning of September 11: “Everything was absolutely ideal on the day I bombed the Pentagon,” and “I feel we didn’t do enough.”
• A few hours after that edition of New York Times hit newsstands on 9/11/2001, four planes were hijacked by Al Qaeda. Two of them brought down the World Trade Center. Another crashed in a field in Pennsylvania. And the other slammed into the Pentagon, once a target of Bill Ayers, scarring the symbol of American military might and killing 125 people.
• Consider the psyche of Dohrn (from 1991-2013 a professor at Northwestern Law School) who, upon hearing of the horrific murder of actress Sharon Tate (where a fork was stuck into her nine-month pregnant belly) by psychopath Charles Manson’s gang, stated: “Dig it. First they killed those pigs and then they put a fork in pig Tate’s belly. Wild!” Dohrn then adopted the “fork salute” for the Weatherman.
• Years after 9/11/2001, Dohrn and Ayers would openly associate with Islamic terrorists. First, in connection with the 2010 “Peace Flotilla,” a terrorist smuggling operation originating from Turkey that sought to arm Hamas in Gaza. The rabid couple’s attraction to terrorism was enabled by the Soros front group, Code Pink.
• In 2011, Ayers and Dohrn teamed up with Code Pink once again when they crashed the revolution in Egypt’s Tahrir Square to help oust American and Israeli ally Hosni Mubarak. Reliving their youth, they pulled a page from their old playbook, teaching the protestors how to organize their very own “day of rage.”

Valerie Jarrett

No figure in the administration holds more sway over Barack Obama than his Senior Advisor, Valerie Jarrett. Officially in charge of the Offices of Public Engagement and Intergovernmental Affairs, her Twitter handle – vj44, as in “Valerie Jarrett, 44th President” – conveys a truer sense of her power. Yet not even one American voted for President Jarret.

• Valerie June Bowman Jarrett was born in Shiraz, Iran in 1956 to James and Barbara Taylor Bowman. An examination of Jarrett’s family is the key to understanding her influence in Chicago.
• Jarrett’s father James, a Howard University graduate, was, at the time of her birth, working as a physician and geneticist in Iran. Her mother Barbara’s family is deeply connected to Chicago politics. Jarret’s maternal grandfather was Robert Taylor, who was on the board of the Chicago Housing Authority, a municipal corporation. To this day the Robert Taylor Homes, a public housing project, bear his name.
• A political appointment, Jarrett was not subjected to confirmation by the U.S. Senate. Yet according to every published account, it is she who is the true center of gravity in the administration. Ranging from healthcare “reform” to negotiating with terrorist Iran, the Senior Advisor, not the President, calls the shots at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
• The few murmurings which have come out regarding Jarrett’s omnipresence in the White House have not been flattering. According to one former administration official, “It’s pretty toxic… She went to whatever meeting she wanted to go to—basically all of them—and then would go and whisper to the president. Or at least everyone believed she did. … People don’t trust the process. They think she’s a spy.”
• Even Obama’s former Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel, according to author Jonathan Alter, was “tired of being undermined by Valerie Jarrett” when he resigned from his position.
• Given Jarrett’s political force in the capital, the media’s curiosity about Jarrett’s background, governing principles, ideological beliefs, and business dealings has been conspicuously lacking.
• One of Robert Taylor’s (Jarret’s grandfather) business partners was Rufus Cook. Rufus’s ex-wife, Ann, is a cousin of Jarrett’s. Cook is also a legal counsel for Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam, based out of Chicago. In 2007, the country was shocked when a video emerged that showed the pastor of Obama’s church, Reverend Wright of Trinity United Church of Christ, saying of September 11, 2001, “America’s chickens are coming home to roost.” This was a borrowed line, originally spoken by the Nation of Islam’s silver-tongued spokesman, Malcolm X, referring to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
• Indeed, TUCC’s Reverend Wright and NOI’s Louis Farrakhan are thick as thieves. In 1984, Wright and Farrakhan traveled together to Libya to meet the “Mad Dog of the Middle East,” Muammar Gaddafi.
• Another Jarrett cousin is Antoinette “Toni” Cook Bush, daughter of Rufus and Ann. In 2013, Toni, a Chicago lawyer, was hired as the head lobbyist for News Corp, owner of Fox News. This is perhaps why Jarrett has been spotted dining with News Corp CEO, Australian Rupert Murdoch.
• Jarrett’s family has direct connections to Obama’s Communist mentor, Frank Marshall Davis. Jarrett’s father in law, Vernon Jarrett, was a journalist who worked with Frank Marshall Davis Citizens’ Committee to Aid Packing-House Workers. In his younger years, explains Kengor, Vernon Jarrett “had been elected to the Illinois Council of American Youth for Democracy, the CPUSA youth wing.” Finally, Robert Taylor (mentioned above) was on the board of Chicago Civil Liberties Union with Frank Marshall Davis.

Jarrett, who met Obama in 1991 and introduced him to Michelle, is a part of their family. Given her connections and power, is it any surprise that she recently said to The New York Times Magazine, “I intend to stay [in the White House] until the lights go off.”

Tony Rezko

Antoin “Tony” Rezko is the Chicago-based Syrian-American slumlord who arranged a corrupt deal for the Obama’s home. Rezko, who is currently serving a 10 ½ year prison sentence and was known for influence peddling through bribery, crafted a special deal in which he loaned money to the Obamas and donated to their campaign organization … all while setting them up in a mansion in Hyde Park.

• Obama’s relationship with the corrupt Rezko goes back decades. Rezko tried to hire Obama to work for his real estate company Rezmar when he graduated from Harvard Law School. In 2008, Obama stated that Rezko was a “friend” whom he had “known for 20 years.”
• The Chicago Sun-Times estimated that Obama had received “$168,308 from Rezko and his circle.”
• In 2005, Rezko arranged the purchase of the Obamas’ home in Chicago. Because the Obama’s were not in the financial position to purchase the house at the time, Rezko made a deal with the owner to purchase the adjoining empty lot next to the home at above market price to compensate for the Obamas’ below market offer on the home ($1.65 million versus the $1.95 asking price).
• The Rezko case unfolded before the nation as Barack Obama was ascending to the presidency. It embroiled Patrick Fitzgerald (who was previously known for prosecuting Vice President Cheney’s chief-of-staff Scooter Libby), Illinois Governor Rob Blagojevich (who is serving a 14 year jail sentence), Obama, and Rezko.
• The convicted felon Rezko is an associate of international criminal and former Saddam Hussein agent, Iraqi Nadhmi Auchi.

Nadhmi Auchi

The Iraqi operator Nadhmi Auchi is the sort of rarefied sort of gentlemen you would normally come across in a spy novel. On the surface, Nadhmi Auchi is a business magnate, a dynamo philanthropist, and an honored citizen of many countries. As was explained by a former senior official of the Defense, State, and Commerce departments, John A. Shaw, Mr. Auchi made a name for himself as the international financier and arms dealer extraordinaire of Saddam Hussein. By 1980, Auchi was an asset of the British foreign intelligence service, MI6. (So multi-faceted is this billionaire mystery man that he has his own dedicated Wikileaks page.) Auchi and Tony Rezko were partners in real estate and pizza.

• Contemporary to the timeline of Obama’s political rise in Chicago, Auchi was building an influence operation one brick at a time in the very same city. His ties from the Middle East to America’s Midwest made his enterprise a conduit of Middle Eastern money into the United States of America.
• Shaw writes, “Nadhmi Auchi, despite his purchased respectability in England, was the financial eminence behind the Chicago-Arab combine, and the man who, with Rezko, helped invent Barack Obama as a political star.” Through Tony Rezko, his local bagman, Auchi financed and guided Obama (and Jarrett) into the Oval Office.
• While a large shareholder in BNP Paribas, Auchi was involved with the U.N. Oil-for-Food scandal, which was based on the sale of Iraqi oil.
• In 2004, Auchi was banned from entering the U.S. for scamming the Pentagon on an Iraqi cellular deal he helped broker. After securing rights to Iraq’s cellular services, Auchi went on to corner the market on power contracts for the post-war transition, as well.
• If Soros personifies the Progressive wing of Obama’s politics, it is Auchi that personifies the wing of the Muslim Brotherhood. Auchi’s stances on litmus test issues tell who he is, politically speaking, in the Middle East. Auchi is anti-Semitic, and led support for the Turkish terror flotilla (an operation which ties him to Ayers, Dorhn, and Soros).
• It may seem an odd dichotomy that two people in low cost housing, Valerie Jarrett and Toni Rezko, and two artful and sophisticated investors, Auchi and Soros (both of whom are convicted of financial crimes in France), ushered Obama to the presidency. Yet each one of these individuals shares one lethal trait: they are masters at using government for their personal gain.
• Auchi has a history of suing his critics, and silencing those who cause too much trouble. His reputation as an aggressive litigator and someone who won’t hesitate to kill may have convinced journalist David Ignatius to think twice about disclosing his knowledge of Auchi’s activities. For instead of a nonfiction book, Ignatius did indeed pen a spy novel, The Bank of Fear, based on Auchi’s career.

Rashid Khalidi and Edward Said

Rashid Khalidi is an anti-Semitic professor and historian of Palestine. Khalidi is currently the Edward Said Professor of Arab Studies at Columbia University. During their Chicago years, the Obamas were close friends with Khalidi and his wife, Mona. They were also friends with Edward Said, Khalidi’s mentor.

• Throughout the 1970s, when Khalidi taught at the University of Beirut, he routinely spoke on behalf of Yasser Arafat’s terrorist Palestinian Liberation Organization.
• The Obamas and Khalidis have been friends for decades. When in Chicago, the Obamas regularly dined with the Khalidis.
• In 1998, the Obamas attended a banquet which featured Edward Said as the keynote speaker. Said, a Palestinian-American (now deceased), had long been a critic of the State of Israel, which he referred to as being in “illegal military occupation since 1967.”
• In 2000, the Khalidis held a fundraiser for Obama when he was running for Congress. The following year, the Woods Foundation (where Obama served as a Board member) donated $40,000 to Mona Khalidi’s charity.
• As one pro-Palestinian activist phrased it in 2008, when Obama’s views on Israel and Palestine were a subject of controversy: “I am confident that Barack Obama is more sympathetic to the position of ending the occupation than either of the other candidates.”

With the benefit of more than six years of hindsight, it is clear that Barack Hussein Obama (with the eager cooperation of Secretary of State John Kerry) has been the most anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian president in United States history.

Conclusion

A man does not become President of the United States without very high powered connections. Usually these connections are accumulated through a long career of public service, whether in the U.S. Congress, Executive, or on the state level. Obama rose to the Presidency after serving a scant four years in the U.S. Senate, two of which were spent running for President. Prior to that, he served an unremarkable seven years in the Illinois State Senate.

Before launching his political career in the living room of American anarchists, Obama was a community-organizing lawyer for progressive groups. Among them was ACORN, which was instrumental in creating the housing bubble.

With such little authentic biography available, we are forced to define Obama by his friends. They include financial and political manipulators and fixers, corrupt businessmen and international criminals, card-carrying Communists and FBI-identified enemies of the state, terrorists foreign and domestic, and their academic apologists.

Part VI will conclude The Betrayal Papers with a look at the various interconnected schemes of the above-named Obama associates.

 

 

 

Grover, Grover, Grover, You’re Busted Dude

Posted on by

The internet is an interesting tool. It is especially fascinating that some crafty people can go backwards in the internet cache and capture evidence.

What say you Grover this time? To all the Republicans, to the Democrats, to the Conservative Union, to Congress and to the NRA….take notice. To the IRS, to policy makers, to the lobby groups, the terrorists are among us due to you. It should be noted, this was during the Clinton administration.

A PARTICULAR HAT TIP TO GLENN BECK, THANK YOU SIR. Great work to Tom Trento for his stick-t0-it’ned-ness.

NEWLY DISCOVERED DOCUMENT EXPOSES NORQUIST’S LIES
A newly discovered document proves that Grover Norquist, top GOP moneyman, sponsored in October 23rd 2000 an anti-Israel pro-HAMAS and pro-Hezbollah rally in front of the White House in Lafayette Park. The rally was run and led by the Muslim Brotherhood terrorist Abdul Rahman al-Amoudi who pleaded guilty to financing terrorism and conspiracy to assassinate then-Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah.  Al-Amoudi is currently serving a 23 year sentence in federal prison. Al-Amoudi who is co-founder of the Islamic Institute with Grover Norquist is seen on video in the Oct 23 rally screaming his support for al-Qaeda and Hezbollah both of which are specially designated Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTO).

The newly discovered document found on the Islamic Institutes website in their weekly Friday brief demonstrably proves that Norquist’s organization was the organizational and contact body for the event dubbed: “March and Rally in Washington Against Israeli Aggression,” and states:

On October 23, 2000, there will be a march and rally in front of the White House in Washington, D.C., to protest Israel’s aggression against the Al-Aqsa Mosque and its escalating use of violence toward the Palestinian people. The march and rally are being organized by the National Task Force for the Crisis in Jerusalem (NTFCJ), a coalition of national American Muslim organizations of which the Islamic Institute is a part. The march begins at 11:00am at Freedom Plaza, and will move to Lafayette Park in front of the White House where a rally will begin at 12:00pm.

It is highly important that the Muslim community in the U.S. demonstrates a show of solidarity by attending this event. A strong presence will emphasize the call of American Muslims for peace and justice in Jerusalem and Palestine. Buses are being chartered nationwide to bring supporters to Washington. For further information, contact the Islamic Institute via phone or e-mail, or the American Muslim Council at (202) 789-2262(202) 789-2262.
Members of the NTFCJ are: the American Muslim Council, the American Muslim Alliance, American Muslims for Jerusalem, the Council on American Islamic Relations, the Islamic Circle of North America, the Islamic Institute, the Islamic Society of North America, the Muslim American Society, the Muslim Public Affairs Council, and the Muslim Student Association.

When asked by Glenn Beck if he (Grover Norquist) sponsored the event Norquist replied that it was a mistake by and intern and that his organization, the Islamic Institute, had no direct involvement or planning of the rally – a direct contradiction of the Organizations weekly brief.

Clearly the Islamic Institute was the primary sponsor, primary planner, primary organizer and primary leader of the anti-Israel in October of 2000 and in possible violation of 18 U.S. Code § 2339A – Providing material support to terrorists.

Friday’s 4pm Show:

HEY, US CONGRESS – “THROW THE TERRORISTS OUT!”

4.13.15

On Monday April 13 and Tuesday 14 Muslim Terrorists walking around the United States Congress will demand that our elected Representatives change federal law thereby making it harder to investigate Muslim terrorists. I know, crazy stuff, but it is happening right in broad daylight! Thank Allah that we at The United West are experts at investigating Muslim Brotherhood terrorists and exposing their influence operations for all Americans to understand and properly respond. To accomplish this we are launching a five-part investigative series entitled: “Muslim Terrorists Lobby 114th Congress.” Our show today focuses on what the Members of the 114th Congress should do when the terrorists enter their offices. And what is that? THROW THEM OUT THE DOOR! Why in the world should an elected Member of Congress give any time to KNOWN terrorists who have a written agenda that includes destroying the essence of the Capitol building in which they are meeting! Watch this show as it is FULL of critically important information to help all Americans properly, professionally and legally DEFEAT this Muslim Brotherhood political influence operation.

 

A True Englishman, Tommy Robinson Speaks

Posted on by

 

It was a privilege to speak with Tommy Robinson from the United Kingdom on the matter of jihad in the streets on England. Hearing truths is rare and having the courage to do so is even more profound.
To better understand the proven history of what Robinson has endured see this video:

 

 

There is California and then the Rest of the Country

Posted on by
by Kevin D. Williamson
California’s drought provides a useful lesson. I am glad California is having a drought. Not because I hate California (I love California) or Californians (I hate them only a little, for what they’ve done to California) or Central Valley farmers (some of my best friends . . .) or even Governor Jerry Brown, droll disco-era anachronism that he is, but because the episode presents an excellent illustration of the one fundamental social reality that cannot be legislated away or buried under an avalanche of government-accounting shenanigans and loan guarantees or brought to heel by politicians no matter how hard the ladies and gentlemen in Sacramento and Washington stamp their little feet: scarcity.
California has X amount of water at its disposal, and it has politicians in charge of overseeing how it gets divvied up. Which politicians? The same ones responsible for the current sorry state of California’s water infrastructure, of course. Should be a hoot.
The main claimants are these: Farmers, who by some estimates consume about 80 percent of the water used in California. Agriculture is a relatively small component of California’s large and diverse economy, but California nonetheless accounts for a large share of the nation’s agricultural output. Both of those things are, in a sense, the good news: If market-rate water costs were imposed on California farms, as they should be, then any higher costs could be passed along — not only to consumers, but up and down the supply chain — in a very large global market, where they should be digested more easily. People with lawns, including people with the very large and complex lawns known as golf courses, who account for an extraordinary amount of California’s non-agricultural water use.
In arid Southern California, and especially in the golf-loving desert resort communities of the Coachella Valley, keeping the grass green often accounts for more than half — and sometimes much more than half — of residential water use. How thirsty is grass? Consider that 200 square feet of California swimming pool uses less water over the course of three years than does 200 square feet of California lawn. (Yes, I know: volume versus surface area, but the math still works out.) And about half of the water used on lawns is lost to the wind, because sprinkler systems spray water in the air rather than on the grass. The goddamned delta smelt, a.k.a. “the world’s most useless fish,” whose comfort and happiness demanded the dumping of some 300 billion gallons of fresh water into the San Francisco Bay — and thence into the Pacific Ocean — in 2009 and 2010. That’s enough fresh water to cover the state of New Jersey nearly three inches deep. The smelt’s delicious friend, the salmon, is a co-claimant.
Governor Brown’s response is a textbook example of the central planner’s fatal conceit. He issued an executive order imposing 25 percent cuts on the state’s 400 local water agencies, which supply about 90 percent of Californians’ water but do not supply the farms that consume most of the state’s water. That 25 percent figure looks bold and authoritative, but when was the last time you saw the production, consumption, or price of a scarce commodity in the real world move by such neat increments?
When something disturbs the equilibrium of the world’s oil markets — which happens every single day — then the markets make minuscule, complex adjustments, and continue to make them around the clock — the markets never sleep — with producers and consumers both modifying their behaviors to accommodate the new economic realities as they emerge. Amazingly (but not amazingly), this happens with no Governor Brown in charge of the process. You’ve never seen the price of pork bellies or soybeans simply jump 25 percent and stay there indefinitely, or rice or wheat consumption fall by neat round numbers. But Governor Brown imagines that he can rationally manage by fiat the consumption of the most important commodity in the world’s seventh-largest economy. Good luck with that. Governor Brown’s solution/non-solution has been criticized for failing to impose serious new restrictions on farmers. There are several reasons for this: First, Governor Brown probably does not want to reinforce the impression that his administration is an instantiation of insular coastal soy-latte progressivism staffed by feckless urbanites of the sort who believe that grapes come from Trader Joe’s and who are therefore willing to see the state’s rural interior gutted; second, and to give a decent if often foolish man proper credit, Governor Brown probably is not much inclined to impose heavy new burdens on the state’s relatively poor and downwardly mobile agricultural corridor, and to see large numbers of the poorest Californians thrown out of work; third, farmers already have seen their water allowances docked.
Among tragedies of the commons, California’s water situation is Hamlet, a monumental work fascinating for all of the possibilities it raises and not given to easy resolution. But even given the underlying complications, from the hydrological to the legal (California’s system of water rights is remarkably complex), the fundamental problem is that nobody knows what a gallon of water in California costs. Water allocations are made mainly through politics rather than through markets, with the state’s legal regime explicitly privileging some water uses over others. There are two possible ways to allocate water in California: The people in Sacramento, Governor Brown prominent among them, can pick and choose who gets what, with all of the political shenanigans, cronyism, inefficiency, and corruption that brings. Or Californians can get their water the same way they get most everything else they need and value: by buying it on the open market.
This is an excellent opportunity to apply the cap-and-trade model that many progressives favor when it comes to carbon dioxide emissions, with an important difference: This deals with real, physical scarcity, not artificial scarcity created by regulation. (Incidentally, it here bears repeating that notwithstanding the inaccurate proclamations of Governor Brown and President Obama, California’s drought almost certainly is not the result of global warming; the climate models supporting the scientific consensus on global warming predict wetter winters for California, not the drier winters that have produced the current crisis. California’s climate is complex, but a great deal of it is dominated by desert and arid to semi-arid Mediterranean conditions.)

As the economist Alex Tabarrok puts it: “California has plenty of water — just not enough to satisfy every possible use of water that people can imagine when the price is close to zero.” As noted, the water-rights picture is complicated, but it is not so complicated that California could not 1) calculate how much water is available for consumption; 2) subtract preexisting claims; 3) auction off the remainder, with holders of preexisting water rights allowed to enter that market and trade their claims for money.
A gallon of water used to green up a lawn in Burbank and a gallon of water used to maintain a golf course in Palm Springs and a gallon of water used to irrigate almonds in Chico would be — and should be — on exactly the same economic and political footing. As Professor Tabarrok notes, San Diego residents use about twice as much water per capita as do residents of Sydney, a city whose climate is comparably arid and whose residents are comparably well-off, a situation that is almost certainly related to the fact that San Diegans pay about one half of a cent per gallon for household water. Governor Brown wants to be the man who decides what is and is not a good use of California’s water; in defending his decision not to impose further restrictions on farmers, he said: “They’re not watering their lawn or taking long showers. They’re providing most of the fruits and vegetables of America and a significant part of the world.” That is no doubt true. But the only way to discover what that is really worth — not in sentimental, good-enough-for-government-work terms, but in cold-eyed dollar terms — is to allow real prices for water to emerge. My own suspicion is that California’s almonds and avocados will remain in high demand when the water used in their cultivation is properly priced on an open market. Relatively small gains in the efficiency of agricultural irrigation would go a long way toward helping California live with the water it has. So would converting a few million suburban lawns to desert landscaping. So would ceasing to dedicate large amounts of fresh water to political projects of dubious value. Which to choose? Before that question can be answered, there is the prior question: “How to choose who chooses?” The rational answer is that water consumers should choose how water gets used, provided that each of them pays the real price for his choices. California’s largest crop is grass — by which I do not mean marijuana, but lawns. Until the day comes when a ton of fresh-cut grass fetches a higher price than a ton of avocados, my guess is that California’s farmers will do fine under a market-based water regime. But maybe not. Everyone has his own favorite drought bugaboo: suburban lawns, almond farms, the delta smelt, golf courses, illegal marijuana cultivation, etc.
Given enough time, somebody will figure out a way to blame this all on the Koch brothers, illegal immigrants, or the Federal Reserve. But the fact is that nobody knows — nobody can know — what the best use of any given gallon of water in California is. Californians can put their money where their parched mouths are, or they can let Governor Brown play Ceres-on-the-Bay, deciding which crops grow and which do not. Whether the commodity is water or education or health care, if you care about something, put a price tag on it. You can’t afford for it to be cheap, and you sure as hell can’t afford for it to be free.*** Now look at the legislative issues in your state to determine what similar actions are being taken. While you’re at it, how does your state compare to the others fiscally?

States across the U.S. share the common goal of economic prosperity, but they differ vastly in how they set out to achieve it. The latest edition of the American Legislative Exchange Council- Arthur Laffer Rich States, Poor States competitiveness index examines policies that maximize economic growth and assesses which states are on the path to prosperity and which are more likely headed to the poorhouse.
For the eighth consecutive year, Utah has remained #1. Rounding out the top 10 for 2014 are: North Dakota, Indiana, North Carolina, Arizona, Idaho, Georgia, Wyoming, South Dakota and Nevada. At the other end of the spectrum, New York obtained the lowest ranking at #50. Working backward, Vermont ranked 49, preceded by Minnesota, Connecticut, New Jersey, Oregon, California, Montana, Maine, and Pennsylvania.

 states Alec

The rankings are a combination of past economic performance (economic growth, net migration and employment) and forward-looking policy variables such as taxes, debt, and the presence of right-to-work laws.

States at the top earned their rankings by implementing policies that energized their economies, attracted businesses and entrepreneurs, and expanded employment and income. So what are these energizing policies that could help states at the bottom boost their economies? Based on both past and present rankings, low income taxes and right-to-work laws provide the most bang for the buck.

Analysis provided alongside last year’s rankings showed economic growth in the nine states with no personal income tax averaged 62 percent from 2003 to 2013 while the nine highest income tax states grew by an average of only 47 percent. And states with no income tax experienced twice the rate of population growth (14 percent) as the highest income tax states (7 percent).

The growth gap between high-tax and low-tax states translates into more than a $100 billion in lost annual output for big, bottom-ranking states like California (#44) and New York (#50). And while it may seem counterintuitive, tax revenue increased substantially more in the nine states with no income tax than it did in the highest income tax states. Lower taxes produce a larger economic pie, and a larger pie means bigger slices for all—including the state tax revenue.

States with right-to-work laws that prevent workers from being coerced to pay union dues attract more businesses and workers, which in turn grow their economies. Compared to forced-union states, right-to-work states experienced twice the rate of employment growth from 2003–2013, one-quarter higher income growth, and one-third greater output growth. What’s more, right-to-work states experienced a 3 percent increase in net migration, while forced-union states suffered a 1 percent loss in net migration.

Competition is inherent in any ranking, and competition among the states is a good thing. Fortunately for states at the bottom of the rankings, research and analysis such as Rich States, Poor States provides an open playbook for prosperity.

Tracking Phone Calls Long Before the Patriot Act

Posted on by

U.S. secretly tracked billions of phone calls for decades

Starting in 1992, the Justice Department amassed logs of virtually all telephone calls from the USA to as many as 116 countries, a model for anti-terror surveillance after Sept. 11, 2001.

WASHINGTON — The U.S. government started keeping secret records of Americans’ international telephone calls nearly a decade before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, harvesting billions of calls in a program that provided a blueprint for the far broader National Security Agency surveillance that followed.

For more than two decades, the Justice Department and the Drug Enforcement Administration amassed logs of virtually all telephone calls from the USA to as many as 116 countries linked to drug trafficking, current and former officials involved with the operation said. The targeted countries changed over time but included Canada, Mexico and most of Central and South America.

Federal investigators used the call records to track drug cartels’ distribution networks in the USA, allowing agents to detect previously unknown trafficking rings and money handlers. They also used the records to help rule out foreign ties to the bombing in 1995 of a federal building in Oklahoma City and to identify U.S. suspects in a wide range of other investigations.

The Justice Department revealed in January that the DEA had collected data about calls to “designated foreign countries.” But the history and vast scale of that operation have not been disclosed until now.

The now-discontinued operation, carried out by the DEA’s intelligence arm, was the government’s first known effort to gather data on Americans in bulk, sweeping up records of telephone calls made by millions of U.S. citizens regardless of whether they were suspected of a crime. It was a model for the massive phone surveillance system the NSA launched to identify terrorists after the Sept. 11 attacks. That dragnet drew sharp criticism that the government had intruded too deeply into Americans’ privacy after former NSA contractor Edward Snowden leaked it to the news media two years ago.

More than a dozen current and former law enforcement and intelligence officials described the details of the Justice Department operation to USA TODAY. Most did so on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss the intelligence program, part of which remains classified.

The DEA program did not intercept the content of Americans’ calls, but the records — which numbers were dialed and when — allowed agents to map suspects’ communications and link them to troves of other police and intelligence data. At first, the drug agency did so with help from military computers and intelligence analysts.

That data collection was “one of the most important and effective Federal drug law enforcement initiatives,” the Justice Department said in a 1998 letter to Sprint asking the telecom giant to turn over its call records. The previously undisclosed letter was signed by the head of the department’s Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs Section, Mary Lee Warren, who wrote that the operation had “been approved at the highest levels of Federal law enforcement authority,” including then-Attorney General Janet Reno and her deputy, Eric Holder.

The data collection began in 1992 during the administration of President George H.W. Bush, nine years before his son, President George W. Bush, authorized the NSA to gather its own logs of Americans’ phone calls in 2001. It was approved by top Justice Department officials in four presidential administrations and detailed in occasional briefings to members of Congress but otherwise had little independent oversight, according to officials involved with running it.

The DEA used its data collection extensively and in ways that the NSA is now prohibited from doing. Agents gathered the records without court approval, searched them more often in a day than the spy agency does in a year and automatically linked the numbers the agency gathered to large electronic collections of investigative reports, domestic call records accumulated by its agents and intelligence data from overseas, it even use 800 numbers for business too!

The result was “a treasure trove of very important information on trafficking,” former DEA administrator Thomas Constantine said in an interview.

The extent of that surveillance alarmed privacy advocates, who questioned its legality. “This was aimed squarely at Americans,” said Mark Rumold, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “That’s very significant from a constitutional perspective.”

Holder halted the data collection in September 2013 amid the fallout from Snowden’s revelations about other surveillance programs. In its place, current and former officials said the drug agency sends telecom companies daily subpoenas for international calling records involving only phone numbers that agents suspect are linked to the drug trade or other crimes — sometimes a thousand or more numbers a day.

Tuesday, Justice Department spokesman Patrick Rodenbush said the DEA “is no longer collecting bulk telephony metadata from U.S. service providers.” A DEA spokesman declined to comment.

HARVESTING DATA TO BATTLE CARTELS

The DEA began assembling a data-gathering program in the 1980s as the government searched for new ways to battle Colombian drug cartels. Neither informants nor undercover agents had been enough to crack the cartels’ infrastructure. So the agency’s intelligence arm turned its attention to the groups’ communication networks.

Calling records – often called “toll records” – offered one way to do that. Toll records are comparable to what appears on a phone bill – the numbers a person dialed, the date and time of the call, its duration and how it was paid for. By then, DEA agents had decades of experience gathering toll records of people they suspected were linked to drug trafficking, albeit one person at a time. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, officials said the agency had little way to make sense of the data their agents accumulated and almost no ability to use them to ferret out new cartel connections. Some agents used legal pads.

“We were drowning in toll records,” a former intelligence official said.

The DEA asked the Pentagon for help. The military responded with a pair of supercomputers and intelligence analysts who had experience tracking the communication patterns of Soviet military units. “What they discovered was that the incident of a communication was perhaps as important as the content of a communication,” a former Justice Department official said.

The military installed the supercomputers on the fifth floor of the DEA’s headquarters, across from a shopping mall in Arlington, Va.

The system they built ultimately allowed the drug agency to stitch together huge collections of data to map trafficking and money laundering networks both overseas and within the USA. It allowed agents to link the call records its agents gathered domestically with calling data the DEA and intelligence agencies had acquired outside the USA. (In some cases, officials said the DEA paid employees of foreign telecom firms for copies of call logs and subscriber lists.) And it eventually allowed agents to cross-reference all of that against investigative reports from the DEA, FBI and Customs Service.

The result “produced major international investigations that allowed us to take some big people,” Constantine said, though he said he could not identify particular cases.

In 1989, President George H.W. Bush proposed in his first prime-time address using “sophisticated intelligence-gathering and Defense Department technology” to disrupt drug trafficking. Three years later, when violent crime rates were at record highs, the drug agency intensified its intelligence push, launching a “kingpin strategy” to attack drug cartels by going after their finances, leadership and communication.

THE START OF BULK COLLECTION

In 1992, in the last months of Bush’s administration, Attorney General William Barr and his chief criminal prosecutor, Robert Mueller, gave the DEA permission to collect a much larger set of phone data to feed into that intelligence operation.

Instead of simply asking phone companies for records about calls made by people suspected of drug crimes, the Justice Department began ordering telephone companies to turn over lists of all phone calls from the USA to countries where the government determined drug traffickers operated, current and former officials said.

Barr and Mueller declined to comment, as did Barr’s deputy, George Terwilliger III, though Terwilliger said, “It has been apparent for a long time in both the law enforcement and intelligence worlds that there is a tremendous value and need to collect certain metadata to support legitimate investigations.”

The data collection was known within the agency as USTO (a play on the fact that it tracked calls from the U.S. to other countries).

The DEA obtained those records using administrative subpoenas that allow the agency to collect records “relevant or material to” federal drug investigations. Officials acknowledged it was an expansive interpretation of that authority but one that was not likely to be challenged because unlike search warrants, DEA subpoenas do not require a judge’s approval. “We knew we were stretching the definition,” a former official involved in the process said.

Officials said a few telephone companies were reluctant to provide so much information, but none challenged the subpoenas in court. Those that hesitated received letters from the Justice Department urging them to comply.

After Sprint executives expressed reservations in 1998, for example, Warren, the head of the department’s drug section, responded with a letter telling the company that “the initiative has been determined to be legally appropriate” and that turning over the call data was “appropriate and required by law.” The letter said the data would be used by authorities “to focus scarce investigative resources by means of sophisticated pattern and link analysis.”

The letter did not name other telecom firms providing records to the DEA but did tell executives that “the arrangement with Sprint being sought by the DEA is by no means unique to Sprint” and that “major service providers have been eager to support and assist law enforcement within appropriate bounds.” Former officials said the operation included records from AT&T and other telecom companies.

A spokesman for AT&T declined to comment. Sprint spokeswoman Stephanie Vinge Walsh said only that “we do comply with all state and federal laws regarding law enforcement subpoenas.”

Agents said that when the data collection began, they sought to limit its use mainly to drug investigations and turned away requests for access from the FBI and the NSA. They allowed searches of the data in terrorism cases, including the bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City that killed 168 people in 1995, helping to rule out theories linking the attack to foreign terrorists. They allowed even broader use after Sept. 11, 2001. The DEA’s public disclosure of its program in January came in the case of a man charged with violating U.S. export restrictions by trying to send electrical equipment to Iran.

At first, officials said the DEA gathered records only of calls to a handful of countries, focusing on Colombian drug cartels and their supply lines. Its reach grew quickly, and by the late 1990s, the DEA was logging “a massive number of calls,” said a former intelligence official who supervised the program.

Former officials said they could not recall the complete list of countries included in USTO, and the coverage changed over time. The Justice Department and DEA added countries to the list if officials could establish that they were home to outfits that produced or trafficked drugs or were involved in money laundering or other drug-related crimes.

The Justice Department warned when it disclosed the program in January that the list of countries should remain secret “to protect against any disruption to prospective law enforcement cooperation.”

At its peak, the operation gathered data on calls to 116 countries, an official involved in reviewing the list said. Two other officials said they did not recall the precise number of countries, but it was more than 100. That gave the collection a considerable sweep; the U.S. government recognizes a total of 195 countries.

At one time or another, officials said, the data collection covered most of the countries in Central and South America and the Caribbean, as well as others in western Africa, Europe and Asia. It included Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, Italy, Mexico and Canada.

The DEA often — though not always — notified foreign governments it was collecting call records, in part to make sure its agents would not be expelled if the program was discovered. In some cases, the DEA provided some of that information to foreign law enforcement agencies to help them build their own investigations, officials said.

The DEA did not have a real-time connection to phone companies’ data; instead, the companies regularly provided copies of their call logs, first on computer disks and later over a private network. Agents who used the system said the numbers they saw were seldom more than a few days old.

The database did not include callers’ names or other identifying data. Officials said agents often were able to identify individuals associated with telephone numbers flagged by the analysis, either by cross-referencing them against other databases or by sending follow-up requests to the phone companies.

To keep the program secret, the DEA sought not to use the information as evidence in criminal prosecutions or in its justification for warrants or other searches. Instead, its Special Operations Division passed the data to field agents as tips to help them find new targets or focus existing investigations, a process approved by Justice Department lawyers. Many of those tips were classified because the DEA phone searches drew on other intelligence data.

That practice sparked a furor when the Reuters news agency reported in 2013 that the DEA trained agents to conceal the sources of those tips from judges and defense lawyers. Reuters said the tips were based on wiretaps, foreign intelligence and a DEA database of telephone calls gathered through routine subpoenas and search warrants.

As a result, “the government short-circuited any debate about the legality and wisdom of putting the call records of millions of innocent people in the hands of the DEA,” American Civil Liberties Union lawyer Patrick Toomey said.

A BLUEPRINT FOR BROADER SURVEILLANCE

The NSA began collecting its own data on Americans’ phone calls within months of Sept. 11, 2001, as a way to identify potential terrorists within the USA. At first, it did so without court approval. In 2006, after The New York Times and USA TODAY began reporting on the surveillance program, President George W. Bush’s administration brought it under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which allows the government to use secret court orders to get access to records relevant to national security investigations. Unlike the DEA, the NSA also gathered logs of calls within the USA.

The similarities between the NSA program and the DEA operation established a decade earlier are striking – too much so to have been a coincidence, people familiar with the programs said. Former NSA general counsel Stewart Baker said, “It’s very hard to see (the DEA operation) as anything other than the precursor” to the NSA’s terrorist surveillance.

Both operations relied on an expansive interpretation of the word “relevant,” for example — one that allowed the government to collect vast amounts of information on the premise that some tiny fraction of it would be useful to investigators. Both used similar internal safeguards, requiring analysts to certify that they had “reasonable articulable suspicion” – a comparatively low legal threshold – that a phone number was linked to a drug or intelligence case before they could query the records.

“The foundation of the NSA program was a mirror image of what we were doing,” said a former Justice Department official who helped oversee the surveillance. That official said he and others briefed NSA lawyers several times on the particulars of their surveillance program. Two former DEA officials also said the NSA had been briefed on the operation. The NSA declined to comment.

There were also significant differences.

For one thing, DEA analysts queried their data collection far more often. The NSA said analysts searched its telephone database only about 300 times in 2012; DEA analysts routinely performed that many searches in a day, former officials said. Beyond that, NSA analysts must have approval from a judge on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court each time they want to search their own collection of phone metadata, and they do not automatically cross-reference it with other intelligence files.

Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., then the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, complained last year to Holder that the DEA had been gathering phone data “in bulk” without judicial oversight. Officials said the DEA’s database was disclosed to judges only occasionally, in classified hearings.

For two decades, it was never reviewed by the Justice Department’s own inspector general, which told Congress it is now looking into the DEA’s bulk data collections.

A SMALLER SCALE COLLECTION

Holder pulled the plug on the phone data collection in September 2013.

That summer, Snowden leaked a remarkable series of classified documents detailing some of the government’s most prized surveillance secrets, including the NSA’s logging of domestic phone calls and Internet traffic. Reuters and The New York Times raised questions about the drug agency’s own access to phone records.

Officials said the Justice Department told the DEA that it had determined it could not continue both surveillance programs, particularly because part of its justification for sweeping NSA surveillance was that it served national security interests, not ordinary policing. Eight months after USTO was halted, for example, department lawyers defended the spy agency’s phone dragnet in court partly on the grounds that it “serves special governmental needs above and beyond normal law enforcement.”

Three months after USTO was shut down, a review panel commissioned by President Obama urged Congress to bar the NSA from gathering telephone data on Americans in bulk. Not long after that, Obama instructed the NSA to get permission from the surveillance court before querying its phone data collection, a step the drug agency never was required to take.

The DEA stopped searching USTO in September 2013. Not long after that, it purged the database.

“It was made abundantly clear that they couldn’t defend both programs,” a former Justice Department official said. Others said Holder’s message was more direct. “He said he didn’t think we should have that information,” a former DEA official said.

By then, agents said USTO was suffering from diminishing returns. More criminals — especially the sophisticated cartel operatives the agency targeted — were communicating on Internet messaging systems that are harder for law enforcement to track.

Still, the shutdown took a toll, officials said. “It has had a major impact on investigations,” one former DEA official said.

The DEA asked the Justice Department to restart the surveillance program in December 2013. It withdrew that request when agents came up with a new solution. Every day, the agency assembles a list of the telephone numbers its agents suspect may be tied to drug trafficking. Each day, it sends electronic subpoenas — sometimes listing more than a thousand numbers — to telephone companies seeking logs of international telephone calls linked to those numbers, two official familiar with the program said.

The data collection that results is more targeted but slower and more expensive. Agents said it takes a day or more to pull together communication profiles that used to take minutes.

The White House proposed a similar approach for the NSA’s telephone surveillance program, which is set to expire June 1. That approach would halt the NSA’s bulk data collection but would give the spy agency the power to force companies to turn over records linked to particular telephone numbers, subject to a court order.