March 20, 2013 - InfoWars Nightly News
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| The End of War | |
| The End of War I'm your host, Melissa Melton, and let's check out what's coming up on this Wednesday, March 20th, 2013 edition. | |
| Tonight, Nigel Farage warns you'd have to be mad to invest in the Eurozone. | |
| Get out while you can. | |
| Then, Obama's so-called ethics panel okays testing anthrax vaccines on babies. | |
| And Feinstein vows not to play dead, but to resurrect her gun confiscation bill. | |
| All that and more coming up on the InfoWars Nightly News. | |
| In our first story tonight, Nigel Farage has a message for Europeans. | |
| Get your money out while you can. | |
| It can't afford Cyprus to fail, it can't afford Greece to fail, Portugal, Spain or Ireland. | |
| They know that once one country goes, the whole deck of cards will come tumbling down. | |
| Do not Don't invest anywhere in the Eurozone. | |
| You've got to be mad to do so because it's now run by people who don't respect democracy, who don't respect the rule of law, who don't respect the basic principles upon which Western civilisation is supposed to be based. | |
| They are propping up a Eurozone which in the end is going to collapse in disastrous failure. | |
| And I would go ahead and add, it's not now run by those people, it's always been run by those people. | |
| That's not new. | |
| And they actually don't want to just do this in the EU, this is their plan for the whole entire world. | |
| So, definitely some scary stuff, and we're going to have to keep you updated on that as it goes, because like he said, if they're doing this in one small country, it doesn't matter, they can do it anywhere in there, Italy, Spain, anywhere they want, once they've done it here, there, in Cyprus, they can do it anywhere. | |
| And in other news, tensions are escalating in North Korea as they have now eyed in a huge cyber attack on South Korea. | |
| Apparently, officials at KBS, NBC and YTM Broadcaster said their computers were shut down at 2 p.m. | |
| and have not been able to reboot. | |
| All they got was a black screen with three skull drawings on it with the phrase that said, hacked by who is team. | |
| Excuse me, and apparently this is a secretive group of hackers, and they were able to air program as normal, but bank computers were also shut down, online banking and ATMs were also not able to be used as well. | |
| And they're saying that North Korea has been publicly stating a huge revenge attack is coming, and so they're saying that it is, and they're actually also saying they're going to attack us as they're vowing military action against more U.S. | |
| B-52 flights. | |
| North Korea is warned of strong military counteraction if the U.S. | |
| again flies B-52 bombers over the Korean peninsula with two flights this month after the totalitarian regime threatened preemptive nuclear strikes. | |
| And they actually said they were going to engulf us in a sea of fire, which I guess is at least a little bit more intimidating than a lake of fire. | |
| I guess this new guy is trying to outdo his daddy. | |
| But tensions are rising. | |
| It is a delicate situation. | |
| And as this unfolds, InfoWars will continue to report on it. | |
| Now in other news, more close to home, Feinstein is vowing not to play dead on anti-Second Amendment bill. | |
| Apparently she lashed out at her colleagues yesterday after Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid decided not to include her proposals in a larger and more comprehensive anti-gun bill. | |
| I did the bill in 1994 on the floor as an amendment. | |
| It enacted a law. | |
| It went on to the House. | |
| It was enacted. | |
| I took away from that meeting the belief that we would have a vote on the full bill and a vote on ammunition feeding devices of more than 10 bullets. | |
| It's aimed to dry up the supply of these over time. | |
| And actually, she went on to say, not to give me a vote on this would be a major betrayal of trust, as I would see it. | |
| Well, I would like to go on and add, Mrs. Feinstein, that you've betrayed the trust of the American people and the Constitution, which you swore an oath to uphold. | |
| And it's the law of our land, and you're just walking all over it. | |
| And actually, for more on how the American people are not going to take this draconian tax on our Second Amendment bills lying down, here's our own correspondent, Dan Bodondi. | |
| This is Dan Badogno reporting for the InfoWars Nightly News, and we are in Providence, Rhode Island. | |
| Hundreds and almost a thousand people already have showed up to support the Second Amendment, and people are still filing in. | |
| The General Assembly of Rhode Island is trying to push through SB 5573, a draconian bill that would have all gun owners register their firearms and pay a $100 fee, and they're also attacking assault weapons to try to ban assault weapons. | |
| But as you know through history, folks, Gun registration leads to gun confiscation. | |
| Why is the Second Amendment important? | |
| It's important because at any point, walking down the street or even in your home, you can get attacked. | |
| We have a right to defend ourselves. | |
| It wasn't written so we could go target shooting, even though that's all we're doing right now. | |
| Hunting and target shooting. | |
| It's here for our protection. | |
| It gives us protection. | |
| The criminals don't go by the Second Amendment, they don't go by the gun laws that they pass, and so that would leave me open to harm, it would leave me helpless and defenseless. | |
| We can't protect any of the others. | |
| You know, what protections do we have if we give up the Second Amendment? | |
| Without the Second Amendment, all the other ones are just words. | |
| First thing the Communists did was they took the guns. | |
| Then they came in, they took all the books, and then they came in, they took the people for retraining camp. | |
| If you didn't go, they shot you, because at that point you couldn't defend yourself. | |
| And then, what happened to my family was, they took the beautiful brownstone they lived in, and kicked them out in the street, and moved the Communist officials in. | |
| And within the first decade of occupation by Communist China under Mao Zedong, It's been estimated anywhere between 68 to 100 million Chinese were murdered, and this was during peacetime. | |
| Is there a state law that says I can't bring that in? | |
| No, it's a state policy. | |
| State policy doesn't count. | |
| State law is what counts. | |
| Why are you here protesting today? | |
| Well, I'm actually here protesting the Second Amendment killing legislation that they're trying to pass at the Rhode Island State House, and I'm also here as a citizen journalist because I fear that the mainstream media does not cover it properly, so I'm here to make sure they do. | |
| I'm here to protest the anti-gun legislation that they put forth in Rhode Island that would charge me $100 per gun and force me to register my guns, which would give an unlawful list of gun owners in case they ever wanted to confiscate my guns, which is unconstitutional. | |
| The Rhode Island Constitution states in one sentence The right to bear arms shall not be infringed. | |
| It's one sentence and they have no right to any further legislation. | |
| They've already gone past what they have the right to do. | |
| Anybody here think I should not be allowed to carry an empty 69 caliber 300 year old musket into this building? | |
| Hey, that's got the end on it. | |
| That's exactly right. | |
| And I also have shoes on and I can take you off and beat you with those too. | |
| Shall I strip naked before I walk in? | |
| It has a ban on it for a reason. | |
| Do you believe gun registration will lead to confiscation? | |
| I just believe gun registration, it's against our constitution and people have a right to own a firearm. | |
| On this right hand column, The overwhelming majority of law-abiding Americans who own firearms, and there's about 80 to 100 million of them, and I am among them, and we own something like 300 some odd million guns. | |
| We own them legally and we use them responsibly. | |
| I have a lot of friends in Germany having served there for three years in a row. | |
| Really nice people. | |
| And yet, in that society, the Nazis rose to the top. | |
| The same element exists in this society, and they're standing right inside wearing gold badges. | |
| FBI tells us they know exactly who's doing it, where they're doing it, and they're in Chicago, Detroit, Atlanta, all of the densely packed populations in the United States. | |
| And those areas are gun-free zones. | |
| Exactly. | |
| And FBI actually has a term for them. | |
| They're called hotspots. | |
| And they identify them as hotspots because they're concerned about a growing drug cartel influence in those zones. | |
| And what happens is that's why you have all those street gang murders and gangbangers. | |
| Well, you know what? | |
| When the revolution happens, people like you are going to be brought to justice and tried for treason. | |
| If you uphold these unconstitutional laws, I'm telling you right now, that's what's going to happen. | |
| You're the chief of police of Providence? | |
| Capitol Police. | |
| No, even lower. | |
| That's unbelievable. | |
| Very good. | |
| I'll find out his name. | |
| Once again, the Second Amendment is being attacked right here in the state of Rhode Island. | |
| About a thousand patriots, including four Rhode Island state representatives and other politicians, all showed up to tell the General Assembly, no, you are not pushing the anti-gun draconian bill through. | |
| And to you lawmakers out there, what part of the right to bear arms shall not be infringed that you do not understand? | |
| And this is Dan Bodondi reporting for the InfoWars Nightly News. | |
| Thanks Badani, keep it up out there. | |
| In more sorry gun news, a family says that New Jersey overreacted to a boy's gun photo that was up on Facebook. | |
| It was a picture of an 11-year-old boy who had received a gun as a present for his birthday from his dad. | |
| And apparently it resembles a military-style assault rifle, but his father said it's actually just a .22 caliber copy. | |
| And that, the family believes, is why child welfare case workers and police officers visited their home and asked to see their guns. | |
| And really all this is doing is perpetuating this nanny state culture that we seem to have here, where everybody's just telling on everybody all the time. | |
| So, it's only going to continue to get worse, this crackdown. | |
| As they continue to try and crack down on our Second Amendment rights, on all of our rights, as we see our Constitution slowly going up in flames at the hands of these evil people, more and more people are just going to be tattling on each other left and right. | |
| We're going to have like this Brazil 1984 culture where we're just all tattling. | |
| You see something, you say something. | |
| We're going to be so busy seeing something and saying something, we're not going to have time to even live our lives anymore. | |
| And speaking of completely ridiculous unethical things, Obama's ethics panel now gives a thumbs up to testing anthrax vaccines on American babies. | |
| This is just despicable. | |
| And it's from Mike Adams at Natural News, and he even says he feels obliged to warn us in advance if you're an evil demon who enjoys the suffering of others, you're going to have a really hard time reading this article. | |
| It is, but you need to read it. | |
| They're basically going to start using American babies as guinea pigs to test bioweapons anthrax vaccines because a presidential ethics panel has now said that that's okay to do. | |
| Never mind the fact that when's the last time you saw a baby get an anthrax just down here on Main Street USA? | |
| Does that just happen all the time? | |
| I don't think I've ever seen that. | |
| This is ridiculous. | |
| And they're even saying this is going to be more moral harm for us as a nation and suffering for the children. | |
| And who gets anthrax? | |
| And these ethics panels, Mike Adams goes on to say, actually are of course stacked with medical industry insiders whose philosophical roots are found in Nazi Germany with IG Farben and Bayer, the company that was involved in grossly inhumane medical experiments on Jewish prisoners. | |
| People that were convicted of war crimes, the people behind Zyklon B. And we're just seeing this medical tyranny openly just unfolding everywhere. | |
| I actually also read that last year the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists has updated their committee opinion on pregnant women receiving tetanus vaccines. | |
| Used to be pregnant women didn't get any vaccines. | |
| Now they're saying you can get up to three vaccines while you're pregnant. | |
| Which happens to just so coincidentally be the same vaccine that the World Health Organization has been testing a birth control vaccine on by adding HCG to it and then it causes women to spontaneously abort their children. | |
| So these things are just continuing, it's crazy land, open season medical tyranny just unfolding everywhere. | |
| And we will keep you up to date on that. | |
| And actually, coming up in the break, I have a news bulletin on some of the crazy new big pharma drugs that are coming out. | |
| Pretty much everything now is a disorder or something they can treat you medically with pharmaceuticals for. | |
| It's amazing. | |
| They actually even have something called shift work disorder now, that if you work a night job and you're sleepy because of it, you need drugs. | |
| Pretty soon you're going to wake up in the morning and they're going to say, here, have a prescription. | |
| You got up today. | |
| I mean, it's amazing. | |
| It's insane. | |
| And actually switching gears now, South by Southwest just came through here in Austin, Texas. | |
| That's a music, movies, and technology festival that comes through every year. | |
| It's a pretty big deal. | |
| Lots and lots of people down there. | |
| And fellow reporter John Bowne and I decided to go on down there and just ask a few people if they would feel safer if the TSA was there to inspect everyone. | |
| I'm Melissa Melton. | |
| I'm here with... John Bowne. | |
| For the InfoWars Nightly News, and we're here in downtown Austin to ask people attending South by Southwest whether or not they'd feel safer if the TSA was here to grope them and search their stuff. | |
| And do they realize that their Fourth Amendment is being violated every day in this country? | |
| And do they even realize what their Fourth Amendment is? | |
| We're just down here at South By. | |
| We're asking people if they would feel safer if the TSA was here to grope them and search their bags. | |
| Yeah, I think it'd definitely be safer. | |
| I think it might be a little bit of an inconvenience, but, you know, if it's for your safety, then it'd definitely be worth it. | |
| Yeah, I mean, there's so many people here, you never know what they're going to be carrying in their bags and stuff. | |
| How would you feel if TSA was down here groping everybody and checking security? | |
| It would be crazy, man. | |
| It would be alright, I guess. | |
| You wouldn't want to be groped by TSA? | |
| No, not at all. | |
| Maybe. | |
| I mean, I guess if people had guns, yeah, I'd feel a little safer. | |
| This is no place for the TSA. | |
| Keep your square asses at the airport. | |
| Bust my balls at the airport. | |
| Don't bust my balls at South by Southwest. | |
| I think the TSA is one of the worst agencies in our entire government. | |
| It's poorly run by a lot of people who are barely educated. | |
| I mean, you know, you look at the scanners and they're going to be the first ones getting the horrible cancers from it. | |
| I mean, of course we'd always feel safer, but there's a certain extent of, like, needs for regulation on that stuff, and I feel like South By, it's not really necessary. | |
| Would you feel a lot safer if the TSA was groping down everybody right now? | |
| Uh, no. | |
| It might feel good, though. | |
| Do you know what the Fourth Amendment is? | |
| Uh, is it not the freedom of You guys familiar with the Fourth Amendment? | |
| Yes, I'm familiar with the Fourth Amendment. | |
| What is it? | |
| I'm not... I can't tell you right now. | |
| That'd be a violation of your Fourth Amendment rights, wouldn't it? | |
| Yes. | |
| The Fourth Amendment says we have the right against the search and seizure of our own private property. | |
| I agree with that. | |
| So what they're doing is unconstitutional. | |
| Sure. | |
| It's un-American. | |
| Sure. | |
| And it just reflects right there in your helmet. | |
| I agree. | |
| Don't you think that's a violation of your Fourth Amendment rights as a U.S. | |
| citizen? | |
| Well, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's true. | |
| That's true because we're out in public, so they shouldn't have no reason. | |
| Would you be worried it'd violate your Fourth Amendment if they were here? | |
| Well, like I said, when it comes to safety, you can't really satisfy everyone. | |
| People are going to be upset about it taking a little bit longer to get into places or taking things that belong to them, but in the long run, if it means saving a life, then, you know, it's worth it. | |
| I don't think all of these people here realize that eventually the TSA will be at events like this. | |
| We've already seen they started out in the airport, then they moved on to bus stations, train stations. | |
| Now in Houston they have TSA spies riding the public city buses. | |
| And they were at the Obama inauguration checking people out. | |
| And eventually they will move into large public events like this. | |
| We've already seen them even at football games. | |
| Where will it end? | |
| Where is it going to stop? | |
| Is it going to stop at the grocery store? | |
| Is it going to stop at the mall? | |
| Is it going to stop on our front door? | |
| We're down here at Lamar Boulevard at the Amtrak station. | |
| The TSA has been doing random searches of people's bags. | |
| How do you feel about that? | |
| I don't think that's a good idea. | |
| They might find stuff that we don't want them to find. | |
| They actually showed up at the Lamar Street Amtrak not that long ago for a surprise inspection. | |
| Really? | |
| They're moving out of airports. | |
| They're not just in airports anymore. | |
| Oh wow. | |
| I thought that's what the police departments were. | |
| I think we're standing here wondering what happened to the American people. | |
| We went out on the street. | |
| Nobody really cares. | |
| The most important thing to them is their trendiness, the latest music to put in their ears and go into a trance-like state, and be induced by commercialism. | |
| That's what's important to people. | |
| And one day, all of that commercialism will be gone, and you'll be in a prison camp. | |
| And there won't be any commercials in the prison camp. | |
| Because you gave up on the Bill of Rights. | |
| I mean, what kind of constitution do we have anymore? | |
| It's supposed to be the law of our land and yet, you know, there's free speech zones everywhere. | |
| We have the trespass bill. | |
| We can't film the police without being harassed or arrested. | |
| Our government can disappear and detain citizens indefinitely under the NDAA. | |
| They're using drones to spy on us and murder innocent people in other countries. | |
| They spy on all of our personal communications, our emails, our phone calls. | |
| They're building a $2 billion NSA data spy hub on our dime to spy on us. | |
| The government hides any action it wants just by saying it's national security. | |
| It can do whatever it wants as long as it's national security. | |
| And it basically ignores all the limitations that were put in place by the people who created the Constitution to begin with to limit the government. | |
| Reporting from downtown Austin, I'm Melissa Melton. | |
| And I'm John Bowne for InfoWars Nightly News. | |
| And that's it for the news portion of tonight's broadcast. | |
| Stick around after the break as David Ortiz interviews Mayor Eva Galambos about her privatized city. | |
| But first, let's go to the quote of the day. | |
| Edward V. Lucas. | |
| And that actually goes along with another quote. | |
| If you never lie, you never have to remember anything. | |
| I don't remember who said that actually, but it's actually very true. | |
| And if you like what you've seen on tonight's broadcast and you're watching this on YouTube, please go to PrisonPlanet.tv and become a subscriber. | |
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| And it also helps fund our operation and keep this information out there because we're the only ones telling you this stuff. | |
| No one else is doing it. | |
| And I've been your host, Melissa Melton. | |
| Have a good evening. | |
| We'll see you back again tomorrow at 7 p.m. | |
| I'm Melissa Melton with an InfoWars News Bulletin. | |
| Colorful big pharma ads on almost every TV channel urge us all the time to ask our doctor today if a drug is right for us. | |
| Products like Avenir's Nudexta, a drug FDA approved for a disorder characterized by involuntary sudden frequent episodes of laughing and or crying. | |
| Avenir's website admits the mechanism by which the drug exerts therapeutic effects in patients is unknown. | |
| Another drug, Nuvagil, is prescribed for something called shift work disorder, which the drug's website claims is a medical condition that can now be diagnosed and treated by a doctor. | |
| Shift work disorder occurs when someone works an overnight job, causing ES, or excessive sleepiness. | |
| Which is also apparently a disorder now. | |
| A warning included at the top of every page of the site claims the drug may cause serious side effects including serious allergic reactions that may affect parts of your body such as your liver or blood cells and may result in hospitalization and be life-threatening. | |
| Many pharmaceuticals only tend to mask symptoms while creating other negative side effects. | |
| Talk to your doctor. | |
| Dizziness upon standing. | |
| This could become permanent. | |
| Seizures, trouble swallowing, and impaired judgment or motor skills. | |
| To have the same cardiovascular warning. | |
| Side effects include nausea, dry mouth, and constipation. | |
| Can lead to coma or death. | |
| Dizziness or fainting may occur upon standing. | |
| Usual changes in mood, behavior, or thoughts of suicide. | |
| Suicide. | |
| Making the sick sicker and never really curing the cause. | |
| But does everything require a drug now? | |
| Like Seasonal Affective Disorder and Restless Leg Syndrome, apparently if you laugh or cry too much, or if you're sleepy because you work overnight, you need pharmaceuticals now because these are officially disorders. | |
| The makers of drugs like Nuvigil claim that shift work disorder is a real disorder As Mike Adams of Natural News has reported, the new Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, known as the DSM-5, classifies every human emotion as a mental disorder. | |
| To make these classifications, a group of intellectuals get together, look at a group of symptoms, and actually vote a disorder into existence. | |
| That's it. | |
| So once a disorder is voted an official disorder, then, as former DSM 4 Chair Alan Francis says, this wholesale medical imperialization of normality could potentially create tens of millions of innocent bystanders who would be mislabeled as having a mental disorder, and Big Pharma can have its field day creating new medications we all need to buy. | |
| Besides being a multi-billion dollar boom for the pharmaceutical industry, is there something more behind the contention that everything now is a medical condition or a mental disorder that now requires pharmaceutical treatment? | |
| In Obama's 23 executive orders on gun control, mental health is a prime focus and seemingly a context for disarming the American people. | |
| The CDC has been directed to research causes of gun violence, undoubtedly addressing mental health while forgetting to look into the pharmaceuticals that have been shown to cause violence in patients and have been present in the majority of mass shootings in this country. | |
| And under Obamacare, doctors can even become spies for the cause, with the ability to ask patients about whether or not they have guns in their homes. | |
| So before asking your doctor today if a new drug is right for you, Perhaps you should ask yourself how important your Second Amendment rights and your health are. | |
| And for more news updates, be sure to go to InfoWars.com and sign up for our free podcast on the right side of our homepage. | |
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| Welcome back. | |
| We are now joined by Mayor Ava Galambos. | |
| She's the mayor of Sandy Springs, Georgia. | |
| It's a suburb of Atlanta. | |
| And Mayor Galambos' town is very, very interesting. | |
| It's privatized most of its services. | |
| I hope that legislators in Detroit and San Bernardino, California watch this interview. | |
| Mayor Galambos, thank you so much for joining us on InfoWars Nightly News. | |
| My pleasure to be here. | |
| Now Mayor, tell us a little bit about Sandy Springs, Georgia and how your town decided to privatize most of its services. | |
| Sandy Springs, Incorporated, in December 2005, we're a city of about 95,000 people directly north of the Atlanta city limits. | |
| When we became incorporated, we made the decision that we would outsource all of our services except for police and fire. | |
| And we have followed that model and we're very satisfied with it and we think that we are more efficient than other cities around us. | |
| We have fewer employees and we provide excellent services. | |
| Now, as a result of your actions, how is your town doing financially? | |
| We are charging exactly the same property tax rate that was charged before we became a city. | |
| In other words, there's not been a tax increase. | |
| And yet we've been able to pave something like 100 miles of road that had never been paved by the county before. | |
| We've been able to put in 15 miles of sidewalks. | |
| We've added new parks. | |
| Our citizens are ecstatic with the services they're getting. | |
| And we are getting ready to create a downtown park and a city hall. | |
| And we've done it all on the same tax rate we had before we became a city. | |
| Now, tell us a little bit about the services you decided to outsource. | |
| From what I understand, the police department, the police officers, they don't get pensions, is that right? | |
| Police and fire are not outsourced. | |
| They are city employees. | |
| They do have a pension program, but it is a pension program that is funded on the basis of defined contributions, not defined benefits. | |
| So yes, we have a pension program that the city contributes to. | |
| Policemen and the firemen contribute into the plan, and it's based on the contributions that eventually their pensions will depend on how the fund is grown. | |
| But we don't know and cannot guarantee what those pensions will be, which of course is the problem with the other cities as they've done in the past. | |
| They define the pensions without knowing whether the funds would ever reach those levels. | |
| So basically, the police officers and firefighters, they contribute to their pension, and you guys, kind of like a 401k? | |
| Exactly. | |
| Now you got it. | |
| Now, Mayor, what are your thoughts when you hear about cities like Detroit, Michigan, San Bernardino, California that are bankrupt? | |
| Well, my thought is that they should move to a gradual changeover to outsourcing. | |
| I do not recommend that a city that has a history of doing everything with employees overnight change to a new system. | |
| I think it needs to be done gradually. | |
| And I think it needs to be done one department at a time. | |
| The first department that I recommend to people who come to see me is Public Works. | |
| Outsource Public Works first, and then gradually go to your other departments like Community Development, like Parks and Recreation. | |
| We even outsource the operation of our Municipal Court. | |
| Now, critics of your initiative say that you're a wealthy community, but as a result of the fact that you're not contributing more in tax revenue, nearby poorer communities are being hurt by the fact that your wealthy town, what they deem to be wealthy, is not, you know, contributing as much as tax revenue. | |
| What is your take on that? | |
| Well it's an absolute falsehood that we're being accused of. | |
| We pay taxes to Fulton County and Fulton County is the provider here of income redistributive services. | |
| By that I mean the indigent hospital, by that I mean the welfare programs, by that I mean the jail. | |
| These are Services that the county provides, and we pay the same taxes to the county for those services as we did before we became a city, but of course we don't tend to use too many of those services. | |
| So we're paying our share, more than our share. | |
| Okay, now I understand there are other nearby communities that are following what Sandy Springs is doing. | |
| Can you tell us a little bit about that? | |
| Yes, we've started something after we became a city. | |
| Several new cities also sprung up in our Fulton County area and now it has moved to the adjacent community and two new cities have sprung up in the adjacent county. | |
| So it's a trend that is proliferating in the metro area of Atlanta. | |
| But they're privatizing a lot of their services as well? | |
| Every one of them has gone the same route that we've gone. | |
| Now are any of these communities running surpluses as a result of this initiative? | |
| We run a surplus, and we put the surplus into infrastructure. | |
| Every year, we're able to put something like 20% of our budget into improving sidewalks, building more parks, paving the roads, what we call infrastructure improvements. | |
| So on the same tax rate, we run a surplus, but we put it right back into the city. | |
| Now, what do the community members think about what you're doing? | |
| We had a survey done of our citizens, and it was a survey that was done nationally. | |
| Other cities had to answer the same questions so that we could compare across cities. | |
| And we came out very favorably, 80% approval on every service. | |
| The only thing they complained about, that we still have too much traffic. | |
| And somehow that's a quandary that all of us face, and it's just part of being a metro area. | |
| Now, have state officials taken note of what you've done and have they talked about possibly implementing similar services? | |
| Well, I think the state has endorsed what we've done by giving approval to these additional new cities. | |
| In Georgia, you cannot become a new city without authorization by the state. | |
| And so the state has seen the value of this and has allowed the proliferation of these additional new cities. | |
| But let me get this straight. | |
| Why would you need to incorporate a new city To privatize your services. | |
| Couldn't you just, you know, keep the same city name or same town name and just privatize your services? | |
| We were not under a city before. | |
| We were part of a county government and that county government had absolutely no intentions of privatizing. | |
| So when we became a city, our area was able to independently make those decisions. | |
| Now, one of the biggest bills that each community has is the school system. | |
| Have there been any initiatives to try to privatize the school system in Sandy Springs? | |
| The initiative to bring the private sector into the schools is more a move towards charter schools. | |
| And yes, we've had the formation of many, many charter schools, or even turning some of our public schools into public charter schools, which gives them more independence and gives them more of Community reaction is to impair control over what goes on in the schools. | |
| But they are not outsourcing their services. | |
| But who's spearheading this charter school movement? | |
| Is it your town or Fulton County? | |
| It's statewide. | |
| We had a referendum in Georgia in November of 2012, in which we had a vote on whether or not to allow the movement to proceed for more charter schools statewide. | |
| And the amendment passed with a good margin. | |
| Now, as a result of getting the private sector more involved in the school system, what results have occurred? | |
| We're still waiting for improvement in the public schools, but I think that the competition of these charter schools is going to make the public schools shape up. | |
| Because they're going to lose their students to the charter schools if they don't produce better results. | |
| Yeah, the results that the public school system are receiving are absolutely dismal. | |
| About 60% of our children nationwide can't read or do math proficiently. | |
| Our total county system has just been changed into a charter system. | |
| That doesn't mean that it's a private system. | |
| It's still a public system, but it has more freedom to decide. | |
| What kind of rules to put in place? | |
| And we see some new, very exciting initiatives in our county charter system, which will give more power to parents and reduce some of the bureaucratic rules in the schools. | |
| Absolutely. | |
| That's very commendable. | |
| Now, do you see this? | |
| There's a town in California called Maywood, California. | |
| I don't know if you've heard about them. | |
| They're doing something very similar to what Sandy Springs has done. | |
| Do you think this will spread throughout the country? | |
| Well, we're getting more and more inquiries from people across the country, but what's interesting is we're getting more and more inquiries from around the world. | |
| Japan has been visiting with us several times. | |
| There's tremendous interest in Japan about instituting our model there. | |
| This week we'll be talking to Norway. | |
| So, yes, there's an interest, I think, across the world of trying new directions for local government. | |
| We were on Chinese television in the Hall of the Great People last month discussing our program because China was interested in how we run local government. | |
| Absolutely amazing. | |
| Now, Mayor, we've got 30 seconds left. | |
| Is there any last thing you'd like to tell the public? | |
| Well, I would like to tell the public that get your local officials to consider, in your cities, privatizing one department at a time. | |
| Give it a try, one department at a time, and see if it works for you. | |
| And then, go on to the rest of the city. | |
| Well, Mayor, thank you so much for your time. | |
| Again, it's absolutely amazing what you're doing in Sandy Springs, Georgia. | |
| We wish you the best, and your town is an absolute inspiration. | |
| Come to see us! | |
| Absolutely. | |
| I have family in Augusta, so maybe I will. | |
| Southern Hospitality. | |
| God bless. | |
| Well, there you go. | |
| Mayor Galambos, Sandy Springs, Georgia. | |
| A truly amazing story. | |
| You see, when you've got less government involved, cities, suburbs absolutely thrive. | |
| Now, thank you. | |
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