W.O.A.S
What Others Are Saying:
(May make some feel Woe.)
The people of Earth are talking and below you will read and hear some major themes that identify institutional crimes, abuse of authority and some solutions as the awareness that these are global issues that harms the global community.
Aristotle on Usury in 350 B.C. wrote:
The most hated sort of money-making, and with the greatest reason, is usury, which makes a gain out of money itself and not from the natural use of it-for money was intended merely for exchange, not for increase at interest. And this term interest, which implies the birth of money from money, is applied to the breeding of money, because the offspring resembles the parent. Wherefore of all modes of money-making, this is the most unnatural. — The Church and Usury, by Rev. P. Cleary
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Born John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
10 January 1834
Naples, Two Sicilies
Died 19 June 1902 (aged 68)
Tegernsee, Bavaria
German Empire
“The issue which has swept down the centuries and which will have to be fought sooner or later is The People vs. The Banks.” – Lord Acton, Historian, 1834 – 1902
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“The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all.” – Gilbert Keith Chesterton, 1908
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“The proliferation of bureaucrats and its invariable accompaniment, much heavier tax levies on the productive part of the population, are the recognizable signs, not of a great, but of a decaying society. Historians know that both phenomena were especially marked in the declining eras of the Roman Empire in the West and of its successor state, the Eastern or Byzantine Empire.” ~ William Henry Chamberlin
READ MORE: http://strike-the-root.com/
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Political philosopher Montesquieu (1689 – 1755) once said:
“There is no greater tyranny than that which is perpetrated under the shield of law and in the name of justice.”
Why DC Lobbyists are Vanishing Interview with Lee Fang
Published on Feb 24, 2014
Journalist and The Nation contributor, Lee Fang, discussing his investigation into Washington’s ‘Shadow Lobbying Complex’ and the evidence proving that lobbying isn’t decreasing at all, and instead it’s simply going underground.
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Loren Howe: Global Financial Slavery
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More Frequently Unanswered Questions (F.U.Q.s)
BANCORRUPTCY = Corrupt Bank
a Corruptocracy, a corrupt global financial system
Do banks Lend Money The Don’t Have?
“Until recently the media has been siding with the crimes of the banksters, ignorantly assuming that they must be telling the truth, since they are large corporations with big fancy buildings and the CEOs wear fancy expensive suits – they couldn’t possibly be criminals? Or it could be that the media simply do not want to rock the boat of their potential income.” ~ http://www.ubuntuparty.org.za/2013/06/uk-minister-exposes-banking-fraud.html
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“There really are no markets any more, there are only central bankers’ interventions. … It’s a Cosmic Fraud. … A profound offense against humanity … It’s so important… really the secret knowledge of the universe”
Recorded on Jan 20, 2013
Chris Powell of GATA sits down with Bridgitte Anderson during the Cambridge House Vancouver Resource Investment Conference to chat about the Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee’s efforts to flush out the truth behind the gold price.
HOW Do You Think The Politicians See You?
HOW They REALLY See You:
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The Mobsters of Wall Street
by Jim Hightower 12 Feb 2014
Assume that you ran a business that was found guilty of bribery, forgery, perjury, defrauding homeowners, fleecing investors, swindling consumers, cheating credit card holders, violating U.S. trade laws and bilking American soldiers. Can you even imagine the kind of punishment you’d get?
How about zero? Nada. Nothing. Zilch.
No jail time. Not even a fine.
Plus, you still get to stay on as boss, you get to keep all the loot you gained from the crime spree, and you even get an $8.5 million pay raise!
Of course, you and I would never get such outrageous, absurd, kid-glove pampering by legal authorities. But, then, we’re not the capo of JPMorgan Chase, America’s biggest bank and a crime syndicate that apparently is too big to jail.
Jamie Dimon is the slick, vainglorious, silver-haired boss of the JPMorgan house of banksters. This CEO has fostered a culture of thievery during his years as a top executive at JPMorgan, leading to a shameful litany of crime. Yet, federal prosecutors have bowed to the politically connected Wall Streeter, refusing to ruffle his feathers with even a single criminal charge.
Meanwhile, one of the scams that Dimon directly supervised produced a $6 billion loss for shareholders in 2012. And his reign of mismanagement and illegalities cost the bank’s shareholders another $20 billion in federal fines last year, resulting in a 16 percent drop in profits. You might think the bank’s board of directors would at least slap Jamie’s wrist for the loss of those billions of dollars, but no — in January, they rewarded him, raising his pay by some 70 percent to a sweet $20 million!
The New York Times noted that, “To ordinary Americans,” such a reward for poor performance “may seem curious.” Curious? Uh-uh.
Try incomprehensible, insane and immoral. Wall Street’s haughty elites continue to demonstrate that they’re common mobsters — only not so ethical.
That’s the funny thing about Wall Street mobsters (or as I like to call them: Banksters) is that they make a killing by defrauding millions of homeowners, customers, investors and taxpayers — then, when caught, they wonder why we don’t love them.
That’s “funny” as in “bizarre,” not as in “ha-ha.”
You would think that after racking up a record level of regulatory fines for the recidivist criminal operation overseen by the boss, a little self-reproachment might have done Dimon some good. But he chose a funny way (again meaning bizarre) to express remorse: He’s been running a feel-sorry-for-me campaign, claiming that he’s the victim of this sordid story!
Never mind his long rap sheet of malfeasance and incompetence, which cost so many so much, Jamie wails that everything from Wall Street’s bailout to the pay of top bank executives have made people envious of bankers’ success. Thus, he moans, an anti-Wall Street sentiment has spread through the public, prompting politicians and regulators to pander to this populist anger by persecuting enterprising bankers like him. He called the whole thing “unfair.”
Good grief. This guy builds bank profits through rip-offs, piles billions of dollars in fines on the backs of shareholders, pockets $20 million in personal pay for one year’s work — and he wants us to weep for him? Being a Wall Street boss, you see, means never having to say you’re sorry, for it’s always someone else’s fault.
Only 25 years ago, more than a thousand bankers were prosecuted for this sort of malfeasance during the savings & loan scandal. Let’s return to the ethical accountability of those days. Or maybe We the People should send our own message to today’s banksters by rolling a guillotine down the center of Wall Street.
Via: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2014/02/12
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Veterans Arrested at Vietnam Memorial
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Financial journalist Lars Schall (L.S.) talked with Jesse, the host of the popular financial web site Jesse’s Café Américain (Jesse)
Jesse: …I write about gold and silver now because they are at the heart of what is happening. And there is not as much about stocks and bonds, because I have stopped trading actively in such a broad range of things.
I am fascinated by the sea change in the world monetary system, which has been colloquially called ‘the currency wars.’
L.S.: Will those ‘currency wars’ intensify going forward according to your analysis, and if so, how do you think they will play out?
Jesse: Yes they will intensify and we are seeing that already. A fiat currency is an exercise in both confidence and power. As confidence weakens, the use of power must intensify to maintain it.
One of the things that people tend to forget is that when one adopts a common currency, they surrender a portion of their economic autonomy. We are seeing this play out in the European Union as monetary theory would predict.
In adopting a common currency, the euro, the entire region thereby agreed to let a central group set their monetary policy for all, which includes the ability to tighten and loosen supply in response to prevailing economic conditions. But whose conditions, when they vary over a broader area?
When a country adopts another currency, they surrender a portion of their own fiscal authority, and thereby their political autonomy.
If you do not believe this, just look at what is happening in Greece and Cyprus.
READ FULL REPORT: larsschall.com
http://www.larsschall.com/2013/09/27/we-are-seeing-an-all-out-defense-of-the-status-quo/
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July 2013 Benjamin Fulford Message: “Who’s Who”
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OBEYING Criminal Orders is a CRIME
OBEYING Criminal Orders makes accessories to crimes:
CRIMES have – principals, accomplices, accessories, aiders, abettors, and conspirators
and “Just Following Orders” for a paycheck is not an excuse.
The paycheck merely becomes a bribe…
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(Truthstream Media.com) Television is mass mind control, and the Internet and cell phones are using the technology, too.
Former managing director and member of the board of directors of Wall Street investment firm Dillon, Read & Co, as well as former Assistant Secretary of Housing and Federal Housing Commissioner in the Dept. of H.U.D. during the Bush 41 administration, Catherine Austin Fitts relays a chilling conversation she overheard circa 1984 while working on Wall Street, where executives discussed how subliminals and entrainment technology was about to be deployed through the television waves.
Fitts, who now publishes Solari.com and gives personal investment advice, said she was so frightened by hearing a conversation she was never authorized to hear, that she threw out her TV for good.
But Catherine Austin Fitts further warns that the television is not the only media devices that uses these techniques — and by now, surely more advanced techniques — to persuade consumers, quell opposition and encourage the status quo. Other media devices are also “compromised,” Fitts says, so users should be aware of its affects on cell phones, radios, the Internet. Financial firms, for instance, often use these technologies to aid in persuasion and sales marketing to help put the customer in a particular mode.
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How Secret Societies Direct World Politics
Published on Jan 8, 2013
CONTINUE WATCHING: http://ur1.ca/cgb8z
TRANSCRIPT AND SOURCES: http://www.corbettreport.com/?p=6577
The idea that global politics is directed by a small group of well-connected elite has long been decried as “conspiracy theory” by the establishment and their media outlets. As listeners to the most recent Corbett Report podcast will know, however, this idea is now openly discussed and acknowledged by those very figures that once sought to deride it.
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http://www.naipaulseegolam2012.us/
Published on Feb 12, 2013
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Who Represents You?
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The CAFR Swindle – The Biggest Game In Town
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STOP feeding the beast and your personal actions…
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Wednesday, November 13, 2013
Andrew Huszar: Confessions of a Quantitative Easer
We went on a bond-buying spree that was supposed to help Main Street. Instead, it was a feast for Wall Street.
For the Wall Street Journal, Andrew Huszar begins:
I can only say: I’m sorry, America. As a former Federal Reserve official, I was responsible for executing the centerpiece program of the Fed’s first plunge into the bond-buying experiment known as quantitative easing. The central bank continues to spin QE as a tool for helping Main Street. But I’ve come to recognize the program for what it really is: the greatest backdoor Wall Street bailout of all time.
Five years ago this month, on Black Friday, the Fed launched an unprecedented shopping spree. By that point in the financial crisis, Congress had already passed legislation, the Troubled Asset Relief Program, to halt the U.S. banking system’s free fall. Beyond Wall Street, though, the economic pain was still soaring. In the last three months of 2008 alone, almost two million Americans would lose their jobs.
The Fed said it wanted to help—through a new program of massive bond purchases. There were secondary goals, but Chairman Ben Bernanke made clear that the Fed’s central motivation was to “affect credit conditions for households and businesses”: to drive down the cost of credit so that more Americans hurting from the tanking economy could use it to weather the downturn. For this reason, he originally called the initiative “credit easing.”
My part of the story began a few months later. Having been at the Fed for seven years, until early 2008, I was working on Wall Street in spring 2009 when I got an unexpected phone call. Would I come back to work on the Fed’s trading floor? The job: managing what was at the heart of QE’s bond-buying spree—a wild attempt to buy $1.25 trillion in mortgage bonds in 12 months. Incredibly, the Fed was calling to ask if I wanted to quarterback the largest economic stimulus in U.S. history. …
For the full story: Wall Street Journal Online
Posted by GGR staff for Mr. Arensberg.
Thanks to Chris Powell for the link.
– See more at: http://www.gotgoldreport.com/2013/11/andrew-huszar-confessions-of-a-quantitative-easer.html#sthash.BpFTU6YB.dpuf
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What you’re really agreeing to when you click “I accept”.
Slated for release Summer 2013. Follow us at twitter.com/TACMayApply and visit tacma.net for more information.
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Former US Treasury Official – Arrest The Gold Manipulators
Dr. Roberts also added: “Paper claims have exceeded the actual amount of gold ever since they took the limits off of speculators’ positions. And this is what we’ve been seeing, isn’t it?
We’ve been seeing the demand for physical gold rising, and it’s being exported (from the West) to Asia very rapidly, and yet the paper price, the derivative price, has been driven down (laughter ensues). It’s nonsensical. Why this doesn’t result in an enormous investigation with arrests and indictments, it just shows that the system is corrupt. Wherever you look it’s corrupt.
READ FULL STORY:
http://kingworldnews.com/kingworldnews/KWN_DailyWeb/Entries/2013/8/9_Former_US_Treasury_Official_-_Arrest_The_Gold_Manipulators.html
Remember the Golden Rule: He who has the gold makes the rules! Got physical gold yet?
- Proof Bullion Banks Are Buying All The Physical Gold They Can!
by www.kingworldnews.com
On the heels of fierce trading in the gold and silver markets, today the man who runs the largest gold and silver dealer in the United States sent King World News some critical information regarding what is going on behind the scenes in the war in the gold and silver markets. 41-year market veteran Bill Haynes also sent KWN private communications from a major refiner detailing where all of the gold being drained out of the COMEX and ETFs is actually being sent. Below is the exclusive KWN piece from the 41-year veteran of the gold and silver markets.
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August 9 (King World News) – By Bill Haynes President of CMI Gold & Silver, Inc.
Proof That The Bullion Banks Are Buying All Of The Physical Gold They Can Get Their Hands On
KingWorldNews.com’s August 7th interview with Stephen Leeb discussed the strong demand for gold in China, which ran contrary to what the mainstream had been reporting. Leeb said that this year China is set to import some 1,200 tons of physical gold. But China is not the only Asian country where the demand for gold is strong….
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read more!
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US Constitution overtaken by military: Alfred Lambrement Webre
Jul 20, 2013
Press TV has conducted an interview with Alfred Lambrement Webre, international lawyer from Vancouver about the Bradley Manning trial in a US military court.
The following is an approximate transcript of the interview.
Press TV: Do you think this was an open and shut case in terms of the point of view of the judge that Manning was going to be guilty no matter what because the US is so after protecting its national security? And of course anybody who leaks any files is going to be found guilty because, well, they don’t want to send out the wrong message?
Webre: This is a military court martial and you have Colonel Lind as the judge. And the ruling of the judge defies belief.
What the judge said is that because the documents that Bradley Manning leaked went out over the internet they could possibly have been seen by al-Qaeda, therefore they could have possibly aided and abetted the enemy – which is a chain of information that defies belief. There was no evidence introduced at the trial that any of the documents aided and abetted the enemy.
However, this has two grave implications: number one, it is clear that from the military point of view the prosecutors who represent the defense establishment, they consider Wikileaksto be in the same shoes as any of the media such as The New York Times or any of the mainstream media such that if any source gives information to The New York Times, which it then prints or prints on its website, then a military prosecutor could argue, oh, you’ve just aided and abetted the enemy with that information.
So it is entirely self-serving and it’s a total constitutional violation of the protection of the media under the First Amendment to the US Constitution.
Secondly, this shows how the United States is becoming increasingly a police state because in this case what you have is an execution of the US Department of Defense, which has engaged in wars of aggression such as the war in Afghanistan and the war in Iraq that have been found to be illegal wars of aggression – war crimes.
Each of which were started by a false flag, mainly September 11, 2001 in the case of the war in Afghanistan; and in the case of Iraq the false statements of the US Ambassador to the United Nations in the United Nations that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, which was another false flag.
So those wars of aggression were started and here you have individuals acting under the First Amendment, acting under the UN Declaration of Human Rights – such as Bradley Manning, such as Edward Snowden who are trying to protect humanity from a global military dictatorship and that military dictatorship is now, through the rulings of the Bradley Manning trial, trying to protect itself. So, this is entirely transparent and it’s transparent to anybody who looks at it.
The US is now a lawless and rogue state where the military has overtaken the Constitution and it is entirely transparent in my judgment both as an attorney and as a war crimes judge.
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June 13, 2013 King World News Blog
http://kingworldnews.com/kingworldnews/KWN_DailyWeb/Entries/2013/6/13_Coming_Chaos%2C_Phony_Global_Markets_%26_The_War_On_Gold.htmlKeith Barron, who consults with major companies around the world and is responsible for one of the largest gold discoveries in the last quarter century:
“This system is not a free, open and transparent system. The current system is built on fraud. Dollars are being created to buy Treasuries, so it’s a fixed game. We’ve never seen this sort of coordinated global market manipulation in world history.This is really an unprecedented situation and it will certainly end in total disaster. Reckless generation of money has always led to great inflation. It just shows the depth of the seriousness of the situation right now that a great inflation has not yet taken hold.
But the bottom line is things are fragile not just in the US, but also in Europe and around the world. In this type of environment I can pretty much guarantee you that some kind of black swan event is coming. When the next black swan appears we will see even greater chaos and devastation as people around the world come to grips with the fact that they have been spoon-fed Joseph Goebbels (Nazi style) propaganda and lied to by their leaders.”
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12 June 2013
Some Thoughts on the Forex Rigging Scandal and Market Manipulation
http://jessescrossroadscafe.blogspot.com/2013/06/some-thoughts-on-forex-rigging-scandal.html
The foreign exchange rigging scandal that is coming to light is very interesting, even in this time of financial scandals and corruption.
Here is the original Bloomberg story on it and you may wish to read it in its entirety.
The corruption in the enormous global foreign exchange market is coming to light not because of any surveillance by regulatory bodies. The multi-trillion dollar market is a genuine ‘spot market’ and is not considered a financial assets market, and is therefore lightly regulated.
As you may recall, a certain liberal economic columnist asserted some years ago that it was not possible to rig the price of commodities using the futures market because the price is set in the spot market. Well, he was wrong about that, since in those cases the spot price is a derivative of the front month in the futures.
But with forex we do have an actual spot market, and apparently that principle does not hold even where there is an actual spot market, and of a size that most would assert that price fixing was not possible. They forget that prices are set at the margins.
Efficient market theory dies hard because it is such a nice neat model and so attractive to the abstract mind. That it is a mere fantasy is another matter.
The story came to light because very large customers went to the regulatory body in London and complained that they were tired of being cheated. The authority was forced to respond.
There is quite a bit of talk that nothing that was done was ‘illegal.’
While that may be technically true from a regulatory perspective, there is sufficient evidence that traders from different companies were acting in concert to fix global benchmarks knowing with the intent to steal from their customers. If that is not the very definition of a criminal conspiracy I am not sure what would be.
And finally, despite its enormous size, the foreign exchange market was able to be rigged against customers because of the concentration of market power in a few hands, and the manner in which trades are placed, taken and executed.
From the Bloomberg story:
“While hundreds of firms participate in the foreign-exchange market, four banks dominate, with a combined share of more than 50 percent, according to a May survey by Euromoney Institutional Investor Plc.
Deutsche Bank AG (DBK), based in Frankfurt, is No. 1, with a 15.2 percent share, followed by New York-based Citigroup Inc. (C) with 14.9 percent, London-based Barclays Plc (BARC) with 10.2 percent and Zurich-based UBS AG (UBSN) with 10.1 percent.”
We do not know what entities have been named in these revelations. These are merely the largest. We may never know depending on how the London regulators choose to dispose of it.
But it does shoot a gaping hole in the efficient markets theory. Here is a huge, widely dispersed market with literally millions of transactions affecting almost every economically involved individual in the world, and it became a chronically rigged market in a corruption scheme that went on for many, many years.
Put that in your free market neo-liberal pipe and smoke it.
I see where Singapore’s regulator was threatening to reprimand the guilty parties. I submit that given the wide range of abuses and scandals that have been revealed and which are still ongoing, that there needs to be some serious action and soul-searching done about how markets are set up, what secrecies are permitted to the major players, the asymmetric distribution of information, and the invariable and pernicious, official sanctioned secrecy that marks every single financial fraud which we have seen over the past twenty years.
Secrecy is a privilege that has a limited place in markets that are honest, efficient and effective.
And I am sorry but if you still choose to believe that the markets, even very large and significant ones, are not being routinely rigged to the disadvantage of the public, then you are probably a fool, or a tool, or an obtuse, purblind ideologue.
And that goes in spades for the precious metals and equity markets that are saturated with outsized position shoving, event driven price rigging, collusion, and high frequency front running as a normal order of business.
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“The US Government Secretly, Illegally, and Unconstitutionally Spies on its Citizens”: What Is The Government’s Agenda?
“The war on Terror” is a Front for an Undeclared Agenda
It has been public information for a decade that the US government secretly, illegally, and unconstitutionally spies on its citizens. Congress and the federal courts have done nothing about this extreme violation of the US Constitution and statutory law, and the insouciant US public seems unperturbed.
In 2004 a whistleblower informed the New York Times that the National Security Agency (NSA) was violating the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) by ignoring the FISA court and spying on Americans without obtaining the necessary warrants. The corrupt New York Times put the interests of the US government ahead of those of the American public and sat on the story for one year until George W. Bush was safely reelected.
By the time the New York Times published the story of the illegal spying one year later, the law-breaking government had had time to mitigate the offense with ex post facto law or executive orders and explain away its law-breaking as being in the country’s interest.
Last year William Binney, who was in charge of NSA’s global digital data gathering program revealed that NSA had everyone in the US under total surveillance. Every email, Internet site visited and phone call is captured and stored. In 2012 Binney received the Callaway Award for Civic Courage, an annual award given to those who champion constitutional rights at risk to their professional and personal lives.
There have been a number of whistleblowers. For example, in 2006 Mark Klein revealed that AT&T had a secret room in its San Francisco office that NSA used to collect Internet and phone-call data from US citizens who were under no suspicion.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/homefront/interviews/klein.html
The presstitute media handled these stories in ways that protected the government’s lawlessness from scrutiny and public outrage. The usual spin was that the public needs to be safe from terrorists, and safety is what the government is providing.
The latest whistle blower, Edward Snowden, has sought refuge in Hong Kong, which has a better record of protecting free speech than the US government. Snowden did not trust any US news source and took the story to the British newspaper, the Guardian.
There is no longer any doubt whatsoever that the US government is lawless, that it regards the US Constitution as a scrap of paper, that it does not believe Americans have any rights other than those that the government tolerates at any point in time, and that the government has no fear of being held accountable by the weak and castrated US Congress, the sycophantic federal courts, a controlled media, and an insouciant public.
Binney and Snowden have described in precisely accurate detail the extreme danger from the government’s surveillance of the population. No one is exempt, not the Director of the CIA, US Army Generals, Senators and Representatives, not even the president himself.
Anyone with access to a computer and the Internet can find interviews with Binney and Snowden and become acquainted with why you do have very much indeed to fear whether or not you are doing anything wrong.
James Clapper, the lying Director of National Intelligence, who would have been perfectly at home in the Hitler or Stalin regimes, condemned Snowden as “reprehensible” for insisting that in a democracy the public should know what the government is doing. Clapper insisted that secretly spying on every ordinary American was essential in order to “protect our nation.” http://news.antiwar.com/2013/06/07/us-spy-chief-slams-reprehensible-leak-of-nsa-surveillance-scheme/
Clapper is “offended” that Americans now know that the NSA is spying on the ordinary life of every American. Clapper wants Snowden to be severely punished for his “reckless disclosure” that the US government is totally violating the privacy that the US Constitution guarantees to every US citizen.
President Obama, allegedly educated in constitutional law, justified Clapper’s program of spying on every communication of every American citizen as a necessary violation of Americans’ civil liberties that “protects your civil liberties.” Contrast the lack of veracity of the President of the United States with the truthfulness of Snowden, who correctly stated that the NSA spying is an “existential threat to democracy.”
The presstitutes are busy at work defending Clapper and Obama. On June 9, CNN rolled out former CIA case officer Bob Baer to implant into the public’s mind that Snowden, far from trying to preserve US civil liberties, might be a Chinese spy and that Snowden’s revelations might be indicative of a Chinese espionage case.
Demonization is the US government’s technique for discrediting Bradley Manning for complying with the US Military Code and reporting war crimes and for persecuting Julian Assage of Wikileaks for reporting leaked information about the US government’s crimes. Demonization and false charges will be the government’s weapon against Snowden.
If Washington and its presstitutes can convince Americans that courageous people, who are trying to inform Americans that their historic rights are disappearing into a police state, are espionage agents of foreign powers, America can continue to be subverted by its own government.
This brings us to the crux of the matter. What is the purpose of the spying program?
Even if an American believes the official stories of 9/11 and the Boston Marathon Bombing, these are the only two terrorist acts in the US that resulted in the loss of human life in 12 years. Far more people are killed in traffic accidents and from bad diets. Why should the Constitution and civil liberty be deep-sixed because of two alleged terrorist acts in 12 years?
What is astounding is the absence of terrorist attacks. Washington is in the second decade of invading and destroying Muslim governments and countries. Civilian casualties in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya are extremely high, and in those countries that Washington has not yet invaded, such as Pakistan, Yemen, and Syria, civilians are being murdered by Washington’s drones and proxies on the ground.
It is extraordinary that Washington’s brutal 12 year assault on Muslim lives in six countries has not resulted in at least one dozen real, not fake FBI orchestrated, terrorist attacks in the US every day.
How can something as rare as terrorism justify the destruction of the US Constitution and US civil liberty? How safe is any American when their government regards every citizen as a potential suspect who has no rights?
Why is there no discussion of this in American public life? Watch the presstitutes turn Snowden’s revelations into an account of his disaffection and motives and away from the existential threat to democracy and civil liberty.
What is the government’s real agenda? Clearly, “the war on terror” is a front for an undeclared agenda. In “freedom and democracy” America, citizens have no idea what their government’s motives are in fomenting endless wars and a gestapo police state. The only information Americans have comes from whistleblowers, who Obama ruthlessly prosecutes. The presstitutes quickly discredit the information and demonize the whistleblowers.
Germans in the Third Reich and Soviet citizens in the Stalin era had a better idea of their government’s agendas than do “freedom and democracy” Americans today. The American people are the most uninformed people in modern history.
In America there is no democracy that holds government accountable. There is only a brainwashed people who are chaff in the wind.
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Bilderberg 2013 and the involvement of Peter Thiel (founder of PayPal). Has the Liberty Movement been compromised?
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Published on Apr 18, 2013
This is Professor Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University speaking at the “Fixing the Banking System for Good” conference on April 17, 2013. This audio is absolutely EXPLOSIVE!
You can now Pre-Order the new documentary, “Jekyll Island” at:
http://www.jekyllisland-themovie.com
Please circulate this around to your friends. Let’s see if we can get a big audience going all around the world. This is what you can do to help out.
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Golden Secrets by Bix Weir
Published on Apr 18, 2012
The mainstream gold world wants you to believe that in the entire history of gold mining there has been just over 160,000 tons of gold mined from the ground. On top of that, with all our latest seismic and exploration technology, we have only found about 100,000 tons of underground gold reserves that could be economically mined in the future. That is what “they” want you to believe but…THIS IS A BOLD FACED LIE!
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Alternative media and citizen journalism is important and needed, here is one reason why.
In the second half, Max talks to Mitch Feierstein, author of Planet Ponzi, about VIX volumes surging as old dummies are replaced with new dummies in the global central bank operated ponzi scheme.
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Wishing for a “ECONOMIC RECOVERY” is like a Slave praying for his harsh master to return…
We the people of Earth need REAL Change, we can build something better after the fall of this system.
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GERALD CELENTE – Build up to WW3 & Global Awakening to Happen in 2013 – Trends Research
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Excellent Financial Analysis for reasons to withdraw all assets out of the banks.
The Backyards and mattresses are looking better each day…
Reggie Middleton uncovers extremely unnerving omissions, misrepresentations and what appears to many lay persons as outright fraud in the Irish banking (and global) system along with an in depth interview with Max Keiser in London.
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The SLOG blogged May 2, 2013
http://hat4uk.wordpress.com/2013/05/02/smoke-signals-28/
“The Final Gold Rush is under way. I’ve been picking up signals all today and most of yesterday in relation to the stampede to get gold out of the clutches of those whom, owners fear, will steal, sell, or embezzle it at the earliest opportunity and first excuse – whichever arrives first.
Gerhard Schubert, head of Precious Metals at Emirates NBD, wrote earlier this week, ‘I have not seen in my 35 years in precious metals such a determined and strong global physical demand for gold. The UAE physical markets have been cleared out by buyers from all walks of life. The premiums, which have been asked for and which have been paid have been the cornerstone of the gold price recovery.‘ The Comex has had about 30% of its gold bars literally drained from the customer accounts of the Comex bank custodian vaults, and the U.S. mint is running way behind on demand for silver eagles and some weights of gold eagles. And there is a major kick bollock and scramble under way among wealthy European families/entities to get their 400 oz bars out of the big bank vaults.
Germany, meanwhile, is still asking (in vain) for the 1800 tonnes of shiny stuff being held by the US. Thus far, the Yanks have agreed to ship 300 tonnes back over seven years. Informed sources suggest that Berlin is asking “How about 1800 tonnes by August?” This is all going to get embarrassing very soon, but whatever happens one thing is clear: the trust in any bank anywhere is evaporating fast. As I posted two weeks ago, we have now entered the exponential acceleration stage of disaster. I hope to post about more overt signs of propellers rising from the waves either later this morning or in the afternoon. Stay tuned.”
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Silver – Back the truck up!
April 13, 2013 …silver is having a fire sale.
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AWARENESS, Signs, Signals, Trends…
By Actions and not Words you shall know.
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http://www.examiner.com/article/chinese-national-sues-federal-reserve-for-devaluing-the-dollar
Published April 25, 2013
Chinese national sues Federal Reserve for devaluing the dollar
On April 23, a woman from the Yunnan province in China filed a lawsuit in U.S. Federal court against the Federal Reserve over their abuse in monopoly power of a currency, and the devaluing the U.S. dollar through substantial money printing. In the first suit of its kind to be brought against a private central bank that controls the value of a global reserve currency, a private individual from a foreign country is alleging that due to the actions implemented by the Federal Reserve since 2006, the value of her money, which is denominated in dollars, has lost over 30% of its value in just seven years.
A woman in Kunming, Yunnan province, is trying to sue the United States central bank after discovering that the real value of the US$250 she put in an account in 2006 had shrunk by 30 per cent.
She claims it was a result of the Federal Reserve issuing too much money.
Her attorney, her son Li Zhen , called the lawsuit “litigation for the public good” which aimed to stop the Fed from continuing its quantitive easing policy and promote people’s awareness of their rights.
He filed the lawsuit alleging “the abuse of monopoly in issuing currency” last month at the Kunming Intermediate People’s Court on behalf of his mother, Liu Hua , but the court has yet to decide whether to officially place the case on file. – South China Morning Post
Since the Federal Reserve’s inception in 1913, Congress has allocated the right over control of the U.S.’s currency to this private institution, and as part of the agreement, trusts the central bank to ensure that the value of the currency is successfully maintained. However, since 1913, Federal Reserve policies have actually caused the dollar to devalue by over 96%, and a dollar today would be worth only $.04 in 1913.
The world relies upon the trust, confidence, and stability of the Federal Reserve to maintain the dollar as a viable reserve currency in international transactions. However, as the money supply has increased over 3.5 times since 2008 alone, the justification that the central bank has been the primary cause for dollar devaluation, and loss of individual wealth is quite viable, and is now the root cause for legal action by a holder of U.S. dollars.
China is one of the largest holders of U.S. dollar reserves, and as such, relies upon their strength and value to keep their exports and economy growing. And for many individuals who hold dollar denominated currencies as a store of wealth and value in their banking institutions, lawsuits like this one from China may eventually lead to greater class action lawsuits against the Federal Reserves over their lack of fiduciary responsibility, or quite possibly, lead to the collapse of confidence in the dollar by the international community as trust in the currency continues to erode.
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Exercise your Freedom
Do I Have The Courage To Break Free? – 27 April 2013
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“The battlefield is the United States of America”
by Simon Black on April 24, 2013
http://www.sovereignman.com/expat/the-battlefield-is-the-united-states-of-america-11691/
April 24, 2013 George Town, Penang, Malaysia
When you’ve got a guy like Senator John McCain who says “The battlefield is the United States of America,” it tells you that almost nothing is safe in the Land of the Free.
Whatever remains of civil liberties is going to feel the full brunt of the state’s boot heel.
They’re already regulating some of the most fundamental aspects of life, from how we are allowed to educate our children to what we can / cannot put in our bodies to the very nature of money.
People are forced to hold their savings in insolvent banks backed by insolvent insurance funds backed by insolvent governments. And those insolvent governments have demonstrated that they are perfectly willing to directly confiscate accounts.
Retirement funds have proven to be an easy, tempting target. A number of countries including Argentina, Ireland, and Hungary have appropriated private pensions. Even the US government temporarily dipped into federal employee pensions.
Western governments are making every possible effort to take over the Internet. Despite every previous attempt (SOPA, PIPA, etc.) failing due to public outcry, they keep trying and trying (ACTA, CISPA, etc.).
They’re raising taxes, creating new ones (including Maryland’s new ‘rain tax’), imposing capital controls, racking up debt, and rapidly devaluing their currencies.
It all reeks of desperation… and it’s all so obvious. At least, for anyone paying attention.
Unfortunately it’s easy to lose sight of the truth. After all, how can there be any economic problems when the stock market is at an ‘all-time high’ and Nobel Prize winning pseudo-scientists tell us that debt levels don’t matter?
Truth is, these enormous challenges shouldn’t be ignored. The entire global financial system is sitting on a bed of dynamite. Central bankers are dousing the pile with gasoline while politicians are standing around smoking.
The potential for epic disaster cannot be understated.
This is not to say that the world is coming to an end. Far from it. History is quite generous with past example of once-great civilizations that collapsed under the weight of their own hubristic debt.
Things didn’t end. They changed. Simple. And that’s what’s happening now in a textbook fashion.
Governments in trouble almost ALWAYS resort to the same destructive tactics. When things are clearly on the decline, rather than INCREASING freedom and opportunity, they try to control EVERYTHING.
We’re already seeing the early stages of this with competitive devaluation, basic capital controls, and bank withdrawal limits.
These will soon give way to wider capital controls, increased border controls, wage and price controls, asset confiscation, and more.
It only delays the inevitable. The more they control, the more rapid the deterioration becomes. Again, this isn’t some sensationalist prediction; it is the very common historical trend.
The other thing that history shows us, however, is that there are always a handful of people who see the writing on the wall and take action. And that action has almost universally involved looking abroad and diversifying internationally.
This is a time-tested strategy that was once available only to the wealthy landed class. But with modern air transport, digital communication, and global competition, solutions are now available to just about anyone.
I’ll be honest with you– moving one’s assets, business, and even family overseas isn’t easy. These are complicated topics with numerous tax, financial, and professional implications. So go carefully and rationally.
But when structured properly, history shows that a well-informed offshore strategy can have a generational impact should chaos ensue.
And, should nothing ever go wrong in the world, you won’t be worse off for it.
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Tucson Martial Law Situation
Published on Apr 15, 2013
AgentX outlines the details for the declaring of a stealth martial law in Tucson Arizona under the guise of testing a noisy new Air Force jet.
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The Secret FDIC Rule That Puts Your Savings At Risk.
What happened in Cyprus isn’t a “one off” event.
The financial media and elite have been trying to convince the world that Cyprus was a unique situation… a “one time” deal… and that our money is safe in the banks.
This is untrue.
Spain, Canada, and New Zealand have already proposed similar measures through which individuals’ SAVINGS accounts would be used to prop up the banks during times of Crisis.
It’s called a “bail-in,” but really it’s “THEFT” plain and simple. The banks made the terrible mistakes that rendered them insolvent. They (the banks) should simply fail. But instead of failing, the regulators want to keep the banks in business… using YOUR money.
Why is this?
Two reasons:
1) The regulators don’t have the money to actually insure deposits that they claim.
2) Politicians realize that people are fed up with the public funding bank bailouts… so they’re targeting individual savers in the banks that are in trouble.
It’s a simple question of math regarding #1. Banking deposits are in the trillions of Dollars and most deposit insurance entities only have a few billion Dollars in funds. Obviously, if a large bank were to fail under these circumstances there wouldn’t be the funds to cover deposits…
Regarding #2, politicians have begun to realize that the public simply won’t stomach another Federal bailout of the banks. So instead of getting everyone and their children to chip in by using the public’s funds… they’re going after the deposits of a select few people who have their funds IN the troubled bank.
Their thinking is that if you can’t steal a little from everyone, you might as well try to steal a lot from a few people.
Could this happen in the US?
You better believe it. In fact, the FDIC has already put forth a proposal to do EXACTLY this in the event of a Crisis.
Just four months ago, the FDIC drafted a formal strategy in which it suggested that during the next Crisis, it can…
1) Decide WHAT banks are systemically important.
2) Take control of any “systemically important” bank that it deems at risk of default.
3) Once in control of the bank, YOUR savings deposits can be “written down” in value (meaning you LOSE money you thought was yours) as part of the bank bailout.
Less than 99% of Americans realize this is the case, but the legislation allowing this is already IN PLACE and the FDIC has already written out the rules for what will happen.
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Published on Apr 15, 2013
Today gold experienced it’s largest two day drop in 30 years crashing through its support at $1400 dollars an ounce, silver also dropped sharply, losing 6% in a single day and Bitcoin fell through the floor shedding 70% last Thursday, all the while the stock market is showing signs that it too is in a bubble and is is likely to face a serious correction in the coming months. What’s really going on here?
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Michael Snyder reported in the Activist Post:
http://www.activistpost.com/2013/03/cyprus-style-bank-account-confiscation.html
Cyprus-Style Bank Account Confiscation Is In The New 2013 Canadian Government Budget!
The politicians of the Western world are coming after your bank accounts. In fact, Cyprus-style bank account confiscation is actually in the new Canadian government budget. When I first heard about this I was quite skeptical, so I went and looked it up for myself. And guess what? It is right there in black and white on pages 154 and 155 of “Economic Action Plan 2013” which the Harper government has already submitted to the House of Commons.
Apparently the goal is to find a way to rescue “systemically important banks” without the use of taxpayer funds…
Canada’s large banks are a source of strength for the Canadian economy. Our large banks have become increasingly successful in international markets, creating jobs at home.
The Government also recognizes the need to manage the risks associated with systemically important banks — those banks whose distress or failure could cause a disruption to the financial system and, in turn, negative impacts on the economy. This requires strong prudential oversight and a robust set of options for resolving these institutions without the use of taxpayer funds, in the unlikely event that one becomes non-viable.
So if taxpayer funds will not be used to bail out the banks, how will it be done? Well, the Canadian government is actually proposing that a “bail-in” regime be implemented…
The Government proposes to implement a “bail-in” regime for systemically important banks.This regime will be designed to ensure that, in the unlikely event that a systemically important bank depletes its capital, the bank can be recapitalized and returned to viability through the very rapid conversion of certain bank liabilities into regulatory capital. This will reduce risks for taxpayers. The Government will consult stakeholders on how best to implement a bail-in regime in Canada. Implementation timelines will allow for a smooth transition for affected institutions, investors and other market participants.
So if the banks take extreme risks with their money and lose, “certain bank liabilities” (i.e. deposits) will rapidly be converted into “regulatory capital” and the banks will be saved.
In other words, the banks will just be allowed to grab money directly out of your bank accounts to recapitalize themselves.
That may sound completely and utterly insane to us, but this is how things will now be done all over the western world.
According to RT, the European Parliament will soon be voting on a new law which will make Cyprus-style bank account confiscation a permanent solution for when major banks fail throughout the EU…
A senior lawmaker told Reuters the Cyprus model may not be an isolated case, and is perhaps a future template in dealing with troubled European banks.
The new template is now likely to turn into a full-scale EU law, letting taxpayers off the hook in case a bail-out is needed, but imposing major losses on bigger savers on a permanent basis.
“You need to be able to do the bail-in as well with deposits,” said Gunnar Hokmark, member of European Parliament, who is leading negotiations with EU countries to finalize a law for winding up problem banks, Reuters reported.
“Deposits below 100,000 euros are protected … deposits above 100,000 euros are not protected and shall be treated as part of the capital that can be bailed in,” Hokmark told Reuters, adding that he was confident a majority of his peers in the parliament backed the idea.
The European Commission has written the draft of the law, which now awaits approval from eurozone member states and the parliament on whether and when it can be implemented. It’s been reported, the law is planned to take effect in the beginning of 2015.
Are you starting to understand?
The other day when I said that “The Global Elite Are Very Clearly Telling Us That They Plan To Raid Our Bank Accounts“, I was not exaggerating.
SEE FULL REPORT HERE:
http://www.activistpost.com/2013/03/cyprus-style-bank-account-confiscation.html
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“They (the Cypriot government officials) are being told all sorts of dire things will happen if they don’t vote for this. You may remember that the Secretary of the Treasury of the United States went to Congress and said, ‘If you don’t give us $750 billion to bailout the banks there will be Martial Law.’
Well, they are pulling all of that kind of stuff now in Cyprus. Whether or not they will succeed in buffaloing the Parliament, or whether the Parliament will stand with the people remains to be seen. Now if the Parliament stands with the people it will give more courage to the Parliaments in Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal, and elsewhere, where efforts will be made to force the public to pay for the mistakes of the banks.
If they don’t stand with the people, there will be more political and social unrest and more discrediting of governments. What’s happening is governments are revealing that, even if they are democratically elected governments, they do not represent the people. They only represent a very few, very powerful folks. This of course destroys any confidence in democracy. That’s really what we are seeing. That’s the biggest crisis.” – Former Assistant of the US Treasury, Dr. Paul Craig Roberts
Read Full Report Here:
http://kingworldnews.com/kingworldnews/KWN_DailyWeb/Entries/2013/3/22_Former_US_Treasury_Official_-_Threats,_Cyprus_%26_Massive_Crisis.html
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http://www.grahamhancock.com/forum/HancockG5-TED.php
Letter dated 15 March 2013 from Graham Hancock to TED
By Graham Hancock
“…By far the most usual way of handling phenomena so novel that they would make for a serious rearrangement of our preconceptions is to ignore them altogether, or to abuse those who bear witness for them.” – William James To all those who are interested in freedom of speech, a non-materialist approach to the mystery of consciousness, and the negative attitude of a powerful lobby of self-styled scientists towards visionary plants…
Please study the documents below which concern the removal from wide circulation of two TEDx presentations, one by myself one by Rupert Sheldrake, and the subsequent framing of these presentations in a negative and defamatory light by senior TED staff on TED’s own website. These actions by TED have stirred up an internet furore (see, for example, the — at time of writing — 700-plus comments on TED’s actions here: http://blog.ted.com/2013/03/14/open-for-discussion-graham-hancock-and-rupert-sheldrake/ ). TED continues to ignore this criticism and to behave as though it has done nothing wrong.
The two TEDx presentations that Ted removed from wide circulation were my “The War on Consciousness” which had received in excess of 132,000 views on the TEDx Youtube channel in the three weeks before TED deleted it, and Rupert Sheldrake’s “The Science Delusion”, which had received in excess of 35,000 views on the TEDx Youtube channel in the three weeks before TED deleted it. TED removed both talks from their Youtube channel on 14 March 2013 on the following grounds: “After due diligence, including a survey of published scientific research and recommendations from our Science Board and our community, we have decided that Graham Hancock’s and Rupert Sheldrake’s talks from TEDxWhiteChapel should be removed from distribution on the TEDx YouTube channel. Both talks have been flagged as containing serious factual errors that undermine TED’s commitment to good science.” After being taken out of wide circulation in this way, thus foreclosing the possibility that the existing 160,000-plus viewers might further share the URL, and after widespread reaction on the internet accusing TED of censorship, TED reposted the videos (where they cannot be searched for or easily found) in an out of the way corner of their blog — thus hoping to defuse the charge of censorship — prefacing the videos with a hostile and negative commentary and at the same time inviting discussion. So far, despite the relative obscurity of the talks’ new location (http://blog.ted.com/2013/03/14/open-for-discussion-graham-hancock-and-rupert-sheldrake/) TED have received 700-plus comments, more than 90 per cent of which are deeply critical of TED’s actions. They have also received a detailed refutation, from me — posted on their blog and emailed directly to TED — of the damaging and defamatory way in which they now preface my talk and of their false characterisation of what I actually say in the talk. So far they they have not replied to my refutation although one imagines if their reasons for removing my talk from their Youtube channel had any merit they would quickly be able to substantiate what they have said about me. Rupert Sheldrake has likewise refuted the misleading way in which TED preface his presentation and has likewise received no answer.
For background info on my position and all the statements that have gone back and forward, please have a look at the full documentation of this affair that is set out below.
Letter dated 15 March 2013 from Graham Hancock to TED. The letter and series of supporting documents below it are self explanatory. It will be necessary to take a look at them all and to follow some of the links given in order to arrive at an informed opinion of what has happened here:
Dear TED
I wish to protest officially the damage to my reputation and my good name as a prominent author and public speaker currently being perpetrated by TED on its own website — see here — http://blog.ted.com/2013/03/14/open-for-discussion-graham-hancock-and-rupert-sheldrake/
I require TED either to substantiate the damaging allegations made there against me by TED or to retract them and publish a full and unconditional public apology.
The substance of my complaint is contained in my letter to Chris Anderson that I posted on the above blog page this morning replying to an earlier letter to me posted by Chris Anderson in the same place on 14 March. I set out for your convenience below my signature the full text of my letter with minor typographical errors corrected and ask you to treat this as an official complaint and investigate it and take immediate action.
Yours sincerely
Graham Hancock (Official letter of complaint follows below)
Letter to Chris Anderson, Curator TED Conferences.
From Graham Hancock 15 March 2013
Chris, your reply is very strange and does no credit to you in your role at the Curator of the TED Conference or to TED as a whole.
Quite simply the issue is this: TED has defamed me by making a number of accusations against me in this public forum on the TED website – accusations that are highly damaging to my reputation as an author and public speaker. I have asked you to substantiate those allegations which surely should be a matter of the highest priority to you if you have a genuine commitment to science and to truth. Yet instead of doing so you dodge my reasonable request for substantiation by telling me you are attending an event in DC, posing a number of irrelevant questions to me, making a reference to Wikipedia, and asking those you see as my “supporters” to “calm down a little.” This is all sleight of hand. All that is required of you here on the public record is simply to substantiate the grave allegations that TED has made against me in the introductory remarks to this page of the TED blog, or, if you cannot substantiate those allegations then retract them and apologize. Your present tactic allows the allegations to remain in the prominent opening statements to this blog page while you “reach out to see” if any of your advisers are “able to go into more depth” in answering my specific questions and while you yourself “sign off” until Monday.
This is not good enough and I demand that TED – either in the form of you personally or those “advisors” you refer to – either substantiate the defamatory allegations you have made against me forthwith or remove those allegations at once and post a full, public and unconditional apology.
I note that the text of TED’s introductory remarks to this page have undergone some editing since they were originally posted. Therefore I will set out again the allegations TED has made against me in these remarks as they stand today (at 09:50 GMT and as confirmed by a screen shot I have taken), and my reasonable questions in which I ask you to substantiate these allegations.
(1) TED says of my “War on Consciousness” presentation: “…he misrepresents what scientists actually think. He suggests, for example, that no scientists are working on the problem of consciousness.”
I would like TED to identify where exactly in my talk they believe I say that “no scientists are working on the problem of consciousness”? Also in what other specific ways does TED believe I misrepresent what scientists actually think?
The only passage I can find in my presentation that has any relevance at all to this allegation is between 9 mins 50 seconds and 11 mins 12 seconds. But nowhere in that passage or anywhere else in my presentation do I make the suggestion you attribute to me in your allegation, namely that “no scientists are working on the problem of consciousness.” Rather I address the mystery of life after death and state that “if we want to know about this mystery the last people we should ask are materialist, reductionist scientists. They have nothing to say on the matter at all.” That statement cannot possibly be construed as my suggesting that “no scientists are working on the problem of consciousness,” or of “misrepresenting” what materialist, reductionist scientists actually think. I am simply stating the fact, surely not controversial, that materialist, reductionist scientists have nothing to say on the matter of life after death because their paradigm does not allow them to believe in the possibility of life after death; they believe rather that nothing follows death. Here is the full transcript of what I say in my presentation between 9 mins 50 seconds and 11 mins 12 seconds: “What is death? Our materialist science reduces everything to matter. Materialist science in the West says that we are just meat, we’re just our bodies, so when the brain is dead that’s the end of consciousness. There is no life after death. There is no soul. We just rot and are gone. But actually any honest scientist should admit that consciousness is the greatest mystery of science and that we don’t know exactly how it works. The brain’s involved in it in some way, but we’re not sure how. Could be that the brain generates consciousness the way a generator makes electricity. If you hold to that paradigm then of course you can’t believe in life after death. When the generator’s broken consciousness is gone. But it’s equally possible that the relationship – and nothing in neuroscience rules it out – that the relationship is more like the relationship of the TV signal to the TV set and in that case when the TV set is broken of course the TV signal continues and this is the paradigm of all spiritual traditions – that we are immortal souls, temporarily incarnated in these physical forms to learn and to grow and to develop. And really if we want to know about this mystery the last people we should ask are materialist, reductionist scientists. They have nothing to say on the matter at all. Let’s go rather to the ancient Egyptians who put their best minds to work for three thousand years on the problem of death and on the problem of how we should live our lives to prepare for what we will confront after death…”
(2) TED says of my presentation: “He states as fact that psychotropic drug use is essential for an “emergence into consciousness,” and that one can use psychotropic plants to connect directly with an ancient mother culture.”
I would like TED to identify where exactly in my talk they believe I state as a fact that psychotropic drug use is “essential” for an “emergence into consciousness.” I would also like TED to identify where exactly in my talk I state that “one can use psychotropic plants to connect directly with an ancient mother culture.”
Having carefully reviewed my presentation several times I can find nowhere where I make such statements.
(3) TED states that there are many “misleading statements” in my presentation.
I would like TED to indentify where exactly in my talk these alleged “misleading statements” occur.
(4) TED says of my “War on Consciousness” presentation: “He offers a one-note explanation for how culture arises (drugs), which just doesn’t hold up.”
Again I would like TED to identify the point in my talk where I state this. Do I not rather say (between 1 min 06 seconds and 1 min 54 seconds) that some scientists in the last thirty years have raised an intriguing possibility — emphasis on POSSIBILITY — which is that the exploration of altered states of consciousness, in which psychedelic plants have been implicated, was fundamental to the emergence into fully symbolic consciousness witnessed by the great cave art? I can cite a wide range of respectable peer-reviewed scientists who have suggested this possibility and I do not see how reporting their work, which I have every right to do, can be construed as offering “a one-note explanation for how culture arises (drugs).” Besides is every talk that touches on the origins of culture obliged to consider all possible factors that might be involved in the origins of culture? How could any speaker be expected to do that in one 18-minute talk?
(5) TED says of my “War on Consciousness” presentation: “… it’s no surprise his work has often been characterized as pseudo-archeology.”
Of what possible relevance is this remark? Many different people have characterised my work in many different ways but at issue here is not what people have said about my work over the years but the actual content of this specific TEDx presentation.
So there are the damaging and defamatory allegations TED has made against me in its website, and here again is my request that you either substantiate these allegations forthwith, or withdraw them and apologize to me prominently and publicly, allowing no further time to elapse to worsen the harm and damage you have already done.
The background to the above letter of complaint is set out in a series of posts I made on my facebook author page between 14 and 15 March. Those posts are set out in datal order below.
Post 1, March 14th, 2013
Urgent call for help against an attempt to censor my work.
I have received notification today that my recent 18-minute TEDx video presentation, “The War on Consciousness” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WaeMyC86Dw), which has at time of writing received more than 132,000 views, is to be deleted from the TEDx website because what I say in that presentation allegedly “strays well beyond the realm of reasonable science”, and because I allegedly make “non-scientific and reckless” statements about psychotropic drugs. I am fighting these charges from TED’s Science Board which in my opinion are untrue and amount to nothing more than an ideologically driven attempt to censor my work. All the indications, however, are that my presentation will be deleted some time today. In order that what I said can be preserved, and that an independent record is maintained, I would ask internet-competent members of this community to download and save my presentation before it is deleted and lost forever. I do not know how to do this myself and my son Luke, who runs my Youtube channel for me, is today out of contact and I cannot reach him. Once again the URL for my presentation is http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WaeMyC86Dw. Will someone kindly please save it in a form in which I can later re-upload it to my own Youtube channel (where it is presently only embedded, not independently uploaded). I don’t intend to allow this bizarre transgression of my freedom of speech on the part of an institution – TED – for which I once had the highest respect, to pass without a fight.
Post 2, March 14th, 2013
Following my last status posted here two hours ago, thanks and deep appreciation to all who have now independently downloaded and saved my presentation “The War on Consciousness” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WaeMyC86Dw) that is threatened with deletion from the TEDx website. Please keep these saved copies on file and disseminate and distribute in any way possible. Meanwhile I have managed to find my son Luke who runs my Youtube channel and we do now have an independent copy of the video which we will upload on my channel if it is deleted from the TEDx website.
This is a sinister and in my view deeply disturbing move by TED, whose name, I believed until now, was associated with the free flow of ideas. Furthermore it is not only my “War on Consciousness” presentation that is threatened with deletion but also the excellent presentation “The Science Delusion” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kO4-9l8IWFQ) by Rupert Sheldrake which was given at the same TEDx conference in Whitechapel, London in January 2013. I believe that a free and open public record around these issues is healthy and to this end publish the relevant paragraphs from the letter from TED that was received yesterday by the organisers of TEDx Whitechapel and that was passed onto me, and to Rupert Sheldrake this morning.
The TED letter states:
After due diligence, including a survey of published scientific research and recommendations from our Science Board and our community (https://www.ted.com/conversations/16894/rupert_sheldrake_s_tedx_talk.html), we have decided that Rupert Sheldrake’s and Graham Hancock’s talks from TEDxWhiteChapel should be removed from the TEDx YouTube channel and any other distribution platform currently hosting the videos.
Both talks have been flagged as containing serious factual errors that undermine TED’s commitment to good science…
SHELDRAKE
Rupert Sheldrake appears to make several major factual errors, which undermine the arguments of talk. For example, he suggests that scientists reject the notion that animals have consciousness, despite the fact that it’s generally accepted that animals have some form of consciousness, and there’s much research and literature exploring the idea. He also argues that scientists have ignored variations in the measurements of natural constants, using as his primary example the dogmatic assumption that a constant must be constant and uses the speed of light as example. But, in truth, there has been a great deal of inquiry into the nature of scientific constants, including published, peer-reviewed research investigating whether certain constants – including the speed of light – might actually vary over time or distance. Scientists are constantly questioning these assumptions. For example, just this year Scientific American published a feature on the state of research into exactly this question. (“Are physical constants really constant?: Do the inner workings of nature change over time?”) Physicist Sean Carroll wrote a careful rebuttal of this point. In addition, Sheldrake claims to have“evidence” of morphic resonance in crystal formation and rat behavior. The research has never appeared in a peer-reviewed journal, despite attempts by other scientists eager to replicate the work.HANCOCK
Graham Hancock’s talk, again, shares a compelling and unorthodox worldview, but one that strays well beyond the realm of reasonable science. While attempting to critique the scientific worldview, he misrepresents what scientists actually think. He suggests, for example, that no scientists are working on the problem of consciousness.In addition, Hancock makes statements about psychotropic drugs that seem both nonscientific and reckless. He states as fact that psychotropic drug use is essential for an “emergence into consciousness,” and that one can use psychotropic plants to connect directly with an ancient mother culture. He seems to offer a one-note explanation for how culture arises (drugs), it’s no surprise his work has often been characterized as pseudo-archeology.
TED respects and supports the exploration of unorthodox ideas, but the many misleading statements in both Sheldrake’s and Hancock’s talks, whether made deliberately or in error, have led our scientific advisors to conclude that our name and platform should not be associated with these talks.
We request that you, as the TEDx licensee responsible for this talk, delete the videos from YouTube and inform Sheldrake and Hancock that the videos have been removed
(End of quote from TED letter)
Rupert Sheldrake is presently travelling in India with limited communications but will be responding in due course. I too am formulating a full response. But meanwhile I would like to make some points here.
(1) The TED letter says of my presentation: “…he misrepresents what scientists actually think. He suggests, for example, that no scientists are working on the problem of consciousness.”
I would like TED to identify where exactly in my talk they believe I say that “no scientists are working on the problem of consciousness”?
(2) The TED letter says of my presentation: “He states as fact that psychotropic drug use is essential for an “emergence into consciousness,” and that one can use psychotropic plants to connect directly with an ancient mother culture.”
I would like TED to identify where exactly in my talk they believe I state as a fact that psychotropic drug use is essential for an emergence into consciousness. I would also like TED to identify where exactly in my talk I state that one can use psychotropic plants to connect directly with an ancient mother culture.
(3) The TED letter says of my presentation: “He seems to offer a one-note explanation for how culture arises (drugs), it’s no surprise his work has often been characterised as pseudo-archeology.”
Again I would like TED to identify the point in my talk where I state this. Do I not rather say that some scientists in the last thirty years have raised an intriguing possibility which is that the exploration of altered states of consciousness, in which psychedelic plants have been implicated was fundamental to the emergence into fully symbolic consciousness witnessed by the great cave art? I can cite a wide range of respectable peer-reviewed scientists who have suggested this possibility and I do not see how reporting their point of view, which I have every right to do, can be construed as offering “a one-note explanation for how culture arises (drugs).” Besides is every talk that touches on the origins of culture obliged to consider all possible factors that might be involved in the origins of culture? How could any speaker be expected to do that in one 18-minute talk? I also see no relevance to any of this in the statement that my work has often been characterised as “pseudo-archaeology”. Many different people have characterised my work in many different ways but at issue here is not what people have said about my work over the years but the actual content of this specific TEDx presentation.
In informing us that they are about to delete our talks from the TEDx Youtube channel, TED also state in their letter: “The talks won’t simply disappear from the web. Instead, we propose to feature them in a new section of TED.com that allows for debate, in which talks are carefully framed to highlight both their provocative ideas and the problems with their arguments.”
I find this last concept both worrying and insulting since it implies that TED feels the need to act as arbiter of the context in which our work is received rather than simply putting what we have to say before an intelligent public and letting the public decide. It also suggests that TED may believe the public are incapable of making up their own minds about our arguments without approved scientists first highlighting “the problems” with our arguments. Would TED, we wonder, put talks by, for example, Richard Dawkins, in the same proposed new area of its website?
We shall see. Meanwhile I hope that the public outcry that has already been generated as a result of TED’s letter will be enough to cause TED to think again and keep both my presentation and Rupert Sheldrake’s presentation live on the TEDx Youtube channel where everyone can make up their own minds. Once again, “The War on Consciousness” will be here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WaeMyC86Dw and “The Science Delusion” will be herehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kO4-9l8IWFQ unless and until TED delete them.
Post 3, March 14th, 2013
Further to my last two statuses I am disgusted to report that TED has indeed hidden my “War on Consciousness” presentation and Rupert Sheldrake’s “Science Delusion” presentation on the TEDx Youtube channel. Both videos are now marked as private and so no member of the public can now view them or make up their own minds about them. If this is how science operates, by silencing those who express opposing views rather than by debating with them, then science is dead and we are in a new era of the Inquisition.
Post 4, March 14th, 2013
In attempt to brush up their severely tarnished image after censoring my presentation “The War on Consciousness” from the TEDx website today (on the grounds that I was “unscientific”) and also censoring the presentation “The Science Delusion” by my colleague Rupert Sheldrake for the same reason, TED have now rushed to create a remote corner of their website, which I imagine they hope no-one will see, where our talks have been put back online and may be debated: http://blog.ted.com/2013/03/14/open-for-discussion-graham-hancock-and-rupert-sheldrake/ This gesture, they claim, is in response to my suggestion that they had censored us and should be taken as evidence of their “spirit of radical openness”.
All I can say is this is extremely devious behavior on TED’s part. On the one hand they take down two videos from Youtube that had generated enormous public interest and traction (mine had received over 130,000 views and Rupert’s over 35,000 views). Then as soon as TED is tagged for censorship (did they hope we wouldn’t notice?) they put the videos up again in a remote place, which cannot benefit from URL sharing by any of the previous 160,000-plus viewers and which is, thus, to all extents and purposes invisible.
Worse, rather than allowing those viewers who do find this remote corner of the TED website to make up their own minds about our presentations, TED feel the need to “frame” our talks in a way, they say, that can “highlight both their [i.e. Hancock’s and Sheldrake’s] provocative ideas and the factual problems with their arguments.” I find this manoeuver disingenuous in that (1) I see no “framing” at all of our “provocative ideas” but plenty of “framing” of what TED claim are the factual problems with our arguments; this “framing” occurs in the lengthy introduction that TED has published to our videos. (2) TED did not approach either Rupert or myself in advance for any refutation of the “factual problems” they allege in our presentations. In fact I refute all these so-called “factual problems” with regard to my own presentation, and have now posted these refutations on the TED blog (http://blog.ted.com/2013/03/14/open-for-discussion-graham-hancock-and-rupert-sheldrake/) in the form of a series of questions to TED to which I expect answers. (3) The whole concept of this manoeuver by TED is worrying and insulting. It implies that TED believes it has the right to act as arbiter of the context in which my presentation and Rupert’s presentation is received rather than simply putting what we have to say before an intelligent public and letting the public decide. It also suggests that TED believe the public are incapable of making up their own minds about our arguments without approved scientists first highlighting “the problems” with our arguments. Would TED, we wonder, treat many of the provocative talks by, for example, Richard Dawkins, in the same way?
I hope that many of my wonderful and supportive facebook community who see this post will go to the TED URL linked above (again — http://blog.ted.com/2013/03/14/open-for-discussion-graham-hancock-and-rupert-sheldrake/) and register to post, and add comments there. I believe this is an important issue and it is important that TED do not get away with what (regardless of how they try to finesse it — “spirit of radical openness LOL!!) is after all censorship.
Post 5, March 14th, 2013
The more I wade into the morass that is TED the more horrified I become at the illusion of openness this organisation has wrapped around itself, when the truth as I have now learned from direct experience is so very different. TED talks a good talk about itself, its nobility, its achievements. “We believe passionately,” TED boasts, “in the power of ideas to change attitudes, lives and ultimately,the world. So we’re building here a clearinghouse that offers free knowledge and inspiration from the world’s most inspired thinkers, and also a community of curious souls to engage with ideas and each other.” (see here:http://www.ted.com/pages/about).
But the truth is quite different. Over the matter of the censorship on Youtube of my “War on Consciousness” presentation and Rupert Sheldrake’s “Science Delusion” presentation, TED is closed minded, operates with an extremely limited view of what is scientifically orthodox, wishes to stay safely within that orthodoxy, and is patronising and disparaging about those who question their policies. As TED Curator Chris Anderson (http://www.ted.com/speakers/chris_anderson_ted.html) writes here (http://blog.ted.com/2013/03/14/open-for-discussion-graham-hancock-and-rupert-sheldrake/) in response to comments criticising TED for censoring my presentation: “Right now this comment section is over-run by the hordes of supporters sent our way by Graham Hancock. It would be nice for you to calm down and actually read some of the criticisms of his work so that you can get a more balanced view point. And meanwhile, we’ll be reading the views of anyone who’ll be patient enough to express them in a reasoned way …as opposed to throwing around shrieks of censorship when nothing of the kind has happened.”
Mr Anderson seems to have plenty of time to pour scorn on those who disagree with the way TED has handled this matter, but so far, more than five hours after I posted them he has not found the time to answer the four simple questions I asked him on page 1 of the public forum he set up (http://blog.ted.com/2013/03/14/open-for-discussion-graham-hancock-and-rupert-sheldrake/) supposedly to foster open discussion of the presentations by myself and Rupert.
Here are those four simple questions again:
(1) TED says of my “War on Consciousness” presentation: “…he misrepresents what scientists actually think. He suggests, for example, that no scientists are working on the problem of consciousness.”
I would like TED to identify where exactly in my talk they believe I say that “no scientists are working on the problem of consciousness”? Also in what other specific ways does TED believe I misrepresent what scientists actually think?
(2) TED says of my presentation: “He states as fact that psychotropic drug use is essential for an “emergence into consciousness,” and that one can use psychotropic plants to connect directly with an ancient mother culture.”
I would like TED to identify where exactly in my talk they believe I state as a fact that psychotropic drug use is essential for an emergence into consciousness. I would also like TED to identify where exactly in my talk I state that one can use psychotropic plants to connect directly with an ancient mother culture.
(3) TED states that there are many inaccuracies in my presentation which display a disrespect both for my audience and for my arguments.
I would like TED to indentify where exactly in my talk these alleged “many inaccuracies” occur.
(4) TED says of my “War on Consciousness” presentation: “He offers a one-note explanation for how culture arises (drugs), which just doesn’t hold up.”
Again I would like TED to identify the point in my talk where I state this. Do I not rather say that some scientists in the last thirty years have raised an intriguing possibility — emphasis on POSSIBILITY — which is that the exploration of altered states of consciousness, in which psychedelic plants have been implicated, was fundamental to the emergence into fully symbolic consciousness witnessed by the great cave art? I can cite a wide range of respectable peer-reviewed scientists who have suggested this possibility and I do not see how reporting their work, which I have every right to do, can be construed as offering “a one-note explanation for how culture arises (drugs).” Besides is every talk that touches on the origins of culture obliged to consider all possible factors that might be involved in the origins of culture? How could any speaker be expected to do that in one 18-minute talk?
For those who have missed this developing story during the day here are links to my earlier relevant posts in order of appearance:
http://www.facebook.com/Author.GrahamHancock/posts/10151551245272354
http://www.facebook.com/Author.GrahamHancock/posts/10151551393237354
http://www.facebook.com/Author.GrahamHancock/posts/10151551414982354
http://www.facebook.com/Author.GrahamHancock/posts/10151551604052354 (the first link in this post is broken and should read: http://blog.ted.com/2013/03/14/open-for-discussion-graham-hancock-and-rupert-sheldrake/)
Post 6, March 15th, 2013
Open letter to Chris Anderson, Curator TED Conferences.
From Graham Hancock 15 March 2013
This letter is a reply to a letter to me that Chris Anderson has posted here on the TED blog page (http://blog.ted.com/2013/03/14/open-for-discussion-graham-hancock-and-rupert-sheldrake/) and that I have also responded to in the same place. For convenience after posting my open letter below, I also post the full text of Chris Anderson’s letter to me.
(1) My open letter to Chris Anderson, Curator TED Conferences, posted on the TED blog page at 09:50 GMT on 15 March 2013
Chris, your reply is very strange and does no credit to you in your role at the Curator of the TED Conference or to TED as a whole.
Quite simply the issue is this: TED has defamed me by making a number of accusations against me in this public forum on the TED website – accusations that are highly damaging to my reputation as an author and public speaker. I have asked you to substantiate those allegations which surely should be a matter of the highest priority to you if you have a genuine commitment to science and to truth. Yet instead of doing so you dodge my reasonable request for substantiation by telling me you are attending an event in DC, posing a number of irrelevant questions to me, making a reference to Wikipedia, and asking those you see as my “supporters” to “calm down a little.” This is all sleight of hand. All that is required of you here on the public record is simply to substantiate the grave allegations that TED has made against me in the introductory remarks to this page of the TED blog, or, if you cannot substantiate those allegations then retract them and apologize. Your present tactic allows the allegations to remain in the prominent opening statements to this blog page while you “reach out to see” if any of your advisers are “able to go into more depth” in answering my specific questions and while you yourself “sign off” until Monday.
This is not good enough and I demand that TED – either in the form of you personally or those “advisors” you refer to – either substantiate the defamatory allegations you have made against me forthwith or remove those allegations at once and post a full, public and unconditional apology.
I note that the text of TED’s introductory remarks to this page have undergone some editing since they were originally posted. Therefore I will set out again the allegations TED has made against me in these remarks as they stand today (at 09:50 GMT and as confirmed by a screen shot I have taken), and my reasonable questions in which I ask you to substantiate these allegations.
(1) TED says of my “War on Consciousness” presentation: “…he misrepresents what scientists actually think. He suggests, for example, that no scientists are working on the problem of consciousness.”
I would like TED to identify where exactly in my talk they believe I say that “no scientists are working on the problem of consciousness”? Also in what other specific ways does TED believe I misrepresent what scientists actually think?
The only passage I can find in my presentation that has any relevance at all to this allegation is between 9 mins 50 seconds and 11 mins 12 seconds. But nowhere in that passage or anywhere else in my presentation do I make the suggestion you attribute to me in your allegation, namely that “no scientists are working on the problem of consciousness.” Rather I address the mystery of life after death and state that “if we want to know about this mystery the last people we should ask are materialist, reductionist scientists. They have nothing to say on the matter at all.” That statement cannot possibly be construed as my suggesting that “no scientists are working on the problem of consciousness,” or of “misrepresenting” what materialist, reductionist scientists actually think. I am simply stating the fact, surely not controversial, that materialist, reductionist scientists have nothing to say on the matter of life after death because their paradigm does not allow them to believe in the possibility of life after death; they believe rather that nothing follows death. Here is the full transcript of what I say in my presentation between 9 mins 50 seconds and 11 mins 12 seconds: “What is death? Our materialist science reduces everything to matter. Materialist science in the West says that we are just meat, we’re just our bodies, so when the brain is dead that’s the end of consciousness. There is no life after death. There is no soul. We just rot and are gone. But actually any honest scientist should admit that consciousness is the greatest mystery of science and that we don’t know exactly how it works. The brain’s involved in it in some way, but we’re not sure how. Could be that the brain generates consciousness the way a generator makes electricity. If you hold to that paradigm then of course you can’t believe in life after death. When the generator’s broken consciousness is gone. But it’s equally possible that the relationship – and nothing in neuroscience rules it out – that the relationship is more like the relationship of the TV signal to the TV set and in that case when the TV set is broken of course the TV signal continues and this is the paradigm of all spiritual traditions – that we are immortal souls, temporarily incarnated in these physical forms to learn and to grow and to develop. And really if we want to know about this mystery the last people we should ask are materialist, reductionist scientists. They have nothing to say on the matter at all. Let’s go rather to the ancient Egyptians who put their best minds to work for three thousand years on the problem of death and on the problem of how we should live our lives to prepare for what we will confront after death…”
(2) TED says of my presentation: “He states as fact that psychotropic drug use is essential for an “emergence into consciousness,” and that one can use psychotropic plants to connect directly with an ancient mother culture.”
I would like TED to identify where exactly in my talk they believe I state as a fact that psychotropic drug use is “essential” for an “emergence into consciousness.” I would also like TED to identify where exactly in my talk I state that “one can use psychotropic plants to connect directly with an ancient mother culture.”
Having carefully reviewed my presentation several times I can find nowhere where I make such statements.
(3) TED states that there are many “misleading statements” in my presentation.
I would like TED to indentify where exactly in my talk these alleged “misleading statements” occur.
(4) TED says of my “War on Consciousness” presentation: “He offers a one-note explanation for how culture arises (drugs), which just doesn’t hold up.”
Again I would like TED to identify the point in my talk where I state this. Do I not rather say (between 1 min 06 seconds 1 min 54 seconds) that some scientists in the last thirty years have raised an intriguing possibility — emphasis on POSSIBILITY — which is that the exploration of altered states of consciousness, in which psychedelic plants have been implicated, was fundamental to the emergence into fully symbolic consciousness witnessed by the great cave art? I can cite a wide range of respectable peer-reviewed scientists who have suggested this possibility and I do not see how reporting their work, which I have every right to do, can be construed as offering “a one-note explanation for how culture arises (drugs).” Besides is every talk that touches on the origins of culture obliged to consider all possible factors that might be involved in the origins of culture? How could any speaker be expected to do that in one 18-minute talk?
(5) TED says of my “War on Consciousness” presentation: “… it’s no surprise his work has often been characterized as pseudo-archeology.”
Of what possible relevance is this remark? Many different people have characterised my work in many different ways but at issue here is not what people have said about my work over the years but the actual content of this specific TEDx presentation.
So there are the damaging and defamatory allegations TED has made against me in its website, and here again is my request that you either substantiate these allegations forthwith, or withdraw them and apologize to me prominently and publicly, allowing no further time to elapse to worsen the harm and damage you have already done.
Signed Graham Hancock, 15 March 2013 at 09:50 GMT
(2) Letter from Chris Anderson to Graham Hancock posted on the TED blog page on 14 March 2013 to which the above open letter is a response:
Graham, greetings, and thanks for engaging here personally. We’ll try to get you some more detailed comments early next week. I’m currently tied up at National Geographic in DC helping launch the TEDxDeExtinction event (which, by the way, is an indication that we have no problem with radical scientific ideas per se.)
I understand why you’re upset at the talk being pulled off Youtube, but we’re quite serious in saying we’re not censoring you. The talk will live here as long it takes for this conversation to work itself out, and perhaps indefinitely. I must say, you’re a compelling speaker and I personally enjoyed the talk quite a bit. I can understand why you and your books have attracted a huge following.
It would help your cause to let this whole discussion calm down a little. You seem to have whipped your supporters up into a bit of a frenzy. There’s no conspiracy out to get you. We just have certain guidelines for our TEDx events that weren’t fully implemented in this instance, and it’s OK to have a public discussion about that.
So here’s a suggestion. While I reach out and see if any of our advisors is able to go into more depth in answering your specific questions, perhaps you could help me understand why your work is widely characterized as pseudo-archeology, as in the current version of this wikipedia page.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudoarchaeology
Is that a distorted description of your views? Is mainstream archaeology simply misguided? Or is there some other explanation?
Do you agree that we should have *some* form of guidelines for our TEDx organizers as to what constitutes credible science, or do you think our approach should be let anyone put anything they want out there and just let the public decide?
I’m signing off now till Monday, but truly I would value your and your supporters’ help in turning this into a more constructive discussion.
Thanks, Graham.
END OF TEXT OF LETTER FROM CHRIS ANDERSON, CURATOR TED CONFERENCES posted on the TED blog page (http://blog.ted.com/2013/03/14/open-for-discussion-graham-hancock-and-rupert-sheldrake/) 14 March 2013.
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1.6 Billion Rounds Of Ammo For Homeland Security? It’s Time For A National Conversation
Armored Personnel Carriers in Baghdad. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)Read Full Report here: http://www.forbes.com/sites/ralphbenko/2013/03/11/1-6-billion-rounds-of-ammo-for-homeland-security-its-time-for-a-national-conversation/
The Denver Post, on February 15th, ran an Associated Press article entitled Homeland Security aims to buy 1.6b rounds of ammo, so far to little notice. It confirmed that the Department of Homeland Security has issued an open purchase order for 1.6 billion rounds of ammunition. As reported elsewhere, some of this purchase order is for hollow-point rounds, forbidden by international law for use in war, along with a frightening amount specialized for snipers. Also reported elsewhere, at the height of the Iraq War the Army was expending less than 6 million rounds a month. Therefore 1.6 billion rounds would be enough to sustain a hot war for 20+ years. In America.
Add to this perplexing outré purchase of ammo, DHS now is showing off its acquisition of heavily armored personnel carriers, repatriated from the Iraqi and Afghani theaters of operation. As observed by “paramilblogger” Ken Jorgustin last September:
[T]he Department of Homeland Security is apparently taking delivery (apparently through the Marine Corps Systems Command, Quantico VA, via the manufacturer – Navistar Defense LLC) of an undetermined number of the recently retrofitted 2,717 ‘Mine Resistant Protected’ MaxxPro MRAP vehicles for service on the streets of the United States.”
These MRAP’s ARE BEING SEEN ON U.S. STREETS all across America by verified observers with photos, videos, and descriptions.”
Regardless of the exact number of MRAP’s being delivered to DHS (and evidently some to POLICE via DHS, as has been observed), why would they need such over-the-top vehicles on U.S. streets to withstand IEDs, mine blasts, and 50 caliber hits to bullet-proof glass? In a war zone… yes, definitely. Let’s protect our men and women. On the streets of America… ?”
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“They all have gun ports… Gun Ports? In the theater of war, yes. On the streets of America…?
Seriously, why would DHS need such a vehicle on our streets?”
Why indeed? It is utterly inconceivable that Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano is planning a coup d’etat against President Obama, and the Congress, to install herself as Supreme Ruler of the United States of America. There, however, are real signs that the Department bureaucrats are running amok.
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TOWNS DON’T NEED TANKS!
The Militarization of Law Enforcement in America: Use of Military Technology and Tactics by Local Level Police
ACLU Launches Nationwide Investigation
Militarization of Local Law Enforcement Erodes Civil Liberties, Encourages Overly Aggressive Policing
American Civil Liberties Union affiliates in 23 states today simultaneously filed more than 255 public records requests to determine the extent to which local police departments are using federally subsidized military technology and tactics that are traditionally used overseas.
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“The American people deserve to know how much our local police are using military weapons and tactics for everyday policing,” said Allie Bohm, ACLU advocacy and policy strategist. “The militarization of local police is a threat to Americans’ right to live without fear of military-style intervention in their daily lives, and we need to make sure these resources and tactics are deployed only with rigorous oversight and strong legal protections.”
The affiliates which filed public records requests are: Arizona, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Jersey, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Texas, Utah, Washington, West Virginia and Wisconsin.
Read Full Report: http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-militarization-of-law-enforcement-in-america-use-of-military-technology-and-tactics-by-local-level-police/5326303
Contact: (212) 549-2666; media@aclu.org
http://www.aclu.org/criminal-law-reform/aclu-launches-nationwide-investigation-police-use-military-technology-tactics
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Published on Mar 16, 2013
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New evidence: CIA and MI6 were told before invasion that Iraq had no active WMD
Tags:
BBC’s Panorama reveals fresh evidence that agencies dismissed intelligence from Iraq foreign minister and spy chief
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Read full Report here:
http://refreshingnews99.blogspot.in/2013/03/new-evidence-cia-and-mi6-were-told.html
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Leaked Document: Military Internment Camps in U.S to be Used for Political Dissidents
Published on Mar 4, 2013
Internment camps for political dissidents in the U.S. aren’t a conspiracy theory. The Department of Defense document entitled “INTERNMENT AND RESETTLEMENT OPERATIONS” or FM 3-39.40 proves this beyond a shadow of a doubt.
Visit our website: http://StormCloudsGathering.com
http://facebook.com/StormCloudsGathering
http://info.publicintelligence.net/USArmy-InternmentResettlement.pdf
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http://americankabuki.blogspot.com/2013/02/silence-is-not-golden-silence-is.html
Saturday, February 16, 2013
Silence is not Golden, Silence is Consent to a Crime
“Just had a phone call asking me to not post any information about the programs because the cabal is monitoring the internet for information. I was asked to pass the same on to everyone else I know. Bringing on the funding and especially the announcements which are critical to my survival is perimount. Therefore i am asking that all of you do the same if you want things to finally happen as you know things are ready to go.As much as I will miss all of you but for the greater good, I am going dark and shutting down my Facebook account starting immediately. I will not even stay around to see your comments to this posting. I am leaving on a high note. All people are being contacted. They contacted john machaffie, and he has scrubbed his web site of any funding postings.Stay on line if you wish, but please do not post any more info about funding or rv. If it continues, so will the delay. Goodbye family as I wish all of you a bright and happy and prosperous future.”
We will not remain silent. Things are not as they say they are! The delay is not because of transparency, the delay is because they do not align their actions with the will of Prime Source.
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LISTEN:
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WHY IT DOESN’T MATTER IF IRAN HAS A NUCLEAR BOMB
Michael Rivero
The above image is a scan of a piece of Trinitite. This is desert sand that was underneath the explosion of the world’s first Atomic bomb in New Mexico as part of project TRINITY, hence the name Trinitite.* The heat from that blast melted the sand into a green glass, not unlike the Fulgurites that result when lightning hits sandy soil.
Now, imagine an entire nation looking like the above sample, melted into green glass. Buried in the green glass are the charred remains of the people of that nation. It’s not an idle fantasy. The US spent $5 trillion dollars (back in the 1950s, when a trillion dollars was REALLY a lot of money!) building a nuclear capability that can actually do that; melt any nation and it’s people into a giant slab of green glass. The USSR knew it, the world knows it, Saddam knew it. The government of Iran knows it.
Even if Iraq had possessed weapons of mass destruction (which we now know they did not), and even if Iraq had the long range ICBMs to reach across the Atlantic with (which we know they did not), Iraq would still not have been a threat to the US because any attack with a weapon of mass destruction would be national suicide.
The same applies to Iran. Even if they were pursuing a nuclear weapon (which nobody can prove they are) and even if Iran had long range missiles to strike at America (which they definitely do not) Iran is not going to preemptively attack the United States with a nuclear weapon because any attack with a weapon of mass destruction would be national suicide.
The same applies to North Korea. Even if they built a nuclear weapon (or bought it from Israel) and even if North Korea had long range missiles to strike at America (which they definitely do not; the Taepodong 2 cannot even reach Alaska) North Korea is not going to preemptively attack the United States with a nuclear weapon because any attack with a weapon of mass destruction would be national suicide.
Those that insist that Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction were a threat that justified invasion, or that Iran’s or North Korea’s weapons of mass destruction are a threat that justifies new invasions, are in essence admitting that the US Government took $5 trillion of your money (over $17,000 from each of you alive today) in a gigantic swindle, because the $5 trillion nuclear deterrent isn’t a deterrent after all, that it doesn’t work, that nobody is really afraid of it, because they all know it was just a hoax to soak the American taxpayer for another several thousand dollars.
Was it all a hoax, Mr. Obama? Did the American people foot a $5 trillion bill in 1950s dollars for a deterrent system that isn’t really a deterrent?
Either the deterrent works or it does not. If it doesn’t, then the American taxpayers have been defrauded on a grand scale (nothing new there; look at Carbon Taxes and the Wall Street bailouts). But if the nuclear deterrent does work, then Iraq or Iran or North Korea can have all the weapons of mass destruction they want; they just won’t risk using them without provocation. Maybe they can put them in a museum or something. But they won’t dare use them against the United States because they don’t want to end up like that piece of green glass at the top of this article. There is no need to invade over the issue of weapons of mass destruction. There never was.
Of course, the issue has shifted. The UN inspectors in Iraq found no evidence of weapons of mass destruction. They found some documents of dubious origin ABOUT weapons of mass destruction, but documents are not a weapon of mass destruction (with the sole exception of the 1040 form). The UN inspectors found a bunch of old empty artillery warheads from 1988, but empty warheads are not a weapon of mass destruction, and tests show that these empties were never weapons. Soil samples have tested negative for chemicals or radioactivity indicating weapons development.
Iraq allowed the inspectors to pretty much go everywhere they want without hindrance, even into Saddam’s home. Imagine the KGB demanding and getting permission to peek into every closet and drawer in the White House and you will get an idea of just how much Iraq was cooperating. The CIA gave the UN inspectors a list of sites they were convinced had weapons of mass destruction. Nothing was found.
But Bush still got his invasion, and grabbed the oil wells.
Now Obama has shifted the target to Iran. And once again, we are being warned that Iran, while it does not actually have nuclear weapons, might be close to building one, and this justifies another invasion. The theory is that if Iran has a nuclear power station, they will build bombs with it. Iran hasn’t planned to build bombs with it, and invites inspections (and now tourists) to prove that they are not making bombs, but the theory is that Iran will make bombs with their reactor and fool the inspectors, because, well, to be blunt about it, that’s what Israel did at Dimona while they clandestinely built the world’s 6th largest nuclear arsenal.
Iran says they don’t want a bomb. Personally, after Iraq proved to the world what the US does to oil-rich nations that do not have weapons of mass destruction I would rethink that position. But if Iran builds a bomb, so what? Maybe they can put it in a museum, or march it down the streets of Tehran in a parade like the Soviets used to do. But they won’t use it against the United States unless really provoked. They won’t dare.
To repeat: Even if Iran has a weapon of mass destruction (which we know they do not), and even if Iran has long range ICBMs to reach across the Atlantic with (which we know they do not), Iran would still not be a threat to the US because any attack with a weapon of mass destruction would be national suicide.
You see, leaders of nations have huge egos. They are driven in large part by that ambition that future generations will admire their faces on statues and stamps and money, and school children will have to memorize their names and birthdates. That doesn’t happen if you let your nation get destroyed. Citizens take a very dim view of that sort of behavior.
Simply having a nuclear weapon does not mean the nation that owns it will use it. Many nations possess nuclear weapons. And contrary to all the dire warnings about nuclear weapons held by other countries, the historical truth is that one and only one country has ever actually used nuclear weapons against the citizens of another nation, the United States of America. For all the talk about the threat from Iraq and now the threat from Iran and North Korea, it is the United States of America which remains the only country to have actually used a nuclear weapon. It is the United States of America which is the provable nuclear threat to the world.
If Iran or North Korea were to have a weapon of mass destruction and use it against the US, the US could just stand back, turn those little brass keys in the silos, and turn the attacking nation into green glass just like that at the top of this article. That’s what we my parents’ generation paid that $5 trillion to build, and your generation pays trillions to maintain. And unless the US Government wants to admit that $5 trillion nuclear deterrent is a hoax, then we should use it as it was intended to be used, to deter an attack without having to invade a foreign attacker.
Why Iran’s nuclear weapons are not a threat (even if they did exist).
The [Ohio class] submarine has the capacity for 24 Trident missile tubes in two rows of 12. The dimensions of the Trident II missile are length 1,360cm x diameter 210cm and the weight is 59,000kg. The three-stage solid fuel rocket motor is built by ATK (Alliant Techsystems) Thiokol Propulsion. The US Navy gives the range as “greater than 7,360km” but this could be up to 12,000km depending on the payload mix. Missile guidance is provided by an inertial navigation system, supported by stellar navigation. Trident II is capable of carrying up to twelve MIRVs (multiple independent re-entry vehicles), each with a yield of 100 kilotons, although the SALT treaty limits this number to eight per missile (plus four decoys). The circle of equal probability (the radius of the circle within which half the strikes will impact) is less than 150m. The Sperry Univac Mark 98 missile control system controls the 24 missiles.
The 14 Trident II SSBNs carry together around 50 percent of total U.S. strategic warheads. (The exact number varies in an unpredictable and highly classified manner below a maximum set by various strategic arms limitation treaties.) Although the missiles have no pre-set targets when the submarine goes on patrol, the SSBNs are capable of rapidly targeting their missiles should the need arise, using secure and constant at-sea communications links. The Ohio class are the largest submarines ever built for the U.S. Navy, and are second only to the Russian Typhoon class in mass and size. A single submarine carries the destructive power more than nine times greater than all Allied ordnance dropped in WWII.
Only the whales and dolphins know where these submarines are when they are out on patrol. Not even the president knows their exact location.
Why Iran’s nuclear weapons are not a threat (even if they did exist) Part 2.
The B-2 Stealth Bomber can carry sixteen B61 or B83 nuclear weapons, is difficult to detect with radar, has a claimed range of 7000 miles, a ceiling of 50,000 feet, and a claimed airspeed of .95 Mach, although the above photo seems to suggest it can actually fly supersonic.
When the Soviet Union achieved nuclear parity with the United States, the Cold War had entered a new phase. The cold war became a conflict more dangerous and unmanageable than anything Americans had faced before. In the old cold war Americans had enjoyed superior nuclear force, an unchallenged economy, strong alliances, and a trusted Imperial President to direct his incredible power against the Soviets. In the new cold war, however, Russian forces achieved nuclear equality. Each side could destroy the other many times. This fact was officially accepted in a military doctrine known as Mutual Assured Destruction, a.k.a. MAD. Mutual Assured Destruction began to emerge at the end of the Kennedy administration. MAD reflects the idea that one’s population could best be protected by leaving it vulnerable so long as the other side faced comparable vulnerabilities. In short: Whoever shoots first, dies second.
If Iran needs to be invaded and occupied to prevent them from ever developing and possibly using a nuclear weapon against the mainland United States, then our parents wasted untold trillions in producing nuclear weapons and submarines to defend against just such a threat; weapons and submarines we are now being told do not achieve their purpose.
And we want our money back.
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Ben Fulford: Reader Asks about Illuminati Structure
02/06/2013
Hi,I’m a male 40- year old Kenyan who’s been a follower ever since your Fukushima expose. I have some questions I’ve always wanted to ask to simplify things. Is there a single high command at the pyramid apex or is there not a single Illuminati monolith? If not, which are the main factions and their specific agendas if any? Is there a single geographical region for each faction like an agreed sphere of influence?
Are any of these factions ever at loggerheads even though they share the same underlying philosophy of elitism, inbreeding, satanism(?) and contempt for Man? There are many threads on the illuminati and I’ve looked long for a functional description but haven’t seen one.
Rgds
Thank you for the very thought provoking question. It will require a long answer. First of all, I believe that for most people the word Illuminati has become a generic term for a secret elite manipulating world events.
The reality is more complicated. Two groups have contacted me, each claiming to be the Illuminati. One says they have been opposed to secret rule by Satanic bloodlines for thousands of years. They claim to have started the French, Russian and American revolutions. Another group calling itself Illuminati says they are descended from the Caesars of Rome and control the Vatican and the Mafia. They are better known as the Vatican P2 lodge. Together they were plotting a fascist world government known as the New World Order. They were opposed by the inbred Royal families of Europe who I think of as the Old World Order.
Until recently, there was unified leadership with 5 key people at the top: David Rockefeller, George Bush Sr., Evelyn Rothschild, Queen Elizabeth and the Pope. Around the time of the election of George Bush Jr. and the self-inflicted 911, 2001 terror attack, they split into two factions: the war on terror faction and the global warming faction. The war on terror faction was the New World Order and the Global warming faction was the Old World Order.
Recently, my contacts with people at or near the top of the Western power structure lead me to believe the real situation has become really complicated because of a power transition. A good parallel is a band of hyenas that has lost its alpha leader. For a while there is complex factional infighting going on and it is hard to figure out exactly what is going on.
That is because an Asian group decided Western leadership was destroying the planet and started to take on both factions. They have done very well and the result has been the 180 nation BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) alliance.
President Obama was very limited in what he could do during his first term because of the power of the two secret factions. He was set up to be a puppet who could fool the colored peoples of the world into thinking he was the world’s leader and not the old white men like George Soros, David Rockefeller and George Bush Sr. who were pulling his strings.
Recently though, the situation has changed. My sources tell me the Rockefellers have fled to an Island near Fiji the Bushes tried to flee to South America but were stopped. Obama is now free to do more than he could in his first term. However, an American president has to represent the consensus of the establishment, especially the military industrial complex, so Obama is still fairly powerless.
Another way to understand what is going on in the West it to realize it has a split personality. One part of the West thinks of itself as heir to Greek (science and democracy) and Roman (law and strong military power) culture. However, a large part of the elite think of themselves as heirs to Babylonian or Egyptian cultures which were ruled by God kings. It is the Babylonian and Egyptian traditions that are associated with occult secret societies, slavery, finance, guilds and Satanism.
.
End.
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http://removingtheshackles.blogspot.ca/2013/02/to-wizards-behind-curtain.html
Tuesday, 5 February 2013
To The Wizards behind the curtain
“This is an open letter to a certain group of….. people. They know who they are.
My Friends, your time is up. You KNEW your time was up weeks ago. You KNEW it, because you were there when the plan was put together. Right? It’s not like all of a sudden someone jumped out from behind the door and yelled “Times Up!! Hand your exam papers forward to the front of the class!”.
You KNEW what this was all about. You KNEW when it was ending. You KNEW what the ending would be and that the timing was non-negotiable.
Here is another thing that you KNOW:
We are all equal. You are not “higher” than us. You are not “superior” to us. You are not more “worthy” than us. WE. ARE. EQUAL.
You can’t have all the toys. They are not yours. But we’re happy to share them with you. That IS the way it’s suppose to be, right?
Time for tough love.
I am sick and tired of this bullshit. So is everyone else that knows what you’re doing. We’re done. This whole thing is DONE. We are not going to sit here and let you get away with your ridiculous superiority complex shit any more. No more pussy footing around. No more playing your hierarchy games. I have better things to do with my time. So does the rest of humanity. All this shit is just sooooo last millennia, and I’m bored with it.
You know what’s at stake. Your eternal heart KNOWs what the outcome of your choice is going to be. Stop listening to your power hungry egos and start listening to what you KNOW is real and true.
If you make the choice you thought you were going to make last Sunday, that’s fine. The paper trail will illuminate in brilliant neon colours and us “peons” will turn around and use your so called power and money against you and change it all back to the way it should be ANYWAY. Go ahead and foreclose on your selves. No Really- do it. I’ll just sit here and wait, and then institute plan “B”.
Or you can make the choice that your heart is telling you to make- the only choice that actually resonates within you because it’s the TRUTH.
Plan A, or Plan B. I don’t care. It’s your choice (free will and all that), and you have to live with it. ALL of IT.
Just make your damn choice and do it NOW. The rest of us are getting off this ride and heading to the next one. You can join us if you want, or you can sit here on your busted ass roller coaster all alone while you watch the tumble weeds roll on by. Forever.
When this is all over, I will give you a hug and tell you that I love you. But for this Now….. don’t try my patience.”
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Defend Yourself!
Published: February 4th, 2013
I had three RANTS queued ahead of this one. However, when I saw the below article, I not only moved this piece to the front of the line – but wrote it Saturday Afternoon…
For years, Sinclair has been extremely vocal of his fear that – in some way, shape, or form – government-sponsored retirement plans like IRAs, 401Ks, Roth IRAs, Keoghs, and pensions would ultimately be CONFISCATED.
Likewise, I have written of this topic endlessly; including two specific RANT topics – “OUT, OUT DAMN IRA” and “RETIREMENT PLAN “CONFISCATION.” Moreover, I have continually reminded readers that both myself and Andy Schectman – Miles Franklin’s President – cashed out our IRAs three years ago (at age 39, as we are the same age); happily paying the taxes and penalties for the right to control our money; which we promptly “rolled” into PHYSICAL gold and silver.
To repeat today’s “QUOTE OF THE DAY,” Sinclair states the following:
Here it comes. Please consider the risk of turning over your retirement account to U.S. management in Treasury instruments only. How much of a push to you need to defend yourself?
…in response to reading the below article – published last week…
Retirement Savings Accounts Draw U.S. Consumer Bureau Attention
Yes, the “Consumer Financial Protection Bureau” (CFPB) is considering…
…taking on a role helping Americans manage the $19.4 trillion they’ve put into retirement savings…
WHAT A COINCIDENCE, as $19.4 trillion would more than cover the $16.5 trillion national debt – excluding $200+ trillion of “unfunded liabilities,” of course. Better yet…
…such a move would be the agency’s first foray into consumer investments.
Adding insult to injury, here is its so-called “justification”…
The bureau’s core concern is that many Americans – notably those from the retiring Baby Boom generation – may fall prey to financial scams.
Remember, the U.S. government ONLY acts in reaction to danger; NEVER proactively. In other words, you can be REST ASSURED they will NEVER consider draconian actions unless the floodgates are already bursting.
For example, I am constantly bombarded with questions about potential gold confiscation (which Sinclair vehemently believes will never happen); and each time, my answer is the same. That is, the government would only consider such an action if the dollar were already crashing; in which case, would you rather own “PRICELESS PRECIOUS METALS OR WORTHLESS DOLLARS?”
For those that don’t believe me, the government did JUST THIS at the heart of 2008’s Global Meltdown I; actually discussing retirement plan confiscation in Congress. Moreover, if the massive MONEY PRINTING orgy they embarked upon hadn’t stabilized financial markets, I ASSURE you this “discussion” would have rapidly graduated to the voting stage…
House discusses 401k/IRA confiscation – November 2008
In today’s fantasy world of “UNPRECEDENTED” MONEY PRINTING, MARKET MANIPULATION, and PROPAGANDA, the government has somehow managed to erect an – albeit paper-thin – façade of stability. However, the fact that QE3 and QE4 were announced during such “non-crisis” times – let alone, the similar actions undertaken in Europe (“whatever it takes”) and Japan (“inflation targeting”); should scream loud and clear that the REAL situation is far more dire.
Now that interest rates are rising and PM suppression exploding – whilst the nation faces a “fiscal cliff” sequester and debt ceiling increase; how can ANYONE be surprised such a topic has “coincidentally” resurfaced?
I can only SCREAM at the top of my lungs of the urgency to avoid being entrapped by this potentially NATION-KILLING legislation; as if enacted, it would not sentence your life’s savings to “DEATH BY INFLATION”; but permanently end any remaining sentiment of America being a free country…
Now Obama wants your 401(k) – November 2012
However, taking action is entirely up to you…
>>>
Retirement Savings Accounts Draw U.S. Consumer Bureau Attention
By Carter Dougherty – Jan 18, 201
The U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is weighing whether it should take on a role in helping Americans manage the $19.4 trillion they have put into retirement savings, a move that would be the agency’s first foray into consumer investments.
“That’s one of the things we’ve been exploring and are interested in in terms of whether and what authority we have,” bureau director Richard Cordray said in an interview. He didn’t provide additional details.
Consumer Financial Protection Bureau director Richard Cordray said, “You know if you lose your home because the rest of your block is foreclosed on, your credit history is affected.” Photographer: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg
The bureau’s core concern is that many Americans, notably those from the retiring Baby Boom generation, may fall prey to financial scams, according to three people briefed on the CFPB’s deliberations who asked not to be named because the matter is still under discussion.
The retirement savings business in the U.S. is dominated by a group of companies that handle record-keeping and management of investments in tax-advantaged vehicles like 401(k) plans and individual retirement accounts. The group includes Fidelity Investments, JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM), Charles Schwab Corp. (SCHW) and T. Rowe Price Group Inc. (TROW) Americans held $19.4 trillion in retirement assets as of Sept. 30, 2012, according to the Investment Company Institute, an industry association; about $3.5 trillion of that was in 401(k) plans.
The Securities and Exchange Commission and the Department of Labor are the main regulators of U.S. retirement savings vehicles and funds. However, the consumer bureau — established by the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act — sees itself as a potential catalyst for promoting a coherent policy across the government, the people said.
Rollover ‘Moment’
With large numbers of Americans heading toward retirement in the coming decade, the CFPB has referred internally to this concept as “the rollover moment,” the people said.
Mark Calabria, director of financial regulation studies at the Cato Institute, a research group that promotes free markets, said that while Dodd-Frank didn’t specifically give the consumer bureau jurisdiction over investments, it could step in if the other agencies don’t.
“I could imagine the CFPB growing into a role on investment savings if it seems like the SEC is asleep at the wheel,” Calabria said in an interview.
The bureau could claim jurisdiction through its Office for Older Americans, which was established by Dodd-Frank with a mandate to improve financial literacy. It is run by Hubert H. Humphrey III, the former attorney general of Minnesota.
The retirement savings industry generally has little to do with the CFPB because the SEC is the main investment regulator, said Ianthe Zabel, an ICI spokeswoman. She declined further comment on the CFPB plans.
Credit Products
The agency officially began work in July 2011 and has focused much of its attention so far on consumer credit products, including credit cards and mortgages. In coming months, the agency is expected to turn their focus to short-term credit products including prepaid debit cards, bank overdraft fees and payday lending.
Longer-term, in addition to focusing on retirement savings, the bureau is studying mobile payments and the plight of Americans whose credit was damaged during the financial crisis, a group officials refer to as “the new subprime.”
“It may be because of things they did and it may just be because they suffered,” Cordray said in the interview. “You know if you lose your home because the rest of your block is foreclosed on, your credit history is affected.”
To contact the reporter on this story: Carter Dougherty in Washington at cdougherty6@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Maura Reynolds at mreynolds34@bloomberg.net
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Published on Jan 31, 2013
Germany cannot get its gold back from the U.S. for seven years.
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Keiser Report: Bond-Pocalypse Now (E400)
Published on Jan 31, 2013
In this episode of the Keiser Report, Max Keiser and Stacy Herbert for their 400th episode discuss Obeelzebub and Jamie Demon as the inevitable outcome of collateral faking, zombie banking and paper printing. They also discuss Russia’s central bank buying gold while David Cameron is telling porkies about UK national debt. In the second half of the show, Max Keiser talks to Ian Williams of Charteris Treasury about silver suppression and the bond-pocalypse.
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Listen to the MP3:
“William Kaye: Founder, Vice Chairman and Senior Managing Director of the Pacific Alliance Group of Companies – PACG was established in 1991 in Hong Kong.
Mr. Kaye is the Managing Partner of the Greater Asian Hedge Fund, as well as its predecessor, the Asian Hedge Fund, LP (1992-98).
Both funds have exhibited a consistent history of absolute and relative outperformance that has been recognized by independent rating organizations. Prior to founding PAG, Mr. Kaye was Manager of the Arbitrage Department (1984-1990) and a Member of the Board of Directors (1986-1990) of PaineWebber Incorporated in New York.
Mr. Kaye joined Paine Webber (PW) in 1978, leaving the Mergers & Acquisitions Department of Goldman, Sachs & Co, and successfully built PW’s Arbitrage Department into an industry leader.”
Gold price suppression is documented, not ‘conspiracy theory,’ fund manager Kaye says
8:30a ET Wednesday, January 30, 2013
Dear Friend of GATA and Gold:
In the third and final excerpt of his interview with King World News, Pacific Group fund manager William Kaye predicts a short squeeze in silver even bigger than the one he expects in gold:
http://kingworldnews.com/kingworldnews/KWN_DailyWeb/Entries/2013/1/30_Ka…
In the full audio of his interview, Kaye praises GATA’s work and says there is much documentation of central bank intervention in the gold market to suppress the price and that such complaints are not mere “conspiracy theory”:
http://www.kingworldnews.com/kingworldnews/Broadcast/Entries/2013/1/30_W…
CHRIS POWELL, Secretary/Treasurer
Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee Inc.
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LISTEN:
>>>
Belgian MP LAURENT LOUIS stands against war – English Voice Over
” http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCTDwIQmAnzSPlR_iivSutvg?feature=watch
Youtube user: Feuillien Geraldine
Published on Jan 22, 2013
CLICK ON THE SUBTITLE ICON for the TRANSLATION in ENGLISH or DUTCH.
Belgian MP LAURENT LOUIS stands against war in Mali and exposes the international neo-colonial plot at the Belgian Parliament.
On January the 17th, 32 years old Belgiam MP Laurent Louis, the most controversial and demonized national political figure ever, explained why he voted against the belgian support to war in Mali. Meanwhile, he expressed his disgust and wrath against the criminal foreign policies of the belgian elite and its submission to foreign financial and interests groups. For the first time at the Belgiam Parliament, he evokes that 9/11 was made up and says what no one before him has never dared to speak out!
Please share this exceptional moment of truth. There were other interventions as powerful from that man regarding the necessity to re-open the DUTROUX CASE, since he has been confronted to official pictures of the pedophile’s little victims that dramatically contradicted the official version of the cause of their death.
I’ll translate his intervention on that subject within the next days because too many dark secrets are poisoning our democracies, and because it seems like in the heart of EUROPE, dark secrets have become a raw material.
Thank’s for sharing. This man needs and deserve our support.”
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http://www.veteransforpeace.org/pressroom/news/2013/01/25/vfp-asks-peabody-stop-war-mother-earth
VFP Asks Peabody To Stop War on Mother Earth
January 25, 2013
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact:
Paul Appell, afarms@mymctc.net, 309-335-1549
Tarak Kauff, takauff@gmail.com, 845-706-0187
VFP Asks Peabody To Stop War on Mother Earth
At 11 am, Friday, Jan. 25, members of Veterans For Peace (VFP), headquartered in St. Louis, and other organizations will gather in Kiener Plaza, across from the headquarters of Peabody Energy Corp. to demand that the company:
- Stop all forms of strip mining, including mountaintop removal, a practice it claims to have ended, but which continues with spinoff coal companies like Patriot.
- Stop polluting the watershed and air and stop coal extraction in favor of renewable energy sources.
- Return millions in tax breaks to the city of St. Louis. In 2010, Peabody Coal, the largest coal-mining company in the world, received a $61 million tax break from the St. Louis Development Corporation, including $2 million from the St. Louis public schools.
Veterans for Peace joins with MORE (Missourians Organizing for Reform and Empowerment), RAMPS (Radical Action for Mountain People’s Survival) and Black Mesa Indigenous Support (BMIS) in making these demands.
They are presenting these demands because of concerns such as:
- Peabody Western Coal Co., a subsidiary of Peabody Energy Corp., has strip-mined Black Mesa, which overlaps Navajo and Hopi lands in the Four Corners area of the Southwest, since 1968. Each year more than one billion gallons of groundwater is removed from the Black Mesa aquifer to make the toxic coal slurry needed to move the coal through a long-distance pipeline.
- Every day in West Virginia 3 million pounds of high explosives are detonated to remove mountaintops that cover coal seams. Over the course of a year that adds up to 27 times the power of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Mountains, valleys, streams and the lives of people and wildlife are forever changed and in many cases, destroyed. Peabody, which claims to have stopped MTR, has non-the-less done incalculable damage, while other coal companies like Arch Coal and Patriot Coal (a spin off of Peabody) both headquartered in St. Louis, still use the process.
- According to a report by Physicians for Social Responsibility and backed by other groups, pollution from burning coal kills tens of thousands of people each year due to asthma, chronic pulmonary obstruction, emphysema, heart attack, stroke and cancer. http://www.psr.org/assets/pdfs/psr-coal-fullreport.pdf
- The National Academy of Sciences concluded that coal-fired plants and overall damages from coal cost U. S. taxpayers an estimated $62 billion in environmental and health outlays in 2005 http://dels.nas.edu/Report/Hidden-Costs-Energy-Unpriced-Consequences/12794?bname=best
VFP national board member Tarak Kauff explained, “There’s a battle going on between huge fossil fuel corporations like Peabody Energy Corp. and a growing public interest grassroots movement. In the end this conflict may matter more than those in Viet Nam, Iraq or Afghanistan because the outcome may determine whether life as we know it will continue on this planet. Members of VFP, many who have experienced directly the horrors of war, realize that the war on Mother Earth is potentially the most dangerous war of all. We are more than veterans of war, we are veterans for peace. Real peace is more than just the absence of war. Peace means justice, in this case environmental justice. Raping, polluting and destroying the environment is not justice.”
Paul Appell, a combat veteran of the Vietnam War, farmer and VFP member, added, “After working the land full time for nearly half a century, I know that one reaps what one sows. In Vietnam I learned that when one sows violence, one reaps blood. As one who has daily witnessed strip-mining here in Knox County, Illinois, for 50-plus years and farmed strip-mined ground for 35, I have experienced the war on Mother Nature. As I stand in solidarity with my fellow citizens protesting Peabody Energy Corporation’s coal removal methods, it is with intimate, firsthand knowledge that violence begets more violence.”
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Liberation of the Human Family – Universal Freedom Network (UFN)
Published on Jan 24, 2013
A conversation with Heather Tucci-Jarraf, Trustee of The One People’s Public Trust:
http://youtu.be/K5jwjA22MfY
Free At Last Web Site:
http://shiftshaper.org/freeatlast/category/free-at-last-2/
Peoples Trust 1776 Web Site:
http://peoplestrust1776.org/
OPPT Update Link:
http://removingtheshackles.blogspot.ca/2013/01/jan-24-update-tantrums-spinnin…
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Episode 255 – Shoulders of Giants: Lysander Spooner
January 26, 2013
While statists across America (and around the world) were celebrating the inauguration of Obama last weekend, anti-statists celebrated a festive occasion of their own: the 205th birthday of Lysander Spooner. Join us this week on The Corbett Report as we explore the life, works, and thought of Lysander Spooner, lawyer, entrepreneur, Deist, abolitionist, freethinker, and one of the giants of the American anarchist tradition.
We’re joined by Gary Chartier of the Center for a Stateless Society for a discussion about the life and work of Lysander Spooner. We talk about Spooner’s American Letter Mail Company, his abolitionist activism, and the development of his anarchist philosophy and his arguments against the state.
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Keiser Report: Threshold of Tyranny Passed (E396, ft. Alex Jones)
Published on Jan 22, 2013
In this episode, Max Keiser and Stacy Herbert discuss the closing of the American mind as intellectual troublemakers like Aaron Swartz are locked up for decades rather than set free to innovate. They look at the two tier justice system in which these intellectual troublemakers are persecuted while political benefactors on Wall Street are allowed to commit an endless array of financial crimes without any fear of prosecution. In the second half of the show, Max Keiser talks to Alex Jones about his appearance on Piers Morgan’s show on CNN. They also discuss the targeting of activists and the role of new media taking on the dinosaurs of media.
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James Gilliland – Solutions And Critial Thinking – 19 January 2013
The old grids are falling away, many are in between worlds, some are struggling to hold on to the old ways. Let them go, they do not serve anyone not even the tyrants. The end game is for Earth to awaken and heal; which includes all life upon her and move to the next level. The prophesies of the beast which consumes, controls and dominates everyone and everything is being seen for what it is and those who serve the beast can no longer hide.
The head of the beast is the international bankster families and their world is unsustainable, borrowed and leveraged to the point of extinction. Just like any predator or parasite that gluttons itself to the point of starving and killing the host thus is the path of the tyrants. Universal Law cannot be usurped and the reactions to their actions will come swiftly. Taking the jobs, houses, and incomes away leaving an insurmountable debt is pure unbridled greed and ignorance when it comes to sustainability. Stealing trillions and leaving everyone else holding the bag thinking there will be no repercussions is the height of arrogance. All these retched souls will have in their passing is the karma and weight of their actions, they will not be allowed to reincarnate for the Earth will have risen beyond their frequency.
I was asked about gun control and they said the problem is gun control never works. If there was a society that lived a loving, joyous life of peace and freedom where the people prospered and trusted their leaders, a world without predators and tyrants there would be no need for guns other than with collectors of history and those who like to hear loud noises. Poverty, psychotropic drugs in place of healing therapies, the gross uneven dispersal of wealth and a tyrannical system based on competition and separation is the problem. Taking guns away will not cure the ills of society. It will also fall into a grander plan of tyranny to dumb down, eliminate the majority of and completely control a defenseless society.
When you know the objectives of the tyrants, you know who is behind the wars, disease, and poverty and yes the killing of children. How can one vote for wars, use drones to kill innocent children and families, walk with heavily armed guards packing automatic weapons protecting their families in many cases and tell others only they have this privilege? It is a hypocritical elitist position. Those giving the solution to take the guns all away in most cases are the ones creating the problems and cannot be trusted to solve anything. If they want everyone to give up their guns lets see them be the first. A politician, who has stolen, embezzled, tortured, killed and profited greatly as the war and disease profiteers puppets are the ones screaming the loudest for gun control. Why would that be? Are they afraid of their karma? Are they afraid of the reaction to their actions—what would happen if the masses found them out? Have you studied history and what happened to people when their guns were confiscated? Can you say genocide did not soon follow? Why did the vast majority of these mass shootings happen in gun free zones and where they had the strictest gun control laws? It is like posting a sign no resistance here do as you wish. Passing a law has never been the solution; why not look at the real problem; which begins in consciousness. The failure of society not educated to honor and respect life. The failure of healing modalities and the use of psychotropic drugs to mask the problems rather than heal them. The gross uneven dispersal of wealth, “poverty.” The complete lack of trust of our governments, religious and most institutions in general. This is the solution not a bunch of elitist hypocrites passing laws and forcing others to do what they themselves will not. Let’s not be distracted from the real problem; which is what many of these events are for. To allow your emotions to guide you without critical thinking is the road to enslavement. If you used critical thinking apply it to these events with the wisdom of knowing the agenda of the tyrants then you will find the truth. If not you will be led like a sheep to slaughter blaming the other sheep for your predicament.
james gilliland
www.eceti.org
End.
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In Case There Was Any Confusion Just Who The Fed Works For…
January 7, 2013
Source: Zero Hedge
Today, to little fanfare, the Fed announced a major binding settlement with the banks over robosigning and fraudclosure, which benefited the large banks, impaired the small ones (which is great: room for even more consolidation, and even more TBest-erTF, which benefits America’s handful of remaining megabanks), and was nothing but one minor slap on the banking sector’s consolidated wrist involving a laughable $3 billion cash payment. As part of the settlement, the US public is expected to ignore how much money the banks actually made in the primary and secondary market over the years courtesy of countless Linda Greens and robosigning abuses. A guess: the “settlement” represents an IRR of some 10,000% to 100,000% for the settling banks. We are confident once the details are ironed out, this will be an accurate range.
Yet what is most disturbing, or not at all, depending on one’s level of naivete, is the response of Elijah Cummings, ranking member of the house Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. As a reminder, Congress had demanded that the settlement not be announced before there was a hearing on it. This did not even dent the Fed’s plans to proceed with today’s 11 am public announcement which can now not be revoked. It is Cummings’ response which shows, yet again, just who is the true master of the Federal Reserve.
From The Committee on Oversight and Government Reform:
Today, Rep. Elijah E. Cummings, Ranking Member of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, issued the following statement regarding the public announcement of a new settlement between the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), the Federal Reserve Board, and 10 mortgage servicers without first briefing the Oversight Committee as requested on a bipartisan basis last week:
“I am deeply disappointed that the OCC and the Federal Reserve finalized this settlement and effectively terminated the Independent Foreclosure Review process before providing Congress answers to serious questions about how this settlement amount was determined, who these funds will go to, and what will happen to other families who were abused by these mortgage servicing companies, but have not yet had their cases reviewed. I do not know what the rush was to make this settlement without answering these key questions, and although I look forward to obtaining information about how this deal may assist homeowners, I have serious concerns that this settlement may allow banks to skirt what they owe and sweep past abuses under the rug without determining the full harm borrowers have suffered.”
On Friday, Cummings and Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa sent a bipartisan letter to Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and Comptroller of the Currency Thomas Curry requesting a briefing before any new settlement was agreed to or announced publicly.
The statement concludes as follows:
In calls to the agencies this morning, agency officials stated that they
would not provide the briefing or answer additional questions before
going public with the announcement of the deal.
And that, folks, says it all, although it should not come as a surprise to anyone who has by now realized that the only goal the Fed has is to boost the Russell 2000 to new record highs, instead of giving any part of a rat’s anatomy about the US public or the broader economy.
>>>
Banks Put Linda Green Behind Them With $10 Billion Robosigning Settlement
January 7, 2013
The chapter on robosigning, i.e., Fraudclosure, is now closed with a $10 billion wristslap on US banks, of which a whopping $3.3 billion in the form of direct cash and $5.2 billion in “other assistance.” The banks who are now absolved from any and all Linda Green transgressions in the past include: Aurora, Bank of America, Citibank, JPMorgan Chase, MetLife Bank, PNC, Sovereign, SunTrust, U.S. Bank, and Wells Fargo. And so, banks can resume to resell properties with mortgages on which the original lien may or may not have been lost in the sands of time.
From the Fed:
Independent Foreclosure Review to Provide $3.3 Billion in Payments, $5.2 Billion in Mortgage Assistance
Ten mortgage servicing companies subject to enforcement actions for deficient practices in mortgage loan servicing and foreclosure processing have reached an agreement in principle with the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) and the Federal Reserve Board to pay more than $8.5 billion in cash payments and other assistance to help borrowers.
The sum includes $3.3 billion in direct payments to eligible borrowers and $5.2 billion in other assistance, such as loan modifications and forgiveness of deficiency judgments. The payments involve mortgage servicers operating under enforcement actions issued in April 2011 by the OCC, the Federal Reserve, and the Office of Thrift Supervision. The agreement ensures that more than 3.8 million borrowers whose homes were in foreclosure in 2009 and 2010 with the participating servicers will receive cash compensation in a timely manner.
Eligible borrowers are expected to receive compensation ranging from hundreds of dollars up to $125,000, depending on the type of possible servicer error.
This agreement includes Aurora, Bank of America, Citibank, JPMorgan Chase, MetLife Bank, PNC, Sovereign, SunTrust, U.S. Bank, and Wells Fargo. For these participating servicers, fulfillment of the agreement would meet the requirements of the enforcement actions that mandated that the servicers retain independent consultants to conduct an Independent Foreclosure Review.
As a result of this agreement, the participating servicers would cease the Independent Foreclosure Review, which involved case-by-case reviews, and replace it with a broader framework allowing eligible borrowers to receive compensation significantly more quickly. The OCC and the Federal Reserve accepted this agreement because it provides the greatest benefit to consumers subject to unsafe and unsound mortgage servicing and foreclosure practices during the relevant period in a more timely manner than would have occurred under the review process. Eligible borrowers will receive compensation whether or not they filed a request for review form, and borrowers do not need to take further action to be eligible for compensation.
A payment agent will be appointed to administer payments to borrowers on behalf of the servicers. Eligible borrowers are expected to be contacted by the payment agent by the end of March with payment details. Borrowers will not be required to execute a waiver of any legal claims they may have against their servicer as a condition for receiving payment. In addition, the servicers’ internal complaint process will remain available to borrowers.
The agencies continue to work to reach similar agreements in principle with other servicers that are not parties to the agreement announced today, but that are also subject to enforcement actions for deficient practices in mortgage loan servicing and foreclosure processing.
OCC and Federal Reserve examiners are continuing to closely monitor the servicers’ implementation of plans required by the enforcement actions issued in April 2011 to correct the unsafe and unsound mortgage servicing and foreclosure practices.
* * *
The signatures below have now been “indemnified”:
>>>
You Are The Battlefield!
There’s no looking for crowd validation.
There’s no waiting for outside redemption.
There’s no collective bargaining to rely on.
The awakening is you. Only you.
That’s what all this ruckus is about.
The battle for your spirit and soul.
And that’s the boat each of us is in.
There is nothing more important in this life for you, or me, than waking up.
Once that’s straightened out the rest will follow.
How we perceive the world around us creates and reinforces the world around us.
Once we become conscious and aware that this existing matrix we’re witnessing is an arbitrary creation manipulated by power-crazed puppeteers, however you perceive them, that is when the change happens.
And the Universe will tell you what to do from there.
>>>
http://nexusilluminati.blogspot.com/2012/06/10-ways-to-stop-being-slave-and-bring.html
We Are Many Lights.
________________________________________________________
http://www.sophialove.org/1/post/2013/01/everybodys-right-still.html
(Re-posted from October 2012)
I am filled with hope, love and excitement for what is to come. Something has changed recently and although I cannot show you a picture of what it was, I can tell you what I see. I see all of us right.
There are so many versions of truth. What if they were all correct? We stand today a divided planet. There are nations and within them states and within them counties and towns. Within the towns there are men, women and children; from every nation, following every religion, team, political party, interest and sexual preference. Within each of these you will find a belief so strong that it seems unchangeable.
Here is a version of life I am coming to resonate with, for it allows for every difference. We are all right. The Cabal has infiltrated the speaking of the “Channels”, while there are some authentic “Channels” as well. There are man made ships as well as off world ships. There is both divine and human intervention. There is a dark force looking for domination and destruction while there are very human men and women who have followed the “service to self” route all on their own. There are “Archons” wreaking havoc and there are Alphabet agencies of human beings carrying out criminal agenda’s. All stories contain truth.
Everyone is right. Everyone is love. You chose to be part of a grand plan – to lift the Earth out of the darkness she has been in; to ascend. The stories are all true. You are here to participate, not because you are better than anyone else, but because it is time now to restore balance to the Earth. The depths of the darkness demanded a great deal of light. You are that light.
There are forces for balance and forces for destruction and forces for peace. The sacred texts speak truth, although the literal interpretations have led to division and speculation and misunderstanding. Many of them were taken out of context, which does not negate their value, or make them irrelevant.
The force that yields the greatest power is the force for One. You are that force. The One has asked for a great influx of light to the earth right now because there is an imbalance; the dark/destruction has seized and held this planet for long enough. Our work is not complete. The balance must be maintained once it is achieved.
We have free will. Man chose this path. We have been (unknown to our conscious selves) collectively in service to a destructive force. This force has one goal and it is absolute – it creates and then destroys as a show of power – absolute power. That is its only purpose. War, ownership and corruption are its methods. When it realizes there are no longer possibilities for domination it moves on – it has.
Its minions, the Archons/Illuminati, do not realize yet that the game is over. They will continue. Like chickens without heads, they are unaware and still running around, doing whatever chickens do. This is where the free will of man comes into play.
Man must now continue to make a stand against destruction by resisting those efforts. He will be helped by off world sources if he chooses to be helped. We have to ask for help, not ask to be “saved”. We do not need a savior; we are here to save ourselves. We are the One. We have come here ourselves, to save ourselves, in service to humanity; the One.
It would appear that we have asked. Although our history is filled with darkness, the overall picture of things is not. We must get past the horror and disbelief of our past and move on to action in our present. It is time to do what we feel called to do.
There are many possibilities. We’ve learned that there is corruption in our banks, corporations, religions and governments – we can start just about anywhere. Think of things to do that will no longer support a self-destructive system. Self reliance and collaboration is key.
It’s not necessary that we all get on the same train, yet it is time to start moving. We are here with purpose. We are here to love absolutely. This may not always be easy, but it is necessary and will alter our world.
Balance means that both sides always exist. This is the lesson of every spiritual teacher we’ve encountered. The earth is a template for growth and evolution. The challenges propel us; we are here for the stimulus they offer. We have come to learn. We are Master creators. We know what to do. We all planned this party, ages ago.
We are the One we’ve been waiting for.
________________________________________________________
>>>
search and see more:
CONTRIBUTIONISM: Michael Tellinger – grassroots South Africa solutions
Uploaded on Jan 2, 2012
A Blueprint For A New Social Structure
Based on the Ubuntu Contribution System
Read more at http://www.contributionism.org
P.O. Box 204, Waterval Boven, 1195 South Africa
We, the people, have appointed the politicians as our servants to do the best they can for us — the people. The politicians and the government have failed us dramatically and have betrayed the dream of Nelson Mandela and many other humans of integrity who dedicated their lives to our freedom.
IT IS NOW CLEAR THAT THE GOVERNMENT AND A HANDFUL OF LARGE CORPORATIONS HAVE STOLEN THE COUNTRY
FROM ITS PEOPLE.
THE COUNTRY BELONGS TO US ,
WE, THE PEOPLE NEED TO TAKE IT BACK.
SIGN UP FOR THIS IMPORTANT NEW MOVEMENT AND LET THE PEOPLE GOVERN –NOT POLITICIANS AND CORPORATIONS.
BRING UBUNTU BACK INTO OUR COMMUNITIES
>>>
UBUNTU Party Opening Statement by Michael Tellinger
Published on Oct 27, 2012
Michael Tellinger gives a short introduction to the UBUNTU Liberation Movement and political Party in South Africa. http://www.ubuntuparty.org.za
>>>
Keiser Report: Banker Infestation (E386)
Published on Dec 29, 2012
“Unfortunately you (the world) are dealing with an entrenched monopolist, oligarchy that will stop at nothing to prevent competition…” – Max Keiser
In this episode, Max Keiser and Stacy Herbert discuss whether things are looking better or worse for the American worker. While Stacy argues that the return of some manufacturing is a sign that wealth creating jobs may return to the US, Max counters that the system is so corrupt that the chances of labor getting any cut of the wealth is nil and that the Internet giants will prevent the rise of a powerful decentralized economy online.
In the second half, Max Keiser talks to Professor Jonathan Feldman about the Global Teach-In and about a boycott and short sale campaign and creating an industrial policy for America because right now the US even outsources some military production to China.
>>>
Political blame game, public confusion and division…
US aiming to avoid year-end budget crunch
Published on Dec 28, 2012
avert a fiscal cliff. Al Jazeera’s Sami Zeidan discusses this with William Black, an associate economics professor at the University of Missouri, and a former federal financial regulator.
>>>
“It is one thing to be motivated by our outrage at the lies and manipulation we are subjected to each and every day. It is another thing entirely to be driven by blind hatred of this system. Tonight on the final episode of Corbett Report Radio James warns against the temptation to define ourselves by hatred of the way things are and offers an alternative: to define ourselves by love for our friends and family, the world around us, and the world we can help to bring into being. Join us tonight for the final voyage of Corbett Report Radio.”
>>>
INNOVATION ON THE FRINGE
What do pirates, terrorists, computer hackers and inner city gangs have in common with Silicon Valley? Innovation. Across the globe, diverse innovators operating in the black and gray economies are developing solutions to a myriad of challenges. Far from being “deviant entrepreneurs” that pose threats to our social and economic stability, these innovators display remarkable ingenuity, pioneering original methods and best practices that we can learn from and apply in our own worlds. The Misfit Economy seeks to unveil and leverage this new well-spring of ingenuity. Join us in exploring the dark side of innovation.
READ MORE: http://www.misfiteconomy.com/
>>>
HOW SAFE IS YOUR SAVINGS IN THE BANKS?
Published on Jul 12, 2012 This has to be the most shocking financial survey ever completed. Reporting the news the financial MSM will not, in this video I present proof of the trouble our financial system is in. If you don’t have TRUST in a free market you have NO market. Read for yourself:
http://mobile.reuters.com/article/idUSBRE86906G20120710?irpc=932
>>>
Our Current DEBT SLAVERY System: Michael Rivero
Part One of Three parts Published on Dec 27, 2012
http://whatreallyhappened.com/
ATTENTION: “Facebook has blocked my account. According to a member post below, Facebook accounts for truth bloggers are being shut down by Facebook. These include… Michael F Rivero, Anthony J Hilder, William Lewis, Richard Gage, William Rodriguez, Infowar Artist, Weare Change, Wacboston At Twitterr, Michael Murphy Tmp, Robert M Bowman, Peter Dale Scott, Jason Infowars, Mike Skuthan, Packy Savvenas, Sean Wright ,and Katherine Albrecht.
In the days before 9-11, the FBI went around the nation shutting down the websites of Muslim charities, so that no opposing voice could be heard to challenge the “Muslims did it” propaganda. Looks like a repeat, which may herald a major false-flag event in the immediate future.” – Quote from http://whatreallyhappened.com/
>>>
THOUGHT FOR THE DAY!
The SSRIs Are the Problem – NOT the Guns!
Published on Dec 23, 2012
Congress knows about this! There has already been hearings held over this matter.
Go to SSRIstories.com for many pages of reported incidents regarding how pharmaceutical drugs are related to the many acts of violence in this country & others.
http://ssristories.com
Michael Rivero on Justin TV: http://www.justin.tv/michaelrivero
http://whatreallyhappened.com
end.
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https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/12/congress-disgracefully-approves-fisa-warrantless-eavesdropping-bill-five-more
December 28, 2012 | By Trevor Timm
Congress Disgracefully Approves the FISA Warrantless Spying Bill for Five More Years, Rejects All Privacy Amendments
“Today, after just one day of rushed debate, the Senate shamefully voted on a five-year extension to the FISA Amendments Act, an unconsitutional law that openly allows for warrantless surveillance of Americans’ overseas communications.
Incredibly, the Senate rejected all the proposed amendments that would have brought a modicum of transparency and oversight to the government’s activities, despite previous refusals by the Executive branch to even estimate how many Americans are surveilled by this program or reveal critical secret court rulings interpreting it.
The common-sense amendments the Senate hastily rejected were modest in scope and written with the utmost deference to national security concerns. The Senate had months to consider them, but waited until four days before the law was to expire to bring them to the floor, and then used the contrived time crunch to stifle any chances of them passing.
Sen. Ron Wyden’s amendment would not have taken away any of the NSA’s powers, it just would have forced intelligence agencies to send Congress a report every year detailing how their surveillance was affecting ordinary Americans. Yet Congress voted to be purposely kept in the dark about a general estimate of how many Americans have been spied on.
You can watch Sen. Ron Wyden’s entire, riveting floor speech on the privacy dangers and lack of oversight in the FISA Amendments Act here.
Sen. Jeff Merkley’s amendment would have encouraged (not even forced!) the Attorney General to declassify portions of secret FISA court opinions—or just release summaries of them if they were too sensitive. This is something the administration itself promised to do three years ago. We know—because the government has admitted—that at least one of those opinions concluded the government had violated the Constitution. Yet Congress also voted to keep this potentially critical interpretation of a public law a secret.
Tellingly, Sen. Rand Paul’s “Fourth Amendment Protection Act,” which would have affirmed Americans’ emails are protected from unwarranted search and seizures (just like physical letters and phone calls), was voted down by the Senate in a landslide.
The final vote for re-authorizing five more years of the FISA Amendments Act and secretive domestic spying was 73-23. Our thanks goes out to the twenty-three brave Senators who stood up for Americans’ constitutional rights yesterday. If only we had more like them.
Of course, the fight against illegal and unconsitutional warrantless wiretapping is far from over. Since neither the President, who once campaigned on a return to rule of law on surveillance of Americans, nor the Congress, which has proven to be the enabler-in-chief of the Executive’s overreach, have been willing to protect the privacy of Americans in their digital papers, all eyes should now turn to the Courts.
EFF was just in federal court in San Francisco two weeks ago, challenging the NSA’s untargeted dragnet warrantless surveillance program. And the Supreme Court will soon rule whether the ACLU’s constitutional challenge to the “targeted” portions of the FISA Amendments Act can go forward.
But make no mistake: this vote was nothing less than abdication by Congress of its role as watchdog over Executive power, and a failure of its independent obligation to protect the Bill of Rights. The FISA Amendments Act and the ongoing warrantless spying on Americans has been, and will continue to be, a blight on our nation and our Constitution.”
end.
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http://stratrisks.com/geostrat/10074 December 27, 2012
Australian spies demand immunity to ‘infiltrate, train’ with terrorist groups
Editor’s Note: Most likely they want retroactive immunity for past and future actions.
Intelligence officials in Australia are demanding legal immunity to infiltrate and train with terrorist groups like Al-Qaeda.
The Attorney-General’s Department wants to authorise Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) agents and informants to provide training to, or be trained by, terrorists in covert missions.
Bur agents risk criminal prosecution for ‘associating covertly with targets’ even if they are collecting intelligence.
According to the Australian, a department spokeswoman said ASIO officers wanted the same legal immunity granted to police working undercover.
She pointed out that in order to obtain intelligence on threats to security, it may sometimes be necessary for ASIO to engage in an authorised way with individuals who may be involved in criminal activity.
According to the paper, the Attorney-General’s Department also wants agents from Australia’s overseas spy agency, the Australian Secret Intelligence Service, to be allowed to conduct weapons training with police and military officers, including soldiers or police from the US, UK, Canada and New Zealand.
The departmental spokeswoman said the Gillard government ‘has made no decisions’ about the demands as it was awaiting the parliamentary committee’s report, due next year, the paper added.
–ANI
end.
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NYT Defends Fortune 500’s Global Human Exploitation
http://landdestroyer.blogspot.com.au/2012/12/nyt-defends-fortune-500s-global-human.html#more
December 27, 2012 (LD) – While the US funds and arms sectarian death squads across the Arab World under the guise of “promoting democracy,” it props its own economy up on a vast network of global human exploitation. From Walmart’s sweatshop-death traps in Bangladesh, to Apple’s deplorable partnership with Taiwan’s Foxconn, millions go underpaid while overworked under dangerous, inhumane conditions to fuel America’s consumerist paradigm.
Public backlash against these practices range from outrage over human exploitation (less common) to complaints that the West’s economies are suffering due to these outsourced jobs (more common). As this backlash increases, and as technology reaches a point where real viable local alternatives may soon displace large, centralized corporations, a perfect storm is forming on the horizon.
Helping to stave off the inevitable, is the New York Times, whose article, “Signs of Changes Taking Hold in Electronics Factories in China,” makes an absolute mockery out of both their own readership’s intelligence as well as the plight of the vast workforce subjected to Western human exploitation. The “signs of change” NYT reports on, include the replacement of 5 dollar plastic stools with 10 dollar wooden chairs and “increased wages” that still fall well below fair compensation.
In reality, corporations like Walmart and Apple do business overseas because the workers they exploit there will never have to be fairly compensated or treated humanely to the degree demanded in the West – should they ever be, there would be absolutely no point of outsourcing jobs overseas in the first place. But the NYT piece serves the purpose of giving faux-progress reports to faux-progressives – allowing them to continue tapping away on their iPads, purchased from the consumer troughs of mega-retailers like Target and Walmart, absolutely guilt-free.
end.
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The Fed is Playing a Very Dangerous Game
http://www.zerohedge.com/contributed/2012-12-27/fed-playing-very-dangerous-game
by Phoenix Capital Research on 12/27/2012
The US Fed is committed to keeping interest rates low for the simple fact that if interest rates were to rise then the payments on the debt would send the US into an EU-syle debt crisis along with the commensurate intense austerity measures being implemented.
Unfortunately for the Fed, the bond markets may indeed force this in spite of the Fed’s efforts.
Weimar Germany, like most historic episodes of hyperinflation, occurred when Germany’s Central Bank began monetizing its debts. This worked until the country lost credibility in the international bond markets at which point the Central Bank was forced to monetize everything resulting in a currency collapse and one of the worst episodes of hyperinflation in history.
The US has been moving increasingly down this path which each new QE program. The two reasons the US has not yet entered an inflationary death spiral are:
- The fact that the US continues to maintain its credibility in the bond markets (at least compared to Europe and Japan).
- Large financial institutions’ needs for high-grade sovereign bond collateral.
Regarding #1, the US has never defaulted on its debt. Compared to Germany (another safe haven), which has defaulted on its debts twice in the last 100 years, the US remains one of the most credible governments in the world, regardless of how bad the country’s finances are becoming (for now at least).
Regarding the collateral situation, as I’ve explained in recent issues (see the “C” Word) one of the most critical issues in the financial system is the shortage of high grade collateral to backstop the $700 trillion derivatives market.
With France and the ESM bailout fund recently losing their AAA status, there is already a scramble for high grade collateral in the system. The US, despite losing its AAA rated status is still consider high grade due to its having never defaulted on its debt. With that in mind, the Fed decision to take US Treasuries at a time when more and more countries are losing their AAA rated status means that even less high grade collateral will be in the system.
Indeed, as I’ve noted before, because so much of the US debt market is already held by government controlled entities, the Treasuries shortage is even worse than the below article indicates.
Clearinghouses, run by firms such as Chicago-based CME Group (CME) and London-based LCH.Clearnet Group, make traders provide collateral, including government bonds, that can be seized and easily converted into cash to cover defaults. Traders may need from $2 trillion to $4 trillion in extra collateral to meet the new requirements, according to Timothy Keaney, chief executive officer of BNY Mellon Asset Servicing.
The trouble is finding all that high-grade debt. The U.S. had $10.8 trillion in Treasuries outstanding at the end of August. Other countries, including Japan and European nations rated AAA or AA, had about $24 trillion of debt in the second quarter of 2011, according to an April report by the International Monetary Fund. Those government securities are already in heavy demand from central banks and investors.
The solution: At least seven banks plan to let customers swap lower-rated securities that don’t meet standards, in return for a loan of Treasuries or similar holdings that do qualify, a process dubbed “collateral transformation.” The maneuver allows investors who don’t have assets that meet a clearinghouse’s standards to pledge corporate bonds or mortgage-linked securities to a bank in exchange for a loan of Treasuries. The investor then posts the Treasuries—the transformed collateral—to the clearinghouse. The bank earns fees plus interest, and the investor is obliged at some point to return the Treasuries. In effect, the collateral is being rented…
JPMorgan Chase (JPM) and Bank of America (BAC) are already marketing their new collateral-transformation desks, executives at the companies say. Other banks confirmed they’re planning to offer the service too, including Bank of New York Mellon (BK), Barclays (BCS), Deutsche Bank (DB), and State Street (STT).
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-09-20/a-shortage-of-bonds-to-back-derivatives-bets
Here’s the actual amount of Treasuries available to the banks:
| Total US Sovereign Debt | $16 trillion |
| Foreign Nation holdings | $5.4 trillion |
| Intergovernmental holdings | $4.8 trillion |
| US Federal Reserve | $1.5 trillion |
| Remaining | $4.3 trillion |
Indeed, as the below article reveals, the search for high quality collateral is one of the primary items holding up the Treasury market. The Treasury’s latest information reveals that:
Foreign ownership of U.S. Treasury securities rose to a record level in October, a sign that overseas investors remain confident in U.S. debt despite a potential budget crisis.
Total foreign holdings of U.S. Treasurys rose to $5.48 trillion in October, the Treasury Department said Monday. That was up 0.1 percent from September. Still, the increase of $6 billion was the weakest since total holdings fell in December 2011.
China, the largest holder of U.S. government debt, increased its holdings slightly to $1.16 trillion. Japan, the second-largest holder, boosted its holdings by a smaller amount to $1.13 trillion. Brazil, the country with the third-largest holdings, increased its total to $255.2 billion.
My point with all of this is that the search for collateral will drive yields lower… until the bond markets truly begin to spin out of control. In the meantime, the US Fed is playing a very dangerous game by purchasing as many Treasuries as it is. But that game can last much longer than anticipated.
How precisely these issues will finally play out is a mystery. But the consequences will be tremendous. And enormous fortunes will be made by those who get it right. The first key clues will be when Bunds and Treasuries begin to nose dive in a big way.
On that note, we’ve recently prepared a Free Special Report outlining how to prepare for this as well as the ongoing currency debasement that is pushing inflation higher. It’s called Protect Yourself From Inflation and it outlines how inflation has already developed in the financial system as well as which investments will profit from it most.
You can pick up your FREE copy here:
http://gainspainscapital.com/gpc-inflation/
Best Regards
Graham Summers
end.
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A Politician’s Promise
http://mises.ca/posts/blog/a-politicians-promise/
Wednesday, December 26th, 2012 by James E. Miller
The sure sign of a halfwit is someone who believes a politician’s promise. They can be observed at candidate rallies with their faces beaming and their hands grasping tightly to a cardboard sign. In bars and restaurants they speak endlessly on how their preferred dictator is smarter, kinder, and cuter than the rest. In doing so, they make up for a lack of drunkenness with exuberance over the prospect of being ruled over. This mix turns the political enthusiast into a package more bothersome than either the chastising puritan or the destitute drunk.
This heap of idiocy finds its source in the promises made by public officeholders. Instead of relying on intelligence and reason to make their case, all an aspiring politico has to do is declare before a mob what he can give it in exchange for their votes. Every election hinges upon the degree that he can manipulate the public into believing his sincerity. Electoral contests are won and lost by the biggest coalition of fools who chant slogans devoid of actual meaning and purpose.
With the recent reelection of Barack Obama, there is speculation abound on how far the soon-to-be anointed king will deliver on his promised agenda. His leftist base of support is expecting an aggressive launch of statist initiatives aimed at righting some undefined injustice. Many of Obama’s detractors seriously believe he will use the Oval Office to institute a kind of socialist hell. Both are wrong. Obama’s second term will be a continuation of the centralization and consolidation of the state that has been occurring since the ratification of the Constitution. The path has already been laid out by the ruling cadre of politicians, high level bureaucrats, military generals, CEOs of banks, and the heads of politically-favored corporations. Obama’s promise of a robust American economy will not come to fruition because that was never the goal. Like all presidencies before it, the Obama presidency is there to ensure the “right” people keep having their pocket’s filled.
Meanwhile, an increasing number of young adults are becoming disillusioned with their own future and income earning potential. Many have witnessed the success of their parents and are now questioning why they aren’t experiencing the same level of achievement. In other words, they make perfect targets for political sloganeering. Through pledges for good jobs, these unemployed will easily be whipped into a frenzy of support for whichever candidate promises them a decent, salaried job. Their role as dupes has already been enshrined by the political class.
The record of unkempt campaign promises may be staggering but it has so far failed to deter a significant portion of people from participating in the electoral process. Time and time again, voters are promised an end to war, poverty, sickness, unemployment, addiction, obesity, starvation, homelessness, mental illness, crime, and violence. And with every election, each problem is exacerbated through state policies. Left to its own devices, a free, market economy has a tendency to improve living standards for all. That’s precisely why economic freedom is never granted by the state. It would make every politician, government worker, and state contractor’s perceived worth vanish overnight.
There are two types of promises that originate from a politician’s breath. The first is a starry-eyed pledge that is practically unworkable. The second is an assurance that would constitute a threat if given by a private individual. When announced, these promises are sold as a cure-all for all of society’s ills. They hardly ever come into fruition but are referred back to only if they aid in another reelection campaign.
The science of politicking is quite simple: appeal to the lowest common denominator of human life. This, most often, is the dim yearning of folks who aspire to do no more than feed themselves day by day. As long as this primitive instinct can be appeased by promise, a career in the nation’s capital is virtually guaranteed. Finding an honest politician is like searching for a virgin in a whorehouse. If you happen to stumble across one, they are always eager to give away what little integrity they have left in return for power.
The goal of the ruling class is a full blown return to feudalism. This social decaying is emboldened by the circus known as democracy where the mob votes away its own humanity for a naïve feeling of comfort. The masses have been fooled by years of unrelenting propaganda that government is, as Leo Tolstoy called it, “the representation of the citizens in the collective capacity” rather than its true designation of “one set of men banded together to oppress another set of men.” They are assured by campaigners for public office of a life that requires minimal effort, little intellectual stimulation, and no prudence whatsoever. A pol who speaks of freedom and responsibility is quickly gutted and cast aside. The mass-mind prefers to grovel at the feet of those who promise them a first class ticket to the land of plenty. In return, they receive a pittance while the more industrious of political brownnosers retain enriching privileges.
That is the true purpose of a political promise. It is a tool to maintain dominance over the herd. As long as the masses are lead to believe that success is only enabled by the state, they will cast a ballot for anyone that will grow state power to what they believe is their benefit. Individual achievement in the context of laboring and serving others is belittled as being a waste of time in comparison to the sacrifice of the public sector. Politicians will pay lip service to individualism but only to point out that success is impossible without central government dictation. That way, campaign promises hold more weight and legitimacy in the eyes of voters eager to stick it to their fellow man. They are means to keep the state machine running smoothly as humanity slowly digests itself through continued warfare and destroying any incentive to save and invest for the future.
Mark Twain once wrote,
To make a pledge of any kind is to declare war against nature; for a pledge is a chain that is always clanking and reminding the wearer of it that he is not a free man.
Under normal circumstances, breaking a promise is regarded as unbecoming for any man. That is why pledges are hardly made except in instances in which they can be followed through with quickly and earnestly. Only the truly dishonest will often make promises since their frequent use has made them into a cheap currency used to solicit favors. The political class is the greatest practitioner of this tradition. It’s become a running joke in Western culture how conniving politicians can be. The fact that so many make light of the pathetic reputation shows a disdain for honest character. Even worse is that such a criminal gang is still respected by the greater public. This terrible truth ends up reflecting worse upon the latter than the former.
James E. Miller holds a BS in public administration with a minor in business from Shippensburg University, PA. He is the Editor in Chief at the Ludwig von Mises Institute of Canada and a current contributor to his hometown newspaper, the Middletown Press and Journal. He currently works in Washington D.C. as a copywriter.
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The World’s Most Profitable Hedge Fund Is About To Make The US Treasury’s Life Much Easier
We know its not Paulson, Ackman, or SAC; is it Dalio’s Bridgewater? No, the world’s most profitable private entity that is in business to generate profits via speculation in financial markets is, drum roll please, the Federal Reserve. Stone & McCarthy (SMRA) estimates the Fed will make around $90bn profits in 2012. Of this around $87.5bn will be remitted to the US Treasury – a new record high (quite helpful when one is trying to avoid a debt ceiling using ‘extraordinary measures’ though we assume this is already penciled in due to its consistency). Since 1947 the Federal Reserve has paid the Treasury roundly $975 bln, about 1/3 of which has been paid over the past 6 years. In other words, the cumulative Federal deficit since 1947 has been reduced by nearly $1 trillion since 1947 due to the repatriation of Fed earnings to the Treasury Department. SMRA estimates that this profitability, thanks to the spread between SOMA coupon income and IOER will likely lift the Fed’s profitability to around $120bn in 2013, but a 1% rise in yields would translate into a $275bn loss.
As SMRA notes:
The Fed doesn’t have to mark securities in SOMA to market. Only if securities are sold are the profits or losses booked.
Moreover, even with the onset of the ultimate exit, the Fed won’t start selling securities until some time later. But as we approach the onset of the exit and later the onset of Fed asset sales, the likelihood is that yields on these securities will be higher than at the time these securities were purchased. This implies capital losses on securities to be sold, and this would negatively impact on Fed earnings…
Ultimately, the Fed will be faced with booking losses on asset sales, while also suffering from declining net interest income as the interest rate on reserves is increased to effect a higher Fed funds target.
The bottomline is that there will come a time when the Fed may not be profitable. But this has to be viewed in the context of the Fed’s repatriation of what will be several hundreds of billions of dollars in the years immediately ahead, and the nearly $1 trillion paid between 1947 and 2012.
The Fed can account for losses without eroding its capital, simply by suspending payments to the Treasury until such time as the Fed returns to profitability.
Source: Stone & McCarthy
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The Annotated Kyle Bass ‘Short-Japan’ Thesis
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2012-12-26/annotated-kyle-bass-short-japan-thesis 12/26/2012
With JPY bleeding lower once again overnight extending to 28-month lows against the USD (and the long-end of the JGB curve starting to show some signs of anxiety), it is perhaps timely to revisit Kyle Bass’s five key reasons why Japan is the epicenter of the world’s failed monetary policy experiment. In this excellent and much-requested summary 8-minute clip, Bass summarizes his Japan thesis and destroys several of the myths that talking-heads like to assign to the so-called widow-maker trade.
JPY/USD…(higher = weaker JPY)
The long-end of the Japanese yield curve is at near-record steeps…
Bass’s exact positioning is unknown but he has commented on using sovereign CDS and critically has not espoused a short Japanese equity position directly – preferring to focus on the debt problems.
(h/t InformedTrades)
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NRC Chairman Writes about Enhancing Safety after a Visit to Fukushima
On December 21, 2012, the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) blog posted a letter from Chairman Macfarlane titled A Visit to Japan: Reflections from the Chairman. She has recently returned from a trip to Japan and a visit to the evacuated areas near the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station.
Here are her concluding thoughts:
On our first day in Japan we visited the crippled reactors at Fukushima Dai-ichi. We approached the scene through silent villages, devoid of people, with weeds growing in abandoned parking lots, and now-empty crop fields. I saw the immense beauty of the countryside and the Japanese coastline. This striking land is now empty and may be unusable for a considerable period; 160,000 people are displaced because of the radiation that escaped these reactors.
We stood atop the No. 4 reactor at the Fukushima site, next to the now-covered spent fuel pool. We witnessed the progress made by a full contingent of cleanup workers in remediating the site, a testament to the resilient spirit of the people of Fukushima and Japan. This said, immense work is still ahead at the Fukushima site and the surrounding areas – work that will take decades to complete.
On reflection, I can’t help but be reminded of the important role the NRC performs for the nation; the work we have underway to further enhance reactor safety; and the renewed importance of ensuring no accident like this happens in the United States. I want to be sure that we continue to take the steps necessary to be certain that communities surrounding nuclear reactors are protected and that we’ve done all we can as regulators to prevent and mitigate severe accidents that displace people and contaminate land.
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Sharing is Not a Crime: A Battle Plan to Fight Back
December 7, 2012 (LocalOrg) – The Battlefield: Christopher Dodd was at one point an alleged elected representative of the people. As a US Senator he was charged with upholding the Constitution and laws of the people, and representing the interests of voters in his state of Connecticut – for 30 years. In reality, Dodd didn’t represent the people, and instead, represents corporate special-interests – and unfortunately, Dodd is not the exception.
In early 2011, it was announced that Dodd – after retiring from 30 years in the Senate – would take up a leading role at the Motion Pictures Association of America (MPAA) for a $1.5 million annual salary. Immediately, the retired Senator would lead the charge to pass the notorious Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), with his incestuous business-government ties visibly rippling through the US House and Senate as well as through the corporate-dominated media.
Beginning in a few weeks, the nation’s major internet service providers will roll out an initiative — backed by Obama and pushed by Hollywood and the record labels – to disrupt and possibly terminate internet access for online copyright scofflaws without the involvement of cops or courts. But that doesn’t mean Hollywood is done filing lawsuits or lobbying Congress.
“It doesn’t mean you give up on litigation,” said Chris Dodd, head of the Motion Picture Association of America, speaking at an industry gathering here Thursday. “It doesn’t mean you give up on legislation.”
As stated in “Decentralizing Telecom,” to constantly fight the interests of mega-corporations, while thus far successful, is not a sustainable strategy. Reacting to the provocations of special interests as they relentlessly attempt to expand their already unwarranted influence and monopolies, must be replaced with a strategy aimed at the very source of their strength.
File sharing is not wrong, and it most certainly is not theft. One would not consider sharing a purchased book with a friend, “theft.” Technology has simply made it possible to share that book with millions of “friends.” File sharing operations making money off of other people’s work might constitute a target for industry and government alike, but file sharing online is also done for absolutely free, through peer-to-peer software.
The answer to sagging business models effected by file sharing is not litigation and legislation, but rather to innovate – something big-industry certainly has the resources to do.
Open-source, crowd-sourced, innovative software, media, and hardware businesses already exist, and are already turning profits while creating local jobs. More importantly, they are opening up markets to consumers who can now become producers, essentially creating “wealth redistribution through entrepreneurship” rather than government subsidies.
These emerging business models prove that jobs, profit, and commerce are not impossible within the new, emerging paradigm people like Dodd work tirelessly against. It does prove, however, that the days the special interests Dodd represents can horde for themselves control over human creativity and the wealth it generates, are coming to an end.
The Battle Plan: By no means should people already engaged in anti-monopoly campaigning give up. People campaigning against SOPA, PIPA, ACTA, and many other forms of legislation represent the minefields upon a battlefield, slowing the advance of the enemy, and denying it access long enough for a counteroffensive to be mounted – but that counteroffensive must eventually be planned and executed.
Dodd’s MPAA “Copyright Alert System,” described by Wired as an “ISP search-and-disrupt operation,” will use the Internet and telecom monopolies to target file sharing. Previously reported on “mesh networks” would easily complicate the enforcement of such a measure. Also, as one keen Wired reader noted in the comment sections:
Too bad the MPAA/RIA know that more sharing happens from portable hard drives than through torrents. So this is a lot like closing the barn door as the horse is leaving…
He would elaborate in a second comment that:
Those file come from the same place as torrents, one person buys it, rips it and shares it. The funny thing is there are less options to get one file (maybe one person you know has it vs. hundreds of torrents) but when you borrow a hard drive you can get more files in a couple of hours than in a year of torrenting.
And indeed, for those looking to get around the corporate-fascist collaboration between government, big-film & record studios, big-software, and big-telecom, a portable hard drive network could easily be organized, expanded and used to sting back even worse than online file sharing already has.
However, such networks, be they mesh or hard drive sharing, are still only countermeasures. To go on the offensive against the special interests behind this campaign, particularly because they still possess almost unlimited finances and political backing, is to avoid taking them head-on and instead attack their supply lines.
We need not travel far to reach these supply lines – for we the consumers of their products and services constitute the sole source of their wealth, with which they buy their influence across governments and the media. Cutting ourselves off, thus cutting their supply lines and leaving them to starve, is as simple as boycotting and replacing them.
We can begin (and in many cases already are) boycotting and replacing them with superior, and more importantly, open alternatives. All things being equal, people would rather watch a free movie than pay for one on Netflix. One rather listen to a free MP3 than pay for one on iTunes.
By crowd-sourcing, crowd-funding, and producing free entertainment online leveraging improved, and increasingly cheaper hardware and software, such alternatives are already emerging. Campaigners against the likes of Dodd, the MPAA, and their SOPA, PIPA, and ACTA travesties, may also consider going a step beyond merely naming those corporations involved, and promote a full-spectrum, permanent boycott (and here), while promoting open-source, innovative alternatives.
Websites featuring open-entertainment could be organized by genre, or contain a variety to choose from. These could be open-versions of iTunes, Netflix, and Amazon, that run on ads, feature donation and referral buttons for artists, and more importantly, remain free and open for all. Live events could be organized and revenue raised for artists and organizers that way.
Image: Open source (OS) solutions for everything from e-mail and browsers, to 3D design graphic and vector art. An excellent resource for finding appropriate OS solutions is OSalt.com.
Design houses and studios using open-source software for commissioned work could augment their income by arranging training workshops and consulting services for other companies to switch over from expensive propriety solutions to open-source. The more people involved in open collaboration, the greater the benefit for all those involved.
Artists have and will always ply their trade for passion. Many are rediscovering the process of working for commissions rather than for royalties, and are using the open-sharing of their work as an advertisement for their commissioned services, live performances, and physical merchandise related to their intellectual efforts.
The arguments of copyrighted industry revolving around the promotion of innovation, art, and entertainment, as well as the creation of jobs, are already falling apart in an emerging, open-paradigm. People like Christopher Dodd whose blatantly compromised agenda makes a mockery of representative governance, embodies an industry and a paradigm that does not deserve perpetuation. Through boycotting and replacing it, by us all becoming open-producers and collaborates instead of consumers bellied up to the corporate troughs, let us ensure a deep enough hole is dug for them, so that when they finally are rolled into it, they never emerge again.
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ISRAHELL ON EARTH: A New Must Watch Documentary
Published on Jul 30, 2012
This powerful documentary exposes the hell that the palestinians have been going through since their land was stolen in 1948. From that day on, the world has been hijacked by a cabal of zionists/occultists, and the support given to them by governments has alienated much of the world. IsraHell on Earth looks at the origins of the abomination that is IsraHell and exposes its apartheid crimes.
Also watch: New Groundbreaking Evidence of 2012 False Flags http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wf2ZvxXBwMQ
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GERALD CELENTE – Can Americans Escape the Deception (Trends in the News)
GERALD CELENTE – Can Americans Escape the Deception (Trends in the News)
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Iran Is Already Under Attack
Published on Oct 2, 2012
CONTINUE WATCHING: http://ur1.ca/agvda
TRANSCRIPT AND SOURCES: http://www.corbettreport.com/?p=5806
“Contrary to what we are being told, Iran is in fact already under attack by Israel, the US, and other western powers, and has been for some time. Through a series of measures, Iran has been facing an onslaught of cyberwarfare, special operations, targeted assassinations, and crippling economic sanctions for years now.”
False Flags Over Iran
Published on Oct 9, 2012
CONTINUE WATCHING: http://ur1.ca/aif4j
TRANSCRIPT AND SOURCES: http://www.corbettreport.com/?p=5852
“That the warmongers are so desperate to frame Iran for any and every attack taking place in the world is worrying, to be sure, but at the end of the day, perhaps there is something hopeful we can take away from this. The fact that the Patrick Clawsons and Gary Harts and Dick Cheneys of the world are dreaming up their provocations and incidents to justify an invasion of Iran means that, at the very least, some measure of justification is still needed to embroil the NATO powers in another war. Once again we find that it is the people who hold the power, and it is the people who must be convinced about the need for this war. Here in 2012, now 9 years after the debacle in Iraq and 1 year after the debacle in Libya, are going to need more convincing than ever that it is necessary to deploy the war machine yet again for another round of military adventurism. And now that the mainstream media has expended whatever was left of their credibility pimping the “weapons of mass destruction” propaganda, the so-called political elite realize that nothing less than a spectacular provocation will do to rouse the public’s ire.”
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GATA’s Chris Powell on the Silver Manipulation Probe & the Fed Gold Audit!
Chris Powell, co-founder and treasurer of the Gold Anti- Trust Action Committee
Since 1998 the Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee, GATA, has been exposing, opposing, and litigating against collusion meant to control the price and supply of gold and other precious metals. GATA has collected and published dozens of documents showing Western treasury and central bank efforts at intervention in metals markets – interventions that occur both openly, as well as surreptitiously, preventing the proper functioning of a free market in gold. Chris Powell, co–founder and treasurer of GATA and Managing Editor of the Journal Inquirer
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Deceit and fraud is a Crime that is rampant in the global financial system.
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Quadrillion Dollar Derivatives Market 20 Times Global GDP
Published on Sep 25, 2012
Markus Stanley: Derivative bets not a zero sum game, have far reaching real world consequences
more at http://therealnews.com
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Uploaded on Oct 24, 2011
Bill Black: If I marched with Occupy Wall St. to the New York Fed, this is what I would demand
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William K. Black on The Keiser Report
Uploaded on Aug 12, 2010
Max Keiser talks to William K. Black about the current financial crisis.
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It is time for the Silver Bullet of LOVE
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To rob a country, own a bank
Uploaded on Mar 19, 2010
William Black, author of “Best way to rob a bank is to own one” talks about deliberate fraud on Wall St. Watch Pt2 of this story at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISsR7ZiWlsk
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To rob a country, own a bank Pt2
Uploaded on Mar 20, 2010
William Black: The finance sector is a huge parasite, it transfers wealth from the poor to the wealthy. Watch Pt3 of this story at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_xdQyfNLnc&feature=channel
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“We are doing our best to liberate planet Earth” – Chris Powell, Secretary/Treasurer of Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee
GATA’s Chris Powell on gold price manipulation
Uploaded on Feb 21, 2011
This video shows an insightful interview between Chris Powell, Secretary/Treasurer of http://gata.org, and James Turk, director of The GoldMoney Foundation and founder of GoldMoney. Chris tells the viewers what the Gold Anti Trust Action Committee is all about, what gold price manipulation means and what legal action GATA is taking to open up the gold market. A rising gold price means the national currency is not being managed well. Gold and silver are competitive currencies against fiat money. Gold is the great discipliner of government. The video was recorded in London. View the full 34-minutes interview at: http://www.goldmoney.com/powell-turk.
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The $1.5 Quadrillion Dollar Derivatives Crisis, & Growing
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Why are (Smart) Investors Buying 50 Times More Physical Silver than Gold?
By: Eric Sprott
As long-time students of precious metals investing, there are certain things we understand. One is that, historically, the availability ratio of silver to gold has had a direct influence on the price of the metals. The current availability ratio of physical silver to gold for investment purposes is approximately 3:1. So, why is it that investors are allocating their dollars to silver at a much higher ratio? What is it that these “smart” investors understand? Let’s have a look at the numbers and see if it’s time for investors to do as a wise man once said and “follow the money.”
Average annual gold mine production is approximately 80 million ounces, which together with an estimated average 50 million ounces of annual recycled gold, totals around 130 million ounces available per year. In comparison, annual mined silver production has averaged around 750 million ounces, while recycled silver is estimated at 250 million ounces per year, which adds up to approximately 1 billion ounces. Using this data, there is roughly 8 times more silver available to buy than there is gold. However, not all gold and silver is available for investment purposes, due to their use in industrial applications. It is estimated that for investment purposes (jewelry, bars and coins), the annual availability of gold is roughly 120 million ounces, and of silver it is 350 million ounces. Therefore, the ratio of physical silver availability to gold availability is 350/120, or ~3:1.1
Now, let’s examine how investors are allocating their investments between gold and silver. The data below is from the US Mint showing gold and silver sales in ounces:
Source: US Mint (www.usmint.gov)
As you can see, investors are choosing to buy silver at a ratio to gold that is well above what is available. This uptrend doesn’t show any signs of slowing either. The ratio of the physical silver to gold is both rising and extraordinarily above the availability ratio of 3:1.
We can also use other data such as the most recent issues of the Sprott Physical Gold and Silver Trusts. The last Gold Trust issue in September 2012 raised US$393 million and the last Silver Trust issue raised US$310 million. On the basis of prices for each metal at the time of issue, we could purchase ~213 thousand ounces of gold and ~9.1 million ounces of silver. This represents a purchase ratio of 43:1.
If we examine ETF holdings in both gold and silver, we note that in the period from 2007 to 2012, the increase in silver holdings amounted to 12,000 tonnes, compared to 1,200 tonnes of gold – meaning, investors purchased ten times more silver than gold.
These are only three factual data points to consider, but there are other indications that silver investment demand is way out of line with availability. Our favourite question to the bullion dealers we meet, is to ask the ratio of their dollar sales in gold versus silver. The answer is that dollar sales are equal, which means that physical silver sales relative to gold are greater than 50:1.
A recent news headline on Mineweb read, “Silver Sales to Outshine Gold in India.2” It went on to quote a bullion dealer that “investors and jewelry lovers prefer silver jewelry these days.” As the largest importer of gold in the world, it would be impossible for India to purchase an equivalent amount of silver, as it would require more than one billion ounces, essentially more than the current annual mine production.
While these last two confirmations of silver demand are anecdotal, the statistics from the US Mint, the ETFs, and our Physical Trust issues, are factual.
For the time being, the silver price is essentially set in the paper market where the daily average trade on the Comex is approximately 300 million ounces. An outrageous number when you compare it to the daily mine production of about 2 million ounces. As Bart Chilton, Commissioner of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission stated on October 26, 2010, “I believe there have been repeated attempts to influence prices in silver markets. There have been fraudulent efforts to persuade and deviously control that price. Based on what I have been told and reviewed in publicly available documents, I believe violations to the Commodity Exchange Act have taken place in the silver market and any such violation of the law in this regard should be prosecuted.”3
Which brings us back to the phrase “Follow the money.” In our view, it is almost inconceivable that investors would allocate as many dollars to silver as they would to gold, but that is what the data shows.
The silver investment market is very small. While the dollar value of gold in the world approaches $9 trillion, the value of silver in the forms of jewelry, coins, bars and silverware is estimated at around $150 billion (5 billion ounces at $30 per ounce). This is a ratio of 60:1 in dollar terms.4
How long can investors continue to buy silver at the current ratios when the availability for investment is only 3:1? We are surprised that the price of silver has remained at such a depressed level compared to gold. Historically, the price ratio between gold and silver has been 16:1, when both were currencies. Today the ratio is 55:1, so what are the numbers telling us? We believe this is one of those times when smart investors will be well rewarded to “Follow the money.”
On behalf of all of us at Sprott, I wish you safe and happy Holidays and a prosperous New Year.
P.S. – US Mint Sold Out of Silver Eagle Bullion Coins Until January 7, 2013
The Mint recently informed authorized purchasers that all remaining inventories of 2012-dated Silver Eagle bullion coins had sold out and no additional coins would be struck. Since the 2013-dated coins will not be available to order until January 7, 2013, this leaves a three week void for the Mint’s most popular bullion offering.
| 1 | Sources: Gold data is from World Gold Council http://www.gold.org, and silver data is from Silver Institute, http://www.silverinstitute.org/site/supply-demand/ |
| 2 | Source: Mineweb.com |
| 3 | Source: Bloomberg: http://mobile.bloomberg.com/news/2010-10-26/silver-market-faced-fraudulent-efforts-to-control-price-chilton-says.html |
| 4 | Sources: Gold data is from World Gold Council, silver data is from United States Geological Survey (USGS) and Silver Institute. |
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Colin Powell, February 2001: “[Saddam] has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction. He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbors. So in effect, our policies have strengthened the security of the neighbors of Iraq.”Condoleeza Rice, July 2001: “We are able to keep his arms from him. His military forces have not been rebuilt.” [Video of comments] |
Iraq WMD Lies:
The Words of Mass Deception
The Lie of the Century
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How the Iraq war was sold to the US public
Also, the media can legally lie to “catapult the propaganda” – example. |
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| Dick Cheney Speech to VFW National Convention August 26, 2002Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. |
| George W. Bush Speech to UN General Assembly September 12, 2002Right now, Iraq is expanding and improving facilities that were used for the production of biological weapons. |
| Ari Fleischer Press Briefing December 2, 2002If he declares he has none, then we will know that Saddam Hussein is once again misleading the world. |
| Ari Fleischer Press Briefing January 9, 2003We know for a fact that there are weapons there. |
| George W. Bush State of the Union Address January 28, 2003Our intelligence officials estimate that Saddam Hussein had the materials to produce as much as 500 tons of sarin, mustard and VX nerve agent. |
| Colin Powell Remarks to UN Security Council February 5, 2003We know that Saddam Hussein is determined to keep his weapons of mass destruction, is determined to make more. |
| George W. Bush Radio Address February 8, 2003We have sources that tell us that Saddam Hussein recently authorized Iraqi field commanders to use chemical weapons — the very weapons the dictator tells us he does not have. |
| Colin Powell Interview with Radio France International February 28, 2003If Iraq had disarmed itself, gotten rid of its weapons of mass destruction over the past 12 years, or over the last several months since (UN Resolution) 1441 was enacted, we would not be facing the crisis that we now have before us . . . But the suggestion that we are doing this because we want to go to every country in the Middle East and rearrange all of its pieces is not correct. |
| Colin Powell Remarks to UN Security Council March 7, 2003So has the strategic decision been made to disarm Iraq of its weapons of mass destruction by the leadership in Baghdad? . . . I think our judgment has to be clearly not. |
| George W. Bush Address to the Nation March 17, 2003Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised. |
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| Ari Fleisher Press Briefing March 21, 2003Well, there is no question that we have evidence and information that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction, biological and chemical particularly . . . all this will be made clear in the course of the operation, for whatever duration it takes. |
| Gen. Tommy Franks Press Conference March 22, 2003There is no doubt that the regime of Saddam Hussein possesses weapons of mass destruction. And . . . as this operation continues, those weapons will be identified, found, along with the people who have produced them and who guard them. |
| Defense Policy Board member Kenneth Adelman Washington Post, p. A27 March 23, 2003I have no doubt we’re going to find big stores of weapons of mass destruction. |
| Pentagon Spokeswoman Victoria Clark Press Briefing March 22, 2003One of our top objectives is to find and destroy the WMD. There are a number of sites. |
| Donald Rumsfeld ABC Interview March 30, 2003We know where they are. They’re in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat. |
| Neocon scholar Robert Kagan Washington Post op-ed April 9, 2003Obviously the administration intends to publicize all the weapons of mass destruction U.S. forces find — and there will be plenty. |
| Ari Fleischer Press Briefing April 10, 2003But make no mistake — as I said earlier — we have high confidence that they have weapons of mass destruction. That is what this war was about and it is about. And we have high confidence it will be found. |
| George W. Bush NBC Interview April 24, 2003We are learning more as we interrogate or have discussions with Iraqi scientists and people within the Iraqi structure, that perhaps he destroyed some, perhaps he dispersed some. And so we will find them. |
| Donald Rumsfeld Press Briefing April 25, 2003There are people who in large measure have information that we need . . . so that we can track down the weapons of mass destruction in that country. |
| George W. Bush Remarks to Reporters May 3, 2003We’ll find them. It’ll be a matter of time to do so. |
| Colin Powell Remarks to Reporters May 4, 2003I’m absolutely sure that there are weapons of mass destruction there and the evidence will be forthcoming. We’re just getting it just now. |
| Donald Rumsfeld Fox News Interview May 4, 2003We never believed that we’d just tumble over weapons of mass destruction in that country. |
| George W. Bush Remarks to Reporters May 6, 2003I’m not surprised if we begin to uncover the weapons program of Saddam Hussein — because he had a weapons program. |
| Condoleeza Rice Reuters Interview May 12, 2003U.S. officials never expected that “we were going to open garages and find” weapons of mass destruction. |
| Maj. Gen. David Petraeus, Commander 101st Airborne Press Briefing May 13, 2003I just don’t know whether it was all destroyed years ago — I mean, there’s no question that there were chemical weapons years ago — whether they were destroyed right before the war, (or) whether they’re still hidden. |
| Gen. Michael Hagee, Commandant of the Marine Corps Interview with Reporters May 21, 2003Before the war, there’s no doubt in my mind that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, biological and chemical. I expected them to be found. I still expect them to be found. |
| Gen. Richard Myers, Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff NBC Today Show interview May 26, 2003Given time, given the number of prisoners now that we’re interrogating, I’m confident that we’re going to find weapons of mass destruction. |
| Donald Rumsfeld Remarks to the Council on Foreign Relations May 27, 2003They may have had time to destroy them, and I don’t know the answer. |
| Paul Wolfowitz Vanity Fair interview May 28, 2003For bureaucratic reasons, we settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction (as justification for invading Iraq) because it was the one reason everyone could agree on. |
| Lt. Gen. James Conway, 1st Marine Expeditionary Force Press Interview May 30, 2003It was a surprise to me then it remains a surprise to me now that we have not uncovered weapons, as you say, in some of the forward dispersal sites. Believe me, it’s not for lack of trying. We’ve been to virtually every ammunition supply point between the Kuwaiti border and Baghdad, but they’re simply not there. |
| Maj. Gen. Keith Dayton, Defense Intelligence Agency Press Conference May 30, 2003Do I think we’re going to find something? Yeah, I kind of do, because I think there’s a lot of information out there.” |
| Based on extensive interviews with both US investigators and Iraqi scientists, the Washington Post, which pursued an editorial policy in clear support of the war, found that Iraq not only did not possess any of the claimed weapons, but also lacked the material conditions to even create them. Its scientific institutions and factories had been thoroughly beaten down by 12 years of conflict, arms embargo and strangling economic sanctions, the Post found.[I]nvestigators said they have discovered no work on former germ-warfare agents…that led US scientists on a highly classified hunt for several months… And they found the former nuclear weapons program, described as a grave and gathering danger by President Bush and a mortal threat by Vice President Cheney, in much the same shattered state left by UN inspectors in the 1990s, the Post reported. [WSWS] |
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THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION’S PUBLIC STATEMENTS ON IRAQ The Waxman Report on 237 lies that sent your loved ones off to be killed and crippled in Iraq.
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| Asked why a nuclear power such as North Korea was being treated differently from Iraq, where hardly any weapons of mass destruction had been found, [Paul Wolfowitz] said: “Let’s look at it simply. The most important difference between North Korea and Iraq is that economically, we just had no choice in Iraq. The country swims on a sea of oil.” [Guardian 4/6/2003] |
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The Story That Didnt Run In its rush to air its now discredited story about President George W. Bushs National Guard service, CBS bumped another sensitive piece slated for the same 60 Minutes broadcast: a half-hour segment about how the U.S. government was snookered by forged documents purporting to show Iraqi efforts to purchase uranium from Niger. [MSNBC]
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http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/country_profiles/3777557.stm
“With no headquarters, budget or permanent staff, the Group of Eight is an informal but exclusive body whose members set out to tackle global challenges through discussion and action.
The G8 comprises seven of the world’s leading industrialised nations, and Russia.
The leaders of these countries meet face-to-face at an annual summit that has become a focus of media attention and protest action.” – BBC NEWS
READ MORE: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/country_profiles/3777557.stm
end.
_______________________________________________
The Creature From Jekyll Island (by G. Edward Griffin)
The Creature From Jekyll Island
A Second Look at the Federal Reserve
by G. Edward Griffin
Recorded: 1994
end.
________________________________________________
________________________________________________
http://www.usgoldbureau.com/gold-confiscation
Government Confiscation of Gold: Understanding the Facts
Many investors have heard that the U.S. government confiscated the public’s gold years ago. Is it true? Is it a rumor? Could it happen again? This is an issue that comes up time and again with gold investors. Rather than speculate, we believe it’s best to consider the facts. Below is a timeline that explains exactly what happened and, more importantly, how today’s investors should react and what they can do to make sure they’re prepared, in case it happens again.
May 1, 1933 – President Roosevelt’s Executive Order 6102 required U.S. citizens to deliver on or before May 1, 1933, all but a small amount of gold coin, gold bullion, and gold certificates owned by them to the Federal Reserve, in exchange for $20.67 per troy ounce. Under the Trading With the Enemy Act of October 6, 1917, as amended on March 9, 1933, violation of the order was punishable by fine up to $10,000 ($167,700 if adjusted for inflation as of 2010) or up to ten years in prison, or both. An exception to the order was listed in section 2 (b) “Gold coin and gold certificates in an amount not exceeding in the aggregate $100 belonging to any one person; and gold coins having a recognized special value to collectors of rare and unusual coins.”
Jan 30, 1934 — The Gold Reserve Act of January 30, 1934 required that all gold and gold certificates held by the Federal Reserve be surrendered and vested in the sole title of the United States Department of the Treasury and changed the value of the dollar in gold from $20.67 to $35 per ounce.
1954 – In 1954 the Treasury Department amended the Gold Regulations of the original Executive Order to enable the continuance of the exemption of rare coins from the gold confiscation provisions, and they expanded the definition of “coins” with a recognized special value to collectors of rare and unusual coins to include “gold coin made prior to April 5th, 1933 (Federal Register 4309, 4312 1954, as codified in 31 CFR Section 54.20)
Aug 15, 1971 – The price of gold remained fixed from Jan 30, 1934 until August 15, 1971, when President Nixon announced that the United States would no longer convert dollars to gold at a fixed value, thus abandoning the gold standard for foreign exchange.
Dec 31, 1974 – On December 31, 1974, with Executive Order 11825, President Gerald Ford repealed the Executive Order that Roosevelt used to call in gold in 1933. This was necessary because on the same day Congress restored Americans’ right to own gold. The limitation on gold ownership in the U.S. was repealed after President Ford signed a bill legalizing private ownership of gold coins, bars and certificates by an act of Congress codified in Pub. L 93-373 which went into effect December 31, 1974. P.L. 93-373 did not repeal the Gold Repeal Joint Resolution, which made unlawful any contracts that specified payment in a fixed amount of money or a fixed amount of gold. That is, contracts remained unenforceable if they used gold monetarily rather than as a commodity of trade.
Oct 28, 1977 – 1977 Congress removed the president’s authority to regulate gold transactions during a period of national emergency other than war. However, the Act of Oct. 28, 1977, Pub. L. No. 95-147, § 4(c), 91 Stat. 1227, 1229 (originally codified at 31 U.S.C. § 463 note, recodified as amended at 31 U.S.C. § 5118(d)(2)) amended the 1933 Joint Resolution and made it clear that parties could again include so-called gold clauses in contracts formed after 1977.
Dec 17, 1985 – President Reagan signed into law the Gold Bullion Coin act which allowed the US Mint to produce gold coins from “newly mined domestic sources”. Gold American Eagles went on to become one of the most well known gold coins.
Gold Confiscation in the Future…
So the question remains; could it happen again? Who knows? Of course it is possible; it has been done before and governments in times of stress simply change the laws. As you can see above, gold bullion was forced to be sold to the government in 1933. Then in 1974, that executive order was repealed. Furthermore, in 1977, Congress removed the president’s authority to regulate gold except during a national emergency of war.
It is true that numismatic collector type coins were excluded in the 1933 confiscation. Whether or not they will again be excluded in any future confiscation is completely unknown. There is a logical thought process for excluding collector coins, in that the government was trying to obtain monetary control of gold bullion. The government had no interest in rare and unusual coins of special value to collectors. However, what the government has done in the past is not necessarily indicative of what they will do in the future.
Bottom line – Confiscation did happen. It was repealed, but it could happen again in the future. Laws can and do change.
________________________________________________
Self-Issued Credit: A Monetary Solution
We actually have the capacity to create a very different reality by enabling our energies to move more freely where they are most needed
More Details are below.
by James Corbett BoilingFrogsPost.com December 18, 2012
As the global economy continues to slow down, the world is being asked to focus on issues of so-called “sovereign debt,” “austerity,” “fiscal responsibility,” “belt tightening” and other such euphemisms for the grim reality that the public is now being asked to pony up the dough for the trillions that have been handed over to the banksters in the past few years. What the constant focus on these issues effectively hides, however, is that underlying the economic woes that are the symptom of the disease is the disease itself: the monetary system.
As monetary reform advocate Bernard Lietaer of the University of California points out, this is not by accident.
Although many are ignorant of this fact, the “Nobel Prize” for Economics is as much of a Nobel Prize as the Federal Reserve is a federal reserve; that is, not at all. This doesn’t prevent the press from lauding “Nobel” laureate Paul Krugman for his deep economic wisdom, however, and it doesn’t prevent Krugman from using his bully pulpit to argue for ever-growing amounts of stimulus spending in a vain attempt to plug the holes in the sinking S.S. Global Economy with ever larger bales of debt-based Federal Reserve Notes.
So if arguments over “sovereign debts” and bailouts and stimulus and easing and other forms of tinkering with the current monetary paradigm are not the answer, that begs the question: what is?
As we have been examining in previous weeks here on The Eyeopener, the question of monetary reform and alternative currencies lies at the heart of the long-term solution for steering us away from the edge of these systemic “fiscal cliffs” and toward a system that is inherently rational, equitable, predictable and sustainable. As everyone who has examined the issue will attest, however, there are a bewildering array of alternative currency systems on offer, from time banks and LETS systems to TEMs, Bitcoins and privately minted precious metals.
For those who are overwhelmed by the variety of choices in the world of alternative currency, it is important to note a basic principle that many of these systems have in common: the idea of self-issued credit.
By examining the roots of this idea, and combining it with modern breakthroughs in communication and data processing, alternative currency proponent Paul Grignon has proposed Digital Coin, an idea for a global economic system that operates on this principle of self-issued credit.
The ins and outs of the digital coin system are complex, and are best served by a thorough review of the proposal at DigitalCoin.info, but the idea that it operates on is simple and time-honored. As Grignon demonstrates in his other works, just as the ancient marketplace thrived in times of “monetary scarcity” (a lack of silver or gold coins) by trading credits that were self-issued by reputable businessmen, so too could a global monetary system be arranged, completely eliminating the need for the outdated “technology” of Federal Reserve notes or central bank administered national currencies.
The implications of this system are enormous. In the digital coin system, money could be split into its functions as a unit of measure and a means of exchange, individuals could issue their own credit and allow it to exchange in the market, speculation would transform from an endeavor to suck money out of transactions into an endeavor to add value to existing relationships, and people would be free to refuse specific credits that had been issued by specific businesses, giving total control of individuals to choose what groups or businesses they are willing to support.
Last year I had the chance to talk to Paul Grignon about this system on my radio program.
Obviously, we are still light years off from implementing such a system, not necessarily due to the technological impediments (though there are those), but because the idea of monetary reform is still far from the minds of the public, who are generally too busy chasing those Federal Reserve notes or Euros or Yen or Pesos or Pounds to contemplate what it is that forms the basis of our entire economic existence.
And if Krugman and the so-called Nobel Laureates and the central bankers and all the others who benefit the most from our current economic paradigm get their way, that profound state of ignorance will never be disturbed.
For those of us who do know about the possibilities of alternative currencies and new monetary paradigms to solve many of the most intractable economic problems that we are facing, it is incumbent upon all of us to better inform ourselves about these issues, and to start raising the awareness of those around us before we are all driven off of the bankster-created fiscal cliff.
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End.
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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/deepak-chopra/dear-ted-is-it-bad-scienc_b_3104049.html
Dear TED, Is It ‘Bad Science’ or a ‘Game of Thrones’?
Posted: 04/18/2013
By Deepak Chopra, MD. FACP, Stuart Hameroff, MD, Menas C. Kafatos, Ph.D., Rudolph E. Tanzi, Ph.D., and Neil Theise, MD
One of modern science’s great strengths is that any questionable finding dies a quick death if it’s invalid. The safeguards are mainly two: Your new finding must be repeatable when other researchers run the same experiments, and peer review by qualified scientists subjects every new finding to microscopic scrutiny. So it surprised the millions of admirers of TED, whose conferences attract wide attention to new, cutting-edge ideas, when that organization decided to practice semi-censorship.
The flap is over two videos of TEDx talks delivered in the UK in January that were summarily removed from TEDx’s YouTube channel (TEDx is the brand name for conferences outside the main TED events that are allowed to use the TED trademark, such as TEDxBoston or TEDxBaghdad — so far, about 5,000 such events have used the name). This amounts only to semi-censorship because the videos were reposted on TED’s blog site. Yet the reputations of the two presenters, Rupert Sheldrake and Graham Hancock, were besmirched. In a letter to all the TEDx organizers, Chris Anderson, the head of TED, proposed certain “red flag” topics, among them health hoaxes and the medicinal value of food but also the general area of pseudoscience. The response has been decidedly negative — scientists don’t like the suppression of free thinking — and among the thousands of comments aired on the Internet, one pointed out that Sheldrake and Hancock spoke at a TEDx conference explicitly dedicated to ideas that challenge mainstream thinking.
There’s no need to stir the coals. TED has been badly singed already. At a cursory glance, much of Anderson’s letter sounds reasonable: TED has every right to give guidelines to conferences using their name. Who’s in favor of health hoaxes and pseudoscience? As it happens, Sheldrake’s talk was on “The Science Delusion” and covered ten dogmas in mainstream science that need to be examined; there wasn’t a hint of bad science in it. Hancock’s talk was on consciousness and psychedelics, a topic without fangs for anyone who has heard of the Sixties, much less lived through them. Even as the videos were begrudgingly reposted, TED felt justified in tagging them as “radical” and attaching a “health warning”.
Yet something quite pivotal is occurring that inflames strong feelings. The decision to remove the two videos was apparently instigated by angry, noisy bloggers who promote militant atheism. Their target was a burgeoning field, the exploration of consciousness. For generations bringing up consciousness as a scientific topic was taboo. In the wildly popular fantasy novels by George R. R. Martin, “A Game of Thrones,” now running as an equally mad success on HBO, the mythical kingdom of Westeros is divided by a great wall 700 feet high. On the other side of the wall are lethal enemies and malefic magic. For centuries, no one has seen the zombie-like White Walkers who live on the other side of the wall, nor the dragons that once ravaged Westeros.
Even so, after magic and zombies fell into disbelief, a hereditary band of guardians swore an oath to keep watch at the wall, generation after generation. TED has put itself in rather the same position. What the militant atheists and self-described skeptics hate is a certain brand of magical thinking that endangers science. In particular, there is the bugaboo of “non-local consciousness,” which causes the hair on the back of their necks to stand on end. A layman would be forgiven for not grasping why such an innocent-sounding phrase could spell danger to “good science.”
The reason becomes clear when you discover that non-local consciousness means the possibility that there is mind outside the human brain or even outside material reality, that a conscious mind is in some way intrinsic to the quantum universe, and that we all are quantum entangled. One of us (Menas Kafatos) has devoted many years of research on the connection of quantum theory to consciousness. Four of us (Stuart Hameroff, Rudolph Tanzi, Neil Thiese, and Deepak Chopra) have devoted years of research to neuroscience, clinical studies and consciousness. For millennia it went without question that such a mind exists; it was known as God. Fearing that God is finding a way to sneak back into the kingdom through ideas of quantum consciousness, militant atheists go on the attack against near-death experiences, telepathy, action at a distance, and all manifestations of purpose-driven evolution. Like the guardians in “A Game of Thrones,” these militants haven’t actually looked over the wall, and given their absolute conviction that the human brain is the only source of awareness in the universe, you’d think that speculative thinking on the subject wouldn’t be so threatening. (Most people wouldn’t picket a convention of werewolves in their hometown. It’s not hard to tell what is fantasy.)
But TED took the threat seriously enough that Anderson’s letter warns against “the fusion of science and spirituality,” and most disappointing of all, it tags as a sign of good science that “it does not fly in the face of the broad existing body of scientific knowledge.” Even a newcomer to science knows about Copernicus, Galileo, and other great scientists whose theories countermanded the prevailing body of accepted knowledge. Einstein believed in a static universe at a time when early proponents of an expanding universe were ignored, and the early reception of the now-popular “multiverse” theory was scornful. The greatest breakthroughs rarely come by acts of conformity.
Anderson’s letter is cautiously couched on the one hand — he takes pains to divorce his warnings from outright bans and acknowledges that the dividing line between real science and pseudoscience is hardly sharp and clear. But the dose of cold water is frigid enough, since his red-flag subjects include “healing” of any kind (his quotation marks) and using neuroscience to explain various mind-body puzzles (“a lot of goofballs” inhabit this area).
TED finds itself on the wrong side of censorship, semi- or not. But this fracas actually opens a window. The general public — and many working scientists — isn’t aware that consciousness has become a hot topic spanning many disciplines, and its acceptability is demarked by age. Older, established scientists tend to be dead set against it, while younger, upcoming scientists are fascinated. There are any number of books on “the conscious universe.” There are peer-reviewed journals on consciousness and worldwide conferences on how to link mind and brain (the so-called “hard problem”). Nobody wants to guard the wall except the self-appointed watchers and minders who form a society for the suppression of curiosity (it should be noted that TED’s Science Board, which undoubtedly plays a role in this dispute, remains anonymous).
Freedom of thought is going to win out, and certainly TED must be shocked by the avalanche of disapproval Anderson’s letter has met with. The real grievance here isn’t about intellectual freedom but the success of militant atheists at quashing anyone who disagrees with them. Their common tactic is scorn, ridicule, and contempt. The most prominent leaders, especially Richard Dawkins, refuse to debate on any serious grounds, and indeed they show almost total ignorance of the cutting-edge biology and physics that has admitted consciousness back into “good science.”
Militant atheism is a social/political movement; In no way does it deserve to represent itself as scientific. Francis Collins, a self-proclaimed Christian, is an acclaimed geneticist who heads the National Institutes of Health. To date, Collins hasn’t let any White Walkers or dragons over the wall. Dawkins, who has a close association with TED, gave a TED talk in 2002 where he said the following:
“It may sound as if I am about to preach atheism. I want to reassure you that that’s not what I am going to do. In an audience as sophisticated as this one, that would be preaching to the choir. [scattered laughter] No, what I want to urge upon you is militant atheism.”
In a society where militant atheism occupies a prestigious niche, disbelief in God is widespread, but it isn’t synonymous with science. In his mega-bestseller “The God Delusion,” Dawkins proclaims that religion is “the root of all evil.” He describes teaching children about religion as “child abuse.” He spoke publically on the occasion of a papal visit to London calling for the Pope to be arrested for “crimes against humanity.” To propose, as Dawkins does, that science supports such extremist views is an errant misuse of science, if not a form of pseudoscience.
TED is a huge enterprise bringing cutting edge ideas to the world, and local TEDx organizers will no doubt feel a chill when they read Anderson’s stern reproof: “It is not your audience’s job to figure out if a speaker is offering legitimate science or not. It is your job.” If the intent of this warning wasn’t explicit enough, TEDx rescinded their trademark from a recent conference in West Hollywood because of “questionable” speakers, causing the cowed organizers to cancel the event before they reconsidered and held it without the coveted brand name. A call to caution is hard to tell from a desire to censor.
One of the authors of this article (Stuart Hameroff) recently gave a TEDx talk in Tucson where he made the point that critics of the possibility of consciousness outside the brain cannot explain consciousness inside the brain. While neuroscience is at a loss, the notion of consciousness being based on finer scale, deeper order quantum effects in microtubules inside brain neurons (the Penrose-Hameroff ‘Orch OR model) has been boosted by recent discoveries of quantum resonances in microtubules, and anesthetic action on microtubules. Quantum entanglement could account for Rupert Sheldrake’s findings, and consciousness occurring outside the brain. Stuart Hameroff’s TEDx talk ‘The future of consciousness’ explains how this can scientifically happen. Should it be censored also?
But the main flaw in TED’s position has been made abundantly clear. It isn’t the organizers’ job to exclude questionable science but a job shared between them and the audience. We’re all adults here, right? Any speculative thinking worthy of the name should make somebody in the audience angry, inspire others, and leave the rest to decide if a challenging idea should be thrown out or not. Any other approach casts shame upon tolerance, imagination, and science itself.
Deepak Chopra, MD. FACP, ChopraFoundation.org/
Stuart Hameroff, MD, Professor of Anesthesiology and Psychology, Director, Center for Consciousness Studies, The University of Arizona, http://www.quantumconsciousness.org
Menas C. Kafatos, Ph.D., Fletcher Jones Endowed Professor in Computational Physics, Director, Center of Excellence, Chapman University,
Facebook: kafatos@chapman.edu
Rudolph E. Tanzi, Ph.D., Joseph P. and Rose F. Kennedy Professor of Neurology at Harvard University, Director of the Genetics and Aging Research Unit at Massachusetts General Hospital
Neil Theise, MD, Professor, Pathology and Medicine, (Division of Digestive Diseases) Beth Israel Medical Center — Albert Einstein College of Medicine, New York, http://www.neiltheise.com
You can read TED’s response here.
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Thank you Dear People,
who are aware of the fraudulent global matrix of institutions and officials that have violated the personal sovereignty of the People of Earth.
As more of us share our awareness and exercise our freedom the clear message for the violations to end will have been sent and alternative solutions will be implemented.
[audio src="http://www.blogtalkradio.com/globalfactradio/2013/09/20/conscious-living-guest-deryl-zeleny-and-swissindo-trust.mp3" /]
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Keiser Report: Mortgage Crisis 2.0
Published on Sep 4, 2014
In this episode of the Keiser Report, Max Keiser and Stacy Herbert discuss the impending second wave of the lastest mortgage crisis, this time due to Helocs (Home equity lines of credit) and HAMP (Home Affordable Modification Program) interest rate resets. In the second half, Max interviews Aaron Krowne on the true state of the housing market across America – from home ownership rates to mortgage arrears.
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Bitcoin to influence the geopolitical chessboard
Too much cheer-leading for “BITCOIN”, however innovation and creativity will deploy alternatives as this global institutional assault on the People continues.
Well worth a listen, discussion, and share ~Ron
2 Sept 2014 Max Keiser and Trace Mayer talk about the U.S. government war against the civilian population with militarized-police-TSA-Mass-surveillance etc, and the WW3 is here and the Bitcoin & innovative freedom vs tyranny…
Start at the 12:39 que
See Part 2 below, go to 11:37 que:
ABOUT Trace Mayer, J.D.: author of The Great Credit Contraction holds a degree in Accounting, a law degree from California Western School of Law and studies the Austrian school of economics. He works as an entrepreneur, investor, journalist and monetary scientist. He is a strong advocate of the freedom of speech, a member of the Society of Professional Journalists and the San Diego County Bar Association. He has appeared on ABC, NBC, BNN, radio shows and presented at many investment conferences throughout the world.
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