Friday, September 8, 2017

This day in WND history: Clinton Foundation a 'vast criminal conspiracy'

ORIGINAL LINK

clinton_foundation

Wall Street expert: Clinton Foundation a ‘vast criminal conspiracy’

WND-20-YearsSept. 9, 2015: Evidence among emails released by the State Department in 2015 revealed Hillary Clinton maintained deep ties to the Clinton Foundation while serving as U.S. secretary of state.

Wall Street analyst and investor Charles Ortel charged the Clintons and their associates had been engaged in a “vast criminal conspiracy to defraud the general public, enrich themselves and entrench their political influence.”

Ortel said he believed the evidence called for a criminal investigation by the FBI as well as by attorneys general in four states where the Clinton Foundation was registered, maintained offices and/or had aggressively solicited individual donations: Arkansas, Massachusetts, California and New York.

He published on his website an executive summary of his “First Foundation Report” of his investigation into the operations of the Bill, Hillary, & Chelsea Clinton Foundation.

“Since July 2002, the worst known example of flagrant and unpunished abuses by a U.S. domiciled, public charity is the record of voluminous flawed, inaccurate, false and misleading public disclosures made by representatives of the Bill, Hillary, and Chelsea Clinton Foundation (the “Clinton Foundation”), as trustees, executives and agents illegally solicited across state, and national boundaries and raised close to $2 billion from donors who were either willingly or unwillingly duped,” Ortel alleged.

Former President Bill Clinton with former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton

Former President Bill Clinton with former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton

Ortel shared with WND his investigative files amounting to hundreds of pages of tables, exhibits and appendices. The documentation supported his claim that between 2002 and 2013, the Clinton Foundation solicited potential donors across state and national boundaries to raise close to $2 billion.

“The biggest unanswered questions concern why state, federal, and foreign government authorities have failed, so far, to prosecute trustees, executives, and agents of the Clinton Foundation and its constituent elements for ceaselessly promoting a global criminal enterprise in the guise of philanthropy,” Ortel wrote.

“Known and unprosecuted felony and misdemeanor offenses of Clinton Foundation Trustees and others include taking donations under false pretenses, diverting donations from their intended purposes, failing to exercise required control over operations, creating substantial private gain, allowing insiders to appropriate illegally created private gains, and thereby corroding an otherwise well deserved reputation that many American charities rightfully have obtained over decades, for performing good works worldwide in conformity with applicable laws and regulations.”

View the full story

To see WND highlights from every calendar date, click here.
Never miss another big story. Sign up for WND’s free email news alerts right now!



via IFTTT

The Intercept should B ashamed of publishing this drivel calling Syria a Nazi white supremacist-loving state theintercept.com/2017/09/08/syr…

ORIGINAL LINK
lD3OqrfE_normal.jpg Rania Khalek
@RaniaKhalek
The Intercept should B ashamed of publishing this drivel calling Syria a Nazi white supremacist-loving state theintercept.com/2017/09/08/syr…

via IFTTT

Thursday, September 7, 2017

JAMIE DIMON’S $13 BILLION SECRET—REVEALED

Four years ago, JPMorgan Chase reached a then-record settlement with the Department of Justice after, among other things, the bank received a copy of a U.S. attorney’s draft complaint documenting its alleged role in underwriting fraudulent securities in the years leading up to the 2008 financial crisis. Following the bank’s $13 billion financial agreement, the draft complaint was never filed. Then the bank paid another settlement to prevent a separate legal case from potentially unearthing it. The contents of the draft complaint have long been a financial-crisis mystery, a Great White Whale of a document. At least until now.

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/09/jamie-dimon-billion-dollar-secret-jp-morgan

Wednesday, September 6, 2017

Dad Teaches Kids to Ride the Bus. But CPS Says He Can Never Leave Them Alone, Ever.

ORIGINAL LINK

BusAdrian Crook, the dad behind the blog 5Kids1Condo, taught his four oldest kids—ages 7, 8, 9, and 11—how to ride the city bus to and from school for the past two years in Vancouver.

The result? Fantastic. The kids love it, and became friends with the bus drivers. Once Adrian even received an email from a random bus passenger saying what a pleasure his well-behaved kids were.

But (you knew there had to be a but) recently someone reported these "unsupervised" kids to the Ministry of Children and Family Development—the Canadian equivalent of Child Protective Services—and the agency opened an inquiry. They came to Adrian's house and interviewed each child separately. Aware of the stakes, Adrian tried to be cordial. He provided character references. And, adds Crook:

I even suggested the Ministry shadow the kids on a bus ride, but they declined.

While the Ministry conducted their weeks-long investigation, they had me sign a "Safety Plan" stating that the kids wouldn't take the bus alone until the investigation was completed. I returned to spending several hours a day transiting the kids back and forth from school, a reduction in freedom the kids didn't understand.

Then decision day finally came.

Can you guess what happened? My guess is that you can:

It started off in a favourable way, with the supervisor insisting that I'd gone "above and beyond" what any parent should have to do to train their kids to be responsible and conscious transit riders….

Ultimately, however, For the Ministry had checked with their lawyers "across the country" and the Attorney General, and determined that children under 10 years old could not be unsupervised in or outside the home, for any amount of time. That included not just the bus, but even trips across the street to our corner store, a route I can survey in its entirety from my living room window.

That bizarre and benighted decision was based on a British Columbia case we've discussed here, in which a judge ruled that no child under 10 can stay home alone. As terrible as that decision was, it was irrelevant to Crook's situation. That was about one 8-year-old, home alone, not four kids together, on the bus.

So what? Crook continues:

The Ministry also said that in other provinces, the legal age to be unsupervised is much higher. In fact, only three provinces have legislated minimum ages at which kids can be left home alone (and BC isn't one of them): Ontario (16), New Brunswick (12) and Manitoba (12). Only Quebec has a statutory minimum age for being left alone in a vehicle, and that's 7 years old.

Does anyone really think there are no children under 16 being left unsupervised in Ontario?

Of course not. But does anyone really think common sense is what we're talking about here? The social workers gave every made-up reason for grounding the kids:

[They] stated that the comparatively wide-ranging freedoms we enjoyed in our childhood were, "before we knew better" – despite widely available crime statistics that demonstrate our kids live in a safer world today than the one we grew up in. ….

Anyone who knows me can tell you I'm a firm believer in evidence-based policy-making, so this fear-driven assertion rung hollow for me.

What's more, the kids already had been taking the bus for two years—safely! So clearly this investigation "safety" plan was only in reaction to the busybody's call, for that is all it takes:

It's a "Cover Your Ass" culture, where even if a trivial issue is reported the Ministry cannot condone it, lest they be responsible for future issues. The Ministry has no incentive or ability to dismiss a report or allow a situation to continue – regardless of how many steps a parent has taken to ensure the safety and well-being of their children.

Our family's freedom of mobility has been dramatically restricted for little reason beyond the complaint of an anonymous person.

The dad is running a GoFundMe page to pay for the legal case he hopes to make against the government. In the meantime, he reminds us all that when the state insists that the only acceptable parenting is helicopter parenting, it is committing a serious crime of its own: robbery. It "robs our children of agency, independence, and responsibility."



via IFTTT

Tuesday, September 5, 2017

Ex-prosecutor: Obama, not Comey, let Hillary skate

ORIGINAL LINK
Former FBI Director James Comey testifies before a House committee Sept. 28, 2016.

Former FBI Director James Comey testifies before a House committee Sept. 28, 2016.

The recent disclosure that then-FBI Director James Comey prepared a statement letting Hillary Clinton off the hook for her abuse of classified information more than two months before his public announcement shouldn’t be a surprise, according to a former federal prosecutor.

Comey simply was following a defense strategy voiced by President Obama in April 2016 and leaked by the State Department a month later “of concocting a crime no one was claiming Clinton had committed,” said former assistant U.S. attorney Andrew McCarthy, writing in National Review’s blog The Corner.

President Obama (White House photo)

President Obama (White House photo)

Obama, his Justice Department and Comey insisted the bar for prosecuting Clinton was evidence she had transmitted classified information with an intent to harm the United States.

Like the reporting you see here? Sign up for free news alerts from WND.com, America’s independent news network.

But the relevant statute doesn’t require intent. The evidence that she, as Comey admitted, willfully transmitted classified information, was grossly negligent in handling it, and withheld or destroyed government records was enough to prosecute her.

“With media-Democrat complex help, they peddled the narrative that she could not be convicted absent this ‘malicious intent,’ in a desperate effort to make the publicly known evidence seem weak,” McCarthy wrote.

“Meanwhile, they quietly hamstrung FBI case investigators in order to frustrate the evidence-gathering process.”

Moreover, McCarthy points out, Obama knew at the time that he had communicated with Clinton over her non-secure, private communications system, using an alias. The Obama administration refused to disclose the email exchanges because they undoubtedly involve classified conversations between the president and his secretary of state, McCarthy said.

The bottom line, he said, is it “would not have been possible to prosecute Mrs. Clinton for mishandling classified information without it being clear that President Obama had engaged in the same conduct.”

And the Obama administration “was never, ever going to allow that to happen.”

When evidence began mounting that Clinton was guilty of gross negligence in her handling of classified information, the Obama administration rewrote the statute in an attempt to impose the “imaginary intent standards” and by “offering absurd rationalizations for not applying the statute as written,” McCarthy said.

“That plan was in place and already being implemented when Director Comey began drafting the ‘findings’ he would announce months later. But it was not Comey’s plan. It was Obama’s plan.”

Comey’s April statement was revealed last week by Sens. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and Lindsey Graham, R-S.C. in a letter to new FBI Director Christopher Wray.

The senators pointed out that as of early May 2016, the FBI had not yet interviewed Clinton.

“Moreover, it had yet to finish interviewing sixteen other key witnesses, including Cheryl Mills, Bryan Pagliano, Heather Samuelson, Justin Cooper and John Bentel. These individuals had intimate and personal knowledge relating to Secretary Clinton’s non-government server, including helping her build and administer the device,” the senators wrote.

Obama was ‘calling the shots’

McCarthy said it’s important to understand that while Comey was the face of the investigation, he was not calling the shots.

McCarthy recalled that on April 10, 2016, President Obama publicly stated that Clinton had shown “carelessness” in using a private email server to handle classified information.

Obama made a point of insisting she had not intended to endanger national security, even though intent is not an element of the criminal statutes relevant to her email scandal.

The president acknowledged that classified information had been transmitted through her server, but he claimed the importance of that fact had been vastly overstated.

McCarthy argues that is “precisely the reasoning that Comey relied on in ultimately absolving Clinton.”

In his July 5, 2016, news conference, Comey stated that Clinton had been “extremely careless” in using a private email server to handle classified information but had not intended to endanger national security.

In May 2016, the Obama Justice Department was leaking to the Washington Post that Clinton probably would not be charged and that her top aide, Cheryl Mills, was considered a cooperating witness rather than a co-conspirator.

Citing its sources inside the investigation, the Post said there was “scant evidence tying Clinton to criminal wrongdoing” because there was “scant evidence that Clinton had malicious intent in [the] handling of e-mails.”

McCarthy noted that like Obama, the Post and its sources neglected to mention that Clinton’s felonies did not require proof of “malicious intent” or any purpose to harm the United States.

In May 2016, McCarthy pointed out, the Obama Justice Department was simultaneously barring the FBI from asking Mills questions that went to the heart of the emails investigation. The agency couldn’t ask her about the process by which Clinton and her underlings decided which of her 60,000 emails to surrender to the State Department and which would be withheld. Ultimately, about 33,000 being were withheld as “private.”

“This was the start of a series of Justice Department shenanigans we would come to learn about: Cutting off key areas of inquiry; cutting inexplicable immunity deals; declining to use the grand jury to compel evidence; agreeing to limit searches of computers (in order to miss key time-frames when obstruction occurred); agreeing to destroy physical evidence (laptop computers); failing to charge and squeeze witnesses who made patently false statements; allowing subjects of the investigation to act as lawyers for other subjects of the investigation (in order to promote the charade that some evidence was off-limits due to the attorney-client privilege); and so on.”

McCarthy concluded that if one wants to say Comey “went along for the ride rather than bucking the tide (as he concedes doing when Lynch directed him to call the Clinton probe a ‘matter,’ not an ‘investigation’), that’s fair. But the fact that Comey already knew in April what he would say in July has long been perfectly obvious.”

“The Obama administration was going to follow its leader. What Comey ultimately stated was just a repeat of what Obama was openly saying in April, and what Obama’s Justice Department was leaking to the press in May. ”

Like the reporting you see here? Sign up for free news alerts from WND.com, America’s independent news network.



via IFTTT

Sunday, September 3, 2017

Roman Empire: Ominous parallels with modern America

ORIGINAL LINK
Gladiators in Rome

Gladiators in Rome

The fall of Rome was a culmination of external and internal factors.

Great Wall of China

By 220 A.D., the Later Eastern Han Dynasty had extended sections of the Great Wall of China along its Mongolian border. This resulted in the Northern Huns attacking west instead of east. This caused a domino effect of tribes migrating west across Central Asia, and overrunning the Western Roman Empire.

Open borders

Illegal immigrants poured across the Roman borders: Visigoths, Ostrogoths, Franks, Anglos, Saxons, Alemanni, Thuringians, Rugians, Jutes, Picts, Burgundians, Lombards, Alans, Vandals, as well as African Berbers and Arab raiders.

Will and Ariel Durant wrote in “The Story of Civilization” (Vol. 3 – Caesar and Christ, Simon & Schuster, 1944, p. 366): “If Rome had not engulfed so many men of alien blood in so brief a time, if she had passed all these newcomers through her schools instead of her slums, if she had treated them as men with a hundred potential excellences, if she had occasionally closed her gates to let assimilation catch up with infiltration, she might have gained new racial and literary vitality from the infusion, and might have remained a Roman Rome, the voice and citadel of the West.”

Loss of common language

At first immigrants assimilated and learned the Latin language. They worked as servants with many rising to leadership. But then they came so fast they did not learn Latin, but instead created a mix of Latin with their own Germanic, Frankish and Anglo tribal tongues. The unity of the Roman Empire began to dissolve.

The welfare state

“Bread and the circus!” Starting in 123 B.C., the immensely powerful Roman politician Gaius Gracchus began appeasing citizens with welfare, a monthly handout of a free dole (handout) of grain.

Roman poet Juvenal (circa 100 A.D.) described how Roman emperors controlled the masses by keeping them ignorant and obsessed with self-indulgence, so they would be distracted and not throw them out of office, which they might do if they realized the true condition of the Empire: “Already long ago, from when we sold our vote to no man, the People have abdicated our duties; for the People who once upon a time handed out military command, high civil office, legions – everything, now restrains itself and anxiously hopes for just two things: bread and circuses.”

Juvenal continued: “Tyrants would distribute largess, a bushel of wheat, a gallon of wine, and a sesterce; and everyone would shamelessly cry, ‘Long live the King.’ … The fools did not realize that they were merely recovering a portion of their own property, and that their ruler could not have given them what they were receiving without having first taken it from them.”

Marcus Tullius Cicero wrote: “The evil was not in bread and circuses, per se, but in the willingness of the people to sell their rights as free men for full bellies and the excitement of games which would serve to distract them from the other human hungers which bread and circuses can never appease.”

The Durants wrote in “The Lessons of History” (p. 92): “The concentration of population and poverty in great cities may compel a government to choose between enfeebling the economy with a dole or running the risk of riot and revolution.”

In “The Great Ages of Man – Barbarian Europe” (NY: Time-Life Books, 1968, p. 39), one Roman is recorded as stating: “Those who live at the expense of the public funds are more numerous than those who provide them.”

Violent entertainment

The Circus Maximus and Coliseum were packed with crowds of Romans engrossed with violent entertainment, games, chariot races, and until 404 A.D., gladiators fighting to the death.

Gerald Simons wrote in “Great Ages of Man – Barbarian Europe” (NY: Time-Life Books, 1968, p. 20): “In the causal brutality of its public spectacles, in a rampant immorality that even Christianity could not check.”

Church lost its role as conscience

Richard A. Todd wrote in “The Fall of the Roman Empire” (Eerdmans’ “Handbook to the History of Christianity,” Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Co., 1977, p. 184): “The church, while preaching against abuses, contributed to the decline by discouraging good Christians from holding public office.”

Planned Parenthood

Roman families had fewer children. Some would sell unwanted children into slavery or, up until 374 A.D., leave them outside exposed to the weather to die.

The Durants wrote in “The Story of Civilization”, Vol. 3 – Caesar and Christ (Simon & Schuster, 1944, p. 134): “Children were now luxuries which only the poor could afford.”

Immorality and infidelity

There was court favoritism, the patronage system, injustice in the legal system, infidelity, bathhouses rampant with homosexuality, sexual immorality, gluttony, and gymnasiums (“gym” being the Greek word for naked). 5th-Century historian Salvian wrote: “For all the lurid Roman tales of their atrocities … the barbarians displayed … a good deal more fidelity to their wives.” (Great Ages, p. 13.)

Salvian continued: “O Roman people be ashamed; be ashamed of your lives. Almost no cities are free of evil dens, are altogether free of impurities, except the cities in which the barbarians have begun to live. … Let nobody think otherwise, the vices of our bad lives have alone conquered us. … The Goths lie, but are chaste, the Franks lie, but are generous, the Saxons are savage in cruelty … but are admirable in chastity. … What hope can there be for the Romans when the barbarians are more pure than they?”

Samuel Adams wrote to John Scollay of Boston, April 30, 1776: “The diminution of public virtue is usually attended with that of public happiness, and the public liberty will not long survive the total extinction of morals. ‘The Roman Empire,’ says the historian, ‘must have sunk, though the Goths had not invaded it. Why? Because the Roman virtue was sunk.'”

As Roman virtue declined, the number of laws increased. Cornelius Tacitus wrote: “The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws.”

Class warfare

City centers were abandoned by the upper class, who bought up farms from rural landowners and transformed them into palatial estates.

The Durants wrote in “The Story of Civilization” (Vol. 3 – Caesar and Christ, Simon & Schuster, 1944, p.90): “The Roman landowner disappeared now that ownership was concentrated in a few families, and a proletariat without stake in the country filled the slums of Rome.”

Inner cities were destabilized, being also plagued with lead poisoning, as water was brought in through lead pipes. (“Plumb” or “plumbing” is the Latin word for “lead.”) The value of human life was low. Slavery and sex-trafficking abounded, especially of captured peoples from Eastern Europe. “Slavs,” which meant “glorious” came to have the inglorious meaning of a permanent servant or “slave.” (Great Ages, p. 18).

Taxes

Welfare and government jobs exploded, especially with emperors wanting to honor themselves by leaving legacies of massive public building projects, such as bath houses, coliseums, parade grounds, etc.

Taxes became unbearable, as “collectors became greedy functionaries in a bureaucracy so huge and corrupt.” Tax collectors were described by the historian Salvian as “more terrible than the enemy.” (Great Ages, p. 20).

Arther Ferrill wrote in “The Fall of the Roman Empire: The Military Explanation” (New York: Thames and Hudson Ltd., 1986): “The chief cause of the agricultural decline was high taxation on the marginal land, driving it out of cultivation.”

Discover more of Bill Federer’s eye-opening books and videos in the WND Superstore!

There was a loss of patriotism, wealth began to flee the Empire, and with it, the spirit of liberty. President William Henry Harrison warned in his inaugural address, 1841: “It was the beautiful remark of a distinguished English writer that ‘in the Roman senate Octavius had a party and Antony a party, but the Commonwealth had none.’ … The spirit of liberty had fled, and, avoiding the abodes of civilized man, had sought protection in the wilds of Scythia or Scandinavia; and so under the operation of the same causes and influences it will fly from our Capitol and our forums.”

More recently, John F. Kennedy observed, Jan. 6, 1961: “Present tax laws may be stimulating in undue amounts the flow of American capital to industrial countries abroad.”

Outsourcing

Rome’s economy stagnated from a large trade deficit, as grain production was outsourced to North Africa. Gerald Simons wrote in “Great Ages of Man – Barbarian Europe” (NY: Time-Life Books, 1968, p. 39): “As conquerors of North Africa, the Vandals cut off the Empire’s grain supply at will. This created critical food shortages, which in turn curtailed Roman counterattacks.”

Exploding debt and coinage debasement

Rome was crippled by huge government bureaucracies and enormous public debt. Rather than curb out-of-control government spending, Roman emperors decided to debase coins by mixing them with cheaper base metals. This devalued their monetary system and caused exponential inflation.

The Durants wrote in “The Lessons of History” (p. 92): “Huge bureaucratic machinery was unable to govern the empire effectively with the enormous, out-of-control debt.”

In “Great Ages of Man – Barbarian Europe” (NY: Time-Life Books, 1968, p. 20), Gerald Simons wrote: “The Western Roman economy, already undermined by falling production of the great Roman estates and an unfavorable balance of trade that siphoned off gold to the East, had now run out of money.”

Rolf Nef of Global Research wrote on Jan. 15, 2007, “Falling Empires and their Currencies” (www.globalresearch.ca): “When empires fall, their currencies fall first. Even clearer is the rising debt of empires in decline, because in most cases their physical expansion is financed with debt. … The common thing is that the currencies of each and every one of these falling empires lost dramatically in value. … The Roman Empire existed from 400 B.C. to 400 A.D. Its history is the history of physical expansion, like the history of almost all empires. Its expansion was driven by a citizen soldier army, paid in silver coins, land and slaves from occupied territories. If there was not enough silver in the treasury to conduct a war, base metals were added to coin more money. That is to say, the authorities debased their currency which presaged the fall of the Empire. There was a limit to the expansion. The empire became over-stretched, running out of silver money, and eventually went under, overrun by barbarian hordes.”

Richard W. Fisher, president and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, remarked before the Commonwealth Club of California, San Francisco, California, May 28, 2008: “We know from centuries of evidence in countless economies, from ancient Rome to today’s Zimbabwe, that running the printing press to pay off today’s bills leads to much worse problems later on. The inflation that results from the flood of money into the economy turns out to be far worse than the fiscal pain those countries hoped to avoid.”

Self-promoting, corrupt politicians

The Roman emperor usurped so much power that the Roman Senate, instead of ruling Rome, only existed to carry out the emperor’s agenda. The Durants wrote in “The Lessons of History” (p. 92): “The educated and skilled pursued business and financial success to the neglect of their involvement in politics.”

Military cuts

Though militarily superior and marching on advanced road systems, the highly trained Roman Legions were over-extended and strained fighting continual conflicts from the Rhine River to the Sassanid Persian Empire. Roman borders were over-extended and the military defending them was cut back to dangerously low ranks. Emperors realized that if they kept citizens preoccupied with endless external wars, the citizens would be distracted from complaining about internal problems and political strife.

Non-Roman citizens were enlisted in the Roman military, being offered citizenship in exchange for their military service. This led to a loss of patriotism and a diminished motivation to defend the Roman borders from invading Germanic tribes.

The Durants wrote in “The Story of Civilization” (Vol. 3 – Caesar and Christ, Simon & Schuster, 1944, p.90): “The new generation, having inherited world mastery, had no time or inclination to defend it; that readiness for war which had characterized the Roman landowner disappeared.”

Want the politically incorrect but true story of St. Patrick? Find it in book form and/or video documentary in the WND Superstore!

With the increase of invading hordes, Roman legions had to be recalled from the frontiers to protect Rome itself. It was at this time that young Patrick was kidnapped from Roman Britain and sold as a slave in Druid Ireland, which he later evangelized.

Terrorist attacks

In 452, Pope Leo rode out to meet Attila and persuaded him not to sack Rome. This delayed the inevitable for only a few more decades. Finally, in 476, barbarian Chieftain Odoacer attacked, and Rome is considered to have officially fallen on Sept. 4, 476.

Lessons from the fall of Rome

John Stossel, host of “Stossel” on the Fox Business Network and author of “No They Can’t: Why Government Fails, but Individuals Succeed,” wrote in his article on the fall of Rome (www.johnstossel.com): “Historian Carl Richard said that today’s America resembles Rome. The Roman Republic had a constitution, but Roman leaders often ignored it. ‘Marius was elected consul six years in a row, even though under the constitution (he) was term-limited to one year.’

“We have presidents of both parties legislating by executive order, saying I’m not going to enforce certain laws because I don’t like them. – That open flouting of the law is dangerous because law ceases to have meaning. I see that today. – Congress passes huge laws they haven’t even read (as well as) overspending, overtaxing and devaluing the currency.

“The Romans were worse. I object to President Obama’s $100 million dollar trip, but Nero traveled with 1,000 carriages. Tiberius established an ‘office of imperial pleasures,’ which gathered ‘beautiful boys and girls from all corners of the world’ so, as Tacitus put it, the emperor ‘could defile them.’ Emperor Commodus held a show in the Colosseum at which he personally killed five hippos, two elephants, a rhinoceros and a giraffe. …”

John Stossel continued: “To pay for their excesses, emperors devalued the currency. (Doesn’t our Fed do that by buying $2 trillion of government debt?) Nero reduced the silver content of coins to 95 percent. Then Trajan reduced it to 85 percent and so on. By the year 300, wheat that once cost eight Roman dollars cost 120,000 Roman dollars.

“The president the Foundation for Economic Education, Lawrence Reed, warned that Rome, like America, had an expanding welfare state. It started with ‘subsidized grain.’ The government gave it away at half price.

“But the problem was that they couldn’t stop there – a man named Claudius ran for Tribune on a platform of free wheat for the masses. And won. It was downhill from ther. … Soon, to appease angry voters, emperors gave away or subsidized olive oil, salt and pork. People lined up to get free stuff.”

John Stossel added: “Rome’s government, much like ours, wasn’t good at making sure subsidies flowed only to the poor, said Reed: ‘Anybody could line up to get these goods, which contributed to the ultimate bankruptcy of the Roman state.’

“As inflation increased, Rome, much like the U.S. under President Nixon, imposed wage and price controls. When people objected, Emperor Diocletian denounced their ‘greed,’ saying, ‘Shared humanity urges us to set a limit.’ Doesn’t that sound like today’s anti-capitalist politicians? Diocletian was worse than Nixon.

“Rome enforced controls with the death penalty – and forbid people to change professions. Emperor Constantine decreed that those who broke such rules ‘be bound with chains and reduced to servile condition.”

John Stossel concluded: “Eventually, Rome’s empire was so large – and people so resentful of centralized control – that generals in outlying regions began declaring independence from Rome. At FreedomFest, Matt Kibbe, president of FreedomWorks, also argued that America could soon collapse like Rome did. ‘The parallels are quite ominous – the debt, the expansionist foreign policy, the arrogance of executive power taking over our country,’ says Kibbe. ‘But I do think we have a chance to … alert people to the danger in imperial Washington and try to fight it. …’

“Empires do crumble. Rome’s lasted the longest. The Ottoman Empire lasted 623 years. China’s Song, Qing and Ming dynasties each lasted about 300 years. We’ve lasted just 237 years so far. … We’ve accomplished amazing things, but we shouldn’t take our continued success for granted. Freedom and prosperity are not natural. In human history, they’re rare.”

Brought to you by AmericanMinute.com.

Discover more of Bill Federer’s eye-opening books and videos in the WND Superstore!

Receive Bill Federer's American Minutes in your email

BONUS: By signing up for these alerts, you will also be signed up for news and special offers from WND via email.
  • Name*
    First Last
  • Email*
    Where we will email your daily updates
  • Postal code*
    A valid zip code or postal code is required


via IFTTT