(NaturalNews) One of the primary drivers behind President Obama’s quest for Uncle Sam to take over one-seventh of the U.S. economy by engulfing the healthcare industry was that such a huge usurpation of the private sector would at least lead to lower insurance premiums for Americans.

Learn more:

http://www.naturalnews.com/038627_Obamacare_health_insurance_rates_rising.html

An interview with Aldous Huxley (Brave New World) discussing the threats to our freedoms in America. I find it interesting that Mike Wallace is smoking a cigarette in the studio in the opening credits. Lots to absorb here and digest.

http://www.peakprosperity.com/forum/80470/rare-aldous-huxley-interview-1958

Published on Jan 8, 2013

In this episode, Max Keiser and Stacy Herbert discuss the butch welfare Queens in Virginia, Maryland and DC who rely on the ‘untouchable’ Pentagon budget. They also discuss the US deploying both its FMDs — “financial extortion”, “monetisation” and “devaluation” — to finance its debt and deficit requirements and its troops to 35 African nations. In the second half of the show, Max Keiser talks to Dan Collins of TheChinaMoneyReport.com about the petro-yuan, China’s gold and the problem with the fact that nobody in Africa wants to buy America’s opium – credit default swaps.

via Keiser Report: Deadly Deflation (E390) – YouTube.

Venezuelan President Chavez once asked me why the US elite wanted to kill him.  My dear Hugo:  It’s the oil. And it’s the Koch Brothers – and it’s the ketchup.

[As a purgative for the crappola fed to Americans about Chavez, my foundation, The Palast Investigative Fund, is offering the film, The Assassination of Hugo Chavez, as a FREE download. Based on my several meetings with Chavez, his kidnappers and his would-be assassins, filmed for BBC Television.  DVDs also available.]

Reverend Pat Robertson said,

“Hugo Chavez thinks we’re trying to assassinate him.  I think that we really ought to go ahead and do it.”

It was 2005 and Robertson was channeling the frustration of George Bush’s State Department. Despite Bush’s providing intelligence, funds and even a note of congratulations to the crew who kidnapped Chavez (we’ll get there), Hugo remained in office, reelected and wildly popular.

But why the Bush regime’s hate, hate, HATE of the President of Venezuela?

Reverend Pat wasn’t coy about the answer:  It’s the oil. 

“This is a dangerous enemy to our South controlling a huge pool of oil.”

A really BIG pool of oil.  Indeed, according to Guy Caruso, former chief of oil intelligence for the CIA, Venezuela hold a recoverable reserve of 1.36 trillion barrels, that is, a whole lot more than Saudi Arabia.

If we didn’t kill Chavez, we’d have to do an “Iraq” on his nation. So the Reverend suggests,

“We don’t need another $200 billion war….It’s a whole lot easier to have some of the covert operatives do the job and then get it over with.”

Chavez himself told me he was stunned by Bush’s attacks:  Chavez had been quite chummy with Bush Senior and with Bill Clinton.

So what made Chavez suddenly “a dangerous enemy”? Here’s the answer you won’t find in The New York Times:

Just after Bush’s inauguration in 2001, Chavez’ congress voted in a new “Law of Hydrocarbons.”  Henceforth, Exxon, British Petroleum, Shell Oil and Chevron would get to keep 70% of the sales revenues from the crude they sucked out of Venezuela.  Not bad, considering the price of oil was rising toward $100 a barrel.

But to the oil companies, which had bitch-slapped Venezeula’s prior government into giving them 84% of the sales price, a cut to 70% was “no bueno.”  Worse, Venezuela had been charging a joke of a royalty – just one percent – on “heavy” crude from the Orinoco Basin. Chavez told Exxon and friends they’d now have to pay 16.6%.

Clearly, Chavez had to be taught a lesson about the etiquette of dealings with Big Oil.

On April 11, 2002, President Chavez was kidnapped at gunpoint and flown to an island prison in the Caribbean Sea.  On April 12, Pedro Carmona, a business partner of the US oil companies and president of the nation’s Chamber of Commerce, declared himself President of Venezuela – giving a whole new meaning to the term, “corporate takeover.”

U.S. Ambassador Charles Shapiro immediately rushed down from his hilltop embassy to have his picture taken grinning with the self-proclaimed “President” and the leaders of the coup d’état.

Bush’s White House spokesman admitted that Chavez was, “democratically elected,” but, he added, “Legitimacy is something that is conferred not by just the majority of voters.”  I see.

With an armed and angry citizenry marching on the Presidential Palace in Caracas ready to string up the coup plotters, Carmona, the Pretend President from Exxon returned his captive Chavez back to his desk within 48 hours.  (How?  Get The Assassination of Hugo Chavez, the film, expanding on my reports for BBC Television.  You can download it for free for the next few days.)

Chavez had provoked the coup not just by clawing back some of the bloated royalties of the oil companies. It’s what he did with that oil money that drove Venezuela’s One Percent to violence.

In Caracas, I ran into the reporter for a TV station whose owner is generally credited with plotting the coup against the president.  While doing a publicity photo shoot, leaning back against a tree, showing her wide-open legs nearly up to where they met, the reporter pointed down the hill to the “ranchos,” the slums above Caracas, where shacks, once made of cardboard and tin, where quickly transforming into homes of cinder blocks and cement.

“He [Chavez] gives them bread and bricks, so they vote for him, of course.”  She was disgusted by “them,” the 80% of Venezuelans who are negro e indio (Black and Indian)—and poor.  Chavez, himself negro e indio, had, for the first time in Venezuela’s history, shifted the oil wealth from the privileged class that called themselves “Spanish,” to the dark-skinned masses.

While trolling around the poor housing blocks of Caracas, I ran into a local, Arturo Quiran, a merchant seaman and no big fan of Chavez.  But over a beer at his kitchen table, he told me,

“Fifteen years ago under [then-President] Carlos Andrés Pérez, there was a lot of oil money in Venezuela. The ‘oil boom’ we called it. Here in Venezuela there was a lot of money, but we didn’t see it.”

But then came Hugo Chavez, and now the poor in his neighborhood, he said, “get medical attention, free operations, x-rays, medicines; education also. People who never knew how to write now know how to sign their own papers.”

Chavez’ Robin Hood thing, shifting oil money from the rich to the poor, would have been grudgingly tolerated by the US.  But Chavez, who told me, “We are no longer an oil colony,” went further…too much further, in the eyes of the American corporate elite.

Venezuela had landless citizens by the millions – and unused land by the millions of acres tied up, untilled, on which a tiny elite of plantation owners squatted.  Chavez’ congress passed in a law in 2001 requiring untilled land to be sold to the landless.  It was a program long promised by Venezuela’s politicians at the urging of John F. Kennedy as part of his “Alliance for Progress.”

Plantation owner Heinz Corporation didn’t like that one bit.  In retaliation, Heinz closed its ketchup plant in the state of Maturin and fired all the workers.  Chavez seized Heinz’ plant and put the workers back on the job.  Chavez didn’t realize that he’d just squeezed the tomatoes of America’s powerful Heinz family and Mrs. Heinz’ husband, Senator John Kerry (now, Obama’s nominee for U.S. Secretary of State).

Or, knowing Chavez as I do, he didn’t give a damn.

Chavez could survive the ketchup coup, the Exxon “presidency,” even his taking back a piece of the windfall of oil company profits, but he dangerously tried the patience of America’s least forgiving billionaires:  The Koch Brothers.

How?  Well, that’s another story for another day. [Watch this space. Or read about it in the book, Billionaires & Ballot Bandits. Go to BallotBandits.org).

Elected presidents who annoy Big Oil have ended up in exile—or coffins:  Mossadegh of Iran after he nationalized BP’s fields (1953), Elchibey, President of Azerbaijan, after he refused demands of BP for his Caspian fields (1993), President Alfredo Palacio of Ecuador after he terminated Occidental’s drilling concession (2005).

“It’s a chess game, Mr. Palast,” Chavez told me.  He was showing me a very long, and very sharp sword once owned by Simon Bolivar, the Great Liberator.  “And I am,” Chavez said, “a very good chess player.”

In the film The Seventh Seal, a medieval knight bets his life on a game of chess with the Grim Reaper.  Death cheats, of course, and takes the knight.  No mortal can indefinitely outplay Death who, this week, Chavez must know, will checkmate the new Bolivar of Venezuela.

But in one last move, the Bolivarian grandmaster plays a brilliant endgame, naming Vice-President Nicolas Maduro, as good and decent a man as they come, as heir to the fight for those in the “ranchos.”  The One Percent of Venezuela, planning on Chavez’s death to return them the power and riches they couldn’t win in an election, are livid with the choice of Maduro.

Chavez sent Maduro to meet me in my downtown New York office back in 2004.  In our run-down detective digs on Second Avenue, Maduro and I traded information on assassination plots and oil policy.

Even then, Chavez was carefully preparing for the day when Venezuela’s negros e indios would lose their king—but still stay in the game.
Class war on a chessboard.  Even in death, I wouldn’t bet against Hugo Chavez.

Greg Palast | Investigative Reporter.

To hear the bankers tell it, the government bailout of four years ago was the best thing to hit the American economy since the invention of the assembly line. Wrong, writes Matt Taibbi: it was one of the biggest and most elaborate falsehoods ever sold to the American people. 

Secrets and Lies of the Bailout | Politics News | Rolling Stone.

Nearly three million viewers have seen Dr. Robert Lustig’s YouTube video “Sugar: The Bitter Truth.” In a new book, he documents the science and politics behind the obesity pandemic and calls for an overhaul of the global food system.

via Dr. Robert Lustig: “Fat Chance: Beating The Odds Against Sugar, Processed Food, Obesity, and Disease” | The Diane Rehm Show from WAMU and NPR.

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2013/01/by-any-measure-the-u-s-is-the-worlds-largest-sponsor-of-terror.html

Published on Jan 6, 2013

It is almost as though your mind will not give up

unless you give the mind up, in a sense.

When I say ‘give it up’, I mean to give up

who are you are in your mind —

you have to give up.

Otherwise, you will speak different things

but you will not change inside,you will not have melted

into that sweetness that comes

when you are really aware of the Truth.

A person cannot change a person;

only Grace and God can change you,

but you have to be humble.

10 October 2012, Monte Sahaja, Pougal

Music: “Heaven” by Buhani

via Don’t Give Any Compassion to the Egoic Mind – YouTube.

http://kunstler.com/blog/2012/12/forecast-2013-contraction-contagion-and-contradiction.html

By James Howard Kunstler
on December 31, 2012 8:25 AM

The people who like to think they are managing the world’s affairs seem fiercely determined to ignore the world’s true condition — namely, the permanent contraction of industrial economies. They just can’t grok it. Two hundred years of cheap fossil fuel programmed mankind to expect limitless goodies forever on an upward-swinging arc of techno miracles. Now that the cheap fossil fuels have plateaued, with decline clearly in view, the hope remains that all the rackets of modernity can keep going on techno miracles alone.