Nordwave Florida

NEW YORK (CNN) — Elie Wiesel, the Nazi concentration camp survivor who went on to win the Nobel Peace Prize, showed little inclination this week to make peace with accused swindler Bernie Madoff, whom he called “one of the greatest scoundrels, thieves, liars, criminals.”

Elie Wiesel called on the federal government to bail out charities just as it has bailed out carmakers and banks.

“Could I forgive him? No,” the 80-year-old told a panel assembled Thursday by Conde Nast’s Portfolio Magazine at New York’s 21 Club to discuss Madoff, whose alleged victims included Wiesel and his foundation, The Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity.

“To forgive, first of all, would mean that he would come on his knees and ask for forgiveness,” the Auschwitz survivor said. “He wouldn’t do that.”

Madoff, 70, is accused of running a Ponzi scheme that may have cost investors up to $50 billion. He faces one charge of securities fraud in connection with an international scheme that has cost some investors their life savings and could land him in prison for up to 20 years.

Wiesel said a wealthy friend who has known Madoff for 50 years introduced them. The two men met twice over dinner, and Wiesel checked with financial experts whom he trusted before investing all of his and his wife’s personal money.

Then, once Madoff had gained his trust, Wiesel invested all $15.2 million that his foundation had amassed, he said.

“We thought he was God, we trusted everything in his hands,” the Boston University humanities professor said.

Wiesel put his friend’s loss at $50 million.

Wiesel rejected the suggestion that “affinity fraud,” the tendency for people to trust others of similar background, played any role in leaving him vulnerable to Madoff. Both men are Jewish.

“It’s not the Jewishness in him, it’s the inhumanity in this man who simply believed he can go around depriving people of their livelihoods. What he has done to certain people, it breaks my heart,” he said.

“At the end, he went down to swindle thousands and thousands of people, and hurt thousands and thousands of people. Take our little foundation. My wife takes care of 1,000 Ethiopian children in Israel. What he does to them — we were going to open a third center in Jerusalem. We cannot do it now. What [he has] done to others, to hospitals, to educational institutions, my God! Didn’t he think?”

Wiesel said he is planning legal action against Madoff but called for the federal government to bail out charities just as it has bailed out carmakers and banks.

“I think it would be a great gesture that the Obama administration should show, we really think of those who are helpless and who are doing with their money only good things.”

Wiesel offered a punishment he would like to see meted out to the financier, who is under house arrest but has not been indicted.

“I would like him to be in a solitary cell with a screen, and on that screen, for at least five years of his life, every day and every night there should be pictures of his victims, one after the other after the other, always saying, ‘Look, look what you have done to this poor lady, look what you have done to this child, look what you have done.’

“But nothing else — he should not be able to avoid those faces, for years to come. This is only a minimum punishment.”

Madoff’s attorney, Ira Sorkin, said he understands Wiesel’s point of view, but said Madoff must be presumed innocent.

Sorkin said the financial debacle is a tragedy, but added that his client is doing everything he can to help the government recover the funds.

Despite what he called his family’s “personal tragedy,” Wiesel said he is organizing a benefit concert for his foundation and has been overwhelmed by unsolicited donations.

“It shows, again, a human being is capable of both very great, good things, and very horrible things,” he said.

http://www.cnn.com/2009/CRIME/02/27/wiesel.madoff/

Several thousand neopatriots – some shouting “Give me liberty or give me death!” – took to the streets in over 30 US cities Friday, representing what some of them call the beginning of a new conservative counterculture in America.

“The spark has been lit,” says Ben Mihalski, a “house husband” from Cobb County, Ga., one of at least 300 protesters who gathered in a hefty downpour outside the Georgia Capitol on Friday to protest what they see as profligate spending by Washington.

Protesters with sign-slogans like “Pillage and plunder: At least the Vikings did it openly” fanned out across capitols and courthouses in cities from Nashville, Tenn., to Los Angeles, objecting to bailouts and policy changes since the inauguration of President Obama.

The Tea Party USA movement also added some symbolic flourish, vowing to gather tens of thousands of tea bags to be dumped on the floor of the US Congress. In Atlanta, the brand was Luzianne.

Critics call the protests a predictably partisan, ill-informed and unhelpful development in the midst of a deep-sink US recession.

But the largely grassroots show of force hints at a sharpening thorn for Democrats and a potential powder keg that could threaten to blow ahead of the 2010 congressional elections.

“It’s worth remembering that the rise of the New Right and the Christian Right, one after the other, were both spurred by tax issues, the whole idea of paying for things they don’t believe in,” says sociologist Eugenia Deerman at Eastern Illinois University in Charleston who studies conservative social movements.

To be sure, the federal spending package includes tax cuts for most Americans, and Obama has promised to eventually halve a US deficit the Democrats have largely blamed on the Bush administration.

But protesters like Kevin Tanner of South Dakota said deficit spending by both parties has unnerved Americans.
“The Republicans have their own problems because we elected them and they didn’t do what we wanted,” says Mr. Tanner.
Many protesters expressed a sense that basic American freedoms of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are threatened by new Washington policies seen by many as more socialistic than capitalistic. The proposed taxpayer bailout of homeowners who may have inflated their earnings in order to secure mortgages is one example, says Jeff Crawford, a protester from Dacula, Ga.

“The first year after the Mayflower arrived, the colonists tried a communal method of storing and sharing food and it failed miserably,” says Mr. Crawford. “Why are things any different now?”

Eighteenth-century symbolism was rife at the Atlanta event as speakers drew comparisons with the Boston patriots who dumped the King’s tea in Boston Harbor to protest taxation without representation, an act that began the American Revolution and the founding of the United States.

Some kids at the Atlanta protest wore tri-cornered hats, and one held a sign that said, “When I grow up I want to be free.”
In Tampa, two dozen protesters held handwritten signs with slogans like “Keep Your Bailout; I’ll Keep My Freedom.” About 300 people showed up in 25-degree weather in Wichita, Kansas, and someone brought a pig.

In St. Louis, local media expected about 50 people to show up while actual turnout surged to over 1,000 people.

Sparked in part by the unity of House Republicans in saying no to the $787 billion stimulus package and a well-publicized rant against a proposed mortgage bailout by CNBC reporter Rick Santelli on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, the protests represent the largest turnout of conservative activists since the anti-gun control rallies of the early 1990s, says Grover Norquist, the president of Americans for Tax Reform.

“Fiscal responsibility is the new counterculture, and that’s what we’re seeing here,” says conservative columnist and blogger Michelle Malkin. “People were so mad about how the bill was passed, not just what was in it, and the lack of deliberation that preceded the signing.”

“It’s given voice to a fledgling grassroots movement … a ragtag bunch of homeschooling moms and little bloggers and a lot of people who are really deciding to get into grassroots activism for the first time,” she says.

How grassroots the movement really is, is debatable, says Ms. Deerman at Eastern Illinois University. “I’m suspicious only because … the conservative movement has repeatedly used this tactic of creating an appearance of grassroots activism when they’re actually very well orchestrated,” she says. “It allows them to mask this ongoing ideological battle that’s super-invested in small government, low taxes, and a free market.”

The protests have happened with remarkable speed, spread by Twitter and Facebook groups and the now famous TV rant by Mr. Santelli, who yelled “It’s lunacy!” as he complained about the spending package. The White House has fueled the fire, protesters say, by taking on conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh and even Mr. Santelli by name. Some rallies that took place Friday were organized in less than 48 hours and had a raw, unrehearsed edge to them.

“One of the challenges the Bush administration had when they decided to invade Iraq … was they took the MoveOn.org institution from a sleepy group apologizing for Clinton’s personal behavior and turned it into a juggernaut,” says Mr. Norquist. He says a similar phenomenon is happening now with the tea party movement. “When you do things that poke the other team, they react.”

The tea party phenomenon has largely been derided by progressives who say it’s fueled by big-money Republican interests opposed to the philosophical shift in Washington that they say will benefit working class Americans.

“Something tells me … that the Republican leadership has a lot more tea parties to throw – and a long way down the rabbit hole to fall – before they see what really concerns Americans nowadays,” writes Huffington Post blogger Jeffrey Feldman.
But Mr. Crawford, one of the protesters, says it’s not easy to get conservatives to take to the streets. The protests, he say, speak to a deepening concern about the direction of the country, especially future tax obligations.

He says the $13-a-week tax cut for individual Americans included in the stimulus bill is small change when it comes to the tax implications of the country’s growing deficit, now tagged at $1.75 trillion. In a recent study, the Rockefeller Institute estimates that states will have to raise at least an extra $100 billion in revenue to cover new obligations once the stimulus bill monies run out in 2012.

Calls to roll back the spending bill are farfetched, protesters agreed, but said the real prize is the 2010 Congressional elections.

“These protests remind people that there’s opposition to taxpayer-funded bailouts, and people in the streets means that Americans will be asking, ‘Why are they objecting? Tell me what’s happening here,’” says Norquist.

Given the dramatic circumstances of the Boston Tea Party, tax revolts are actually quite unusual in the US.

“The most interesting thing about the American people is that we are generally compliant in paying taxes, and tax revolts that seem surprising here are fairly common in a country like France where those farmers, if they get upset, they simply don’t pay,” says Mary Segers, a political scientist at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, NJ. “Americans are a strange people with respect to taxes, so this revolt is very interesting for that reason alone.”

http://features.csmonitor.com/politics/2009/02/27/budget-debate-launches-new-tea-party/#right

In another copycat shoe-throwing incident against Israelis in Europe, Amsterdam police on Sunday arrested three people who hurled footwear at an Israeli army officer while he was lecturing at a hotel in the Dutch capital.

“Today it’s shoes, tomorrow knives and then guns,” the officer, Captain (res.) Ron Edelheid, told Haaretz.

“I was on a private visit to see my mother,” he said. “As an IDF Spokesperson reservist I volunteered to speak before the Dutch Jewish community about Operation Cast Lead.”

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Dutch-born Adelheit, who immigrated to Israel many years ago, said he had filed a criminal complaint against the suspected assailants – two men and a woman – whom police arrested at the hotel.

“Fifty demonstrators waited for me outside the Apollo Hotel, chanting nasty slogans,” he said. “Three entered the room, shouting and throwing four shoes at my direction.” He said the hecklers were “typically Dutch-looking.”

Adelheit said he believed the protesters learned of the event from Jewish websites. He added the event was originally scheduled to take place at the College Hotel, until management canceled “because of threats.”

Dr. Ronny Naftaniel, who heads the Hague-based pro-Zionist CIDI organization, said the incident was aimed against freedom of expression and “an importation of an element very foreign to Dutch culture.”

Noting Adelheit was scheduled to speak tomorrow in Antwerp, one Dutch Jewish community leader joked that “in Amsterdam they threw left shoes. Maybe in Antwerp Adelheit will find the right ones to go along with them.”

Israel’s ambassador to Sweden was targeted this month by shoe-throwing protesters while speaking at Stockholm University.

The protestors were apparently imitating an Iraqi who targeted former U.S. President George Bush in December. Since then, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao was also targeted with a shoe in Britain.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1066383.html

It has already started… Ammunition Accountability Legislation

Remember how Obama said that he wasn’t going to take your guns? Well, it seems that his allies in the anti-gun world have no problem with taking your ammo! The bill that is being pushed in 18 states (including Illinois and Indiana ) requires all ammunition to be encoded by the manufacture a data base of all ammunition sales. So they will know how much you buy and what calibers.

Nobody can sell any ammunition after June 30, 2009 unless the ammunition is coded. Any privately held uncoded ammunition must be destroyed by July 1, 2011. (Including hand loaded ammo.) They will also charge a 05 cent tax on every round so every box of ammo you buy will go up at least $2.50 or more! If they can deprive you of ammo they do not need to take your gun!

This legislation is currently pending in 18 states: Alabama, Arizona,
California,Connecticut, Hawaii, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Maryland, Mississippi, Missouri, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina,Tennessee, and Washington.

More at:

http://ammunitionaccountability.org/Legislation.htm