There can be no doubt about it… Planet Earth is in the middle of a Slave Revolt!
We are living through times that will be written about thousands of years from now. We are witnessing the overthrow of an ancient control system involving murder, lies, and bribery. The inbred family group controlling this system of Babylonian debt slavery is called the Khazarian Mafia… or more simply the Cabal. The epicenter of this revolt is the United States.
Although there are huge clouds of disinformation being spewed out by all sides, let’s try to summarize what’s going on. The trigger event was the bankruptcy of the Cabal owned UNITED STATES OF AMERICA CORPORATION on February 16th, 2020, a date that will live on in history. The Chinese, in essence, told the Cabal they would no longer accept their debt certificates. Instead, they said that from now on payment is required in gold or other things that really exist.
The Cabal, anticipating this event, tried to bow the Chinese into submission with a failed biological weapons attack and a more successful electromagnetic attack using 5G and satellites. This attack probably caused millions of casualties in Wuhan, China, according to CIA sources who secretly visited Wuhan after the attack.
Meanwhile, the bankruptcy of the U.S. Corporation triggered an undeclared civil war in the United States that is still raging on. Here is how British MI6 intelligence views the situation.
“It appears to be the restoration of the First Federal Republic over the second secret (Masonic) illegal constitution. The collaterals suggest the CEO of the Colony Corporation of the District of Columbia has been sworn into the correct constitution. Civil war is on the horizon there.”
That is why U.S. President Donald Trump no longer uses the Presidential seal.
Pentagon sources say: “Martial law is complete as all 50 states are under disaster declarations, joint special operations command (JSOC) has received marching orders, and Trump declares himself a wartime president.” That’s why one million reserve troops have been mobilized.
“It appears the top dogs of Hollywood, Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and others, may have been detained or kept under house arrest,” the sources say.
At the same time several U.S. states, notably California, have declared themselves independent from the regime in Washington DC. California Governor Gavin Newsom said that “as a nation-state” California would acquire the hospital supplies that the federal government has failed to provide and might even “export some of those supplies to states in need.”
Two separate personal contacts living in California report they have seen tanks on the streets there. There are also multiple non-natural earthquakes being detected around the Area 51 base in Nevada and the military underground bases in California.
Pentagon sources say “Cabal tunnels stretch from Mexico to Canada, so war on…
Mexican Cartels was declared to stop the flow of drugs, arms, humans, children, terrorists, and money.”
There is also a crackdown taking place in Israel the Pentagon sources say, noting “Israel under Passover lockdown may make it easy to round up war criminals and terrorists.”
The culling in Israel appears to have started with the “coronavirus death” of former Israeli Chief Rabbi Eliyahu Bakshi-Doron who has called for the murder of Jews who marry non-Jews.
This war is by no means over and the elite are fighting back hard. This is seen, for example, in the call to vaccinate everyone with what is likely to be a cocktail of toxic substances including microchips, CIA sources say.
The Cabal killed Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s daughter and granddaughter in revenge for warning about the dangers of their vaccines, MI6 sources say. Kennedy says:
Also, as a sign of who he really works for, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Thursday that “Canadians won’t be able to return to life as they knew it before the novel coronavirus pandemic until a vaccine is available.” Justin, the son of Fidel Castro, almost certainly murdered his brother, the real son of Pierre Trudeau, in order to become Prime Minister.
The elite are also using the fake pandemic and quarantine in order to force the population into surrendering their human rights. As a result, “instead of workers now demanding a restoration of wages, hours, and workplace rights, they are clamoring for any chance to work at all, under any conditions handed down. Elites can ‘afford’ to do this because they’ve been given trillions of dollars to do so,” notes writer Joaquin Flores.
The Stanford Advocate notes freedoms are being drastically curtailed:
“While leaders around the world fight the spread of the coronavirus, they’re amassing sweeping new powers. As legislatures limit or suspend activities in the name of social distancing, many of the norms that define democracy – elections, deliberation and debate, checks and balances – have been put on indefinite hold… France and Bolivia have postponed elections. Peru handed its president broad new legislative authority. Israel sharply ramped up the reach of its surveillance state.”
More and more people are waking up to the fact that the coronavirus being used to curtail freedoms around the world – is fake. Dr. Scott Jensen, a Republican State Senator from Minnesota, for example, says doctors have been ordered by the U.S. government to label all deaths as coming from the “coronavirus.”
“I work in healthcare. When patients in two hospitals I work at die, if they have ANY respiratory issues, we are ordered to put COVID on the death certificate. These patients were never even tested for the virus. Cancer, trauma, blood loss deaths are now all COVID deaths. If you are sick, almost everyone gets oxygen. So if you die, COVID is placed on your death certificate! This is a scamdemic! It’s all lies!”
The CIA source also sent us the following:
“The Coronavirus originated from the city of Wuhan in China and has now reached every corner of the world. But this virus has not reached Beijing, the capital of China, and the economic-capital Shanghai near Wuhan, why …?
Beijing is the city where all the leaders of China live. Military-leaders live here, those who run the power of China live here and there is no lock-down in Beijing! It is open! Corona has no effect here, why …?
Shanghai is the city that runs the economy, it is the economic capital of China, where all the rich people in China live! Those who keep the industry running, there is no lock-down here, corona has no effect here…! * Why …? “
As we noticed last week the bioweapons’ laboratory at the epicenter of this “coronavirus,” is owned by the Soros Foundation, a Rothschild front. We informed the Chinese that the Coronavirus had been traced to their facility at “666 Gaoxin Road,” in Wuhan, China.
The fact this information is not on the front pages of Chinese newspapers is telling.
The reason, apparently, is there were secret communications last week between the Rothschilds and the Chinese, according to Asian Secret Society sources. The Rothschilds said they had devices in Russia aimed at China. The Chinese responded by saying if they were attacked again they would retaliate by obliterating Switzerland and Israel. Instead of war, they offered to sell the Rothschilds 1,000 tons of gold and are still awaiting a formal answer. The Asians have made it clear the current situation cannot be resolved by force, only by cooperation. Chinese Ambassador to the United States Cui Tiankai says:
“Let’s work together to respond to this global crisis, to save people’s lives, to save the future of the global economy, and to save the future of the global community. This is our paramount task.” Cui calls for “a new and effective global governance system…based on mutual respect and…full recognition of diversity.”
The UN will at the very least be radically restructured under an improved system of governance. Right now they are short of funds. “We understand that there is money in the pipeline, though it has not been officially received,” said Stéphane Dujarric, Spokesman for the Secretary-General of the UN last week.
The Asians are also cracking down on coronavirus fear-mongering. That’s why, “At least 266 people have been arrested for posting coronavirus-related information in 10 Asian countries, from Thailand to India and Mongolia, according to an AFP tally based on police reports.”
Asian Secret Society sources say their membership is now figuring out the coronavirus is fake. However, the 5G electromagnetic attacks are the real threat, so they are dealing with it. For those of you who still do not understand the 5g threat is not “fake news,” please look at this article backed by about 100 scientific citations.
“We see this whole thing as hybrid warfare against the world’s nation-states, so by having the Prime Minister-executive leader of Great Britain going down, the rest of the world’s leaders should be galvanized, which they now are, etc.”
In other words, they may have faked Johnsons’ “coronavirus,” in order to successfully scare other world leaders into action.
In Japan, the military is preparing action against the fraudulently installed regime of slave Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, because he has been pushing 5G and is causing the economy to collapse with the fake pandemic, say Japanese right-wing sources close to the Emperor.
Meanwhile, as more and more people wake up to the fake pandemic, there are signs of Project Blue Beam holograms all over the world. Here are examples from Indonesia, Israel and various parts of the U.S. Keep your head up as there may be a show – coming soon – to the skies above you too. This is just a small part of the fake end-times party being organized and carried out, multiple sources agree.
We also note that the shutdown of most non-essential commercial activity has already been a boon for nature. I was able to take the following picture at my local park.
The goal is to have a world in harmony with nature, where everybody has a healthy and happy standard of living. This planet can be a turned into a heaven intended for all, including an immortal spirit for those who wish it. Remember that even though humanity is winning, the battle for Planet Earth is not over. We all need to do our part.
No religious or political creed is advocated here. Organised religion is unnecessary to spirituality. Excellent teachings of the masters have been contaminated by the dogmatic control of these religions. Discernment yes; judgement does not. If you use discernment you are free to research with an open mind.
With discernment it is possible to reach the spirit of the letter of any writing and it is also much easier to listen to the voice of the soul that comes from the heart. Individually you can be helped to find your Truth that is different of everyone. Please respect all credits.
Discernment is recommended.
All articles are of the respective authors and/or publishers responsibility.
Do you wonder how this virus jumped over from China to the USA in no time?
While researching the online archives we found a hard truth: The father of this Virus is the CDC (Center for Disease Control and Prevention)
The virus didn’t originate in China but it is a C.I.A. gift to China to bring it in line to cough up the much needed funds the USA, Inc. needs to avoid bankruptcy on January 31st 2020.
For all those with IQ’s lower than a gold fish the added bonus is that they will have the opportunity to take advantage of the soon coming Free mass vaccinations for all! Yeah!
Alas the Deep State / US government, Inc. will soon have the FREE inoculation we all need to stay alive!
In the below patent you’ll find 72 pages of truth so you can be the judge of this terrible “sudden unknown outbreak”
Pease read the patent on the link below first, then download it and share this article far and wide before the DEEP STATE AGENTS delete it. Stay wise and healthy!
Here is some great advise how to deal with this typer of virus fromEarthley Wellness:
The news is abuzz with word of this new Wuhan coronavirus, warning people it could be the next global pandemic…should you worry about it?
Here’s what we know right now:
Symptoms for most people are mild, basically cold-like. Sore throat, runny nose, cough. Some people later experience shortness of breath or pneumonia, but it’s not clear how common that is. There have been “hundreds” of cases and 6 deaths, all in adults. Most cases have been in people over the age of 40.
Some sources are claiming there is a patent on this virus; but this is the SARS strain, not the Wuhan strain. A company named Novovax is working on a vaccine for it, but none is current available.
There is one case in Washington state, a man who had recently traveled in Wuhan, China. He is reported to be in “good condition.”
Most people do not need to go to the doctor if they get it. If they experience trouble breathing, they may need to go in for assistance.
Experts have no idea how the illness is transmitting right now, and with only a handful of cases, no idea how serious it actually is. They are checking travelers who come from Wuhan China to make sure they don’t have the illness before letting them into the country.
Based on the low amount of information, they are likely scaring people unnecessarily (they believe it is less deadly than SARS and that was a very minor event ultimately).
There are things you can do. Elderberry has been shown to inhibit coronaviruses, for example. Echinacea may also be beneficial. Other herbs have been investigated, like Red Spider Lily (native to China) and found to be beneficial. Peppermint, too, has been shown to be helpful!
Basically? Keep your herbs on hand and don’t worry too much. Most healthy people are probably safe from serious illness.
No religious or political creed is advocated here. Organised religion is unnecessary to spirituality. Excellent teachings of the masters have been contaminated by the dogmatic control of these religions. Discernment yes; judgement does not. If you use discernment you are free to research with an open mind.
With discernment it is possible to reach the spirit of the letter of any writing and it is also much easier to listen to the voice of the soul that comes from the heart. Individually you can be helped to find your Truth that is different of everyone. Please respect all credits.
Discernment is recommended.
All articles are of the respective authors and/or publishers responsibility.
The Fed is buying the debt to keep their scam going. The USA is their “front” operation and their muscle, just like any organized crime syndicate. You ever seen the movie The Town? The Fed is Fergie pretending to arrange flowers for a living when it’s really the brains behind the operation telling the rest of the crews what to do- sell bonds, invade countries, wreck markets-whatever it takes to keep itself both in power and under the radar.
None of it is real, it’s all an illusion. There is no money, no debt, no value beyond what people are convinced exists, but the illusion is extremely powerful despite it’s intangible nature because human beings are the one animal that are able to manifest reality simply by agreeing to believe in something. Love, nation, the printed value on a piece of paper.
No religious or political creed is advocated here. Organised religion is unnecessary to spirituality. Excellent teachings of the masters have been contaminated by the dogmatic control of these religions. Discernment yes; judgement does not. If you use discernment you are free to research with an open mind.
With discernment it is possible to reach the spirit of the letter of any writing and it is also much easier to listen to the voice of the soul that comes from the heart. Individually you can be helped to find your Truth that is different of everyone. Please respect all credits.
Discernment is recommended.
All articles are of the respective authors and/or publishers responsibility.
It has been a mantra of U.S. foreign policy for a decade or more that, without the United States, the Middle East would descend into chaos. Or even worse, Iran would resurrect the Persian Empire and swallow the region whole.
Yet when U.S. President Donald Trump opted not to go to war with Iran after a series of Iranian-attributed attacks on Saudi Arabia last year and declared his intentions to pull troops out of the region, it wasn’t chaos or conquest that ensued. Rather, nascent regional diplomacy—particularly among Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates—and de-escalation followed. To be sure, the cards were reshuffled again in January, when Trump ordered the assassination of Qassem Suleimani, one of Iran’s most important military figures. Courtesy of Trump, the region is once more moving toward conflict, and the early signs of diplomatic progress achieved during the preceding months have vanished.
It is thus time for Washington to answer a crucial question that it has long evaded: Has America’s military dominance in the Middle East prevented regional actors from peacefully resolving conflicts on their own? And in that way, has it been an impediment to stability rather than the guarantor of it?
Following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, U.S. President Jimmy Carter proclaimed a new doctrine: “An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region,” he stated, “will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.” In the context of the Cold War, preventing the Soviets—the main outside force Carter was worried about—from gaining control over the energy-rich region had a strategic logic.
But over time, that logic shifted. In the 1980s, U.S. President Ronald Reagan expanded the doctrine to include threats to the flow of oil originating from inside the region, too. As the geopolitical context changed still further, subsequent presidents found even more ways to justify America’s growing military presence in the Middle East. What started as a policy to prevent others from establishing hegemony over the oil-rich waters of the Persian Gulf morphed into a policy of asserting American hegemony in the region in order to “save” it.
As long as U.S. allies lack the capability or competence to secure the region, the thinking went, Washington would have no choice but to shoulder this responsibility. U.S. President George W. Bush was explicit about that; without an increase in U.S. troop levels in Iraq, he claimed, there would be chaos in the region. He missed the irony, of course, that his invasion of Iraq was the single most destabilizing event in the Middle East of the past decades.
As the scholars Hal Brands, Steven Cook, and Kenneth Pollack wrote endorsing the Carter Doctrine and its continuation, “the United States established and upheld the basic rules of conduct in the region: the United States would meet efforts to interfere with the free flow of oil by force; uphold freedom of navigation; demand that regional powers give up their irredentist claims on other states or face grave consequences; and prevent the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.”
This account is accurate enough (although the last rule on the list always exempted Israel), but the story glosses over how the policy also gave cover to U.S. allies for some fairly destabilizing behaviors of their own. That’s an omission Brands makes in a Bloomberg article, too, where he points to Saudi Arabia’s slaughter of the Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi to argue that a “post-American Middle East will not be stable and peaceful. It will be even nastier and more turbulent than it is today.” And in the words of U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham in 2018, “If it weren’t for the United States, they’d be speaking Farsi in about a week in Saudi Arabia.”
All this without a nod to the fact that, if anything, the United States’ protection of the Saudi regime has enabled its promotion of terrorism and its destabilizing activities in the region, which have, in turn, prompted further Iranian response.
Assertions about the United States’ pivotal role in the Middle East, no matter how often repeated, have not been proved true. Iran, ravaged by sanctions, corruption, and economic mismanagement, is nowhere near establishing hegemony in the region. Saudi Arabia spends more than five times as much on its military than does Iran; the entire Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC)—Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, Oman, and the UAE—outspends Iran by a factor of eight. Meanwhile, whereas Iran has no nuclear weapons yet undergoes more inspections than any other country, Israel has a nuclear weapons program with no international transparency whatsoever. Iran may have been adept at taking advantage of U.S. overextension and missteps in the last few decades, but establishing hegemony is a different matter altogether.
Further, the region did not fall into deeper chaos as a result of Trump’s earlier refusal to get into a shooting war with Iran after attacks by Iranian proxies against Saudi oil installations in September 2019. Critics lamented the president’s decision as an abandonment of the Carter Doctrine, calling it a disaster for the GCC and warning that it may even prompt Saudi Arabia to seek nuclear weapons.
Instead, recognizing that the U.S. military was no longer at their disposal, Saudi Arabia and the UAE began exercising the diplomaticoptions that had always been available to them. For its part, Saudi Arabia stepped up direct talks with Houthi rebels in Yemen as a way to ease tensions with their backer, Iran. The level of violence on both sides declined as a result, and more than 100 prisoners of war were released. In November, the United Nations’ Yemen envoy, Martin Griffiths, reported an 80 percent reduction in Saudi-led airstrikes, and there were no Yemeni deaths in the previous two weeks.
Riyadh also opted to reduce tensions with Qatar, a former ally that had become a nemesis. The Saudi government seemingly ordered its notorious Twitter army to tone down the insults against Qatar and its emir, Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, and some sporting events between the two countries resumed, according to the New York Times.
An even stronger change of heart occurred in Abu Dhabi. In July, the UAE started withdrawing troops from Yemen. The same month, it participated in direct talks with Tehran to discuss maritime security. It even released $700 million in funds to Iran in contradiction to the Trump administration’s maximum pressure strategy.
Some of these measures may have been more tactical than strategic. Saudi Arabia may have reduced tensions with Qatar and the Houthis in order to better situate itself for a confrontation with Tehran down the road or to offset international condemnation of its killing of Khashoggi, human rights abuses at home, and brutal tactics in Yemen. The UAE, too, may have felt that a tactical reduction of tensions was warranted.
Nevertheless, as the United States appeared poised to back out of the region, its erstwhile allies’ calculations tilted toward diplomacy. The Saudis and Emiratis simply had no choice but to cease some of their recklessness because they could no longer operate under the protection of the United States. If stability in the Middle East is the United States’ main goal, Washington should have celebrated rather than bemoaned these developments.
In the wake of the U.S. assassination of Suleimani—which some former U.S. officials have called an act of war—the calculations may change once more. According to Iraqi Prime Minister Adil Abdul-Mahdi, Suleimani was in Iraq to bring him Tehran’s response to a message from Riyadh on how to defuse regional tensions, presumably as part of the House of Saud’s renewed interest in diplomacy. The Iraqis, according to him, were mediating between the two rivals, an initiative that has now been thrown into question.
Iran may very well conclude, rightly or wrongly, that Saudi Arabia and the UAE conspired with Washington to assassinate Suleimani and as a result not only end the recent diplomacy but also target Riyadh and Abu Dhabi as part of the revenge for Suleimani’s death. This is yet one more instance, it seems, in which U.S. activities in the region have brought more turmoil than stability.
To be sure, there is no guarantee that recent diplomatic efforts would have been successful. A more responsible Riyadh might not have begotten a more responsible Tehran. But it is noteworthy that diplomacy did not even begin in earnest until Washington clearly demonstrated its unwillingness to entangle itself in a war between Saudi Arabia and Iran. And by returning to the region in a show of military force, Trump may once again disincentivize the United States’ allies from taking diplomacy seriously. They may even interpret Suleimani’s killing as a license to resume their recklessness—activities like Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s purported kidnapping of the Lebanese prime minister and ordering of the dismemberment of Khashoggi; Saudi Arabia and the UAE’s imposition of a blockade on Qatar; and the two countries’ further destabilization of Libya, Syria, Lebanon, Sudan, and Yemen.
As in the past, in other words, it seems as if the Middle East’s descent into chaos is more likely with the United States than without it.
No religious or political creed is advocated here. Organised religion is unnecessary to spirituality. Excellent teachings of the masters have been contaminated by the dogmatic control of these religions. Discernment yes; judgement does not. If you use discernment you are free to research with an open mind.
With discernment it is possible to reach the spirit of the letter of any writing and it is also much easier to listen to the voice of the soul that comes from the heart. Individually you can be helped to find your Truth that is different of everyone. Please respect all credits.
Discernment is recommended.
All articles are of the respective authors and/or publishers responsibility.
It has been a mantra of U.S. foreign policy for a decade or more that, without the United States, the Middle East would descend into chaos. Or even worse, Iran would resurrect the Persian Empire and swallow the region whole.
Yet when U.S. President Donald Trump opted not to go to war with Iran after a series of Iranian-attributed attacks on Saudi Arabia last year and declared his intentions to pull troops out of the region, it wasn’t chaos or conquest that ensued. Rather, nascent regional diplomacy—particularly among Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates—and de-escalation followed. To be sure, the cards were reshuffled again in January, when Trump ordered the assassination of Qassem Suleimani, one of Iran’s most important military figures. Courtesy of Trump, the region is once more moving toward conflict, and the early signs of diplomatic progress achieved during the preceding months have vanished.
It is thus time for Washington to answer a crucial question that it has long evaded: Has America’s military dominance in the Middle East prevented regional actors from peacefully resolving conflicts on their own? And in that way, has it been an impediment to stability rather than the guarantor of it?
Following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, U.S. President Jimmy Carter proclaimed a new doctrine: “An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region,” he stated, “will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.” In the context of the Cold War, preventing the Soviets—the main outside force Carter was worried about—from gaining control over the energy-rich region had a strategic logic.
But over time, that logic shifted. In the 1980s, U.S. President Ronald Reagan expanded the doctrine to include threats to the flow of oil originating from inside the region, too. As the geopolitical context changed still further, subsequent presidents found even more ways to justify America’s growing military presence in the Middle East. What started as a policy to prevent others from establishing hegemony over the oil-rich waters of the Persian Gulf morphed into a policy of asserting American hegemony in the region in order to “save” it.
As long as U.S. allies lack the capability or competence to secure the region, the thinking went, Washington would have no choice but to shoulder this responsibility. U.S. President George W. Bush was explicit about that; without an increase in U.S. troop levels in Iraq, he claimed, there would be chaos in the region. He missed the irony, of course, that his invasion of Iraq was the single most destabilizing event in the Middle East of the past decades.
As the scholars Hal Brands, Steven Cook, and Kenneth Pollack wrote endorsing the Carter Doctrine and its continuation, “the United States established and upheld the basic rules of conduct in the region: the United States would meet efforts to interfere with the free flow of oil by force; uphold freedom of navigation; demand that regional powers give up their irredentist claims on other states or face grave consequences; and prevent the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.”
This account is accurate enough (although the last rule on the list always exempted Israel), but the story glosses over how the policy also gave cover to U.S. allies for some fairly destabilizing behaviors of their own. That’s an omission Brands makes in a Bloomberg article, too, where he points to Saudi Arabia’s slaughter of the Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi to argue that a “post-American Middle East will not be stable and peaceful. It will be even nastier and more turbulent than it is today.” And in the words of U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham in 2018, “If it weren’t for the United States, they’d be speaking Farsi in about a week in Saudi Arabia.”
All this without a nod to the fact that, if anything, the United States’ protection of the Saudi regime has enabled its promotion of terrorism and its destabilizing activities in the region, which have, in turn, prompted further Iranian response.
Assertions about the United States’ pivotal role in the Middle East, no matter how often repeated, have not been proved true. Iran, ravaged by sanctions, corruption, and economic mismanagement, is nowhere near establishing hegemony in the region. Saudi Arabia spends more than five times as much on its military than does Iran; the entire Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC)—Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, Oman, and the UAE—outspends Iran by a factor of eight. Meanwhile, whereas Iran has no nuclear weapons yet undergoes more inspections than any other country, Israel has a nuclear weapons program with no international transparency whatsoever. Iran may have been adept at taking advantage of U.S. overextension and missteps in the last few decades, but establishing hegemony is a different matter altogether.
Further, the region did not fall into deeper chaos as a result of Trump’s earlier refusal to get into a shooting war with Iran after attacks by Iranian proxies against Saudi oil installations in September 2019. Critics lamented the president’s decision as an abandonment of the Carter Doctrine, calling it a disaster for the GCC and warning that it may even prompt Saudi Arabia to seek nuclear weapons.
Instead, recognizing that the U.S. military was no longer at their disposal, Saudi Arabia and the UAE began exercising the diplomaticoptions that had always been available to them. For its part, Saudi Arabia stepped up direct talks with Houthi rebels in Yemen as a way to ease tensions with their backer, Iran. The level of violence on both sides declined as a result, and more than 100 prisoners of war were released. In November, the United Nations’ Yemen envoy, Martin Griffiths, reported an 80 percent reduction in Saudi-led airstrikes, and there were no Yemeni deaths in the previous two weeks.
Riyadh also opted to reduce tensions with Qatar, a former ally that had become a nemesis. The Saudi government seemingly ordered its notorious Twitter army to tone down the insults against Qatar and its emir, Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, and some sporting events between the two countries resumed, according to the New York Times.
An even stronger change of heart occurred in Abu Dhabi. In July, the UAE started withdrawing troops from Yemen. The same month, it participated in direct talks with Tehran to discuss maritime security. It even released $700 million in funds to Iran in contradiction to the Trump administration’s maximum pressure strategy.
Some of these measures may have been more tactical than strategic. Saudi Arabia may have reduced tensions with Qatar and the Houthis in order to better situate itself for a confrontation with Tehran down the road or to offset international condemnation of its killing of Khashoggi, human rights abuses at home, and brutal tactics in Yemen. The UAE, too, may have felt that a tactical reduction of tensions was warranted.
Nevertheless, as the United States appeared poised to back out of the region, its erstwhile allies’ calculations tilted toward diplomacy. The Saudis and Emiratis simply had no choice but to cease some of their recklessness because they could no longer operate under the protection of the United States. If stability in the Middle East is the United States’ main goal, Washington should have celebrated rather than bemoaned these developments.
In the wake of the U.S. assassination of Suleimani—which some former U.S. officials have called an act of war—the calculations may change once more. According to Iraqi Prime Minister Adil Abdul-Mahdi, Suleimani was in Iraq to bring him Tehran’s response to a message from Riyadh on how to defuse regional tensions, presumably as part of the House of Saud’s renewed interest in diplomacy. The Iraqis, according to him, were mediating between the two rivals, an initiative that has now been thrown into question.
Iran may very well conclude, rightly or wrongly, that Saudi Arabia and the UAE conspired with Washington to assassinate Suleimani and as a result not only end the recent diplomacy but also target Riyadh and Abu Dhabi as part of the revenge for Suleimani’s death. This is yet one more instance, it seems, in which U.S. activities in the region have brought more turmoil than stability.
To be sure, there is no guarantee that recent diplomatic efforts would have been successful. A more responsible Riyadh might not have begotten a more responsible Tehran. But it is noteworthy that diplomacy did not even begin in earnest until Washington clearly demonstrated its unwillingness to entangle itself in a war between Saudi Arabia and Iran. And by returning to the region in a show of military force, Trump may once again disincentivize the United States’ allies from taking diplomacy seriously. They may even interpret Suleimani’s killing as a license to resume their recklessness—activities like Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s purported kidnapping of the Lebanese prime minister and ordering of the dismemberment of Khashoggi; Saudi Arabia and the UAE’s imposition of a blockade on Qatar; and the two countries’ further destabilization of Libya, Syria, Lebanon, Sudan, and Yemen.
As in the past, in other words, it seems as if the Middle East’s descent into chaos is more likely with the United States than without it.
No religious or political creed is advocated here. Organised religion is unnecessary to spirituality. Excellent teachings of the masters have been contaminated by the dogmatic control of these religions. Discernment yes; judgement does not. If you use discernment you are free to research with an open mind.
With discernment it is possible to reach the spirit of the letter of any writing and it is also much easier to listen to the voice of the soul that comes from the heart. Individually you can be helped to find your Truth that is different of everyone. Please respect all credits.
Discernment is recommended.
All articles are of the respective authors and/or publishers responsibility.
An 83-year-old retired engineer in Michigan underpaid his property taxes by $8.41. In response, Oakland County seized his property, auctioned it off to settle the debt, and pocketed nearly $24,500 in excess revenue from the sale.
Under Michigan law, it was all legal. And hardly uncommon.
Uri Rafaeli, who lost his property and all the equity associated with it, is just one of thousands of people to be victimized by Michigan’s uniquely aggressive property tax statute. The law, passed in 1999 in an attempt to accelerate the rehabilitation of abandoned properties, empowers county treasurers to act as debt collectors. In the process, it creates a perverse incentive by allowing treasurers’ offices to retain excess revenue raised by seizing and selling properties with delinquent taxes—even when the amount owed is miniscule, and even when the homes aren’t abandoned or blighted at all.
Organizations representing property owners like Rafaeli say the practice is unconstitutional, inequitable, and unreasonably harsh. They call it “home equity theft”—a process that’s a close relative to the civil asset forfeiture laws that have been used by police departments to similarly deprive innocent Americans of their property without due process. They are now asking the state Supreme Court to restrict the practice.
“Michigan is currently stealing from people across the state,” says Christina Martin, an attorney with the Pacific Legal Foundation, a nonprofit law firm now representing Rafaeli and other homeowners in a class-action lawsuit that will go before the Michigan Supreme Court in early November.
“Counties have been authorized to take not just what they are owed, but to take people’s life savings.”
A Win-Win Situation
Rafaeli’s case—which has the potential to stop the predatory behavior of county treasurers across the state—began with a simple mistake.
Uri Rafaeli
Photo courtesy Pacific Legal Foundation
In August 2011, Rafaeli purchased a three-bedroom, 1,500-square-foot home in the predominantly African American community of Southfield, Michigan, a lower-middle-class suburb just north of Detroit. “The investment was good to the state economy, and [at] the same time, it may produce a good rent for my retirement. A ‘win-win’ situation,” says Rafaeli, who lived in neighboring Macomb County at the time. (He no longer lives in Michigan.)
The $60,000 purchase was recorded by the Oakland County Register of Deeds on January 6, 2012. About six months later, in June 2012, Rafaeli was notified that he had underpaid his 2011 property tax bill by $496. Rafaeli made subsequent property tax payments on time and in full—and, in January 2013, he attempted to settle the unpaid tax debt, according to court documents.
But he made a mistake in calculating the interest owed, resulting in another underpayment of $8.41.
A little more than a year later, in February 2014, Rafaeli’s rental property was one of 11,000 properties put up for auction by Oakland County. It was sold for $24,500 in August of the same year—far less than what Rafaeli had paid for the property just three years earlier.
Today, real estate service Zillow, which rates the Southfield region as a “hot” market in the Detroit region, estimates the property is worth $128,000, But Rafaeli has missed out on reaping a financial reward for being an early investor in the area.
Uri Rafaeli’s house and surrounding property in Southfield, Michigan.
Source: Google Maps
“I believed in the power of the U.S. to withstand the difficulties,” says Rafaeli, “and I believed in its fairness and dignity in doing business there.” Now, he says, he thinks differently.
“Punitive for Property Owners, and Profitable for the County”
In court documents, Rafaeli’s attorneys estimate there have been more than 100,000 properties—along with the “entire equity in them”—that have been taken by Michigan counties since 2002. “In thousands of instances each year, the proceeds for a given property sold at auction far exceed the delinquent tax amount and are far less than a delinquent taxpayer’s equity in the property,” they argue. “This results in millions of dollars in surplus proceeds and equity for the counties and tax sale purchasers.”
At the root of those seizures is a 1999 update to Michigan’s general property tax statute. That legislation, Act 123 of 1999, gave Michigan’s 83 county treasurers the authority to act as the primary agents for handing the foreclosure and auction of properties with unpaid taxes. It also expedited the process for seizing and auctioning homes that owed taxes, allowing county treasuries to sweep aside liens and other speed bumps in the tax foreclosure process.
The legislation’s goals were “to encourage the rapid reuse of property, prevent the onset of blight, and improve the overall use of property” in the state, according to a 2011 University of Michigan report about the effects of Act 123 in Wayne County—where Detroit is located, and where the 1999 law has had the most devastating effects on homeowners.
Over the past decade, more than 150,000 properties in Detroit have gone through the tax forfeiture process, according to data collected by Jerry Paffendorf, the founder of Loveland Technologies, a Detroit-based mapping firm. The process, says Paffendorf, is “punitive for property owners and profitable for the county.”
Paffendorf became increasingly interested in Michigan’s unique tax foreclosure rules shortly after Detroit’s 2013 bankruptcy, when his company worked with an anti-blight task force to identify and photograph abandoned properties across the city. At the time, the media was fascinated with Detroit’s economic collapse—one of the most memorable signs of which were the homes being auctioned for $1,000 or less.
As he began tracking the supposedly vacant homes being auctioned off by the city, Paffendorf noticed an odd trend: Lots of them weren’t actually vacant.
“There was sort of an assumption that tax foreclosures were happening to abandoned buildings. You know, properties that people had left,” he tells Reason. But that wasn’t always the case. “We saw thousands of properties that had people living in them being auctioned.”
That was happening because of the accelerated foreclosure process created by Act 123, which harshly punished any Michigander for falling behind on property tax payments. Prior to 1999, the average time between a property falling into tax delinquency and foreclosure was five to seven years, but Act 123 reduced that timeline to a little over two years. The accelerated foreclosure process caught many homeowners who fell behind on their taxes during the Great Recession.
In Michigan, property taxes are due twice per year. Bills are sent in July and December, with payments due in April and November. If there are outstanding debts from the previous year, delinquent properties are turned over to the county in March the following year. The county buys the debt from municipalities—the funding comes from the county’s “delinquent tax revolving fund” (DTRF)—and the county effectively becomes the debt collector for the unpaid taxes. Under state law, counties are allowed to impose a one-time 4 percent administrative fee to each delinquent property, and may charge 1 percent interest for every month the tax remains unpaid.
If the property owner still owes back taxes by March 31 of the third year of delinquency—that is, two years and 31 days after the county took over the collection process—the county can foreclose and take the property to auction.
After a property is auctioned, the county keeps the proceeds and recycles the revenue through the same DTRF used to buy the debt from municipalities in the first place.
If the county ends up with a positive balance in its DTRF, the excess funds can be channeled into the county budget.
That’s how Wayne County has funneled more than $382 million in delinquent tax surpluses into its general fund budget since 2012, according to an analysis by Bridge magazine, a Michigan-based nonprofit publication.
In Oakland County, where Rafaeli’s Southfield property was seized and sold in 2014, the process has been lucrative too. According to the county’s most recent comprehensive annual financial report, its DTRF had $196.8 million in net assets.
The same document details plans to use the DTRF for a number of pet projects, including the construction of a new animal shelter and adoption center. The county also “anticipates the continuation of annual transfers from the DTRF to support General Fund / General Purpose operations in the amount of $3.0 million annually for FY 2019 through FY 2023″—totals that are in line with historical norms, according to the annual report.
That’s hundreds of millions of dollars in private equity that have been transferred to the two counties’ control—completely legally, under the terms of Act 123.
“It is simply government-sanctioned theft,” says private attorney Philip Ellison. Ellison has been involved in a series of class-action lawsuits targeting nine Michigan counties’ use of home equity forfeiture over the past six years, during which time, he calculates, counties in Michigan have pocketed more than $36 million in surplus equity seized from tax delinquent properties.
Ellison represents people like Donald Freed, a resident of Alma, Michigan, who had his home and 35 acres of land seized by Gratiot County, Michigan, over a $750 tax debt. The property was auctioned for more than $100,000—and, of course, the county kept the change.
Romualdo and Erica Perez
Photo courtesy Pacific Legal Foundation
The same thing happened to Romualdo and Erica Perez, a father/daughter duo who bought a four-unit apartment building and an adjacent, abandoned single-family home in Detroit in 2012. Even though they were living in New Jersey at the time, Romualdo would drive 11 hours to Detroit on weekends to fix up the properties in the hopes of eventually relocating there to be closer to other relatives. Romualdo and Erica planned to live in the house and earn a living by renting the small apartment building.
“Every bit of money we saved and every spare minute we had went to fixing the house,” Erica says. “The plumbing, the electricity—everything.”
But the first year they owned the property, they underpaid their property taxes by $144. County tax records show that they made full payments, on time, every subsequent year. But Wayne County never informed them of the unpaid debt, they say, because the notices were sent to the wrong address. But the county should have known the correct address for the notices because more recent property tax payments indicated the proper address, says Martin.
In 2017, the county foreclosed on their property, sold it for $108,000, and kept the excess equity beyond the $359 owed in back taxes, fees, and interest. They, too, are suing the state with the assistance of the Pacific Legal Foundation, in a case that’s separate from Rafaeli’s.
Making Detroit a Worse Place to Live
In addition to destroying the livelihoods of individual property owners, Act 123 has made Detroit a less attractive place to live.
(Graphic courtesy Loveland Technologies / Jerry Paffendorf)
“Detroit’s collapsing structures and vacant lots didn’t just happen,” the Obama administration’s special Detroit Blight Removal Task Force concluded in its 2013 report. “They are the physical result of dire economic and social forces that pulled the city apart.”
The county’s aggressive home equity forfeiture scheme seems to be part of the problem. Over a two year period between 2017 and 2018, volunteers working with the Quicken Loan Community Fund, a Detroit-based nonprofit connected to the mortgage company, interviewed more than 60,000 property owners who owed taxes to the city. Most were aware that they owed taxes, but did not have accurate information about the process or the potential consequences.
Worse, the survey found that aggressive use of home equity forfeiture was leaving the city with more vacant properties, not fewer. “In theory, the annual tax foreclosure auctions are intended to take properties that are neglected and not generating tax revenue, and sell them to owners who will pay taxes and put the properties to productive use,” the Quicken Loans Community Fund report concluded. “In practice, most Detroit homes that have been tax foreclosed do not return to productive use. Instead, speculators who purchase cheap property at auction allow it to deteriorate without paying property taxes, leading to further depressed home values and blight.”
Paffendorf, whose company was involved in the Quicken survey, says that about 80 percent of tax-foreclosed properties end up abandoned. Some are vacant because they are going through forfeiture, and some are going through forfeiture because they are vacant, he says. But regardless of which way the causation runs, it’s fairly obvious that a law that was meant to return tax-delinquent abandoned properties to productive, tax-producing ones is failing to achieve that goal.
“If you sell houses with people living in them,” Paffendorf tells Reason, then “you’re only creating more vacant properties.”
An Incentive for County Officials to Steal
The aggressive use of home equity forfeiture under Act 123 has not only failed at its stated goal of returning abandoned homes to productive use, it has created a perverse incentive for county officials to effectively steal from their constituents.
On the morning of April 1, 2014, Linda Irwin, Cass County’s treasurer, emailed a county contractor to say she was “tickled pink” to have the opportunity to seize a $3.5 million lakefront property. The deadline for the property owner to settle an unpaid property tax debt had passed the day before and the county was ready to foreclose. In subsequent emails, the contractor joked with Irwin about using the property to host cookouts for county employees, according to court documents attached to a lawsuit against Cass County.
It wasn’t until three weeks later that Douglas Anderson, the registered agent who was handling the property and overseeing the construction of a still-unfinished home, became aware anything was wrong. In court documents, lawyers representing Anderson and property owner Sergei Antipov allege the county failed to provide adequate notice about the unpaid property taxes. Cass County argues that it took the appropriate steps required under law, sending two certified letters to the address. Both were returned as undeliverable, likely because there was no one actually living at the address yet.
It was not until April 18, 2014, weeks after the foreclosure deadline had passed, that county officials called Anderson to tell him the property was being seized. When Anderson and Antipov offered to pay the back taxes, the county refused to accept it.
“It’s a done deal,” Irwin told a local newspaper in June 2014. “They’ve tried to send us a check for $100,000, and I’ve returned it. I’ve had my council look at it, and we’ve done everything right. We didn’t make any mistakes. They did.”
Maybe so. But the county—and the contractor, Title Check, which works with county treasurers across the state and gets to keep a portion of the proceeds from auctioned properties—does not appear to have done much to alert Antipov that he owed taxes.
Antipov’s situation bears many similarities to the forfeitures that targeted the Rafaeli and Perez properties, among others. In each case, the property owners alleged that they were not given sufficient warning about their delinquent taxes. In some cases, that’s because county officials were mailing notices to unfinished homes or properties without permanent residents. In others, like Rafaeli’s case, the notices were delivered to tenants who failed to pass along the information to their landlord, mistakenly believing that the county would inform the landlord separately.
The county officials involved in each of those lawsuits contend in court documents that they complied with the notification requirements written into state law. Although Act 123 does require that county treasurers make three attempts to contact tax delinquent property owners, attorneys representing the homeowners say more should be done.
“They don’t have to sue in the normal sense,” says Martin. Because the legal action—the forfeiture—is filed against the property itself, the notice required is significantly lower than what is required in other legal matters. And some counties don’t include delinquent taxes on subsequent property tax bills, she says. “There is no notice on the new assessments that says ‘you have not paid a prior year’s bill.'”
In Cass County, officials don’t appear to have done anything beyond the bare minimum. Antipov’s attorneys say it would have taken a quick online search to find that the property was owned by an LLC registered in Anderson’s name and with his Indiana address. Antipov, who owns a metal fabrication company in Indiana, owns another property in Cass County and would have been on the county’s tax rolls (and likely known to the treasurer’s office) But neither the county nor Title Check made anything other than the bare minimum effort to avoid running out the clock established by Act 123.
“This is a major asset,” Irwin said in 2014. “We can sit on it and decide what to do with it, or we can move forward with an auction.”
Irwin died in 2018, but Cass County is still engaged in a lawsuit over the property. The county has racked up more than $250,000 in legal fees since 2014 defending its right to seize Antipov’s property, documents show. The home is still unfinished.
And while some county officials use Michigan’s aggressive foreclosure law to benefit their budgets or to provide a setting for backyard barbeques, others use it in ways that are more openly designed to advance municipal self-interest.
Wayne County Treasurer Eric Sabree has also been caught on camera admitting that Wayne County and the city of Detroit will sometimes conspire to manipulate the auction process. During a 2015 appearance on “Detroit Wants To Know,” a local web series, Sabree talked about how the treasurer’s office will bundle properties together in order to make them more attractive to potential buyers—or perhaps less attractive, so the city of Detroit can keep certain parcels for itself.
“It’s a group of properties we put together, because we cooperated with the city of Detroit…Nobody will buy this bundle, and then we can just give it to the city, and then the city will use the demolition funds to tear them down,” he said. “And in the bundle, we also had some good properties, which the city then sold to fund the demolition and the management of the properties they took.”
It’s not only the city that benefits. In February, the Detroit Free Press and The Detroit News published a joint expose showing that Sabree’s relatives purchased several homes in county-run tax foreclosure auctions. When confronted with the allegations, Sabree dismissed the rules that forbid treasurer’s office employees or their family members from bidding in those auctions as “intrusive and unrealistic.”
Sabree did not return requests for comment. But in July, an ethics board voted 5-1 to clear him of any wrongdoing, concluding that his wife’s purchase of properties in 2011 did not violate the ethics rules because the rules were adopted in 2012. Wayne County Executive Warren Evans told the Detroit Metro Times that he was “not sure that the Board’s action today did much to address” the concerns about Sabree’s behavior.
In Oakland County, the suburban county north of Detroit where Rafaeli’s property was seized and sold in 2014, there were 86 properties included in the county’s 2019 land auction, held in October. In 2018, the county auctioned off 79 properties that had been seized due to unpaid taxes, according to a list obtained by Reason via Michigan’s freedom of information law. That’s down from nearly 300 properties that went to the auction block as recently as 2015 in the same county.
County Treasurer Andrew Meisner, who is a defendant in the Rafaeli lawsuit going to the Michigan Supreme Court, did not return repeated requests for comment on this story.
His office says it tries to help homeowners avoid foreclosure. In a press release issued in March 2019, Meisner said his office has “contacted hundreds of property tax owners to discuss their options to avoid foreclosure” before the April 1 property tax payment deadline. “Preventing foreclosure is in everyone’s best interest,” said Meisner, in the same statement. Yet the evidence clearly shows that county officials and budgets have benefited from aggressive seizures and sales.
An Unconstitutional Fine
If Rafaeli is victorious before the Michigan Supreme Court, the next step would be to enter into negotiations with Oakland County to determine a fair market value for his lost property and he would be entitled to “just compensation.” And so would lots of other Michiganders. “If the Michigan Supreme Court in the Rafaeli case…rules in favor of the property owners, counties will be required to make an appropriate refund,” says Ellison.
Legally, the matter is fraught. Counties seizing excess revenue above and beyond the amount necessary to settle the unpaid debts could be considered a taking—in which case it would be subjected to the Fifth Amendment, which promises that “private property [shall not] be taken for public use, without just compensation.” The Michigan Constitution offers similar protections against government taking private property without compensation.
Oakland County has prevailed in lower courts by arguing that the seizure of Rafaeli’s property was a forfeiture. But that argument runs into other legal problems: For one, even under the wide leeway that is afforded in asset forfeiture laws, there must be an allegation of underlying criminal activity. Not paying property taxes is a civil violation, but not a criminal one.
“Traditionally, civil forfeiture would only apply to the product of the crime or the proceeds of the crime,” says Martin. Although many states and localities have stretched their use of civil asset forfeiture to include cases where no one is actually convicted of a crime—often as part of drug enforcement—the legal doctrine requires that the property seized must be “tainted with criminal activity,” she says.
But if that’s the way courts want to look at it, then the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against excessive fines would apply. It doesn’t matter that a state law, like Act 123, might authorize such a forfeiture if it is unconstitutional.
In a landmark U.S. Supreme Court case last year, Timbs v. Indiana, the high court ruled that the excessive fines clause applies to both state and federal proceedings. In Timbs, the state of Indiana attempted to seize a $42,000 vehicle that had been used to transport illegal drugs, but the Supreme Court determined that taking the value of the vehicle—which was many times in excess of the allowable monetary fine for the crime Tyson Timbs had committed—violated the Eighth Amendment.
That might matter for the Rafaeli case. “Tax foreclosure is not the same thing as a forfeiture,” Wesley Hottot, an attorney with the Institute for Justice, a nonprofit libertarian law firm, tells Reason. Hottot was the lead attorney in the Timbs case.
“But even if they were right,” Hottot adds, the forfeiture in this case violated the excessive fines clause of the U.S. Constitution, he says, “because it was grossly disproportionate to the minor offenses involved.”
Michigan Supreme Court
Wiki Commons
In a brief submitted to the state Supreme Court defending Oakland County’s use of home equity forfeiture against Rafaeli, the Michigan Association of County Treasurers makes several arguments in favor of the existing arrangement. The current system allows for counties to more easily? address blight, the group argues, despite evidence, like Paffendorf and Quicken found, that it has made blight worse in some places.
Elsewhere, the group’s arguments seem to contradict one another. Ruling that tax foreclosure is a taking “could eliminate any incentive for property owners to pay delinquent real property taxes,” the MACT argues, because the threat of punishment must exist for property owners to comply. But, later, the group argues that the seizure of an entire property to pay a smaller debt is “not intended to be punitive” and therefore does not run afoul of the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on excessive fines.
At the very least, the group’s attorneys argue, the legislature—not the courts—should be responsible for fixing Act 123, because it would be able to do so “without destroying the tax collection process.”
At other times, county officials have pleaded poverty. “They were on the verge of [bankruptcy] for quite a while. It was up to elected officials and administrators of local governments to take the initial steps (to collect taxes) and somehow they just didn’t do it,” Ray Wojtowicz, a retired Wayne County treasurer, told Bridge in 2017. It’s clear that counties in Michigan now count on being able to pad their budgets with revenue from homes seized for having unpaid taxes.
The burden of aggressive property tax enforcement, meanwhile, falls heaviest on poor communities. Wealthier homeowners have easier access to the legal and accounting assistance necessary to avoid underpayments or to quickly address any problems. Once property is seized, there’s no guarantee of due process or even a court hearing. Homeowners don’t even have access to public defenders; those are allocated only in criminal cases.
In some counties, Act 123 has “created this incredibly unhealthy incentive where the county isn’t just satisfied when they make enough to cover what they would have made in taxes,” says Paffendorf. “They are relying on these surpluses from people who are in debt.”
University of Massachusetts law professor Ralph Clifford has spent years studying home equity forfeitures in Massachusetts. The state has a less aggressive foreclosure law, but similarly allows municipalities to pocket excess revenue when tax delinquent foreclosures occur. His research shows that an estimated $56 million is appropriated from Massachusetts taxpayers every year. After reviewing all such seizures—known as “tax deed” actions, under Massachusetts state law—that took place between August 2013 and July 2014, Clifford found that towns in the state collected $42.87 for every dollar in taxes owed. His analysis includes one instance in which a property assessed for a value of $24,000 was taken to cover a $26 tax bill.
“As far as I can tell,” he told Reason, “it’s all just blatantly unconstitutional.”
Reforming the System
“We’d had these situations for decades, where people have lost their entire homes over a few hundred dollars of unpaid property taxes,” Montana state Sen. Tom Jacobson (D–Great Falls) tells Reason. “They would lose their entire homes. Forty years. All that equity. Over a few hundred bucks.”
Shortly after his election to the state legislature in 2012, he introduced a bill to require that property owners be compensated for what is taken—minus the debt owed and any interest.
But Jacobson says he was surprised by the level of opposition he witnessed. Lobbyists for counties (which handle property taxes in Montana, like in Michigan) said the bill would hurt their budgets.
He reintroduced the bill during the 2015 and 2017 sessions—Montana lawmakers meet for a formal session only once every two years, though they have an interim session in off years where much of the groundwork is laid, though no votes are taken. By the third time though the process, lawmakers agreed to add additional notification requirements before a property could be seized.
This year, the state legislature passed, and Gov. Steve Bullock signed, a bill giving property owners the right to the remainder of the equity in their homes after the tax debt is settled. The bill also requires that properties cannot be sold for less than 50 percent of their assessed value—an important caveat that should prevent some of what has occurred in Michigan.
The reforms also flip the counties’ incentives. Instead of being able to profit off delinquent taxes, says Jacobson, officials will now have an incentive to make sure the taxes are paid up front and on time—or they’ll have an incentive to help taxpayers find ways to meet their obligations.
A Penalty More than 8,000 Times the Underlying Debt
FABIANO/SIPA/Newscom
In Michigan, however, the practice of seizing homes over tiny underpayments of property taxes is likely to remain in place unless the courts step in. A bill introduced in the Michigan state House by Rep. Gary Howell (R–Lapeer) to reform Act 123 collected a handful of co-sponsors this year but did not receive even a committee vote.
Which means there will be more people like Uri Rafeali, who lost a home over an $8.41 mistake. His property, bought as an investment, is valued at an estimated $136,000. The penalty imposed by Oakland County was more than 8,000 percent greater than the underlying debt.
But today, while the legal battle over its fate plays out, the house sits empty. It generates no tax revenue for the city or county. It earns no money for Rafaeli or his wife in their retirement.
“The Constitution was written to prevent the government from violating a right that preexists the Constitution,” says Martin. “If this can happen to multimillionaires and to the poor, to the elderly….If this can happen to Mr. Rafaeli, it can happen to anyone.”
No religious or political creed is advocated here.
Organised religion is unnecessary to spirituality.
Excellent teachings of the masters have been contaminated by the dogmatic control of these religions.
Discernment yes; judgement does not. If you use discernment you are free to research with an open mind.
With discernment it is possible to reach the spirit of the letter of any writing and it is also much easier to listen to the voice of the soul that comes from the heart. Individually you can be helped to find your Truth that is different of everyone.
Please respect all credits.
Discernment is recommended.
All articles are of the respective authors and/or publishers responsibility.
WHISTLE BLOWN: The Source of The Opioid Epidemic In The USA.
By anonymous.
Posted May 19, 2019 by Edward Morgan.
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The hospitals of New Hampshire are responsible for the sole called “opioid epidemic”. They receive shipments of heroine and fentanyl from the military and selling it illegally to street dealers in order to fund secret underground projects such as the SSP(Secret Space Program) and ICC. The heroine and fentanyl come straight from China via boat to Alaskan U.S military bases. From there they are shipped across Canada to the north New Hampshire border.
Military personnel are allowed easily across the Canadian border and are not stopped or questioned from Canadian police because they are marked military vehicles. The Canadian/U.S border is not heavily watched or protected as well making the shipments smooth and easy. From there, they proceed to northern New Hampshire military bases such as the one in Littleton, NH. At the base, the drugs are loaded into inconspicuous trucks and then shipped to hospitals such as Dartmouth Hitchcock, Nashua, NH or Cottage Hospital in Woodsville, NH. These sleezeball hospitals are fronts for the illegal drugs trade and are filled with malpractice in order to get extra money from the government via unpaid, uncalled for, ridiculously unnecessary hospital bills.
They will intentionally make you sick to get all the money they can from you. Aside from that, they sell the drugs to dealers in order to get the drugs out on the street and into the arms of the sheep, revolutionaries that would present a problem to the deep states control. Since the state and local police are in on this scheme; the street dealer, after being sold the drugs, is carefully watched along with every deal they make. When the time is right, they are caught and snatched up by the police and sent to federal prison where they will live out the rest of their days, and where no one will listen to their story of how the government and hospitals played them like a god damn fiddle.
The drugs are seized and ready to be sold out to the highest bidder yet again. Thus, the cycle continues. The worst part is that the FBI is completely aware, and in on this devious plot because they need that drug money to fund their little secret projects that must be left out of the public eye. Look up State of Corruption New Hampshire if you don’t believe me. They sent a hit man to murder him because he’s tries to disclose this sick plan.
The money that doesn’t go to the SSP, ends up in the pockets of the governor, politician’s, and those involved to keep them quiet and compliant, obviously. All the while, destroying new Hampshire families and their funds. Almost every single home in this corrupt state is in all actuality, owned by the banks and every single family is in their debt and also owned by these fuckers. The cost of living is impossible to actually live on. Small businesses are kept to almost nothing or also in debt to the bankers. The level of mind control, especially up north is gross. It’s perfect to keep their shit a secret, no prying eyes.
That’s why I’m sending this… I need those prying eyes. I need evidence to take these fuckers down for good. They NEED to be EXPOSED. FOR GOOD. If you can help catch these people, I need pictures. Times of shipments, videos of the shipments. I need first hand witnesses. Anything that can end the needless destruction of the New Hampshire people. The innocents don’t deserve this. I’m sure we all have seen people get their lives ended by heroine and fentanyl use.
Chinese threat to dump U.S. treasuries is elephant in room of U.S./China trade war.
Benjamin Fulford Sample Report
2019/05/13.
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The U.S./Chinese trade war that took most pundits by surprise is actually the result of an agreement between Eastern and Western secret societies to permanently rid the world of the Zionist menace, multiple sources agree. The other thing to note is that Western, especially American, media are ignoring the trade war elephant in the room—the threat by China and the rest of the world to dump U.S. Treasury holdings and thus formally bankrupt the U.S. Corporation.
Let’s step back a minute and look at why the world wants to bankrupt the corporate U.S. government and force a regime change there.
Ever since George Bush Jr.’s handlers stole the election in the year 2000 and staged 9/11, the Zionist (Khazarian) mafia-controlled U.S. regime has spent trillions of dollars on never-ending war. This same regime, and its evil twin Israel, have created terrorist organizations like Al Qaeda and Daesh to perpetuate this war. This same regime has been actively trying to kill 90% of the world’s population with bioweapons, starvation, nuclear war, and now 5G microwave technology. The latest sign of how antisocial this regime is came last week when 187 countries, with the sole exception of the U.S., agreed to stop dumping toxic plastic into the oceans.
The Chinese used to support this endless warmongering and murder by buying U.S. Treasury bonds, until they realized they were paying the Americans to kill them. They thus decided to take their dollars elsewhere and spend them on helping the planet, and the multi-trillion-dollar Belt and Road Initiative is an example. Now suddenly the Zionist controllers of the Washington, D.C. regime are realizing their US$800 billion dollar per year trade deficit and US$ trillion dollar per year budget deficit are endangering the survival of their regime.
The budget deficit is being covered up by accounting tricks (such as the Feds using proxies to buy their own bonds), but the trade deficit is another matter. It is based on real stuff in the real world and cannot be covered up with accounting tricks forever. As the saying goes, “You can avoid reality for a certain amount of time, but eventually it has a way of catching up with you.”
In an attempt to fix the problem, U.S. President Donald Trump asked the Chinese to buy a “trillion dollars” worth of American stuff. The Chinese rationally responded that the U.S. does not have that amount of “stuff” to sell even if they wanted to. Now, the Trump plan to use tariffs to fix the trade deficit is going to be a tax on U.S. consumers and will not help the U.S. economy become competitive. That’s because the so-called U.S. dollar is too expensive, but the Americans cannot devalue it in order to make their exports competitive because the “U.S. dollar” is not an American currency. It is owned by European and Asian royals, together with international oligarchs, who do not want it to lose value.
On the other hand, if the U.S. government started issuing its own currency, say worth half what a U.S. dollar is now worth, U.S. consumers would still pay more for Chinese imports just as they would with tariffs, but this time U.S. exports would be competitive. The U.S. government could then spend as many trillion of, let’s say, greenbacks, as it wanted to in order to fix its domestic infrastructure, etc.
The main drawback is that the U.S. military could no longer afford to be guarding corporate interests at its 800 or so locations around the world. That’s why the White Dragon Society (WDS), Asian secret societies, the British Commonwealth, and others are proposing an alternative. This would involve replacing the entire political structure in Washington, D.C. with competent new people. The current system is so corrupt with its fake elections and bribed and blackmailed politicians that it is beyond reform.
However, the U.S. is full of competent and honest people who ran into a glass ceiling in the current system because they were immune to Zionist bribery and blackmail. These are the people who would rebuild a debt-free Republic of the United States of America. In such a scenario, the multi-polar world would pool its resources to transform the U.S. military-industrial complex into a benevolent force for planetary protection and space exploration.
Okay, now let’s finally get to the breaking news of the past week. The biggest news from last week is that newly installed Japanese Emperor Naruhito issued coded calls for help, according to British royal family sources. The cry for help was conveyed through “neuro-linguistic programming” in a brief speech the Emperor made, the sources say. He used “a certain combination of words written in a certain style and embedded with wordings and other devices” to let the world know the Imperial Family was being attacked, the sources say. The attacks were carried out by …
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Americans have been trained by decades of Cold War propaganda to look for any confirmation that ‘socialism means poverty.’ But in the case of Venezuela and other states not governed by the free market, this cliche simply doesn’t ring true.
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A pro-government supporter wears a T-Shirt with image of Venezuela’s late President Hugo Chavez, as he waits for results during congressional elections in Caracas, Venezuela, Sunday, Dec. 6, 2015. Some members of the opposition are angry after elections officials ordered polling centers to stay open for an extra hour, even if no one was standing in line to vote. Government opponents mobbed some voting stations demanding that the National Guard stick to the original schedule of closing at 6 p.m. (AP Photo/Alejandro Cegarra)
WASHINGTON — (ANALYSIS) The political and economic crisis facing Venezuela is being endlessly pointed to as proof of the superiority of the free market.
Images and portrayals of Venezuelans rioting in the streets over high food costs, empty grocery stores, medicine shortages, and overflowing garbage bins are the headlines, and the reporting points to socialism as the cause.
Indeed, corporate-owned, mainstream media advises Americans to look at the inflation and food lines in Venezuela, and then repeat to themselves clichés they heard in elementary school about how “Communism just doesn’t work.”
In reality, millions of Venezuelans have seen their living conditions vastly improved through the Bolivarian process. The problems plaguing the Venezuelan economy are not due to some inherent fault in socialism, but to artificially low oil prices and sabotage by forces hostile to the revolution.
Starting in 2014, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia flooded the market with cheap oil. This is not a mere business decision, but a calculated move coordinated with U.S. and Israeli foreign policy goals. Despite not just losing money, but even falling deep into debt, the Saudi monarchy continues to expand its oil production apparatus. The result has been driving the price of oil down from $110 per barrel, to $28 in the early months of this year. The goal is to weaken these opponents of Wall Street, London, and Tel Aviv, whose economies are centered around oil and natural gas exports.
And Venezuela is one of those countries. Saudi efforts to drive down oil prices have drastically reduced Venezuela’s state budget and led to enormous consequences for the Venezuelan economy.
At the same time, private food processing and importing corporations have launched a coordinated campaign of sabotage. This, coupled with the weakening of a vitally important state sector of the economy, has resulted in inflation and food shortages. The artificially low oil prices have left the Venezuelan state cash-starved, prompting a crisis in the funding of the social programs that were key to strengthening the United Socialist Party.
Corruption is a big problem in Venezuela and many third-world countries. This was true prior to the Bolivarian process, as well as after Hugo Chavez launched his massive economic reforms. In situations of extreme poverty, people learn to take care of each other. People who work in government are almost expected to use their position to take care of their friends and family. Corruption is a big problem under any system, but it is much easier to tolerate in conditions of greater abundance. The problem has been magnified in Venezuela due to the drop in state revenue caused by the low oil prices and sabotage from food importers.
The Bolivarian experience in Venezuela
Americans have been trained by decades of Cold War propaganda to look for any confirmation that “socialism means poverty.” A quick, simplistic portrait of the problems currently facing Venezuela, coupled with the fact that President Nicolas Maduro describes himself as a Marxist, can certainly give them such a confirmation. However, the actual, undisputed history of socialist construction around the world, including recent decades in Venezuela, tells a completely different story.
Hugo Chavez was elected president of Venezuela in 1999. His election was viewed as a referendum on the extreme free market policies enacted in Venezuela during the 1990s. In December, when I walked through the neighborhoods of central Caracas, Venezuelans spoke of these times with horror.
Demonstrators gather in Bolivar Square to show their support of Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro, in Caracas, Venezuela. The demonstrators gathered as the Organization of American States is meeting to discuss a report from Secretary General Luis Almagro denouncing violations of the Venezuela’s constitution.
Venezuelans told of how the privatizations mandated by the International Monetary Fund made life in Venezuela almost unlivable during the 1990s. Garbage wouldn’t be collected. Electricity would go off for weeks. Haido Ortega, a member of a local governing body in Venezuela, said: “Under previous governments we had to burn tires and go on strike just to get electricity, have the streets fixed, or get any investment.”
Chavez took office on a platform advocating a path between capitalism and socialism. He restructured the government-owned oil company so that the profits would go into the Venezuelan state, not the pockets of Wall Street corporations. With the proceeds of Venezuela’s oil exports, Chavez funded a huge apparatus of social programs.
After defeating an attempted coup against him in 2002, Chavez announced the goal of bringing Venezuela toward “21st Century Socialism.” Chavez quoted Marx and Lenin in his many TV addresses to the country, and mobilized the country around the goal of creating a prosperous, non-capitalist society.
In 1998, Venezuela had only 12 public universities, today it has 32. Cuban doctors were brought to Venezuela to provide free health care in community clinics. The government provides cooking and heating gas to low-income neighborhoods, and it’s launched a literacy campaign for uneducated adults.
During the George W. Bush administration, oil prices were the highest they had ever been. The destruction of Iraq, sanctions on Iran and Russia, strikes and turmoil in Nigeria — these events created a shortage on the international markets, driving prices up.
After the death of Chavez, Nicolas Maduro has continued the Bolivarian program. “Housing Missions” have been built across the country, providing low-income families in Venezuela with places to live. The Venezuelan government reports that over 1 million modern apartment buildings had been constructed by the end of 2015.
The problems currently facing Venezuela started in 2014. The already growing abundance of oil due to hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, was compounded by Saudi Arabia flooding the markets with cheap oil. The result: massive price drops. Despite facing a domestic fiscal crisis, Saudi Arabia continues to expand its oil production apparatus.
The price of oil remains low, as negotiations among OPEC states are taking place in the hopes that prices can be driven back up. While American media insists the low oil prices are just the natural cycle of the market at work, it’s rather convenient for U.S. foreign policy. Russia, Venezuela, Ecuador, and the Islamic Republic of Iran all have economies centered around state-owned oil companies and oil exports, and each of these countries has suffered the sting of low oil prices.
The leftist president of Brazil, Dilma Rousseff, has already been deposed due to scandal surrounding Petrobras, the state-owned oil company which is experiencing economic problems due to the falling price of oil. Although much of Brazil’s oil is for domestic consumption, it has been revealed that those who deposed her coordinated with the CIA and other forces in Washington and Wall Street, utilizing the economic fallout of low oil prices to bring down the Brazilian president.
The son of President Ronald Reagan has argued that Obama is intentionally driving down oil prices not just to weaken the Venezuelan economy, but also to tamper the influence of Russia and Iran. Writing for Townhall in 2014, Michael Reagan bragged that his father did the same thing to hurt the Soviet Union during the 1980s:
“Since selling oil was the source of the Kremlin’s wealth, my father got the Saudis to flood the market with cheap oil.
Lower oil prices devalued the ruble, causing the USSR to go bankrupt, which led to perestroika and Mikhail Gorbachev and the collapse of the Soviet Empire.”
The history of socialist construction
Prior to the 1917 revolution, Russia was a primitive, agrarian country. By 1936, after the completion of the Five-Year Plan, it was a world industrial power, surpassing every other country on the globe in terms of steel and tractor production. The barren Soviet countryside was lit up with electricity. The children of illiterate peasants across the Soviet Union grew up to be the scientists and engineers who first conquered outer space. The planned economy of the Soviet Union drastically improved the living standards of millions of people, bringing them running water, modern housing, guaranteed employment, and free education.
There is no contradiction between central planning and economic growth. In 1949, China had no steel industry. Today, more than half of all the world’s steel is produced in China’s government-controlled steel industry.
Cuba has wiped out illiteracy, and Cubans enjoy one of the highest life expectancies in Latin America.
People hold up images showing Fidel Castro, second from right, Venezuela’s late President Hugo Chavez, center, and Cuba’s revolutionary hero Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara, bottom left and right, during a May Day march in Revolution Square in Havana, Cuba, Wednesday, May 1, 2013. The image of Chavez carries the words in Spanish “Chavez : Our best friend.” (AP Photo/Ramon Espinosa)
When the Marxist-Leninist governments of Eastern Europe collapsed in the early 1990s, economists like Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University, who can be counted among capitalism’s “true believers,” predicted rapid economic growth. Since the 1990s, conditions in what George W. Bush called the “New Europe” have become far worse than under socialism. The life expectancy has decreased and infant mortality has risen. Human and drug traffickers have set up shop. In endless polls, the people of Eastern Europe repeatedly say life was better before the defeat of Communism.
Russia’s recovery from the disaster of the 1990s has come about with the reorientation of the economy to one centered around public control of its oil and natural gas resources — much like Venezuela. The Putin government has also waged a crackdown on the small number of “oligarchs” who became wealthy after the demise of the Soviet Union. Once strong state to control the economy was re-established, Russia’s gross domestic product increased by 70 percent during the first eight years of Putin’s administration. From 2000 to 2008, poverty was cut in half, and incomes doubled.
Neoliberal capitalism has failed
It is only because these facts are simply off-limits in the American media and its discussions of socialism and capitalism that the distorted narrative about Venezuela’s current hardships are believed.
American media has perpetuated a cold-war induced false narrative on the nature of socialism.
When discussing the merits of capitalism and socialism, American media usually restricts the conversation to pointing out that socialist countries in the third world have lower living standards than the United States, a country widely identified with capitalism. Without any context or fair comparison, this alone is supposed to prove the inherent superiority of U.S.-style capitalism.
If the kind of neoliberal “free trade” advocated by U.S. corporations was the solution to global poverty, Mexico, a country long ago penetrated with the North American Free Trade Agreement, would be a shining example of development, not a mess of drug cartels and poverty. The same can be said for oil-rich countries like Nigeria, where exports are massive but the population remains in dire conditions.
The governments of Bangladesh, Honduras, Guatemala, Indonesia, and the Philippines have done everything they can to deregulate the market and accommodate Western ”investment.” Despite the promises of neoliberal theoreticians, their populations have not seen their lives substantially improve.
If one compares the more market-oriented economy of the U.S., not to countries in the global south attempting to develop with a planned economy, but to other Western countries with more social-democratic governments, the inferiority of the “free market” can also be revealed.
Even as the social-democratic welfare states of Europe drift closer to the U.S. economic model with “austerity cuts,” the U.S. still lags behind them in terms of basic societal health. Western European countries with powerful unions, strong socialist and labor parties, and less punitive criminal justice systems tend to have healthier societies.
The American perception that socialism or government intervention automatically create poverty, while a laissez faire approach unleashes limitless prosperity, is simply incorrect. Despite the current hardships, this reality is reflected in the last two decades of Venezuela’s history.
A punishment vote, not a vote for capitalism
The artificially low oil prices have left the Venezuelan state cash-starved, prompting a crisis in the funding of the social programs that were key to strengthening the United Socialist Party.
It is odd that the mainstream press blames “socialism” for the food problems in Venezuela, when the food distributors remain in the hands of private corporations. As Venezuelan political analyst Jesus Silva told me recently: “Most food in Venezuela is imported by private companies, they ask for dollars subsidized by the government oil sales to do that; they rarely produce anything or invest their own money.”
According to Silva, the economic sanctions imposed on Venezuela by the U.S., in addition to the oil crisis, have made it more difficult for the Venezuelan government to pay the private food importing companies in U.S. dollars. In response, the food companies are “running general sabotage.”
“Venezuela’s economy depends on oil sales. Now that oil prices are dropping down, the challenge is to get other sources of economic income,” he explained. “Meanwhile, the opposition is garnering electoral support due to the current economic crisis.”
When the United Socialist Party and its aligned Patriotic Pole lost control of Parliament in December, many predicted the imminent collapse of the Bolivarian government. However, months have passed and this clearly has not taken place.
While a clear majority cast a voto castigo (“punishment vote”) in December, punishing the government for mismanaging the crisis, the Maduro administration has a solid core of socialist activists who remain loyal to the Bolivarian project. Across Venezuela, communes have been established. Leftist activists live together and work in cooperatives. Many of them are armed and organized in “Bolivarian Militias” to defend the revolution.
Even some of the loudest critics of the Venezuelan government admit that it has greatly improved the situation in the country, despite the current hardships.
In December, I spoke to Glen Martinez, a radio host in Caracas who voted for the opposition. He dismissed the notion that free market capitalism would ever return to Venezuela. As he explained, most of the people who voted against the United Socialist Party — himself included — are frustrated with the way the current crisis is being handled, but do not want a return to the neoliberal economic model of the 1999s.
He said the economic reforms established during the Chavez administration would never be reversed. “We are not the same people we were before 1999,” Martinez insisted.
The United Socialist Party is currently engaging in a massive re-orientation, hoping to sharpen its response to economic sabotage and strengthen the socialist direction of the revolution. There is also talk of massive reform in the way the government operates, in order to prevent the extreme examples of corruption and mismanagement that are causing frustration among the population.
The climate is being intensified by a number of recent political assassinations. Tensions continue to exist on Venezuela’s border with the U.S.-aligned government of Colombia. The solid base of socialist activists is not going to let revolution be overturned, and tensions continue to rise. The Maduro and the United Socialist Party’s main task is to hold Venezuela together, and not let the country escalate into a state of civil war.
Americans have been trained by decades of Cold War propaganda to look for any confirmation that ‘socialism means poverty.’ But in the case of Venezuela and other states not governed by the free market, this cliche simply doesn’t ring true.
.
A pro-government supporter wears a T-Shirt with image of Venezuela’s late President Hugo Chavez, as he waits for results during congressional elections in Caracas, Venezuela, Sunday, Dec. 6, 2015. Some members of the opposition are angry after elections officials ordered polling centers to stay open for an extra hour, even if no one was standing in line to vote. Government opponents mobbed some voting stations demanding that the National Guard stick to the original schedule of closing at 6 p.m. (AP Photo/Alejandro Cegarra)
WASHINGTON — (ANALYSIS) The political and economic crisis facing Venezuela is being endlessly pointed to as proof of the superiority of the free market.
Images and portrayals of Venezuelans rioting in the streets over high food costs, empty grocery stores, medicine shortages, and overflowing garbage bins are the headlines, and the reporting points to socialism as the cause.
Indeed, corporate-owned, mainstream media advises Americans to look at the inflation and food lines in Venezuela, and then repeat to themselves clichés they heard in elementary school about how “Communism just doesn’t work.”
In reality, millions of Venezuelans have seen their living conditions vastly improved through the Bolivarian process. The problems plaguing the Venezuelan economy are not due to some inherent fault in socialism, but to artificially low oil prices and sabotage by forces hostile to the revolution.
Starting in 2014, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia flooded the market with cheap oil. This is not a mere business decision, but a calculated move coordinated with U.S. and Israeli foreign policy goals. Despite not just losing money, but even falling deep into debt, the Saudi monarchy continues to expand its oil production apparatus. The result has been driving the price of oil down from $110 per barrel, to $28 in the early months of this year. The goal is to weaken these opponents of Wall Street, London, and Tel Aviv, whose economies are centered around oil and natural gas exports.
And Venezuela is one of those countries. Saudi efforts to drive down oil prices have drastically reduced Venezuela’s state budget and led to enormous consequences for the Venezuelan economy.
At the same time, private food processing and importing corporations have launched a coordinated campaign of sabotage. This, coupled with the weakening of a vitally important state sector of the economy, has resulted in inflation and food shortages. The artificially low oil prices have left the Venezuelan state cash-starved, prompting a crisis in the funding of the social programs that were key to strengthening the United Socialist Party.
Corruption is a big problem in Venezuela and many third-world countries. This was true prior to the Bolivarian process, as well as after Hugo Chavez launched his massive economic reforms. In situations of extreme poverty, people learn to take care of each other. People who work in government are almost expected to use their position to take care of their friends and family. Corruption is a big problem under any system, but it is much easier to tolerate in conditions of greater abundance. The problem has been magnified in Venezuela due to the drop in state revenue caused by the low oil prices and sabotage from food importers.
The Bolivarian experience in Venezuela
Americans have been trained by decades of Cold War propaganda to look for any confirmation that “socialism means poverty.” A quick, simplistic portrait of the problems currently facing Venezuela, coupled with the fact that President Nicolas Maduro describes himself as a Marxist, can certainly give them such a confirmation. However, the actual, undisputed history of socialist construction around the world, including recent decades in Venezuela, tells a completely different story.
Hugo Chavez was elected president of Venezuela in 1999. His election was viewed as a referendum on the extreme free market policies enacted in Venezuela during the 1990s. In December, when I walked through the neighborhoods of central Caracas, Venezuelans spoke of these times with horror.
Demonstrators gather in Bolivar Square to show their support of Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro, in Caracas, Venezuela. The demonstrators gathered as the Organization of American States is meeting to discuss a report from Secretary General Luis Almagro denouncing violations of the Venezuela’s constitution.
Venezuelans told of how the privatizations mandated by the International Monetary Fund made life in Venezuela almost unlivable during the 1990s. Garbage wouldn’t be collected. Electricity would go off for weeks. Haido Ortega, a member of a local governing body in Venezuela, said: “Under previous governments we had to burn tires and go on strike just to get electricity, have the streets fixed, or get any investment.”
Chavez took office on a platform advocating a path between capitalism and socialism. He restructured
A Luz está a revelar a Verdade, e esta libertar-nos-á!
-Só é real o AMOR Incondicional.
-Quando o Amor superar o amor pelo poder, o mundo conhecerá a Paz; Jimi Hendrix.
-Somos almas a ter uma experiência humana!
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