The Council On Foreign Relations (CFR) And The New World Order

- By William Blase - December 31, 2014

For those who may be confused by the controversies surrounding the "New World Order", a One-World-Government, and American concern over giving the UN more power; those unaware of the issues involved; and those wishing more background, I offer the following.

Originally presented for an Honors Class, "Dilemmas of War and Peace," at New Mexico State University, the paper was ridiculed and characterized by Dr. Yosef Lapid, (an acknowledged and locally quoted "expert" on Terrorism and Middle Eastern affairs) as "paranoid... possibly a symptom of mental illness." You may judge for yourself.

Citing source data is the "scientific method," but does not seem to apply to "Conspiracy Theories." A thousand sources may be quoted, yet will not convince the "skeptics," the "realists." It seems to me the "symptoms of mental illness" are on their side, if they refuse to look at evidence ("There are none so blind as those who WILL not see"); or perhaps something more sinister is at work, such as a knowledge of the truth, that does not want YOU to know.

To be paranoid means to believe in delusions of danger and persecution. If the danger is real, and the evidence credible, then it cannot be delusional. To ignore the evidence, and hope that it CANNOT be true, is more an evidence of mental illness.

The issue involves much more than a difference of philosophy, or political viewpoint. Growing up in the midst of the "Cold War," our generation were taught that those who attempted to abolish our national sovereignty and overthrow our Constitutional government were committing acts of treason. Please judge for yourself if the group discussed is guilty of such.

If one group is effectively in control of national governments and multinational corporations; promotes world government through control of media, foundation grants, and education; and controls and guides the issues of the day; then they control most options available. The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), and the financial powers behind it, have done all these things, and promote the "New World Order", as they have for over seventy years.

The CFR is the promotional arm of the Ruling Elite in the United States of America. Most influential politicians, academics and media personalities are members, and it uses its influence to infiltrate the New World Order into American life. Its' "experts" write scholarly pieces to be used in decision making, the academics expound on the wisdom of a united world, and the media members disseminate the message.

To understand how the most influential people in America came to be members of an organization working purposefully for the overthrow of the Constitution and American sovereignty, we have to go back at least to the early 1900's, though the story begins much earlier (depending on your viewpoint and beliefs).

That a ruling power elite does indeed control the U.S. government behind the scenes has been attested to by many americans in a position to know. Felix Frankfurter, Justice of the Supreme Court (1939-1962), said: "The real rulers in Washington are invisible and exercise power from behind the scenes." In a letter to an associate dated November 21, 1933, President Franklin Roosevelt wrote, "The real truth of the matter is, as you and I know, that a financial element in the large centers has owned the government ever since the days of Andrew Jackson." February 23, 1954,

Senator William Jenner warned in a speech: "Outwardly we have a Constitutional government. We have operating within our government and political system, another body representing another form of government, a bureaucratic elite which believes our Constitution is outmoded."

Baron M.A. Rothschild wrote, "Give me control over a nation's currency and I care not who makes its laws."

All that is needed to effectively control a government is to have control over the nation's money: a central bank with a monopoly over the supply of money and credit. This had been done in Western Europe, with the creation of privately owned central banks such as the Bank of England.

Georgetown professor Dr. Carroll Quigley (Bill Clinton's mentor while at Georgetown) wrote about the goals of the investment bankers who control central banks: "... nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole... controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences."

The Bank of the United States (1816-36), an early attempt at an American central bank, was abolished by President Andrew Jackson, who believed that it threatened the nation. He wrote: "The bold effort the present bank had made to control the government, the distress it had wantonly produced...are but premonitions of the fate that awaits the American people should they be deluded into a perpetuation of this institution or the establishment of another like it."

Thomas Jefferson wrote: "The Central Bank is an institution of the most deadly hostility existing against the principles and form of our Constitution...if the American people allow private banks to control the issuance of their currency, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all their property until their children will wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered."

Does that not describe the situation in America today?

The U.S. managed to do without a central bank until early in this century, when, according to Congressman Charles Lindbergh, Sr., "The Money Trust caused the 1907 panic, and thereby forced Congress to create a National Monetary Commission." Headed by Senator Nelson Aldrich, father-in-law of John D. Rockefeller, Jr., the Commission recommended creation of a central bank.

Though unconstitutional, as only "The Congress shall have Power...To coin Money, regulate the Value thereof..." (Article I, Section 8, U.S. Constitution) the Federal Reserve Act was passed in December 1913; ostensibly to stabilize the economy and prevent further panics, but as Lindberg warned Congress: "This act establishes the most gigantic trust on earth...the invisible government by the money power, proven to exist by the Money Trust investigation, will be legalized." The Great Depression and numerous recessions later, it is obvious the Federal Reserve produces inflation and federal debt whenever it desires, but not stability.

Congressman Louis McFadden, House Committee on Banking and Currency Chairman (1920-31), stated: "When the Federal Reserve Act was passed, the people of these United States did not perceive that a world banking system was being set up here. A super-state controlled by international bankers and industrialists...acting together to enslave the world...Every effort has been made by the Fed to conceal its powers but the truth is--the Fed has usurped the government."

Although called "Federal," the Federal Reserve system is privately owned by member banks, makes its own policies, and is not subject to oversight by Congress or the President. As the overseer and supplier of reserves, the Fed gave banks access to public funds, which enhanced their lending capacity.

Peter Kershaw, in "Economic Solutions" lists the ten major shareholders of the Federal Reserve Bank System as: Rothschild: London and Berlin; Lazard Bros: Paris; Israel Seiff: Italy; Kuhn- Loeb Company: Germany; Warburg: Hamburg and Amsterdam; Lehman Bros: New York; Goldman and Sachs: New York; Rockefeller: New York. (That most, if not all of these families just happen to be Jewish, you may judge the significance of yourself). The balance of stock is owned by major commercial member banks.

According to Devvy Kidd, "Why A Bankrupt America?" The Federal Reserve pays the Bureau of Engraving & Printing approximately $23 for each 1,000 notes printed. 10,000 $100 notes (one million dollars) would thus cost the Federal Reserve $230. They then secure a pledge of collateral equal to the face value from the U.S. government. The collateral is our land, labor, and assets... collected by their agents, the IRS. By authorizing the Fed to regulate and create money (and thus inflation), Congress gave private banks power to create profits at will.

As Lindberg put it: "The new law will create inflation whenever the trusts want inflation...they can unload the stocks on the people at high prices during the excitement and then bring on a panic and buy them back at low prices...the day of reckoning is only a few years removed." That day came in 1929, with the Stock Market crash and Great Depression.

One of the most important powers given to the Fed was the right to buy and sell government securities, and provide loans to member banks so they might also purchase them. This provided another built-in mechanism for profit to the banks, if government debt was increased. All that was needed was a method to pay off the debt. This was accomplished through the passage of the income tax in 1913.

A national income tax was declared unconstitutional in 1895 by the Supreme Court, so a constitutional amendment was proposed in Congress by none other than ...Senator Nelson Aldrich. As presented to the American people it seemed reasonable enough: income tax on only one percent of income under $20,000, with the assurance that it would never increase.

Since it was graduated, the tax would "soak the rich", ...but the rich had other plans, already devising a method of protecting wealth. As described by Gary Allen in his 1976 book "The Rockefeller File," "By the time the (16th) Amendment had been approved by the states, the Rockefeller Foundation was in full operation...about the same time that Judge Kenesaw Landis was ordering the breakup of the Standard Oil monopoly...John D...not only avoided taxes by creating four great tax-exempt foundations; he used them as repositories for his 'divested' interests...made his assets non-taxable so that they might be passed down through generations without...estate and gift taxes...Each year the Rockefellers can dump up to half their incomes into their pet foundations and deduct the "donations" from their income tax."

Exchanging ownership for control of wealth, foundations are also a handy means for promoting interests that benefit the wealthy. Millions of foundation dollars have been "donated" to causes such as promoting the use of drugs, while degrading preventive medicine. Since many drugs are made from coal tar derivatives, both oil companies and drug manufacturing concerns (many Rockefeller owned or controlled) are the main beneficiaries.

With the means to loan enormous sums to the government (the Federal Reserve), a method to repay the debt (income tax), and an escape from taxation for the wealthy, (foundations), all that remained was an excuse to borrow money. By some happy "coincidence," in 1914 World War I began, and after American participation national debt rose from $1 billion to $25 billion.

Woodrow Wilson was elected President in 1913, beating incumbent William Howard Taft, who had vowed to veto legislation establishing a central bank. To divide the Republican vote and elect the relatively unknown Wilson, J.P. Morgan and Co. poured money into the candidacy of Teddy Roosevelt and his Progressive Party.

According to an eyewitness, Wilson was brought to Democratic Party headquarters in 1912 by Bernard Baruch, a wealthy banker. He received an "indoctrination course" from those he met, and in return agreed, if elected: to support the projected Federal Reserve and the income tax, and "listen" to advice in case of war in Europe and on the composition of his cabinet.

Wilson's top advisor during his two terms was a man named Colonel Edward M. House. House's biographer, Charles Seymour, called him the "unseen guardian angel" of the Federal Reserve Act, helping to guide it through Congress. Another biographer wrote that House believed: "...the Constitution, product of eighteenth-century minds...was thoroughly outdated; that the country would be better off if the Constitution could be scrapped and rewritten..." House wrote a book entitled "Philip Dru: Administrator," published anonymously in 1912. The hero, Philip Dru, rules America and introduces radical changes, such as a graduated income tax, a central bank, and a "league of nations."

World War I produced both a large national debt, and huge profits for those who had backed Wilson. Baruch was appointed head of the War Industries Board, where he exercised dictatorial power over the national economy. He and the Rockefellers were reported to have earned over $200 million during the war. Wilson backer Cleveland Dodge sold munitions to the allies, while J.P. Morgan loaned them hundreds of millions, with the protection of U.S. entry into the war.

While profit was certainly a motive, the war was also useful to justify the notion of world government. William Hoar reveals in "Architects of Conspiracy" that during the 1950s, government investigators examining the records of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a long- time promoter of globalism, found that several years before the outbreak of World War I, the Carnegie trustees were planning to involve the U.S. in a general war, to set the stage for world government.

The main obstacle was that Americans did not want any involvement in European wars. Some kind of incident, such as the explosion of the battleship Main, which provoked the Spanish - American war, would have to be provided as provocation. This occurred when the Lusitania, carrying 128 Americans on board, was sunk by a German submarine, and anti-German sentiment was aroused. When war was declared, U.S. propaganda portrayed all Germans as Huns and fanged serpents, and all Americans opposing the war as traitors.

What was not revealed at the time, however, was that the Lusitania was transporting war munitions to England, making it a legitimate target for the Germans. Even so, they had taken out large ads in the New York papers, asking that Americans not take passage on the ship.

The evidence seems to point to a deliberate plan to have the ship sunk by the Germans. Colin Simpson, author of "The Lusitania," wrote that Winston Churchill, head of the British Admiralty during the war, had ordered a report to predict the political impact if a passenger ship carrying Americans was sunk. German naval codes had been broken by the British, who knew approximately where all U-boats near the British Isles were located.

According to Simpson, Commander Joseph Kenworthy, of British Naval Intelligence, stated: "The Lusitania was deliberately sent at considerably reduced speed into an area where a U-boat was known to be waiting...escorts withdrawn." Thus, even though Wilson had been reelected in 1916 with the slogan "He kept us out of war," America soon found itself fighting a European war. Actually, Colonel House had already negotiated a secret agreement with England, committing the U.S. to the conflict. It seems the American public had little say in the matter.

With the end of the war and the Versailles Treaty, which required severe war reparations from Germany, the way was paved for a leader in Germany such as Hitler. Wilson brought to the Paris Peace Conference his famous "fourteen points," with point fourteen being a proposal for a "general association of nations," which was to be the first step towards the goal of One World Government-the League of Nations.

Wilson's official biographer, Ray Stannard Baker, revealed that the League was not Wilson's idea. "...not a single idea--in the Covenant of the League was original with the President." Colonel House was the author of the Covenant, and Wilson had merely rewritten it to conform to his own phraseology.

The League of Nations was established, but it, and the plan for world government eventually failed because the U.S. Senate would not ratify the Versailles Treaty.

Pat Robertson, in "The New World Order," states that Colonel House, along with other internationalists, realized that America would not join any scheme for world government without a change in public opinion.

After a series of meetings, it was decided that an "Institute of International Affairs", with two branches, in the United States and England, would be formed.

The British branch became known as the Royal Institute of International Affairs, with leadership provided by members of the Round Table. Begun in the late 1800's by Cecil Rhodes, the Round Table aimed to federate the English speaking peoples of the world, and bring it under their rule.

The Council on Foreign Relations was incorporated as the American branch in New York on July 29, 1921. Founding members included Colonel House, and "...such potentates of international banking as J.P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, Paul Warburg, Otto Kahn, and Jacob Schiff...the same clique which had engineered the establishment of the Federal Reserve System," according to Gary Allen in the October 1972 issue of "AMERICAN OPINION."

The founding president of the CFR was John W. Davis, J.P. Morgan's personal attorney, while the vice-president was Paul Cravath, also representing the Morgan interests. Professor Carroll Quigley characterized the CFR as "...a front group for J.P. Morgan and Company in association with the very small American Round Table Group." Over time Morgan influence was lost to the Rockefellers, who found that one world government fit their philosophy of business well. As John D. Rockefeller, Sr. had said: "Competition is a sin," and global monopoly fit their needs as they grew internationally.

Antony Sutton, a research fellow for the Hoover Institution for War, Revolution, and Peace at Stanford University, wrote of this philosophy: "While monopoly control of industries was once the objective of J.P. Morgan and J.D. Rockefeller, by the late nineteenth century the inner sanctums of Wall Street understood the most efficient way to gain an unchallenged monopoly was to 'go political' and make society go to work for the monopolists-- under the name of the public good and the public interest."

Frederick C. Howe revealed the strategy of using government in a 1906 book, "Confessions of a Monopolist": "These are the rules of big business...Get a monopoly; let society work for you; and remember that the best of all business is politics..."

As corporations went international, national monopolies could no longer protect their interests. What was needed was a one world system of government controlled from behind the scenes. This had been the plan since the time of Colonel House, and to implement it, it was necessary to weaken the U.S. politically and economically.

During the 1920's, America enjoyed a decade of prosperity, fueled by the easy availability of credit. Between 1923 and 1929 the Federal Reserve expanded the money supply by sixty-two percent. When the stock market crashed, many small investors were ruined, but not "insiders." In March of 1929 Paul Warburg issued a tip the Crash was coming, and the largest investors got out of the market, according to Allen and Abraham in "None Dare Call it Conspiracy."

With their fortunes intact, they were able to buy companies for a fraction of their worth. Shares that had sold for a dollar might now cost a nickel, and the buying power, and wealth, of the rich increased enormously.

Louis McFadden, Chairman of the House Banking Committee declared: "It was not accidental. It was a carefully contrived occurrence...The international bankers sought to bring about a condition of despair here so that they might emerge as rulers of us all."

Curtis Dall, son-in-law of FDR and a syndicate manager for Lehman Brothers, an investment firm, was on the N.Y. Stock Exchange floor the day of the crash. In "FDR: My Exploited Father-In-Law," he states: "...it was the calculated 'shearing' of the public by the World-Money powers triggered by the planned sudden shortage of call money in the New York Market."

The Crash paved the way for the man Wall Street had groomed for the presidency, FDR. Portrayed as a "man of the little people", the reality was that Roosevelt's family had been involved in New York banking since the eighteenth century.

Frederic Delano, FDR's uncle, served on the original Federal Reserve Board. FDR attended Groton and Harvard, and in the 1920's worked on Wall Street, sitting on the board of directors of eleven different corporations.

Dall wrote of his father-in-law: "...Most of his thoughts, his political 'ammunition,'...were carefully manufactured for him in advance by the CFR-One World Money group. Brilliantly... he exploded that prepared 'ammunition' in the middle of an unsuspecting target, the American people--and thus paid off and retained his internationalist political support."

Taking America off the gold standard in 1934, FDR opened the way to unrestrained money supply expansion, decades of inflation--and credit revenues for banks. Raising gold prices from $20 an ounce to $35, FDR and Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, Jr. (son of a founding CFR member), gave international bankers huge profits.

FDR's most remembered program, the New Deal, could only be financed through heavy borrowing. In effect, those who had caused the Depression loaned America the money to recover from it. Then, through the National Recovery Administration, proposed by Bernard Baruch in 1930, they were put in charge of regulating the economy. FDR appointed Baruch disciple Hugh Johnson to run the NRA, assisted by CFR member Gerard Swope. With broad powers to regulate wages, prices, and working conditions, it was, as Herbert Hoover wrote in his memoirs: "...pure fascism;...merely a remaking of Mussolini's 'corporate state'..." The Supreme Court eventually ruled the NRA unconstitutional.

During the FDR years, the Council on Foreign Relations captured the political life of the U.S. Besides Treasury Secretary Morgenthau, other CFR members included Secretary of State Edward Stettinus, War Secretary Henry Stimson, and Assistant Secretary of State Sumner Welles.

Since 1934 almost every United States Secretary of State has been a CFR member; and ALL Secretaries of War or Defense, from Henry L. Stimson through Richard Cheney.

The CIA has been under CFR control almost continuously since its creation, starting with Allen Dulles, founding member of the CFR and brother of Secretary of State under President Eisenhower, John Foster Dulles. Allen Dulles had been at the Paris Peace Conference, joined the CFR in 1926, and later became its president.

John Foster Dulles had been one of Woodrow Wilson's young proteges at the Paris Peace Conference. A founding member of the CFR...he was an in-law of the Rockefellers, Chairman of the Board of the Rockefeller Foundation, and Board Chairman of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

In 1940 FDR defeated internationalist Wendell Willkie, who wrote a book entitled "One World," and later became a CFR member. Congressman Usher Burdick protested at the time on the floor of the House that Willkie was being financed by J.P. Morgan and the New York utility bankers. Polls showed few Republicans favored him, yet the media portrayed him as THE Republican candidate.

Since that time nearly ALL presidential candidates have been CFR members. President Truman, who was not a member, was advised by a group of "wise men," all six of whom were CFR members, according to Gary Allen. In 1952 and 1956, CFR Adlai Stevenson challenged CFR Eisenhower.

In 1960, CFR Kennedy (who was probably killed because he had the courage NOT to go along with all their plans) CFR Nixon. In 1964 the GOP stunned the Establishment by nominating its candidate over Nelson Rockefeller.

Rockefeller and the CFR wing proceeded to picture Barry Goldwater as a dangerous radical. In 1968 CFR Nixon ran against CFR Humphrey. The 1972 "contest" featured CFR Nixon vs. CFR McGovern.

CFR candidates for president include George McGovern, Walter Mondale, Edmund Muskie, John Anderson, and Lloyd Bentsen. In 1976 we had Jimmy Carter, who is a member of the Trilateral Commission, created by David Rockefeller and CFR member Zbigniew Brzezinski with the goal of economic linkage between Japan, Europe, and the United States, and: "...managing the world economy...a smooth and peaceful evolution of the global system." We have also had (though his name strangely disappears from the membership list in 1979) CFR director (1977-79) George Bush, and last but not least, CFR member Bill Clinton.

They have all promoted the "New World Order," controlled by the United Nations. The problem is that "...the present United Nations organization is actually the creation of the CFR and is housed on land in Manhattan donated to it by the family of current CFR chairman David Rockefeller," as Pat Robertson describes it.

The original concept for the UN was the outcome of the Informal Agenda Group, formed in 1943 by Secretary of State Cordell Hull. All except Hull were CFR members, and Isaiah Bowman, a founding member of the CFR, originated the idea.

The American delegation to the San Francisco meeting that drafted the charter of the United Nations in 1949 included CFR members Nelson Rockefeller, John Foster Dulles, John McCloy, and CFR members who were communist agents--Harry Dexter White, Owen Lattimore, and the Secretary-General of the conference, Alger Hiss. In all, the Council sent forty-seven of its members in the United States delegation, effectively controlling the outcome.

Since that time the CFR and its friends in the mass media (largely controlled by CFR members such as Katherine Graham of the "Washington Post" and Henry Luce of" Time, Life"), foundations, and political groups have lobbied consistently to grant the United Nations more authority and power. Bush and the Gulf War were but one of the latest calls for a "New World Order."

Admiral Chester Ward, a member of the CFR for over a decade, became one of its harshest critics, revealing its inner workings in a 1975 book, "Kissinger ON THE COUCH." In it he states "The most powerful cliques in these elitist groups have one objective in common: they want to bring about the surrender of the sovereignty and national independence of the United States."

Most members are one-world-government ideologists whose long- term goals were officially summed up in September 1961 State Department Document 7277, adopted by the Nixon Administration: "...elimination of all armed forces and armaments except those needed to maintain internal order within states and to furnish the United Nations with peace forces...by the time it (UN global government) would be so strong no nation could challenge it."

Within the CFR there exists a "much smaller group but more powerful...made up of Wall Street international bankers and their key agents. Primarily, they want the world banking monopoly from whatever power ends up in control of the global government ...This CFR faction is headed by the Rockefeller brothers," according to Ward.

What must be remembered is that this is not some lunatic- fringe group...these are members of one of the most powerful private organizations in the world: the people who determine and control American economic, social, political, and military policy. Members' influence and control extends to "leaders in academia, public service, business, and the media," according to the CFR 1993 "Annual Report."

Their founding they describe as: "American Participants in the Paris Peace Conference decided that it was time for more private Americans to become familiar with the increasing responsibilities and obligations of the United States...there was a need for an organization able to provide for the continuous study of U.S. foreign police for the BENEFIT OF ITS MEMBERS (emphasis mine) and a wider audience of interested Americans."

They sponsor hundreds of programs, where members "exchange views with American and foreign officials and policy experts... discuss foreign policy issues...consider international issues of concern to the business community" (Corporate business), and "...affiliated groups of community leaders throughout the United states...meet with decision makers."

The CFR states that it is "host to many views, advocate of none," and it "has no affiliation with the U.S. government." No, no affiliation at all, if you don't count: "A Council member was elected president of the United States...Dozens of other Council colleagues were called to serve in cabinet and sub-cabinet positions," as they describe it in "Foreign Affairs," along with many members of Congress, the Supreme Court, the Joint Chiefs, the Federal Reserve, and many other Federal bureaucrats.

They are not AFFILIATED with government, they ARE the government, in effect.

One re-occurring view was stated in the 50th anniversary issue of "Foreign Affairs," the official publication of the CFR. In an article by Kingman Brewster, Jr. entitled "Reflections on Our National Purpose." Our purpose should be, according to him, to do away with our nationality, to "take some risks in order to invite others to pool their sovereignty with ours..."

These "risks" include disarming to the point where we would be helpless against the "peace-keeping" forces of a global UN government. We should happily surrender our sovereignty to the world government in the interests of the "world community."

Today we have the spectacle of Spc. 4 Michael New, a U.S. soldier in Germany who refuses to wear the uniform of the UN, facing an "administrative discharge." He states rightly that he swore an oath to defend the U.S. Constitution, not the United Nations. Many other Americans have taken that same oath, such as myself, and believe it is our sworn duty still to defend the Constitution, since an oath sworn before God must be fulfilled. (Why else do we swear to tell the truth in our courts, or when taking public office?) Is it a crime these days to actually BELIEVE in God and the oath that was taken?

Meanwhile, others who attempt to destroy the Constitution and our sovereignty are given honors and position...At least they are not hypocrites...only supremely arrogant.

"In short, the 'house of world order' will have to be built from the bottom up rather than from the top down...An end run around national sovereignty, eroding it piece by piece, will accomplish much more than the old fashioned assault..." in the opinion of Richard N. Gardner, former deputy assistant Secretary of State in "Foreign Affairs," April 1974.

James Warburg, son of CFR founder Paul Warburg, and a member of FDR's "brain trust," testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on February 17, 1950, "We shall have world government whether or not you like it--by conquest or consent."

Is this an AMERICAN speaking, or a dangerous lunatic? Who is this "We" who threatens to CONQUER us?

They are a group that actually has the power to do it, and is doing it every day, bit by bit.

CFR Members in the mass media, education, and entertainment push their propaganda of "humanism" and world brotherhood. We should all live in peace under a world government, and forget about such selfish things as nationalities and patriotism. We can solve our own problems. We don't need God, or morals, or values: it's all relative, anyway, right?...Because if we actually had some moral character and values, we might be able to discern that these people are actually EVIL.

The Bible says that the LOVE of money is the root of all evil (1 Tim. 6:10). These people are evil because they love money and power, and greed drives them to do anything to achieve their goals. They have lost all morality and conscience, and believe such concepts, as well as our Constitution, "outdated".

THAT is insanity--to have more wealth than can be spent, and still it is never enough. They have to control governments, start wars, conspire to rule the world; least the "common people" wake up to how they have gained their wealth, take it away from them, and demand that they pay the price for their crimes.

That is why they constantly pit us one against the other, with "Diversity," Affirmative Action, and other programs,...black against white, men against women, rural against urban, ranchers against environmentalists, and on and on...least we look in their direction.

We The People are held to a much higher standard. If we threaten the President or a public official, we are charged with a crime...yet the One-World-Gang can threaten the Constitution and the liberties of We The People, the sovereign rulers of this nation, and nothing is said or done.

Perhaps they do not fear what Man can do to them... they believe they have arranged everything, and their power and wealth will prevail in this world. However, those among them who have sworn an oath before God to uphold and defend the Constitution: the President, members of Congress, and the military; may find one day that they do indeed have something to fear.

List of CFR Members

Colonel House, the fallen angel, still has relatives controlling the CFR. Karen Elliot House is Chairman of the Membership Committee, and a member of the Nominating Committee, along with Jeane Kirkpatrick. David Rockefeller is now "Honorary Chairman of the Board", after serving as Chairman 1970-1985; and "Director Emeritus," after serving as a Director 1949-1985. Peter G. Peterson is Chairman, Admiral B. R. Inman is Vice Chairman, while Thomas Foley and Jeane Kirkpatrick are Directors serving on the Executive Committee.

These "private citizens" have access to government officials and policy makers as often as they wish, yet the results of their meetings can only be given to other government officials, corporate officers, or law partners. Participants are forbidden to transmit an attributed statement to any public medium, such as newspapers or TV, where there is "risk that it will promptly be widely circulated or published," as the "Annual Report" puts it.

Should not OUR public officials be forbidden to meet in secret with private groups? Public officials should only be allowed to discuss public business and policy in a public forum. The Public...remember US?

There is much more to say about this group and their plans for America. Gary Allen, in "The Rockefeller File," states that they are behind the many regional government plans, which would abolish city, county, and state lines, leaving us at the mercy of federal bureaucrats; and behind the push for "land use" controls. They want "federal control of everything. Since they intend to control the federal government..."

There are also the many allegations of involvement in gun running, drug smuggling, prostitution and sex slaves; and the many mysterious assassinations and "suicides" of witnesses and others who get too close to the truth...but that is another story.

REFERENCES

Bo Adelmann, 1986. "The Federal Reserve System." The New American, October 17.

Gary Allen, 1976. The Rockefeller File. Seal Beach, CA: '76 Press.

Gary Allen with Larry Abraham, 1972. None Dare Call it Conspiracy. Rossmoor, CA: Concord Press.

"Congressional Record," December 22, 1913, Vol. 51.

Phoebe and Kent Courtney, 1962. America's Unelected Rulers, The Council on Foreign Relations. New Orleans: Conservative Society of America.

Curtis B. Dall, 1970. FDR My Exploited Father-In-Law. Washington D.C.: Action Associates.

A. Ralph Epperson, 1985. The Unseen Hand. Tucson, AZ: Publius Press.

F.D.R.: His Personal Letters, 1950. New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce.

William P. Hoar, 1984. Architects of Conspiracy. Belmont MA: Western Islands.

Herbert Hoover, 1952. The Memoirs of Herbert Hoover, The Great Depression 1929-1941. New York: Macmillan.

Frederick C. Howe, 1906. Confessions of a Monopolist. Chicago: Public Publishing Co.

Robert C. Johansen, 1980. Models of World Order, in "Dilemmas of War and Peace."

Peter Kershaw, 1994. "Economic Solutions."

Devvy Kidd, 1995. "Why A Bankrupt America?" Colorado: Project Liberty.

Ferdinand Lundberg, 1938. America's 60 Families. New York: Vanguard.

Louis T. McFadden, 1934. "The Federal Reserve Corporation, remarks in Congress." Boston: Forum Publication Co.

James Perloff, 1988. The Shadows of Power. Appleton, WI: Western Islands.

Carroll Quigley, 1966. Tragedy and Hope. New York: Macmillan.

Pat Robertson, 1991. The New World Order. Dallas: Word Publishing.

Charles Seymour, ed., 1926. The Intimate Paper of Colonel House. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Colin Simpson, 1972. The Lusitania. Boston: Little, Brown.

Arthur D. Howde Smith, 1940. "Mr House ob5 Texas." New York: Funk and Wagnalls.

Antony C. Sutton, 1975. Wall Street and FDR. New Rochelle, New York: Arlington House.

George Sylvester Viereck, 1932. The Strangest Friendship in History. New York: Liveright.

 

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"It is the sacred principles enshrined in the UN Charter to which we will henceforth pledge our allegiance."
George Herbert Walker Bush, Speech at the UN, February 1, 1992

"A world society cannot be haphazard. Since there are no precedents, it cannot be traditional at this stage of development. It can only be deliberate and experimental, planned and built up with particular objectives and with the aid of all available knowledge concerning the principles of social organization. Social engineering is a new science."
Scott Nearing, a socialist and advocate of World Government - United World, 1944, p.221

"Complete and accurate surveillance as a means of control is probably a practical impossibility. What is much more likely is a loss of privacy and constant inconvenience as the wrong people gain access to information, as one wastes time convincing the inquisitors that one is in fact innocent, or as one struggles to untangle the errors of the errant machine."
Victor Ferkiss, Technological Man: The Myth and the Reality, 1969

"To achieve world government, it is necessary to remove from the minds of men, their individualism, loyalty to family traditions, national patriotism and religious dogmas."
G. Brock Chisholm, co-founder of the World Federation for Mental Health, former director of UN World Health Organization

"It is the sacred principles enshrined in the United Nations charter to which the American people will henceforth pledge their allegiance."
President George Bush addressing the General Assembly of the U.N., February 1, 1992

"If this were a dictatorship, it'd be a heck of a lot easier, just so long as I'm the dictator."
President-Elect George W. Bush

"One-fourth of humanity must be eliminated from the social body. We are in charge of God's selection process for planet earth. He selects, we destroy. We are the riders of the pale horse, Death."
Psychologist Barbara Marx Hubbard - member of Task Force Delta; a United States Army think tank

"Secrecy is the beginning of tyranny."
Robert A. Heinlein

"We are going to end up with world government. It's inevitable ... There's going to be conflict, coercion and consensus. That's all part of what will be required as we give birth to the first global civilization."
James Garrison, president, Gorbachev Foundation USA; quoted in The Daily Record, Dunn, NC, p.4 10/17/95

"Further global progress is now possible only through a quest for universal consensus in the movement towards a new world order."
Mikhail Gorbachev, before the UN, December 7, 1988

Global Warming: Fact or Fiction? Featuring Physicists Willie Soon and Elliott D. Bloom

Published: August 16, 2019

Is global warming real? Have any such predictions been established scientifically? Would massive “carbon” taxes and other controls put America and the world - especially the poor—at great risk?

At this special event, geoscientist and astrophysicist Willie Soon separates fact from fiction in the global warming debate. He explains why the forecasts from CO2 climate models have been so wrong and why solar influences on clouds, oceans, and wind drive climate change, not CO2 emissions. Stanford University physicist Elliott Bloom then comments.

“The whole point of science is to question accepted dogmas. For that reason, I respect Willie Soon as a good scientist and a courageous citizen.” - Freeman J. Dyson, Professor Emeritus of Physics, Institute for Advanced Study; Templeton Prize Laureate

“I am writing to express my deep admiration and respect for Dr. Willie Soon, a fine astrophysicist and human being.... As Willie has shown in many ways, observational facts do not fit the CO2 dogma, and an enormous amount of evidence points to the Sun as a much more important driver of climate.... Willie was right—whatever the cause of changing temperature, the main driver cannot be the concentration of atmospheric CO2.” - William Happer, Chairman, Presidential Committee on Climate Security; Cyrus Fogg Brackett Professor of Physics Emeritus, Princeton University; Member, National Academy of Sciences

Willie Soon is a geophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. He received his Ph.D. (with distinction) in aeronautical engineering from the University of Southern California, and he has been Astronomer at the Mount Wilson Observatory; Senior Scientist at the George C. Marshall Institute; Senior Visiting Fellow at the State Key Laboratory of Marine Environmental Science at Xiamen University; and Professor of Environmental Studies at the University of Putra Malaysia. The author of 90 scientific papers, he has IEEE received the Nuclear & Plasma Sciences Society Award, Rockwell Dennis Hunt Award, Smithsonian Institution Award, Courage in Defense of Science Award, Petr Beckmann Award for Courage and Achievement in Defense of Scientific Truth and Freedom, and Frederick Seitz Memorial Award.

Elliott D. Bloom is Professor Emeritus in the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Laboratory (SLAC) at Stanford University and a Fellow of the American Physical Society. He was a member of the SLAC team with Jerome I. Friedman, Henry W. Kendall and Richard E. Taylor who received the Nobel Prize in Physics.

The Independent Institute is a non-profit, non-partisan, public-policy research and educational organization that shapes ideas into profound and lasting impact. The mission of Independent is to boldly advance peaceful, prosperous, and free societies grounded in a commitment to human worth and dignity. Applying independent thinking to issues that matter, the Independent Institute creates transformational ideas for today’s most pressing social and economic challenges. By connecting these ideas with other organizations and networks, Independent seeks to inspire action that can unleash an era of unparalleled human flourishing at home and around the globe. http://www.independent.org/publicatio...

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Global Dimming of the Sun

PBS Airdate: April 18, 2006

NARRATOR: He warned us, more than 25 years ago, that human activity was changing the Earth'sclimate. Since then, the world has gotten hotter, and NASA scientist James Hansen's warning has been echoed by the vast majority of climate scientists everywhere.

JAMES HANSEN (NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies): Global warming in the past century is about eight-tenths of a degree Celsius, with most of it occurring in the last 30 years.

NARRATOR: And now the warnings have become more urgent.

JAMES HANSEN: I don't agree that we've passed the point where there's no hope, but, but, on the other hand, we're darned close.

NARRATOR: Close, because scientists have uncovered a new factor that may be masking the full impact of global warming. Called global dimming, it's powerful enough to alter temperatures in a matter of days. It may have contributed to the world's deadliest drought, and it could mean that the Earth's climate is about to start heating up as fast as the most dire predictions.

JAMES HANSEN: I think we have less than a decade to avoid passing what I call "point of no return."

NARRATOR: What will the future of our planet be, now that we're Dimming the Sun? Right now on NOVA.

Google is proud to support NOVA in the search for knowledge: Google.

What would you ask an oil company? What is being done to make us less reliant on oil? That's a question. If we're going to keep our dependency on oil, primarily, for the coming years, the initial future years, where's it coming from?

Major funding for NOVA is provided by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, serving society through biomedical research and science education: HHMI.

And by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and by contributions to your PBS station from viewers like you. Thank you.

NARRATOR: September 12th, 2001, the aftermath of tragedy: ironically, as America mourned, the weather all over the country was unusually clear and sunny. Eight hundred miles west of New York, in Madison, Wisconsin, climate scientist David Travis was on his way to work.

DOCTOR DAVID TRAVIS (University of Wisconsin-Whitewater): Around the 12th, later on in the day, when I was driving to work, and I noticed how bright blue and clear the sky was, and...at first I didn't think about it, then I realized the sky was unusually clear.

NARRATOR: For 15 years, Travis had been researching a relatively obscure topic: whether the vapor trails left by aircraft were having a significant effect on the weather. In the aftermath of 9/11, the entire U.S. fleet was grounded, and Travis finally had a chance to find out.

DAVID TRAVIS: It was certainly, you know, one of the tiny positives that may have come out of this—an opportunity to do research—that hopefully will never happen again.

NARRATOR: Travis suspected the grounding might make a small, but detectable, change to the weather, but what he observed was both immediate and dramatic.

DAVID TRAVIS: We found that the change in temperature range during those three days was just over one degree centigrade. And you have to realize that from a layman's perspective that doesn't sound like much, but from a climate perspective that is huge.

NARRATOR: The temperature range is the difference between the highest and the lowest temperatures in a 24-hour period. Usually, it stays much the same from day to day, even if the weather changes, but not this time. Travis had come across a new and powerful phenomenon, one which would call into question all our predictions about the future of our planet.

The trail that would lead to this extraordinary discovery of global dimming began 40 years ago, in Israel, with the work of Gerry Stanhill, a young English immigrant. Trained as a biologist, Gerry got a job helping to design irrigation systems. His task was to measure how strongly the sun shone over Israel.

DOCTOR GERALD STANHILL (Israel Ministry of Agriculture): It was important, for this work, to measure solar radiation, because that is the factor that basically determines how much water crops require.

NARRATOR: For a year, Gerry collected data from a network of light meters. The results were much as expected and were used to help design the national irrigation system. But, 20 years later, in the 1980s, Gerry decided to update his measurements. What he found stunned him.

GERALD STANHILL: Well, I was amazed to find that there was a very serious reduction in sunlight, the amount of sunlight in Israel. In fact, if we compare those very early measurements, in the 1950s, with the current measurements, there was a staggering 22 percent drop in the sunlight, and that really amazed me.

NARRATOR: A 22 percent drop in solar energy was simply massive. If it were true, surely the effects would be obvious to every Israeli. The figures were hard for other scientists to take seriously, so when Gerry published, his results were ignored.

GERALD STANHILL: I must say that the publications had almost no effect whatsoever on the scientific community.

NARRATOR: But Gerry was not the only scientist who had noticed a decline in sunlight. In Germany, a young graduate student, Beate Liepert found that the same thing seemed to be happening over the Bavarian Alps, as well.

DOCTOR BEATE LIEPERT (Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory): I was the same; I was as skeptical as any other climatologist. But then I, I saw the same results in Germany, so I believed him.

NARRATOR: Germany, Israel, what about the rest of the world? Working independently of each other, Liepert and Stanhill began searching through journals and meteorological records from around the world. And everywhere they looked, they found the same story.

Between the 1950s and the early 1990s, the level of solar energy reaching the Earth's surface had dropped: nine percent in Antarctica, 10 percent in areas of the U.S.A., by almost 30 percent in one region of Russia, and by 16 percent in parts of the British Isles. This seemed to be a global phenomenon, so Gerry gave it a suitable name: "global dimming."

But again, the response from other scientists was one of disbelief.

GERALD STANHILL: The scientific community was obviously not ready to deal with the fact that there was a global dimming phenomenon.

NARRATOR: Gerry claimed that, on average, the solar energy reaching Earth had fallen by two percent to four percent. That should be making the world significantly cooler, yet scientists knew the Earth was getting hotter.

As we burn coal, oil and gas, we increase the concentration of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Like a thermal blanket, they prevent the Sun's heat from radiating back into space, causing global warming.

BEATE LIEPERT: My friends' reaction, actually, to Gerry's and to my work—at the same time, too—was, "Oh my god, this is really extreme. You are contradicting global warming. Do you know how many billions of dollars was spent on global warming research? And you and this old guy are contradicting us?"

NARRATOR: So Liepert and Stanhill's work was widely dismissed. But global dimming was not the only phenomenon that didn't seem to fit with global warming. In Australia, two other biologists, Michael Roderick and Graham Farquhar, were intrigued by another paradoxical result, the worldwide decline in something called the "pan evaporation rate."

PROFESSOR GRAHAM FARQUHAR (Australian National University): It's called pan evaporation rate because it's evaporation rate from a pan. Every day, all over the world, people come out in the morning and see how much water they've got to add to a pan to bring it back to the level it was the same time the morning before. It's that simple.

NARRATOR: In some places, agricultural scientists have been performing this routine daily task for more than a hundred years.

GRAHAM FARQUHAR: The long-term measurements of pan evaporation are what gives it its real value.

DOCTOR MICHAEL RODERICK (Australian National University): And the fact that they're doing the same thing, day in, day out, with the same instrument.

GRAHAM FARQUHAR: Yeah, they deserve a medal, each of them.

MICHAEL RODERICK: Yeah.

NARRATOR: Nobody outside of agriculture took much notice of the pan evaporation measurements, but, in the 1990s, scientists spotted something very strange, the rate of evaporation was falling.

GRAHAM FARQUHAR: There is a paradox here about the fact that the pan evaporation rate's going down, an apparent paradox, but the global temperature's going up.

NARRATOR: This was a puzzle. Most scientists reasoned that like a pan on the stove, turning up the global temperature should increase the rate at which water evaporated. But Roderick and Farquhar did some calculations and worked out that temperature was not the most important factor in pan evaporation.

MICHAEL RODERICK: Well, it turns out, in fact, that the key things for pan evaporation are the sunlight, the humidity and the wind. But really, the sunlight is a really dominant term there.

NARRATOR: They found that it was the energy of the photons hitting the surface—the actual sunlight—that kicks the water molecules out of the pan and into the atmosphere. And so they, too, reached an extraordinary conclusion.

MICHAEL RODERICK: You know, if the pan is going down, then maybe that's the sunlight going down.

NARRATOR: Was the falling pan evaporation, in fact, evidence of global dimming? Somewhere in the journals, they felt, must be the hard numbers that could tie the two things together.

MICHAEL RODERICK: And then one day, just by accident, I had to go to the library to get an article out of Nature. And, as you do, I couldn't find it, and I just glanced at a...through the thing, and there was an article called "Evaporation Losing Its Strength," which reported a decline in pan evaporation over Russia, the United States and Eastern Europe.

And there, in the measurements, they said that the pans had, on average, evaporated about a hundred millimeters less of water in the last 30 years.

NARRATOR: Mike knew how much sunlight was needed to evaporate a millimeter of water, so he put the two sets of figures together, the drop in evaporation with the drop in sunlight.

MICHAEL RODERICK: So you just do the sum in your head: a hundred millimeters of water, less a pan evaporation, two and a half mega joules, so two and a half times a hundred is two hundred and fifty mega joules. And that was, in fact, what the Russians had measured with the decline in sunlight in the last 30 years. It was quite amazing.

NARRATOR: It was the same in Europe and the U.S.A. The drop in evaporation rate matched the decline in sunlight reported by Beate Liepert and Gerry Stanhill. Two independent sets of observations led to the same conclusion. Here, at last, was compelling evidence that global dimming was real.

BEATE LIEPERT: All of a sudden you see, "Oh my god, the world is dimming." And then you, all of a sudden, you see, "Oh my god, this really has an im..., tremendous impact.

GRAHAM FARQUHAR: And it had to be dimming in Europe and in America and in Russia. This is on a global scale. And we thought, "This is really important," because the amount of dimming was enormous. So this is big on a, on a global scale.

NARRATOR: But what was causing it? Scientists knew there was nothing wrong with the sun itself. The culprit had to be somewhere here on Earth.

The Maldives, a nation of a thousand tiny islands in the middle of the Indian Ocean: it was here that Veerabhadran Ramanathan, one of the world's leading climate scientists, began to unravel the mystery of what's causing global dimming. He had first noticed declining sunlight over large areas of the Pacific Ocean in the mid-1990s.

PROFESSOR VEERABHADRAN RAMANATHAN (University of California, San Diego): But we didn't know, at that time, it was part of a much larger global picture, but I knew we had to find out what was causing that.

NARRATOR: Ramanathan was certain of one thing, the big drop in sunlight reaching the ground had to be something to do with changes in the Earth's atmosphere. There was one obvious suspect.

VEERABHADRAN RAMANATHAN: Almost anything we do to create energy causes pollution.

NARRATOR: Burning fuel doesn't just result in the invisible greenhouse gases which cause global warming; it also produces visible pollution, tiny airborne particles of soot and other pollutants. These create the haze that shrouds many of our cities. So Ramanathan wondered, "Could this pollution be behind global dimming?" The Maldives were the perfect place to find out.

The Maldives seem unpolluted, but in fact the northern islands sit in a stream of dirty air descending from India. Only the southern tip of the long island chain enjoys clean air, coming all the way from Antarctica.

So, by comparing the northern islands with the southern ones, Ramanathan and his colleagues would be able to see exactly what difference the pollution made to the atmosphere and the sunlight.

Project INDOEX, as it was called, was a huge multinational effort. For four years, every possible technique was used to sample and monitor the atmosphere over the Maldives. INDOEX cost $25,000,000, but it produced results; and they surprised everyone.

VEERABHADRAN RAMANATHAN: The stunning part of the experiment was this pollutant layer, which was three kilometers thick, cut down the sunlight reaching the ocean by more than 10 percent.

NARRATOR: A 10-percent fall in sunlight meant that particle pollution was having a far bigger effect than anyone had thought possible.

VEERABHADRAN RAMANATHAN: Our models led us to believe the human impact on the dimming was close to half to one percent, so what we discovered was 10-fold.

NARRATOR: INDOEX showed that the particles of pollution were blocking some sunlight themselves. Even more significant was what they were doing to the clouds. They were turning them into giant mirrors.

Clouds are made of droplets of water. These form when water vapor in the atmosphere starts to condense on the surface of naturally occurring airborne particles, typically pollen or sea salt. As they grow, the water droplets eventually become so heavy they fall as rain.

But Ramanathan found that polluted air contained far more particles than the unpolluted air, particles of ash, soot and sulfur.

VEERABHADRAN RAMANATHAN: We saw 10 times more particles in the polluted air mass north of the Maldives compared with what we saw south of the Maldives, which was a pristine air mass.

NARRATOR: In the polluted air, billions of manmade particles provided 10 times as many sites around which water droplets could form. So, polluted clouds contained many more water droplets, each one far smaller than it would be naturally. Many small droplets reflect more light than fewer big ones, so the polluted clouds were reflecting more light back into space, preventing the heat of the sun from getting through. This was the main cause of global dimming over the Indian Ocean.

VEERABHADRAN RAMANATHAN: Basically, the global dimming we saw in the north Indian Ocean was contributed, on the one hand, by the particles themselves shielding the ocean from the sunlight, on the other hand, making the clouds brighter. So this insidious soup, consisting of soot, sulfates, nitrates, ash and what have you, was having a double whammy on the global dimming.

NARRATOR: And when he looked at satellite images, Ramanathan found the same thing was happening all over the world: over India; over China, and extending into the Pacific; over Western Europe extending into Africa; over the British Isles. But it was when scientists started to investigate the effects of global dimming that they made the most disturbing discovery of all. Those more reflective clouds could alter the pattern of the world's rainfall, with tragic consequences.

MICHAEL BUERK, Newscaster: Dawn, and as the sun breaks through the piercing chill of night, on the plain outside Korum, it lights up a biblical famine, now, in the 20th Century. This place, say workers here, is the closest thing to Hell, on Earth.

NARRATOR: The 1984 Ethiopian famine shocked the world. It was partly caused by a decades-long drought right across sub-Saharan Africa, a region known as the Sahel. For year after year, the summer rains failed. There were many factors at work, but now there's evidence that among them was global dimming. The Sahel's lifeblood has always been a seasonal monsoon. For most of the year it is completely dry, but every summer, the heat of the sun warms the oceans north of the Equator. This draws the rain belt that forms over the Equator northward, bringing rain to the Sahel.

But for 20 years, in the 1970s and 80s, the tropical rain belt consistently failed to shift northward, and the African monsoon failed. For climate scientists like Leon Rotstayn, the disappearance of the rains had long been a puzzle. He could see that pollution from Europe and North America blew right across the Atlantic, but all the climate models suggested it should have little effect on the monsoon.

But then Rotstayn decided to take the Maldive findings about the impact of pollution on clouds into account.

DOCTOR LEON ROTSTAYN (Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, Atmospheric Research): What we found, in our model, was that when we allowed the pollution from Europe and North America to affect the properties of the clouds in the northern hemisphere, the clouds reflected more sunlight back to space, and this cooled the oceans of the northern hemisphere. And to our surprise, the result of this was that the tropical rain bands moved southward, tracking away from the more polluted northern hemisphere towards the southern hemisphere.

NARRATOR: In Rotstayn's model, polluted clouds kept the heat of the Sun from getting through, the heat that was needed to draw the tropical rains northward. So the life-giving rain belt never made it to the Sahel.

LEON ROTSTAYN: So, what our model is suggesting is that these droughts in the Sahel, in the 1970s and the 1980s, may have been caused by pollution from Europe and North America affecting the properties of the clouds and cooling the oceans of the northern hemisphere.

NARRATOR: Other models suggest that global warming was also a factor in the Sahel disaster. But Rotstayn's work shows the potential for air pollution to have far reaching effects on rainfall, perhaps even contributing to a terrible drought that blighted the lives of over 50,000,000 people. And this could be just of taste of what global dimming has in store.

VEERABHADRAN RAMANATHAN: The Sahel is just one example of the monsoon system. Let me take you to anther part of the world, Asia, where the same monsoon brings rainfall to 3.6 billion people, roughly half the world's population. My main concern is this air pollution and the global dimming will also have a detrimental impact on this Asian monsoon. We are not talking about few millions of people, we are talking about few billions of people.

NARRATOR: For Ramanathan the implications are clear.

VEERABHADRAN RAMANATHAN: There is no choice here; we have to cut down air pollution, if not eliminate it altogether.

NARRATOR: In Europe and North America, air pollution is already in decline. Scrubbers in power stations, catalytic converters in cars, and low sulfur fuels, though they do nothing to reduce greenhouse gases, have already led to a marked reduction in visible air pollution.

Coincidence or not, this should be good news for the Sahel, and in recent years the droughts have not been nearly so bad. But in developing countries, like China and India, air quality has been getting worse. The health effects are terrible. It's estimated that respiratory diseases kill a million Indians each year.

As a result, it's likely that India and China will follow the same path as the developed world and strive to bring air pollution under control. But there's a terrible catch. While global dimming is a major threat, it now appears it has been protecting us from an even greater threat: accelerated global warming.

It was David Travis who first caught a glimpse of what the world could be like without global dimming. It happened in those chaotic days following the tragedy of 9/11. For 15 years, Travis had been studying the vapor trails, or contrails, left behind by high-flying aircraft. As a jet passes through the air, the pollution particles it emits can trigger the condensation of water droplets. These manmade clouds seem small, but when they all spread out, they can blanket the sky.

DAVID TRAVIS: Here are some examples of what we call "outbreaks" of contrails. These are large clusters of contrails. And here's a particularly good one from Southern California. Here's the west coast of the United States. And you can see, here, this lacing network of contrails, covering at least 50 percent, if not 75 percent or more of the sky in that area. It doesn't take an expert to realize that if, if you look at the satellite picture and see this kind of contrail coverage that they've got to be having an effect on temperature at the surface.

NARRATOR: But the problem Travis faced was to establish exactly how big an effect the contrails were actually having. The only way to do that was to find a period of time when conditions were right for contrails to form, but there were no flights. And, of course, that never happened—until September, 2001. Then, for three days after the 11th, virtually all commercial aircraft were grounded, so Travis set about gathering temperatures from all over the U.S.A., and comparing them to records from the last 30 years.

DAVID TRAVIS: ...initially, data from over 5,000 weather stations across the 48 United States, the area that was most dominantly affected by the grounding.

NARRATOR: Travis was not looking just at temperature, which varies a lot from day to day. Instead he focused on something that normally changes quite slowly: the temperature range, the difference between the highest temperature during the day and the lowest at night. Had this changed at all during the three days of the grounding?

DAVID TRAVIS: As we began to look at the climate data and the evidence began to grow, I got more and more excited. The actual results were much larger than I expected.

So here we see, for the three-day period preceding September 11^th, a slightly negative value of temperature range with lots of contrails, as normal. Then we have this sudden spike right here of the three-day period. This reflects lack of clouds, lack of contrails, warmer days cooler nights, exactly what we expected, but even larger than we expected.

NARRATOR: During the three-day grounding, the nights had gotten colder and the days, warmer. Averaged over the whole continental U.S., the temperature difference between day and night had suddenly increased by over a degree Celsius or two degrees Fahrenheit. Travis had never seen anything like it before.

DAVID TRAVIS: This was the largest temperature swing of this magnitude in the last 30 years.

NARRATOR: Manmade clouds from aircraft are a minor contributor to global dimming. If removing them had such a dramatic effect, what would happen if air pollution were to be reduced all over the world?

DAVID TRAVIS: The 9/11 study showed that if you remove a contributor to global dimming, jet contrails, just for a three-day period, we see an immediate response of the surface temperature. Do the same thing globally, we might see a large-scale increase in global warming.

NARRATOR: This is the crux of the problem. While the greenhouse effect has been warming the planet, it now seems global dimming has been cooling it down.

This new understanding is something that climate modelers like Peter Cox have to contend with.

DOCTOR PETER COX (University of Exeter): Climate change, to the current date, appears to have been a tug of war, really, between two manmade pollutants. On the one side, we've got greenhouse gases that are pulling the system towards a warmer state, on the other hand, we've got particles from pollution that are cooling it down. And there's a kind of tug of war going on between the two, in which the middle of the rope, if you like, determines where the climate system is going in terms of warming or cooling.

NARRATOR: So which is stronger in the tug of war? Something powerful enough to push and pull on the global temperature has what scientists call a "climate forcing" effect.

PETER COX: Since we're pumping up greenhouse gases, we actually provide what's called a forcing on the climate system, a warming effect, which you can measure in terms of watts-per-meter-squared, much like you could measure watts from a light bulb. And that forces the climate to a warmer state.

NARRATOR: Because greenhouse gases trap heat, when we add to them we increase the heat energy trapped in the atmosphere. Today, the extra energy trapped by manmade greenhouse gases would be enough to run a 100-watt light bulb, placed every six meters over the entire surface of the globe, an extra 2.6 to three watts of energy for every square meter. It's this extra energy that's driving global temperatures ever higher.

But it's now clear to the world's climate scientists that this greenhouse warming is not the only factor at play. There's also the cooling from global dimming. The question is, "How big an effect is it having?"

In 2002, NASA launched the Aqua satellite. Onboard was a suite of instruments designed to measure the effect of dimming pollutants on the energy budget of the Earth. The observations from Aqua have enabled climate scientists to make a rough estimate of global dimming's total cooling effect on our planet.

JAMES HANSEN: Our estimate for the particle forcing is minus-one-and-a-half-watts- per-meter-squared. So that would imply a cooling of more than one degree Celsius.

NARRATOR: In other words, while the human greenhouse effect has produced 2.6 to three watts of extra energy for every square meter of the Earth, global dimming has subtracted about 1.5 watts, so, more than half the warming effect of our greenhouse emissions has been masked by the cooling effect of particle pollution.

Perhaps this is why, despite a large rise in the concentration of greenhouse gases, until recently, the temperature rise has been hard for most of us to notice.

JAMES HANSEN: In a way, it is unfortunate that the small particles were in the atmosphere because we would have realized much earlier that the...how strong the greenhouse effect is, and would have had more time to make the adjustments that are going to be necessary to slow down and eventually stop the growth of greenhouse gases.

NARRATOR: Despite the cooling from global dimming, scientists agree that over the past century or so, average temperatures have risen between .6 and .8 degrees Celsius, about one to one and a half degrees Fahrenheit.

The increase, small as it may seem, is very fast by the standards of Earth history, but now we face something much faster. Ironically, if we keep bringing particle pollutants down—with great benefits to health—but continue pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, Peter Cox believes we could be creating the worst possible combination for global temperatures.

PETER COX: We're going to be in a situation, unless we act, where the cooling pollutant is dropping off while the warming pollutant is going up. CO₂ will be going up and particles will be dropping off, and that means that we'll get an accelerated warming. We'll get a double whammy. We'll get reducing cooling and increased heating at the same time, and that's, that's a problem for us.

JAMES HANSEN: If the particle forcing is what we estimate, about minus-1.5 watts, that would imply that removing that forcing would cause a global warming of more than one degree Celsius. That's more than the warming that we've seen already, so this is a huge factor.

NARRATOR: If we continue as we are, combining reduced air pollution with an increase in greenhouse gases, temperatures could rise by a further two or even three degrees Celsius. That's as much as five degrees Fahrenheit by mid-century, much sooner than current models predict.

JAMES HANSEN: But, in my opinion, three degrees Celsius is not the level of dangerous interference; that's the level which guarantees disaster.

NARRATOR: James Hansen is particularly worried about what this rise in temperature would do to the Greenland ice sheet. Even at today's temperature, there are signs that substantial melting is already underway.

JAMES HANSEN: It has been overlooked how sensitive ice sheets are to global temperature. We can see that in the last year, the mass of Greenland decreased by 200 cubic kilometers of ice. That's a lot of ice.

I cannot imagine that the ice sheets could survive more than a few centuries with a three-degree Celsius warming. So that would mean a sea level rise of several meters per century, and it would just continue. And once that starts, it's out of our control.

NARRATOR: The last time the Earth was three degrees warmer was 3,000,000 years ago, when there was a natural increase in the level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. The geological evidence indicates that melting ice raised sea levels 25 meters higher than today.

JAMES HANSEN: In the United States, New York City...with a 25-meter sea level rise, most of the city would be under water; Washington, D.C....much of it would be under, but there are other regions that would be...suffer much more; Florida...almost the entire state would be under water; and, likewise, Louisiana. So we really can't afford to go down that path.

NARRATOR: And it would not just be coastlines that would be transformed if the Earth warms by three degrees. Climate models suggest the Amazon basin would become much drier and vulnerable to fire. What's left of the world's greatest tropical rainforest could simply burn away, and, in the process, release still more carbon dioxide, further accelerating global warming.

Most models do not yet take full account of the impact of global dimming and predict warming between two and five degrees Celsius, by the end of the century. But just as global dimming may have lulled the public and politicians into a false sense of security about climate change, has it misled climate scientists about the real power of the greenhouse effect to change global temperatures?

Peter Cox, a leading climate modeler, has come up with a controversial new analysis based on the observed warming of the last century. If scientists have underestimated the cooling effects of global dimming in the past, he believes, they may also be underestimating the heating effects of global warming in the future.

PETER COX: We've got two competing effects, really, that...we've got the greenhouse effect, which has tended to warm up the climate, but then we've got this other effect, that's much stronger than we thought, which is a cooling effect that comes from particles in the atmosphere. And they're competing with one another.

And we know the climate's moved to a warmer state by about six-tenths of a degree over the last hundred years. So the whole thing's moved this way. If it turns out that the cooling is stronger than we thought, then the warming, also, is a lot stronger than we thought. And that means the climate's more sensitive to carbon dioxide than we originally thought, and it means our models may be under-sensitive to carbon dioxide.

NARRATOR: While today's models foresee a maximum warming of five degrees Celsius by the end of the century, Cox thinks that it is not beyond the realms of possibility that by 2100, temperatures could rise by as much as 10 degrees Celsius, 18 degrees Fahrenheit.

Many plant species could not survive such rapid climate change. In his scenario, trees would die all over the planet; the world's best agricultural land would be struck by drought and soil erosion; famine would not be far behind. And in the far north, there would be a risk of releasing a vast natural store of greenhouse gas bigger than all the oil and coal reserves of the planet.

PETER COX: We will be in danger of destabilizing these things called "methane hydrates," which store a lot of methane at the bottom of the ocean, in a kind of frozen form—ten thousand billion tons of this stuff—and they're known to be destabilized by warming.

NARRATOR: If this were to happen, some or all of the ten thousand billion tons of methane, a greenhouse gas eight times stronger than carbon dioxide, would be released into the atmosphere. When this last happened 50,000,000 years ago, when the Earth was already warmer than it is today, the average temperature rocketed by 13 degrees Fahrenheit, making the Earth 25 degrees hotter than today, and life struggled to survive.

Some scientists consider this model extreme, but all climate models contain important unknowns and ranges of possibility. Our new understanding of global dimming has complicated the task of forecasting the future but has also brought the probability of dangerous climate change much closer.

Today, there's a strong scientific consensus that without urgent action to reduce our burning of coal, oil and gas, we risk creating a world very different from the one which has been so hospitable to humanity.

JAMES HANSEN: I think we have less than a decade to avoid passing what I call "point of no return." I think we have to keep global warming less than one degree Celsius, or we're going to get very bad effects. And the problem is that to achieve...to keep the warming less than one degree Celsius, we have to level off the emissions and get them to decline before the middle of the century, substantially.

Right now, the course that we're on—plus 2 percent per year in greenhouse gas emissions—well, if you continue that, even for 15 years, it's a 35 percent increase. And then there's no way that you could possibly meet this alternative scenario with warming less than one degree Celsius.

PETER COX: One of the real driving forces is that you leave an environment that is comfortable for your children. And if we carry on going the way we're going, we're not going to do that. We're going to leave an environment that's much worse than the environment we lived in, and it will be down to what we did when we were using that environment, and that would be, tragic, really, if that happened.

What clean technologies are on the horizon or already in use to reduce our impact on the world's climate? Learn more on NOVA's Dimming the Sun Web site. Find it on PBS.org.

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The Covert Campaign That Rigged U.S. Tax System to Benefit The Parasite Ruling Class

- By David Cay Johnston

The Covert Campaign That Rigged U.S. Tax System to Benefit The Parasite Ruling Class, thus Cheat Everybody Else (Portfolio, 2003)

This summary is made by Chuck Collins, United for Fair Economy.

“The Republicans’ mantra to their corporate buddies is ‘Friends don’t let friends pay taxes.’”

–Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-TX)

“Instead of drilling for oil and gas, Enron was drilling the tax code, looking for ways to find more and more tax shelters.”

–Sen. John B. Breaux (D-LA)

“Attorneys and accountants should be pillars of our system of taxation, not the architects of its circumvention.”

–Mark W. Everson, Commissioner of the IRS, 2003

This is the long-awaited book by David Cay Johnston (DCJ), who won the Pulitzer Prize in 2001 for his beat reporting on tax issues. DCJ wrote a number of important stories about the estate tax – and broke the story of Responsible Wealth’s “Call to Preserve the Estate Tax.” One comment relevant to our work: “And the critics who have decried the growing concentration of wealth and power at the top have been wrong – because they have seriously understated the transformation now taking place.” (p. 19)

For someone knowledgeable about the inequities of our federal tax system, the picture Johnston paints would shock even a cynical mind. He chronicles a tax system on the brink of a fundamental legitimacy crisis, one that has been deliberately engineered and works in the interest of the very wealthy. In sum:

The tax system is being used by the rich, through their allies in Congress, to shift risks off of themselves and onto everyone else. And perhaps worst of all, our tax system now forces most Americans to subsidize the lifestyles of the very rich, who enjoy the benefits of our democracy without paying their fair share of its price. (p. 19)

Johnston eloquently argues that this represents a tax SHIFT – with the slack picked up by the poor, the middle class and even the lower rungs of the upper classes. Among those “hurt” by changes in the tax system are those whose incomes rise as high at $500,000 a year – for even this wealthy group has gotten the shaft in favor of the super-super rich.

This book is a plea for citizen vigilance to stop the auction of our nation’s laws and tax rules to the bipartisan “party of money.”

The book begins with a profile of Jonathan Blattmachr, a tax attorney for the old wealth firm Milbank & Tweed, and architect of tax avoidance strategies for the $10 million and up set. “As all economists are taught, there is no free lunch. Blattmachr’s clients just leave part of their bill on your table.” (p. 11) DCJ argues there are two tax systems:

Congress lets business owners, investors and landlords play by one set of rules, which are filled with opportunities to hide income, fabricate deductions and reduce taxes. Congress requires wage earners to operate under another, much harsher set of rules in which every dollar of income from a job, a savings account or a stock dividend is reported to the government, and taxes are withheld from each paycheck to make sure wage earners pay in full. (p. 10)

“…When it comes to taxes, it often pays to cheat so long your income is not from wages.” (p. 14).

Johnston observes that we have essentially a flat income tax system. The rich pay a large share of federal income taxes. The richest 1 percent, those with $330,000 or more in 2000, earned 21 percent of all reported income and paid more than 37 percent of individual federal income taxes (p. 11). But factor in all other federal taxes – beer, gasoline, Social Security – the top 1 percent’s share drops to 25 percent.

If you tally up the economic benefits to the top 1 percent that do not show up in income statistics – for reasons of written law and because of tax tricks fashioned by lawyers like Blattmachr – then the richest 1 percent are taxed more lightly than the middle class. The same data show that the poor are taxed almost as heavily as the rich are – and even more heavily than the superrich. (p. 11)

DCJ shows how the tax burden on the top 400 has gone down. During the Clinton years, the share of income going to the top 400 taxpayers doubled from 0.5 percent to 1.1 percent. But the top 400’s portion of income going to federal income taxes fell by 18 percent, while rising for everyone else by 18 percent! (p. 308)

Trends that Johnston writes about:

Corporate executive compensation games – such as deferred compensation – mean that executives don’t have to pay income tax. Congress allows them to put it off for decades. Chapter 4 “Big Payday” tells the story of Coca Cola’s Roberto Goizueta’s $1 billion dollar payday, thanks to taxpayers.

Corporate perks – such as private jets – are an obvious way that government allows the rich to enable the rest of us to subsidize lavish tastes and luxuries. Ms. Welch’s divorce suit against husband Jack Welch gave us an extraordinary window into the world of executive perks. DCJ tells the legislative history of how owning a private jet can be cheaper, after tax deductions, than flying coach – and how Senators sneaked the provision into the law despite vigorous objections of Sen. Howard Metzenbaum (Chapter 5, “Plane Perks).

Alternative Minimum Tax – Chapter 7 on the “Stealth Tax” talks about how the Alternative Minimum Tax, created to require the rich to pay some taxes, is creeping up the income ladder and capturing many middle-income households that won’t get their advertised Bush tax cut. The Bush administration is not doing anything to change this, fomenting a political backlash that will probably enable them to get rid of the entire AMT, not reform it. “By 2010 about 85 percent of all taxpayers with two or more children will be forced off the regular income tax and onto the alternative minimum tax.” (p. 113) The cost of repealing the AMT in 2003 is $950 billion, assuming that all the 2001 tax cuts are made permanent.

Social Security as Tax Shift – In Chapter 8, DCJ argues that the decision to raise Social Security withholding on workers – and give away tax breaks to the rich – is one of the cruelest shifts.

In the two decades beginning in 1983 the government has spent almost $5.4 trillion more than it took in from income, estate, gift and excise taxes. The reason that government debt grew by a smaller though still gigantic figure, $3.6 trillion, was because those excess Social Security taxes that were used to finance income tax cuts for the rich.” (p. 123)

This was a political choice that hurt the three-fourth of taxpayers who pay more in Social Security withholding than they pay in income taxes. “Those excess Social Security taxes rob many of their capacity to save, while tax cuts for the rich expand that group’s capacity to save.” (p. 306)

Overseas Tax Avoidance – Corporations have not just slashed their tax bills by reincorporating in other countries, but also through transactions that shift some of their tax liabilities overseas – and reducing what they pay at home. “You pay for this through higher taxes, reduced services or your rising share of our growing national debt.” (p. 12)

The goal is to “take expenses in the United States and take profits in countries that impose little or no tax.” One effective way to do this is to shift intellectual property – patents, logos, etc. to other countries and pay use rights to the foreign subsidiaries.

Weakening Enforcement and Shifting Resources to Working Poor – Congress has weakened IRS enforcement, particularly of the very rich. The IRS enforcement arms have been handcuffed and discouraged from pursuing tax cheats.

At the same time, they’ve increased oversight of low-income people who file for the Earned Income Credit (a Clinton administration compromise to keep the program from being cut). Chapter 9 –“Preying on the Working Poor” – documents this skewed focus.

“The IRS audited 397,000 of the working poor who applied for the credit in 2001, eight times as many audits as it conducted of people making $100,000 or more.” That works out to one of every 47 returns seeking the credit, compared to one in 366 taxpayers who did not apply for it.” (p. 130)

Meanwhile, in 2002, the IRS assessed just 22 negligence penalties against 2.5 million corporations, a decline of more than 99 percent from 1993 when nearly 2,400 penalties were imposed. (p. 139) In Chapter 10, “Handcuffing the Tax Police,” DCJ shows how conservatives in Congress put enormous scrutiny on the IRS – dramatized by Sen. Roth’s oversight hearings to defang IRS enforcers. “They were part of a strategy by a segment of Washington Republicans to win votes by going after the IRS and the tax system.” (p. 153). Chapter 11, “Mr. Rossitti’s Customers,” describes how the IRS commissioner overhauled the IRS to make it “customer oriented” and totally weakened its ability to crack down on tax cheats. Audits on the wealthy plummeted, the reason “was entirely the change in the way IRS resources were used. But the effect was also sure to reduce complaints by those in the political donor class about IRS agents harassing them.” (p. 165).

Corporate partnerships have become one of the great tax avoidance devices. One involved joint ownership with a nonprofit corporation, often a life insurance entity that allowed for massive shelters. “Chapter 12,” For Want of a Keystroke” and Chapter 14, “Mr. Kellogg’s Favorite Loophole” talks about these scams. One aggressive IRS official, who really understood the role of partnerships in tax avoidance, suggested a few pieces of information to collect on IRS tracking that would help clue them into aggressive avoidance. But the resources were not there, even though these suggestions would bring in billions of lost revenue.

Massive tax avoidance has been advocated by some crackpots who claim the laws have no legitimacy. These rebels get aid and comfort from DC lobbying groups like Center for Freedom and Prosperity, a group the New Republic calls a “lobby for tax cheats.” DCJ exposed a lot of these visible scammers, who sold their services to people trying to avoid taxes—and a few have gone on trial as a result.

But the real culprits are the silent tax avoiders, who shift assets, ownership and income to overseas tax shelters, like the Cayman Islands. One investigator estimated the US loses $70 billion a year to offshore tax fraud. IRS summoned credit card companies to identify overseas accounts with credit cards…230,000 were turned over. Few were pursued.

Tax Shelter Industry – Chapter 16 “Profiting off Taxes” describes all the big accounting firms who sell tax avoidance. One law professor defines a tax shelter as “an investment that is worth more after-tax than before tax.” (p. 220) Poterba at MIT estimated that such shelters cost $54 billion in 1998 – a $500 tax shift onto each US family (p. 227). Companies that don’t pursue tax shelters are at a competitive disadvantage.

Tax shelters also encourage more tax shelters. The chief executives and chief financial officers of companies pay close attention to the portion of their profits paid in taxes compared to competitors. There are even services that rate the relative tax efficiency of companies, giving bad marks to those that pay more than the average, and praising those that come in below the average. (p. 227)

These companies allow “Profits to Trump Patriotism” (Chapter 17). In one webcast of an overseas tax shelter pitch, an Ernst and Young lawyer was asked about the downside of the shelter. She noted that many companies are dealing with the issue of “patriotism” in the weeks after 9/11 as fires still burned on the World Trade Center site. She went on:

"Is this the right time to be migrating a corporation’s headquarters to an offshore location? That said, we are working through a lot of companies right now that it is – that the improvement on earnings is powerful enough that maybe the patriotism issue needs to take a back seat." (p. 231)

Not only are individuals like Kenneth Dart renouncing their citizenship to avoid taxes, but some very public companies like Stanley Works tools are escaping US obligations, even though they enjoy every other element.

This arrangement was all benefit and no cost to companies that brought the deal. The United States military would still be obligated to protect the company’s physical assets in the United States. American courts would still enforce contracts on which commerce depends. Companies making the move would continue to have complete access to the rich marketplace of the United States. And all of the other benefits of doing business in the United States – a well-educated workforce, research facilities, the FBI – would be available gratis, the costs shifted onto everyone else, who would have to make up the lost revenue. (p. 230)

Congressional leaders went after some of the companies, trying to bar them from competitively bid contracts – because requiring tax-paying companies to competing against tax avoiders is unfair competition. 110 Republicans broke ranks to support the law. “But a funny thing happened after the election, in which Republicans won control of both the House and Senate. Congress voted to bar contracts to Bermuda mailbox companies -- with a loophole that allowed their American subsidiaries to get contracts.” (p. 250).

Eliminating Liability for Oversight Professions – States have weakened laws that give corporate professions of law and accounting the incentive to self-police. By allowing “limited liability” partnerships and corporations, these actions ushered in the widespread cheating and accounting games that led to Enron and World-Com type scandals. Without this, members of oversight firms don’t watchdog each other because there is no consequence. At worst, they just dissolve the partnership.

Prior to the creation of these LLP structures, “all partners had to worry, and watch, to make sure that one bad apple did not destroy everyone else in the firm by such acts as helping a client company cook the books.” (p. 258)

The problem is that the LLP structure destroys the self-policing mechanism that helps to keep legal and accounting firms from using their enormous power to the detriment of others, especially the third parties like investors who rely on the integrity of audited financial statements to make decisions on buying and selling stocks. (p. 258)

DCJ believes there is no amount of government regulation that can replace this internal oversight, that “the blunt instrument of a regulatory agency can never be fine enough to police the professions.”

Life Insurance Scams – A number of the avoidance scams come with the assistance of life insurance. Since income payments from life insurance policies are NOT taxed, a growing number of wealthy people move vast amounts of wealth down the line, tax free, through insurance policies. It’s become a large share of the insurance sector’s business. Gimmicks with names like “split dollar family life insurance” and “swap funds” allow avoidance of estate and gift taxes.

In Congressional hearings, Rep. Richard Neal asked the Bush administration why they haven’t cracked down on these instruments, one administration official responded that “we are against taxes on capital gains in general and so we will not take any action against the funds.” (p. 267) Joint Committee on Taxation told Neal that closing the exchange funds wouldn’t raise any revenue because “the class of investors engaging in swap funds” would find other ways to avoid the tax. (p. 267)

Investment firms like Ernst and Young and KPMG charge hefty fees to help investors avoid taxes, sometimes the cost of 25% of a loophole. Only the rich can buy these shelters. They are shown to them in private and they are required to sign non-disclosure agreements. In addition, these clients pay as much as $1 million for opinion letters from law & accounting firms indicating that these are acceptable shelters. This protects them from personal liability – because they were acting on the advice of professional advice.

Two Retirement Systems – One for the Rich. Law changes governing retirement accounts shifted more risk off of corporations and well-paid top managers and onto workers and most Americans. Wealthy executives can move their retirement investments around (in addition to their ample paychecks), while their workers are locked into undiversified retirement programs. (Chapter 20, “Only the Rich Deserve a Comfortable Retirement.”)

How did this happen?

The push for tax shelters accelerated with the great wealth inequality explosion of the last two decades. The excessive pay had an important side effect: “creating a demand for corporate tax shelters, which helped shift the overall tax burden off capital and onto labor.” (p. 40)

Where is the vigilance? Not in Congress, where legislators are paid off to insert little provisions into the tax code benefiting the rich and big corporations. “When the great majority of people are not pursuing their own interests, the power of the political donor class grows.” (p. 43)

DCJ describes an interview with Rep. Amo Houghton, chair of House IRS Oversight committee and the wealthiest man in Congress. Houghton is clueless about IRS weaknesses and widespread tax cheating. He announced a hearing about cheating, but then backed down. The Bush administration also tried to silence outgoing Charles Rossotti when he wanted to talk about the IRS’s needs to strengthen enforcement.

The media has also not been watching. Most reporting about tax issues is the “consumer beat” section of newspapers and doesn’t probe into the fine print. “Many journalists rely for expert quotes on a dozen well-financed nonprofits that existing in Washington to promote policies that primarily benefit their rich donors.” (p. 13)

Reform Ideas and Conclusions

Reforms are needed to deal with bi-partisan erosion of the tax system’s fairness.

Recognize Our Tax System and Enforcement is Antiquated. Too much focus on watching the wage earners – and not enough on the new economy mechanisms for wealth, reflecting our antiquated wage economy tax system. “Our tax system was designed in a bygone era. It worked reasonably well for a national, industrial, wage-based economy. Today, however, we are moving to a global, services, asset economy in which capital flows freely across borders while workers cannot.” (p. 305)

Hire more skilled workers. The new avoidance mechanisms need skilled workers – that don’t turn around and go work for the tax cheaters after 5 years at the IRS. There is a need for over 30,000 workers, which is an indicator of the “neglect that began many administrations ago, a festering sore that both parties have let worsen to the detriment of honest taxpayers. In 1988, IRS had 16,600 auditors, by 2002, down to 11,500, a 30 percent decline. But the number of individual income tax returns has doubled – so resources have been effectively cut in half between 1988 and 2002. (p. 297)

Upgrade Technology. The IRS needs to invest in better technology to track cheaters – and maintain integrity of the system.

Measure the tax gap. Last done in 1988, the tax gap measurement is the “difference between the taxes that would be paid if everyone obeyed the law and what is actually collected.” Estimates in 2003 are $200 billion to 300 billion, given the changes in the economic, growth in executive compensation, and aggressive tax avoidance.

Problems with National Sales Tax proposal
--Regressive
--Would need to be 25 % to raise revenue equal to income tax
--Promotes savings, but could lead to Japan like slumps in key sectors

Flat Tax Problems
--Really a consumption tax
--Forbes flat tax only on wages; creates other unintended consequences and distortions
--Consumption taxes could have progressive rates structure

The current drift of our tax system is towards essentially a Forbes style flat tax that taxes wages and not wealth, labor and not capital.

DCJ has one major kooky idea which suggests that this shift of taxes off wealth and onto wages will lead to demands for greater social goods – as people want more for their tax dollars. With the U.S. culture of individualism, I’m not sure that’s where we would go. Those European systems evolved out of a set of values that recognized social wealth and community interests, which in turn has built political support for progressive tax systems. (p. 311)

Eliminate deferred income except with limited contributions to 401(k) retirement programs.

Simplification without losing progressivity. We need to understand that much of the complexity comes from tax avoidance.

Complexity also benefits the rich, the well advised and the well connected. Much of the complexity is because of Congressional favors for the political donor class, whose access to power benefits them at the expense of those who cannot afford to buy a steady stream of campaign contributions to insure that their senator or representative tax their calls. These favors add to the tangle of fine details that brilliant minds like Jonathan Blattmachr’s weave into legal threads that can be twisted into loopholes for their rich clients.

Congress, in a fairer America, would stop the routine practice of inserting favors into tax bills without public hearing and without accountability. Taxpayers would come out far ahead if every tax bill had to be the subject of open debate with the names of sponsors attached to each change. Transparency is good for taxpayers overall, bad for the favored few. (p. 312-313)

One set of Accounting Books. Congress should not require corporations to keep two sets of books – one for shareholders showing one set of profits – and another for the IRS showing (lower) profits.

Whatever a corporation tells its shareholders is its profit should be the figure on which it is taxed; it should be a clear disclosure. When corporations complain of all the complexity in the tax code and pose for pictures with tax returns as tall as the company’s chief tax executive, what they do not say is that those piles of paper save them money. (p. 313)

Eliminate the Limited Liability Partnership (LLP) form for lawyers and accountants, forcing them to hold themselves accountable. “Attorneys and accountants should be pillars of our system of taxation, not the architects of its circumvention.”
-- Mark W. Everson, Commissioner of the IRS, 2003

Public disclosure – make it a public record whether individuals have filed their tax returns and paid the tax that they said they owed. (p. 316)

DCJ concludes that this is a democracy issue, which we need to look at ourselves as a society and our attitudes about taxation. Taxation helps us fulfill the premise of our Constitution. “Reform begins with you.”

While reform has yet to be taken seriously in Washington, that can change. Complex, remote and foreboding as our tax system is often made to seem, it is within our power to get a system that is fair and serves the common good. With some effort we can have fundamental reform. We can make our tax system work for us. But we have to demand that reform and we have to focus on the principles that would make a tax system fair, efficient and effective. (p. 304)

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America - From Freedom To Fascism - By Aaron Russo

Published: May 10, 2011 - By Aaron Russo

America: Freedom to Fascism is a 2006 film by filmmaker and activist Aaron Russo, covering a variety of subjects, including: the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), the income tax, Federal Reserve System, national ID cards (REAL ID Act), human-implanted RFID tags, Diebold electronic voting machines (aka Dominion), globalization, Big Brother, taser weapons abuse, and the use of terrorism by the government as a means to diminish the citizens' rights. The film has been criticized for its promotion of conspiracy theories, its copious factual errors, and its repeated misrepresentations of the individuals and views it purports to criticize.

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