Institutional Reports
What Half A Second Of Market “Trading” Looks Like In Slow Motion
That modern markets are broken beyond repair should by now be clear to everyone: with liquidity that can be shut off at the flick of a switch, 70% of overall market “volumes” merely churning between various rebate collecting HFT algos, and the consolidated quote tape stuffed by billions of cancellation-sniffing quotes, it is surprising that major, marketwide millisecond +/- 2% swings are not a daily occurrence (as opposed to single-stock flash crashes and smashes which now do take place daily). http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-05-03/what-half-second-trading-looks-todays-market
Examine and use DISCERNMENT
BECAUSE the corporate-governments control most media and keep secrets and use both mis-information and dis-information to manipulate the public opinion and legislation and authority to act in ways that are not in the BEST INTEREST of the PEOPLE, but rather is in the BEST INTEREST of a ELITE few.
With this in mind dig deeper and ask more questions
This is a slightly edited reprint of my 2015 report because with each passing season this becomes more relevant.
What Are Governments Likely To Do?
Governments will obey their money masters.
They dislike annoying grassroots populism with social unrest opposing their policies.
It would be prudent for you to be aware of what is “Really Going On”.
Expect the worse from the worse.
Be alert and prepared.
Economic Collapse – What I See Happening
Originally printed 15 March 2015 –
Many write about the looming monetary system crisis, including myself.
Writers call it by many different names: the event, reset, collapse, etc.
Whereas I often share my vision for a world wide agreement of debt free currencies that include complementary community currencies, the institutions are enforcing the perpetuation of this current debt bondage system and suffering.
I have grown weary of frequently reading so much ambiguity and confused thoughts of economic collapse and doom. A persistent economic doom from the 1970’s ’till today, obviously the public economic models are flawed if over all these decades the economists and other experts can not accurately access the operation of the economy.
I will attempt to briefly explain the institutional plans for the international monetary system.
Institutional plans do not always work as planned…
I encourage you to research further and I wish for this discussion to grant you clarity, confidence, and strong sense of survival in a emergency situation.
RESTRUCTURING:
Restructure is more likely than the U.S. default (institutions plan for it, even as they publicly tell you otherwise) because institutions reform and restructure to survive, unless wars and courts prevent them…
*{War is also a possibility, but we are doing our best to prevent armed conflict among the developed nations, and end the existing wars in the weaker nations.}
Put the G20 on your “watch” list as they are the finance ministers along with the central banks and IMF who will restructure their international monetary system, and expect the member nations to enforce their policies on obedient trained citizens. Important to realize that Russia and the BRICS org. are part of the bankers’ monetary system and thus they are not our saviours.
CURRENCY After The Event:
For the United States there are two major issues about the U.S. dollar (USD) as the World Reserve Currency:
(Dumping the dollar has some advantages for the U.S.)
“The dollar is our currency, but it’s your problem.” This is what U.S. Treasury Secretary John Connally said to his counterparts in the Rome G-10 meeting in November, 1971, shortly after the Nixon administration ended the dollar’s convertibility into gold and shifted the international monetary system into a global floating exchange rate regime. The world has been suffering from this “problem” ever since the U.S. obtained the “exorbitant privilege” of issuing the world’s reserve and trade currency under the Bretton Woods system after WWII. –Dollar Imperialism, 2015 Edition by MICHÈLE BRAND and RÉMY HERRERA
1. International Monetary System –
The USD belongs to the (IMS) nations of the world and not to the united states.
Thus, after “the event” there will be a new dollar, approved by the U.S. federal government and executed by the U.S. Treasury department.
That new currency dollar will belong to the U.S. Treasury and its agents (federal reserve or not).
The currency problem is not that it is “fiat”, neither is the problem derived from not being pegged to gold and silver.
The problem is Confidence and Trust.
The international monetary system has lost trust (remember I said I will be brief, research this on your own, and plenty of helpful posts are on this website, and there is no shortage on the internet)…
Many power brokers can no longer trust the USD debt-based international monetary system.
The securitized debts are all suspect, with unknown counter party risks and volatile interest rates. Where the securities can no longer be trusted for the stated values; as the home mortgage backed securities (MBS) melt down revealed in 2008.
Fraud, volatility, and risk are too great, and fuel uncertainty with malinvestment or anemic capital investment.
Today we are left with rumours and speculation if the central banks were able to remove/discharge most of the toxic debts from the system and restore liquidity…
Many wars, imperialism, economic sanctions, retaliations, and the massive corruption that was revealed after the 2008 banker bailouts have led to distrust, insolvency, and instability among other economic connected problems. Not the least of which has been the depositors’ inability to save with current negative interest rates or rates below inflation (ZIRP/NIRP) bank deposits lose value sitting idle in bank accounts.
The banks see depositors as too great a liability for their balance sheets. Depositors are unsecured creditors at a time when investment banks are feverishly trying to move cash seeking short term and immediate yields.
If you haven’t done so, please remove your savings from the bank.
The international bankers are determined and committed to restoring confidence after “the event”.
The bankers may ask what currency has world wide acceptance and confidence?
If none exist, then create one, or a basket of currencies, preferably digital so that 100% tax compliance and other regulatory controls will be set in place. (How convenient BRICS & IMF both claim to have a solution plan)
Perhaps, you have heard of the Direct Deposit, Cryptocurrencies, and Cashless Society?
2. Sovereign Debt –
This is even a bigger topic…
In the text above I touched on the related foreign side of debt, now take a look from the U.S. perspective:
To remain brief, I will say that most of the USD debt is not for or by the American People.
Thus debt, and taxation as the means of paying off the governments’ debt obligations, is the major concern.
MOUNTAIN OF DEBT
Securitization is the foundation of this concept that has been leveraged and rehypothecated until derivative shadows hide risk in a “shadow banking industry” that is now vastly larger than all the real world production and services combined!
If you want to research that rabbit hole then focus on securitization, derivatives, bills of exchange, promissory notes, negotiable instruments, and special purpose (SPV, and SPE).
Also be aware of secret black budget projects and off book accounting.
{NOTE that “Money” is not mentioned; because ‘money’ is an agreement and is negotiable.
Currencies, notes, bonds, and securities are the more appropriate terms, rather than “Money”.}
Obviously, some or all of the computer archived debt will eventually be discharged and zeroed out.
Some national currencies’ value will increase as others’ decline, such as with China and the U.S..
For most of the People, and citizens within nations, the issue will be national currency value and exchange.
What value will the national currencies (electronic bank accounts & cards) have?
How much will food and housing cost?
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) is planning to be a major decision maker with the value of national currencies. They want their SDRs to be the determining factor, but will the member nations agree?
The U.S. has been the lone standout and have failed to ratify, through legislation, the IMF 2010 Quota and Governance Reforms Agreement (DE-Dollarization: a IMF Working Paper provides a summary of the key policies that encourage dedollarization). [Ed: The U.S. did eventually ratify the treaty around December 2015. Read IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde’s Press Release here.]
{Quick, sidebar: the U.S. claims to protect the USD reserve currency status, but that may not be true. A subtle plan may be to influence (by sanctions and limited warfare) the Eastern power bloc to implement the required services and mechanisms to support a stable redundant/parallel world wide monetary system. China & Russia has finally removed their complacency and implemented alternative credit rating agencies and SWIFT payment system.}
The governments and other major corporations apparently have agreed to accept the new government currencies and bonds, as it shifts control away from the established Anglosphere (UK/U.S. and allies) power bloc.
But will you, the People, accept their new monetary policies?
For the nations, the question is pointless because they are not asking you or the citizens.
Governments do not even disclose the full texts of the international meeting minutes, nor their full text agreements for you to read in its entirety and debate on the mass media news prior to enforcement.
International Monetary System (IMS Hegemony)
Be not surprised; be prepared.
…have clarity, confidence, and strong sense of survival in a emergency situation.
If you find this information useful or of value then please share it with others.
§
G-SIFI Use The Jedi’s Mind Trick!
Economic Collapse – What I See Happening
(PDF) Basel III and Asset Securitization – ResearchGate
Gold Daily and Silver Weekly Charts – Economics, a Thoroughly Disgraced Profession
10 December 2013
“I write to you from a disgraced profession. Economic theory, as widely taught since the 1980s, failed miserably to understand the forces behind the financial crisis.
Concepts including “rational expectations,” “market discipline,” and the “efficient markets hypothesis” led economists to argue that speculation would stabilize prices, that sellers would act to protect their reputations, that caveat emptor could be relied on, and that widespread fraud therefore could not occur.
Not all economists believed this – but most did.”
James Galbraith
But in the defense of the economists I would like to add:
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding [or seeing] it.”
Upton Sinclair
In other words, I don’t think in many cases that there was a failure of the intellect, so much as a failure of intellectual and moral integrity.
Economics is a profession that succumbed almost en masse, whether by individual actions or the complicit silence of careerism, to the pervasive corruption of financial fraud, and of the persuasive power of Wall Street, the Banks, and big money. The only group that approaches their failure is the national political and financial class, including the accountants and the regulators.
For the most part this has not yet changed because of the unreformed state of the financial system, combined with the snare of the credibility trap. And they cover their shame by calling themselves the ‘scholar-gentry’ and tut tutting about the failure of the public in much the same tones that the plutocrats of past colonial empires would agonize over the plight of the victims of their perfidy in terms of the white man’s burden.
Scotia Mocatta managed to squeeze out another 20,000 or so ounces of bullion for the registered (deliverable) category at the Comex. The bullion banks now have it back up to 723,000 which should be more than enough to meet deliveries.
So when will there be any actual deliveries of gold bullion out of these warehouses?
Someone redeemed 19,200 ounces of gold out of the Sprott gold fund.
Have a pleasant evening.
> > >
Oct 10, 2013
Report Finds Police Worldwide Criminalize Dissent, Assert New Powers in Crackdown on Protests
In a major new report, the International Network of Civil Liberties Organizations details a global crackdown on peaceful protests through excessive police force and the criminalization of dissent. The report, “Take Back the Streets: Repression and Criminalization of Protest Around the World,” warns of a growing tendency to perceive individuals exercising a fundamental democratic right — the right to protest — as a threat requiring a forceful government response. The case studies detailed in this report show how governments have reacted to peaceful protests in the United States, Israel, Canada, Argentina, Egypt, Hungary, Kenya, South Africa and Britain. The report’s name comes from a police report filed in June 2010 when hundreds of thousands of Canadians took to the streets of Toronto to nonviolently protest the G-20 summit. A senior Toronto police commander responded to the protests by issuing an order to “take back the streets.” Within a span of 36 hours, more than 1,000 people — peaceful protesters, journalists, human rights monitors and downtown residents — were arrested and placed in detention. We are joined by three guests: the report’s co-editor, Abby Deshman, a lawyer and program director with the Canadian Civil Liberties Association; Anthony Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union; and Hossam Bahgat, an Egyptian human rights activist and the founder and executive director of the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights.
http://dncdn.dvlabs.com/ipod/dn2013-1010.mp4
Click video above or audio only below
http://traffic.libsyn.com/democracynow/dn2013-1010-1.mp3
Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: We turn now to a major new report detailing the global crackdown on peaceful protests, both through excessive police force and the criminalization of dissent. The report is called “Take Back the Streets: Repression and Criminalization of Protest Around the World.” It was put out by the International Network of Civil Liberties Organizations. The name of the report, “Take Back the Streets,” comes from a police report filed in June 2010, when hundreds of thousands of Canadians took to the streets of Toronto to nonviolently protest the G-20 summit. A senior Toronto police commander responded to the protests by issuing an order to, quote, “take back the streets.” Within a span of 36 hours, over a thousand people—peaceful protesters, journalists, human rights monitors and downtown residents—were arrested and placed in detention.
AMY GOODMAN: According to the report, what happened in Canada is emblematic of government conduct in the face of protest around the world: the tendency to perceive individuals exercising a fundamental democratic right—the right to protest—as a threat requiring a forceful government response. The case studies detailed in this report show how governments have reacted to peaceful protests in the United States, in Israel, Canada, Argentina, Egypt, Hungary, Kenya, South Africa and Britain.
For more, we’re joined by co-editor of the report, Abby Deshman, a lawyer and program director with the Canadian Civil Liberties Association. We’re also joined by Anthony Romero. He is executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, author of the book In Defense of Our America: The Fight for Civil Liberties in the Age of Terror. And still with us, Hossam Bahgat—he is the founder and executive director of the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights.
We welcome you all to Democracy Now! Abby, talk about the report.
ABBY DESHMAN: Sure. This is a collaboration between multiple domestic human rights and civil liberties organizations, that we’ve really come together to group our domestic work, group our national work and identify trends in how we feel the governments are responding to democratic dissent and protest in the streets. And, you know, gathering together this number of practitioners to really provide practitioners’ notes shows that there are very disturbing trends. People are taking to the streets across the world, and governments are responding with excessive use of force, criminalization and repression.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, when you say “disturbing trends,” governments have never looked kindly on dissent within their borders or by their own citizens. What do you see as new about what is occurring now? Because I remember years back when we at Democracy Now! covered the Seattle World Trade Organization protests live, there clearly were some new tactics by both the nonviolent protesters as well as the government response.
ABBY DESHMAN: Well, partly what’s new—I mean, at least for me; I’m young in this game—but partly what’s new is massive uprising in the streets. I think we are seeing, in the past three, five years, record numbers of people, in recent memory, taking to the streets. And we are seeing new police tactics—the numbers of arrests, the massive, hundreds of people rounded up at a time. There are new policing weapons: long-range acoustic devices, sonic cannon, excessive amounts of tear gas being used in Egypt. These are trends that are currently surfacing in multiple countries.
AMY GOODMAN: Anthony Romero, talk about the United States.
ANTHONY ROMERO: Well, it’s important to put the United States in the global context. And normally when we think about protest and freedom of speech, we think that’s been a right that’s been well established and well respected. And yet, you point out the difficulties we’ve seen with the WTO protesters, the protesters with the Occupy movement and, in particular, this case study that we highlight in Puerto Rico, a place where most Americans don’t think of Puerto Rico as part of the United States, but it is. The Constitution applies. Over four—close to four million American citizens live there. And yet, you have the second-largest police department in the nation, only second to New York City Police Department, and the massive levels of repression and shutdown of—of arrests, of tear-gassing, of beating of students, of labor leaders, the level of impunity that lasted for years, until the ACLU filed a report, lobbied our Justice Department, filed a lawsuit, and then the Justice Department stepped in, only recently, to try to put the Puerto Rico Police Department under better control of rule of law.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And this whole tactic of picking people up en masse and then holding them, supposedly while protests continue, basically pulling them out without any real charges just to get them off the streets?
ANTHONY ROMERO: We saw that New York, right? I mean, that’s how they—that’s how they dealt with many of the protests here in New York, especially after the conventions—during the conventions, where they corralled record numbers of people, arrested them in record time, in ways that were just astonishing, held them often incommunicado for 24, 36, 48 hours—a form of preventive detention, if you will.
And I think one of the things we have to bear in mind is like, look, our government is shut down. Our government is not working. People are frustrated. People may take to the streets as an important part of demonstrating their unrest, their unhappiness with our government. And so, how we protect the rights of individuals to protest and to dissent is critically important, especially in our democracy, that’s so fundamentally broken down and at loggerheads at the moment. The people—it’s the government of the people, by the people and for the people. And when the government doesn’t respond to the people, the people have to take the government back.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: But to follow up on this, because what the police departments do is they don’t mind having to deal with lawsuits later on. You know, years later they end up paying these settlements to protesters who had their civil liberties violated, but at that moment they’re able to effectively shut down the dissent. So, I’m wondering how can you, as a civil liberties lawyer, find—what ways can the courts be utilized to prevent these kinds of occurrences from repeating themselves over and over again?
ANTHONY ROMERO: I think part of it, you have to—even in cases where they infringe on civil liberties and freedom of speech and expression, you have to sue, to use that as a deterrent for further police departments, to shame them, to cost taxpayers money. We have to work with police departments, those that are open to it, to hear what their concerns are for public safety. They have real concerns around public safety; they can be addressed.
We also have to make sure that we don’t allow the excessive use of less lethal force. I mean, one of the things we’ve seen in the reports on Puerto Rico, as much in Egypt and Canada and Argentina, has been the increased use of police of certain weapons, of certain tactics, which they say is less lethal, but they end up in deaths. We have deaths in the arrests in Puerto Rico. We have deaths in Argentina. We certainly have deaths in places like Egypt. And so we have to make sure that we hold the police accountable for those—for those actions.
AMY GOODMAN: And then the issue of surveillance, like our last headline today—
ANTHONY ROMERO: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: —this undercover officer in the infamous West Side Highway videotape of the motorcycle gang and the guy with the SUV, that one of these officers, it turns out, was—one of these motorcycle riders was an officer, undercover, and he was undercover in Occupy Wall Street, as well—
ANTHONY ROMERO: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: —picked up at Grand Central.
ANTHONY ROMERO: When you look at the fact that it’s not just what they do at the protest itself, but prior to the protests the surveillance, prior to the protests the infiltration. We have police departments who brazenly brag about sending in undercover cops to pretend they’re part of the protest movements as a way to derail them or to shape them in the ways they want. All of this, in the context after 9/11, where any activity that disagrees with the government is—often vehemently, is seen as potential terrorist activity or a potential terrorist plot, the powers of the government to use of surveillance, infiltration, the police tactics, they all have to be seen as one part of an effort to shut down and to dispel dissent. We see it. We see the fact that there’s a quell on public dissent. Muslims are less likely to express themselves now. We hear that from our clients. We hear that from our—some of the litigation we bring. And so, it’s a very pernicious part that’s very, very real and often not uncovered until we put out reports like this.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Abby, the Canadian example of the G-20 summit, what most surprised you in terms of as you were unearthing what happened there and the civil liberties violations?
ABBY DESHMAN: Well, actually, how high the police orders went. You know, we thought that this was a coordinated response. We saw that there was consistency, a really defined point in time when the policing turned during the G-20. We then had confirmation that there were orders all the way from the top, that these were not random acts by individual commanders panicking under situations, that these really were decisions that were taken by very senior police leaders to violate not only the rights of citizens, but their own policies and procedures about how to deal with protests, and really that they were taking notes from an international scene where this had happened before. We had not seen this technique in Canada. It was clear that it had happened at previous G-20 summits, and they were importing these policies.
AMY GOODMAN: Hossam Bahgat, we were just talking about the level of repression in Egypt, but fit this into this global context.
HOSSAM BAHGAT: Yes. While Egypt might be an extreme case, of course, because we have sort of crossed the threshold from just the violent repression of protests to mass and deliberate killings, really the trend in Egypt fits with the trend identified by the report in all of these case studies. We see, as Abby and Anthony mentioned, that the mass protests are not, of course, a new phenomenon, but they are taking new shapes. And whether it’s the Arab uprisings, the protests in Turkey and Brazil, the anti-austerity mass protests in Europe, the Occupy movement here, they are going to continue.
And we see the right to protest publicly and the right to dissent as an essential part of democracy. There is an attempt on the other side, by governments, to reduce the democratic rights of individuals to just voting, to being called in once every few years to cast a vote and then be sent home and leave the governance to the people that have been elected. The people refuse. The people see that, in many countries, the democratic institutions—and we’re talking in the United States here, but the democratic institutions around the world are not working and are not necessarily reflecting the wills of the people. And the people are going to continue to take their demands, yes, through channels like the media and civil society and labor unions and others, but they are going to go on the street, and they are going to protest publicly. And states need to know that they have a responsibility not just to protect this right, but to even enable people to express these rights, because the only other alternative—the killings that we’re seeing in Egypt or the killings that even started in Syria as just violence in the face of peaceful protests and turned into civil wars—these are recipes for only pushing the situation into very, very dangerous directions. And the violent response only leads to even violent protests.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Yeah, and, Abby, I wanted to ask you—much was made, obviously, in Egypt and during the Arab Spring of the impact of social media and the use of the Internet by dissidents to mobilize, to communicate. In your report, did you dwell into the responses of government officials in terms of how they responded to the change in tactics of the popular movements?
ABBY DESHMAN: Yeah, absolutely. Police do say that they need new tactics because people can mobilize more quickly. Things are going out on Twitter, and then a large crowd forms. Things are very mobile on the ground. But the truth is, in my experience, during the G-20, we knew exactly what was going to happen, because it was on the Internet, it was on social media. The protesters themselves had classified their protests in terms of levels of risk. So I actually am very skeptical of those claims that they need new powers in order to try to police these new forms of protest. We knew exactly what was going to happen during the G-20 protests. They followed that pattern. The police simply weren’t prepared and then violated rights as their reaction.
AMY GOODMAN: And how should the state deal with violence?
ABBY DESHMAN: Well, the state does need to respond to violence. But I would say the state overresponds to violence, particularly in protests. So, there may be one or two or even 10 or 30 people in a crowd of thousands, tens of thousands, that commit property damage, that commit violent acts. The state often takes that as an authority to abrogate the rights of every single person in that crowd. They need to respond to violence. They need to protect the rights of all the other people in that crowd who are peacefully protesting and exercising their democratic rights. Their role is to facilitate protest, not to find excuses to shut it down.
AMY GOODMAN: What about the U.S. cutting military aid to Egypt, Hossam? How does that play into what the military government does with the protesters? Does it change?
HOSSAM BAHGAT: I mean, in Egypt, especially after the massacres, of course, our position was that there should be investigations, there should be an independent fact finding, and there should be accountability. And until that takes place and until the government also accepts responsibility for these killings, there should be a suspension of the provision of any arms or tools of repression from any country in the world. We’re not just talking about the U.S. military assistance. And any resumption of the sale of weapons or the provision of weapons or tools of repression to the Egyptian government must be conditioned on accepting the retraining and provision of, you know, new tools for riot control, but that business should not continue just as usual when it comes to Egypt.
Especially when—exactly like Abby said, the problem is now, in all of these demonstrations that we are seeing, in the report, all around the world, there is—there is always a few protesters that are going to use violence. The trend we’re seeing now is that governments use this to dub the entire protest—20,000, 30,000—as non-peaceful or as violent. And that leads to two things: One, the peaceful participants that are not using violence are, again, lumped together with the others and are deprived of their rights as peaceful protesters; and even those that do engage in stone throwing or other violence are robbed of all their other rights, including their right to life, of course. And the states are just using this as an excuse, sometimes through infiltration by provocateurs into these protests, in order to just remove entire protests outside the realm of protection of law.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I’d like to get back to Anthony Romero in terms of this whole idea of the Obama administration finally doing something in Egypt to cut off some of the military aid to the—to the coup leaders. How has the Obama administration dealt with the increasing repression by local police on public protesters? Has there been any—any actions by the Justice Department to try to rein this in, or have they basically been supportive?
ANTHONY ROMERO: They’ve basically been supportive. I mean, to be clear, the ACLU doesn’t take positions on foreign policy or the U.S. aid to Egypt, but we do look very closely about how our government, federal government, works with state and local governments. And the level of collusion between the federal agents, the FBI, and local police departments has become very troubling, the way they track and the way they monitor and do surveillance on Muslims. So, one of the key cases we have now is in New York City with the New York City Police Department, but it involves the FBI and the federal government. You see it in the immigration context, if you pull the camera back a little further back, where you find the FBI and the DOJ and Department of Homeland Security working with local sheriffs and police.
AMY GOODMAN: You have a case against Arpaio in Arizona.
ANTHONY ROMERO: Oh, it’s exactly that.
AMY GOODMAN: The sheriff, Joe Arpaio.
ANTHONY ROMERO: The sheriff, Arpaio, who resists a federal order from a federal judge to have a monitor and to have any type of accountability. But Arpaio was created by the policies of Janet Napolitano. I mean, Arpaio is not just a one—
AMY GOODMAN: When she was governor or head of the Department of Homeland Security?
ANTHONY ROMERO: Well, I would say more in the Department of Homeland Security, because it’s exactly that type of collusion that she encouraged—the 287(g) programs, the Secure Communities programs, that insisted that federal government officials work with local law enforcement officials. Now, Sheriff Arpaio has gone off the farm, but the fact is that there are too many local police departments that are working with the federal government on things like surveillance, on immigration, on dissent, on protest. And so, I think actually part of the responsibility does come from the federal government.
Source: http://www.democracynow.org/2013/10/10/report_finds_police_worldwide_criminalize_dissent#.UlbBdESpwhw.facebook
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5 Red Flags of Imminent Economic Collapse
These 5 red flags will give you anywhere from a few days to a few months of warning that things are about to change drastically…and well before those around you grasp the full extent of what is going on. This is hopefully a scenario that never happens as this will truly be the end of the world as you knew it.
http://www.munknee.com/5-warning-signs-that-economic-environment-is-about-to-decline-rapidly/
So writes Marjory Wildcraft (disasterandemergencysurvival.com) in edited excerpts from her original article* entitled 5 Red Flags of Imminent Collapse: Be Aware of the Warning Signs.
The following is presented by Lorimer Wilson, editor of www.FinancialArticleSummariesToday.com and www.munKNEE.com and the FREE Market Intelligence Report newsletter (sample here – register here). The excerpts may have been edited ([ ]), abridged (…) and/or reformatted (some sub-titles and bold/italics emphases) for the sake of clarity and brevity to ensure a fast and easy read. This paragraph must be included in any article re-posting to avoid copyright infringement.
Wildcraft goes on to say in further edited, and perhaps paraphrased in some places, excerpts:
The indicators below will give you anywhere from a few days to a few months of warning that things are about to change drastically.
1) Interest rates on US Treasuries go up steeply, and/or suddenly
The definition of ‘defaulting’ on it’s debt means the U.S. Gov’t isn’t able to pay the interest on the almost $16 trillion it owes. Currently interest rates are at all-time lows…but, as interest rates rise, the interest expense will get bigger – and this will be very difficult for a Gov’t that is already deficit spending way beyond its means.
You want to keep an eye on the current rates on Treasuries for two reasons:
- Increasing rates will require a debt laden Gov’t to borrow more and will accelerate inflation and the date of collapse. This is a 6-12 month red flag. As of today, rates are slowly rising although they are still very low.
- A sudden and sustained spike in the interest rates indicates that there are fewer buyers of US debt. Without the ability to borrow more money or rollover the existing debt the US Gov’t will have to shut down or do desperate things like stealing from retirement plans or citizens bank accounts. [If, and when, this happens] get your money out of the banks or markets immediately. This is a very severe red flag indicating only weeks before major financial crisis and economic collapse.
Here and here are sites for monitoring Treasury interest rates. Also read Rapid Rise In Interest Rates Will Collapse U.S. Financial System – Here’s Why
2) Price of oil goes above $120/barrel
Essentially everything on this planet depends on oil; food, transportation, heating & cooling, and basically every consumer item you can think of. The world economy cannot sustain high prices of oil without collapsing. We saw that very clearly in 2008 when the price of oil hit a high of $146/barrel in June, and by September of that year we were in a full blown financial crisis…
If the price of light sweet crude oil [rises to, and] stays above $120/barrel, then you have only a few months before a major financial crisis unfolds. The financial crisis of 2008 was ‘solved’ by atrocious US Gov’t spending of more than a trillion dollars/year. That particular solution won’t be available to use in the next crisis. Does ‘the powers that be’ have another card up their sleeve for the next financial crisis? I don’t know, but I assume the answer is “no”.
Go here for prices on crude oil. Look on the left sidebar a bit lower on the page.
3) Food Prices Predict Rioting And Civil Breakdown
There is a direct correlation between rioting and the cost of food. It is a very simple principle – when people can’t afford to eat, they revolt [as was the case] in 2010 when food prices soared and Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire in Tunisia in December of that….sparking a series of revolutions throughout the Arab world…[Such] revolutions are predictable as detailed in this article…
The level of hunger and desperation in the Untied States has increased in recent years indicated by the increasing numbers of people on food stamps and increasing strain on local food banks. According to http://www.FeedingAmerica.org 1 in 6 Americans are dealing with hunger…. We are approaching conditions for civil unrest and revolt here in the Untied States…
The UN FAO Food Price Index (see here) has climbed recently to within 10% of the February 2011 high of 237 and should have you on alert right now. Were the index to cross into the 240s and then stay above that level then the probability is very high you only have weeks or possibly months before widespread violence will break out world-wide.
4) Category 5 hurricane hits Texas City/ Houston area.
Approximately 30% of all US oil refining is done in a small area called Texas City near Houston. A category 5 hurricane… hitting these refineries would cripple diesel production and, without diesel, the vast just-in-time trucking system would come to a crawl. Food, fuel, and medicine are the three most crucial items trucked around in this county and all of those deliveries would be dramatically reduced drastically limiting their supply. Food inventoried in the grocery stores, for example, would only last about 4 days while delivery of everything else we commonly depend on would also come to a crawl. Prices would skyrocket…
Red Flag: if a category 5 hurricane hits the Houston area, you’ve only got days before rampant price increases and martial law breaks out.
5) EMP Disaster
EMP stands for electro-magnetic pulse and is a strong burst of energy that would have the net effect of destroying the electrical power grid. An EMP pulse would either be man made (i.e. terrorist induced) by exploding nuclear device(s) in the atmosphere above the U.S. or as the result of an intense solar flare from the sun. The net result would be the same – the loss of human life as high as 90% within a six month period according to U.S. Gov’t studies.
Should your electrical power be disrupted, the first thing to do is determine the extent of the outage. Hopefully it is simply a neighborhood, or perhaps city-wide, outage that is a temporary inconvenience.
- Try using your phone…and if it works the entire system has not been destroyed, although there is a small possibility the phone system might work for a while with the backup power they have.
- Turn on a radio and if you are getting radios stations with normal programming, then the disturbance is only minor and you can relax. If your radio doesn’t work at all, or you can’t get any radio stations across the dial, the condition is very grave.
- Keep an AM radio with charged batteries in a ‘Faraday cage’ that protects the electronics from EMP pulse. AM radio signals can travel extremely far and checking transmission from AM radio stations at night is a way of determining the range of destruction. This protocol will give you awareness of the situation hours and days before those around you grasp the full extent of what is going on. This is hopefully a scenario that never happens as this would truly be the end of the world as we knew it.
[Editor’s Note: The author’s views and conclusions in the above article are unaltered and no personal comments have been included to maintain the integrity of the original post. Furthermore, the views, conclusions and any recommendations offered in this article are not to be construed as an endorsement of such by the editor.]
*http://disasterandemergencysurvival.com/archives/5-red-flags-of-imminent-collapse-be-aware-of-the-warning-signs (Copyright © 2013 Survival – All Rights Reserved)
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Oct 9, 2013
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-10-09/meet-28-other-money-market-funds-broke-buck-after-and-lehman
Also additional info: http://libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org/2013/10/twenty-eight-money-market-funds-that-could-have-broken-the-buck.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+LibertyStreetEconomics+%28Liberty+Street+Economics%29
Meet The 28 Other Money Market Funds That Broke The Buck After (And Before) Lehman
Everyone knows that one of the immediate catalysts of the near systemic collapse in the aftermath of the Lehman bankruptcy, one which set in motion the sequence of events that led to Bernanke increasing the Fed’s balance sheet fourfold, was when the Reserve Primary Money Market Fund announced on September 16 that the value of its shares had dropped to 97, sparking an epic run on money market funds, and requiring an immediate bailout first from its sponsor, and then the Federal Reserve and US government. What is far less known is that the Reserve Primary Fund was just one of many money market funds that got locked out and was in danger of collapse following the decision to let Dick Fuld hang. How many? According to a research note released by the NY Fed itself, at least 28 more!
As Marco Cipriani et al report, “at least twenty-nine MMFs had losses large enough to cause them to break the buck in September and October 2008 despite significant government intervention and support of the sector. Five funds or more experienced losses exceeding the 3 percent reported by Reserve, and one fund reported a loss of nearly 10 percent. Among the twenty-nine funds that would have broken the buck without sponsor support, the average loss was 2.2 percent.
The NY Fed report continues by suggesting what is well-known: that in a time of crisis, nobody wants to point out that the emperor is naked, or that the money market fund has broken the buck:
Yet, the losses for twenty-eight of these MMFs may have gone unnoticed during the crisis, as neither their shareholders nor almost anyone else could have observed their magnitudes at the time. As in other episodes in which MMFs suffered significant losses, the losses were absorbed—and hence obscured—by voluntary financial support from MMF sponsors (the MMFs’ asset management firms or their parent companies). The extensive record of sponsor support for MMFs does allow us to look back to the 2008 crisis and other periods of strain for indirect evidence about funds’ losses. In a 2010 report, Moody’s found 144 cases in which U.S. MMFs received support from sponsors between 1989 and 2003. Brady, Anadu, and Cooper (2012) documented 123 instances of support for seventy-eight different MMFs between 2007 and 2011, including thirty-one cases in which support was large enough that it probably was needed to prevent funds from breaking the buck. Still, these data only allow estimates of what MMF losses must have been to motivate sponsors’ actions.
Alas, the “sponsor support” was not sufficient, and required a wholesale bailout. The report continues:
In contrast, the data we describe are market-based values of MMF portfolios reported confidentially by the funds themselves during the crisis to the Department of the Treasury (“Treasury”) and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). In general, these “shadow” net asset values (NAVs) are invisible to investors and the public, as MMFs are permitted to round their reported share values to $1 so long as the shadow NAV remains above $0.995. Only if the shadow NAV drops below that threshold does the fund break the buck—unless it receives sponsor support. During the crisis, many MMFs did receive such support, so their shadow NAVs remained invisible. However, any MMF with a shadow NAV below $0.9975 that participated in Treasury’s Temporary Guarantee Program for MMFs was required to report to Treasury and the SEC what its shadow NAV would have been without some forms of sponsor support, such as capital support agreements. Since virtually the entire industry participated in the program, these data provide an unprecedented record of MMFs’ portfolio losses at the time.
Said otherwise, the primary investment vehicle for some $3 trillion in assets suddenly found itself insolvent. And this is merely the first thing that Bernanke, Paulson, the bank CEO and everyone else failed to grasp when less than a week prior they decided to let Lehman brothers fail. Of course, since nothing has changed since then but merely the amount of excess liquidity sloshing in the system, any questions about “invisible” underwater asset managers will remain unanswered until the next liquidity crisis drags not only the MMF industry but everyone else down. Because despite what Yellen, Bernanke, Greenspan et al wish to tell us, a credit bubble is never fixed with another credit bubble: it merely delays the day of reckoning while making its severity that much worse.
So before the government had to step in, what were the immediate actions by sponsors to mitigate the inevitable disaster:
Even so, the NAV data do not reflect the full extent of losses that might have occurred without sponsor interventions. Some of the reported shadow NAVs were likely boosted by common forms of sponsor support, such as direct cash infusions and sales of securities to sponsors at above-market prices. Of course, the data also do not reflect portfolio losses that might have occurred in the absence of Treasury’s guarantee program and other government support for MMFs in 2008.
In the table below, line 1 shows that seventy-two MMFs reported shadow NAVs at least once from September 5 to October 17, 2008, indicating that their shadow NAVs dipped below $0.9975 at some point in this period. Although some funds reported data daily, all funds with shadow NAVs below $0.9975 were required to report at least weekly, and the number of reports jumped each Friday. Line 1 lists the number of funds reporting shadow NAVs on each Friday, which ranged from nineteen to sixty-three. Line 2 shows that on most Fridays the majority of reporting MMFs had shadow NAVs of $0.9975 or less.
Twenty-nine MMFs reported a shadow NAV below $0.995—low enough to break the buck, absent sponsor support—at some point during this episode (line 3). As many as eleven MMFs on any particular Friday reported shadow NAVs below 99.5 cents, including five funds that reported NAVs below this level before the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy. Average shadow NAVs for all reporting funds, excluding the effects of guarantees, dropped to $0.993 on October 3 and October 17 (line 4). Among funds with NAVs falling below $0.995 at some point, minimum shadow NAVs averaged $0.978 (line 5, column 1). That is, these funds lost, on average, at least 2.2 percent during the crisis.
In other words, money markets were insolvent on the days before the Lehman bankruptcy crashed the system, but they became really insolvent after.
The scale and scope of the losses in 2008 also highlight the significance of sponsor support for MMFs. After all, what made the Reserve Primary Fund unique in 2008 was neither its exposure to Lehman Brothers nor its portfolio losses, but the fact that its sponsor could not absorb its losses. However, the industry’s reliance on implicit recourse to sponsors is systemically risky because it creates channels for transmitting destabilizing strains between sponsors and their “off-balance-sheet” MMFs, and because uncertainty about whether sponsors will come to funds’ rescue may precipitate runs (McCabe 2010). Hence, the data we have described underscore the need for robust and effective MMF reforms that would provide a form of stability to the MMF industry not predicated on voluntary and uncertain support from sponsors.
But why is the Fed admitting that everything beneath the surface (of the Fed’s liquidity tsunami) is rotten? Simple: this latest “expose” on Money Markets is merely the latest attempt to restructure the money market industry: a process that started long ago with the Group of 30, the SEC, and Federal Reserve. Why restructure? Because at last check, retail and institutional money markets held just under $2.5 trillion in assets, read cash. And with QE forced to end sooner or later, for the simple reason that the Fed is now monetizing 0.4% of all 10 year equivalent bonds per week (since there is no taper in a reduced deficit environment), what would the Fed want more than anything? Why a brand new wave of “asset rotations”, one originating from the Money Market industry – so famously loathed by the status quo – and used to buy, what else, stocks. Preferably at their all time highs.
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August 16, 2013
Thank http://www.silverdoctors.com/jim-willie-the-shock-of-dollar-rejection/ for providing this link.
Jim Willie: The Shock of Dollar Rejection
In this MUST LISTEN interview with TruNews, Jim Willie explains why the Federal Reserve’s policy of zero interest rates and indefinite quantitative easing will eventually result in the dollar being cut off from world trade, a major power shift to the East, and mass social unrest in the United States.
The Golden Jackass’ thoughts on the coming shock of global dollar rejection and the end of the petro-dollar are below:
http://blogtalk.vo.llnwd.net/o23/show/5/272/show_5272375.mp3
*Evidence reveals a effort to re-introduce a GOLD-backed currency for central banks to continue to control commerce, trade, and governance…
(I remind readers that free people looking for a global consciousness shift will not endorse a precious metals backed currency that continues the fractional reserve model to perpetuate debt bondage. Governments are not pursuing a alternative and here lies the problem and the people will have to implement a grassroots solution. ~ Ron)
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State of Jefferson, Rise! Federal Government Excesses, Green Lobby Overreach and State-level Indifference Reinvigorates a Vision for Democratic Rebirth
August 16, 2013
“The State of Jefferson would have in fact become the 51st state were it not for the upwelling of nationalism brought on by World War II.
Last Tuesday, August 13th, Siskiyou County Board of Supervisors held an open hearing to consider public comments on a resolution draft overseen by Mark Baird, President of Scott Valley Protect Our Water. As many as 100 local residents filled the boardroom and spilled out into the hallway. This is no flash-in-the-pan movement.
Advocates call for Siskiyou County to withdraw from the State of California. Ultimately, the county would form a new state, the “State of Jefferson.” Advocates envision additional Northern California and Southern Oregon counties joining a newly formed State of Jefferson, an amalgamation similar in scope to the 1941 movement.
Decades of widely perceived policy abuse and neglect by federal and state agencies have wrought havoc on rural economies. Siskiyou County has certainly seen it’s fair share of economic decline.”
Read More: thenewsdoctors.com
Similar Stories:
Will North Colorado Be The 51st State In The Union?
Utah Refuses to Let Man Pay Taxes With Silver Despite State Law Making PM’s Legal Tender
End.
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Jeff Nielson: World Gold Council can’t spell ‘decoupling’
Submitted by cpowell on Thu, 2013-08-15 20:53. Section: Daily Dispatches
4:52p ET Thursday, August 15, 2013
Dear Friend of GATA and Gold:
With its latest report on gold demand, the World Gold Council is trying to conceal the distinction between paper gold and real metal, Jeff Nielson of Bullion Bulls Canada writes today. Gold demand can be said to have declined lately, Nielson notes, only if paper gold ownership is counted as the gold council counts it. But if only ownership of real metal is counted, demand is off the charts, he adds. That is, the world is figuring out what the World Gold Council can’t admit: that paper gold is a fraud, a claim against metal that doesn’t exist. Nielson’s commentary is headlined “Q2 Gold Demand: WGC Can’t Spell ‘Decoupling'” and it’s poted at Bullion Bulls Canada here:
http://www.bullionbullscanada.com/gold-commentary/26300-q2-gold-demand-w…
CHRIS POWELL, Secretary/Treasurer
Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee Inc.
>>>
Aug 15, 2013
The world is losing trust in the dollar as a safe haven. -RT news
Gold Gone? Germany baffled as Fed bars access to bullion
>>>
Aug 15, 2013
“After an initial $20 plunge, the price of gold turned violently higher and closed near the highs in what turned out to be almost a $50 trading range. In the aftermath of this turbulent trading, today one of the legends in the business shocked King World News when he said the reason for the wild trading action was that Asian central banks were demanding their gold, some of which is being stored in Western vaults, be sent home to Asia.
Keith Barron, who consults with major companies around the world and is responsible for one of the largest gold discoveries in the last quarter century, also spoke about the stunning reason for this game-changing move by Asian central banks.” – King World News
Meanwhile, as of August, here is a view of the manipulated paper-market for GOLD Bullion:
(“Market manipulation explains gold price plunge(s) amid soaring demand”)
30 Day Gold Price History in USD per Ounce.
36 year gold price history in US Dollars per ounce.
See more Data: http://therealasset.co.uk/charts-and-graph/gold-price-charts/
End.
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Published on Jun 28, 2013
“We’ll get Bush in the US” the world’s top war crimes prosecutor tells The Truthseeker after Dubya’s deputies warn him against travel, lawyers file for Obama’s arrest tomorrow when he hits South Africa, huge secret wars in America’s name being masked from the folks funding them.
Seek truth from facts with Yousha Tayob of the Muslim Lawyers Association, leading war crimes prosecutor Francis Boyle, Senior Staff Attorney Katherine Gallagher of New York’s Center for Constitutional Rights which stopped Bush’s first trip after his waterboarding admission, Marjorie Cohn, author of Cowboy Republic: Six Ways the Bush Gang Has Defied the Law, and former NSA intelligence officer Scott Rickard.
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Mozilla, EFF, ACLU rally public against electronic surveillance
The Firefox browser developer sets up a site to send e-mail to Congress urging changes to surveillance laws and an investigation to “reveal to the public the extent of this domestic spying.”
The Fort Meade, Md., headquarters of the National Security Agency, which is vacuuming up Verizon call records “on an ongoing daily basis.”(Credit: Getty Images)Incensed at revelations of U.S. government surveillance programs, Mozilla, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the American Civil Liberties Union, Reddit, and others have launched an effort called StopWatching.Us to marshal opposition to the secret programs.
“The revelations about the National Security Agency’s surveillance apparatus, if true, represent a stunning abuse of our basic rights,” the site says. “We demand the U.S. Congress reveal the full extent of the NSA’s spying programs.”
The site includes a petition that people can sign and send electronically. Other participants in the initiative include the American Library Association, the Internet Archive, the World Wide Web Foundation, Free Press, and Greenpeace.
Some of the surveillance plans came to light last week after leaks including a court order authorizing the government to gather extensive information on all Verizon calls and the PRISM program to obtain information from Internet companies. It’s still not clear how automated the government’s access is.
No doubt the organizations will be able to enlist many allies, but it’s not clear how effective the effort will be. A poll from the Pew Research Center and The Washington Post found 56 percent of U.S. citizens think the NSA tracking phone records is acceptable as a way to investigate terrorists.
In a blog post, Alex Fowler, who leads Mozilla’s public policy and privacy work, detailed Mozilla’s objections. “Mozilla believes in an Internet where we do not have to fear that everything we do is being tracked, monitored and logged by either companies or governments. And we believe in a government whose actions are visible, transparent and accountable,” he said.
Mozilla is best known as the developer of the Firefox Web browser, but it also pushes for standards, choice, and openness on the Web. “Our only commitment is to Internet users who rely on an open Web where content, imagination, trust, and innovation can thrive,” Fowler said.
The organizations expressed their concerns in a letter to Congress. The full text of the letter is as follows:
Dear Members of Congress,
We write to express our concern about recent reports published in the Guardian and the Washington Post, and acknowledged by the Obama Administration, which reveal secret spying by the National Security Agency (NSA) on phone records and Internet activity of people in the United States.
The Washington Post and the Guardian recently published reports based on information provided by a career intelligence officer showing how the NSA and the FBI are gaining broad access to data collected by nine of the leading U.S. Internet companies and sharing this information with foreign governments. As reported, the U.S. government is extracting audio, video, photographs, e-mails, documents, and connection logs that enable analysts to track a person’s movements and contacts over time. As a result, the contents of communications of people both abroad and in the U.S. can be swept in without any suspicion of crime or association with a terrorist organization.
Leaked reports also published by the Guardian and confirmed by the Administration reveal that the NSA is also abusing a controversial section of the PATRIOT Act to collect the call records of millions of Verizon customers. The data collected by the NSA includes every call made, the time of the call, the duration of the call, and other “identifying information” for millions of Verizon customers, including entirely domestic calls, regardless of whether those customers have ever been suspected of a crime. The Wall Street Journal has reported that other major carriers, including AT&T and Sprint, are subject to similar secret orders.
This type of blanket data collection by the government strikes at bedrock American values of freedom and privacy. This dragnet surveillance violates the First and Fourth Amendments of the U.S. Constitution, which protect citizens’ right to speak and associate anonymously and guard against unreasonable searches and seizures that protect their right to privacy.
We are calling on Congress to take immediate action to halt this surveillance and provide a full public accounting of the NSA’s and the FBI’s data collection programs. We call on Congress to immediately and publicly:
1. Enact reform this Congress to Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act, the state secrets privilege, and the FISA Amendments Act to make clear that blanket surveillance of the Internet activity and phone records of any person residing in the U.S. is prohibited by law and that violations can be reviewed in adversarial proceedings before a public court;
2. Create a special committee to investigate, report, and reveal to the public the extent of this domestic spying. This committee should create specific recommendations for legal and regulatory reform to end unconstitutional surveillance;
3. Hold accountable those public officials who are found to be responsible for this unconstitutional surveillance.
Thank you for your attention to this matter.
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Dwindling U.S. gold stocks signal surge in physical demand
Mon Apr 29, 2013 11:22pm EDT
* COMEX stocks down 30 pct since Feb, accelerated last week
* Growing preference for physical bars, coins after selloff
* Higher premium in non-U.S. markets triggers bullion outflow
By Frank Tang
NEW YORK, April 29 (Reuters) – Physical gold stocks held at CME Group’s Comex warehouses in New York have dropped to a near-five year low in a further sign that gold’s price crash unleashed a frenzy of demand as investors scramble to buy bars and coins.
U.S. gold stocks, comprised of 100-troy ounce COMEX gold bars, have fallen almost 30 percent since February, as dealers have switched to selling into the burgeoning Asian market, where prices and demand are higher than in New York.
But the pace of the outflows from vaults has accelerated since bullion’s historic sell-off, falling more than 7 percent last week for its biggest weekly drop since 2005.
Analysts say the sudden recent surge is further evidence of pent-up demand for coins and bar, particularly from China and India, caused by the slump in prices. Investors also appear to prefer to hold physical metal rather than futures, traders said.
“Some investors feel much safer having gold within their reach and their hands,” said Jonathan Potts, managing director of Delaware Depository, a CME-approved silver warehouse which also holds gold and other precious metals for investors.
Total gold stocks held at CME’s COMEX warehouses, often viewed as a gauge for physical supply and demand, fell almost 30 percent to around 8 million ounces on Friday, their lowest level since July 2008, from this year’s high of nearly 11 million ounces in mid-February, CME data showed.
What surprised many dealers was that most of last week’s withdrawals, worth $620 million based on Monday’s prices, were from a vault run by JPMorgan Chase, one of the top global bullion banks.
A JPMorgan spokeswoman declined to comment.
Exchange data showed that the fall at JPMorgan’s warehouse was led by plummeting “eligible” stocks, which meet COMEX requirements but do not have warehouse delivery receipts issued against them, as opposed to “registered” stocks, which are the only gold used to meet Comex futures delivery requests.
The bank’s eligible stocks fell more than 420,000 ounces to 163,802 ounces on Friday from 586,769 ounces last Monday, making up about two-thirds of all Comex gold stocks.
On the other hand, JPMorgan is by far the biggest warehouse holding about 760,000 ounces of registered stocks.
Eligible gold stocks held by HSBC, another top bullion bank, however, edged up 40,000 ounces to 3,146,000 ounces on Friday from 3,184,000 ounces, although they are still below the 3,343,000 ounces prior to gold’s sharp selloff two weeks ago.
An HSBC spokeswoman also declined to comment.
In addition to JPMorgan and HSBC, CME has three approved gold warehouse firms, Brink’s, Scotia Mocatta and Manfra, Tordella & Brookes (MTB) for a total of five CME-approved storage facilities all based in New York City.
While the JPMorgan warehouse accounts for 11 percent of total gold stocks, HSBC and Scotia Mocatta hold a combined 80 percent of them.
The strength of physical retail buying has taken dealers and mints around the world by surprise, leaving them struggling to keep up with demand.
Potts said that Delaware Depository, based in Wilmington, Delaware, has so far this year delivered about $500 million worth of physical precious metals, or about 340,000 ounces of gold, a jump of 10 percent from the same period last year.
Investors’ voracious physical appetite has helped bullion recover more than half the ground lost in the historic two-day sell-off. Spot gold prices hit a ten-day high of $1,485 per ounce on Friday and it traded up nearly 1 percent at $1,475 on Monday.
Even so, speculative investors show no sign of returning, uncertain about bullion’s prospects, as better economic data prompted some U.S. Federal Reserve policymakers to suggest withdrawing economic stimulus that has supported prices over the past four years.
ASIAN WEALTH, HIGHER PREMIUMS ELSEWHERE
Comex stocks had fallen since February on buying by affluent Asian investors.
U.S. export data for December showed an exodus of privately owned gold from the United States into emerging economic powers, such as China, which analysts attributed to a growing number of gold vaults and new precious metals investment products, particularly exchange-traded funds.
Pressure on Comex futures in recent months, as speculative investors have grown more bearish, have also spurred some U.S. banks and traders to sell bullion in Asia, where demand is better. U.S. COMEX futures had fallen 21 percent to $1,320 an ounce on April 16 from the 2011 year-end prices.
Implied gold lease rates, seen as bullion’s premium calculated by subtracting the London interbank offered rates (LIBOR) from the gold forward offered rates (GOFO), had turned positive since February.
GOFO are the rates at which bullion banks are prepared to lend gold on a swap against U.S. dollars.
Since gold’s cost of carry is negative in the United States, analysts say, it is profitable for dealers to take up Comex stock, remelt the bars into the correct specification and sell it to markets in Asia or Europe where physical gold demand exceeds that in the United States.
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Sacred Earth, a New Economy and the 21st Century University
By David C. Korten [PDF format]
University of BritishColombia
April 4, 2013,
New Economy Summit
I’m thrilled to be a part of this student initiated, student led gathering and of the larger movement you are spearheading. I had all but given up hope that our universities might become relevant to the extreme challenges humanity faces in the 21st century. I had not considered the possibility that students might provide the leadership needed to drive the transformation of higher education.
You are society’s canaries in the mineshaft and you are organizing to sound the alarm and demand change. Thank you, thank you, thank you. You offer hope for the human future.It makes perfect sense. No one is more aware of the failure of our institutions of higher learning than you, their students, are. They send you out into a failing 21st century world with a 20th century education that prepares to serve corrupted institutions we must now put behind us burdened with student debts that may keep you in bondage to the old system for the rest of your lives. You have good reason to rebel.
Institutional Failure
To get us all on the same page, let me begin with a quick overview of state of our 21st century world. You might think of it as a list of issues our universities are failing to address.
1. We face a global economic crisis created by an unstable financial system that favors speculation over real investment, drives continuing cycles of boom and bust, mires people and governments in debts they cannot pay, and holds national governments hostage to the interests of global financiers.
2. We face a global social crisis of extreme and growing inequality. The enormous disparities feed violence by undermining institutional legitimacy, human health, and the social fabric of families and communities.
3. We face a global environmental crisis of climate chaos, loss of fertile soil, shortages of clean freshwater, disappearing forests, and collapsing fisheries. This crisis is reducing Earth’s capacity to support life and creating large-scale human displacement and hardship that further fuel social breakdown.
4. We face a governance crisis in the seeming incapacity of any of our major institutions, including universities, to come to terms with and address the three afore mentioned economic, social, and environmental crises.
These four crises are interlinked, self-imposed, potentially terminal, and a direct consequence of institutional structures that value money more than life and that allocate power to those least likely to use it in service to the common good. We the people, allow this travesty to play out because we live in a cultural trance induced by stories that lead us to accept beliefs and values at odds with reality—a condition for which our academic and media institutions bear a major responsibility.
Your student movement is part of a larger human awakening to the foundational reality that we humans are living beings that survive and thrive only as members of a Sacred Earth community of life. Life and Earth are sacred—meaning they are entitled to reverence and respect. Money is just a number.
We must build from the bottom up the institutions of a new system that aligns with this reality. If that sounds like a serious challenge, you hear correctly.
We will not get out of our current mess by tinkering at the margins of a failed system to make it slightly less destructive.
A Personal Wakeup Call
I devoted some thirty years of my professional life to international development, including twenty-one years living and working in Africa, Latin America, and Asia on a mission to end world poverty. I originally assumed that the work of international development was to support the people of impoverished countries in learning to use their talents and natural wealth more efficiently and effectively to meet their needs and achieve healthy happy lives. Over time, I realized that what was really happening was very different.
Yes, I witnessed growth in GDP, expansion of the middle class, and the accumulation of huge fortunes by a fortunate few.
I also, however, observed that as GDP grew, life for the majority became less secure and more desperate. Slums spread. Families and communities disintegrated. Once beautiful cultures, survived mainly as tourist attractions. Rivers died. Once vibrant coastal corals and verdant hillsides became barren wastelands.
Eventually, I realized that in the name of helping the poor, rich countries were loaning poor countries foreign currency to invest in growing their economies. Because foreign currency is only good for buying things from abroad, this created dependence on foreign goods and technology purchased with loans that could be repaid only by selling their national labor and assets to foreigners.
When payment came due, the International Monetary Fund and World Bank stepped in like mafia debt collectors with baseball bats ready to break legs.
They told indebted countries they must restructure their economies, not to better meet the needs of their own people, but rather to repay the debt. Reduce your spending on health and education, they said. Sell your land and natural resources to private foreign corporations. Set up duty free zones with cheap nonunionized labor with no rights or benefits to produce goods for export to foreign consumers.
Debt, dependence, and deprivation for the many. Outsized profits for the few.
You may recognize a familiar pattern, something of a preview of the dynamic that now plays out in varied forms here in Canada, the United States, in Europe, and all around the world.
In Search of the Sacred
Why do we tolerate it? We humans crave meaning and purpose. This leads us to place great stock in shared cultural stories that lend purpose, meaning and direction to our lives and relationships. Political demagogues have long recognized that those who control these stories control the society. During the 20th century, corporate PR and advertising specialists became masters of the arts of cultural manipulation to create an individualistic culture of profligate material consumption that serves well the short-term interests of the financial oligarchy, but now threatens the survival of all.
Of our many influential cultural stories, the most important are those that define what we hold to be sacred [entitled to reverence or respect]. When we get the sacred wrong, we entangle ourselves in a collective web of self-destructive, even suicidal, self-deception—as our current situation demonstrates.
Separated from nature, we of modern society have lost our sense of what is truly sacred. Losing sight of the truly sacred, we fill the breach with a familiar story constantly affirmed in the public mind by pundits and economists schooled in what Nobel Laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz has called a faith-based religion. Call it our Sacred Money story.
Time is money. Money is wealth. Those who make money are society’s wealth creators. Poverty is a sign of personal failure. Consumption is the path to happiness. Individualistic greed and competition are human virtues that the invisible hand of the free market directs to ends that create opportunity and prosperity for all. Those who would deprive society’s wealth creators of the fruits of their labor engage in envy—a mortal sin. Maximizing financial gain is a moral and legal duty of business—indeed of each individual. Earth is a rock in space useful as source of free resources and a convenient waste dump.
Over the past few decades this has become the story by which we define the purpose, meaning, and direction of society and of our individual lives and relationships. In its thrall, we embrace money as a sacred object of veneration and the measure of our human worth and accomplishment, banks as our temples, consumption as our solace, economists as our moral authorities, and free [unregulated] markets as a superhuman controlling power that rewards the faithful and torments the unfaithful.
The Sacred Money story frames the moral and intellectual foundation of a Sacred Money economics, otherwise known as neoliberal or market fundamentalist economics. This is the economics taught as an objective values free science to business and economics students in virtually all the world’s colleges and universities.
False on every point, it perverts our sense of values and leads to the concentration of decision-making power in the hands of a financial oligarchy. It is neither a true science nor a true religion. It is an immoral, anti-democratic political ideology at odds both with the moral teachings of all the world’s great religions and the findings of contemporary science.
The immoral and intellectually false premises of the Sacred Money story sets us up to measure economic performance by financial metrics like GDP and stock price indices like the Dow Jones Average.
GDP is in substantial measure an indicator of the rate at which we are monetizing relationships previously based on mutual caring. This process destroys the natural bonds of family and community, while increasing our dependence on obtaining money controlled by global finance to purchase goods and services offered for sale by global corporations that serve global finance.
With a similar bias in favor of financial interests, stock price indices are primarily an indicator of the rate at which the inflation of financial assets is increasing the power of those who own financial assets relative to the power of those who do not.
Contrast the Sacred Money story of Sacred Money economics with this very different and more truthful Sacred Earth story. Imagine how different our world would be if this were the foundational story underlying the design and management of our economic institutions.
Time is life. Life is the most precious of the many forms of wealth. As living beings, we survive and prosper only as contributing members of a living Earth Community evolving toward ever-greater beauty, complexity, self-awareness, and possibility. Making time for life—to experience and serve—is the path to happiness and well-being. Equality, community, and connection to nature are essential foundations of human health and happiness. It is our human nature to care and to share. Earth is our sacred mother. As she loves and nurtures us, we must love and care for her. The institutions of business, government, and civil society exist for only one purpose—to serve as vehicles through which we cultivate and express our true nature and create our means of living in service to the Earth Community to which we all belong.
Fortunately, new communications technologies that connect nearly all the world’s peoples make it possible for the first time in our history to rethink and choose as a species the stories by which we will live together in a shrinking and interdependent world—and to do so with extraordinary speed. It is thus within our means to change the human course as a conscious collective human choice.
To succeed, however, we need a shared sacred story of the origin, nature, and purpose of creation—a cosmology—that reflects the fullness of our current human knowledge, gives us a reason to live, and provides the frame for a new economy that supports healthy, life-serving relationships with one another and a living Earth.
A Reason to Live
In 1992, my wife Fran and I returned to the United States from Asia and settled in New York City. While writing When Corporations Rule the World, I frequently gave talks pointing out that we humans are on a path of our own creation to potential species extinction, I often got a response something like:
“Yes, it may be true we are on a suicidal course, but changing our ways would be expensive and inconvenient. And if the doomsayers turn out to be wrong, we will have ended the party for nothing.”
I was stunned and dismayed. Then I chanced upon Thomas Berry’s book Dream of the Earth in which he observes:
“For people generally, their story of the universe and the human role in the universe is their primary source of intelligibility and value. The deepest crises experienced by any society are those moments of change when the story becomes inadequate for meeting the survival demands of a present situation.”
Bingo: To care about our common future, we need a story of the origin, nature, and purpose of creation that reflects the fullness of our current human knowledge, gives us a reason to live, and serves as our guide to forming healthy, mature relationships with one another and a living Earth.
Three Defining Creation Stories
Three story candidates have established currency in Western culture: the Distant Patriarch, the Grand Machine, and the Integral Spirit. The first two are instantly familiar, but inadequate to the needs of our time. Only the third serves the needs of our time, but lacks a defined public presence and institutional sponsorship. Here is a quick review.
Distant Patriarch
The Distant Patriarch story is most commonly associated with the institutions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. It views creation as the work of an all-knowing, all-powerful God who, from his home in a separate, sacred dimension called Heaven observes and judges our obedience to His commandments as handed down to us through sacred texts and interpreted by His anointed religious authorities. This story focuses our attention on our individual relationships with a personal but distant God and on access to the afterlife as our primary purpose in our present life.
Because all that happens in this life is by God’s will, it logically follows that those who possess great wealth and power in our present life are His favored and thereby poses divine authority. The economy is a vehicle for producing our sustenance until death releases us from the burden of Earthly labor.
I once heard a woman on a radio call in show say that she thinks of her life on Earth as nothing more than a short stay over in a cheap hotel on the way to Heaven. That is her story. No way can we expect her to accept responsibility for the upkeep of the cheap hotel or concern herself with the plight of its less fortunate residents.
Grand Machine
The Grand Machine is standard story of Newtonian physics and classical evolutionary biology commonly associated with science and the secular academy.
By the reckoning of this story, we live in a clock works universe in which only the material is real. Life is merely an accidental outcome of material complexity and has no meaning. Only the material is real. Consciousness and free will, or agency, are illusions.
Our fate thus depends on forces beyond our ability to influence or control in reality without meaning, purpose, or moral foundation.
Life evolves through a brutal competition for survival, territory, and reproductive advantage much as the global corporations we depend on as the drivers of economic progress. Earth is only a pool of cheap resources and a place to dispose our wastes.
In a desperate search for meaning, or at least a distraction from terrible loneliness of a life without meaning in an uncaring universe, we turn to the pursuit of money and material indulgence as our source of solace and sacred purpose. We assess the economy’s performance accordingly. Having a bad day? Go shopping.
For more than six centuries, science and religion have engaged in mortal combat for recognition as the primary story keeper of Western civilization. Yet each contributes to the intellectual and moral foundation of the suicidal Sacred Money economy that drives our self-destruction.
Integral Spirit
The Integral Spirit story has ancient roots and is affirmed by our inner awareness, indigenous wisdom, the teachings of the prophets, the findings of science, and our daily experience. It is the story that I believe resides in some form in the heart of every person, even though it lacks institutional support and public visibility. If this assessment is correct, we need only provide a source of public affirmation to bring it to the fore of public consciousness as a shared story of humanity.
By the reckoning of this story, all of creation is the expression of an integral spiritual intelligence engaged in a sacred journey to discover and actualize its possibilities through an ongoing process of becoming. In this story of God as spirit rather than patriarch, the material universe of our experience are more than God’s creation—it is God made flesh. God is in the world and the world is in God, yet they are not identical.
We come to know the nature, purpose, and intention of this divine force through both our inner experience and our observation of its physical manifestation. All beings, stars, planets, humans, animals, plants, rocks, and rivers are expressions of this divine force—each with its place and function in the journey of the whole. Through its lens, we view the beauty and vastness of a self-organizing constantly evolving cosmos with a sense of awe, wonder, and profound meaning.The spirit is both imminent and transcendent; a concept referred to by religious scholars as panentheism.
Far from being alone in an uncaring cosmos, we are all deeply and irrevocably interconnected. To the extent that we accept our human responsibility to and for the well-being and continued creative unfolding of the whole, our lives take on profound meaning and purpose.
Our obligation to love and care for our Earth mother as she loves and cares for us, becomes self-evident. We come to recognize our species as creation’s bold experiment in the capacity of a species with a highly advanced capacity for self-aware consciousness and choice to contribute to the creative journey of the whole.
Life’s Capacity for Creative Self-Organization
Disciplined observation of life’s self-organizing structures and dynamics provides many insights to guide our rethinking and restructuring of human institutions and relationships.
Let’s start with the human body, a particularly intimate demonstration of life’s extraordinary capacity for conscious, intelligent self-organization. My body, as is yours, is comprised of tens of trillions of individual living cells and organisms, each a decision-making entity in its own right; each with the ability to manage and maintain its own health and integrity and at the same time work in concert with the body’s countless other cells to maintain the health and resilience of the larger whole that is me; that is each of us. The degree and complexity of the coordination and cooperation involved is breathtaking beyond human imagination—yet it is so seamless, so familiar we take it for granted.
Together these cells maintain our body’s health and integrity even under conditions of extreme stress and deprivation to create a capacity for extraordinary feats of physical grace and intellectual acuity far beyond the capability of the individual cells that comprise it. Indeed, there is no way we could possibly discern the body’s demonstrated capabilities merely by the study of its individual physical parts.
Another stunning demonstration of life’s capacity for intelligent, cooperative, self-organization is Earth’s biosphere, the exquisitely complex, resilient, and continuously evolving layer of Earth life.
When We Fail to Honor Our Sacred Mother
According to evolutionary biologists, the first living organisms appeared on Earth some 3.6 billion years ago. As their numbers and diversity increased, they organized themselves into a planetary-scale living system comprised of trillions of trillions of individual choice-making living organisms that work together to optimize the capture, organization, and sharing of available energy, water, and nutrients resources to bring Sacred Earth to life. Acting with no discernible source of central direction, they continuously renew Earth’s soils, rivers, aquifers, fisheries, forests, and grasslands while maintaining global climatic balance and the composition of Earth’s atmosphere to meet the requirements of the widely varied life forms that comprise Earth’s community of life.
All the while, constantly experimenting, testing, and learning this living system—a living superorganism in its own right—evolves toward ever-greater complexity, beauty, and creative potential—sometimes with what seems an impossible foresight.
In the course of their participation in this grand evolutionary journey, Earth’s living organisms together filtered excess carbon and a vast variety of toxins from Earth’s air, waters, and soils and sequestered them deep underground. In so doing, this grand alliance of seemingly primitive species, created the environmental conditions suited to the emergence of a highly advanced species with an extraordinary capacity for conscious self-reflective choice.
So how have we humans chosen to use this precious gift of our unique capacity for self-reflective choice? We dedicate our best minds and most advanced technologies to the extraction and release of these sequestered carbons and toxins back into Earth’s atmosphere, waters, and soils in a foolhardy effort to dominate, suppress, and control the natural processes of a living Earth that make our lives possible.
Our current life destructive, climate disruptive, and hugely profitable expansion of tar sands oil extraction, deep-sea oil drilling, hydraulic fracture natural gas extraction, and mountaintop-coal removal is only a particularly visible current example of this ungrateful insanity.
An economic system based on the premise that money is more valuable than life regards this extraction as essential to jobs and profits. We treat the related economic, social, environmental, and governance devastation as simply regrettable collateral damage. Can we truly presume to be an intelligent species?
If we step back and take in the bigger picture, we see an economy structured and managed as if it were our human purpose to disrupt Earth’s climate, poison its air and water, destroy the natural fertility of its soils, and eliminate all of nature’s species other than those we choose to serve on our dinner table. Imagine our reaction if this were being done to us by an alien species from outer space. We would be mobilizing every resource at our command to protect our Sacred Earth mother—which is exactly what we should now be doing.
Of course, the destruction of Earth’s capacity to sustain higher life forms is no one’s actual intention.
What We Teach
We have convinced ourselves that by maximizing growth in corporate profits, GDP, and the financial assets of a ruling oligarchy we move forward on a path to wealth and prosperity for all. The resulting financial instability, social, and environmental collapse and governance failure are simply collateral damage. No harm intended. It’s just business.
Speaking with the authority of a holder of MBA and PhD degrees from the Stanford Business School and a former Harvard Business School professor, I am deeply aware that our colleges and universities train our economics and business graduates to serve and defend the institutions responsible for this travesty and the values and theories these institutions propagate. Discussion of the connection between the theories and methods thus taught and the consequences isn’t part of the approved curriculum.
The last course I taught at the Harvard Business School was a doctoral seminar on The Future of Business. It was a course I developed and presented shortly after the release of the landmark Club of Rome report on the Limits to Growth. I engaged my students in exploring the implications for how we assess business performance and how we train our future business leaders.
As I said, it was the last course I taught at the Harvard Business School. I got word back from another professor through one of my students that the mission of the Harvard Business School is to train its students to succeed in the system of business, as it exists, not to change the system. Preparing its students to change the system of business is exactly what the responsible 21st century business school must do.
I left Harvard the end of 1977 and moved to Asia where I came into intimate contact with the front line real world drama of failing economic doctrines and institutions. It proved to be the most important and intellectually liberating experience of my life. I have never since considered a return to academia.
Design for a Sacred Earth Economy
Irrespective of whether we call it a new economy, a living economy, a life-serving economy, or a sacred Earth economy, the structure and dynamics of the economy we must now create will align and integrate with the structure and dynamics of Earth’s biosphere.
The biosphere segments itself into self-reliant, self-regenerative bioregional communities, each engaged in the constant capture, sharing, and regeneration of the nutrients, energy and water required to maintain the health and vitality of all of its resident organisms. Each contributes. Each benefits. We must do the same.
Our future depends on learning to assimilate into and function as responsible members of these generative living communities. We will trade a portion of our material surplus with our neighbors, but will assure that the exchange is fair and balanced, that all trading partners remain self-reliant in meeting their essential needs, and that information, culture, and beneficial knowledge and technology are freely shared.
Given the need for creative micro adaptation to local conditions everywhere it is impossible the achieve Earth balance between people and nature through the central direction of local action. As with the biosphere, our human economies must self-organize locally everywhere, recognizing that if the people of each bioregional are living in sustainable balanced relationship with their local ecosystems then we, as a species, will be in global balance with our Sacred Earth mother.
The transition from a Sacred Money economy to a Sacred Earth economy requires a deep institutional transformation to shift power from Wall Street financial markets that value and serve only money to living communities of place for which life is the defining value and purpose.
Sacred Earth Ecologists
“Religion, Science, and Spirit: A Sacred Story for Our Time.”
“The Personal Story Behind the Essay, ‘Religion, Science, and Spirit: A Sacred Story for Our Time’”
The Pursuit of Happiness: A Living Earth Economic Paradigm”
How to Liberate America from Wall Street Rule
Jobs: A Main Street Fix for Wall Street Failure
A Plea for Rio+20: Don’t Commodify Nature
America’s Deficit Attention Disorder
Growth or Equality: Two Competing Visions for America’s Future
What Would a Down-to-Earth Economy Look Like?
Taking Ecological Economics Seriously
Agenda for a New Economy blog series
In their choice of performance indicators, Sacred Money economists prefer financial metrics like GDP and stock price indices that, as I noted earlier, count erosion of the caring relationships of family and community and the concentration of financial power as progress. Sacred Earth ecologists prefer living indicators of the health and happiness of our children, families, communities, and natural systems. They recognize that far from being a measure of benefit, GDP is best understood as an indicator of the economic cost of achieving a given level of well-being.
Sacred Earth ecologists will embrace life as their defining value, derive their decision rules from their observation of living systems, and draw insight all the many established disciplines ranging from physics, biology, and ecology to psychology, anthropology, and theology. More than interdisciplinary, they will be trans-disciplinary—meaning they will look beyond the self-limiting old paradigm frames of established disciplines.Sacred Money economists guide the design and management of the institutions of the Sacred Money economy. We need a professional cadre of Sacred Earth ecologists to oversee the design and management of the institutions of the Sacred Earth economy. As the Sacred Money economist asks, “What will generate the greatest financial return?” the Sacred Earth ecologist will ask, “What would Nature do?”
Sacred Money economists oversee a financial system that concentrates the powers of ownership and money in unregulated Wall Street financial institutions accountable only to impersonal market forces. They argue that this maximizes financial efficiency—by which they mean maximizing financial returns to the owners of financial assets. Wall Street financial institutions have little connection to or interest in local communities and generally find it most convenient and profitable to engage in speculative trading and other predatory financial games that contribute nothing to providing good jobs and creating real wealth.
Sacred Earth ecologists recognize that ownership and the control of money is power. If power resides in global financial markets, decisions will favor financial interests. If it resides with real people who have a stake in their communities and natural environment decisions are far more likely to support human, family community and natural health.
The Sacred Earth ecologist will favor community rooted cooperatively owned financial institutions, as for example mutual banks and credit unions where local people and safely deposit their savings to be recycled in the community to finance local businesses and home ownership. These local financial institutions allow communities to create their own credit in response to local needs and opportunities.
The same principles apply to ownership more generally. It is a priority of the Sacred Earth ecologist to maximize the localization and distribution of ownership, utilizing cooperative ownership models for larger scale enterprises— thus distributing power and rooting it in communities of place.
So who are these sacred Earth ecologists? Two of your local environmental heroes, David Suzuki and Bill Rees would be among them. Too few, they are pioneers of a new field of expertise yet to be defined. Development of this new field represents one of the defining intellectual challenges of our time.
Sacred Earth Legal Scholars
We face a similar challenge with respect to the law. By the reckoning of prevailing Sacred Money legal doctrine, corporations [legally protected pools of money] are the most sacred of institutions and their rights are the most sacred of rights—a doctrine famously and shamelessly promoted by the U.S. Supreme Court. Under this doctrine, nature is nothing more than property subject to exploitation at the will of its owners.
A Sacred Earth legal system will recognize that we humans survive and prosper only as members of a vibrant, living Earth Community. Living Earth is therefore the most sacred of beings and its rights, the rights of nature, are the most sacred of rights. Corporations, on the other hand, are property. The only reason for a corporation to exist is to serve the living community that created it by issuing its charter.
Higher Education for the 21st Century
For the most part, our existing educational programs and institutions proudly and aggressively prepare their graduates for jobs in failing institutions that we must now replace—and the sooner the better. Not only must future graduates be prepared to serve new institutional forms that support ecological balance, shared prosperity, and living democracy, they must be prepared to create them anew with few models from which to learn. It isn’t just about young people. The entire society must be retooled and re-skilled—immediately.
Few of our existing institutions of higher learning are prepared to address this challenge. .
The academy currently organizes by narrowly defined academic disciplines and trains its graduates to think and act within similarly confining intellectual silos. This is among the reasons why modern societies are now in such deep crisis.
Sacred Earth organizes as interlinked living systems. The academic programs of the future must produce citizens who think and act in terms of complex, interconnected, living systems, not narrow disciplines.
Working out the specifics of essential institutional reforms will require deep reflection and rigorous debate. Here are some initial suggestions.
- Liberate the minds of faculty and students by removing the walls that divide the university into isolated disciplines isolated from the communities in which their students will eventually live and work. Organize faculty and students into interdisciplinary learning teams and engage them in solving real world problems and restructuring critical institutional systems in ways that align with ecosystem structures and processes. Focus less on specialized degree programs and more on life-long learning.
- Teach history as an examination of the large forces that shape the human course to deepen understanding of how large-scale social change happens.
- Replace economics departments with departments of ecology. Invite Sacred Money economists to retire, retrain as Sacred Earth ecologists, or to teach economics as one of a number of courses on the intellectual failures of 20th century that brought humanity to the brink of self-destruction.
- Replace the metaphor of the machine with the metaphor of the living organism as the academy’s defining intellectual frame. Staff departments of biology and ecology with new biologists who strive to understand life on its own terms rather than through the dead world lens of reductionist Newtonian physics.
- Introduce Law School courses exploring the nature, structure, and doctrines of a Sacred Earth/Rights of Nature legal system.
This is a heavy agenda. If you’re not feeling a bit overwhelmed you weren’t paying attention.
This seems a good time to take a break with an inspiring song from Raffi, a local celebrity. Raffi holds office here in Vancouver and lives on nearby Salt Spring Island. How many of your grew up with his music?
Raffi recorded this song, “No Wall Too Tall” to celebrate the launch of my most recent book, Agenda for a New Economy: From Phantom Wealth to Real Wealth. A Declaration of Independence from Wall Street. We first played it when I launched the book from the pulpit of the historic Trinity Wall Street Church at the foot of Wall Street with a call to bring down the temples of the Wall Street money worshipers. Tonight we include a call to bring down the walls that separate the university from the community and the walls between disciplines. I want you to all get up and dance with me.
Moment of Readiness
Breakthroughs in public consciousness take hold only at rare moments of readiness. I have observed over the past year indications from a multitude of colleagues and institutions that we have arrived at a moment of unprecedented readiness to engage a public conversation re-examining our most foundational beliefs, exploring our nature as spiritual beings, and embracing our responsibility for the care of our Sacred Earth mother.
There is abundant evidence that everyone enjoys greater psychological and physical health in more equal societies with a strong sense of community and deep connection to nature.
The transition will require temporary sacrifices for the few, but on balance, it represents an opportunity for us all to grow in understanding and spiritual maturity, rebuild community, and achieve true happiness. There is no solution to the unfolding human crisis within a system based on demonstrably false values and flawed assumptions. This presents a strong challenge for colleges and universities that to an alarming extent still teach the false values and theories that bear major responsibility for society’s moral and institutional failure.
The necessary leadership for cultural and institutional transformation is unlikely to come from within tired, siloed, old paradigm academic disciplines and departments controlled by entrenched interests. It is more likely to come from the demands and leadership of conscious, informed, and outraged students working in alliance with individual faculty members and others who recognize the failure and want to be part of the solution.
You, the vanguard of an emerging and potentially decisive youth movement demanding the transformation of outdated academic institutions and curricula that charge too much and deliver too little, may hold the key to a positive and prosperous human future.
We humans are engaged in a monumental work of reinventing our societies and ourselves. I believe it is the most exciting intellectual challenge and creative opportunity in the whole of the human experience. You are among the company of those at the leading edge.
Thank you for your commitment—and for your attention.
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Dr. David Korten is the author of Agenda for a New Economy: From Phantom Wealth to Real Wealth, The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community, The Post-Corporate World: Life after Capitalism, and the international best seller When Corporations Rule the World. He is board chair of YES! Magazine, co-chair of the New Economy Working Group, a founding board member emeritus of the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies, president of the Living Economies Forum, an associate fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies, and a member of the Club of Rome. He earned MBA and PhD degrees from the Stanford University Graduate School of Business and served on the faculty of the Harvard Business School. He blogs for YES! Magazine. This presentation draws extensively from his essay “Religion, Science, and Spirit: A Sacred Story for Our Time.”
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http://www.investinginbonds.com/assets/files/Intro_to_Credit_Derivatives.pdf
Blythe Masters’ Crowning Achievement:
The Credit Default Swap
As reported earlier, JPM’s head commodity maven, Blythe Masters (her very rare public appearance can be seen here) suddenly finds herself in hot water for, among other things, allegedly lying under oath, obstructing justice and “engaging in a systematic cover up” to “approve schemes” seeking to defraud the states of California and Michigan in electricity trading (Enron flashbacks are more than welcome). So just who is Blythe? Most people on this site should be very familiar with her work by now (the NYT has a good recap), so instead of reconnecting the dots, we will once again present the presentation by one very young Ms. Master, introducing her then quite innovative product: the Credit Default Swap, titled appropriately enough “The J.P.Morgan Guide To Credit Derivatives” (by Blythe Masters). Because it is always best to let one’s work speak.
Warren E. Buffett called derivatives “financial weapons of mass destruction.” And that made Ms. Masters a “destroyer of worlds,” a September 2008 article in The Guardian declared.
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Youtube user Dutchsince Published on Apr 1, 2013
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ionospheric_heater
This is a profound release, just put out by the US Naval Research Lab on Feb. 25, 2013
In essence, this experiment done by the Navy contradicts ALL the skeptics who said it quote “could not be done” using frequency in the Atmosphere.
Ironic indeed that the frequency they used from HAARP matches the capability of NEXRAD RADAR.. as they are creating this plasma in the atmosphere using 0-4MHz.. (nexrad pulses between 0 to 12.4MHz putting the HAARP frequency and RADAR frequency on overlapping spectrums)
To top it off, with this Navy experiment — the plasma RING/SPHERE was observed on RADAR from Poker Flats, AK.. refuting even more skeptics who said HAARP cannot be seen on RADAR.
Furthermore, separately, we found RADAR is used to generate plasma from a place called SPEAR (in Norway) , they are using RADAR as a ‘heater’ in the same GHz spectrum that NEXRAD RADAR normally operates on when not in pulse mode (2.7GHz to 3.0GHz). Proving RADAR can , and is currently being used to induce effects in the atmosphere — not just observe it.
Finally, we found information that RADAR was used to generate artificial plasma / literally LIGHTNING at the MIT research labs… C-band and S-band.. again.. same bands that NEXRAD RADAR use.
In otherwords, NEXRAD RADARs for sure have the functionality to act as small versions of HAARP or EISCAT. To function as ‘heaters’ and plasma / lightning generators (for signal reflection / over the horizon capability / heating weather modification).
Any skeptic who said it could not be done, (for instance those at Realist News, or Metabunk just to name a few) NEED TO ISSUE FULL RETRACTIONS AND CORRECTIONS —- assuming of course they really are into science and not trying to just protect their egos.
If they don’t issue retractions and corrections saying they were wrong, then you know they’re pushing an agenda that does not include real science — up until now they could say “it can’t be done”… now what is their explanation?
They said I was photoshopping and HOAXING these RADAR pulses … lol .. nice one.. now lets see what they have to say… right now.. its been out 2 days.. and we hear CRICKETS from their side.
links here:
photos of past events:
more about the HAARP ring / RADAR pulse theory here:
http://goo.gl/9v3oZ
even more here:
Past HAARP ring / RADAR pulse events and the storms which hit within 72 hours:
Michael Janitch
TIP from John: http://goo.gl/RzMWL
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Tuesday, Mar 12, 2013 02:38 PM EDT
Former AIG chief pushes forward with lawsuit against government
Maurice Greenberg is arguing that the federal bailout that rescued the insurer was unconstitutional
AIG Building, NY (Wikimedia)Former AIG executive officer Maurice Greenberg is pushing forward with a lawsuit against the government over its $182 billion rescue of the insurance giant. Although AIG declined to join the lawsuit in January (as the New York Times noted, “the insurer faced an enormous public uproar over the prospect of suing the source of its lifeline”), Greenberg is moving forward with his new company, Starr International Co.
The Times noted that Greenberg’s complaint, which was granted class-action status on Monday, “largely restat[es] his arguments that 2008 bailout of the insurer was unconstitutional and wrongly cheated shareholders out of billions of dollars.”
As Reuters reported in January, “Greenberg, whose Starr International owned 12 percent of AIG before its near-collapse, has accused the New York Fed of using the rescue to bail out Wall Street banks at the expense of shareholders, and of being a ‘loan shark’ by charging exorbitant interest of 14.5 percent on the initial loan.”
Sen. Elizabeth Warren has called the the lawsuit “outrageous” and, when AIG was poised to stand with Greenberg, she said the company should not “bite the hand that fed them for helping them out in a crisis.”
See Full Story:
http://www.salon.com/2013/03/12/former_aig_chief_pushes_forward_with_lawsuit_against_government/
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A new Gold Standard is being born
Jan 17, 2013
The world is moving step by step towards a de facto Gold Standard, without any meetings of G20 leaders to announce the idea or bless the project.
Some readers will already have seen the GFMS Gold Survey for 2012 which reported that central banks around the world bought more bullion last year in terms of tonnage than at any time in almost half a century.
They added a net 536 tonnes in 2012 as they diversified fresh reserves away from the four fiat suspects: dollar, euro, sterling, and yen.
The Washington Accord, where Britain, Spain, Holland, Switzerland, and others sold a chunk of their gold each year, already seems another era – the Gordon Brown era, you might call it.
That was the illusionary period when investors thought the euro would take its place as the twin pillar of a new G2 condominium alongside the dollar. That hope has faded. Central bank holdings of euro bonds have fallen back to 26pc, where they were almost a decade ago.
Neither the euro nor the dollar can inspire full confidence, although for different reasons. EMU is a dysfunctional construct, covering two incompatible economies, prone to lurching from crisis to crisis, without a unified treasury to back it up. The dollar stands on a pyramid of debt. We all know that this debt will be inflated away over time – for better or worse. The only real disagreement is over the speed.
The central bank buyers are of course the rising powers of Asia and the commodity bloc, now holders of two thirds of the world’s $11 trillion foreign reserves, and all its incremental reserves.
It is no secret that China is buying the dips, seeking to raise the gold share of its reserves well above 2pc. Russia has openly targeted a 10pc share. Variants of this are occurring from the Pacific region to the Gulf and Latin America. And now the Bundesbank has chosen to pull part of its gold from New York and Paris.
Personally, I doubt that Buba had any secret agenda, or knows something hidden from the rest of us. It responded to massive popular pressure and prodding from lawmakers in the Bundestag to bring home Germany’s gold. Yet that is not the end of the story. The fact that this popular pressure exists – and is well-organised – reflects a breakdown in trust between the major democracies and economic powers. It is a new political fact in the global system.
Pimco’s Mohammed El Erian said this may have a knock-on effect:
“In the first instance, it could translate into pressures on other countries to also repatriate part of their gold holdings. After all, if you can safely store your gold at home — a big if for some countries — no government would wish to be seen as one of the last to outsource all of this activity to foreign central banks.
If developments are limited to this problem, there would be no material impact on the functioning and well-being of the global economy. If, however, perceptions of growing mutual mistrusts translate into larger multilateral tensions, then the world would find itself facing even greater difficulties resolving payments imbalances and resisting beggar-thy-neighbour national policies.
“The most likely outcome right now is for Germany’s decision to have minimum systemic impact. But should this be wrong and the decision fuel greater suspicion – a risk scenario rather than the baseline – the resulting hit to what remains in multilateral policy co-operation would be problematic for virtually everybody.
As I reported on Tuesday, gold veteran Jim Sinclair thinks it is an earthquake, comparing it to Charles de Gaulle’s decision to pull French gold from New York in the late 1960s – the precursor to the breakdown of the Bretton Woods system three years later when Nixon suspended gold conversion.
Mr Sinclair predicts that the Bundesbank’s action will prove the death knell of dollar power. I do not really see where this argument leads. Currencies were fixed in de Gaulle’s time. They float today. It is within the EMU fixed-exchange system – ie between Germany and Spain – that we see an (old) Gold Standard dynamic at work with all its destructive power, and the risk of sudden ruptures always present. The global system is supple. It bends to pressures.
My guess is that any new Gold Standard will be sui generis, and better for it. Let gold will take its place as a third reserve currency, one that cannot be devalued, and one that holds the others to account, but not so dominant that it hitches our collective destinies to the inflationary ups (yes, gold was highly inflationary after the Conquista) and the deflationary downs of global mine supply. That would indeed be a return to a barbarous relic.
Hopefully, it will be nothing like the interwar system. That was a dollar peg that transmitted US deflation to the whole world when the Fed tightened too hard in 1928 and went berserk in 1930.
A third reserve currency is just what America needs. As Prof Micheal Pettis from Beijing University has argued, holding the world’s reserve currency is an “exorbitant burden” that the US could do without.
The Triffin Dilemma – advanced by the Belgian economist Robert Triffin in the 1960s – suggests that the holder of the paramount currency faces an inherent contradiction. It must run a structural trade deficit over time to keep the system afloat, but this will undermine its own economy. The system self-destructs.
A partial Gold Standard – created by the global market, and beholden to nobody – is the best of all worlds. It offers a store of value (though no yield). It acts a balancing force. It is not dominant enough to smother the system.
Let us have three world currencies, a tripod with a golden leg. It might even be stable.
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http://www.canadianbusiness.com/economy/chinas-currency-goes-mainstream/
Renminbi goes mainstream
The world’s fastest-growing currency.
Jan 16, 2013 Deborah Stokes
You can call it the yuan or the renminbi—they are used interchangeably—but whatever you call it, you’d better get ready for the world’s fastest-growing currency. An oddity outside China’s borders less than a decade ago, the renminbi (which translates as “the People’s currency”) is quickly becoming one of the world’s most commonly used forms of payment.
Last year, reports SWIFT, the worldwide bank-owned payment system, the renminbi moved from 20th spot in the rankings of the world’s most-used currencies to 14th in August, ahead of the Danish kroner but behind the Russian ruble. The No. 1 position is held by the euro, with the U.S. dollar at No. 2. Canada’s loonie ranks sixth.
By November, the renminbi (RMB) had slipped to 16th spot. But that was more a reflection of the crisis in Europe slowing demand for Chinese exports than a crisis in the currency. Indeed, the internationalization of the RMB is proceeding as planned by the Chinese government.
Beginning in earnest around four years ago, Beijing engineered a series of liberalization moves to allow the renminbi to catch up to the economic status of its homeland, now the world’s second-largest economy. For example, most of the restrictions on cross-border buying and selling goods in RMB have now been lifted. Renminbi investing options have also opened up. Foreign banks now offer an array of RMB products and services; you can open an RMB account in Canada today.
The deregulation in 2010 of the yuan in Hong Kong turned the city into a RMB investment hub, a position for which London, Singapore and other financial centres are now vying. But with a miniscule RMB bond market and plenty of investment quotas and restrictions, the RMB is still far from free-trading.
As long as the reforms keep coming, and China’s economy keeps humming along at its current pace, could the RMB soon crack the world’s top currencies? Sacha Tihanyi, Asian FX strategist for Scotiabank in Hong Kong, says he wouldn’t bet against it, although reaching the top five is “probably a five-year time frame.” Reaching the top 10 would mean doubling the RMB’s share of worldwide payments, from approximately 0.42% now, to about 0.9%. Getting into the top five would take quadruple the amount of payments currently made in RMB.
As for reaching the pinnacle—the renminbi as global reserve currency—that’s more of a long shot. It won’t happen until Beijing fully relinquishes control. “China would certainly have to take steps to allow a free-floating currency and a more open capital market, which I believe it will over the next 10 years, but perhaps not sooner,” says Blake Jespersen, managing director, foreign exchange sales, BMO Capital Markets.
Still, to put things in perspective, the U.S. dollar didn’t become a global reserve currency until after the Second World War, 150 years after it was created and three decades after the Federal Reserve was formed. That is, the greenback’s ascendancy trailed America’s rise to global economic dominance. If you mean to do business in China’s century, expect to do more of it in China’s coinage.
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Germany’s Entire Gold Hoard At The Fed May Already Be Gone
January 16, 2013
Today a legend in the business told King World News, “… the German gold hoard, which is supposed to be stored at the Fed, may already be gone.” Keith Barron, who consults with major companies around the world and is responsible for one of the largest gold discoveries in the last quarter century, also believes countries like Germany, Austria, and others are in serious danger of having claims on their gold stored at the Fed evaporate.
Here is what Barron had to say: “This has been happening for quite some time. In fact, I can remember hearing 6 or 7 years ago that Gaddafi wanted all of his gold back from New York. There were several tons going on a transport plane out of New York once a week to Libya.”
Keith Barron continues:
“He (Gaddafi) just didn’t trust any other government with it. Of course we all know what happened to him eventually. His gold has kind of gone missing (appropriated), and nobody knows where it is now. This is the problem the Germans, Austrians, and various other countries are facing.
They don’t want their gold to go missing….
“In the case of Germany, the gold was sent abroad to France, and to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York during the Cold War because of fears the Russians may overrun Germany and seize the gold.
Those kind of fears evaporated a long time ago, and there is no reason for the Germans to have the gold elsewhere. In the last year, somebody in the ministry was interviewed and they were asked why the gold was still abroad? They said, ‘To facilitate trading.’ Well, this is exactly why the gold shouldn’t be elsewhere. It should be sitting there as the patrimony of the country, and it should be inviolate.
The latest round of gold repatriation was started by Hugo Chavez, and in Chavez’ case nobody knows if he is alive or dead right now. So we have seen a pattern from Saddam Hussein, to Gaddafi, and now Chavez, that anyone who interferes in the gold market or attempts to threaten the US dollar’s dominance ends up dead.
Ecuador decided to take a page out of Chavez’s book and ask for Ecuador’s gold back. So their gold was repatriated. The Germans and the Austrians were the latest to have public discussions asking the question, ‘Where is our gold?’
Now the Germans have decided to take back their gold out of France, and apparently small portions of their gold will be sent from the Fed to Germany in coming years. I do believe a lot of Germany’s gold has been leased out internationally, through the bullion banks. So the reality is that the German gold hoard, which is supposed to be stored at the Fed, may already be gone.
There was the situation quite a few years ago when Drexel Burnham Lambert went down. They had borrowed 17 tons of gold from the Bank of Portugal, and when Drexel failed, the Bank of Portugal never got it back. Its claim evaporated when Drexel evaporated.
If you look at what happened to Portugal, the question becomes, should key bullion banks fail, would Germany and other nations forfeit their gold because the existing leases and claims would simply evaporate, as was the case with Portugal? This is something to consider. Countries such as Austria and others were getting paid to participate in gold leasing. I’m sure in the fine print it states if the bullion bank conducting the lease fails, the gold is lost, again, as was the case with Portugal and their 17 tons of lost gold.
I believe that most of the Western world’s gold, which is supposed to be in central bank vaults, has been leased out. Much of it is now in private hands in India, and what remains continues going East to China and other Asian vaults. So most of the Western gold has vanished from the vaults and it’s now just a book entry.
These various Western countries and bullion banks simply roll these leases over when they come due, and the gold never gets returned back to the countries. So it’s very interesting to see what’s going on. Obviously the trust is breaking down in the system.
Maybe we are going to see a bit of a run to the exits when more of this gold has to be repatriated, and the bullion banks are going to have to buy it from somewhere or fail. I just don’t think there is enough available physical gold out there to cover all of the outstanding loans. It’s just not out there in the marketplace to be acquired. For what it’s worth, all of this is very bullish for the gold price going forward.”
© 2013 by King World News®. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. However, linking directly to the blog page is permitted and encouraged.
The interviews with Bill Fleckenstein, John Hathaway, Egon von Greyerz, Ben Davies, Kevin Bambrough, Nigel Farage, Eric Sprott, Art Cashin, and John Mauldin are available now. Also, be sure to listen to the other recent KWN interviews which include John Embry, Gerald Celente, and Andrew Maguire by CLICKING HERE.
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(WHY DOES THE FEDERAL RESERVE NEED 7 YEARS TO RETURN GERMANY’S GOLD???)
Sinclair, Barron, and Leeb on the Bundesbank’s strange gold move
Submitted by cpowell on Wed, 2013-01-16 20:59. Section: Daily Dispatches
3:50p ET January 16, 2013
Dear Friend of GATA and Gold:
Comment is flowing in on the Bundesbank’s plan to repatriate all of a fifth of its gold held at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York over the next seven years.
Jim Sinclair argues that the move is retaliation by the euro bloc for U.S. attacks on gold that hamper the euro bloc’s strategy for strengthening its new currency:
http://www.jsmineset.com/2013/01/16/germany-reacts-to-the-retiring-treas…
At King World News, mining entrepreneur Keith Barron joins those who believe that most of Germany’s gold has departed into the market through secret leases:
http://kingworldnews.com/kingworldnews/KWN_DailyWeb/Entries/2013/1/16_Ge…
Also at King World News, fund manager Stephen Leeb agrees that the gold is gone but adds that the United States and China both want the gold price restrained at the moment, the U.S. because it is just about out of gold and China because it wants to get a lot more before the price explodes:
http://kingworldnews.com/kingworldnews/KWN_DailyWeb/Entries/2013/1/16_Wh…
CHRIS POWELL, Secretary/Treasurer
Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee Inc.
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NBC Admits No Assault Rifle Used At Sandy Hook
Posted on January 19, 2013
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Former Roman Catholic priest busted for selling meth to the feds
http://m.nypost.com/f/mobile/news/local/breaking_feds_former_roman_catholic_LIflvqIlvKC8XsJ8wiGMSO
A former Roman Catholic priest is among five people who have been indicted by a federal grand jury in an alleged drug operation involving shipments of methamphetamine to Connecticut from California.
Federal prosecutors said Kevin Wallin, 61, former pastor at St. Augustine’s parish in Bridgeport, received the shipments and sold methamphetamine to an undercover officer six times since last September. Prosecutors say investigators also gathered evidence from court-authorized wiretaps.
The grand jury in Bridgeport indicted the five people Tuesday on charges of conspiring to distribute 500 grams or more of a substance containing methamphetamine and 50 grams of actual methamphetamine. Wallin, of Waterbury, was also charged with six counts of possession with intent to distribute methamphetamine. The conspiracy charges carry 10 years to life in prison upon conviction.
All five are detained. It’s not clear if they have lawyers.
Also charged are Kenneth Devries, 52, of Waterbury, Michael Nelson, 40, of Manchester, Chad McCluskey, 43, of San Clemente, Calif., and Kristen Laschober, 47, of Laguna Niguel, Calif.
Wallin resigned as St. Augustine’s pastor in June 2011 after serving nine years in the post, citing health and personal issues, the Diocese of Bridgeport said in a statement. Diocese officials granted him a sabbatical the following month.
During the sabbatical, diocese officials became concerned about Wallin’s well-being and reached out to him, but he has never spoken directly to church officials, the diocese said in the statement, which did not elaborate.
Wallin’s faculties for public ministry were suspended in May 2012 and he has not been reassigned, the diocese said.
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http://deadlyclear.wordpress.com/2013/01/19/crooks-and-liars-breaking-the-law-should-not-be-a-business-expense/
CROOKS AND LIARS – ‘Breaking The Law Should Not Be A Business Expense’
By Susie Madrak, January 18, 2013
‘Breaking The Law Should Not Be A Business Expense’
In the past, federal regulators have been known to include provisions that waived the ability of a company to write off the costs of a settlement. But since our banks are always considered Too Big To Fail, they are of course offered every consideration, and We the People will end up paying for this. That doesn’t sit well with me, and probably not with you, either:
Big Banks Get Tax Break On Foreclosure Abuse Deal
WASHINGTON (AP) — Consumer advocates have complained that U.S. mortgage lenders are getting off easy in a deal to settle charges that they wrongfully foreclosed on many homeowners.
Now it turns out the deal is even sweeter for the lenders than it appears: Taxpayers will subsidize them for the money they’re ponying up.
The Internal Revenue Service regards the lenders’ compensation to homeowners as a cost incurred in the course of doing business. Result: It’s fully tax-deductible.
Critics argue that big banks that were bailed out by taxpayers during the financial crisis are again being favored over the victims of their mortgage abuses.
“The government is abetting the behavior by not preventing the deduction,” said Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa. “The taxpayers end up subsidizing the Wall Street banks after the headlines of a big-dollar settlement die down. That’s unfair to taxpayers.”
Under the deal, 12 mortgage lenders will pay more than $9 billion to compensate hundreds of thousands of people whose homes were seized improperly, a result of abuses such as “robo-signing.” That’s when banks automatically approved foreclosures without properly reviewing documents.
Regulators reached agreement this week with Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. Last week, the regulators settled with 10 other lenders: Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Citigroup, MetLife Bank, PNC Financial Services, Sovereign, SunTrust, U.S. Bank and Aurora.The settlements will help eliminate huge potential liabilities for the banks.
I have to wonder: Does this do anything at all to help homeowners with zombie titles?
Many consumer advocates argued that regulators settled for too low a price by letting banks avoid full responsibility for wrongful foreclosures that victimized families.
That price the banks will pay will be further eased by the tax-deductibility of their settlement costs. Companies can deduct those costs against federal taxes as long as they are compensating private individuals to remedy a wrong. By contrast, a fine or other financial penalty is not tax-deductible.
Taxpayers “should not be subsidizing or in any way paying for these corporations’ wrongdoing,” said Phineas Baxandall, a senior tax and budget analyst at the U.S. Public Interest Research Group, a consumer advocate.
[…] At least one lawmaker, Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, wants regulators to bar the tax deductibility of the lenders’ costs. Brown made his argument in a letter to Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, U.S. Comptroller of the Currency Thomas Curry and other top regulators. The Fed and the comptroller’s office, a Treasury Department agency, negotiated the foreclosure abuse settlements with the banks.
“It is simply unfair for taxpayers to foot the bill for Wall Street’s wrongdoing,” Brown wrote in the letter dated Thursday. “Breaking the law should not be a business expense.” Read more on Huffington Post.
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NY Times – Paying the Price, but Often Deducting It – By Gretchen Morgenson
However, tucked away in these settlements is a problem: the costs are tax-deductible. As the New York Times’ Gretchen Morgenson explained, “the banks can claim them as business expenses. Taxpayers, therefore, will likely lighten the banks’ loads.” At least two U.S. senators think that taxpayers shouldn’t have to cover the cost of the banks’ mistakes.
“Senator Charles Grassley, the Iowa Republican who is a senior member of the Senate Finance Committee, has been critical of favorable tax treatments of settlements. I asked him last week about the issue as it relates to mortgage settlements.
“You can be sure the Wall Street banks consider tax consequences in negotiations and the government should, too,” he said. “Any portion of a settlement that’s intended to be a penalty should include language clarifying it isn’t deductible. Otherwise, the government’s punishment will have less sting than intended.”
IT is to be expected that corporations, like any taxpayers, will do what they can to reduce their tax bills. And a 2005 report from the Government Accountability Office suggests that tax benefits in settlements are prevalent. Examining more than $1 billion in settlements made by 34 companies, the G.A.O. found that 20 had deducted some or all of the money from their tax bills.
But as Mr. Grassley suggested, the government can take deductibility off the table as an option. And occasionally it does. For example, a Justice Department spokesman said that there would be no deductibility of the $500 million penalty and fine portion of the settlement reached with UBS last month in regards to manipulation of interest rates.
Certainly, a settlement’s punitive effect is lessened by any tax sweeteners it generates. Perhaps that’s why it is rarely clear from the public announcements that some or all of the settlement amounts will be deductible. [. . .]
CONGRESS has tried to change this setup. In 2003, Mr. Grassley and two other senators introduced the Government Settlement Transparency Act.
It would have required that payments made by companies acknowledging actual or potential violations of a law would not be tax-deductible. The legislation never passed.
Bills have also been introduced in Congress that would bar deductibility on punitive damage awards arranged among private parties. Those have died, too. Past administrations have supported this idea, and the Obama administration has a proposal in its 2013 budget stating that no deduction would be allowed in such a circumstance. That proposal also states that when an existing insurance policy covered the payment of punitive damages, the amount paid would be considered income to the insured person.
Not a bad idea.
As settlements for corporate misdeeds pile up, perhaps it will get some traction.”
What do you think? Is it time for Congress to make the Wall Street bank frauds settlement deals non-deductible expenses? Hey, think about it – we can only deduct half of a business lunch – and that’s a legal activity!
If these settlement deals are made non-deductible expenses maybe they should be made non-dischargeable debts in bankruptcy too?
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Germany Reacts To The Retiring Treasury Secretary’s Parting Shot
Posted by Jim Sinclair on January 16, 2013 @ 1:05 pm in General Editorial
My Dear Friends,
I respectfully disagree with most of the explanations given today on the why of German actions in gold. My understanding is that the causal event of this notification actually came from the actions of the US Exchange Stabilization Fund and the long term plans to strengthen the euro.
I have published a chart from Patrick showing the extreme change in the ratio of gold to fiat currency presently being held in reserve by Euroland.
First you need to understand what the Exchange Stabilization Fund is and is not. It is an account at a major gold bank in the name of the Exchange Stabilization Fund. This fund can legally trade in gold and does. The President of the USA and the Secretary of the US Treasury run this fund. Those two managers by law are permitted to designate another manager if they wish. The fund can trade long or short, borrow or lend anything. Basically this is a an account that can legally do anything it wants whenever it wants in secret as the year end statement can easily be brought to only benign activates by warehousing all the trades.
Their broker is quite an expert in that strategy to wash year-end positions for clients.
What occurred as I am told is an act in Germany in reaction to a parting shot from the retiring Secretary of the US Treasury via the Exchange Stabilization Fund.
When gold traded at $1918 it was setting up for a challenge of a very important round number, $2000. The sell off was a product of long liquidation in an anticipation of $2000 in a fast market. Gold did fall on its own weight into the $1800 area, however the body block at $1800, $1775 and $1750 was a product of the Exchange Stabilization Fund operating as an account of a major Gold Bank. Seeing that, this gold bank went to the short side for the account of its hedge funds and not wholly owned trading arm. This gold bank issued a public statement that the gold market was dead as a doornail, finished and completed.
On the level of central banking there are no secrets. The long term plan for the currency war between the euro and the dollar is a derivation of the Free Gold Thesis. That means a significant change in the percentage of fiat currency versus gold at market value held by Euroland as reserves. This thesis has a target for cooperating Asian central banks for gold holdings at no less than 15% at market value. I question some of the thesis of Free Gold thinkers, but much of it has been in my writing for more than a decade on what the end game recovery will look like.
I am told that the parting shot to break gold’s back by the Exchange Stabilization Fund was considered a direct attack on the Euro strategy for what the end game recovery will look like. The Free Gold thesis requires significantly higher gold prices to work and to elevate the euro back in reserve by choice category.
The German reaction was not political but rather a direct warning that they could demand return of their gold just like DeGaulle of France did in the 60s by making a direct and immediate demand for conversion of the US dollar holdings into Gold.
A major central bank will not insult another major central bank unless it is an act of financial war. It has not come to that yet, but it is not that far away. It is 2015 to 2017 and not 2020.
The reason that gold is relatively firm after the media leak and release on the night of the 14th is that I am not the only person who knows the real story. The price of gold will go to and beyond $3500. Gold will be market to market by the majority, if not all, major central banks. This will balance the balance sheet of the many and major debtor nations and will provide the platform for recovery after unwinding.
Respectfully,
Jim
Exchange Stabilization Fund
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Exchange Stabilization Fund (ESF) is an emergency reserve fund of the United States Treasury Department, normally used for foreign exchange intervention. This arrangement (as opposed to having the central bank intervene directly) allows the US government to influence currency exchange rates without affecting domestic money supply.
As of October 2009, the fund held assets worth $105 billion, including $58.1 billion in special drawing rights (SDR) from the International Monetary Fund.[1]
Background
The U.S. Exchange Stabilization Fund was established at the Treasury Department by a provision in the Gold Reserve Act of January 31, 1934. 31 U.S.C. § 5117. It was intended as a response to Britain’s Exchange Equalisation Account.[2] The fund began operations in April 1934, financed by $2 billion of the $2.8 billion paper profit the government realized from raising the price of gold to $35 an ounce from $20.67. The act authorized the ESF to use its capital to deal in gold and foreign exchange to stabilize the exchange value of the dollar. The ESF as originally designed was part of the executive branch not subject to legislative oversight.
The Gold Reserve Act authorized the ESF to use such assets as were not needed for exchange market stabilization to deal in government securities. The Fund had no statutory authority, however, to engage in other activities that it began to undertake.[citation needed] The principal such extraneous activity it devoted itself to was lending dollars to politically favored governments.
In 1938–40, the director of the Division of Monetary Research, Harry Dexter White, worked on a proposal for loans to Latin America and participated in plans for an Inter-American Bank, which did not materialize. The plan for an Inter-American Bank, however, inspired White’s first draft of the subsequent plans for the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank that White prepared in 1941 at Secretary of the U.S. Treasury Henry Morgenthau’s direction.
More… [1]
URL to article: http://www.jsmineset.com/2013/01/16/germany-reacts-to-the-retiring-treasury-secretarys-parting-shot/
URLs in this post:
[1] More…: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exchange_Stabilization_Fund
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http://investordiscussionboard.com/node/37250/thread#post-37250
Presenting The 50 Point S&P 500 Move Courtesy Of The Illegal “Geithner Leak”
Yesterday we broke the news of what is prima facie evidence, sourced by none other than the Federal Reserve’s official August 16, 2007 conference call transcript, that then-NY Fed president and FOMC Vice Chairman Tim Geithner leaked material, non-public, and very much market moving information (the “Geithner Leak”) to at least one banker, in this case then Bank of America CEO Ken Leiws, in advance of a formal Fed announcement – an act explicitly prohibited by virtually every capital markets law (and reading thereof). It was refreshing to see that at least several other mainstream outlets, including Reuters, The Hill and the NYT, carried this story which is far more significant than Season 1 of Lance Armstrong’s produced theatrical confession and rating bonanza. It is notable that Richmond Fed’s Jeff Lacker who made the inadvertent (or very much advertent) disclosure has not backed down from his prior allegation and told the NYT yesterday that “My understanding was that President Geithner had discussed a reduction in the discount rate with these banks in connection with these initiatives.” What, however, the mainstream media has not touched upon, yet, is just how profound the market response to the Geithner Leak was, and by implication, how much money those who were aware of what the Fed was about to do made. Perhaps, it should because as we show below, the implications were staggering. But perhaps what is even more relevant, is why the Fed’s previously disclosed details of Mr. Geithner’s daily actions at the time, have exactly no mention of any of this.
Backstory
Before we get into the prime of today’s narrative, a quick detour.
For those who may not remember, early August 2007 was a very tumultuous time in the markets. On one hand, it marked the all time highs of the S&P. On the other, August is when the cracks in the facade started to become apparent to all, even the Fed, following what is now known as the quant meltdown, in which quantitative strategies suddenly stopped working and led to a brief but notable market crash, one which caught the Fed’s attention.
The immediate result of this major market swoon was not one, but two ad hoc FOMC conference calls, the first on August 10, and the second on August 16. The first one was more of a brainstorming session held at 8:45 am on Friday, in advance of a 9:15 generic market supporting statement by the Fed (full text here), whose purpose was, in the words of Chairman Bernanke, that “we’re just saying that we are here, we are going to try to maintain the fed funds rate at 5¼ percent, we will provide adequate reserves, and we’re going to try to work against any remaining stigma associated with borrowing at the discount window.”
What is important about the first call is where Bernanke left it, namely with a direct preview of what was about to come next. To wit:
There is just one procedural point. Again, this is not something that we’re contemplating, but one possible thing we could do would be to lower the discount rate, reduce the 100 basis point spread between the discount rate and the federal funds rate. It’s not obvious that it is the right thing to do. There are probably some technical and logistical issues concerned with it. It’s not obvious that it would be helpful. But I just want to put it on a list of things that we might consider and to remind you that the procedure for doing it would involve requests from your boards and then approval by the Board of Governors. So should we come to that point and we begin to discuss that particular option, we would need the Presidents to get the assent of their boards so that we could go ahead and take that action. Are there any other comments or questions? All right. Well, we will keep you well apprised, and I’m sure you will be following the markets on your own.
That point came a few days later, when the disturbance in the markets continued and when the Fed felt compelled to hold yet another conference call not a week later, in which the Bernanke proposal to cut the discount rate spread to the fed funds rate was enacted, and the margin was cut in half from 100 bps to 50 bps.
The formal announcement of the decision to do this took place at 8:00 am on August 17 and was worded as follows:
To promote the restoration of orderly conditions in financial markets, the Federal Reserve Board approved temporary changes to its primary credit discount window facility. The Board approved a 50 basis point reduction in the primary credit rate to 5-3/4 percent, to narrow the spread between the primary credit rate and the Federal Open Market Committee’s target federal funds rate to 50 basis points. The Board is also announcing a change to the Reserve Banks’ usual practices to allow the provision of term financing for as long as 30 days, renewable by the borrower. These changes will remain in place until the Federal Reserve determines that market liquidity has improved materially. These changes are designed to provide depositories with greater assurance about the cost and availability of funding. The Federal Reserve will continue to accept a broad range of collateral for discount window loans, including home mortgages and related assets. Existing collateral margins will be maintained. In taking this action, the Board approved the requests submitted by the Boards of Directors of the Federal Reserve Banks of New York and San Francisco.
The statement was the result of the previous day’s (August 16, 2007) conference call deliberations which took place at 6:00 pm Eastern. And while the 37 page transcript provide much color in terms of the Fed’s misreading of what was happening in the markets (in this case several computers going haywire, a faux pas that would only be matched by the January 21 2008 unprecedented and unscheduled 75 bps cut in response to Jerome Kerviel’s overnight futures trading fiasco, what is particularly relevant to this story is a statement by then Fed governor Donald Kohn who said…
After this meeting is over, the Board will likely vote on two requests that we have in house to reduce the primary credit rate to 5¾ percent. We would announce this at 8:00 tomorrow morning, along with whatever statement the Committee approves, and we would expect and hope that if this goes forward as we anticipate, the other ten Reserve Banks would go to their boards after the announcement to come on board for the 5¾ percent primary rate so that we reduce any risk of leaks ahead of time.
… as well as a statement by none other than Tim Geithner who explained how the banks and other “market participant” institutions are acting and thinking at this troubled time, as follows:
…Although they had lots of clarification about what is permitted now under current policies at the discount window, they obviously don’t have any idea that we’re contemplating a change in policy or what might be possible and what we might say or not say going forward. They obviously can’t and understand that they can’t say anything about us…
What these two extracts confirm is that it was expected and well-known, after all it was “obvious”, that the banks can not have advance knowledge of what the Fed would announce in just 12 short hours. Yet it is the latter that is of particular attention, and we are certain the Department of Justice and the SEC, are clearly ahead of us here, because it comes from none other than the person who it now is clear was the source of the leak.
The Geithner Leak
Those who happened to have the misfortune of trading stocks on August 16, 2007, and especially those who were short the stock market just because they saw the writing on the wall – writing that would crush the S&P to 666 in one and a half short years and lead to the failure or consolidation of half of America’s banking system – remember that day very well. What happened on August 15, and continued through the 16th was an aggressive bout of selling, that took the S&P from 1390 to 1360 at the close of the prior day trading day, and subsequently sent it lower by another 30 points to 1330 at just about 2 pm Eastern. What happened next would have otherwise remained a mystery, if not for yesterday’s declassification of the Fed’s 2007 transcripts. Because suddenly, out of nowhere, an unprecedented bout of buying started with no news to serve as a catalyst. The buying sent the S&P soaring by some 50 points (!) in the span of an hour.
Once again – there was no market-moving news to explain this move. At least no publicly disclosed market-moving news.
Now we know whose job it was to unleash the buying spree at precisely 2:00 pm on that Thursday. His name: Timothy Franz Geithner.
And we know this because Jeffrey Lacker knows this. From the August 17 minutes:
MR. LACKER. Vice Chairman Geithner, did you say that [the banks] are unaware of what we’re considering or what we might be doing with the discount rate?
VICE CHAIRMAN GEITHNER. Yes.
MR. LACKER. Vice Chairman Geithner, I spoke with Ken Lewis, President and CEO of Bank of America, this afternoon, and he said that he appreciated what Tim Geithner was arranging by way of changes in the discount facility. So my information is different from that.
This exchange took place some time after 6:00 pm on Thursday, and some time after the 50 points ES ramp had taken place “out of nowhere.” In other words, not only did the leak that many FOMC members (including, humorously, Tim Geithner) were concerned about take place, but it was none other than the Geithner Leak to at least Ken Lewis, and who knows how many other bank CEOs, which we also now know made the rounds among those bank trading desks who were privy to its confidential and illegal market moving content at just after 2:00 pm on that day.
For those who need a visual reminder of just what happened on August 16 2007, here it is:
Many shorts ended up being carted out of the front door that day, unsure what has just happened. Sure enough, the next day at 8:00 am the Fed did what it had decided the previously it would do, and announce the 50 bps cut to the discount rate to fed funds rate spread. The market response was just as blistering as the rest of the market piggy backed:
To summarize what happened for all those who were too stunned from the day’s rapid events, the S&P futures moved from a low of 1320 (and 1330 at the 2:00 pm moment that the market saw a mysterious “invisible hand” pushing it higher), all the way to well over 1410 the next day: an unprecedented 90 ES point move in a few hours! The reason: the Fed’s market moving announcement, as well as the Geithner Leak at just around lunch time on August 16th.
The Fed’s Records
We now know what the illegal catalyst was for the massive market surge on the afternoon of August 16: Tim Geithner leaking what the Fed was about to do to the rest of his banker colleagues: a leak that breaches every possible law and rule.
So in an attempt to cement this fact with concrete official evidence, we went to the source: the New York Fed’s own calendar of what Tim Geithner was supposedly doing on August 16th.
We have access to this thanks to an April 2009 FOIA request by the New York Time’s Gretchen Morgensen. What the FOIA revealed to the NYT and the world, was 658 pages of daily events that Tim Geithner was engaged in, in the period from 2007 to 2009. Supposedly, this was a complete list of his daily events, and phone calls.
What the daily schedules show is that between August 8 and August 20, 2007 Tim Geithner was supposed to go on vacation to Cape Cod, from where he participated telephonically on at least the August 10 conference call.
It appears that Geithner ended his vacation prematurely, and was back in the office at 33 Liberty on August 13:
We fast forwarded to that fateful day – August 16 – when Tim was holding all these phone calls with Ken Lewis, and who knows who else, to see what, according to the Fed’s official records, Tim Geithner was doing. We find…
… nothing! Actually no, we learn that at 5:30 am Geithner spoke on the telephone to then-BOJ Governor Toshihiko Fukui. And that was the only direct telephonic conversation Geithner had that day, at least according to the Fed’s own internal records.
Between the 8:30 am “teleconference with Board of Governors” and the 4:00 pm “Markets Status Meeting”, Tim Geithner apparently did exactly nothing. We now know that is not the case, as we know that he spoke to at least one Ken Lewis in the day(s) before the August 17th announcement. We certainly don’t know who else he spoke to, to leak material, non-public and market moving information.
Perhaps it is time for a stronger FOIA request, maybe this time from someone like Bloomberg. Because we are 100% certain that if Bloomberg’s Mark Pittman was still alive he would be all over this. We are confident at least one reporter at the Bloomberg newsroom is willing to carry on the Pittman legacy and find out why the New York Fed has no official records of what is arguably the most important time block of Tim Franz Geithner’s daily calendar: his daily leaks of material Fed information to Bank CEOs.
Or perhaps this particular conversation was on Geithner’s cell phone. Maybe it is time not for Bloomberg, but for the DOJ to step in and request Mr. Geithner’s cell phone record: who knows – one just may find undisclosed conversations between the soon to be former Treasury Secretary and CEOs such as Ken Lewis, Lloyd Blankfein, Jamie Dimon, and all those others who it appears were worthy of knowing what the Fed would do almost one full day ahead of everyone else, and as a result make billions in illegal profits as a result of frontrunning the announcement of the world’s most important central bank?
And perhaps it is time for all those who were short the market on the afternoon of August 16 to form a group and actually sue the Federal Reserve for not only breaching its responsibility to the US taxpayers, but for illegally enriching bank CEOs even more than it has to date?
* * *
Maybe there is a reason why the Fed has a 5 year delay in disclosing full transcripts. Because something tells us the statute of limitations on pursuing Fed inside information disclosure charges against the soon to be ex-Treasury Secretary will have just expired.
Of course, when the Fed’s attempts to delay the inevitable convergence between stock markets and reality finally fails with a collapse that makes the August 2007 market moves seem like a joke, we are quite confident that the statue of limitations on that other form of justice, vigilante, will be the last thing the general public which has been betrayed by the Fed over and over and over, whose sole purpose is solely to make the rich even richer, will be the last thing on anyone’s mind.
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http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-01-11/fleecebook-meet-jp-morgans-matt-zames
FleeceBook: Meet JP Morgan’s Matt Zames
Jan 11, 2013
Previously, in our first two editions of FleeceBook, we focused on “public servants” working for either the Bank of International Settlements, or the Bank of England (doing all they can to generate returns for private shareholders, especially those of financial firms). Today, for a change, we shift to the private sector, and specifically a bank situated at the nexus of public and private finance: JP Morgan, which courtesy of its monopolist position at the apex of the Shadow Banking’s critical Tri-Party Repo system (consisting of The New York Fed, The Bank of New York, and JP Morgan, of course) has an unparalleled reach (and domination – much to Lehman Brother’s humiliation) into not only traditional bank funding conduits, but “shadow” as well. And of all this bank’s employees, by far the most interesting, unassuming and “underappreciated” is neither its CEO Jamie Dimon, nor the head of JPM’s global commodities group (and individual responsible for conceiving of the Credit Default Swap product) Blythe Masters, but one Matt Zames.
It is our humble opinion that Matt is one of the most interesting people not only at JPMorgan but in all of modern finance, courtesy of his dominant role at the Treasury Borrowing Advisory Committee (of which he is Chairman, profiled here: The Supercommittee That Really Runs America“), a group of Wall Street individuals best known for telling the current (and future) Treasury Secretary what to do, and thus effectively represent the handful of people, all of which are employed by various financial firms, that decides the fate of US public spending (and deficit creation, which incidentally must always go on – i.e., no spending cuts… ever, because if there were no deficits to be monetized the Fed would no longer create excess reserves, which are now the lifeblood of bank profitability in the New Normal as explained previously).
But perhaps just as important, Matt Zames is now the head of JPM’s infamous Chief Investment Office. As also explained previously, courtesy of the London Whale massive prop trading faux pas in early 2012, we have the CIO to thank for providing us the insight into just how banks funds their massive, Volcker-rule skirting prop trading operations (which incidentally are far more pervasive than the recent Bloomberg’s expose on a certain group at Goldman, which has openly been involved in prop trading since its inception), namely via excess deposits over loans. We are certain that it is not only JPM, but every other commercial US bank (see Wells Fargo’s record delta reported earlier today), that takes advantage of what is now a cumulative $2 trillion imbalance of excess deposits, driven by the Fed’s excess reserves, to do just what JPM did and reinvest deposits, no longer firewalled from trading activities, in risky assets, such as buying stocks and selling CDS. But mostly buying stocks. As a “hedge” of course.
In other words, it is Mr. Zames whose dual role of continuing to be on the TBAC on one hand, and indirectly determining how many excess reserves will be created by the Fed as a result of excess Treasury monetization – an issue he has direct input on in his capacity as quasi public servant, to then flip, and on the other hand, use said reserves, transformed via repo or (ab)used directly, as prop trading dry powder in his private sector capacity as CIO head, and proceed to invest as he sees fit. All of this, of course, will be done with absolute stealth: after all has JPM released anything more than broad strokes details of what precisely went so wrong at the JPM CIO aside from a $200 billion notional CDS position going horribly wrong? Because, naturally, the regulators are complicit on this scheme too.
It is precisely his role at the proverbial core of the US ponzi scheme, where he takes public funds, indirectly, with one hand, and proceeds to invest it for private benefit, with the other, that is what makes Mr. Zames quite so fascinating.
Among the other things that make Mr. Zames quite fascinating, is that he used to be a trader for none other than the first hedge fund to feel the unwrath of the Federal Reserve, and receive a bailout: Long-Term Capital Management (the same LTCM, its management team, and of course its legal team, that ushered in the parasitic and destructive era of Too Big To Fail… but that is a story for another day). It is somewhat ironic that Mr. Zames had to go from the original hedge fund blow up, to head another (one located deep in the bowels of JP Morgan) that blew up just before his arrival.
But fear not: Mr. Zames is quite qualified for all of the above – after all he graduated from MIT. Sadly, Matt is not on the “MIT engineers” list of central bankers (profiled previously) who meet secretly at the BIS every now and then and decide the fate of public funding in the “free world.” At least not yet. Or at least, not that we know of.
Yet, that Zames does all of the above with virtually no public exposure is most fascinating.
Which is why we are happy to make him the third honorary inductee into the Zero Hedge FleeceBook half of fame.
More on Mr. Zames courtesy of Bloomberg’s Max Abelson:
Zames Rises From JPMorgan Battlefield to Dimon’s War Council
Twice in the past 100 days, JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM) Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon has turned to a 41-year-old former hedge-fund trader to tackle challenges facing the largest U.S. bank.
Matt Zames, named chief investment officer in May to contain trading losses that have cost at least $5.8 billion, became the firm’s co-chief operating officer last week. Zames, who began the year as co-head of the bank’s fixed-income business, now oversees senior executives including Chief Financial Officer Douglas Braunstein, 51, and regulatory affairs head Barry Zubrow, 59.
“He had the guts and the brains,” Dimon said in an interview after announcing the management shakeup on July 27. “Matt is straight, direct, does his work. He’s got that kind of confidence without arrogance.”
Zames shoots sporting clays, described by its national association as “golf with a shotgun.” He studies military history, reading books about World War II and more recent conflicts. A husband and father of three, he leaves his bed in New Jersey at 4:45 a.m., he said in an interview.
“I wake up every morning — every morning — excited to actually make this place a better place,” he said. “I am truly humbled and honored to have been given the opportunity.”
Zames will continue to lead the chief investment office while adding oversight of finance, strategy and regulatory affairs, according to a memo sent to employees last week. The additional duties place him among senior executives who might one day succeed Dimon. Zames will serve as co-COO alongside Frank Bisignano, 52, whose responsibilities include technology and security.
Two JPMorgan executives who weren’t authorized to speak on the matter said Zames is particularly interested in trying to help shape regulatory policies so they’ll be better for the New York-based bank and the broader economy.
He and Dimon, 56, were both involved in an earlier multibillion-dollar trading crisis. After graduating from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management in 1993 and spending some months at Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS), Zames became a trader for Long-Term Capital Management LP.
The hedge fund was bailed out in 1998 after Russia’s debt default led to $4 billion of losses in what was then one of the largest collapses in U.S. investment history. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York organized support from banks including the firm Dimon was leading, Salomon Smith Barney. Zames said he “definitely” remembers meeting Dimon then, though his boss doesn’t. “No,” Dimon said when asked about the encounter.
Even so, Long-Term Capital veterans recall Zames as one of the firm’s most-trusted young traders.
Zames was trusted and mentored by senior colleagues, according to Rickards and Long-Term partner Eric Rosenfeld.
“He’s a mathematician and he’s a poet: He understands the math, but he understands qualitatively what’s going on,” said Rosenfeld, who now teaches fixed-income at Sloan. Zames is one of the people on Wall Street who “live and breathe the trades they’re doing,” he said.
The trading that Zames has overseen at JPMorgan has made the firm billions of dollars. Fixed-income trading revenue last year was $14.8 billion excluding accounting adjustments, more than any other global bank. JPMorgan posted the only increase in debt trading among the largest firms that year, while Bank of America Corp. (BAC) and Goldman Sachs slid more than 30 percent.
In last week’s interview, Dimon praised Zames’ handling of the crisis and recounted their meeting in May to discuss the situation. Dimon had called Zames into work on a Saturday, and the two were standing in a hallway when the CEO asked him to take over the money-losing unit. Zames’ promotion came fewer than three months later.
“When you have a talent like that, you got to give him a challenge,” Dimon said.
…
While Dimon said in last week’s interview that he hopes to keep leading JPMorgan for “many, many more years,” Zames’ promotion fueled speculation that the former trader is now a potential successor…
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Read more here
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http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-01-09/guest-post-american-justice-dead
Guest Post: Is American Justice Dead?
01/09/2013 22:08
Submitted by David Galland, via Casey Research,
Every nation-state has a body of laws woven into the fabric of society. As Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto has commented on extensively, the stronger the rule of law, the stronger the economy.
And by “stronger” laws, I mean laws that are impervious to tampering for personal or political gains. The connection between a sound judiciary and economic health is readily comprehensible, except maybe to a politician… businesses and individuals are far more likely to invest capital in a country with understandable laws that are impartially and universally enforced than if the opposite condition exists.
That’s because the lack of a consistent body of law breeds uncertainty and adds a huge element of risk for entrepreneurs. That is the case here in Argentina, where hardly a week goes by without La Presidenta and her meddlesome comrades cooking up some new hurdle for businesses to overcome.
Which brings me back to the matter at hand – American justice on a slippery slope.
Few recent cases make the contention clearer than the announcement last week by the US Justice Department that it had settled its case against HSBC for acting as the bag men for Colombian and Mexican drug cartels. The fine, $1.9 billion, amounts to about five weeks of revenue for the bank.
And that was pretty much it.
Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone magazine, who can run hot or cold when it comes to reporting, in my opinion, nails his column on the verdict, which you can read here.
The basic setup is that for years, at the highest levels of HSBC, the bank worked hand in glove with the drug cartels to launder their money. So smooth was their relationship that the drug gangs used special cardboard boxes for them to fill with cash – boxes that were designed to fit easily through the teller windows of the HSBC branches in Mexico.
Now, don’t get me wrong – I am 100% against the so-called “War on Drugs.” That there are hundreds of thousands of Americans in prison for the “crime” of voluntarily ingesting recreational drugs, or providing said drugs in a rare free-market transaction (there’s a willing buyer and a willing seller and no regulations – at least none that anyone pays any attention to), is an abomination.
And so it is that the US has the highest prison population in the world, and by a wide margin: on a per-capita basis, it is 33% higher than the closest contender, Russia.
If you take into account everyone under “correctional supervision,” 3.1% of the US population is either in jail or on probation (for blacks, it’s a stunning 9.2%). According to Human Rights Watch, since 1980 the number of people in US jails for drug charges has increased twelvefold.
Yet, the money men for the murderous cartels that supply the stuff – the sort of fat-cat villains that serve as the centerpiece of every James Bond movie – get off with a hand slap.
How is this possible? The answer is that, just like the much-maligned “banana republic,” the judicial system in the Anglo-Saxon world has been bifurcated into two systems – one for the politically favored and the other for the rest of us.
In the case of HSBC, the rationale for management being spared even a criminal trial, let alone years behind bars, is that the bank is too big to fail. And that should anyone within the bank be collared for their colossal crimes, it could provide the trigger for the widespread collapse of the global financial system.
To which an Anglo-Saxon from the UK might retort, “Bollocks!” This is rather a case of the politically connected and their equally politically connected, high-priced law firms twisting the judicial system to their purposes.
Another recent case is that of the LIBOR fixing scandal.
As you know, in this case a group of banks clearly conspired to rig the rates on the interest-rate index used to underpin over $300 trillion in loans. As the scandal was revealed, it was also revealed that top tax dodger and now US Treasury Secretary Tim “Timmy” Geithner was aware of the rigging as far back as at least 2007 when operating the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
Yet Geithner’s elevated position in the Obama administration meant that this inconvenient revelation quietly faded into nothingness. As did the clear implication that if Geithner knew about it, so did untold scores of others at the Fed and other institutions at the time.
Meanwhile, back in the present, instead of rounding up the heads of these institutions, it was announced this week that a handful of floor traders – the ever useful minions – have been fingered to take the fall. For the sake of the public show, I suspect the fall will be pretty hard.
Hell, the last time I checked, even Jon Corzine, who as a former senator and governor of New Jersey is the über-insider, is still a free man despite being the lead actor in the bankruptcy of MF Global and the subsequent looting of billions in customer funds. No one, except maybe Corzine himself, thinks that he isn’t criminally complicit, yet, at this writing, there isn’t even a hint he’ll be prosecuted.
As David Webb has so thoroughly documented, a spate of cases over the last decade has set a clear precedent that financial institutions – at least those of a size to count with the political class – are pretty much free to lie, cheat, misrepresent, and even use their clients’ funds to trade for their own book.
And if things go wrong, they can pass the losses on to the clients, or in the case of Corzine simply shrug his Savile Row-clad shoulders, and feign ignorance about where said funds went.
It Goes On… and On…
And the conniving and criminality doesn’t stop at the judiciary but has infested pretty much every corner of the government.
A personal recent favorite was Hillary Clinton‘s oh-so-convenient bout of fainting that kept her from testifying about the truly bizarre attack on the Benghazi consulate, thereby skipping the direct damage to her career that would have resulted from having to answer the unanswerable in front of television cameras.
Then there’s the sweetheart deal embedded in the soon-to-be-updated federal regulations related to mortgages. Given all the abuses leading up to the housing crash, John Q. might posit that there will be strong teeth in these new regulations. Sure, there’s a couple – but lookie what else is in the new regs; this from the New York Times…
As regulators complete new mortgage rules, banks are about to get a significant advantage: protection against homeowner lawsuits.
The rules are meant to help bolster the housing market. By shielding banks from potential litigation, policy makers contend that the industry will have a powerful incentive to make higher-quality home loans.
But some banking and housing specialists worry that borrowers are losing a critical safeguard. Industries rarely get broad protection from consumer lawsuits, and banks would seem unlikely candidates given the range of abuses revealed during the housing bust.
Mind-boggling.
Skipping across the pond, we have the truly incredible case of Julian Assange, who is now a prisoner, surrounded by upwards of 100 police officers, in the Ecuadorian embassy in London where he’s been seeking asylum.
At one point, a senior British official suggested they were seriously considering throwing hundreds of years of diplomatic precedent out of the window by storming the embassy to get their man.
Yet his purported crime, having consensual sex with two different women without a condom (in one case, he had one, but it apparently broke) would, at most, be treated as a minor offense in pretty much any court, in pretty much every country in the world. Unless, of course, he knew he had AIDS and was deliberately trying to transmit it, which he wasn’t.
Do your own research, and maybe you’ll draw a different conclusion – here’s one fairly thorough story on the charges against Assange – but that the UK government is willing to spend untold sums of money it can’t afford keeping him penned up in the Ecuadorian embassy smacks of collusion and corruption.
What’s really going on, of course, is that Assange’s WikiLeaks organization embarrassed the power elite by doing what the media no longer does – getting to the truth, in this case releasing a stash of embarrassing diplomatic cables.
While Assange is fighting the good fight, it’s a fight against entrenched political interests, and so it’s a losing battle. Aided by the corrupt judiciary or, failing that, the malleable military, it’s just a matter of time before he ends up in a cell next to Bradley Manning whose tortured corpus is now on trial for giving up state secrets that were really not all that secret.
In economic policy, too, the evidence of two different systems is glaring. Look no further than the Fed’s recent decision to light the afterburners on over a trillion in new money creation each year.
Whom does such a policy help? The politicians, of course, by allowing them to claim they “fixed” the economy that they broke in the first place… when all they are really doing is replacing the capital formation and spending of a healthy private sector with the polluted effluence of government disbursements.
Whom does such a policy hurt? The population at large, by eroding the value of everything they own and eviscerating their ability to earn money on their money through a free market in interest rates… all the while fostering yet more malinvestment in the Potemkin villages of an uneconomic solar industry, electric cars, high-speed trains, etc.
Make no mistake, the Fed and the government are keenly aware of the damaging consequences of their actions – but, out of self-interest, take those actions nonetheless.
The enviro-socialists that have bought their way into the corridors of power provide another array of examples, using laughably bad science and arbitrary rulings to disadvantage key sectors of the economy such as energy and mining.
What’s It Mean to You and Me?
There is little question that the vast majority of the public is ignorant or apathetic, or both, to the pervasive corruption of the political classes and their financiers.
But even if they were paying attention and outraged, the fact of the matter is that things have degraded to the point where there is next to nothing John Q. can do about it. Sure, you can write your Congressman; just be sure to be extra polite, or your letter will end up in the hands of zee Homeland Security.
Ditto if you write angry emails and send them to all your friends. Just don’t make the mistake of thinking there is still such a thing as privacy or the right of free speech in the Anglosphere.
And heavens forbid you try to organize a physical protest. Next thing you know, you’ll end up wearing a pair of these bad boys coming to your friendly police officer’s belt soon.
(Not only do these next-gen cuffs restrain you, but they allow the arresting officer to remotely deliver electric shocks and, if that doesn’t do the trick, even inject drugs into you.)
Of course, if your company or industry wants to fight it out in the courts, you have to be ready and able to spend millions in legal fees fighting a government with unlimited funds (provided, of course, by your taxes and money borrowed from the Chinese or ginned up by the Fed).
What I’m trying to say is that, regardless of what the popular corruption indexes show – and those are typically based on fairly suspect surveys on matters such as transparency in corporate reporting or whether bribes are required to do business – when you take into account the systematic skewing of the judicial and electoral systems to favor the entrenched politicos and their friends in high places, the level of corruption in the Anglosphere would make an African despot blush.
It’s not an accident that the Republicans and the Democrats, two sides of the same coin despite all the rhetoric, are never remotely at risk of losing their collective grip on power – the system has been carefully and thoroughly rigged to prevent that from happening.
Logically, if there is virtually nothing the public at large can do about the rigged game they are forced to live with, then it comes down to decisions we make as individuals.
Some general approaches for your consideration.
- Suck it up. The Stoic approach is to recognize there are certain things you can’t do anything about, so put the hypocrisy and self-dealing of officialdom and their enablers out of mind and live your life the best you know how.
- Profit from it. While it may seem counterintuitive, the more challenging the environment for business creation, the more money an especially hard-charging entrepreneur can make. This is why Asian shop owners open up in ghettos and why the margins for “war profiteers” are so high – because they literally have to risk life and limb to collect them.A successful acquaintance recently told me that, as the head of the Argentine branch of a major international electronics brand, his division was regularly able to pull down margins in excess of 40% while his counterparts in less volatile political environments were happy with less than 10%.It just takes an extra measure of patience and fortitude to overcome the challenges that scare less determined individuals away.
- Move West… or South, but probably not North. A combination of #1 and 2 above, the brave minority might want to consider taking the show on the road.
- If you can’t beat them, join them. As Doug Casey has often pointed out, the effect of Pareto’s Law operating over time on the large democracies has resulted in the worst sort of people controlling the levers of government at the federal, state and local level. If you happen to be a sociopath with control issues, then you might want to hop on the gravy train and worm your way into government, or into one of the many parasitic enterprises sucking the life from the body politic.
- Go outlaw. Yesterday, a flash mob gathered in the southern Argentine city of Bariloche for the sole purpose of looting a large store of electronics, food and booze, and sundry other items that will make the Christmas holidays all the more festive.When I heard of the incident, I mentioned to my wife that this could very well be the proverbial first shot in the breakdown of civil society in cities around the world. And sure enough, as I was writing, the news broke that spontaneous mobs have formed in a number of cities around Argentina for the sole purpose of looting stores.This is precisely the sort of thing one can expect in an economy laid low by political corruption, malfeasance and self-serving meddling. When people lose hope, and lose faith that the judicial system will protect them from the entrenched interests, then it is well within the range of some of those people to just say screw it and go outlaw.
I could be wrong, but I think what happened in Bariloche yesterday has the potential to be just as seminal as the self-immolation in Tunisia that set off the Arab Spring.
The implications of mobs deciding to come together to just take what they want are potentially huge. In the Anglo-Saxon world, it could provide exactly the excuse needed to bring down the stainless-steel curtain built with hundreds of billions of homeland security expenditures over the past decade.
In fact, while I am probably overstating it, the action of the mob in Bariloche yesterday could be the missing link between Neil Howe’s Third and Fourth Turning, ushering in the next and most troubled era.
It’s ironic that it’s happening in here in my new retreat in Argentina, but it’s of no personal import because our new hometown of Cafayate is rural, small and very successful, and the sort of place where everyone knows everyone else. And, besides, there are no large supermarkets to raid.
In addition, despite the dark era of military rule (or perhaps because of it), Argentina is not a violent culture, and the big cities are few and far between. The same can’t be said of places like Chicago and Detroit, where flash mobs have been increasingly cropping up with the primary intention of committing violence.
How fast and how far things will spread from here is only a matter of conjecture, but the range of possibilities is wide.
Regardless of whether the rule of law continues to be diminished through the acts of corrupt politicians or a mob – or through the militarized arm of the politicos trying to control the mob – I fear the knock-on consequences on the economy and on society at large.
I really don’t want to be a Chicken Little, but taking some basic precautions to protect yourself and your assets is only commonsense at this juncture.
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Some claim this release of information was merely a ploy to move the market:
http://news.yahoo.com/feds-fisher-reorganize-banks-too-big-fail-022955393–sector.html
also see:
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/01/18/business/18fomc-transcripts.html?ref=business
Fed hawk voices doubts over benefits of bond buying
By Alister Bull and Ann Saphir | Reuters – Wed, Jan 16, 2013
WASHINGTON/MINNEAPOLIS (Reuters) – A senior Federal Reserve official voiced skepticism on Wednesday about the benefits of additional asset purchases by the U.S. central bank, while a more dovish policymaker maintained his campaign for additional policy easing.
Dallas Federal Reserve President Richard Fisher, in remarks that were mainly about the need to reorganize banks that were “too big to fail,” said the effectiveness of the Fed’s massive bond purchases in helping the economy was fading.
“I believe that it is increasingly having a lesser impact as we go through time,” Fisher said, when asked about the benefits of further so-called quantitative easing.
“(Borrowing) rates are the lowest they have been in a lifetime, but they have not come down as quickly as I would like … to see, and I don’t think, therefore, our policy has been as effective as we would like it to be,” he said.
The Dallas Fed chief is counted among the most hawkish of the U.S. central bank’s 19 policymakers in his concern about potential inflation.
The Fed pledged last month to keep buying $85 billion of Treasury and mortgage-backed bonds a month until there was a significant improvement in the outlook for the labor market, but said it was also monitoring the program’s efficacy and costs.
Minutes of that December 11-12 meeting, released earlier in January, showed that several policymakers thought the bond purchases should be halted well before the end of this year.
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http://www.cnbc.com/id/100374190/AIG_sues_NY_Fed_over_right_to_sue_Bank_of_America_others
AIG sues NY Fed over right to sue Bank of America, others
Published: Friday, 11 Jan 2013 | 8:48 PM ET
* AIG says did not transfer legal claims to Maiden Lane II
* NY Fed, which created Maiden Lane, declined to comment
NEW YORK, Jan 11 (Reuters) – American International Group Inc has filed a lawsuit against a vehicle created by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York to help bail out the insurer, in a bid to preserve its right to sue Bank of America Corp and other issuers of mortgage debt that went sour.
The complaint filed in the New York State Supreme Court in Manhattan seeks a declaration that AIG has not transferred billions of dollars of “litigation claims” to Maiden Lane II, including many related to the insurer’s $10 billion lawsuit against Bank of America.
Maiden Lane II was created in December 2008 to buy residential mortgage-backed securities (RMBS) from AIG and ease liquidity strains.
According to the complaint, New York Fed officials in December told Bank of America that Maiden Lane II had, by agreeing to buy the securities, assumed from AIG all litigation claims relating to what it bought. AIG said this included more than $7 billion of damages claims against Bank of America.
AIG is not seeking monetary payments in the lawsuit, but wants the court to clarify that the New York-based insurer still has the right to sue issuers of securities in Maiden Lane II.
New York Fed spokesman Jack Gutt declined to comment. Bank of America spokesman Lawrence Grayson also declined to comment.
The lawsuit is part of the fallout from AIG’s $182.3 billion federal bailout that began in September 2008, and which was fully paid off last year.
It came after AIG provoked a firestorm in Congress and from the American people this week as it mulled whether to sue the government that bailed it out by joining a $25 billion lawsuit by former Chief Executive Maurice “Hank” Greenberg. AIG eventually decided to stay out of that case.
When it sued Bank of America in August 2011, AIG accused the Charlotte, North Carolina-based lender of misrepresenting the quality of more than $28 billion of securities it had bought from the bank and its Countrywide and Merrill Lynch units.
An AIG spokesman said Friday’s lawsuit “narrowly seeks a declaration from the Court that a 2008 contract between AIG and ML II did not transfer to ML II AIG’s right to sue Bank of America and other financial institutions for the billions of dollars of damages they caused AIG and its shareholders in connection with the fraudulent sale of RMBS to AIG.”
According to Friday’s complaint, Maiden Lane II paid $20.8 billion for a variety of subprime and other mortgage securities from AIG, barely half of their estimated $39.3 billion face value.
The case is American International Group Inc et al v. Maiden Lane II LLC, New York State Supreme Court, New York County, No. 650115/2013.
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http://www.latimes.com/business/money/la-fi-mo-jamie-dimon-leaves-new-york-fed-board-as-term-expires-20130107,0,1079684.story
Jamie Dimon leaves New York Fed board as term expires
Jamie Dimon, the chairman and chief executive of JPMorgan Chase & Co., has quietly left the board of the New York Federal Reserve.
Dimon didn’t relinquish his board membership to silence critics who, in the middle of last year, saw a conflict of interest — or at least an appearance of one — after JPMorgan suffered an embarrassing loss in a risky bet, despite the New York Fed’s oversight.
“This is a clear example of the fox guarding the henhouse,” Sen. Bernard Sanders (I-Vt.) said in May after Dimon revealed a derivatives bet by a trader nicknamed “the London Whale.”
The bet wound up costing about $6 billion. It was a black eye for a bank that emerged from the financial crisis practically unscathed.
Elizabeth Warren, a Wall Street critic who is now a Democratic senator from Massachusetts and will sit on the Senate Banking Committee, also had called on Dimon to step down.
But Dimon — who said all along that his role on the board was merely advisory and came with no oversight over the Fed’s regulatory functions — finished out his second term, which expired at the end of 2012.
New York Fed board members customarily step down after serving a maximum of two terms.
Three positions on the New York Fed’s nine-member board are nominated by member banks. These “Class A” directors do not play a role in selecting the New York Fed’s presidents or its regulatory decisions, according to the New York Fed.
Dimon’s replacement has not been announced. The remaining two bank executives on the New York Fed’s board are Richard Carrion, chairman and CEO of Banco Popular de Puerto Rico, and Paul Mello, president and CEO of Solvay Bank in New York.
>>>
Hmm, what ever happen to this bill:
http://www.americanbanker.com/issues/177_99/Bernie-Sanders-Jamie-Dimon-regional-Fed-banks-1049542-1.html?zkPrintable=true
Sanders Pushes Bill to Bar Bankers from Regional Fed Boards
End.
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Tuesday, January 15, 2013
http://americankabuki.blogspot.com/2013/01/high-financial-affairs-battle-for.html
High Financial Affairs – The Battle for Control of the Global Financial System
High Financial Affairs
 |
| Scrooge McDuck ©Walt Disney |
Introduction
additional whistle blowers with intimate knowledge of these affairs; most especially those with information that pertains to the ‘positive’ forces working behind the scenes in high places. There is a growing consensus amongst those of us whom are quietly keeping watch over these affairs: We agree that it is coming time for the ‘positive’ forces to give us some real concrete evidence as to their existence. We continue to hear of powerful Asian societies, (most notably the Dragon Family), a 140+ nation alliance known as The New League of Free Nations/Non-aligned Movement (said to possibly be centered around the BRICS nations), as well as positive forces at work in the united States of America; in particular a purported group of wealthy Americans who draw their bloodlines back to the time of the Pilgrims. There is also much talk concerning oath keeping forces within the Pentagon whom are pushing back hard against the globalist cabal and their attempts to implement a world-wide fascist dictatorship under the control of the United Nations that, from the mouths of some of the leading members within this framework of power, has come to be called a New Word Order for the future. We hear that the most dangerous and perhaps most powerful of these groups is the ‘Texas Camp’ overseen by President George H.W. Bush, his son George W. Bush, The Clintons, and their minions. Further research has brought forth information that possibly links these men to Nazi factions which escaped from Germany in the aftermath of World War II via the so-called Vatican Rat Lines and the subsequent Project Paperclip.We are told that all of these purported ‘positive’ groups are said to be working on a ‘plan’ to wrest control of the global financial system away from the hands of nefarious forces and thus reset the system for the betterment of all mankind, and that some of those in high positions of power whom are trying to assist in this effort are members of the banking and bloodline families themselves (i.e. some whom we ‘think’ are allies are really enemies, and some whom we perceive as ‘enemies’ are actually our allies). This ‘plan’ to free the planet from the bonds of financial servitude is said to be global in scope.There is a growing body of evidence to support the fact that the IMF, spearheaded by Christine Lagarde, is part of this effort. Also involved in this is said to be a one Madame Wu Yi, the former Vice Premiere of China. Russian President Vladimir Putin is also said to be a major player in this. We are told that the impending revaluation of the Iraqi Dinar will be a key part of this global financial reset. We also continue to hear murmuings of NESARA, the National Economic Security and Reformation Act, which is said to be the centerpiece of a new asset-backed financial system in the united States.
What is most curious to note is that Neil Keenan was at one time working in tandem with Keith Francis Scott as part of the $1 trillion lawsuit and subsequent series of liens;though a very public ‘split’ appears to have taken place between the two parties sometime in the late Spring of 2012. One particular case bears mentioning in regards to Neil Benjamin Gibson: That of the seizure of monies collected as part of the redemption of Federal Reserve Bonds on behalf of two ‘clients’ from the Philippines, Graciela Tetangco and Gualberto Medalla, through the Marquis Bank Prive. Gibson seemed to have been working in tandem with another purported NOC operative, Percy Gutierrez, as part of this affair (below you will find screen shots of account holdings in the billions of dollars held in Marquis Bank Prive, one of only a number of shadowy banks which appear to be in use by NOC operatives as part of this special global acquisition project).
Taking all of this into consideration then, the main question that needs to be raised would be: What is the true purpose behind the joint DHS/Federal Reserve Bank ‘purchasing’ and ‘acquisition’ of Federal Reserve Notes and Bonds? Is it an attempt to ‘gather up’ genuine financial instruments issued many decades ago, or merely an attempt to flood the market with phony pieces of paper and then ‘buy back’ said instruments as a means of grabbing up additional resources? Or is this entire operation a part of a much larger and even more complex agenda?
end.
_____________________________
DOES HUMAN RIGHTS INCLUDE EXPOSURE OF ISRAELI ATROCITIES?
January 15, 2013 at 12:11 (Cover Up, Human Rights, Israel, Palestine, zionist Slander)
Should non-governmental organizations (NGOs) criticize governments when the latter fail to uphold democracy and good governance? Should governments be accountable to the private citizens who are affected by their policies?
Op-ed: NGOs claiming to promote human rights use EU funds to promote anti-Israel initiatives
Should non-governmental organizations (NGOs) criticize governments when the latter fail to uphold democracy and good governance? Should governments be accountable to the private citizens who are affected by their policies?
*
As mentioned above, EU officials either denied our requests for information, or obfuscated and dissembled. In fact, the EU’s impulse to conceal was so great, NGO Monitor later found that some of the redacted information was already available in the public domain.
*
Further evidence is a leaked protocol of an EU meeting on NGO funding from 1999, one of the only uncensored documents dealing with this topic to emerge from EU offices. The protocol shows an explicit and concerted plan to support NGOs in an effort to manipulate Israeli voting patterns. When the founder of NGO Monitor, Prof. Gerald Steinberg, referred to the protocol at a public event, a European diplomat attempted to silence him, claiming that the document was top secret and should not be the subject of public debate.
_____________________________
http://www.occupythebanks.com/2012/02/satanic-ritual-child-abuse-murdered-by.html
Site founders statement: we have taken terrible risks to publish this page. Don’t let that be in vain; please, if you visit – EXPOSE THE TRUTH NOW – do not delay; Tweet this page – Revisit every hour or so for NEW UPDATES today! Next up: EUROPEAN POLITICIANS! 😉
- FRENCH CHILDREN; GERMAN FILMMAKERS – ABUSED CHILDREN TESTIFY
- BELGIUM – CONVENIENT CASTLES; INCONVENIENT TRUTHS – THE MOST CENSORED POLITICS IN THE EU – RIGHT IN THE HEART OF THE EU!
- FOREX, SATANISM & THE CIA – HERO DEAD FED TED
- DEAD FED TED – 2003 – SATANIC ABUSE – 30 YEARS OF IGNORED EVIDENCE
- 911: DEAD FED TED; Dare You Listen?
- DEAD FED TED: LATEST DEVELOPMENTS May 2011
- SCOTTISH GOVERNMENT AND LEGAL PROFESSION CONNECTIONS – HOLLY GRIEG COVER UP CONTINUES
- CHILD PORN & THE PENTAGON – 5,200 NAMES KNOWN SINCE 2006 – NOT ONE ARREST MADE OF ANYONE!
- NEW CONSPIRACY OF SILENCE – the RARE, BANNED USA DOCUMENTARY ABOUT WHITE HOUSE and SENIOR FIGURES THROUGHOUT USA BEING INVOLVED!
- NEW – Friday 20th February 2012UK CAMPAIGNER AGAINST RITUAL CHILD SEXUAL ABUSE SENT TO JAIL FOR 12 MONTHS IN SCOTLAND!!
- NEW – Tuesday 28th February 2011FIRST VICTORY SCOTTISH PAEDOPHILE HORRORS EXPOSED SECRET SUFFERING OF CHILD SEX SLAVE – 5 y.o.!
- NEW 13 Posted 28th February 2012 EUROPE CELLER SLAVE HORROR! – Austrian Parliament Admits ACCOMPLICE!! http://www.occupythebanks.com/search?q=Savile
NEW 14 posted 02nd March 2012 - Occupy The Court of Appeal – LIVE!! BRITAIN ARISES TO INJUSTICE- filmed by the only people in Britain trying to change YOUR truth – Occupy!! 😉
NEW 15 posted 6th March 2012 - Raping Children, Snatching Children – the victims disappear into ‘State Protection’ under the guise of law – Court of Appeal now Indicted by British People as involved in Protecting the Establishment Kiddie Fuckers. Brain Garrish Speaks out – Victim Holly Grieg bravely comes into view (despite the
blackout!)
NEW 16 posted 13th May 2012 - First British Adult Satanic Child Sexual Abuse Victim Speaks out
http://www.occupythebanks.com/2012/05/occult-mind-control-military-child.html - CHILD SEX SLAVE VATICAN POLICE VATIGATE SCANDAL
http://www.occupythebanks.com/2012/05/vatican-paedo-pope-police-sex-slave.html - FBI IMPLICATED JUST LIKE HERO DEAD FED TED SAID (didn’t we tell you!) ….
http://www.occupythebanks.com/2012/07/vatican-fbi-child-sex-slaves-doj.html - HOLDERS JUSTICE IMPLICATED – simply perfect!
http://www.occupythebanks.com/2012/09/pedophilia-kiddie-porn-holders-dark.html
NEW – THE NETHERLANDS TOP LAW OFFICER IN GOVT **CHILD RAPIST – DUTCH ‘Free Press COVER UP THIS STORY FOR FOURTEEN YEARS (whilst the TOP LEGAL OFFICER OF THE DARK CABAL IN ROYAL HOLLAND COVER UP CHILD TRAFFICKING - VIDEO PROOF – TESTIMONY OF THE RAPED BOYS (now adult) HOORAY!!!!!!
http://www.occupythebanks.com/2012/10/dutch-when-child-traffickers-rule.html
(video testimony now appears at the bottom of this page also!!!! DUTCH – HEROES!!! 😉NEW – BRITISH BROADCASTING CORPORATION COVERS UP CHILD RAPE - BRITISH TAXPAYERS PAY BRITISH BROADCASTING CORPORATEION EMPLOYEES TO RAPE THEIR CHILDREN – you cannot make this stuff up (did we tell you or did we tell u)
http://www.occupythebanks.com/2012/10/bbc-50-year-pedophile-coverup-being.html - LIVE HOUSE OF COMM<ONS: the ADMISSION OF THE COVERUP **LIVE**
- The COVERUP CALLS OUT BY US – TWICE **IGNORED**
- THE PARLIAMENTARY **RETROSPENCE** — 5,000 **ILLEGALLY DETAINED 10 YEARS** (WOW)!!!!!!!!!!!
- #SAVILE
-
**ALERT** EMERGENCY LAWS PASSED (5,000 DETAINED)
Coming from Lord Louis, who was the favourite uncle of Prince Philip, that was quite something. So obviously I hooked up with the Prince – what was good enough for Lord Louis was good enough for him.
Please check back throughout the day; we will be adding videos all day. The best of Ted! Please listen to this interview now, as a backgrounder to the otherwise unbelievable videos that are going to be appearing on this page for the rest of the day. We get bullets too. ;(
>>>
FRANCE – RITUAL SATANIC CHILD ABUSE – ABUSED CHILDREN TESTIFY TO THE TRUTH TED EXPOSED!
TESTIMONY OF THE ABUSED CHILDREN ABOVE. Pan-EU; global even, networks of Satan Worshipping, Child Sexual Abusing – Ritualistically practised mind … And so the The White Rabbit, decides to take your deeper down into the The Rabbit Hole. You had worked out before now why we choose the The White Rabbit as our Twitter nym right?! hehe …. BANKSTERS’ NEMESIS; no more child abuse for you guys in the EUROPEAN CASTLES
BELGIUM – CONVENIENT CASTLES; INCONVENIENT TRUTHS – THE MOST CENSORED POLITICS IN THE EU
The uncomfortable but convenient reality on the European Continent; those that would lead and perhaps do lead us (we caste no aspersions and did NOT make this video to be 100% clear). When you understand copyright, and how it’s used by the elite to buy up any truth they don’t want published … well; a reminder of the unmentionable…
Beyond the Dutroux Affair
Next up, we’re back to dot-connecting the European to the USA end of this;
FOREX, SATANISM & THE CIA – HERO DEAD FED TED
DEAD TED 2003 – 30 YEARS OF IGNORED EVIDENCE
If you simply don’t believe that the US Government’s employees under a duty to Protect and Serve know about child sexual abuse but do nothing about it. In other words if you have a credibility gap on that issue, you must see now the last post on this page where we detail the current state of affairs: 5,200 KNOWN purchasers of CHILD PORN INSIDE THE PENTAGON; not one arrest. Unbelievable we know, but that’s why as our regular readers already know, we always publish (where possible) the source for the information that appears on this website … and in this case, you’ll likely recognise (& remember) the source!
SCOTTISH GOVERNMENT AND LEGAL PROFESSION CONNECTIONS – HOLLY GRIEG COVER UP CONTINUES
“An open email, to the First Minister, calling for a public inquiry.
Ian McFerran
http://www.holliedemandsjustice.org/
http://holliedemandsjustice-robertgreensblog.blogspot.com/ ”
_________________________________________
Stephen J. Crothers: Black Holes
Published on Nov 27, 2012
Stephen J. Crothers: Black Holes, General Relativity and Newtonian Gravitation
Stephen J. Crothers webpage, complete with his papers and various articles: http://www.sjcrothers.plasmaresources.com/
LINKS to full transcripts of this interview: http://viXra.org/abs/1212.0010 http://www.scribd.com/doc/115892163/The-Stephen-Crothers-Interview
>>>
Einstein’s Flaws and the Reality of Quasars by Michael Suede Parts 1 – 6
1st part
2nd part
3rd part
4th part
5th part
6th (final part)
Published on Jun 8, 2012
Science Journal detailing the history of Mainstream Fallacies (READ IT):
http://www.wbabin.net/ntham/amesbury.pdf
Cavitation – Sonoluminescence – Implosion Technology – Sacred Sciences Part 4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0PTO74hNUpM
Addressing problems with the Solar System:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=toTd2dQjEes
Thunderbolts Electric Universe Page:
http://www.youtube.com/thunderboltsproject
Electric Universe Playlist:
http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLB9BD5DB7ACA6E120&feature=plcp
Adding a Z Axis to the Solar System:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7m6AEiAMb9g
Twin Vortexes – VBM and more:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3HoRQKpjqqQ
Dewey B Larson (READ “THE CASE AGAINST THE NUCLEAR ATOM”)
http://www.reciprocalsystem.com/dbl
Free Energy and Free Thinking:
http://www.feandft.com
Dr. Pallathadka Keshava Bhat
http://www.feandft.com/Dr.%20Bhat.htm
Vortex Basics:
http://www.feandft.com/vortex_basics.htm
Electric Cosmos:
http://www.electric-cosmos.org/indexOLD.htm
Walter Russell Photo Album (FACEBOOK USERS):
https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10150220576998302.310244.683583301&…
35 books on Suppressed Sciences:
http://www.scribd.com/my_document_collections/3113156
ESA New Test of Relativity:
http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/GSP/SEM0L6OVGJE_0.html
Lucky It Aint Rocket Science (LIARS)
http://www.thunderbolts.info/thunderblogs/archives/davesmith_au08/liars.htm
The Black Hole at the Heart of Astronomy:
http://www.holoscience.com/news.php?article=7qqsr17q
Poor Review:
http://www.thunderbolts.info/thunderblogs/archives/davesmith_au08/041308_mock…
Essential Guide:
http://www.thunderbolts.info/wp/2012/01/17/essential-guide-to-the-eu-chapter-8
Halton Arp:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mf5y6PJR5lE
Misunderstood Sun:
http://www.holoscience.com/news.php?article=ah63dzac
Psyence of the Big Bang:
http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2006/arch06/060823bigbangscience.htm
Pioneer Anomaly:
http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2008/arch08/080828pioneer.htm
E.U.M. (Electric Universe Model):
http://haltonarp.com/articles
http://www.holoscience.com
http://www.thunderbolts.info/home.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kristian_Birkeland
http://plasmauniverse.info/people/alfven.html
.
.
Order out of Chaos – The Geometry of Implosion (Live Presentation):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BRex364_Yv8
Pdf version of the presentation so others can follow along:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/92170878/The-Geometry-of-Implosion
Atomic Feng Shui – Aetheric Diodes and Unconventional Magnetization:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/77264199/Atomic-Feng-Shui-Aetheric-Diodes-and-Magne…
What a Magnet Is and Why (9 Parts):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fT3w1Wc3W9Y&list=PLF36B518240B98295&in…
Jason Verbelli interviewed by James Gilliland
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCymZJGuwTw
Nuclear Remediation:
http://www.peswiki.com/index.php/Directory:Nuclear_Remediation
Resonant Nuclear Battery (Dr. Paul Brown):
http://www.rexresearch.com/nucell/nucell.htm
Nitinol Military Testing:
http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a108973.pdf
SEG Mock Up vs SEG Prototype
http://www.scribd.com/doc/75278338/SEG-Mock-Up-Verses-SEG-Prototype-Stages-of…
1st Visit to Searl Magnetics:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_Lk1VFgvUk
Q&A:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GqPhwuakcLM
Theory of Operation:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJX17LgBYaQ
SEG Background
http://www.rexresearch.com/searl4/searl4.htm
Design
http://www.rexresearch.com/searl/searl.htm
Validations
http://www.rexresearch.com/roschin/roschin.htm
Searl Sites
http://www.SearlSolution.com
http://www.SwallowCommand.com
http://www.JohnSearlStory.com
Donate to Searl:
http://www.northpointcharity.org
Invest in Searl:
http://www.searlmagnetics.com/investing
Non Contact Attachment
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8bc6KU78rY
Non-Linear Magnetics
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pq_iPPfxg0w
Max Field (600% Stronger)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1auuL62SQqM
Nanomagnetic Engineering
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kk2E9jhx5HQ
Magnetism On / Off Switch
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=twxQjrmxgqQ
.
.
PAX / Lily Impeller:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HBHxl7uULqg
Logic & Theory of Water Enhancers:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ihXnxUi3FSc
Making Colloidal Silver & Healthy Water
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5nQuOFvvt3k
Clayton Nolte:
http://www.NaturalActionWater.com
Skycollection:
http://www.youtube.com/user/skycollection
Dan Winter’s Imploder:
http://www.FractalField.com
Doc Willard’s Water:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4gu8FI1ofO8
The Black Box:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OLJn6R_aT84
ElectroCulturing:
http://www.rexresearch.com/elculture/elculture.htm
http://www.rexresearch.com/agro2/0agro1.htm
http://www.electrocultureandmagnetoculture.com/links.html
Top Secret Water
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJhogR7YLps
Free Energy Flyer:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/56042386/Free-Energy-Flyer-for-the-Public-With-Work…
>>>
Russellian Science – Helical Trajectories and Dr. Keshava Bhat – Adding a Z axis to the Solar System
Uploaded on Jan 29, 2012
Listen to what the astronaut says from 30 seconds to 1 minute 35 seconds.
“The physics is a bit different. It’s not about gravitation. It’s about charge forces.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJ_CPGV9SeQ
He doesn’t even realize the significance of this own words.
The Sun is charged, the Earth is charged. There is angular velocity of the celestial bodies, yet they continue with the fallacious notion of nuclear pulling forces from a neutral center. The simple truth is seen in the first 2 minutes of the video.
.
.
“But hitherto I have not been able to discover the cause of those properties of gravity from phenomena, and I frame no hypotheses.”
— Sir Isaac Newton (SIN)
MECO (Magnetospheric Eternally Collapsing Object):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetospheric_eternally_collapsing_object
Dewey B Larson:
http://www.reciprocalsystem.com/dbl
Lucky It Aint Rocket Science (LIARS)
http://www.thunderbolts.info/thunderblogs/archives/davesmith_au08/liars.htm
The Black Hole at the Heart of Astronomy:
http://www.holoscience.com/news.php?article=7qqsr17q
Poor Review:
http://www.thunderbolts.info/thunderblogs/archives/davesmith_au08/041308_mock…
Essential Guide:
http://www.thunderbolts.info/wp/2012/01/17/essential-guide-to-the-eu-chapter-8
Twin Vortexes – Leedskalnin – Free Mason Symbol:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3HoRQKpjqqQ
Electric Cosmos:
http://www.electric-cosmos.org/indexOLD.htm
ESA New Test of Relativity:
http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/GSP/SEM0L6OVGJE_0.html
Halton Arp:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mf5y6PJR5lE
Misunderstood Sun:
http://www.holoscience.com/news.php?article=ah63dzac
Psyence of the Big Bang:
http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2006/arch06/060823bigbangscience.htm
Pioneer Anomaly:
http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2008/arch08/080828pioneer.htm
Free Energy and Free Thinking:
http://www.feandft.com/
E.U.M. (Electric Universe Model):
http://haltonarp.com/articles
http://www.holoscience.com/
http://www.thunderbolts.info/home.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kristian_Birkeland
http://plasmauniverse.info/people/alfven.html
Dr. Pallathadka Keshava Bhat
http://www.feandft.com/Dr.%20Bhat.htm
40 books on Suppressed Sciences to research:
http://www.scribd.com/my_document_collections/3113156
History of Mainstream Fallacies
http://www.wbabin.net/ntham/amesbury.pdf
Physics Myths vs Facts:
http://www.physicsmyths.org.uk
Trouble with Relativity
http://www.gsjournal.net/old/physics/marcus.htm
Reality of Quasars
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nKIUPofq4Ok
Electric Universe Playlist
http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLB9BD5DB7ACA6E120&feature=plcp
Einstein doesn’t work here anymore
http://ebookee.org/Einstein-Doesn-t-Work-Here-Anymore_764239.html
How Einstein Ruined Phyiscs
http://einsteinwrong.com/home/2011/how-einstein-ruined-physics
Debunking Einy
http://www.feandft.com/13%20Einstein’s%20Ether.htm
Mythematics
http://www.feandft.com/14%20The%20E=MC%20Squared%20Mythematical%20Theory.htm
Armchair Research
http://www.feandft.com/16%20The%20Arm%20Chair%20Physics%20of%20Kinematics.htm
Dr. Pallathadka Bhat
http://www.feandft.com/Dr.%20Bhat.htm
Vortex Basics
http://www.feandft.com/vortex_basics.htm
Walter Russell Photo Album (FACEBOOK):
https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10150220576998302.310244.683583301&…
>>>
Dr. Keshava Bhat’s Helical Solar System – 2D Models vs. 3D Reality (SEE VIDEO DESCRIPTION)
Uploaded on Jan 27, 2012
Listen to what the astronaut says from 30 seconds to 1 minute 35 seconds.
“The physics is a bit different. It’s not about gravitation. It’s about charge forces.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJ_CPGV9SeQ
He doesn’t even realize the significance of this own words.
The Sun is charged, the Earth is charged. There is angular velocity of the celestial bodies, yet they continue with the fallacious notion of nuclear pulling forces from a neutral center. The simple truth is seen in the first 2 minutes of the video.
.
.
“But hitherto I have not been able to discover the cause of those properties of gravity from phenomena, and I frame no hypotheses.”
— Sir Isaac Newton (SIN)
Science Journal detailing history of Mainstream Fallacies:
http://www.wbabin.net/ntham/amesbury.pdf
Dewey B Larson (Read “THE CASE AGAINST THE NUCLEAR ATOM”)
http://www.reciprocalsystem.com/dbl
Trouble with Relativity:
http://www.gsjournal.net/old/physics/marcus.htm
Free Energy and Free Thinking:
http://www.feandft.com
Reality of Quasars:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nKIUPofq4Ok
Electric Universe Playlist:
http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLB9BD5DB7ACA6E120&feature=plcp
Einstein doesn’t work here anymore:
http://ebookee.org/Einstein-Doesn-t-Work-Here-Anymore_764239.html
How Einstein Ruined Phyiscs:
http://einsteinwrong.com/home/2011/how-einstein-ruined-physics
Resonant Nuclear Battery (Dr. Paul Brown):
http://www.rexresearch.com/nucell/nucell.htm
Essential Guide:
http://www.thunderbolts.info/wp/2012/01/17/essential-guide-to-the-eu-chapter-8
Electric Cosmos:
http://www.electric-cosmos.org/indexOLD.htm
ESA New Test of Relativity:
http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/GSP/SEM0L6OVGJE_0.html
Halton Arp:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mf5y6PJR5lE
E.U.M. (Electric Universe Model):
http://haltonarp.com/articles
http://www.holoscience.com/
http://www.thunderbolts.info/home.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kristian_Birkeland
http://plasmauniverse.info/people/alfven.html
Dr. Pallathadka Keshava Bhat
http://www.feandft.com/Dr.%20Bhat.htm
40 books on Suppressed Sciences to research:
http://www.scribd.com/my_document_collections/3113156
History of Mainstream Fallacies
http://www.wbabin.net/ntham/amesbury.pdf
Physics Myths vs Facts:
http://www.physicsmyths.org.uk
Trouble with Relativity
http://www.gsjournal.net/old/physics/marcus.htm
Reality of Quasars
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nKIUPofq4Ok
Electric Universe Playlist
http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLB9BD5DB7ACA6E120&feature=plcp
Debunking Einy
http://www.feandft.com/13%20Einstein’s%20Ether.htm
Mythematics
http://www.feandft.com/14%20The%20E=MC%20Squared%20Mythematical%20Theory.htm
Armchair Research
http://www.feandft.com/16%20The%20Arm%20Chair%20Physics%20of%20Kinematics.htm
Dr. Pallathadka Bhat
http://www.feandft.com/Dr.%20Bhat.htm
Vortex Basics
http://www.feandft.com/vortex_basics.htm
Walter Russell Photo Album (FACEBOOK):
https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10150220576998302.310244.683583301&…
Twin Vortexes and VBM:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3HoRQKpjqqQ
Adding a Z Axis to the Solar System:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7m6AEiAMb9g
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Coded Magnets Behave Differently:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6WC9hO_8wg
PAX / Lily Impeller:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HBHxl7uULqg
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Pier Luigi Ighina:
http://www.rexresearch.com/ighina/ighina.htm
Ighina Info Page:
http://fortunadrago.xoom.it/main/?page_id=185&lang=en
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Ed Leedskalnin:
http://www.Leedskalnin.com
http://www.CoralCastleCode.com
>>>
January 19, 2013 – RUSSIA – Unrelenting snowfalls have caused unprecedented chaos in Russia. Over the past week, the country has seen scores of traffic accidents, flight delays and, in some cases, the complete isolation of some remote settlements and towns. While the snowstorms have caused inconvenience for large population centers in western Russia, they have been life-threatening further east in the country. Falling snow and ice caused many accidents due to poor visibility and bad road conditions. Moscow witnessed a 13-kilometer jam on MKAD, one of the city’s main highways, reducing speeds to 10 to 25 kph in the capital. More than 12,000 snow removal trucks worked around-the-clock to clean up the mess, but their efforts did little, with the city coming to an effective standstill. The chair of the Duma’s transport committee called for local transport officials to face legal sanctions for failing to cope with the winter weather. “Until local bureaucrats face the wrath of the law, winter will always be a surprise occurrence. They will continue to do nothing, as people suffer,” Mikhail Bryachak told Kommersant FM radio.The polar circle city of Norilsk has been buried under 10 feet of snow – entire apartment blocks, markets, stores and offices were buried under snow overnight. Banks of snow were as high as two people put together, reaching the second-story windows of some apartment buildings. Cars, stores, garages were blocked. Norilsk metropolitan workers were forced to dig passageways through the snow banks to create access between the outside world and the barricaded city. Meanwhile, icicles up to three feet in length have formed off the ledges of buildings, breaking at random and causing a lethal hazard for pedestrians below. Elsewhere, the extreme weather continues. In the Altai Republic in Western Siberia, 12 Russian settlements were isolated because of the snowstorm. Seven settlements, with a total population of 1,300 people, remain cut off from the outside world due to the snow drifts. Emergency crews are currently en route to deliver needed supplies to the stranded populations. Snow accompanied by strong winds has caused flight delays in the airport of Russia’s far eastern town of Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky. The runway has been cleared, but planes are not risking takeoff due to strong side-winds. Flights were also delayed in Russia’s easternmost cities of Vladivostok and Khabarovsk. More snow storms are predicted in Western Siberia and the Western Urals over the weekend. In the end of 2012, Russia saw extreme winter not witnessed since 1938. The coldest-ever December in Russia led to the evacuation of hundreds of people in Siberia, where temperatures fell below -50 degrees Celsius; Moscow also saw its coldest night ever for the season. More than 90 Russians died during the cold snap, and more than 600 people were taken to hospital due to the extremely dangerous weather, which is 10 degrees below the December norm. Nearly 200 people have died throughout Russia as a direct result of weather-related accidents and hypothermia this season, according to official statistics, although the extreme conditions have likely contributed to many more fatalities. –RT
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World’s Oldest Authentic Map of Atlantis
Uploaded on Sep 11, 2011
Filmed in Denver, August of 1997, at the Global Science Congress Convention. Arousing and provoking lectures by Paul Schaffranke and Harry Hubbard as they briefly outline certain spectacles of thought and nature. Displayed are maps from the Lazeria Collection, and the first public showing in North America of the world’s oldest map of Atlantis, crafted by the Jesuit Priest, Atanasias Kircher in 1665, which proves that modern day Plato books have been tainted with important sections left out for obvious reasons.
Any use of this video is restricted under terms of the Creative Commons license at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/legalcode and at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ by Living Light Network http://livinglightnetwork.org
International Common Law Copy Rights 2011 by Living Light Network http://livinglightnetowrk.org as applicable to any content, production, or publicity including, but not limited to, previous copyrights or other rights that are no longer valid or legally enforceable.
Posted with exclusive written permission and by request of Harry Hubbard.
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Denver Workshop: The Dead Sea Scrolls Mystery
Uploaded on Sep 11, 2011
Second and third tapes filmed in Denver during the Ptolemy Productions Workshop at the Global Conference. Begins with Harry Hubbard as he shows the audience conclusive data to show how history was literally created and purposefully bent during the late 1800’s up to the mid 1900’s. Part One of the program is titled, “Who stole the Lamp?” Part Two of the program is titled, “Pass the Hat,” which discusses problems dealing with present day Numismatic Studies. Part Three features Paul Schaffranke as he picks up where Part Two has left off. Schaffranke details problems with archaic Punic inscriptions and provides the origin and basis for a newly morphed form of language called “Hebrew” as he combs through problems with the Dead Sea Scrolls Manuscripts. Never before revealed data obliterates and destroys modern Semitic Scholars, as the issue unfolds of why the DSS are shrouded in secrecy, and kept from the public at large. A must for any Historian, Numismatist or student of ancient Semitic Inscriptions. No religious overtones expressed or implied by the hosts.
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Published on Apr 1, 2013
~Unslave Humanity Tactical Media: http://whynotnews.eu/?p=2143 ~credits video: http://youtube.com/dutchsinse ~this video is [FAIR USE] under © COPYRIGHT LAW it is: 1 noncommercial 2 trans-formative in nature 3 not competitive with the original work 4 not effecting its market negatively FAIR USE NOTICE: This video contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ionosphe…
This is a profound release, just put out by the US Naval Research Lab on Feb. 25, 2013
In essence, this experiment done by the Navy contradicts ALL the skeptics who said it quote “could not be done” using frequency in the Atmosphere.
Ironic indeed that the frequency they used from HAARP matches the capability of NEXRAD RADAR.. as they are creating this plasma in the atmosphere using 0-4MHz.. (nexrad pulses between 0 to 12.4MHz putting the HAARP frequency and RADAR frequency on overlapping spectrums)
To top it off, with this Navy experiment — the plasma RING/SPHERE was observed on RADAR from Poker Flats, AK.. refuting even more skeptics who said HAARP cannot be seen on RADAR.
Furthermore, separately, we found RADAR is used to generate plasma from a place called SPEAR (in Norway) , they are using RADAR as a ‘heater’ in the same GHz spectrum that NEXRAD RADAR normally operates on when not in pulse mode (2.7GHz to 3.0GHz). Proving RADAR can , and is currently being used to induce effects in the atmosphere — not just observe it.
Finally, we found information that RADAR was used to generate artificial plasma / literally LIGHTNING at the MIT research labs… C-band and S-band.. again.. same bands that NEXRAD RADAR use.
In otherwords, NEXRAD RADARs for sure have the functionality to act as small versions of HAARP or EISCAT. To function as ‘heaters’ and plasma / lightning generators (for signal reflection / over the horizon capability / heating weather modification).
Any skeptic who said it could not be done, (for instance those at Realist News, or Metabunk just to name a few) NEED TO ISSUE FULL RETRACTIONS AND CORRECTIONS —- assuming of course they really are into science and not trying to just protect their egos.
If they don’t issue retractions and corrections saying they were wrong, then you know they’re pushing an agenda that does not include real science — up until now they could say “it can’t be done”… now what is their explanation?
They said I was photoshopping and HOAXING these RADAR pulses … lol .. nice one.. now lets see what they have to say… right now.. its been out 2 days.. and we hear CRICKETS from their side.
🙂
links here:
photos of past events:
more about the HAARP ring / RADAR pulse theory here:
http://goo.gl/9v3oZ
even more here:
Past HAARP ring / RADAR pulse events and the storms which hit within 72 hours:
Michael Janitch
TIP from John: http://goo.gl/RzMWL
Ronmamita's Blog 
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