The Trillion-Dollar Conspiracy (35 page)

Originally, Change.gov stated, “Obama will call on citizens of all ages to serve America by developing a plan to
require
[emphasis added] 50 hours of community service in middle school and high school and 100 hours of community service in college every year.”

Following a barrage of criticism over drafting children into Obama’s “national security force,” the website’s wording was softened to read, “Obama will call on citizens of all ages to serve America by setting a goal that all middle school and high school students do 50 hours of community service a year and be developing a plan so that all college students who conduct 100 hours of community service receive a universal and fully refundable tax credit ensuring that the first $4,000 of their college education is completely free.”

Some critics, such as those writing for WorldNetDaily.com and
Modern Conservative,
found Obama’s “civilian security force” reminiscent of Hitler’s brownshirts, the Hitler Youth, and youth brigades in Russia and other Communist countries. Scarier words came from Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel. In his 2006 book
The Plan: Big Ideas for America,
Emanuel wrote, “It’s time for a real Patriot Act that brings out the patriot in all of us. We propose universal civilian service for every young American. Under this plan, all Americans between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five will be asked to serve their country by going through three months of basic training, civil defense preparation, and community service.”

Due to public resistance, such a plan for universal civilian service languished until passage of Obama’s health-care plan, euphemistically called the Patient Protection Affordable Care Act, on March 23, 2010. The Senate version, adopted by the House, included a provision for establishing both a National Health Service Corps as well as a Ready Reserve appointed by the president. The purpose of the Ready Reserve was to meet a perceived need for “additional Commissioned Corps personnel available on short notice (similar to the uniformed service’s reserve program) to assist regular Commissioned Corps personnel to meet both routine public health and emergency response missions.” Is this Obama’s “civilian army”?

ACORN AND SEIU

Z
OMBIES LIKE TO FLOCK
together in packs or large crowds under the control of a master. In the horror movies, one rarely saw a zombie roaming about alone. Today, American zombies prefer to gather in large groups and they too are likely to follow some master, whether it be a gang boss, guru, or political chieftain.

Political leaders do not work alone. Rather, they are surrounded by staffs, mentors, guides, advisers, and other string pullers, and they have minions working for them in the form of nonprofit organizations. Liberals during the 2000 presidential election accused Bush’s Republican supporters of Nazi-style Stormtrooper tactics when they surrounded and occupied a building conducting a recount vote in Palm Beach County, Florida.

But those who cause problems haven’t always sat on the right side of the political fence. Another example of Stormtrooper tactics can be seen in an attack by a Service Employees International Union (SEIU) member on Kenneth Gladney, a young black man who was trying to distribute small flags with a Revolutionary War motto on them at a St. Louis Tea Party meeting. According to Gladney’s attorney, David B. Brown, “Kenneth was approached by an SEIU representative as Kenneth was handing out ‘Don’t Tread on Me’ flags to other conservatives…. The SEIU representative demanded to know why a black man was handing out these flags. The SEIU member used a racial slur against Kenneth, [and] then punched him in the face. Kenneth fell to the ground. Another SEIU member yelled racial epithets at Kenneth as he kicked him in the head and back. Kenneth was also brutally attacked by one other male SEIU member and an unidentified woman.”

Also consider the recent activities of ACORN (the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now), SEIU, and the political action group MoveOn. In 2009, the Census Bureau enlisted ACORN to promote the 2010 census, already under criticism for marking individual homes with global positioning system (GPS) satellite coordinates. Census director Robert Groves, in a letter to ACORN president Maude Hurd, stated that the community organization had become a distraction. ACORN national deputy director, Brian Kettenring, said, “We will continue to do what we’ve said we’ll do, which is encourage people in communities to participate fully in the census.” On September 11, 2009, the U.S. Census Bureau discontinued its partnership with ACORN in the 2010 census after hidden-camera videos recorded four ACORN employees giving tax advice on running a brothel.

Furor arose after a young activist named James O’Keefe posed as an aspiring politician and told ACORN workers he planned to use his girl-friend’s prostitution income to fund future campaigns. He claimed to want advice on how to obtain a loan for a house from which to conduct her profession. In the videos, ACORN workers gave instructions for creating a company in order to prove they had enough income for a house that could serve as a brothel and home for teenage prostitutes.

After secretly filming at the ACORN’s Baltimore office, and later in Washington, D.C., the activists posted the videos on YouTube. ACORN officials said the four offending workers were fired. Yet despite the terminations and assurances from the president and the executive director of ACORN Housing that ACORN Housing staff members are expected to behave ethically and comply with the law, a growing number of Republican politicians began calling for congressional hearings and IRS audits of ACORN.

After the ACORN videos were released on YouTube, the Senate voted 83–7 to block the Housing and Urban Development Department (HUD) from giving grants to ACORN, which ended housing and community funding to the organization. This meant that ACORN would not receive grants for programs such as counseling low-income people on how to get mortgages and for fair housing education and outreach.

Only three days after the Senate stopped ACORN funds, the House followed suit, voting 345–75 (the “nays” being all Democrats) to deny the organization all federal funds. “ACORN has violated serious federal laws, and today the House voted to ensure that taxpayer dollars would no longer be used to fund this corrupt organization,” remarked Republican representative Eric Cantor of Virginia.

Most caring Americans agree that although it is noble to try to help the poorer segments of our society, it is counterproductive, even outrageous, to support groups with taxpayer money who commit corrupt and unlawful acts as well as preach hatred of the United States, causing further division within the nation. This division plays right into the hands of the globalist fascists who, through their control of the mass media and party politics, placed Obama in office and were using his supporters to advance their socialist agenda.

TIPS AND OTHER SNOOPS

O
BAMA’S CIVILIAN ARMY SCHEME
is only the latest in attempts to recruit Americans to spy on their fellow Americans. In midsummer 2002, a program called TIPS (Terrorism Information and Prevention System) was launched by President George W. Bush. The program was part of a larger program called the “Citizen Corps,” which was a program first created by President Bush to mobilize the nation’s citizenry against national security threats. On its website, TIPS describes itself as “a national system for concerned workers to report suspicious activity.” In published material, TIPS advocates said the program was to be administered by the Justice Department, coordinated by FEMA, and operated under the Homeland Security Department. It would involve “millions of American workers who, in the daily course of their work, are in a unique position to see potentially unusual or suspicious activity in public places.” This, of course, referred to postal carriers, meter readers, repair personnel, or anyone who might have an ax to grind against their neighbors. The program was quickly dropped, however, following public outrage, and after the U.S. Postal Service stated that it would not participate in the snitch program.

The U.S. Postal Service stated it had “been approached by Homeland Security regarding Operation TIPS; however, it was decided that the Postal Service and its letter carriers would not be participating in the program at this time.” Nothing was mentioned about whether or not individual carriers could join on their own or if “at this time” left open the possibility that the postal service may participate in TIPS in the future. Despite the postal service’s public reticence, some researchers believe that postal service employees may still be reporting suspicious behavior. It is just not done officially.

Other critics immediately compared the TIPS plan to the Nazi Gestapo, the former East German secret police service, and to Fidel Castro’s Committee for the Defense of the Revolution (CDR), an organization established by Castro on September 28, 1960. With the CDR, Cubans are encouraged to spy on and report any “counterrevolutionary” behavior by their neighbors. An estimated eight million Cubans belong to more than 121,000 committees in the CDR system.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and other public watchdog organizations reacted negatively to Operation TIPS, saying it would create an atmosphere in which Americans would be spying on one another. “The administration apparently wants to implement a program that will turn local cable or gas or electrical technicians into government-sanctioned Peeping Toms,” declared ACLU legislative counsel Rachel King. Of TIPS, Rutherford Institute executive director John Whitehead said, “This is George Orwell’s ‘1984.’ It is an absolutely horrible and very dangerous idea. It’s making Americans into government snoops. President Bush wants the average American to do what the FBI should be doing. In the end, though, nothing is going to prevent terrorists from crashing airplanes into buildings.”

Even former Homeland Security chief Tom Ridge was forced to back-pedal over the TIPS organization, saying, “The last thing we want is Americans spying on Americans.”

Although Ridge still vouched for the TIPS program, the Citizen Corps softened both its language and details about the program after it began to make a national stir.

In July 2002, the website stated Operation TIPS “will be a nationwide program giving millions of American truckers, letter carriers, train conductors, ship captains, utility employees and others a formal way to report suspicious terrorist activity. Operation TIPS, a project of the U.S. Department of Justice, will begin as a pilot program in 10 cities…. Operation TIPS, involving 1 million workers in the pilot stage, will be a national reporting system that allows workers, whose routines make them well-positioned to recognize unusual events, to report suspicious activity…. Everywhere in America, a concerned worker can call a toll-free number and be connected directly to a hotline routing calls to the proper law enforcement agency or other responder organizations when appropriate.”

In an Orwellian act of word changing, by early August 2002, the list of occupations that would participate in TIPS was dropped and the words “suspicious terrorist activity” and “unusual events…suspicious activity” were changed to “suspicious and potentially terrorist-related activity” and “Potentially unusual or suspicious activity in public places.”

The TIPS program was merely an official way for Americans to snoop, and further what author Jim Redden called modern society’s “snitch culture.” From the schoolkid Drug Abuse Resistance Education (DARE) program to professional finger pointers such as the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), more and more Americans were being encouraged to spy and report on one another. It’s one thing to keep an eye out for strangers in the neighborhood and quite another to constantly snoop on the activities of neighbors.

Many people believe that neighborhood snooping went out with Bush-era fearmongering. However, these people should know that the Major Cities Chiefs Association, which includes police chiefs from sixty-three of the largest departments in the United States and Canada, endorsed a program called iWATCH during an annual conference in Denver on October 3, 2009. Los Angeles police chief William Bratton, whose department developed the iWATCH program, called it “the 21st century version of Neighborhood Watch.” The program’s watchword is “If you see something, say something.”

As a policy counsel for the ACLU and a former FBI agent who worked terrorism cases, Mike German was unenthusiastic about iWATCH despite assurances that the program would not infringe on individual liberties. German told the Associated Press he suspects people will fall back on personal biases and stereotypes of what they think a terrorist should look like when deciding to report someone to the police. He said, “That just plays into the negative elements of society and doesn’t really help the situation.”

There have been many cases where innocent people have had their lives unsettled, ruined, or even lost due to egregious snitching. Although these stories are usually not played up in the corporate mass media, the purchase of “snitch” information continues to be a mainstay of federal law enforcement. In 1994, the DEA spent $31.7 million and Customs spent $16.5 million to pay thousands of informants.

Although accurate numbers are hard to come by, former Miami police supervisor and DEA special agent Dennis G. Fitzgerald’s book
Informants and Undercover Investigations
reported that a 2005 inspector general’s report revealed the DEA has about four thousand “confidential sources” at hand on any given day. They may be paid up to $100,000 a year for their information, although their paycheck must be approved by DEA headquarters.

The FBI can pay up to $25,000 to informants for information on serious crimes. Under a program called “Rewards for Justice,” both the U.S. State and Treasury departments can offer money to informants for information leading to the arrest and conviction of any terrorist or terrorist group. By September 2005, more than $50 million had been paid out from this fund. One can only imagine how the lure of $100,000 to a million dollars simply to find some sort of terrorist activity could highly induce a greedy person to make false claims.