Brazilian Court convicts 12 politicians in Mensalão Scandal

By LUIS MIRANDA | THE REAL AGENDA | OCTOBER 2, 2012

The time has come for Jose Dirceu to face justice in the Mensalão corruption scandal.

The Brazilian Supreme Court convicted Monday afternoon 12 individuals from four different political parties which were government allies during the Lula administration. These convictions are part of the process known as Mensalão, a corruption case where 38 people were brought to trial charged with seven crimes including active and passive corruption, money laundering and gang formation.

So far the Supreme Court issued 22 convictions and four acquittals. The acquittals were issued due to what the court said was lack of evidence. Monday’s convictions relate to 12 politicians from the political parties known as PP, PR, PTB and PMDB, which up until today are close to the Brazilian government and members of the Executive power.

According to the judges from the Supreme Court these politicians, which include MPs and party chairmen, such as Roberto Jefferson, president of the PTB and informer in the corruption case since 2005, had created a corruption scheme that brought former President Lula da Silva to the brink of losing his mandate. Despite multiple accusations against Lula himself, the Court has refused to hear testimony from those who accuse him of knowing about the corruption scheme that paid political groups in exchange for political support.

These 12 politicians have been convicted of having bribed with money taken from public coffers, to amass support for the Lula government and sell their votes in favor of the bills introduced by the Government, including the reform of the Social Security System.

The dean of the Supreme, Celso de Mello, who sentenced the 12 politicians for the three crimes charged by the Attorney General, made a harsh reflection on the serious consequences of corruption by politicians who should be the guarantors of democratic ethics. Mello defined them as “empowered criminals.” He said that “no one lives with dignity in a state taken by corruption”.

Mello had question the very same projects approved by people being accused of bribery today. He remembered that, for example, the judgments issued by a corrupt judge is invalid. The Chief Justice Ayres Britto, quoted Ulysses Guimarães, while explaining that “political corruption is the cancer of democracy.”

In the next few days, the focus will be on the block of inmates that belong to the Workers Party (PT), who, when the scandal broke out, were the ones responsible for the corruption scheme. They include José Dirceu, Lula’s right hand man and two-time presidents of PT, the former party member José Genuino and the treasurer Delubio Suares.

The three are accused of bribery, and of being the corrupters of political allies and of forming an organized gang as they sought to perpetuate their grasp of power in Brazilian politics and the government.

The possible sentence for Dirceu is the trickiest because, according to political scientists such sentence would also taint former president Lula, who maintains that he did not know anything about the corruption scheme known as the Mensalão.

An acquittal of Dirceu, who still claims he is innocent of the charges, would indirectly absolve Lula who insists that the ongoing process in the Supreme is a way to put in doubt the projects that his government conducted during the eight years he was in power, which he says, helped 30 million Brazilians to get out of poverty.

The PT, one of the most corrupt organizations in the country, has called on its militants and social formations to take to the streets to “defend the attempted coup against Lula”.

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European Union considers defunding Food Bank Programs

By LUIS MIRANDA | THE REAL AGENDA | SEPTEMBER 5, 2012

Food Banks feed two million people in Spain, twice the number of people than they did in 2007, but their future is now uncertain. Although the financial crisis that has ravaged the continent turned them into the people’s pantry, their existence is now being contested by European authorities who question whether these food banks should be funded at all.

Food banks have been funded by the EU since 1987, with twenty members as beneficiaries, but their support for 2014 and beyond will depend on the new European budgetary framework. The stakes are high between supporters of austerity and cohesion while poverty increases as a result of the crisis, 116 million EU citizens were at risk of poverty in 2010, two million more than the previous year.

The debate about funding — or not — the food banks will begin this month. The champions of moderation in spending, led by Germany and seconded by the UK, Sweden, Denmark, Finland and Holland, consider that the EU should not provide support to food banks. Last February, the European Commission decided to continue the program for this year and next while “noted the opinion of several Member States not to continue the program beyond 2013,” said a spokesman Commissioner for Social Affairs and Inclusion.

The supporters of so-called cohesion will face the defenders of feeding the people in the EU, a task that the cohesion group believes should rest with each European nation and not the EU. They have a head start: the Commission supports continued funding for food banks for the period 2014-2020, while lowering the total amount of 2,500 million euros. “It is a matter of European solidarity, more important than ever in times of economic crisis,” said the Commission. Another change is that the program should not be directed according to the chapter of the Common Agricultural Policy, which was born in the lee of agricultural surpluses. Instead, it should run according to a new framework based on ‘Social Spending and Cohesion’.

The discussion comes when, due to the crisis, “there are doubts whether the emergency food aid and other social assistance for those most in need could be completely eliminated if the food aid program of the EU is closed,” said the spokesman for the Social Affairs Commissioner.

The favorable position of the Commission is a true relief for Spain, for example, despite the funding cuts being handled. “The proposal is 2,500 million euros compared to 3,500 in the previous period,” said Fernando Miranda, the president of the Spanish Agricultural Guarantee Fund, which works within the Ministry of Agriculture. The fund is responsible for implementing the plan to assist the neediest people in the EU. Spain is the second country that benefits the most from the food bank program, with 80, 4 million euros this year.

“The downgrade would mean a drop in annual funding from 500 to about 350 million euros for all countries,” lamented the president of the Spanish Federation of Food Banks, Jose Antonio Busto. He added that the European funding provides about 40% of the food, and the rest comes from donations from supermarkets and other sources. This reduction would result, predictably, in less funding for Spain. According to his calculations, Spain would receive between “50 and 60 million euros a year, which resembles pre-crisis levels,” estimated Miranda. That is about 34% less than today.

“The drop in funding would be a problem, because demand continues to increase in Spain” warns Busto. Now two million people are fed through the food bank program. In 2007, the number was of about 850,000 people. From the people dependent on food bank programs,  21.8% belonged to the group that lives below the poverty line — 19.5% in 2009 — who have been added to the list due to the increasing unemployment.

100 million Americans Poor or near Poverty Line

By MAC SLAVO | SHTFPLAN.com | JULY 23, 2012

It’s bad out there. Really bad.

As world leaders finally begin to admit that we are smack dab in the middle of another Great Depression and the economy stands at the cusp of another earth-shaking collapse of the financial system, the US census reports that nearly 100 million Americans are now classified as living in poverty or are considered “near poor.”

That’s nearly 1/3 of our populace who are living in the worst economic conditions in nearly fifty years.

We haven’t seen these highs since the mid ’60s. That survey indicates the poverty level has grown from 15.1% to as high as 15.7% [since 2010], and it’s spreading at record levels to many socio-economic groups from unemployed workers, suburban families, to the poorest poor.

…More discouraged workers are giving up on the job market and unemployment aid is running out. They found that the suburbs are seeing an increase in poverty

Those experts surveyed also predict poverty will remain above the pre-recession level of 12.5% for many more years.

Via Yahoo:

It’s not encouraging any way you look at it. And if you look at near poverty, which is another measure – the next income bracket up… you’re looking at just a huge number of Americans; I think on the order of almost 100 million people are either poor or close to poor. And poor, just in case you haven’t kept up on the definition is $11,000 a year for an individual or $22,000 for a family of four.

Poverty is up 25% since President Obama took the helm, and as predicted by the survey, will continue unabated as economic conditions worsen.

There can be no economic recovery – ever – if we continue down the path we’re on:

They are responsible for the overspending and making of promises that cannot be kept and thus the stifling of the economy as a whole as resources are shifted to an infantile and futile attempt to maintain the illusion of prosperity.

Prepare for a storm, my friends, for it is coming our way.

Source: Market Ticker

For 100 million of our fellow countrymen today, the storm is already pounding them with hurricane-like winds.

The contagion is most certainly spreading.

Twenty two percent of Americans are unemployed, underemployed or simply no longer counted, and half of American households are dependent on some type of government benefit to make ends meet. In fact, more people are applying for government disability benefits each month than there are jobs created.

The storm is coming, and when it strikes the government will be powerless to stop it, despite the belief by the majority of Americans that existing social safety nets and emergency response plans will bail them out.

How do you create a Prison? You Turn the Lights Off

By LUIS MIRANDA | THE REAL AGENDA | MAY 25, 2012

As it is often explained, the success of a control grid relies not on the force it utilizes to impose or manage such control, but on the successful application of measures to gain unlimited control. What happens when you put a live frog in a pot with water that is boiled slowly, under low fire? Nothing. The frog won’t realize it is being cooked for dinner until it’s too late, until its flesh has begun to burn. The heat increases so slowly that the frog is unable to notice. The boiling water is similar to the system that globalists used for the past century to make people comfortable with rather adverse situations. The heat has been accumulating over the decades and we never realized we were that unsuspecting frog.

The desire to control doesn’t always come with rigid rules that violently impose a decision. The use of brute force is a tool of the past. Control is acquired over time, with lots of patience and by using a technique called Incrementalism. In the past, when men where freer no one questioned whether there was a need to keep freedom from being limited or eradicated, so a group of very smart powerful men decided to take advantage of the lack of vigilance and began creating a gigantic cooking pot to put us all into it and turned on the fire. Then, they began implementing a set of policies thought of and perfected many years before, and the passage and acceptance of those policies began raising the fire little by little. Every so often, a new level of control was achieved, which inversely meant less freedom for all of us. But that new level of lesser freedom wasn’t noticed by most people and it rapidly became the ‘new normal’. This scenario repeated itself over decades and brought us where we are today.

The frogs are almost completely boiled and proportionally only a few of them have noticed that their bodies are burning. Many of those awaken frogs chose to do something about it, but most frogs were still asleep. In the last decade, more frogs have waken up and now there are frogs all over the world slapping others on the face to show them that bubbles began to form under the water and those bubbles are already coming up to the surface. The courageous frogs have even dared to show the sleeping frogs the burn marks on their skin. But since the burning feeling has been the ‘new normal’ for a while, the unsuspecting sleepy frogs don’t think it is a problem to have burning marks on the skin. In fact, those frogs think the others who are warning them are crazy, because they complain about the burning, so they just go back to sleep while their skins continue to get redder and redder. For those frogs, perhaps it is too late. Other frogs have already been fully cooked, mentally and physically.

How did the powerful men managed to build those cooking pots around us, turn on the fire and let us cook without any major opposition? They raised the fire very slowly, kept us distracted and believing we were all as free as our ancestors were and even more important, taught us not to think about whether we were still free or not, or if we had lost any freedom, rights or privileges. Today, those cooking pots resemble not only the world, but the country we live in, the city, the neighborhood, the street where we grew up on.

The industrial era brought about development and that development allowed people to achieve a great degree of comfort and progress. But that state of affairs did not occur randomly; it was all calculated. For anyone who read history, it may be easier to understand the analogy of the boiling frog and how it all plays out from now on. Industrialization didn’t only bring progress and comfort, it also brought a lifestyle and that in turn resulted in previously thought out standards of living. People went from been free in their houses and farms, producing their food and enjoying family life and self-sufficiency to getting dragged into highly polluted concrete and steel prisons which became modern and trendy, so everyone wanted to live there. They were then given trinkets and technology, fashion and glamour to make sure they stayed inside the cities, even when that supposed higher standard of living suffered and decayed over the years under pressure because of large agglomerations, traffic and contamination. People thought they came to the cities to be better, because it would open the door to more opportunity. That is where all the trendies lived, wasn’t it? But that was not the plan.

The original plan was to make people like their misery, which at first looked like heaven. People had not come to the cities to live, they had come to work under tightly controlled rules. They arrived to the cities as part of a large experiment that if successful would allow the globalists to not only have people work for them, but to enjoy their slavery. And it worked. Most of the frogs are half-way cooked and they are loving it. A minority of the frogs that managed to wake up are adapting and preparing. The smarter ones already left the cooking pot by jumping out of it. They left the ‘reservation’ to go back to free lawn, the open backyard where they once lived, where their ancestors spent their lives, which is where they were all meant to be. As for the rest of the frogs, they will stay in the ‘reservation’; some of them fighting the boiling water while others continue to cook away.

Meanwhile, the globalist plan to keep us all in the prison cities continues. When people try to wake up and look around for signs of the prison in the highly dense cities, they don’t see it. They are looking for cell bars, barb wire and high fences. When someone says that there are concentration camps being built, people look around again in hopes of noticing the large open spaces with the guard towers, the loud speakers and the train tracks next to them. Again, they failed to see that the prison is their homes, their streets, their neighborhoods and ultimately, their city. The powerful men who decades or centuries ago sought to attract free people into their highly advanced, good looking prison cities achieved their goal to such extent that people can’t even see they live in them. So the system that is in place and the men that are in control of it decided that it is time to turn the clock back, as they had carefully planned. The cities people got used to love are now devolving and becoming what they were supposed to be: PRISONS.

Is it not easier to control people when they are tightly packed in densely populated areas? All you have to do is close the access to those cities in order to get control of who and what comes in and goes out. How does anyone transform New York into a prison? It is as simple as closing the tunnels and bridges. How do the controllers train for that? You take advantage of ‘emergencies’ to implement the plans and practice for the closings as it happened on 9/11. How do you close the Washington DC metro area? By doing the same thing. But how about larger cities that due to their landscape or geographic layout are harder to close and control or cities that emerged back in the days of the industrial revolution where big factories and assembly lines attracted and employed countryside folks for decades? Well, you start by destroying their economies by paying the factories and assembly lines to leave. That will cause massive unemployment and people will have to depend on the government to live, feed themselves and have a place to call home. Then, when most people are in that condition, you start packing them up tighter and tighter areas by decreasing or eliminating services until everyone lives in a smaller, more easily controllable section of the once booming metropolis. Then you turn the lights off.

This is where many cities in the United States are right now. Perhaps the most deplorable of all of them is Detroit. A recent article by Bloomberg demonstrates that the globalist plan is well under way. According to the article, 139 squared miles of the city has 60 percent less people than back in 1950. Many areas have turned into decaying slums with no power or life, because many if not all people have left to parts of the city where it is safer to live. Other facts provided by Bloomberg are eye opening as well. For example, 88,000 streetlights are broken and they are not close to being fixed, because the city doesn’t have any money to do so. Residents of Detroit are now afraid to walk outside even during the early hours of the evening. The only solution that gained steam for Detroit was reducing the areas where people live. In other words, concentrating city dwellers in tighter places. Sounds familiar? “You have to identify those neighborhoods where you want to concentrate your population. We’re not going to light distressed areas like we light other areas,” said Chris Brown, Detroit’s Chief Operating Officer. But Detroit isn’t the only city that is turning into a dungeon.

In fact, the problem isn’t about a city or a few cities that are facing economic trouble and as a consequence are boxing their residents into smaller areas. Complete states like Illinois, California and Massachusetts are struggling to keep conventional life going. The lack of funds to finance a city or a state isn’t a casualty of the bad economic times we’re facing though. That part was also planned. Cities and states hide and mal invest taxpayer monies by having a double set of books known as the Comprehensive Annual Financial Reports. One set of books is for public consumption and the other is to manage the real finances, the money that is taken away or that disappears into black wholes, pet projects and nonexistent investments. The consequences of corruption at all levels is bad services, insecurity and poverty, which to many frogs (people) is the only possible option, so they decide to stay in the cooking pot (city). Those who have options leave to other cities or states, but the majority stays. Later, basic services such as police, fire departments, paramedics, water and electricity are made available to only a few areas, because it is too dangerous to send public servants to cesspit looking neighborhoods.

The plan Detroit has, according to Bloomberg is to “rethink the city” in order to reorganize it or reconfigure it with areas defined as residential, business, green spaces and agricultural. Much attention to the last area. Having agriculture in a city is not necessarily good. Food will be closer, but it also means people won’t even need to leave the tight areas they live in to get their food. Is this convenient or perhaps another ‘new normal’? Who will control the flow of food in a mainly government-sponsored prison city? Are dark streets and unsafe neighborhoods the new normal? How is it that globalists manage to destroy countries, their economies, their way of life and they are not called terrorists? Well, they did it incrementally. What will the future bring? Nothing better unfortunately, unless the rest of the frogs wake up immediately.

Detroit’s plan will not work, because it isn’t supposed to work. California’s plan will not work. Illinois’ plan will not work. And ff people in the prison cities open their eyes and feel the burning the globalists also have a plan for it. Police and Army on the streets will comfortably take care of it. They will do whatever it takes maintain control on behalf of their bosses. Mexican, Canadian, Colombian and Ukranian troops will join together to kill and destroy. With California reaching 36 percent unemployment and Washington DC almost 52 percent, it is hard to see how these and other states in similar condition will get any better. Right now, South Carolina’s unemployment is 31.2%, Rhode Island 29.8%, Washington 29.0%, Arizona 29.0%
Nevada 28.8%, Idaho 28.4%, North Carolina 28.2%, Missouri 27.7% and Louisiana 27.6%. Can it get any worse than this. Sure, and it will.

In the meantime, the US government has approved the National Defense Authorization Act, that allows the government to kill anyone it deems a threat to national security. They’ve almost banned free speech and public protest. The TSA are patting people down on major highways. The Army is on the road checking cars illegally. The government uses sound canyons against the public as the police isolates globalist gatherings in the very same cities.

Welcome to 1984.

How the West was Conquered

by Luis R. Miranda
The Real Agenda
February 28, 2012

The existence of society as we know it today is not a random event of nature or anything of the sort. Today’s society is a direct reflection of the gigantic plans for social engineering that were put in place and gradually imposed on the people. Globally, people have gone from being independent, self-sufficient beings to becoming dependent sheep who need their big corporate-controlled government to provide them with everything they need to survive. That was the plan from the beginning. Now, people are at the mercy of large multinational corporations — mainly banks — who turned them into their slaves by using governmental agencies to impose their policies. But it doesn’t stop there. To add insult to injury, the masses believe they actually are free and that they have choices, as supposed to being livestock, which is what reality demonstrates.

For many decades, this phenomenon was widely unknown by most people who were dependent on the system. But after the elites behind the social engineering became more arrogant than usual and started to speak openly about their plans, a minority of the people found out about it. Today, a larger minority is knowledgeable about the plans of the elites, but the masses are still ignorant or in denial. The main cause of this denial is the fact that the masses are those people who for decades and decades have benefited from big explicit or hidden socialist policies which are tools to get people hooked on their dope. As many already know, letting go of an addiction is pretty hard, especially when such an addiction is everything you’ve known. Try asking a homeless person to stop sniffing shoe glue to calm down his hunger without showing him a warm meal. That is exactly what it would be like. Of course there are those who prefer their dependency and enslavement to independence and self-governance. Those are the societies where most people, regardless of their low income and lousy conditions are conformed to keep on living in slums and receiving the miserable help that their governments provide them, as if that was the way it is supposed to be. Clear examples of these societies include Venezuela, Cuba, Brazil, to cite a few, where people stand behind dictators or candidates who assure them that their welfare checks will continue to come, instead of providing adequate market conditions for them to pick themselves up from the filth they live in.

But how did the technocrats manage to get everyone into the barn? They’ve always managed to stay in control. They’ve always owned the money, the resources, the politicians and the governments, and therefore the people of the world. They worked by taking control of the poorest and most devastated regions of the world with their government-sponsored, although corporate-financed programs to keep billions of people under their boots. After setting roots there, they succeeded when implementing their centralized control policies in developing countries i.e. Argentina in 1990′s, slowing their path to development and in most cases stopping them to a halt. Their success in poor countries leveraged them to impose their programs in developing countries, which they did for the past 50-100 years. With a firmer footstep in most of the planet, the controllers brought their system to the more sophisticated nations, the developed world, which they had purposely supported in order to legitimize their colonizing and conquering schemes.

That is where we are now. Currently, countries that had strong potential to become developed nations, as well as industrialized ones, are suffering the consequences of opening the door to the men who were always in control on the outside. Their success lies in their ability to convince or otherwise penalize or buy off those who hadn’t opened their doors. For this penalties and buy offs to work, they had to create an external “legitimate” system of control that could impose their policies on the sovereign nations so that they could be attacked, invaded and destroyed to later be absorbed. From these plans is where emerged organizations such as the League of Nations, the United Nations, the World Health Organization, The World Trade Organization, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, The European Union, the African Union, the North American Union, Mercosur, the G-20, the G-8, and so on. These entities were established by the technocrats and are supported by people who were bought off or convinced to join their system. These people are infiltrated in all strata of society, from education, to academia, finance, religion, the scientific community, the government agencies and of course those who work for large corporations.

In order not to raise questions, the elites also created foundations and philanthropic organizations which they finance and control and which helped them implement their policies, always for the sake of the common good. This collectivist way of thinking is perhaps the most successful tool when convincing the masses that it was better to think collectively, to steal from Peter to support Paul. Then came the term social justice which worked as another hook to attract more supporters because of its collectivist origin. Most people changed their way to see the world. Instead of supporting individual rights and liberties, they became cheerleaders for big government to decide what was best for them and their peers. This marked the appearance of centralized government at the local, state and national levels and the creation of laws and policies that gave government control over individual rights and responsibilities such as private property, security, food availability, free speech, healthcare and others. A central entity suddenly “knew better” about how to manage local resources than the people themselves. The power of the people shrank as the big governments grew out of control and behind them, the elites amassed more and more power right in front of the unsuspecting masses. The Welfare State, the Socialist State, the Communist State — all a creation of the globalists — were at the gates waiting to take over. In order to impose these systems of government then created conflicts among countries with secret destabilizing attacks or by practicing the Hegelian Dialect of Problem, Reaction Solution.

When the sovereign nations resisted the attacks of the elitists through their supranational organizations or their corporate-controlled governments, they used military force usually backed up by fake intelligence or false events in order to invade those nations “to democratize them” and “bring peace”. These military actions were and continue to be supported by false threats or by the abuses committed by dictators that were put in place by the globalists themselves. This way, the technocrats managed to consolidate power by further controlling governments or puppet governments as well as to rob nations from their natural resources. All the riches of the planet became property of the corporations who invaded former independent nations at the behest of their puppet governments right after the wars ended. The consequence of their successful economic, political and military conquest campaigns was the end of the nation-states, which the globalists had as one of their main objectives when they started their crusades decades and decades ago. Additional success for the elites was spurred by their well-established controlled opposition movements — World Economic Forum, World Social Forum — in which they involved community leaders in order to swindle the people into believing that their representatives could actually make a difference by joining these corporate funded organizations. But how could they help fight those they deemed their opposition when the very same forces were at the head of such “alternative movements”? They couldn’t.

But perhaps the last nail on the coffin in favor of the globalist take over was the campaign orchestrated by the main stream media — also in the pocket of the corporations — that sought to blame Capitalism for the current global economic depression. This campaign is not new. The globalists, through their economic, financial and media operations have been very clear that their plan was always to build up society in order to extract as much riches as possible so that they could later implode the global economy and with it western society.  Right now, the globalists are leading a charge to swallow countries like Greece, Spain, Portugal, and others in Europe, after they successfully  took control of the United States, Mexico, Canada, most of the Middle East, Oceania and much of Africa through their proxy governments and puppet presidents. It rests to see if the people of the world, the informed minority that everyday grows larger, will do what minorities have always done throughout history: to save the ignorant majority as well as themselves from the technocrat elite that is very close to completing their long-awaited plans to destroy the world as we know it today.


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