September 11, 2008

A week ago, most Americans had never heard of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin. Now, following her Vice Presidential acceptance speech viewed live by more than 40 million people, Palin is viewed favorably by 58% of American voters according to the latest Rasmussen Reports survey. The self-described ‘hockey mom’s’ poll ratings, if they are to be believed, are that of a rock superstar who is rated now higher than either McCain or Democrat Obama. The same Bush-Cheney propaganda apparatus that made the nation believe Saddam Hussein was the new Hitler and that Georgia was a helpless victim of ruthless Russian aggression after 8.8.08 in Georgia is clearly behind one of the most impressive media propaganda efforts in recent history—the effort to package Republican Vice Presidential candidate, Sarah Palin, Governor of Alaska for less than 19 months, to be the American dream candidate. A view into her background is beginning to leak out from those who know her in Alaska.

Part I: ‘V for Vendetta’—Don’t mess with ’ol Sarah...

Who is Palin?

Palin skyrocketed to fame after her clever Republican convention nomination speech. She never wrote the speech. It was written, not surprisingly, by George Bush's former speechwriter, Matthew Scully.

Alaska is a state with a tiny population scarcely more than that of Frankfurt am Main. Prior to becoming Governor which she has been for only 19 months, Sarah Palin’s only political experience was as mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, population circa 5,000.

As Mayor, according to a report that appeared in the Anchorage Daily News on September 4 by journalist David Hulen, during Palin’smayoral administration ‘most of the actual work of running this small city was turned over to an administrator. She had been pushed to hire this administrator by party power-brokers after she had gotten herself into some trouble over precipitous firings which had given rise to a recall campaign.’

Palin campaigned in Wasilla as a ‘fiscal conservative.’ But during her 6 years as Mayor, she increased general government expenditures by over 33%, while taxes collected by the City increased by 38%. She reduced progressive property taxes and increased a regressive sales tax which taxed even food. The tax cuts that she promoted benefited large corporate property owners way more than they benefited residents.

According to the report, which was submitted to the paper by a life-long Wasilla resident, Anne Kilkenny, who knows Sarah on a first name basis and has followed local politics actively, “The huge increases in tax revenues during her mayoral administration weren't enough to fund everything on her wish list though, borrowed money was needed, too. She inherited a city with zero debt, but left it with indebtedness of over $22 million. What did Mayor Palin encourage the voters to borrow money for? Was it the infrastructure that she said she supported? The sewage treatment plant that the city lacked? or a new library? No. $1million for a park. $15million-plus for construction of a multi-use sports complex which she rushed through to build on a piece of property that the City didn't even have clear title to, that was still in litigation 7 yrs later--to the delight of the lawyers involved! The sports complex itself is a nice addition to the community but a huge money pit, not the profit-generator she claimed it would be. She also supported bonds for $5.5million for road projects that could have been done in 5-7 yrs without any borrowing. While Mayor, City Hall was extensively remodelled and her office redecorated more than once. These are small numbers, but Wasilla is a very small city.”

As a Republican candidate winning the Governor’s chair in 2006 she has a very short record to stand on. Some things can be said, despite. Alaska is a state that has enjoyed a record state budget surplus since 2003 as its main export is crude oil from BPs Prudhoe Bay fields. Palin’s own husband is an oilworker for BP. As oil prices soared from $30 a barrel to over $140 this summer, Alaska was awash with surplus funds. Governor Palin, however, refused to use the funds to finance needed state infrastructure. Instead, she recommended that the state borrow/bond for road projects, even while she proposed distribution of surplus state revenues: spend today's surplus, borrow for needs. The banks advising her no doubt loved it.

Political censorship

Palin as Mayor tried to impose her own select program of book banning at the local Wasilla Public Library. She handed the librarian a list of books she demanded be removed from the library. They reportedly included such books as Little Red Riding Hood by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, My Friend Flicka by Mary O'Hara, One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey, Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs, The Living Bible by William C. Bower, Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare, Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, Canterbury Tales by Chaucer, Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, Decameron by Boccaccio, Cujo by Stephen King and numerous other books. According to Kilkenny, when the respected librarian in astonishment refused to remove the books, Palin tried to get her fired. There was a huge public protest and the librarian remained.

The incident was apparently indicative of Palin’s political career. As a Republican Party candidate, Palin got herself elected running as a "reformer," opposed to the “old boys’ club” of politics. When a local reporter dared to suggest that Palin the “reformer” was not so, Palin tried to get her fired. "She came at me like I was trying to steal her kids," said the reporter, who now works for an oil company in Anchorage. "I heard she had a wild temper and vicious mean streak but it's nothing like you can imagine until she turns it on you."

As the Anchorage paper reported, “Sarah complained about the ‘old boy's club’ when she first ran for Mayor, so what did she bring Wasilla? A new set of ‘old boys.’ Palin fired most of the experienced staff she inherited. At the City and as Governor she hired or elevated new, inexperienced, obscure people, creating a staff totally dependent on her for their jobs and eternally grateful and fiercely loyal--loyal to the point of abusing their power to further her personal agenda…”

Personal vindictiveness

In one incident which has been noted in major media, Palin as Governor fired the head of the Alaska State Police, also a respected civil servant when the Chief refused to fire a trooper that was the ex-brother-in-law of Palin and in a messy divorce proceeding with Palin’s sister. Under a subsequent state investigation for abuse of power, she has had to admit that more than two dozen contacts were made between her staff and family to the person that she later fired, pressuring him to fire her ex-brother-in-law. She tried to replace the man she fired with a man who she knew had been reprimanded for sexual harassment. When this caused a public furor, she withdrew her support.

Her political career in Alaska was promoted by the “old boys” in part no doubt because of her striking looks and her stage presence. When then-Governor Murkowski was handing out political favors, Sarah Palin got the best, the Chair of the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, one of the best paid, at $122,400 a year. She had no background in oil & gas issues other than a husband who worked in the oil industry.

According again to Kilkenny, “State party leaders hate her because she has bit them in the back and humiliated them. Other members of the party object to her self-description as a fiscal conservative. Around Wasilla there are people who went to high school with Sarah. They call her ‘Sarah Barracuda’ because of her unbridled ambition and predatory ruthlessness.”

The conclusion of those who followed her political record from the beginning in Alaska was summed up, “No legislative experience other than City Council. Little hands-on supervisory or managerial experience; needed help of a city administrator to run town of about 5,000.”

She is also reportedly racist and just a little mean-spirited. When it was announced on the TV that Obama had secured victory over Hillary Clinton, Palin was overheard by the waitress in a town restaurant, Lucille (who asked the press that her last name not be used), stating loudly to her friends at the table, “So Sambo beat the bitch!" Sambo is a reference to “Little Black Sambo” a highly derogatory term for blacks tantamount to “nigger” or perhaps worse. "It was kind of disgusting," said Lucille, who is part Aboriginal, in an interview with a journalist, after admitting that she is frightened of being discovered.

People who know her, according to a report by investigative reporter Charley James, say Sarah Palin refers regularly to Alaska's Aboriginal people as ‘Arctic Arabs,’ as well as the more colorful ‘mukluks,’ or simply, ‘f**king Eskimo's,’ according to a number of Alaskans and Wasillians interviewed by researcher Charley James. According to Alaskans interviewed by James, she is also vindictive and mean.

James reports on why local Alaskans fear to speak out: "The GOP is kind of like organized crime up here," an insurance agent in Anchorage who knows the Palin family, explained. "It's corrupt and arrogant. They're all rich because they do private sweetheart deals

with the oil companies, and they can destroy anyone. And they will, if they have to. Once Palin became mayor, she became part of that inner circle."

Foreign Policy Experience? No Problem…

During the Republican convention in St. Paul national media began to focus on the obvious lack of foreign policy experience of Palin. To refute the image, the McCain spin doctors claimed that Palin as Governor, was Commander-in-Chief of the Alaska National Guard, citing it as demonstration of Palin’s ‘foreign policy experience.’

The campaign was severely embarrassed, to put it mildly, when the Alaska National Guard Adjutant General, Major General Craig Campbell, on national TV, refuted the claim by stating truthfully to the press that neither he nor Palin play any role in national defense activities, even when they involve the Alaska National Guard. Campbell stated, ‘The entire operation is under federal control, and the governor is not briefed on situations.’

Curiously, two days later on 5 September Campbell completely changed his story to praise Palin’s role as ‘Commander-in-Chief’ of the Alaska National Guard, telling the neo-conservative FoxNews, ‘National Guards are state military forces run by governors, and Sarah Palin does it great.’

Three days after that Campbell was promoted to Three-star General by Palin, one of only two in the entire US National Guard. Palin and the machine behind her is evidently willing to spare no effort getting their goals. However the true nature of Sarah Palin only comes to the fore, as well as the partial explanation of her galvanizing effect on the Republican base when her ultra-extremist religious background is taken into account.

Part II: Reclaiming America for Christ—Palin’s bizarre religious roots

Palin plays to the ‘Born-Agains’

As I discuss in some detail in my soon-to-be-released book, Full Spectrum Dominance: Totalitarian Democracy in the New World Order, one of the most alarming transformations of American domestic politics over the past three decades since the early 1970’s and the time George H.W. Bush was head of the CIA, has been the deliberate manipulation of significant segments of the population around a synthetic ideology of “born-again” “evangelical Christian Fundamentalism,” tightly tied to a fierce opposition to abortion as “murder.”

The phenomenon of the rapid spread within the United States since the 1980’s of evangelical Pentacostalism is similar to that embraced during the 1980’s by such figures as the Born Again Evangelical Protestant Guatemalan dictator Rios Montt who allegedly killed 77,000 Mayans during his reign. The spawning of some of these sects clearly has been done in order to create the zombie shock troops willing to literally ‘die for Christ’ in places such as Iraq or Afghanistan, Iran or elsewhere that the Pentagon needs their services. That ideology has been used to build a fanatical activist middle-class base within the Republican party which backs a right-wing domestic agenda and a military foreign policy that sees Islam as Satanism incarnate among other things.

Many of the religious evangelical sects, including Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church, are coordinated top-down by a secretive organization called the Committee on National Policy.

Palin drew early attention from state GOP leadership when, during her first mayoral campaign, she ran on an anti-abortion platform. Normally, political parties do not get involved in Alaskan municipal elections because they are nonpartisan. But once word of her extreme fringe evangelical views made its way to Juneau, the state capitol, state Republicans put money behind her campaign, according to Charley James. “Once in office, Palin set out to build a machine that chewed up anyone who got in her way. The good, Godly Christian turns out to be anything but.”

The religious background of Sarah Palin is not unrelated to her bid to take the nation’s second highest office. Voters have a right to know more, though to date she herself has been extremely vague about it. Given the details, it becomes clearer perhaps why.

Sarah Palin, the strikingly attractive 44-year-old alleged mother of five children (the maternity of the fifth is subject of wide speculation), hardline foe of abortion even in extreme cases of rape, has spent more than two and a half decades of her life as a member of an Alaska church which is part of a fanatical Christian-named cult project that is sweeping across America. Palin comes out of the most radical stream of US Born-Again Evangelism known as ‘Joel’s Army.’

A soldier in Joel’s Army

Sarah Palin is a product of the extreme fringe of the American Evangelical movement known variously as the Third Wave Movement, also known as the New Apostolic Reformation, and as Joel's Army. Until 2002 according to their own website, Palin was a member of Wasilla Assembly of God with Senior Pastor Ed Kalnins. Online video clips of Palin speaking from the pulpit of this church are at revealing. (http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article20712.htm.).

Sarah Palin was reportedly re-baptized at age twelve at the Wasilla Assembly of God church. Palin attended the church from the time she was ten until 2002, over twenty-eight years. Palin's association with the Wasilla Assembly of God has continued nearly up to the day she was picked by Senator John McCain as running mate.

Palin is now under investigation for possible improper use of state travel funds for a trip she made on June 8 to Wasilla to attend a Wasilla Assembly of God ‘Masters Commission’ graduation ceremony, and a multi-church Wasilla event known as ‘One Lord Sunday.’ At the latter, Palin and Alaska LT Governor Scott Parnell were publicly blessed, onstage before an estimated crowd of 6,000, through the "laying on of hands" by Wasilla Assembly of God's Head Pastor Ed Kalnins, her former pastor.

In his sermons Kalnins promotes such exotic theological concepts as the possession of geographic territories by demonic spirits and the inter-generational transmission of family ‘curses.’ Palin has also been ‘anointed,’ by an African cleric, Bishop Thomas Muthee, prominent in the Joel’s Army movement, who has repeatedly visited the Wasilla Assembly of God and claims to have effected positive, dramatic social change in a Kenyan town by driving out a ‘spirit of witchcraft.’

As Governor in Juneau, six hundred miles from Wasilla, Palin attends the Juneau Christian Church of Pastor Mike Rose, an equally extreme Assembly of God Third Wave church.

Member of a theocratic sect

This clearly suggests Palin was carefully selected by the leadership of the Bush-Cheney Republican party to galvanize the Party’s activist Evangelical base, something McCain had been unable to do.

Some theological and political background to the Joel’s Army or Third Wave movement as it is also known, is instructive. It teaches a radical fundamentalist creed that its adherents must actively engage in politics, to become what they term, ‘soldiers in God’s Army.’

The Joel’s Army or Third Wave movement focuses on recruiting young people to sessions of writhing on the floor in uncontrollable ecstasy, calling it a sign of the ‘Holy Spirit.’ Children as young as five speak of having ‘gotten saved.’ The movement is extremely authoritarian according to those conservative Christian churches who have studied and openly oppose the sect as heretical. It teaches a dogma that echoes the infamous Manichean line of George Bush following the shock of September 11, 2001: ‘There are two kinds of people in the World: Those who love Jesus, and those who don’t.’

Until recently a ‘general’ in Joel’s Army was a 32-year old Canadian, Todd Bentley. In one case, on YouTube, clips of his most dramatic healings have been condensed into a three-minute highlight reel. Bentley describes God ordering him to kick an elderly lady in the face. One eye-witness report published by the Southern Poverty Law Center, a watchdog group, describes the Joel’s Army mass recruiting techniques of Bentley:

‘Todd Bentley has a long night ahead of him, resurrecting the dead, healing the blind, and exploding cancerous tumors. Since April 3, the 32-year-old, heavily tattooed, body-pierced, shaved-head Canadian preacher has been leading a continuous "supernatural healing revival" in central Florida. To contain the 10,000-plus crowds flocking from around the globe, Bentley has rented baseball stadiums, arenas and airport hangars at a cost of up to $15,000 a day. Many in attendance are church pastors themselves who believe Bentley to be a prophet and don't bat an eye when he tells them he's seen King David and spoken with the Apostle Paul in heaven...Tattooed across his sternum are military dog tags that read "Joel's Army." They're evidence of Bentley's generalship in a rapidly growing apocalyptic movement that's gone largely unnoticed by watchdogs of the theocratic right. According to Bentley and a handful of other "hyper-charismatic" preachers advancing the same agenda, Joel's Army is prophesied to become an Armageddon-ready military force of young people with a divine mandate to physically impose Christian "dominion" on non-believers.’

Their name comes from their special focus on the Old Testament Book of Joel, Chapter Two. On his website, Bentley declares,

‘An end-time army has one common purpose -- to aggressively take ground for the kingdom of God under the authority of Jesus Christ, the Dread Champion…The trumpet is sounding, calling on-fire, revolutionary believers to enlist in Joel's Army. ... Many are now ready to be mobilized to establish and advance God's kingdom on earth.’

This past March, at a ‘Passion for Jesus’ conference in Kansas City sponsored by the International House of Prayer, or IHOP, a ministry for teenagers from the heavy metal, punk and goth scenes, a Joel’s Army pastor, Lou Engle, called on his audience for vengeance:

‘I believe we're headed to an Elijah/Jezebel showdown on the Earth, not just in America but all over the globe, and the main warriors will be the prophets of Baal versus the prophets of God, and there will be no middle ground," said Engle. He was referring to the Baal of the Old Testament, a pagan idol whose followers were slaughtered under orders from the prophet Elijah.

‘There's an Elijah generation that's going to be the forerunners for the coming of Jesus, a generation marked not by their niceness but by the intensity of their passion," Engle continued. ‘The kingdom of heaven suffers violence and the violent take it by force. Such force demands an equal response, and Jesus is going to make war on everything that hinders love, with his eyes blazing fire.’

Joel's Army believers are hard-core Christian ‘dominionists,’ meaning they believe that America, along with the rest of the world, should be governed by conservative Christians and a conservative Christian interpretation of biblical law. There is no room in their doctrine for democracy or pluralism. Palin’s fanatical stand on abortion comes from the Joel’s Army dogma, as one of its pastors described it: ‘Everyone born after abortion's legalization can consider their birth a personal invitation to take part in this great army.’

Joel's Army followers are often labile teenagers and young adults. They are taught to believe they're members of the final generation to come of age before the end of the world. This is the actual background of the woman who might become Vice President to a 72-year old President John McCain, a man reported to have severe skin cancer and other major health problems. According to the US Constitutional succession, should McCain be incapacitated or die in office, she would become President.