Satan’s Underground – Evil Exposed

It’s Satan’s Underground, written by a girl named Lauren.  This is not a book to savor or digest.  It is a book to pour through with dogged determination.  I suggest one sitting.  If you put it down, you will not pick it back up.  The book is important, though.  Everybody needs to read this.  Lauren fought her way back into a life of pain and suffering to tell this story and it must be told.  It’s fascinating.  God says that all things work to His glory and there are times that is just really hard to believe.  Almost every night that I watch the news, I am convinced that it cannot be true.   But now, thanks to this girl named Lauren, I know it is.  As horrifying and painful as it was, she endured her situation, specially chosen by the Lord to shed light on the true evil we are up against in this world.  We are in a struggle against evil that is unimaginable.  In fact, that is what Satan and his minions are counting on.  Satan’s greatest acheivement in this world is convincing us that he is a product of storybooks and movies, nothing more.  We underestimate him greatly. 

I picked up this book thinking it was about human trafficking.  It’s actually about the pornography business, hardcore porn.  I had always thought the porn industry to be lurid and unsavory, but, since I have never exposed myself to hardcore porn (or porn beyond a glance at my babysitter’s dad’s Playboy), I did not know human beings are capable of such depravity.  I rather doubt that they are, actually.  I don’t think this could happen or perpetuate without the influence of pure evil. 

Lauren’s story begins when she is six.  She is raped by a man while she calls for her mother, who is upstairs.  She doesn’t come.  As she continues to endure such incidents, she learns from one of these men that her mother is prostituting her.  As she matures, she learns that not only did her mother prostitute her from the time she was six, that was the reason she was there.  Lauren was adopted with the intentions of being a child prostitute and an object of pornography.  This was an upper middle-class family here in our very own country and it appears that this occurred in the early 70′s.  That was before the Internet.  That was before human trafficking became an industry.  It is crucial that we find some perspective here…

This seedy, hard core porn industry is dependent on having victims sold into it or tricked into it.  It may be inaccurate to combine the issue with human trafficking, but both industries involve very poor women and children forced into sexual acts for the profit of their keepers.  It feels safe to combine them.  There are only an estimated number of trafficked slaves because it is an underground practice, but the number is between 800,000 and 4 million.  The industry is the fastest-rising of illicit industries, currently tied for second with arms trafficking, only behind the drug industry.  However, human trafficking is expanding more quickly than the drug trade.  These numbers are for all people who are taken into some sort of slavery, but the numbers involved in the sex industry are still staggering.  Depending on the country, it is between 46 and 90 per cent, most children.  MOSTLY CHILDREN taken into the sex trade.  A girl, not even in her teens, may be purchased for $150.00 then sold up to ten times in a night, profitting her keeper about $10,000.00 in a month.  We should be galvanized against this!  This should not go on in a world where people claim to be good and decent. 

We Americans tend to feel removed from these horrors, but it is estimated that 14,000 people are trafficked into the United States each year.  Break it down…Thats 280 per state, down the street.  That’s 38.4 people each day.  Remember, most of these are children.  In the UK, law enforcement officials cited one child porn site that received 1,000,000 hits in a month.  “In 2007, the British-based Internet Watch Foundation reported that child pornography on the Internet is becoming more brutal and graphic, and the number of images depicting violent abuse has risen fourfold since 2003. The CEO stated ‘The worrying issue is the severity and the gravity of the images is increasing. We’re talking about prepubescent children being raped.’  About 80 percent of the children in the abusive images are female, and 91 percent appear to be children under the age of 12.”

^EVIL. 

Not surprisingly, Lauren’s tormentors were active Satanists.  She says in the introduction to her book that law enforcement doesn’t record the ritualistic aspects of crimes because it results in them being discredited and often ruin the chances of a conviction.  A close friend of mine in high school became a witch and there was a very active Satanic cult in my small hometown.  When I found my own way, I began to research the occult.  I am not an expert, but I am educated.  Everything Lauren says in her book rings true with what I have learned over the years, although I had never before heard first hand accounts of their methods for “recruiting.”  The adoption scam that landed Lauren with her wicked mother is all to real.  I have been able to find accounts on-line of these adoptions between the United States and India.  The others are expected – run-aways abducted, young girls promised modeling careers.  Oh, but there is also the aspect of breeding.  The girls who are kept to make the movies and take the pictures, and be prostituted, will become pregnant and the babies are used for more of the same. 

Please muster your courage and read the book.  It will take courage.  Then do some careful research.  Fact-check this incredible story.  Next time the news reports a story of a child, dead at the hands of her parents, follow your gut.  Learn the rest of the story.  There is evil in our midst and we cannot afford to pretend it does not exist.  We cannot turn our heads because of the horror.  We have to know and we have to find a way to stop it.

Freedom to Fail

According to Bob Woodward, Alan Greenspan was a great protector of free markets.  It was his priority.  I believe this is a general consensus regarding Greenspan and it is probably his perception, too.  An interesting incident came from Woodward’s account, though. 

In the ’90′s a hedge fund management company was on the verge of failure.  The pricetag of a bailout was $4 billion.  There was no interest in bailing TCFM out, as the general view was that hedge funds were risky and investors deserved what came of it.  Hedge funds were a new investment vehicle and people were skeptical.  TCFM actually went to the Fed with their books to show that they had no way out and failure was imminent.  After some discussion and investigation, the parties involved determined that failure of this company would result in massive losses to huge companies like Lehman Brothers, Goldman Sachs, and Merril Lynch.  The ripple effect was expected to result in billion dollar losses for these companies and others.   The Fed experts put their heads together and discovered a solution that would not involve the government or taxpayers.  They went to the largest financial institutions to solicit investments, many of these institutions being the ones who stood to loose if TCFM went under.  The Fed governors explained the situation to these bankers, outlining potential losses in  no uncertain terms.  The $4 billion dollar bail out was a go and no one was the wiser, except for the financial giants that put up so much risky capital to avoid this failure.  TCFM was saved and the economy continued to grow.

Nobody knew about this.  The press was anticipating the release of the Ken Starr report so they could disclose the lurid details of the Clinton affair, so they were completely disinterested in the lackluster details of the economy.  Given the context, we probably wouldn’t have cared.  The economy was not the spectator sport that it has become now that everyone has a stake.  But here are the consequences.  The Fed was presented with a $4 billion dollar problem that they took the lead and worked through in the interest of maintaining a growing economy that maybe should have taken a break.  Had Greenspan allowed the failure, we would have suffered an economic setback that may not have been that large.  What the Fed did, though, was send a very clear message to the major players that they would not allow failure.  These major players took note.  In the aftermath of this near collapse, congress and financial industry leaders cried out for reform.  They wanted to put a stop to these risky hedge funds, but Greenspan refused in the name of free markets.  Hedgefunds, he argued, were bringing too much money into the economy to regulate or quell them.  Besides, they were available overseas so the US economy stood to loose untold investment dollars. 

I hate to see market regulation.  BUT, if the markets are going to function without regulation, failure must be an option.  By authoring a bailout using public institutions who were directly involved, risk was removed from the equation.  Investors felt free to make decisions under the knowledge that they would not fail, so their choices became riskier and riskier.  In his efforts to preserve the free market, Greenspan undermined the free enterprise system.  That $4 billion deal could have been the end had Greenspan chosen to regulate hedge funds afterward.  Had he sacrificed economic growth, the entire financial melt-down could have been complete at a cost of under $100 billion.  The pain of these losses would have kept these firms away from hedge funds and we could have avoided the hundredS of billions that are being poured into the marketplace today.  Investors would have been much more risk averse, which is crucial in our free enterprise system.

Integrity Recessed

Bob Woodward’s “Maestro.” 

One hundred pages in one day, a work day, no less.  This book reads like an optimistic page of the bail out preamble.  I picked up the book because I have been blaming Greenspan for the failure of our economy since about 2002.  I need to build a more formidable case than “I think.”  This has offered a fascinating insight to the genius it takes to run a national economy, regardless of the skill.  Mere attainment is borne from genius. 

Greenspan led us through more than one recession.  Interestingly, the same ingredients seemed to be a part of all of them.  There is one striking difference between past recessions and the one we find ourselves stepping into now – integrity.  In previous recessions, we were saved from complete market failure because the wealthy bought up the assets.  They saw bargains as consumer sentiment faltered and purchased, often re-purchased, stocks in undervalued companies.  The purchases bolstered the markets, keeping consumer sentiment from being beaten as it has been the last couple of weeks.  The wealthy were taking risks on companies because they trusted those companies.  The wealthy understood that they held the power to keep things afloat and possibly turn a good investment if they were lucky.  This is a 20 year turn around from the current greed we are witnessing.  CEO’s are taking huge payoffs as they leave their smoldering institutions and they have no remorse.  They’re just greatful they’re getting out with something, because there sure won’t be anything left for the underlings. 

It would be nice to be reassurred that things may be tough for the next couple of months, maybe even a year or two, but we will recover.  This is a different nation now, though.  Somewhere in the last 15 or 20 years we sold out on a grand scale.  The corruption is unprecedented.  Senate insiders are saying that the lies are astounding as this bail out bill is hammered out.  As proven by the market (1700 points down since the bail-out bill passed), there is no faith in the government’s ability to fix this.  Absolutely.  This is not a problem for the government; nothing was fixed by the bailout bill.  For the first time EVER, I teeter on despondence.  I truly wonder if America has what it takes, and the wondering part is optimistic.  I don’t think we have it.

What Happened to the Romanoffs? A Man and His Speech

Unwittingly, I have been on a Russian history binge of late.  It was not intentional, but a summer of reading about Russia has culminated in a surprising endeavor into early Ayn Rand.  I have never been a fan, but recently I’m on a bit of a kick – an Ayn Rand kick.  I would bet that phrase has NEVER been uttered before.  The book of the moment is “We the Living,” Ayn’s first published work.  After trudging through Armand Hammer’s autobiography, then a list of books about the Middle East that actually centered around Russia’s political history, I have been rewarded by this engaging work of fiction.  While Hammer painted post-revolutionary Russia and her leader as a benevolent force that just needed a benefactor to get moving, Ayn Rand paints a decidedly different picture.  Her post-revolutionary Russia has pressed life from the masses.  There is no food, no heat, no work, no passion (except that between Leo and her – a stark contrast to the setting).  Even though it is a work of fiction, I am more prone to believe the work of a refugee than that of a speculator.  Hammer gained a lot from the decline of that great society.  He built wealth and pilfered their national treasures to sell them in American department stores like common trinkets. 

Ayn writes of a leader awash in character.  Her Lenin suffers from a single-minded determination to resolve disparity among the citizens.  Apparently, he was very eloquent of speech and this very speech galvanized the Russians to give up the life they knew to fight for the unknown.  He accomplished his goal; economic disparity is a thing of the past in Russia after the revolution, replaced by vast suffering and unprecedented poverty.  It is a glimmering example of why we must be on guard for the complications inherent in a perfect plan.  I doubt that Lenin expected his populace to starve and freeze and suffer from terminal diseases that should not have been.  After he redistributed the wealth on the massive scale that he did, though, and nationalized all business, the economy collapsed beyond repair.  Russia will never be restored to her former glory.  Well, never say never, but right now it has been nearly a century of struggle because of Lenin’s error in judgement.  Lenin may have had the hearts of the people in mind – rarely is he referred to as cruel or despotic, but he himself was forced to suppress the citizens as they became impatient and weary of their condition.  There were spies who arrested subversives without question.  And the standard he set deteriorated his own vision and primed Russia for the next dreaded despot – Stalin.  He inherited full control over the great USSR and he was free to exercise greed and a maniacal hunger for power.

As I read this novel against the backdrop of my new knowledge of Russian history, I can’t help but worry for our country.  We have a candidate who exploits the disappointment Americans feel as their debts mount and their paychecks do not.  This man – yes, Barack Obama – is a charismatic speaker and he has struck a chord with disillusioned young people who fear for their future.  Unfortunately, if they elect Obama, their fears will be self-fulfilling.  Right now Americans are in a precarious position.  We, too, could give up fighting for the country we love to fight for that which is unknown.  Obama has promised to expand our government and redistribute wealth in such a way that our great nation will be unrecognizable.  I don’t believe that his intentions are malevolent, but I do believe they are destructive.  It is imperative that we ask ourselves where his policies will leave us.  He is promising the world, but to paraphrase Thomas Jefferson, if the government can give us the world, it can take it away.  Please be careful when you cast your vote in November.