Image TRANSATLANTIC GLOBAL GOVERNANCE: A Regime Change Or Coup By Any Other Name

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Paul McGuire, an internationally-recognized prophecy expert, Fox News and History Channel commentator, bestselling author and host of the GOD TV show, Apocalypse and the End Tim

TRANSATLANTIC GLOBAL GOVERNANCE:  A Regime Change Or Coup By Any Other Name
If the TPA is finally passed in one form or another,  then the United Nations Arms Trade Treaty could be passed without a senatorial vote!

By Paul McGuire | June 22, 2015
NewsWithViews.com

Trojan HorseAfter six decades the Republican Party is ready to grant fast track “trade promotion authority” that will allow for the emergence of the Transpacific Partnership and a transatlantic global governance agreement. Although these secret treaties are called “free trade” agreements, they are actually a Trojan Horse designed to do an end run around the Constitution and bring in global governance.

Top SecretThe individual and sovereign nations of Europe were destroyed by a series of “harmless” trade treaties that created the European Union. When the citizens of the European nations finally woke up it was too late because they had legally handed over their freedoms. The exact same stealth strategy of secret trade treaties is being used by American politicians on the left and the “right” to force America to come under the rule of global governance, which was formerly called global government. The reason that the trade treaties are secret is because there are powerful people who do not want you to know that they are designed to destroy our prosperity, our freedom, and our sovereignty.

The other reason that the contents of the trade treaties are secret is because they reveal the plan to transfer manufacturing, jobs, and the wealth of the middle class to global entities and Third World nations. They give our politicians secret powers to give away our Constitutional rights such as Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Religion, the right to privacy, and the right to bear arms. That means that trade treaties are a Trojan Horse that will allow the illegal rulership of the United States by multinational corporations, international banking cartels, and foreign governments who are not bound by the Constitutional protections that we take for granted.

The reason that the majority of the Republican Party and Democratic Party are still aggressively pushing these trade treaties, despite the protests of the American people, is because the leadership and the majority of politicians in both parties are “bought and sold” men and women; they do not represent the American people at all; they represent the people who put them in power and keep them in power: the multi-national corporations and the international banks.

In the Republican Party, you have much talk about conservatism, saving American jobs, protecting the wealth of the middle class, and strengthening America, all of which is a complete sham because the majority of the Republicans are voting against all of these things by voting in favor of secret trade treaties. In order to sucker punch the American people they will talk about protecting traditional marriage and a few other symbolic gestures to perpetuate the illusion that they have conservative values. On the Democratic side you have all the major Democratic leaders who claim to be protecting the jobs of American workers and especially union jobs, but the reality is that they are controlled by the same international banks and multinational corporations as the Republicans.

For example, Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) masquerades as a conservative, but voted for the TPA. Cruz justified his vote by saying:

“Historically, since FDR virtually every president has had fast track authority. What fast track provides is simply if a free trade agreement is negotiated, that Congress will vote on it up or down without amendments and history has demonstrated for the last 80 years that the only way to get free trade agreements adopted is to have fast track. That if there is no fast track, free trade agreements do not end up being negotiated.”

Senator Cruz’s remarks are essentially a lie. The purpose of enabling any president with “fast track authority” is to go around the Constitution and use secret trade treaties as a mechanism by which any topic can be inserted into a trade treaty whether or not it has to do with trade or not. If the TPA is finally passed in one form or another, then the United Nations Arms Trade Treaty could be passed without a senatorial vote. This would allow the Second Amendment, which grants U.S. citizens the right to bear arms, to overturned by the United Nations. Senator Cruz, who claims to be an expert on the Constitution, apparently knows this and he supports it.

The reason you hear almost nothing about any of this in terms of substantive details and real facts is because the same international bankers and multinational corporations who control both political parties also totally control the media, including the massive pseudo-conservative media-industrial complex. This complex consists of large numbers of “conservative” media personalities who pretend to be telling you the truth, but who are in reality actively engaged in covering up the truth by selectively ignoring the most important news stories or giving them only lip-service coverage or by causing people to focus their attention on the endless and mindless parade of pseudo-investigative news stories about shocking scandals, sex change operations, child molestation, murders, affairs, tabloid journal-crimes, etc. ”

All of this is designed to keep your eyes off the real ball. If the media personalities and media organizations are not seriously talking about the real meaning of the TPP and they are filling up their airtime with tabloid style-pseudo journalism, then they are in on the fix! If they are pontificating like blow-hards about the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, but they don’t really connect the dots, they have been muzzled. If they cover the morbid details about the church-shooting killer, Bruce Jenner, sexual molestation, and other clever sideshows, they are part of the problem.

What is the real ball? It is the united effort by Democrats and Republicans like Speaker Boehner to create a Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) which transfer the governing power of the United States from “We the people,” to globalists. It authorizes a new transnational governance structure, which could include nations like China. This would mean the Chinese government, rather than the American people, would have authority to govern America, at least to some degree.

What the trade treaties are really all about is a mechanism for a coup or regime change, where America ceases to be governed by “We the people,” but rather by some international body. I detail with this subject more in MASS AWAKENING.

Website: PaulMcGuire.us
E-Mail: newmediavoice@aol.com

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Image THE BABYLON CODE: KEY TO UNDERSTANDING THE COMING ONE WORLD ECONOMIC, GOVERNMENTAL, AND RELIGIOUS SYSTEM

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Paul McGuire, an internationally-recognized prophecy expert, Fox News and History Channel commentator, bestselling author and host of the GOD TV show, Apocalypse and the End Times

THE BABYLON CODE: KEY TO UNDERSTANDING THE COMING ONE WORLD ECONOMIC, GOVERNMENTAL, AND RELIGIOUS SYTEM

By Paul McGuire
June 2, 2015
NewsWithViews.com

Our entire planet is convulsing from the massive changes coming to our economic, political, and religious systems. Watching our television news and social media, millions of people are simply overwhelmed by events; it is as if our collective unconscious is being infected with dread and despair.

Images of ISIS terrorists wearing black robes and masks beheading journalists and innocent women in their attempt to establish a new Islamic caliphate are both horrific and barbaric. In response to this terrorist threat from an extreme Islamic religious sect, Pope Francis and the Vatican and a rising number of “Evangelical’ churches are calling for a more inclusive one world religion where all faiths merge.

Economic news of the potential for Greece to default on its loans and the rising practice of “bank bail-ins” where banks are now seizing the deposits of the common man in order to pay off their debts, threatens to move across the EU like falling dominoes and eventually into the U.S. To prevent the possibility of a global economic collapse a New International Economic Order is being set in motion where the dollar will not be the de facto world’s currency, but something like the BRICS nations (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) proposed basket of competing currencies, which would constitute a new one world currency.

Simultaneously, Denmark is its way on to being the world's first cashless society, as the government proposes new laws that will allow retailers to refuse cash payment.

Already a third of the population uses the Danske Bank app called MobilePay, which links your mobile to other users' phones and allows you to confirm payments with a simple swipe on your smartphone's screen. In the UK, cashless technologies like Paym, and in the U.S. Google Wallet allow people buy and sell without cash. Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Iceland are now leading the world in cashless payments, from small purchases for a pack of gum to large purchases. Five of Sweden's six big banks now operate cashless branches and some predict the country could become cashless by 2030.

Clearly, other countries around the world, including the U.S., are quickly moving to a global cashless economic system. The final step would be the use of some kind of microchip or nano-chip implant…and a person could not buy or sell without this technology.

As we look at all these crises a common theme seems to be emerging: the “solutions” being implemented and proposed all contain the elements of globalism and the creation of some kind of new global economic, political, and religious order. It is as if history is repeating itself because thousands of years ago Mankind attempted to deal with similar problems by creating the world’s first one world religion, one world government, and one world economic system at the Tower of Babel in ancient Babylon, founded by Nimrod. Ancient Babylon was a globalist society built on mysterious but real science, technologies, and spiritual systems that have been passed on for many thousands of years through a secret priesthood. This is why it is no accident that a Babylonian commercial and economic system known as Mystery Babylon is prophesied to return, in the Book of Revelation 17:5.

Although I have been researching Babylon for many decades, I began the most intensive pursuit of my life about five and a half years ago when I partnered with Troy Anderson, a Pulitzer Prize-nominated journalist, in deciphering the coding system imbedded in the Tower of Babel and being implemented today by a secret priesthood who plan to radically restructure our society based on the “Mystery Religions” of ancient Babylon. We believe that we have uncovered some of these “mysteries,” which can explain what is going on behind the scenes in the world today. We have co-written our research in a new book that is coming out in October called The Babylon Code.

Our research has uncovered a secret coding system passed on by secret societies who plan to recreate the one world religion, one world economic system, and one world government developed by Nimrod and recorded in Genesis 11. This secretive elite has passed on this prophetic code and occult teaching in Egypt, Rome, China, Europe, and the U.S. Our research has uncovered the secret of the ancient god-kings who ruled the world’s most powerful empires. In fact, the ancient pre-flood super civilization Atlantis provided the science and technology which allowed ancient Babylon to flourish, and while many in in the so-called higher levels of our society would ridicule such ideas, the men and women who compromise what Aldous Huxley termed the Scientific or Technocratic Elite, who currently rule our global system, have always been avid students of the science, geopolitics, and governmental structure of Atlantis, primarily through reading the Greek Philosopher Plato’s writings.

On a global cultural level the lower classes, middle class, and managerial classes, which includes prime ministers, presidents, senators, CEO’s, scientists, and college professors are clueless about what is really happening because they suffer from a socially engineered myopia and they cannot connect the dots because their brains have been programmed from youth to be left brain dominant. This means that they are good at thinking inside of the box and following orders. But due to social engineering they are unable to access their right brain, which is creative and could ask the big questions and connect the dots. When the neurological pathways are trained from childhood to bypass the right brain, eventually people become hollow shells who are able to conform to the artificial norms of society and are programmed to serve their scientific or technocratic masters.

An example of how this programming works is the social engineering system called Common Core, which is designed to create people who are capable of group think and connecting with the hive mind and “World Brain,” but not capable of thinking as empowered individuals.

As Anderson and I began to delve deeper into our research we were able to interview people who are part of this Scientific Elite, such as world class economists, the heads of NSA psy ops programs, military generals, presidents, prime ministers, and high ranking members of the Freemasons and Illuminati because we found as a general principal that these individuals were hiding nothing…everything was “hidden in plain sight” and out in the open for anyone to see. But due to their programming most people cannot see what is actually in front of them.

What we discovered and extensively document is that the chaos we see in our nation and world is largely scientifically engineered, inspired by one of the primary coding systems from Babylon, which is “Order Out of Chaos.” The fact that the U.S. dollar openly displays Illuminati symbols like the all-seeing Eye of Horus and the words “New World Order” in Latin on the base of a picture of a pyramid is evidence of the fact that no one is hiding anything! It is all in plain sight. But through extensive interviews and examination of historical documents, we found that this ancient code explains many contemporary current events.

For example, we are seeing a steady increase in the number of race riots in America and across the world. Jesus Christ spoke of this when he talked about the signs of the times, and referred to “war and rumors of wars” and said that “nation will rise up against nation,” meaning racial or ethnic groups. So Jesus Christ is telling us that in the last days there will be an increase in race wars. But what is causing those race wars in the United States are highly trained activists working behind the scenes, agents who specialize in “manufactured crisis” or chaos. In order for a new order to be established they have to destroy the old with chaos.

Now to this add hard economic realities. The Republicans in the 1990s passed a whole string of trade treaties like NAFTA and GATT and promoted the WTO, which has created an annual trade deficit of $500 billion, which caused a loss of four million jobs in places like Baltimore. In addition, the U.S. economy in 2015 shrank by around .7% which represents a massive hit on the once most powerful economy in the world. The trade deficits, which are set to continue with the TTP promoted by both Republicans and Democrats, will further destroy America’s inner cities like Baltimore. Jobs that were once available to Americans, such as manufacturing autos, mobile phones, clothing, and furniture no longer exist in cities like Baltimore.

Baltimore, like many American cities, was once a place where tens of thousands of blue collar workers could earn a good living in industries building cars, airplanes, steel, etc. But just like what happened to Detroit, these good paying jobs and industries moved to China, Mexico, and other Asian nations. The Technocratic Elite and their foot soldiers like Newt Gingrich and others did this deliberately. So now American inner cities are like war zones that look like Iraq and are ripe for the agents of manufactured crisis.

If you study the system of the Technocratic Elite established at Babylon and passed on through the ages in places like Egypt, which had millions of slaves operating under their god-king system, you see that on a global level the god-king system is emerging once again. But one of the most powerful secrets of The Babylon Code is that this secret priesthood is not hiding anything. They have learned that through sorcery, or what would now be called scientific mind control, the masses can be conditioned to love their slavery.

his is what Aldous Huxley referred to when he said “In a truly effective Scientific Dictatorship men and women can be trained to love their servitude or slavery.” When the Book of Revelation refers to the return of “Mystery Babylon” in the last days, it is talking about a global economic, religious, and governmental system that uses modern economics, science, and technology, but also uses the same occult systems that controlled the original Babylon, and that means under this “world system” the masses willingly surrender their wills to this collective hive mind. This is one of the mysteries revealed by the pyramid with the all-seeing eye of Lucifer above it and below it the words “new world order” on the back of the U.S. dollar.

Race riots, the transfer of the wealth of the middle class, and social and moral anarchy are intensifying. Events are spiraling downwards ever more rapidly and things will get much worse before they get better…we are in for a rough ride. But, at the end of it all, there will be a divine intervention, something completely unexpected is about to arrive.

Paul McGuire: radio talk show host, author, feature film producer and television commentator.

Paul McGuire is the author of 22 books, such as the best-selling, The Day the Dollar Died and Are You Ready for the Microchip? Paul is the host of the syndicated television show, The Paul McGuire Report. Paul McGuire hosted the nationally syndicated talk radio show, "The Paul McGuire Show" for 10 years. Paul McGuire is a television commentator and has been a frequent guest on the Fox News Network and CNN.

Paul is the producer of two science fiction films in Hollywood. The History Channel did a 2-hour special with Paul McGuire entitled Seven Signs of the Apocalypse. Paul has interviewed numerous world leaders, Presidents and Prime Ministers. Paul lives in Los Angeles, California.

At fifteen years old, Paul was demonstrating with radical activist Abbie Hoffman and made an honorary member of the Black Panther Party. However, while studying Altered States of Consciousness at the University of Missouri, Paul had a miraculous experience hitchhiking in a remote area similar to the movie Field of Dreams. Paul re-thought his socialist and humanist world view and rejected it as completely false. Paul has devoted his life to communicating truth to people.

Website: PaulMcGuire.us

E-Mail: newmediavoice@aol.com

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Image BILDERBERG & TRADE TREATIES: The Shadow Government That Rules The World

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Amazon's #1 New Release in Christian Eschatology

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Paul McGuire, an internationally-recognized prophecy expert, Fox News and History Channel commentator, bestselling author and host of the GOD TV show, Apocalypse and the End Times

BILDERBERG & TRADE TREATIES:
The Shadow Government That Rules The World
Our job is to give the people NOT what they want,
but what WE decide they ought to have.”

By Paul McGuire | June 9, 2015
NewsWithViews.com

TPP MembersJulian Assange and Wikileaks exposed part of the secret behind Obama’s Trans Pacific Partnership, which leading Republicans signed. Senator Jeff Sessions, a Republican from Alabama, was one of the few senators who publicly challenged the secret Obama treaty that, according to the 17 documents released by Wikileaks, will cover over 80% of the U.S. economy and create what Sessions called “global governance,” establishing a global government without the knowledge or consent of the America people.

Although the alternative media and news outlets like the Drudge Report exposed the great dangers of the TPP, the corporate media not only glossed over the important news about the trade treaties, but the major media outlets, including the pseudo-conservative television networks and “Manchurian Candidate” conservative talk show hosts pretending to be investigative news journalists.

They wasted America’s time with endless hours on Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar and the child molestation scandal surrounding their son, Josh Duggar, and what it was like as parents when they learned about his actions, or Bruce Jenner’s sex change operation.

The vast majority of the media outlets in the United States are controlled by just six corporations who are controlled by the power elite who also control secret organizations like the Bilderberg Group, whose sinister plans are never exposed by the major media outlets.

The Bilderberg Group is behind the trade treaties and its leaders are planning global government, which is the only real news story worth covering. The Bilderberg Group’s 2015 meeting is coming up soon at a remote mountain resort in Austria. During last year’s Bilderberg meeting in Copenhagen Denmark over 120 elite globalists planned the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership and the TPP trade treaties. The Bilderberg Group, which was financed in part by Nazi money in 1954, gathered the most powerful men in the world in Oosterbeek, Netherlands.

Their meetings include such powerful people as David Rockefeller, Henry Kissinger, Bill Clinton, Gordon Brown, Angela Merkel, Alan Greenspan, Ben Bernanke, Larry Summers, Tim Geithner, George Soros, Donald Rumsfeld, Rupert Murdoch, Barack Obama, heads of state, international bankers, top military leaders, and the heads of the largest corporations in the world. Essentially, the Bilderberg Group already practically rules the world and is bringing it under their planned world government. In a new book entitled, “The Babylon Code,” which I wrote with Pulitzer Prize nominated journalist, Troy Anderson, we go into the details of the secret history of the Bilderberg Group.

In 1991 Bill Clinton came to Bilderberg and met with David Rockefeller, who explained why the North American Free Trade Agreement was a Bilderberg priority. It was this trade treaty, NAFTA, that transferred billions of dollars of wealth from America’s middle class to Third World Nations around the world. The end game for Bilderberg is a one world government, one world religion, and one world economic system, which are outlined in Revelation Chapter 13. They want total control over the masses, whom they see as their slaves. They select and choose almost all presidents and heads of intelligence and law enforcement agencies and they completely control the Democratic and Republican parties. This is why, no matter what the polls say, the Democrats and Republicans will support things like Trade Treaties and numerous other legislation that the American public does not want.

The concept of a two party system in America is a total charade that only an imbecile would believe in. The top men and women in both political parties are all bought and paid for and they get to stay in power to the degree that they do the bidding of their masters, and that is not the American people, but the “shadow government,” which truly runs America. Most of the Republican candidates now running for President are completely under the control of the Bilderberg Group and they have absolutely no loyalty to America and the American people, no matter how many American flags they wave!

Former CBS News president Richard Salant said of the media, “Our job is to give the people not what they want, but what we decide they ought to have.” Sociologist Hadley Cantril, an expert in mind control and propaganda, wrote “Pyscho-political operations are propaganda campaigns designed to create perpetual tensions and manipulate different groups of people to accept the particular climate of opinion the Council on Foreign Relations seeks to achieve in the world.”

The Bilderberg Group and the CFR exercise enormous control over Evangelical Christianity, churches, and Christian leaders. Through Rockefeller financed programs the Christian church and its leadership in America has largely been transformed into a secular corporation that no longer preaches the Gospel of Jesus Christ but a gospel of consumer-marketing and psychological motivation.

105008590_scaled_420x333The strategy of using trade treaties to go around constitutions and the laws of individual nation states began to take off with the European Union as a potential global government with 109 nations, in Strasbourg, France. The Louis Weis Building was built to look like a modern Tower of Babel with steel and glass. This headquarters of the EU was completed in 1999 and designed by the famous architect Le Corbusier, who also built the United Nations. Along with Jean Monnet, he dreamed of global government or a scientific Utopia ruled by a Technocratic Elite. From the beginning it was conceived to be a rebirth of the Tower of Babel.

Beginning in the 1920’s Monnet believed that a European Union could be secretly created by enacting a series of harmless trade treaties, but, concealed by the arcane legal language of each Trade Treaty, a careful strategy was being implemented to create a single European Union, without the masses knowing that they would lose their freedoms and sovereignty. The Monnet method was to enact one seemingly harmless trade treaty after another in order to establish a kind of reborn Roman Empire.

EU CouncilIn many respects, the EU is a partial fulfillment of the Fourth Kingdom in Daniel 7:23. “Thus he said, The Fourth Beast shall be the fourth kingdom on earth, which shall be diverse from all kingdoms, and shall devour the whole earth, and shall tread it down and break it into pieces.” Adolph Hitler and the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini both essentially wished to restore the Roman Empire. Although their empires were defeated in 1945, a secret group of European leaders organized the Council of Europe, and through a coal and steel treaty they created the European Union.

Now, right before your eyes, the same exact strategy is being used to destroy America in the same way sovereign nations were destroyed by the European Union. Through a series of secret trade treaties American is being surrendered to the control of a global government.

Website: PaulMcGuire.us
E-Mail: newmediavoice@aol.com

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Gallery Brian “Head” Welch

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The Babylon Code: Solving the Bible's Greatest End Times Mystery.
Now Available for Pre-Order.
pizap.com14358389246481

Ex-Korn guitarist Brian “Head” Welch recounts his self-destructive rise to stardom, and the major changes in his life since praying to God for deliverance.

Head Joins the Body
Troy Anderson/ AUGUST 13, 2007

It was 2004 and Korn's lead guitarist Brian "Head" Welch had hit rock bottom. As a member of the controversial nü-metal band that became the voice for youth worldwide with lyrics about alienation and abuse, the pressures of the rock star life had torn his marriage apart.

Addicted to methamphetamines and alcohol and left to raise his daughter by himself, the childhood dream of stardom had become a nightmare for the longhaired, bearded, and heavily tattooed musician. The wealth and fame he once thought would bring him happiness and fulfillment had left him miserable and empty, mired in a dark depression.

At the end of his rope, Welch prayed … and God answered in a big way.

The Rise to Ruin

Brian Welch grew up in Bakersfield, a central California city nicknamed "Bako" for its scorching desert heat. In 1980, while listening to a drum solo on an 8-track Queen tape, the ten-year-old boy decided he wanted to play drums. But his dad talked him out of it, recommending the guitar instead. He started taking lessons.

"I instantly got good," Welch said. "I had an ear for music. I was figuring out heavy metal songs by Ted Nugent, Ozzy Osbourne, and Queen really quick the first couple of years."

While his talents as a guitar player progressed and he played in various bands, Welch said he also developed a "paralyzing fear" that haunted him even as he gained riches and fame—a condition he attributes to his father's angry outbursts, as well as bullies who picked on him and nicknamed him "Head."

By high school, Welch had met most of the members of what later would become Korn. It was here near Death Valley where Welch and fellow guitarist James "Munky" Shaffer developed the groundbreaking band's heavy, growling metal-influenced ...

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Gallery Flash and Cash

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Flash and Cash

Crime rings rip off billions of taxpayer dollars
By TROY ANDERSON, Staff writer
POSTED: 12/31/69, 4:00 PM PST | UPDATED: ON 05/12/2007 

Flamboyant and ostentatious, they drive luxury cars, unwind in multimillion-dollar mansions, flaunt designer clothes and flash dazzling jewels.

But behind the glitz lurks what law enforcement officials say is a brazen new breed of organized criminal - Eurasian mobsters who carry out brutal murders, stockpile assault rifles and launder cash around the globe.

And the burgeoning Eurasian crime syndicates are increasingly funding their international empires by siphoning billions of dollars from taxpayer-funded health and welfare programs across the United States.

"It's a huge problem, and Los Angeles is the hot spot for this type of crime," said Assistant U.S. Attorney Consuelo Woodhead, who oversees health care fraud prosecutions.

"Maybe we still have a little bit of the Wild West here, an area that attracts those who want to get rich quick. It's also because we have a very diverse, elderly population with a lot of recent immigrants who aren't necessarily familiar with the Medicare and Medi-Cal systems."

Hundreds of billions

While exact figures are difficult to tally, experts estimate as much as $300 billion a year is lost to health care fraud in the United States - more than half of it to organized crime.

"It's hundreds of billions of dollars," said Malcolm Sparrow, a professor at the Harvard University Kennedy School of Government and a national expert on health care fraud. "The only question is what is the first digit."

Since 2000, the Los Angeles County Health Authority Law Enforcement Task Force has arrested more than 110 Eurasian, Middle Eastern, Nigerian and Asian organized-crime members suspected of health care fraud.

Another team, the Southern California Eurasian Organized Crime Task Force, says it has arrested more than 100 suspects in recent years on fraud and other charges.

"We equate this to like the 1930s and '40s Mob," said Glendale Police Department Sgt. Steve Davey, who heads the Southern California team. "We are in a state similar to investigators years ago during the beginning of the La Cosa Nostra investigations.

"We're making headway arresting street-level and midlevel criminals. We have yet to get to the top."

Law enforcement officials estimate more than 2,500 members and associates of Russian and Armenian organized-crime syndicates operate in the county - twice as many as a decade ago.

While the criminals are mostly involved in white-collar offenses, investigators say they have also committed more serious crimes, including murder.

"We had somewhere around 30 shootings and attempted murders just from 2000 to 2003," Davey said.

Murder for profit

Earlier this year, two San Fernando Valley men were sentenced to death for their role in abducting and murdering five Russian immigrants, then dumping their bodies in a Northern California reservoir. A third defendant is scheduled to be sentenced Tuesday.

The three defendants were part of a Russian mob that used ransoms paid for their victims to buy Mercedes-Benz cars, mink coats and an Aspen, Colo., ski vacation.

(In investigating the case, authorities learned that one of the victims was known as a mob "bookkeeper," who kept accounting records for nearly 30 health care businesses suspected of defrauding the government.)

In a county task force investigation of five Glendale and Burbank medical clinics suspected of stealing $25 million from Medicare, officials discovered 41 firearms, ranging from high-caliber assault rifles to a James Bond-type .22-caliber "pen gun."

The team also seized $420,000 in cash and $1 million in jewelry.

"It's equivalent to the cocaine boom of the 1980s," said sheriff's Sgt. Stephen P. Opferman, a member of the regional task force. "(But) it just doesn't involve narcotics - it involves stealing government funds.

"We see these people involved living the same lifestyles. There's a lot of flash and cash - money, jewelry, nice cars and big houses. We are finding people driving three Mercedes, living in $3 million homes - and they have Medi-Cal benefits cards."

$3 billion annual loss

Medi-Cal spends about $34billion annually to provide care for about 7 million indigent Californians - with about $3 billion of that lost to fraud, experts say.

The state Attorney General's Office has a bureau that deals specifically with Medi-Cal fraud. It's prosecuted about 1,000 such cases over the past eight years - double the number for the previous eight years. Most, officials say, are related to organized crime.

And the court-ordered recovery of funds ripped off from Medi-Cal hit a record $274 million in 2005-06, nearly as much as all the money recovered in the previous 15 years combined.

"For every $100 million in Medi-Cal funds we protect, those funds can provide comprehensive treatment for 8,000 breast cancer patients, treat up to 155,000 people suffering from TB or provide up to 645,000 days of nursing-home care," said Joseph Fendrick, who oversees the Bureau of Medi-Cal Fraud and Elder Abuse.

Barbara Siegel, managing attorney at Neighborhood Legal Services in Pacoima, said fraud is driving up the cost of health care and insurance and leaving innocent people with medical bills for services they never received.

"They get a bill and come to us and say, `I never saw this doctor or never went to this lab,"' Siegel said.

And it's not just Medi-Cal that's being targeted. Experts say all county, state and federal health and welfare programs are in the bull's-eye.

As Fendrick's investigators have cracked down on Medi-Cal fraud, many criminals have switched to the federal Medicare program, said Matt McLaughlin, supervisor of the FBI's Los Angeles Area Health Care Fraud Squad.

In a typical scam, crime syndicates send contacts to senior centers, offering nutritional supplements or cash to elderly residents to go to a clinic to fill out Medicare forms and undergo medically unnecessary treatments and tests, McLaughlin said.

Benefit-card numbers are often used to bill for medical equipment. Officials at the U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services division office in Los Angeles are currently tracking thousands of bills submitted to Medicare for $5,000 power wheelchairs, prosthetics, oxygen tanks and other equipment that beneficiaries never received or didn't need, officials said.

Victims lose benefits

In August, division officials visited 400 medical-equipment companies in Glendale, Burbank, North Hollywood and other cities throughout the county and removed 70 from the approved Medicare program list because the businesses didn't exist yet were billing Medicare.

"Many people have lost their Medicare benefits as a result of falling prey to these schemes," McLaughlin said.

The FBI and the county task force have dedicated more resources to investigating Medicare scams. The FBI estimates nearly 60 percent of all its Eurasian organized-crime cases involve government fraud.

"Government scams are the bread and butter of these organized-crime groups," said Opferman, the regional task force member. "It's kind of like the Gold Rush. This is the reason they are here.

"You literally have free money being shoveled out, and it's a free-for-all. Any government program is susceptible.

"They exploit loopholes in every handout we have."

Organized crime's sophisticated operations often make it difficult to detect fraud by operating legitimate businesses and using shell companies to launder funds.

Law enforcement officials say billions of dollars are laundered through banks in Russia, Armenia, Switzerland and Dubai in the United Arab Emirates, making it difficult to recover money stolen from U.S. taxpayers.

"Once the money goes overseas, the money trail disappears," Opferman said.

And just as the FBI eventually used tax-evasion charges to prosecute Chicago mobsters in the 1930s, authorities are considering all approaches in dealing with crime syndicates.

"It's kind of the Al Capone approach - looking at whether they are evading taxes," said prosecutor Albert H. MacKenzie, who heads the county's Fraud Interdiction Program.

In the past three years, Mac- Kenzie has identified more than 300 doctors, lawyers and members of organized crime suspected of health care fraud involving more than $200 million in unreported income.

"We have individuals who obtain money and use it to set up clinics that remain in operation for a limited period of time, bill for services and then disappear," said Lance Wong, head deputy district attorney in the Healthcare Fraud Division.

"We have a huge problem here. Committing these crimes is lucrative. And the chance of getting caught is slim because the government just doesn't have the resources to fight it."

Identity theft used

Wong's office is prosecuting a case with organized-crime links that cost Los Angeles city and county taxpayers more than $6.7 million, District Attorney Steve Cooley said. The case is one of a growing number in which organized-crime groups are using identity theft to help commit fraud.

In that case, Glendale residents Samvel Melkonyan, 49, and Tigran Ghalmukhyan, 35, allegedly billed the county for medical services performed from 2002 to 2004 using businesses not incorporated until 2005. A preliminary hearing is set for June 18.

Prosecutors say the suspects stole the identities of nearly 200 county employees - mostly active and retired sheriff's deputies - who were unaware that they were listed as "patients" in the scam.

The men allegedly issued claims to the county for tests administered by fictitious diagnostic clinics in Van Nuys and North Hollywood, prosecutors said.

"The scam was ultimately being run by some Middle Eastern guys living in Dubai," Opferman said. "There are definitely people living a very lavish lifestyle above (Melkonyan)."

Melkonyan's Los Angeles attorney, Michael Geragos, did not return calls for comment. Last week, Geragos' office said he was traveling and could not be reached for comment.

Cooley said virtually no government benefit program is safe.

"The problem is that governmental institutions assume, I think mistakenly, that people who apply for public benefits or compensation are being honest," Cooley said.

"In this day and age, that is an assumption unsupported by reality. ... When you start throwing billions of taxpayer dollars around, you need to figure out who is capable of stealing it and how to prevent it."

Difficult prosecution

Department of Social Services spokeswoman Shirley Washington said the state is working with county welfare offices to investigate and prosecute fraud.

Officials estimate as much as 5 percent of the $5.3 billion spent each year providing food stamps and general welfare benefits is lost to fraud, Washington said.

"Recent data in Los Angeles County shows that in the five-year period from 1999 to 2004, the state and county worked together to reduce or deny welfare benefits in 77,973 cases involving fraud," Washington said. "That's out of 299,048 referrals (in suspected welfare fraud cases)."

Stephen Tidwell, assistant director in charge of the FBI office in Los Angeles, said Southern California has a "significant problem" with organized crime groups defrauding government programs.

"We have the largest number of agents dedicated to working health care fraud of any FBI office in the country," McLaughlin said. "It's a very substantial problem, and we are working in a task force capacity to develop new strategies to increase the impact we can have on those who are committing health care fraud.

"But it's a large problem, and it's going to take our very best to hope to increase our effectiveness."

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