Whorled View

The Homeland Production Agency: An idea who’s time has come.

Dave Austin — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 22:05:37 +0000

We should be getting a nice fat tax rebate this year thanks to the economy being in the toilet. I should be grateful but I can’t help but think that this tax rebate will have little effect on the economy while it balloons both inflation and the deficit. Most of everything we buy today is made overseas so all the rebate will really do is put more money into the pockets of our Asian neighbors. Very little of it will end up staying here in the US of A. What good is it if everyone buys a flatpanel TV where only 20% of that rebate stays in the country (as Walmart’s markup), which remainder Walmart employees will use to buy the foreign-made Nintendo Wii to use with said foreign-made TV.

“…only 20% of that rebate stays in the country (as Walmart’s markup), which remainder Walmart employees will use to buy the foreign-made Nintendo Wii to use with said foreign-made TV“

The other problem with the existing rebate (besides the dangerous impact on inflation and the deficit) is the removal from circulation by nervous consumers. With the bleak future constantly thrown in our faces people are likely to conserve as much as possible.

To stimulate the economy you must put money in a system that keeps it in the country and keeps it in circulation. President Bush’s current stimulus package does very little if anything to this effect.

My solution came from an idea I had while visiting www.madeintheusa.com. It has a quote in the side bar which says, “There are 293 million people living in the United States. If each one would shift $20 a month in spending from foreign made products to American made products, that would create 5 million new jobs.”

“There are 293 million people living in the United States. If each one would shift $20 a month in spending from foreign made products to American made products, that would create 5 million new jobs.”

Wow. Adjusting $20/month from one brand to another will create 5 million new jobs - and thats without any “new” spending. Imagine if the whole stimulus plan (roughly $1200/family) could be used for only domestically made products. The economic effect would be enormous. But how do you earmark that money for domestically manufactured products? $150 billion is a lot of money, so the corruption to acquire would be an acceptable risk for many (if not most) companies with foreign products. In short, it would necessitate yet another government entity (booo!) to monitor business and corporate supply claims: the Homeland Production Agency or “HPA”.

But it’s time has come. Being a Republican who has some John Birch leanings I shudder to think of creating another government agency, but nevertheless it’s become an evil necessity. There must be an agency that has as it’s main goal the encouragement of production in our Homeland. Such an agency would work closely with the IRS to provide tax incentives for companies to incorporate US made parts and pieces. Because of tax incentives, corporate taxes must account for which supplies are imported or domestic, and the HPA must verify those claims. Each product then gets a HPA rating where 0% means it is wholly foreign made and 100% means it sells wholly domestically made. Lastly, the HPA would be responsible for making sure tax rebates go toward domestically made products as much as possible.

“Each product then gets a HPA rating where 0% means it is wholly foreign made and 100% means it sells wholly domestically made.”

This last item seems the trickiest (although it isn’t as I’ll show below). How does the HPA make sure that 100% of your tax rebate goes toward purchasing domestically produced products? Simple (although in practice it will be a task initially costing 100’s of millions): by making the HPA pay for the products directly, and through a system already in place that facilitates the power of internet database processing.

It would involve using a modified version of Paypal as the payment system, and your Social Security number gives you access to an HPA-paypal account to where your tax rebate will be deposited. You may even add to this balance if you wish. Any website can implement the HPA-paypal system - as simply as adding any other payment module (as a very experienced e-commerce programmer, let me assure you that this is very easy to do).

“Any website can implement the HPA-paypal system - as simply as adding any other payment module (as a very experienced e-commerce programmer, let me assure you that this is very easy to do).”

For example, let’s say that your family’s rebate has arrived in you HPA account, so you log onto amazon.com (or any e-commerce website). Lets say that you want to buy a leafblower, a trampoline, a Wii, a doodad, and a Schwinn ten-speed. You select “HPA-Paypal” for my payment method and check out. HPA pays 100% for the leafblower and trampoline because they’re both made entirely in the US, but only for half of the Schwinn because of the foreign parts, and nothing for the Wii, made entirely outside the US. HPA won’t pay for the doodad either because the doodad manufacturer didn’t register their product with the HPA and so it isn’t in the HPA database. Note that amazon.com doesn’t need this information - it’s all taken care of at check-out by HPA when they pull the info from the HPA database. At checkout you enter a credit card to pay for the remainder of the balance that the HPA won’t pay (for foreign manufactured products). Piece of cake … for everyone concerned.

“You log onto amazon.com … select HPA-Paypal for my payment method … and enter a credit card to pay for the balance that the HPA won’t pay. Piece of cake.”

Ten years ago funding domestically made products like this would have been impossibly difficult. Today such a system can be put into place within months (at least on a limited basis initially), and become a necessary and powerful tool to be used down the road to address future economic issues. All the pieces are already in place. It could, in fact, provide the framework for a less intrusive, and consumption based tax method as we begin to deal the the problems inherent in today’s income tax methods. It is, in short, a no-brainer.

McCain debates Hillary, lovingly

Dave Austin — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 16:01:31 +0000

Now that the Republican party has practically let the mainstream media pick their candidate we can look forward to what their debates will be like:

Hillary: Repeal the Bush Tax cuts!
McCain: I agree!

Hillary: Reward illegals with citizenship!
McCain: I agree!

Hillary: Punish America alone for global warming!
McCain: I agree!

Hillary: No conservative Judges like Alito!
McCain: I agree!

Hillary: Abort unwanted babies!
McCain: I agree if it belongs to my daughter!

Hillary: Gay rights!
McCain: As long as they’re “passionate lesbians”!

Hillary: No Man-Woman Marriage Amendment!
McCain: I agree!

Hillary: Protect incumbents and limit free speech!
McCain: Long live McCain-Feingold!

Hillary: No Alaska drilling!
McCain: I agree!

Hillary: Vote for me!
McCain: I agree! Wait… ! Ummmmmm…

Note to skin: Start crawling.

70% Solar Energy by 2050: Scientific American

Dave Austin — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 07:04:20 +0000

Probably one of the best layman articles on the subject from a contemporary perspective except for one major problem. Nevertheless it’s worth a good read. Check it out: http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=a-solar-grand-plan

The problem: Once again it places more emphasis on Solar PV than Solar thermal. It pretends to justify this by throwing around some magical numbers that at this point are pure theory and highly unlikely. Compare that to Solar thermal where the numbers are even better and are proven.

Solar Thermal is cheaper and always will be.

Case in point: It says Cadmium Telluride (nanosolar film) will be able to produce electricity for $0.05/kWh by 2020. This is based on the theory that they can get efficiencies up to 14%. I’m sorry, but I’m quite convinced that in order to do that they’ll have to enable some technologies that will up the price of the manufacturing enough to blow that number out of the water. They think they can improve the efficiency by 40%, based on what? Silicon solar efficiencies have improved maybe 10% in the last 20 years? Sure Cadmium Telluride went from 8% to 9% in the last year, but they’re approaching a ceiling that will get extremely hard to raise. My guess is that it will top out at 12%, which leaves solar PV maxing out at $0.06/kWh assuming all other costs stay the same, which they won’t. Add to that $0.04 /kWh for storage and you get 0.10/kWh, AND YOU HAVE TO WAIT UNTIL 2020 TO SEE THAT RESULT.

Compare that to Ausra’s Solar thermal technology which by 2013 should produce electricity, including storage, at $0.07 /kWh.

HELLO!? Am I the only one running these numbers? Solar Thermal is so superior. Nothing, I repeat: NOTHING should go toward the development of something that will cost more near term and long term than Solar Thermal will.

Two more reasons Solar thermal is better:

TIME TO MARKET: Solar Thermal can scale up to supply all our needs at coal prices by 2015 if we wanted to. Unlike any kind of Solar PV solar thermal uses no fancy technology. It uses no special materials that require special processing. The materials and the parts and pieces that make solar thermal plants are found all throughout existing industrial parks across America -and at bargain prices. All you need is the money to buy the supplies (tons cheaper than what Solar PV factories cost), and people to build them (requires no special training or science). All these things are in stark contrast to the supply problems that have plagued the Solar PV industry. Solar PV, whether it’s thin film or otherwise, will never be able to scale up at the rate that the Scientific American author suggests. The materials and processing equipment demands are just too great even if the money was there … can’t be done.

LIFETIME: A solar thermal plant lasts almost forever if cared for correctly, with few replacement parts, and reasonable maintenance. Sure parts of the turbine needs replacing as with any turbine including the ones used by SolarPV to reconvert pressurized gas to electricity, but thats about it. No solar cells to replace. The mirrors last forever. The dewar tubes containing the molten salt or H2O (Ausra’s technology) should last a very long time if maintained right. Compare that to SolarPV where the life of the Solar Cells is 20-30 years at the most. Also you’ll have to replace the compressors as well as the turbines parts in the Solar PV plant (incidentally solar thermal needs no compressors - another bonys). Can you imagine that? With a Solar PV plant you’re replacing practically the whole plant every 20-30 years. Not so with Solar Thermal.

In short, media bias favoring Solar PV once again garners unworthy support, thereby siphoning off the funds from Solar Thermal, possibly in order to fatten the wallets of those who invest in Solar PV (Al Gore) or work for the industry. Solar PV, even in Cadmium Telluride thin films will forever be inferior, less efficient, and a more expensive technology than Solar thermal. Articles like this that have some fantastic information and promote the use of the Sun’s rays almost do more bad than good by obfuscating the issue and guaranteeing that our hard earned tax dollars will be taken away from Solar Thermal and reinvested in Solar PV assuming that Solar PV will someday meet the magic numbers that it was supposed to achieve 20-30 years ago, and neither will we solve our energy problems as quickly as we could if all the funds went to something like what Ausra does (www.ausra.com ).

The Vitamin C “Dead Zone”

Dave Austin — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 16:50:25 +0000

Most medical practitioners do not understand how the body utilizes high concentrations of ascorbates (Vitamin C and it’s buffered variants). As a result clinical studies for Vitamin C are poorly designed and result in inadequate and misleading conclusions. Ultimately such misleading conclusions discourage medical practitioners from using vitamin-based treatments despite a growing number of studies with seemingly polar opposite conclusions that strongly promote the use of vitamin-based therapies and treatments. This is a globally important issue, since vitamin-based therapies provide the world with cheap and effective treatments that are readily available. Sadly those same therapies are widely disparaged because of an overwhelming amount of research inappropriately done in what I call the “dead zone”. Read more about this “dead zone” here: http://www.the-austins.com/Vitamin%20C%20Dead%20Zone.html

Concentrated Solar Power: The claims just keep getting better

Dave Austin — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 06:00:09 +0000

According to this CNN article released today Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) that harnesses the heat of the sun (not the brightness of the sun, which is what Solar PV does) just keeps looking better. Among the claims:

Electricity produced by CSP can be as cheap as 8 cents per kWh. That’s about 20% cheaper than most people are paying in the united states right now for electricity. That’s 1/4 the cost of electricity produced by the ever so much more popular Solar PV panels.
A 92 x 92 square mile CSP farm placed in the empty barren desert in the SW United States could produce all the energy needed by the whole United States.
It could easily solve the desalinated water shortage crisis - which for many countries is a much bigger problem than any kind of oil shortage crisis.
Only 0.3% of the Sahara desert is needed to power most of Europe and upper Africa, resulting in a 70% carbon reduction for the region. It will save astonishing amounts of money too as cities must otherwise relocate costing of 100’s billions of dollars, whereas it could all be averted with a CSP plant in the $10 billions of dollar range.
Since 90% of the world lives relatively close to desert or to substantial power grids connected to such areas then 90% of the world’s population can be served by this breathtakingly economical and clear resource.

Strangely enough some of the biggest opponents to CSP appear to be a group of environmentalists and key Democrat politicians who seem to be letting expected tax incentives lapse. Based on my last post, you’ll see that this comes as no surprise to me. For 30 years they’ve been trying to keep CSP in the background so industry experts could make money off new alternative energy startups that will never compare with respect to efficiency, cost, and time to market.

These tax incentives for the power companies are vital. Even though CSP may be cheaper than filthy fossil fuels, power companies are making tons of money on fossil fuels. They have the right to jack the prices as high as they need, and at times like now when there is no shortage, but the cost is high due to political concerns, they make all the money. Why? Because they already own such a huge interest in the reserves. The only way to get power companies to build CSP farms is to financially encourage them - and that isn’t happening.

Al Gore says something really stupid again

Dave Austin — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 17:29:45 +0000

He won the popular vote for President of the United States. He jumped on the green energy bandwagon. For those two things I applaud him.

Everything else he’s done reminds me what an incredible stroke of luck it was that he lost the electoral vote. I posted earlier about how awful of a job I thought he did on the “Inconvenient Truth”, and I suggested similar programs that were far better on a number of levels - although even they were seriously flawed. His moaning throughout the program about how unfairly he was treated and about how little data convinced him of global warming were tedious at best, and the treatment of any of the data he presented was excruciating from a statistical standpoint. The worst part of it was his solution to the problem (use less electricity and spend money on technologies that were entirely unlikely to help), which was the equivalent of stopping a fire hydrant with a stick of bubble gum. Besides, you cannot begin to legislate that. Neither can you force China to do that. The solution should have been this: we need tons of cheap clean energy and we need it fast, and stop investing in technology that has no chance of being competitive with coal.

Nothing else will work. Gore seems oblivious on this point.

Does such a ridiculous remark have anything to do with the fact that he runs a Venture Capitalist firm that invests largely in these inferior “competitive” technologies?

So what now did he recently say that filled me with disgust? What proved his underlying blind ignorance to institute “fairness” at the expense of achieving the ultimate goal? It was simply this: When an Ausra executive said that their Solar Thermal technology would produce electricity so cheap as to “thrash” all the other alternatives, Gore reprimanded him for “assassinating” the competition. You can read about it here at the end of this fortune magazine article from November 12th. Be sure to read also the blindedly ignorant opinion of the author of the article, gushing over Gore like he was a rock-star who could do no wrong.

Excuse me?! Why is Gore being overly protective of less efficient, more expensive, and slower to market technologies?! Can you say “biased”? Can you say “self-serving”? Does such a ridiculous remark have anything to do with the fact that he runs a Venture Capitalist firm that invests largely in these inferior “competitive” technologies?

… when someone says something extremely stupid that also reveals their true motives it’s time to call a spade a spade …

If Gore was truly interested in saving the planet, then he would have said something smart like “Wonderful! Let the competition begin!”. And that, my friends, is why we are in the current mess that we are in. Solar Thermal has been capable of providing us with near grid-cost energy for a dozen years while people like Gore have insisted that all the DOE funds go to more expensive and less efficient, and less eco-friendly projects.

Am I the only one that sees a conflict of interest in making a Eco-Venture-Capitalist-Advisor into the Czar of environmentally friendly technologies? Are people really so stupid as to think such a person could be objective? And journalists … when someone says something extremely stupid as well as revealing of their true motives it’s time to call a spade a spade instead of praising the person for senselessly sticking to their rusty and hypocritical guns.

Solar Thermal energy to overtake Solar PV energy within 10 years

Dave Austin — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 15:55:21 +0000

The cost of Solar Thermal electricity is half the cost of Solar PV, and expected to be 1/4 of the cost of Solar PV within the next 10 years. This has been true for dozens of years, but producing solar thermal as a business has never been as lucrative as solar PV because it can only be done in huge installations, so it’s been ignored relatively speaking. Solar PV has always received the bulk of government subsidies by far - largely because of lobbying power of big businesses and because it’s easier to sell Solar PV to consumers (rooftop panels) than Solar Thermal to power companies (giant solar farms). That’s finally changing. Power companies and the Congressmen who get funding for green energy are finally getting wise. As such some major Solar Thermal plants are in the works, and Acciona expects that by 1017 more electricity will be generated by Solar Thermal plants than all the Solar PV panels in the United States combined (including the one on your solar calculator). That’s cool. Read more about it here.

South American Nutriceuticals are Changing the World

Dave Austin — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 19:42:00 +0000

The modern medical society has gotten into the nasty habit of disparaging nutriceuticals. Nutriceuticals are “nutritional supplements” that actually have therapeutic value (like pharmaceuticals). They comprise many vitamins when taken in large doses, and many herbs (only the nutritional ones though). Many herbs are not nutriceuticals because they have no nutritional value are used like drugs, and are really no different than pharmaceutical drugs - and in most cases they are worse (imho). I don’t know why the concerted effort by medical societies to disparage nutriceuticals (for example: megadoses of vitamin C) but an in-depth analysis is enough to make a conspiracy theorist rabid. Indeed it seems many doctors have adopted a Hippocrates-be-damned philosophy when it comes to certain therapies. If it isn’t considered mainstream by their medical societies they’ll do their best to disparage it.

Fortunately for the rest of the world there are non-medical practitioners making unbelievable breakthroughs in the field of nutriceuticals. They’re chemists, biologists, nutritionalists, even double-laureate physicists. There is also a growing number of physicians who’ve decided patient health is more important than professional respect, and are starting to embrace nutriceutical research and treatments. One such person is Dr. Mark Miller of Albany Medical College.

Just today Dr. Tariq Haqqi confirmed that Dr. Miller’s Progrado is the first substance known to block the molecules responsible for cartilage damage in joints. Progrado is one of two substance Dr. Miller has extracted from a Brazilian rain forest tree that grows 30ft/year that has amazing antioxidant properties. In addition to treating the causes of arthritis and joint problems (instead of treating the symptoms) Progrado is also an antioxidant that is 6 times stronger than Vitamin C. Glucosamine, a $1 billion/year industry, comes closest to repairing cartilage and yet even it doesn’t even really compare. And, like Vitamin C, Dr. Miller’s treatment (called Reparagen ) is remarkably safe - you have to exceed 700 times the prescribed amount to reach toxic levels. There are so many benefits to these two substances from anti-aging to ulcer remediation that it’s approaching miracle-cure status among it’s users. Unfortunately you can’t use the word “cure” in an official setting because then the FDA considers it a “drug”, will regulate it, and the price will then go through the roof.

Dr. Miller has done tremendous research with regard to many other South American nutriceutical remedies that have also had astounding results. Take the Peruvian maca, a radish-like tuber that comprises a major part of the Peruvian diet, also called “Inca Gold”. Medicinal qualities were reported before Dr. Miller came along, but Dr. Miller through a leap of logic decided to feed them to fish (6% of the diet) to see how it dealt with hypoxia (a common prenatal problem), and after 100 days the biomass of the fish increased 800% compared to standard, through improved reproduction and better health. This has lead to human trials to observe similar phenomena with amazing results.

What makes these advances so remarkable? They are nutriceuticals. That means that by being nutritional supplements with the oldest track records in the world, products can be brought to market quickly. Dr. Miller has combined efforts with Paul Bobrowski of Rainforest Nutritionals to offer these supplements directly to the public so they can be obtained with as few middlemen as possible. He sells his Reparagen at a reasonable price at www.reparagen.com and Nutrazon at a reasonable price at www.nutrazon.com. As far as I can tell the nutrazon product is a better value. His plan, it seems is to use viral marketing techniques instead of big-buck pharmaceuticals to get the word out.

This is yet another example of a Hippocratic patient-oriented approach. Dr. Miller has patented the manufacturing process for extraction of these nutriceuticals as well as formulas designed for specific uses, however has not chosen to sell them to pharmaceutical companies who’d then pump the prices way up.

I’m convinced that we’ve just scratched the surface with all the benefits that nutriceuticals (and especially those in bio-diverse regions like south america) can bring us. If we can just get the information out to the consumer, and convince enough doctors to break away from their pharmaceutical kick then we’ll see a massive revolution in health that will result in a much healthier, happier, prosperous and productive world.

ps - if you want to enjoy the benefits of Dr. Miller’s work, you’ll get it best with his nutrazon fluid supplement, found at www.nutrazon.com . You can buy wholesale if you join, so I’d suggest you click “join” and in the application process (very simple) you’ll get an opportunity right then to buy the product. Note that joining costs $35, but if you buy a case (4 bottles) it pays for itself. All future orders will then be at wholesale. If you need a sponsor id use 100377.

Winning the War on Terror through Vitamin C

Dave Austin — Sun, 21 Oct 2007 03:12:55 +0000

The war on Terror costs money. Lots of it. It seems then that the best way to win the war on terror is to free up tons of money, making it available to the economy so the war on terror can be funded.

Where to get such money? Well, according to the results of a British researcher: http://torontosun.com/Lifestyle/2007/10/20/4590932-sun.html we could very likely solve heart disease problem cheaply and efficiently. Heart disease is the #1 killer in the United States. It costs Americans more money every year by far than does the Iraqi conflict. The wild thing is that tons of research backs up this claim the cheap doses of Vitamin E (an antioxidant), cheap resveratrol (another antioxidant), and cheap megadoses of Vitamin C can prevent, and even reverse the conditions that lead to heart attacks, and yet our “noble” allopathic tradition discourages it, claiming that it’s dangerous because it can give you diarrhea … or even worse: it might make you fart!

Oh! The horrors!

Meanwhile the war on terror is bankrupting the world, yet heart disease costs even more. Same thing with Cancer (costs more than the war on terror), which disease is also very treatable, very effectively by extremely cheap IV based ascorbate treatments (as high as 200 mg/day, but usually 70 mg twice/week is adequate). So if we started using these cheap treatments and reinvesting that money usually spent on Cancer and Heart Disease into the economy then we would have more than enough to pay for the War on Terror. Not to mention it would save 100,000,000’s lives every year worldwide - allowing the patients to live full and productive lives.

But then who’s going to pay for all the yachts? No wonder the AMA and your very own doctor frowns upon anything that has anything to do with Vitamin C. And so we’ll bankrupt the economy of the world. Just remember - it wasn’t the war that did it. It was the refusal to save money where money could have been saved.

Why We Owe Israel Our Support

Dave Austin — Fri, 05 Oct 2007 20:24:24 +0000

Today is “Al-Quds (Jerusalem) Day” (not to be confused with the Israeli “Jerusalem Day” held in May) an Iranian-invented occasion to call for the wiping off of Israel from the Middle East map. In celebration of the day Mahmoud Ahbmadinejad, of course, has already spewed his nonsense that Israel’s existence is illegal (http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/909545.html). So I think Israel supporters should also have Jerusalem day to show our support for Israel. In particular I think it’s important for all Americans to finally accept why we owe such support to the Jews.

What if you were given irrefutable evidence that top American and British leaders knew that Jews were ignominiously being slaughtered by the millions in 1942, but kept it hush-hush until late 1945, after which time most of the 9 million European Jews were quietly being executed in concentration camps ? The “final solution” didn’t really happen until 1942, so that would cover by far most of the concentration camp deaths. What if those deaths all occurred because most Jews thought they were just being “relocated” so they didn’t put up much of a fight? What if it could have been significantly avoided if of the US and the UK made the most meager efforts to notify the Jewish people (air-dropping leaflets was a daily occurrence), but instead they covered it up?

Well … that’s exactly what happened. Yes, our leaders were quietly complicit in the murder of millions of Jews over the space of a few years. This has been publicly known for over 30 years now, but I never heard about it throughout my public school education. I’m sure it still isn’t taught, although I don’t know why it isn’t. The point is that Roosevelt and his whole cabinet knew it was happening and suppressed the distribution of that information.

You don’t believe me? As I said, it’s thoroughly well documented. Read these excerpts from a speech (http://www.theopavlidis.com/reprints/matsas/part1.htm) given a few years ago to the Jewish Community Center in DC by Dr. Michael Matsas, an expert on the subject (Read his book if you want the documented references):

American diplomats stationed in Istanbul and Cairo sent advice to Washington, as to how the Greek Jews could be saved. The documents with such advice were ignored and were filed in the National Archives, where I was the first one to discover them in 1975. I found over 500 pages of such documents, thanks to the “Freedom of Information Act.” The Allies with their silence helped the Germans in the slaughter of the Jews. The Allies with their silence eliminated even our instinct of survival, which in case of danger, orders you to hide, flee, or fight. They preferred to damage even their own military interests The Germans needed few soldiers to capture Jews who did not offer any resistance.Thanks to the abandonment of the Jews by our British and American allies, thousands of able Jewish men and women were led like lambs to the slaughter houses of the death camps. It is abundantly clear now that the United States knew about the mass killing of the Jews as early as July 1941. In October 1941 the American Military Attache in Berlin reported, “The normal procedure for the Nazis upon taking over a city in the East, was to establish local commandos, to separate the Jews, and to shoot them.” A logical conclusion, writes Richard Breitman, was that the deportees would also be killed if sent to the East.On August 1, 1942, a German businessman transmitted to the World Jewish Congress in Switzerland the information that Hitler had ordered the liquidation of all Jews throughout the territories occupied by Germany. The information was transmitted to England and the United States. John Pehle, the Executive Director of the War Refugee Board, made the following comments in a recent TV documentary: “The State Department was actively suppressing information about the Holocaust, while Undersecretary of State Breckinridge Long tried to cover it up. By suppressing information, the Government becomes an accomplice in what the Germans were doing, by hiding information from the American public. Officials of the Treasury Department who discovered the State Department’s deliberate obstruction of rescue efforts, revealed the “nasty scandal” in a report entitled, “Acquiescence of this Government in the Murder of the Jews of Europe.”A rabbi from Baltimore, Maryland, in a bitter sermon, suggested that, “If we had any Jewish dignity, we would picket the White House and demand that the President use his influence to stop the killing of the Jews.” Within an hour, the Board of his Congregation fired him, for his disrespect of President Roosevelt, who was beloved by the American Jews and who received 90% of their votes.

In November 1942 Rabbi Stephen Wise publicly announced the murder of over two million Jews. In a meeting with the President, Roosevelt declared, “The Government of the United States is very well acquainted with most of the facts that you are now bringing to our attention.”

Professor David Wyman said in his book, “The Abandonment of the Jews,” that “anti-Semitism was widespread and the State Department was actively blocking information about the genocide and deliberately obstructed rescue efforts. The press had little to say and this was in the inner pages. The President refused to focus on the issue. The United States and Great Britain were deeply committed to a policy of not rescuing the Jews, while, if the US accepted a policy of rescue, hundreds of thousands would have been saved and in the process it would have rescued the conscience of the nation.”

Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau wrote, “We knew in Washington from August 1942 on that the Nazis were planning the extermination of all the Jews of Europe. Yet for nearly 18 months, the State Department did practically nothing. Officials procrastinated or suppressed information about atrocities.”

Why did the Government of the United States demonstrate such hostility toward the European Jews? In the TV documentary “America and the Holocaust – Deceit and Indifference,” I believe there is the answer to this question. “Pervasive anti-Semitism dominated the US in 1940. Jews were unacceptable to many employers and they were unwelcome in resorts and country clubs.”

Saving the Jews of Europe should have been a moral obligation for the US and not simply a humanitarian act. Five hundred fifty thousand American Jews served with distinction in the Armed Forces of the United States. Eleven thousand were killed, 40,000 were wounded, and almost all of them had relatives in Europe who were abandoned to the hands of the Germans. Those in power in the American government rejected thousands of applications for immigration to this enormous country. Among these applications was that of Anne Frank’s family in Amsterdam. While 6 million Jews were dying in Europe, the United States was becoming a nuclear superpower, thanks to Jewish scientists like Albert Einstein, Oppenheimer, Zillard, Teller, Rabbi, and Admiral Hyman Rickover (inventor of the nuclear submarine), while the relatives of these Jews were left to die in the gas chambers of Auschwitz and Treblinka.

The abandonment of the European Jews by President Franklin D. Roosevelt became obvious when he refused entry to this immense country to the 900 German Jews of the “St. Louis.” Six hundred of them eventually were killed by the Germans. Why is there so much Christian hate toward the Jews? I discussed this subject with a professor of theology at Cornell University who did not know that I am a Jew. He concluded, “Killing the Jews is not enough.” “What can be worse than killing them?” I asked with obvious surprise and shock. “Eternal damnation,” was his reply. I wonder what Jesus would say, if he knew in what kind of degradation fell his noble teachings like “Love your neighbor as you would yourself’ or “Don’t do to others what you don’t want them to do to you.”

I conclude with a poem by Yitzhak Katznelson, which was written a few days before the Germans killed him, and it seems to be appropriate even today.

Sure enough, the nations did not interfere, nor did they protest, Nor shake their heads, nor did they warn the murderers. Never a murmur. It was as if the leaders of the nations Were afraid that the killings might stop.

It stinks when history thumps you on the head. In the defense of those who heard second-hand (like most Church leaders) I’m sure that for most the stories and numbers were just to horrific to be believed as people learned about it through the American rumor mill, but that’s no excuse for the grievous level of apathy - though I think we see the same thing today with regard to the genocide in Darfur, Sierra Leone, and Tibet. Admittedly when this information first came my way my initial gut reaction was that this insidious covertness was never practiced by our leaders, followed by an assumption that there must have been a good reason that they kept quiet, but of course the very idea is ludicrous. Six million European Jews, that’s 2 out of every 3, were murdered and our elected leaders were silent partners for much of the slaughter.