Jerome R. Corsi's Blog, page 344

Pensions at risk nationwide after ruling

NEW YORK – With dozens of U.S. cities struggling to cope with diminishing municipal tax revenues and rising city expenses, Detroit’s bankruptcy ruling sent shock waves through city employees and unions nationwide.

In a dramatic ruling Tuesday, U.S. bankruptcy Judge Stephen Rhodes said Detroit, the largest U.S. city ever to declare bankruptcy, is eligible to proceed with the city’s Chapter 9 filing. The decision clears the way for Detroit’s emergency manager, Kevyn Orr, to negotiate with approximately 100,000 creditors to bring the city out from under $18.5 billion in debt.

Moreover, Rhodes ruled that in reducing Detroit’s obligations to creditors, Orr is not required to give city pensioners a special, protected status under labor contracts with the city. That makes it virtually certain Detroit’s pensioners will receive sharp cuts in the retirement benefits they were promised under their labor contracts.

The Detroit Free Press reported Tuesday that Detroit’s 23,500 retirees were shocked and dismayed Judge Rhodes ruled the U.S. Constitution trumps Michigan’s constitution. The judge rejected an argument advanced by attorneys representing city pensioners that a clause in the Michigan constitution prevented pension benefits from being cut in a Chapter 9 filing.

“Pension benefits are a contractual obligation of a municipality and are not entitled to any heightened protection in bankruptcy,” Rhodes said.

The ruling put on notice cities with unfunded pension liabilities and pension benefits for municipal employees. Unlike corporate pensioners protected from loss by the federal Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation, no protection from cuts will be afforded by clauses in a state’s constitution that may have been drafted to protect state and municipal employees against federal law in bankruptcy situations.

“I think it’s hugely important,” Robert Novy-Marx, an associate professor of finance at the University of Rochester’s Simon Business School, told the Detroit Free Press.

“In terms of the legal landscape, it clarifies the fact even pension benefits can be impaired. That very much changes the conversation that workers and municipalities are going to have going forward. Up until now, the workers have said we’re going to get paid no matter what. We’re not going to negotiate.”

Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette joined labor unions representing Detroit municipal employees in vowing to appeal the ruling, the newspaper reported.

Detroit’s city pension funds are short by $3.5 billion, Fox News reported.

Typically, municipal bankruptcy filings are relatively rare, according to Governing.gov, a website devoted to tracking state and local government management. California leads the list with four municipal bankruptcy filings in recent years. The city of Vallejo filed for bankruptcy protection in 2008, followed by Stockton and Mammoth Lakes filing for Chapter 9 last summer. San Bernardino followed suit in August.

Governing.gov suggests many cities are deterred from filing Chapter 9 because of adverse consequences that are difficult to overcome. They include the downgrading of credit ratings, a process that can be both lengthy and costly, and the long-term negative implications impeding an area’s future economic growth.

Only 13 cities, according to Governing.gov, have pursued Chapter 9 filings over the past five years, adding up to only one of every 1,668 eligible localities, or 0.06 percent of all U.S. cities.

Some cities, such as Camden, N.J. – a city of 77,000 adjacent to Philadelphia that is one of the poorest in America after losing several major manufacturing firms – has survived financially without having to file for bankruptcy only because the state of New Jersey has provided hundreds of millions of dollars in loans, grants and direct aid over the past few years.

A study by the Pew Charitable Trusts reported in July found that fewer than half the states have laws allowing them to intervene in municipal finances. Practices vary among the 19 states that have intervention programs, with most intervening in municipal finances only in reaction to a financial crisis.

Occasional success stories can be found.

In August, Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder announced that the financial emergency in the city of Pontiac was over after successful efforts by the city’s emergency manager, Lou Schimmel, to reduce city debt from $115 million in 2011 to $28 million in May 2013. Pontiac reduced the number of city employees from more than 500 six years ago to 20 currently (excluding courthouse workers), reduced annual general fund expenses from $57 million six years ago to $28 million in fiscal year 2012-2013 and sold the city’s golf course to private operators.

In September, Moody’s listed Chicago at the top of a list of U.S. municipalities facing financial insolvency because of unfunded pension liabilities.

Moody’s downgraded Chicago to A3 in July because the city faced pension liabilities that were 678 percent of the city’s operating revenues as of fiscal 2011.

Among the top 10 municipal entities rated by Moody’s as struggling with financial insolvency because of high unfunded pension obligations, along with Chicago, were Jacksonville, Fla.; Houston, Texas; and Dallas, Texas.

Déjà vu: Holder deal risks another mortgage crisis

NEW YORK – In the new $13 billion JP Morgan Chase subprime loan deal with the Justice Department, Attorney General Eric Holder appears to have designed a multi-million dollar, backdoor kickback for activist groups like the disgraced community organizer ACORN.

Critics say the Obama administration has learned nothing from the mortgage meltdown in 2008-2009, which was prompted by the default of subprime loans packaged into financial instruments.

Instead, the administration is engineering a strategy to revive the subprime mortgage market by forcing banks to fund left-wing community organizing groups that would once again place low-income families into mortgages they can’t afford.

As Investor’s Business Daily pointed out in an editorial Tuesday, “Annex 2” of the JPMorgan settlement agreement, announced Nov. 19, mandates that “JPMorgan fork over any unclaimed or unpaid damages to a nonprofit group that finances Acorn clones and other shakedown groups.”

“Annex 2” specifies that JPMorgan pay out $4 billion in “consumer relief” to aid consumers harmed by its packaging of subprime loans into securities that were sold to institutional investors at the height of the housing boom.

JPMorgan has agreed to make payments under the Making Home Affordable Program and the Home Affordable Modification Program, two Obama administration programs designed to get low-income families into home mortgages. The programs assist low-income families with mortgage loan forgiveness, loan modification agreement payments and targeted mortgage obligations to “relieve urban blight.”

However, if by Dec. 31, 2017, JPMorgan has not paid out the full $4 billion, then the Holder Justice Department will require the bank to pay “liquidated damages in the amount of the shortfall to NeighborWorks America, a government-funding organization that supports a network of left-leaning community organizers the IBD editorial characterized as “operating in the same vein as Acorn.”

The payments to NeighborWorks America could provide the group with hundreds of millions of dollars to utilize in various programs to get low-income families into home mortgages.

IBD pointed out that in 2011 alone, NeighborWorks America provided $35 billion in “affordable housing grants” to 115 ACORN-like groups, “with recipients including the radical Affordable Housing Alliance, which pressures banks to make high-risk loans in low-income neighborhoods.”

IBD concluded Holder’s backdoor kickback to leftist groups seeking to get low-income families into risky mortgages funds all over again the problem that led to the subprime mortgage crisis in 2008.

The IBD editorial said:

In effect, lenders are bankrolling the same parasites that bled them for the risky loans that caused the mortgage crisis. Infused with new cash, they can ramp back up their shakedown campaign, repeating the cycle of dangerous political lending that wrecked the economy.

Under the dubious deal, JPMorgan is also obligated to donate foreclosed homes to these “nonprofits” while offering home loans to “low to moderate income borrowers” in areas hit “hardest” by subprime foreclosures.

The consent order refers JPMorgan to a HUD map of “targeted” areas such as Detroit, Cleveland, Atlanta, Miami, Washington, D.C. and Chicago. In announcing the deal, Holder alleged JPMorgan “misled investors” in securities backed by subprime mortgages. Yet, oddly, the deal aids only deadbeat borrowers — not investors.

Like other recent bank shakedowns, the JPMorgan deal is really an anti-poverty program benefiting Democrat strongholds hit hardest by subprime foreclosures.

IBD calculates the “off-budget welfare program” engineered by Holder’s Justice Department and underwritten by large U.S. banks such as JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and Citibank, now totals “$86 billion and climbing,” amounting to “a fraud, using Wall Street to finance a social agenda.”

Déjà vu

Providing home mortgages to homebuyers unable to pay mortgages when interest rates rose across the economy was the crux of the subprime mortgage market. It expanded from the rationale of providing low-income families with “affordable housing” to the point at which income verification was considered a minor detail in a housing market in which rising home values had become the norm.

The Community Reinvestment Act, or CRA, was signed into law by President Jimmy Carter in 1977 with the goal of forcing banks to provide credit to businesses and homeowners with poor credit.

The CRA carried out a social agenda of stopping banks from “red-lining” inner-city areas, a practice of refusing to lend in places where the risk of default was high.

Even though lending to those with poor credit is inherently risky, the Carter administration was intent on forcing banks to accept a social responsibility to provide credit to homeowners and businesses in low-income neighborhoods.

The CRA became super-charged during the Clinton administration with a set of new rules that allowed subprime mortgages to be securitized.

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, in a speech to the Community Affairs Research Conference in Washington, D.C., on March 30, 2007, noted a 1992 law passed during the Clinton administration expanded the CRA market by requiring the government-sponsored enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to securitize “affordable housing loans,” a euphemism widely understood to mean low-income housing loans.

In the early months of 2007, before the mortgage bubble burst, subprime mortgages constituted as much as 65 percent of all loans packaged into mortgage-backed securities.

One of the lead subprime mortgage writers was Countrywide Financial Corporation, which in 2006 financed approximately 20 percent of all mortgages in the United States.

Bubble built on subprime success

Headed by Angelo Mozilo, Countrywide pioneered in providing undocumented loans in which mortgage applicants were not required to provide any loan documentation or down payments.

To keep the monthly payments low for the first year or more of the loan, the unregulated subprime market developed a whole set of unorthodox mortgages, such as “interest-only” loans in which no principle payments were required or “balloon” loans in which what amounted to a down payment was postponed.

As CNBC reported in a Special Report first broadcast Feb. 12, 2009, titled “House of Cards”, the best mortgage customer at the height of the mortgage bubble became “anyone with a pulse.”

CNBC quoted Wall Street mortgage banker Michael Francis, who enlisted lenders on the West Coast to supply him with mortgages to package into mortgage-backed securities bonds.

“We removed the litmus test,” Francis told CNBC. “No income, no asset. Not verifying income … breathe on a mirror and if there’s fog you sort of get a loan.”

Even the credit agencies played along. CNBC interviewed Ann Rutledge, who rated securities for Moody’s.

When home prices surged, no borrowers defaulted, and riskier Triple-B rated securities made from subprime mortgages began to look as good as the safe Triple-As, she explained.

“Eventually the market gets smart and says, ‘Let’s lower the requirements for Triple-A,” Rutledge said.

The credit rating agencies had an incentive to award a mortgage-backed security the best possible ratings, CNBC noted, because the agencies were paid for their appraisals by the very investment banks that issued the mortgage-backed securities.

Bubble burst

The mortgage bubble was destined to burst when Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan and the Fed began raising interest rates late in 2004.

When Ben Bernanke succeeded Greenspan as Fed chairman on Feb. 1, 2006, he continued Greenspan’s policy of tightening credit.

Fed fund rates, at 4.29 percent when Bernanke took over, rose to 5.25 percent in August 2006, when rates stayed at or near that plateau for almost a year.

By August 2007, Bernanke and the Fed realized the mortgage bubble had burst and the economy was entering a recession.

At that point, Bernanke and the Fed began lowering rates, dropping Fed funds rates from the plateau of 5.25 percent in August 2006 to 4.24 percent by the end of 2006 and to nearly zero by the end of 2007. Still, the move to drop rates was too little and too late. Unfortunately, the damage had already been done.

Subprime mortgages written during the building of the mortgage bubble could not withstand higher rates.

The wave of foreclosures that started in the subprime market eventually spread to the mortgage market as a whole, triggering not just a meltdown of the housing market, but also a general collapse of the economy that led to the massive recession that plagued the end of George W. Bush’s second term as president.

Drug dealers love 12 years of U.S. occupation

NEW YORK – Opium production in Afghanistan is at a record high amid 12 years of U.S. military occupation, according to a new United Nations report.

While the use of opiates among the Afghanistan population has also reached epidemic proportions, allegations that Afghanistan government officials, possibly with the active cooperation of the CIA, are involved in the drug trafficking business remain unsubstantiated, the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime, UNODC, reported in November.

The U.N. measured Afghanistan’s opium production this year at 5,500 tons, representing an increase of 49 percent over 2012.

The UNODC report on world drug production issued in May said Afghanistan is currently the lead producer and cultivator of opium globally. The nation was responsible for 74 percent of the global illicit opium production in 2012. About 131,000 hectares in Afghanistan was devoted to opium cultivation, more than all the other nations combined.

Prior to the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, the Taliban had reduced opium production in the country to a record low of 7,606 hectares.

According to the U.S. Congressional Research Service, the number of U.S. forces in Afghanistan peaked at about 100,000 in June 2011 and was reduced to a “pre-surge” level of about 66,000 in September 2012. The number is expected to fall to 34,000 by February 2014. The size of the “residual force” that will remain in Afghanistan after 2014 is dependent on the outcome of current negotiations between the U.S. and Afghanistan governments.

As of October, the last month for which accurate statistics are available, NATO reported there were still 60,000 U.S. troops on the ground in Afghanistan, 83 percent more than the 32,800 in Afghanistan when Obama took office.

A question rarely surfaced in the establishment media is whether the presence of U.S. troops in Afghanistan and the surge in the nation’s opium production are linked to active CIA involvement in the drug trade.

In 1991, Alfred W. McCoy published a book titled “The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade” that investigated CIA involvement in the narcotics trade worldwide. It included U.S. involvement in the narcotics trade in Afghanistan before and after the fall of the Taliban.

In 1996, journalist Gary Webb wrote a series of articles published in the San Jose Mercury News that resulted in his 1998 book “Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion.” In it, he linked the explosion of a crack cocaine epidemic in Los Angeles in 1996 to CIA drug-running activities that generated covert funds for the Contras in Nicaragua in the Reagan administration, known as Iran-Contra.

On March 16, 1998, following an extensive congressional investigation, CIA Inspector General Frederick P. Hitz testified before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence that rogue CIA agents and Contra agents were involved in drug trafficking activities.

In 2008, under the administration of President George W. Bush, the CIA and the DEA investigated charges Ahmed Wali Karzai, the brother of Afghan President Hamid Karzai, was involved in the drug trade. Both agencies concluded the alleged drug trafficking was politically motivated.

Still, the CIA-backed Mujahedeen in the 1980s in part turned to drug trafficking to support its insurgency guerrilla war against the Soviet Union. The Northern Alliance persisted in the opium trade to fund its opposition to Taliban rule, defying the Taliban’s aggressive efforts to eradicate opium production in Afghanistan.

Researchers such as Michael Chossudovsky, professor of economics (emeritus) at the University of Ottawa and founder of the Center for Research on Globalization, continue to follow the leads established by McCoy and Webb. Chossudovsky argued that one of the “hidden objectives” of the U.S. war in Afghanistan was to restore the CIA sponsored drug trade to its historical levels and exert direct control over the drug trades internationally.

“There are powerful business and financial interests behind narcotics. From this standpoint, geopolitical and military control over the drug routes is as strategic as oil and oil pipelines. However, what distinguishes narcotics from legal commodity trade is that narcotics constitutes a major source of wealth formation not only for organized crime but also for the U.S. intelligence apparatus, which increasingly constitutes a powerful actor in the spheres of finance and banking,” Chossudovsky wrote in 2005.

“In turn, the CIA, which protects the drug trade, has developed complex business and undercover links to major criminal syndicates involved in the drug trade. In other words, intelligence agencies and powerful business syndicates allied with organized crime, are competing for the strategic control over the heroin routes. The multi-billion dollar revenues of narcotics are deposited in the Western banking system. Most of the large international banks together with their affiliates in the offshore banking havens launder large amounts of narco-dollars.”

Updating his research this year, Chossudovsky charged the UNODC, following its mandate to support the prevention of organized criminal activity, obfuscates the true size and criminal nature of the Afghanistan drug trade. The UNODC has insisted that a large part of the opium trade in Afghanistan is no longer channeled toward the illegal heroin market.

“Each kilogram of opium produces 100 grams of pure heroin. The U.S. retail prices for heroin (with a low level of purity) is, according to UNODC, of the order of $172 a gram. The price per gram of pure heroin is substantially higher,” Chossudovsky concluded in his analysis this year.

“The profits are largely reaped at the level of the international wholesale and retail markets of heroin as well as in the process of money laundering in Western banking institutions. The revenues derived from the global trade in heroin constitute a multi-billion dollar bonanza for financial institutions and organized crime.”

WND, in a series of articles beginning in 2012, reported a former HSBC bank executive in New York documented HSBC was a conduit of massive money laundering internationally.

Later that year, HSBC paid a record $1.92 billion fine to the U.S. government to avoid criminal charges on allegations HSBC laundered money for major drug cartels worldwide.

Iran cashes in on Obama deal

NEW YORK – Despite White House denials of reports surfacing in Arabic-language newspapers in Kuwait that President Obama was planning a trip to Tehran in the middle of next year, Iran is moving rapidly to become a full participant in the international community.

Tehran hopes to benefit from the momentum gained from a tentative agreement on its nuclear program with the P5+1 Western nations, the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council, U.S., Russia, China, U.K. and France, plus Germany.

Iran’s oil minister, Bijan Zanganeh, a veteran of the Iranian oil industry, is planning to return to Vienna this week to take advantage of an easing of Western oil sanctions scheduled to occur in six months by reasserting Iran’s willingness to resume full participation in OPEC oil production.

Iran hopes to regain its position as the second largest oil-producing OPEC nation, behind Saudi Arabia. In Iran’s absence, Iraq has moved into second place.

Tehran, however, will face difficulty negotiating resumed OPEC production because the 12-member nations are expected to continue until at least June their agreement to cap oil production at 30 million barrels per day.

“Iraq has replaced Iran’s oil with its own,” Zanganeh said in November, as reported by Reuters. “This Iraq move is not friendly at all.”

If OPEC does allow Iran to resume OPEC oil production, room will have to be made by reducing the oil production of other OPEC members.

Reuters also reported increased U.S. oil production resulting from new shale production may require OPEC to cut production in the second half of 2014 to keep the price of oil above $100 a barrel.

Iranian oil production has decreased 1 million barrels per day, down to 2.7 million barrels a day, since the start of 2012 when sanctions effectively closed Iran out from major world oil markets. Meanwhile, Iraq has boosted oil production to nearly 3 million barrels a day since 2012.

Readmitting Iran to OPEC as a full production partner may raise tensions with Sunni-led Saudi Arabia. With Iran’s restoration, OPEC’s second and third largest producers would be Shia-led governments.

Iran to continue uranium enrichment

Last Wednesday, in a television interview from Iran that was co-sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations and the Asia Society, Iran’s new president, Hassan Rouhani, vowed Tehran would never stop uranium enrichment.

“We will never forgo our inherent right to benefit from peaceful nuclear technology, including nuclear enrichment, under any circumstances,” Rouhani said.

He complained the sanctions imposed by the Western nations were an unfair infringement on Iran’s sovereign rights.

“The continuation of pressure, arms-twisting, intimidation and extraterritorially imposed measures directed against the Iranian people and innocent civilians trying to prevent them from having access to a whole range of necessities, from technology to medicine, from science to foodstuff, could only poison the atmosphere and undermine the conditions necessary for making progress and weaken our resolve.”

Rouhani asserted it was “natural for the people of Iran” to want to reassert a sovereign right to enrich uranium within the framework of the international agreement of the safeguards framework and under the supervision of the U.N.’s International Atomic Energy Agency, IAEA. He pointed out that more than 40 nations have embarked on enrichment programs, “some within the framework of the safeguards agreement, and even some outside of the safeguards agreement framework.”

When asked exactly how many centrifuges Iran would need to keep operative enriching uranium, Rouhani dodged giving a direct answer.

“I don’t think the numbers really matter, for those who are asking the questions,” Rouhani answered. “In all the reports by the IAEA, which are periodically issued every three months, the number of centrifuges is announced, declared, the active centrifuges, as well as the inactive centrifuges.”

Despite evidence Iran has continued to play a role in Mideast violence by continuing to support the Assad regime in Syria, Rouhani denied Iran was a threat to other nations in the region.

“There is a group that through false propaganda has sought to portray Iran as a threat, and by portraying Iran as a threat, to bring pressure on people,” Rouhani objected. “Those who have placed this pressure on Iran should be asked when they chose to exert such pressure on the people of Iran, why to such extent, when Iran’s intended activities are fully peaceful and when the IAEA has said in all its reports that it has found no evidence of deviation in Iran’s activities.”

On Nov. 24, as negotiations were yet being concluded in Geneva, Rouhani in a speech broadcast on Press TV in Iran and translated by the Middle East Media Research Institute vowed Iran’s enrichment activities would proceed, despite the Geneva agreement.

Iran threatens Israel

On Nov. 20, before the Geneva agreement was reached, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s Supreme Leader, declared in an assembly of thousands of Basij militia that Israel was doomed to fail.

Khamenei characterized the “Zionist regime” as the “sinister, unclean rabid dog of the region,” insisting Israelis “cannot be called human beings.” He prompted the audience to shout in response, “Death to America” and “Death to Israel.”

On Nov. 21, at a meeting with Jewish leaders in Moscow, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Khamenei’s speech reminded him “of the dark regimes of the past that plotted against us first and then against humanity,”

Iran, therefore, must be prevented from attaining nuclear weapons, he said.

“This is the real Iran,” Netanyahu insisted. “We are not confused.”

Has political left adopted license to lie?

EAST HANOVER, N.J. – In a speech last week, Jack Cashill, a frequent WND contributor and author of the WND book “If I Had a Son: Race, Guns, and the Railroading of George Zimmerman,” argued George Zimmerman was the victim of a political prosecution, despite being found “not guilty” of the murder of African-American teenager Trayvon Martin.

“For the first time in the history of American jurisprudence, a state government, Florida, with a Republican governor, conspired with the U.S. Department of Justice under a Democratic president in the White House, with ready compliance of a Democratic-leaning mainstream media, the cooperation of a left-leaning entertainment industry, and the tattered vestiges of the civil rights movement, to send a transparently innocent man to prison for the rest of his life,” Jack Cashill told a to an attentive audience Nov. 29, explaining his view Zimmerman was unfairly prosecuted.

Arguing his conclusion the criminal prosecution of George Zimmerman in Florida for the murder of Trayvon Martin amounted to a political show-trial, Cashill explained Zimmerman was scapegoated as a racially motivated murderer.

The mainstream media exploited the Zimmerman case, Cashill continued, to advance a contrived narrative that teenage high-school students like Martin, portrayed at trial as an unarmed African-American youth, are no longer safe in their own neighborhoods.

“The pattern has become obvious in that those on the far left in American politics feel they have a license to lie, almost casually and without conscience, following a model that was introduced by the Soviets in the 1920s, so much so that it has become normative for the Democratic Party and their allies in the media,” Cashill said. “In response, we acquiesce in that our allies on the institutional political right under-cut us when we try to expose the truth by calling us ‘conspiracy theorists.’”

Discover the Soviet roots of leftist lies in Ion Mihal Pacepa’s “Disinformation: Former Spy Chief Reveals Secret Strategies for Undermining Freedom, Attacking Religion and Promoting Terrorism.”

This, Cashill stressed, supported his basic theme for the evening: “How to become a genuine, all-American ‘conspiracy theorist,’ because in the eyes of the mainstream media, if we dare to tell the truth, we are going to be cast as ‘conspiracy theorists’ by the left in the effort to preserve the lie by discrediting us as truth-tellers.”

But, Cashill cautioned, the requirement for “conspiracy theorists” on the political right is that the arguments made must have a firm basis in truth and facts.

“If you are wrong, you’re going to get punished, because there’s an army of blogs in Washington, D.C., like Media Matters, with 100 people working in cubicles all day long just to catch the political right on any errors we might make,” Cashill cautioned. “At Media Matters, I have my own case-officer who does nothing but monitor everything I say and right in the hopes of being able to do an end-zone victory dance around any factual error they might find.”

To make the point, Cashill stressed, “We have an obligation to be right all the time, but it’s not a problem because we have a vested interest in telling the truth.”

Cashill compared the mainstream media coverage of the Trayvon Martin murder case to the famous Sacco and Vanzetti murder case in the 1920s.

In 1921, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were Italian-born anarchists who were found guilty and sentenced to death for murdering two guards during an armed robbery of a shoe factory in South Braintree, Mass.

Cashill argued that even though the guilt of Sacco and Vanzetti was proven beyond doubt, the political left in America rallied to politicize the case to advance a predetermined, post-World War I, leftist narrative.

Well-known figures from Felix Frankfurter to Upton Sinclair, Cashill claimed, championed in newspaper articles, essays and books of the day that Sacco and Vanzetti were executed not because they were convicted murderers but because they were victims of racial prejudice, singled out because they were working-class immigrants, prosecuted for their left-leaning views on trumped up criminal charges for crimes they did not commit.

“The Russian communists exploited the Sacco and Vanzetti case worldwide to argue the United States was not a ‘melting pot,’ but a xenophobic nation, racially opposed to immigrants,” Cashill said.

“The playbook of virtually the entire Democratic Party in the United States is taken from the former Soviet Union, in which lying for the truth was perfectly OK,” Cashill said. “In Soviet Russian, the word for ‘big truth’ was ‘pravda.’ The ‘little truths,’ or the facts, the ‘detali’ in Russian, are irrelevant, such that you can lie on the little truths, the facts, the detali, just so long as the big truth, the pravda, is advanced.”

Cashill applied what he called the Soviet playbook logic of “lying for the truth” to Obamacare and current U.S. politics, noting that with Obamacare the American public has realized perhaps for the first time that President Obama is more than capable of telling the American people the “little lies” to advance the “big lies” of his leftist goals.

“For Obama, the big truth is, ‘Your health is going to be better,’” Cashill commented, referencing Obamacare. “But the facts are, ‘Everything we are saying to you up until now is a lie, because we need to get re-elected in order to force Obamacare into implementation.’”

The “Baer/Haggerty Offensive,” a conservative multi-media political activist group in New Jersey, sponsored Cashill’s speech.

Get your copy of Cashill’s “If I Had a Son: Race, Guns, and the Railroading of George Zimmerman” – autographed! – from the WND SuperStore now.

U.N. milks 'warming' claim to spend half-trillion-plus

NEW YORK – Acting on global warming fears, the United Nations and the World Bank urged the spending of $600 to $800 billion a year on “sustainable energy” as an alternative to continued reliance on oil and natural gas.

U.N. Secretary Ban Ki-moon and World Bank President Jim Yong Kim declared the massive infusion of cash is necessary in the face of a “rising global thermostat.”

The move made clear the U.N. and the World Bank continue to pursue an energy agenda that presumes a causal link between human-generated carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and a global warming phenomenon of sufficient magnitude to cause catastrophic consequences.

“Climategate” exposes the global warming scam. Get it now at the WND Superstore.

No mention was made at the joint press conference of the accumulating scientific evidence that global warming theories are based on faulty scientific research or that the Obama administration has lost billions of taxpayer dollars pursuing “green energy” projects that have failed to prove economically viable.

“Sustainable energy is the golden thread that connects economic growth, social equity, a stable climate and a healthy environment,” Ban Ki-moon told reporters after chairing a meeting of the Advisory Board of the U.N. Sustainable Energy for All initiative.

At the meeting, the U.N. chief called for action in four areas: finance, energy access, energy efficiency and renewable energy.

Launched in 2011, the U.N.’s Sustainable Energy for All initiative, currently involving 81 countries, seeks to achieve three broadly stated goals by 2030.

The initiative aims for universal access to modern energy, doubling energy efficiency and doubling the share of renewable energy. The objective is to provide services such as lighting, clean cooking and mechanical power in developing countries, as well as improved energy efficiency, especially in the world’s highest-energy consuming countries.

Ban praised Brazil’s “Light for All” program that he claimed has reached 15 million people with needed electricity and Norway’s commitment of $330 million in 2014 for global renewable energy and efficiency. He also noted Bank of America’s Green Bond that has raised $500 million for three years as part of its 10-year $50 billion environmental business commitment.

Also singled out for praise was the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Companies, OPEC, for its announcement of a $1 billion fund for energy access.

“The global thermostat is rising, threatening development goals and economies small and large,” Ban Ki-Moon added. “It is clear that we need a transformation in how we produce, use and share energy.”

A key theme of the conference was the need for international cooperation between governments worldwide and private industry, known as “Public-Private Partnerships,” or PPP initiatives, to pursue alternative energy. The assumption is that global warming theory has scientific justification and that green energy projects can become economically viable, operating profitably without the continuation of government subsidies and tax breaks that amount to billions of dollars in government assistance worldwide.

At a press conference in Sweden in September, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, reported that scientists are 95 percent certain that humans have been the “dominant cause” of global warming since the 1950s.

“Our assessment of the science finds that the atmosphere and ocean have warned, the amount of snow and ice has diminished, the global mean sea level has risen and that the concentrations of greenhouse gases have increased,” said professor Thomas Stoker, IPCC co-chairman, in announcing the publication of a 36-page document issued as the first part of a IPCC trilogy due over the next 12 months.

The credibility of the IPCC was badly impaired in a 2009 scandal known as “Climategate,” in which emails archived at the University of East Anglia in the U.K. exchanged between IPCC scientists were made public. The emails showed widespread use of fraudulent data by noted “experts” working with the U.N. on global warming research.

Just prior to the IPCC, a new group of documents leaked to the Associated Press showed various scientists sought to suppress scientific evidence demonstrating the earth has experienced a lull in surface warming since 1998.

The evidence of a lull in global warming casts doubt on the “scientific consensus” the U.N. asserts exists among scientists worldwide regarding whether or not the utilization of carbon-based fuels by humans is the cause of rising levels of carbon dioxide measured in the earth’s atmosphere.

In April, Gallup reported U.S. worry about global warming is headed back up after several years of expanding public skepticism, exemplified by the 58 percent of Americans who say they worry a great deal or a little amount about global warming.

The trend is up from 51 percent in 2011, but still considerably below the 62-72 percent levels seen in the 10-year period 1991 through 2000.

Researcher Christine Lakatos has created a website, GreenCorruption.blogspot.com, dedicated to exposing Obama administration corruption in funding $150 billion in green initiatives from 2009 through 2014. The funding included both stimulus funds and non-stimulus funds, promoting ultimately failed green energy projects that were tied to prominent Democratic Party politicians and contributors

In Egypt, it's 'moderate Muslims vs. Obama brothers'

NEW YORK – The Egyptian Air Force officer currently residing in the United States who has pressed terrorist charges in Egypt against President Obama’s half-brother Malik has characterized the decision of the Egyptian government to prosecute the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt as a conflict of “moderate Muslims vs. the Obama brothers.”

As Jan. 8, 2014, approaches and Egypt prepares for the next appearance in court of former president Mohamed Morsi and the 14 Muslim Brotherhood leaders facing charges of incitement to murder, Sadek Raouf Ebeid believes the Obama brothers will be implicated because of their support for the Brotherhood in Egypt.

Ebeid was the man who last August filed Complaint No. 1761 with the office of Egyptian Attorney General Hisham Barakat, accusing Malik Obama of managing investment funds for the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.

In a letter addressed to WND, translated and published on the website of Arab-language researcher Walid Shoebat, Ebeid noted the promptness with which Barakat responded to the filing of his complaint.

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He said the quick response to his request that Malik be placed on the Egyptian terrorist watch list reflected not just the efficiency of Ebeid’s lawyer in Egypt, Ahmed el-Ganzory, but also the degree to which this case “resonated with the feelings of the majority of moderate Muslims in the Arab world.”

WND reported in September that Ebeid’s complaint cited Malik for managing funds for both the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and the Islamic Dawa Organization, or IDO, in Sudan.

Earlier this month, WND reported Egyptian lawyers have filed criminal terrorism charges in the International Criminal Court against President Obama, in addition to the criminal terrorism charges previously filed in Egyptian courts against Malik.

The charges filed in the ICC assert President Obama coordinated, incited and assisted the armed elements of the Muslim Brotherhood in the commission of crimes against humanity, including the torching, destruction and plundering of some 85 Christian churches from March 7 through Aug. 18 in Egypt.

‘Two distinct understandings of Islam’

Ebeid says moderate Muslims in Egypt are working to criminalize the radical activities of the Muslim Brotherhood that controlled the Morsi government to enable Egypt to return to a more tolerant situation in which Christians and Jews are not persecuted.

Ebeid wrote:

One has to admit that there are two distinct understandings of Islam.

A moderate, peaceful understanding of Islam that is lead by the Egyptian Grand Sheikh of Al Azhar, Dr. Ahmed el-Tayeb, an Egyptian Sheikh, who has studied philosophy in Paris and is currently the head of Al Azhar Mosque. I am proud to be the first to nominate el-Tayeb for the Nobel peace prize, for his role in spreading the moderate understanding of Islam, referred to in Arabic as “Al Islam Al Wasati.”

The majority of the thirty-three million Egyptians who flooded the streets of Egypt in June 2013 were predominantly moderate Muslims.

While some political commentators may continue to argue whether this event was a coup or a revolution, any objective historian will admit that it was a human earthquake. It was a human earthquake that shook the ground of the Middle East, taking the Arab world out of the dark ages and into the Arab renaissance.

More than ever, Egyptians adhered to the moderate version of Islam, (“Al Islam Al Wasati”). This version is symbolized by the Sheik Ahmed el-Tayeb. He was the man whom the military Generals in Egypt consulted with and whose blessings were obtained, while etching into stone, the post-revolution road map.

In contrast to the earlier teachings of Egypt’s deposed president Morsi, who was recorded in 2010, saying that Arabs need to nurse their children on hatred of the Jews, Egypt’s pending constitution has a third amendment guaranteeing the right of Jews to practice their faith in Egypt.

Ebeid was asked how this relates to President Obama and his brother Malik:

Recently, Egypt’s only lady to ever sit on the Supreme court bench in the Arab world, Judge Tahani el-Gibally (al-Jebali) has made a declaration that has shaken all Egyptians & International observers worldwide. Per her testimony that we included in Case 1761 that I filed on August, 24th 2013, she confirmed what prominent investigative reporters in the US have published earlier.

The Shoebat Foundation has published photos and indisputable evidence that a gentleman by the name of Malik Obama, is serving as the right arm of General al-Bashir.

Photos of Malik Obama participating in an al-Bashir-sponsored organization are now on the desk of Egypt’s A.G., Hisham Barakat, which seeks to question Malik.

Soon after the case was filed, El Ganzory was permitted to serve Malik Obama with papers. He did so at the Kenyan embassy. Recently, after being called back to the embassy, the papers were returned to El Ganzory with a message that Malik is not in Kenya at this time and could not be served. El Ganzory was told Malik is in the U.S. I expect the next course of action to be that papers will be presented to the American embassy so that Malik can be properly served.

The Egyptian judicial system will not be intimidated by who Malik Obama’s brother is. While the writer of this article is proud to be a U.S. physician who deeply respects the USA, he cannot change history. Egypt had a high court in place when Christopher Columbus was still lost on the high seas.

While the US is definitely a major power politically, financially & militarily, Egypt’s deep-rooted judicial system is a lethal weapon of its own. It has already brought two of its own presidents to trial.

Bringing the brother of another country’s sitting president will not be an uphill battle!

In August, WND reported that Tehani al-Gebali, the vice president of the Supreme Constitutional Court of Egypt, gave a speech and participated in an interview broadcast on Egyptian television, identifying Malik Obama as “a major architect” managing investments for the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.

WND also reported in August the Egyptian government planned to introduce evidence the Obama administration paid bribes as large as $850,000 to individually named Muslim Brotherhood leaders, through the U.S. Embassy in Cairo.

Attacks on Coptic Christians

The Muslim Brotherhood’s seizing of power in Egypt and its subsequent government led to attacks on the country’s Coptic Christians.

Middle East expert Raymond Ibrahim said in a paper published Nov. 12 on the website of the Gatestone Institute that the attacks began with the June 30 Revolution that “saw the ousting of President Morsi and prompted the Muslim Brotherhood to scapegoat and incite violence against the Copts.”

Ibrahim reported the attacks became “even more brutal in mid-August after security forces cleared out Muslim Brotherhood ‘sit in’ camps, where people were being tortured, raped, and murdered.”

He noted the attacks were especially devastating in Minya in Upper Egypt, where the large Christian community was hit especially hard, with at least 20 attacks on churches, Christian schools and orphanages.

According to Ibrahim, the goal of the radical Muslims in their attack on the Copts in Egypt was “to erase all the traces of a Christian presence,” such that even the orphanages were looted and destroyed.

Earlier, in an article titled “Attacks on Christians Escalate in Egypt, Nigeria” published by the Gatestone Institute Sept. 19, Ibrahim wrote:

On July 4th, the day after the Egyptian military liberated its nation from Muslim Brotherhood rule, Christian Copts were immediately scapegoated and targeted. All Islamist leaders—from Brotherhood supreme leader Muhammad Badi, to Egyptian-born al-Qaeda leader Ayman Zawahiri, to top Sunni cleric Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi—made a point to single out Egypt’s Copts as especially instrumental in the ousting of former Islamist president Morsi, a claim that ushered in a month of slaughter against the nation’s Christian minority.

Although religious violence by Muslims against Christians remains largely unreported in the mainstream media in the United States, Ibrahim warned that persecution of Christians in the Islamic world is on the way “to reaching pandemic proportions.”

Poverty under Obama rises to alarming level

NEW YORK – As Americans celebrate Thanksgiving, it is important to remember that despite establishment-media reporting of an Obama “economic recovery,” the number of Americans on welfare today is higher than the number that have full-time jobs, says Michael Snyder, creator of TheEconomicCollapseBlog.com.

Snyder outlined the economic reality in a recent editorial that points out the fragility of the U.S. economy.

“The gap between the wealthy and the poor is at a level that America has never seen before, and this is beginning to create a ‘Robin Hood mentality’ that could cause a tremendous amount of social chaos in the years ahead,” Snyder writes.

“Anger at the ‘haves’ in America continues to rise at a very alarming pace, and the ‘have nots’ are becoming increasingly desperate. At some point all of this anger is going to boil over, and you won’t want to be anywhere around major population centers when that happens.”

Documentation for Snyder’s claim that there are more Americans on welfare than the number of Americans working full-time comes from Census Bureau statistics that show there were 108.6 million people in the U.S. in the fourth quarter of 2011 who were recipients of one or more means-tested government benefit programs. That’s compared to the 101.7 million people who worked full-time year round in 2011, including both private sector and government workers.

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The U.S. Census Bureau further reports nearly half (49.2 percent) of Americans are receiving benefits from at least one government program, with 84.5 million Americans, 26.9 percent of the population, living in households where one or more persons received Medicaid benefits.

Despite the trillions of dollars spent in anti-poverty programs since President Lyndon Johnson launched “The Great Society” in 1964, the U.S. under President Obama has just seen the highest spike in poverty since the 1960s, leaving 50 million Americans living below the poverty line, defined as a family of four earning less than $23,021 a year.

As measured by the Census Bureau, median U.S. household income fell for the fifth straight year in 2012, to $51,017, the lowest annual income adjusted for inflation since 1995. As a result, income inequality has intensified, with the top 5 percent of all households earning 22.3 percent of all the nation’s income in 2012.

Nearly one out of five U.S. households were enrolled in the federal government’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, commonly known as food stamps, with 22,993,709 American households enrolled in the program in August, totaling 47,665,069 persons, approximately one in every seven Americans. In the 1970s, by comparison about one out of every 50 Americans was on food stamps.

Since President Obama took office, the federal government has spent a total of $3.7 trillion on approximately 80 different means-tested poverty and welfare programs – excluding Social Security and Medicare) – a sum nearly five times greater than the federal government spent on NASA, education and all federal transportation projects over that time.

Pope Francis urges income redistribution

NEW YORK – In an apostolic exhortation titled “Evangelii Gaudium,” or “The Joy of the Gospel,” widely praised in the mainstream media worldwide, Pope Francis has set an agenda to return the Catholic Church to the humility Christ showed in his devotion to the poor.

In his discourse, however, Francis sets a clearly anti-market tone that makes no attempt to hide his affinity with the anti-capitalist themes common to socialist manifestos of the past century.

Francis castigates unfettered capitalism as an ideology that worships “the absolute autonomy of the marketplace and financial speculation” to produce “a new tyranny” that results in the earnings of the already rich “growing exponentially” while the poor suffer an income gap “separating the majority from the prosperity enjoyed by the happy few.”

Urging Christians to reject to what he characterizes as “the new idolatry of money,” the pope believes income redistribution is essential to a moral theory of economics.

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“I encourage financial experts and political leaders to ponder the words of one of the sages of antiquity: ‘Not to share one’s wealth with the poor is to steal from them and to take away their livelihood. It is not our own goods which we hold, but theirs,’” he writes.

Clearly, Francis has embraced a vision in which the cruel reality of poverty takes on a moral imperative.

“How can it be that it is not a news item when an elderly homeless person dies of exposure, but it is news when the stock market loses two points?” he asks. “Can we continue to stand by when food is thrown away while people are starving? This is inequality. Today everything comes under the laws of competition and the survival of the fittest, where the powerful feed upon the powerless. As a consequence, masses of people find themselves excluded and marginalized: without work, without possibilities, without any means of escape.”

He charges that capitalists and free-market advocates “end up being incapable of feeling compassion at the outcry of the poor, weeping for other people’s pain, and feeling a need to help them, as though all this were someone else’s responsibility and not our own.”

Francis is equally harsh on the Roman Catholic Church itself, returning to a theme he claims to have raised often with the priests and the faithful of Buenos Aires: “I prefer a Church which is bruised, hurting and dirty because it has been out on the streets, rather than a Church which is unhealthy from being confined and from clinging to its own security.”

In July, Francis issued his first papal encyclical, “Lumen Fidei” (“The Light of Faith”), a collaborative work begun by his predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI. The document is strong on the theological orthodoxy that Catholics came to associate with Benedict and short on the human feelings, the “joy of the Gospel,” that Catholics are beginning to associate with Francis.

In this first pastoral statement written in his own voice, Francis continues to support traditional Catholic views that women should not be admitted to the priesthood and abortion must be rejected on moral grounds.

“The reservation of the priesthood to males, as a sign of Christ the Spouse who gives himself in the Eucharist, is not a question open to discussion,” he wrote.

“Among the vulnerable for whom the Church wishes to care with particular love and concern are unborn children, the most defenseless and innocent among us,” he writes. “Precisely because this involves the internal consistency of our message about the value of the human person, the Church cannot be expected to change her position on this question. I want to be completely honest in this regard. This is not something subject to alleged reforms or ‘modernizations.’ It is not ‘progressive’ to try to resolve problems by eliminating a human life.”

Still, the pope wants the faithful to understand his dogmatic stands are not unfeeling, as he is compelled to add a note of sympathy not commonly expressed in the dogmatic natural-right articulations characteristic of his predecessor.

“On the other hand,” he is quick to add, “it is also true that we have done little to adequately accompany women in very difficult situations, where abortion appears as a quick solution to their profound anguish, especially when the life developing within them is the result of rape or a situation of extreme poverty. Who can remain unmoved before such painful situations?”

What remains to be determined is how the Vatican will react to challenges certain to come from the radical left in the U.S.

What will the Vatican do when same-sex couples begin to demand to be married within the Catholic Church in the U.S., asserting they have the same rights as traditional couples?

What will the Vatican do if the Supreme Court upholds as constitutional the requirement in the Affordable Care Act that Catholic Church employers in the U.S., including Catholic hospitals and charities, must provide their employees with health insurance that meets the requirement of Obamacare to provide coverage for contraception services and abortions?

It’s unlikely Francis will be convinced that his socialist sympathies and market antagonism have failed to reduce poverty in the U.S. despite the explicit and repeated statements by President Obama that income redistribution would be a guiding principle of his economic policies.

Francis continues to hint that he intends to reform the papacy to embrace other religions, and perhaps even nonbelievers, not in his role as infallible arbiter of Catholic dogma, but as an equal, one among many in the common human struggle to attain salvation.

“To give but one example,” he writes, “in the dialogue with our Orthodox brothers and sisters, we Catholics have the opportunity to learn more about the meaning of episcopal collegiality and their experience of synodality. Through an exchange of gifts, the Spirit can lead us ever more fully into truth and goodness.”

Establishment media worldwide has embraced the simplicity of Pope Francis and his determination to live as a simple priest in a hotel room rather than to enjoy the luxurious accommodations of the papal suite of the Apostolic Palace in the Vatican.

Earlier this month, Francis set the stage for the issuance of “The Joy of the Gospel,” his first full statement of his personal faith, by firing German Bishop Franz-Peter Tebartz-van Elst – commonly dubbed “bishop bling” or the “luxury bishop” in the media – for spending some $42.7 million on a renovation of his official residence adjoining the cathedral in Limburg, Germany.

After the public rebuke the Vatican and Francis ensured was widely reported, Bishop Tebartz-van Elst is residing more simply in a Benedictine Abbey in Germany.

Obama 'insults' Catholics in Vatican-embassy shutdown

NEW YORK – A decision by the Obama administration to downsize the U.S. Embassy to the Holy See to an office in the U.S. Embassy to Italy in Rome is being widely interpreted as an insult to Catholics in the United States and to the Vatican.

The White House bills the move, scheduled for January 2015, as a security measure in the wake of the attack on Sept. 11, 2011, on a U.S. compound maintained in Benghazi, Libya.

Former Ambassador James Nicholson, a former secretary of veteran affairs in the Bush administration and a former chairman of the Republican National Committee, told the National Catholic Reporter the move was a “massive downgrade” in U.S.-Vatican ties. It reverses what was established by President Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II in 1984, when the U.S. opened formal diplomatic relations with the Holy See.

The Obama administration was at ideological loggerheads with Pope Benedict XVI, who took a traditional moral view condemning same-sex marriage – a redefinition of marriage the Obama administration has championed – and objected to Obamacare measures that would require Catholic institutions in the United States to offer to employees only health insurance that provided for contraception and publicly funded abortions.

Recalling the historic alliance between Reagan and the Vatican under Pope John Paul II that contributed to the bringing down of the Berlin Wall and the end of communism in the former Soviet Union, the decision by the Obama administration appears to reflect Obama’s disdain for working directly with the Vatican on matters of U.S. foreign policy.

“It’s turning this embassy into a stepchild of the embassy to Italy,” Nicholson said. “The Holy See is a pivot point for international affairs and a major listening post for the United States.”

Clearly angered by the Obama administration decision, Nicholson stressed the decision “to shoehorn [the U.S. delegation] into an office annex inside another embassy is an insult to American Catholics and to the Vatican.”

Nicholson characterized the security argument as a “smokescreen,” insisting that the U.S. is not a pauper nation. He said “if we want to secure an embassy we certainly can,” adding that the security arrangements at the current location are “state of the art.”

Obama administration officials countered, explaining to the National Catholic Reporter that once the new U.S. Embassy to the Vatican is operational, the facility will have its own entrance on Rome’s Via Salustina, making it a separate diplomatic facility.

Raymond Flynn, a Democrat who served three terms as mayor of Boston before being appointed U.S. ambassador to the Vatican under the Clinton administration, was also outraged by the decision.

“It’s not just those who bomb churches and kill Catholics in the Middle East who are our antagonists, but it’s also those who restrict our religious freedoms and want to close down our embassy to the Holy See,” Flynn told the National Catholic Reporter, describing the move as part of a broader hostility to religious groups and the Catholic Church in particular.

Flynn added he could not see any “diplomatic or political benefit to the Untied States” from the relocation, calling the decision “shortsighted.”

Breaking the story internationally, Vatican expert John L. Allen Jr. noted in his National Catholic Reporter article that so far the Vatican has decided to give Obama’s decision tacit consent.

The move is also widely being interpreted as a concession the Obama administration wishes to make prior to the ramp-up for the November 2014 mid-term elections to the powerful pro-abortion forces in the Democratic Party. The activists have championed same-sex marriage as a constitutionally protected civil right, much as “pro-choice” themes have been employed to convince single-women voters that Republicans are “opposed to women’s rights.”

The radical leftist Washington-based group “Catholics for Choice” has pushed in recent years, under the banner of SeeChange.org, for a “See Change,” a reference to the Vatican as the “Holy See.” The activists argue that the Vatican should be stripped of its membership in the U.N. because the Catholic Church continues to oppose abortion on moral grounds.

Still, the Obama administration defended the decision both on security and cost-savings grounds, stressing that abandoning the Villa Domiziana as a separate facility for the U.S. Embassy to the Vatican could save between $600,000 and $1 million annually. The Obama administration is preparing to complete its fifth year in office with yet another federal budget deficit approaching or topping $1 trillion a year.

“I see no diminishing in the importance of the relationship at all,” insisted Ken Hackett, the current U.S. ambassador to the Vatican, in a statement to the National Catholic Reporter.

Hackett argued that “the relationship between the Vatican and the U.S. government hasn’t been better than it is right now in quite a while,” especially under Pope Francis.

In the heavily Catholic country of Ireland, the Irish Central reported most nations have two embassies in Italy – one to the country of Italy and another to the Holy See, acknowledging the Vatican is a sovereign state within Italy.

Moreover, the Irish Central noted, some nations, like the U.S., have a third embassy in Rome, dedicated to the United Nations organizations headed in Italy.