ARE THEY COMING AFTER YOU GUNS NOW YOU DAMN RIGHT
President Barack Obama is looking for new ways to act “administratively, unilaterally using his executive authority” to enact new gun control legislation, White House spokesman Josh Earnest said during a press conference Tuesday.
The official was responding to a journalist’s questions about the President’s reaction to news of a shooting that occurred at an Oregon high school. Two people were killed, including the shooter.
While the President is looking for ways to implement his gun control agenda unilaterally, Earnest stressed that the Administration would also like to see legislative action to increase gun control.
“The President’s goal is to look for opportunities to act administratively, unilaterally using his executive authority to try to make our communities safer,” Earnest said. “We’re always looking for those opportunities. But none of those opportunities when they present themselves is going to be an acceptable substitute for robust legislative action.”
Following the 2012 school shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., Obama implemented 23 new executive actions designed to strengthen gun control laws.
“There’s no doubt there has been an alarming frequency of tragic incidents of gun violence that are concerning to Democrats and Republicans in Washington but more importantly to people all across the country,” Earnest said. “The question is what can we do to make certain something like this never ever happens again? There are going to be other tragedies. The question, I think, really facing lawmakers right now is what common sense steps can Democrats and Republicans take to reduce the likelihood of gun violence.”
During an Internet question-and-answer appearance on the social networking site Tumbler Tuesday, President Obama told participants that he felt his biggest frustration as President was his inability to convince Congress to pass stricter gun control legislation.
“People ask me what I’m proudest of and what are my biggest frustrations as president,” Obama said. “My biggest frustration is that this society hasn’t been willing to take some basic steps to keep guns out of the hands of people who can do damage. We’re the only developed country where this happens. And it happens weekly. Our levels of gun violence are off the charts.
“If public opinion does not demand change in Congress, it will not change,” he said.
Answering questions with Tumblr founder David Karp, Obama pointed to several recent high profile shootings as proof of epidemic gun crime.
“Levels of gun violence are off the charts,” Obama said. ” There is no advanced developed country on Earth that would put up with this.”
Obama argued that Americans should be “ashamed,” using the opportunity to bemoan his inability to pass gun control legislation.
“We’re the only country in the world where this happens and it happens once a week,” Obama said.
Obama went on to refute any link between mass shootings and mental health as well, instead blaming the ability of Americans to collect ammunition.
“It’s not the only country that has psychosis, and yet we kill each other in these mass shootings at rates that are exponentially higher than anyplace else,” Obama said. ” What’s the difference? The difference is these guys can stack up a bunch of ammunition in their houses.”
Invoking his role as parent, Obama also pushed the notion that American gun owners are collectively responsible for mass shootings.
“This country has to do a lot of soul searching,” Obama said. “This is becoming the norm. And we take it for granted in ways that, as a parent, are terrifying to me.”
The President even went as far as praising Australia’s gun confiscation program, claiming that “very severe” gun laws have helped the country.
“Couple of decades ago, Australia had a mass shooting, similar to Columbine or Newtown,” Obama said. “And Australia just said, well, that’s it, we’re not doing, we’re not seeing that again, and basically imposed very severe, tough gun laws, and they haven’t had a mass shooting since.”
Earlier that day, White House spokesman Josh Earnest told reporters that the President is “always” looking for ways to “unilaterally” act on gun control.
“The president’s goal is to look for opportunities to act administratively, unilaterally using his executive authority to try to make our communities safer,” Earnest said.
In reality, the President’s comments and actions once again conflict with actual statistics regarding gun crimes.
Obama’s claim of “off the chart” gun violence is in complete opposition to countless studies that have found a 49 percent drop in gun homocide since 1993.
A similar study by the Bureau of Justice Statistics found that non-fatal gun crimes have dropped nearly 70 percent over the same time period.
Ironically, a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study on gun violence ordered by the President last year reached similar conclusions.
“Firearm-related death rates for youth ages 15 to 19 declined from 1994 to 2009,” the report states. “The number of public mass shootings of the type that occurred at Sandy Hook Elementary School accounted for a very small fraction of all firearm-related deaths.”
The study even pointed to the benefits of concealed firearm carry for protection against criminals, yet another point that interferes with the Obama Administration’s gun control agenda.
“Almost all national survey estimates indicate that defensive gun uses by victims are at least as common as offensive uses by criminals, with estimates of annual uses ranging from about 500,000 to more than 3 million per year” the report reads.
“Studies that directly assessed the effect of actual defensive uses of guns (i.e., incidents in which a gun was ‘used’ by the crime victim in the sense of attacking or threatening an offender) have found consistently lower injury rates among gun-using crime victims compared with victims who used other self-protective strategies.”
Reports from the Bureau of Justice Statistics also reveal that school shootings are not becoming the “norm” as the President suggested.
Despite the massive plunge in gun crime, a recent survey found that 56 percent of American’s believe it has actually increased, a point unsurprising given the media’s reporting on the issue.
The President also alluded to a recent report from “Everytown for Gun safety,” a gun control group founded by former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, which claims an average of 1.37 school shootings have occurred every week since the 2012 Sandy Hook shooting.
Shortly after its release Tuesday, a journalist began listing all of the report’s inaccuracies on Twitter, documenting how it even included drug related shootings off of school property.
Obama’s refusal to acknowledge the role of mind-altering pharmaceutical drugs in mass shootings is reprehensible given the fact that nearly every mass shooter in the last 20-years has been on psychotropic drugs, a point almost always ignored by media. Prescriptions for antidepressants have risen by 400 percent since 1988 according to the CDC, making American the largest consumer of psychotropic drugs in the world.
The President’s public comments regarding children, who are just as likely to be struck by lightning as they are to be in a mass shooting, are a far cry from his private conversations.
Just last year, reports indicated that Obama was overheard bragging to administration aides about how well he killed people with drone strikes. According to several US officials, more than 4,700 people, many of whom were woman and children, have died from such strikes. Researchers estimate that the President’s drone attacks kill anywhere from 36 to 50 innocent people per 1 suspected terrorist. Obama’s decision to assassinate 16-year-old American citizen Abdulrahman al-Awlaki also discredits his alleged concern.
The President’s credibility also comes into question given his involvement in the Fast and Furious gun running scandal. Documents obtained by CBS News in 2011 revealed that American guns shipped into Mexico would be covertly used to blame the Second Amendment, allowing the administration to push tougher gun laws.
The Obama Administration’s agenda becomes most clear when one examines not the shootings it mentions, but the shootings it ignores.
While the media gives endless attention to shootings that can be used for political gain, gun control capitols such as Chicago, which recently saw four dead and more than 30 injured in one weekend, are completely ignored.
As gun crime continues to plummet, focusing on the root issues of gun violence will assure that number continues its decline.
The Russians are actually making a move against the petrodollar. It appears that they are quite serious about their de-dollarization strategy. The largest natural gas producer on the planet, Gazprom, has signed agreements with some of their biggest customers to switch payments for natural gas from U.S. dollars to euros. And Gazprom would have never done this without the full approval of the Russian government, because the Russian government holds a majority stake in Gazprom. There hasn’t been a word about this from the big mainstream news networks in the United States, but this ishuge. When you are talking about Gazprom, you are talking about a company that is absolutely massive. It is one of the largest companies in the entire world and it makes up 8 percent of Russian GDP all by itself. It holds 18 percent of the natural gas reserves of the entire planet, and it is also a very large oil producer. So for Gazprom to make a move like this is extremely significant.
When Barack Obama decided to slap some meaningless economic sanctions on Russia a while back, he probably figured that the world would forget about them after a few news cycles.
But the Russians do not forget, and they certainly do not forgive.
At this point the Russians are turning their back on the United States, and that includes the U.S. dollar.
What you are about to read is absolutely stunning, and yet you have not heard about it from any major U.S. news source. But what Gazprom is now doing has the potential to really shake up the global financial landscape. The following is an excerpt from a news report by the ITAR-TASS news agency…
Gazprom Neft had signed additional agreements with consumers on a possible switch from dollars to euros for payments under contracts, the oil company’s head Alexander Dyukov told a press conference.
“Additional agreements of Gazprom Neft on the possibility to switch contracts from dollars to euros are signed. With Belarus, payments in roubles are agreed on,” he said.
Dyukov said nine of ten consumers had agreed to switch to euros.
And Gazprom is not the only big company in Russia that is moving away from the U.S. dollar.
According to RT, other large Russian corporations are moving to other currencies as well…
Russia will start settling more contracts in Asian currencies, especially the yuan, in order to lessen its dependence on the dollar market, and because of Western-led sanctions that could freeze funds at any moment.
“Over the last few weeks there has been a significant interest in the market from large Russian corporations to start using various products in renminbi and other Asian currencies, and to set up accounts in Asian locations,” Pavel Teplukhin, head of Deutsche Bank in Russia, told the Financial Times, which was published in an article on Sunday.
Diversifying trade accounts from dollars to the Chinese yuan and other Asian currencies such as the Hong Kong dollar and Singapore dollar has been a part of Russia’s pivot towards Asian as tension with Europe and the US remain strained over Russia’s action in Ukraine.
And according to Zero Hedge, “expanding the use of non-dollar currencies” is one of the main things that major Russian banks are working on right now…
Andrei Kostin, chief executive of state bank VTB, said that expanding the use of non-dollar currencies was one of the bank’s “main tasks”. “Given the extent of our bilateral trade with China, developing the use of settlements in roubles and yuan [renminbi] is a priority on the agenda, and so we are working on it now,” he told Russia’s President Vladimir Putin during a briefing. “Since May, we have been carrying out this work.”
“There is nothing wrong with Russia trying to reduce its dependency on the dollar, actually it is an entirely reasonable thing to do,” said the Russia head of another large European bank. He added that Russia’s large exposure to the dollar subjects it to more market volatility in times of crisis. “There is no reason why you have to settle trade you do with Japan in dollars,” he said.
The entire country is undergoing a major financial conversion.
This is just staggering.
Meanwhile, Russians have been pulling money out of U.S. banks at an unprecedented pace…
So in March, without waiting for the sanction spiral to kick in, Russians yanked their moolah out of US banks. Deposits by Russians in US banks suddenly plunged from $21.6 billion to $8.4 billion. They yanked out 61% of their deposits in just one month! They’d learned their lesson in Cyprus the hard way: get your money out while you still can before it gets confiscated.
For those that don’t think that all of this could hurt the U.S. economy or the U.S. financial system, you really need to go back and read my previous article entitled “De-Dollarization: Russia Is On The Verge Of Dealing A Massive Blow To The Petrodollar“. The truth is that the U.S. economic system is extremely dependent on the financial behavior of the rest of the globe.
Because nearly everyone else around the rest of the planet uses our currency to trade with one another, that keeps the value of the U.S. dollar artificially high and it keeps our borrowing costs artificially low.
As Russia abandons the U.S. dollar that will hurt, but if other nations start following suit that could eventually cause a financial avalanche.
What we are witnessing right now is just a turning point.
The effects won’t be felt right away. So don’t expect this to cause financial disaster next week or next month.
But this is definitely another element in the “perfect storm” that is starting to brew for the U.S. economy.
Yes, we have been living in a temporary bubble of false stability for a few years. However, the long-term outlook has not gotten any better. In fact, the long-term trends that are destroying our economic and financial foundations just continue to get even worse.
So enjoy the “good times” while you still can.
They certainly will not last too much longer.
