The Global Financial System Is About To Shift: Part II
October 15 2016 | From: TheMindUnleashed Part 2 is a continuation from Part 1, which is a Mind Unleashed exclusive interview with Neil Keenan, the man who is working to open the Global Collateral Accounts.
These accounts are arguably the banking cabal’s deepest secret in regards to planetary wealth and relates to historical events like the Bretton Woods Agreement and JFK trying to end the Federal Reserve.
Q: You’ve stated in some of your updates that you’re working with multiple intelligence agencies, presidents and prime ministers. Can you go into more detail on that for us without divulging things that can’t yet be said?
I will not reveal any name or agency. My team knows who they are and that is all that matters at this time.
Q: Some people say that Sukarno’s son is M1 and that he is working to open the accounts. Is that true? How does Edy Seno fit into this picture?
There are many people who make many claims about opening the accounts and they have done so for many years in which they have not completed one legal deal.
They are told to return home when they fly to Hong Kong or England attempting to cash things in.
Their great successes happened with illegal transactions whereas the Governmental Corporations steadily utilized the assets for their own personal needs.
The Elders have been rightful in illegally utilizing some of the global currencies or gold considering that they have not been paid one cent to this very day for providing the assets with security and safety.
The Elders have placed their own lives on the line for many years with some of them having either been killed or imprisoned and for what? Protecting the humanitarian assets!
The rightful depositors will not hesitate in granting some sort of stipend for doing a great job under extreme pressure once they are opened. I will see to it.
One final note here. If there is a Sukarno in charge then one simple question answers all this: Who does the Sukarno Trust belong to? It is not a Sukarno! It is Edy Seno.
Neil Keenan with Edy Seno in Indonesia
He is the heir to the Sukarno Trust due to his fathers and family’s allegiances to President Sukarno during his reign and the West is attempting to steal all his assets if possible.
Edy is real and secure in his ways and feels very humble and sorry that he has not been able to open the accounts for humanity seeing the accounts, as stated, are owned by the depositors that being the Dragon Family.
On the other hand Edy has many real assets belonging to the trusts but the West has shut him down with hopes of utilizing the assets themselves. Nothing has ever been returned to the East. Soon, when things open up the West will receive humanitarian packages issued by a professional team of people but the East will get their’s as well.
No more thievery and or slavery.
We can stop the Globalist movement and we absolutely will once we get things going. UBS, Credit Suisse, HSBC (already being cleaned up by the family and & Sister. Do not play with Sister she is one piece of big banking knowledge) and others like the EU, the Federal Reserve and THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA corporation will be exposed soon – should they not adhere to the new found principles of fairness and honesty.
In November of 2011 I was issued a deed of Authorization and Agreement from Dr. Edy Seno Soekanto, who was sworn in to be the “legal heir of record as stated” in the last will and testament of the late legal holder of the Family Inheritance Guarantee, as attached to all the gold deposits.
This was ordered by President Sukarno between 1948 and 1968 when he was granted such Inheritance Guarantee as payment for his services to the World.
Dr. Soekanto swears that President Sukarno [often also spelt 'Soekarno'] had designated to him the collection all those funds known as the Family Inheritance Guarantee and the accumulated interest thereon, and that he has “been acknowledged by depository bank, as evidenced by the bank instruments, books, record and ledgers and codes in his possession, as the sole recognized heir to.”
Under this agreement, and because of his “severe and long-term chronic illness,” Dr. Soekanto granted me [Neil Keenan] the authority to act as one of his Attorneys in Fact: "To act jointly and/or severally and to undertake all means and methods to recover the funds owing to him and the People of Indonesia.”
Presidents Soekarno and Kennedy
Dr. Soekanto has further agreed and confirmed that he also holds the “full secret Book of Codes,” “The Maklumat Book and Ledgers and all records of the accounts” as delivered to him and that, upon their request, he will “deliver or cause delivery of the originals of such books for presentment any court determined to have such jurisdiction” and “for any other purpose” I may require or need for the Books.
I have custody of certified copies of the said Book of Codes, The Maklumat Book and Ledgers, and with his POA, authorization to use them when needed. Copies were given to others for safekeeping under my direction.
Q: Some organizations have come out in what appears to be an attack on you and your mission Neil. OPPT is one that comes to mind. What is OPPT and who were they working for?
I have no reason to speak of OPPT ever again. We spent time, effort and money exposing them and they disappeared. They are literally nothing more than a Cabal shill effort no matter where they hide.
They, Swiss Indo, Red Dragons, Karen Hudes (Hades) and others have no say and are worthless. If you wish to see what happened between any of the above and Neil Keenan and Group K please go to neilkeenan.com and look into the archives and you will see how we dealt with such matters.
Q: How come more bankers or politicians do not speak of the global collateral accounts? What percentage of those “in the know” actually know that these accounts exist?
Let’s be very clear about this point. The higher levels know very well about this matter and they used to play with the notes daily, gambling them away. Imagine gambling with someone else’s money when it does not matter if you win or lose. This is what they did at the higher levels. The ones that have spoken about it have been killed or “suicided”(thrown off roofs most likely amongst other things)
Would you speak of it? This is why those in the know, no matter which side of the fence they reside on, are following my moves as close as you could imagine.
Q: Once open, what will these accounts be used for? Will free energy projects be involved too? Which ones are in mind? Are you working with people/organizations/government who can bring these technologies out to the masses?
The GCA have been allocated (by The Dragon Family) to be used for humanitarian purposes. Virtually any positive development that one can imagine that will benefit the people of this world and our environment will fall within the scope of this mandate.
This will clearly require the removal of those comprising the entity known as the “Cabal” and their enslavement of humanity both financially and otherwise, and the ending of their legacy of control, depopulation and environmental destruction.
By definition this includes the release of free energy technologies along with thousands of other beneficial technologies that have been suppressed, some of which for well over a century.
I am in contact with researchers and developers who have very advanced technologies which are waiting to be released, once it is safe and practicable to do so.
Q: How much gold and metals actually exist in these accounts? Will this help to transform our financial system?
The amount of mined and processed gold is vastly underreported. There exists almost 14 times more gold bullion than is acknowledged in terms of the status quo line on the topic.
In short, what this means is that there are far more physical assets with tangible value than are required to back our global currencies and to fund the remediation of every issue that we face in our world.
Q: After the accounts are open, what is expected to happen in the following 3 months initially? The following year after they are opened?
I have no idea how long it is going to take to set things up. It will not be an easy job and it will involve the people of the planet and fixing things that have been broken by the West in their attempts towards taking over the Planet with their Globalist policies. I am sure not so long, although we will surely find out!
Q: What role is the BRICS playing in resetting the financial and political systems of the world?
BRICS is doing what I (Group K) proposed years ago by holding the Monaco Accords and as well pushing for an Eastern Financial System (think BRICS Bank, Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, etc.).
All the ideas were there and they utilized them to get to where they are but they can be financially stronger and will be in the very near future.
Q: What role specifically is Vladimir Putin playing? Is he helping humanity?
Yes. If either Vladimir Putin / Russia and or China turned their heads for one week it would be the end of the West as we know it. They are what keeps us alive and standing in terms of maintaining balance. One slip and the West (whose leaders do not represent we the people) will come down to the point where we will have to “release the Kraken.”
Exposé On Cabal-Driven Worldwide Terrorism Implemented By The United States And It's Allies
October 15 2016 | From: Sott / GlobalResearch / Various J. Michael Springmann worked for the State Department in the 1980s, in Saudi Arabia. What he witnessed and experienced did not make much sense at the time, but what he later learned put it all in context, and helped to explain the entire course of U.S. foreign policy for the next 30 years.
In short, just as the CIA provided funding and training for radical Mujahideen to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan, they have been doing the same thing ever since. Prior to 9/11, this legion of foreign fighters was used to destabilize and destroy Yugoslavia. Afterward, Iraq, Libya, and today Syria.
For this entire period of time, al-Qaeda has been a fighting force for America, a fact that has been known for years, but which is only now going mainstream due to American failures and Russian successes in Syria.
Today, we interview Mr. Springmann about his time at the consulate in Jeddah, and the events that led him to blow the whistle and expose the reality of the U.S.'s creation and support of terrorism around the globe.
In the second hour of the show, we discussed the latest Trump and Clinton leaks, and how they reveal what everyone should have already known: politicians are two-faced and corrupt, and fairly unsavory individuals. Brent closed the show with another Police State Round-up on police un-accountability.
Since the United States was founded in 1776, she has been at war during 214 out of her 235 calendar years of existence. In other words, there were only 21 calendar years in which the U.S. did not wage any wars.
To put this in perspective:
Pick any year since 1776 and there is a bout a 91% chance that America was involved in some war during that calendar year.
No U.S. president truly qualifies as a peacetime president. Instead, all U.S. presidents can technically be considered “war presidents.”
The U.S. has never gone a decade without war.
The Americans Stand on Our Side and Give us Weapons - Jabhat al-Nusra (Al Qaeda) Commander in Syria
US weapons are being delivered to Al-Nusra Front by governments that Washington supports, a militant commander has told German media. RT discusses the interview with Jürgen Todenhöfer, the journalist who spoke to the Al-Nusra commander.
The CIA has been coordinating weapon deliveries on the Turkey-Syria border, German journalist Jurgen Todenhofer, who recently spoke with a Jabhat al-Nusra commander, told RT. He added that the US knows that the weapons it delivers to rebels end up with terrorists.
“This is a game everybody knows. It’s very clear that the Americans know that their weapons will in the end be in the hands of terrorists,” Todenhofer said speaking to RT.
The only time in the U.S. went five years without war (1935-40) was during the isolationist period of the Great Depression.
In most of these wars, the U.S. was on the offense. Admit- tedly some of the wars were defensive. However, the above list leaves out covert CIA operations and other acts which could be considered war.
Let’s update what’s happened since 2011:
2012 – War on Terror in Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Syria and Yemen
2013 – War on Terror in Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Syria and Yemen
2014 – War on Terror in Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Syria and Yemen; Civil War in Ukraine 2015 – War on Terror in Somalia, Syria and Yemen; Civil War in Ukraine
So we can add four more years of war. That means that for 222 out of 239 years – or 93% of the time – America has been at war. (We can quibble with the exact numbers, but the high percentage of time that America has been at war is clear and unmistakable.)
Indeed, most of the military operations launched since World War II have been launched by the U.S. And Ameri- can military spending dwarfs the rest of the world put together.
No wonder polls show that the world believes America is the number 1 threat to peace. Sott Comment: Rather staggering, don’t you think? Also, for many of the war years, the US had multiple opponents. After all this war practice, we might rightly expect a simple bombing raid on ISIS to produce results.
America’s history reflects violence. It’s blood-drenched. It glorifies war. It does so in the name of peace. However, this agenda is not driven by the American people so much as it is driven from up on high by the Cabal leadership who manipulate the sleeping masses to buy into actions that only appear to be "American".
The US / NATO is the tool and the scapegoat of the 'global elite's' New World Order.
America believes war is peace. It’s part of the national culture. Eventually it’s self-destructive. Today’s super-weapons make the unthinkable possible.
Hyman Rickover knew. He knew decades ago. He founded America’s nuclear navy. In 1982, he told Congress:
“I do not believe that nuclear power is worth it if it creates radiation.” Then you might ask me why do I have nuclear powered ships?”
“That is a necessary evil. I would sink them all. I am not proud of the part I played in it. I did it because it was necessary for the safety of this country.”
That’s why I am such a great exponent of stopping this whole nonsense of war. Unfortunately limits – attempts to limit war have always failed.”
“The lesson of history is when a war starts every nation will ultimately use whatever weapon it has available.”
“Every time you produce radiation, you produce something that has a certain half-life, in some cases for billions of years.”
“I think the human race is going to wreck itself, and it is important that we get control of this horrible force and try to eliminate it.”
In his Der Ring des Nibelungen operas (the Ring), Richard Wagner portrayed his apocalyptic version. He did so musically. Gotterdammerung (Twilight of the Gods) prophesied the end of the world.
Einstein feared it. He didn’t know what WW III weapons would be used. He said “World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.”
Bertrand Russell was an Einstein contemporary. He knew. He warned. No one listened. He asked:
“Shall we put an end to the human race, or shall mankind renounce war. It’s the only way to live in peace. The alternative is annihilation."
The choice is clear. The wrong one assures disaster. America’s heading humanity toward it. A slow-motion train wreck looms. The big one. There’s no second chance. There’s no coming back.
Historian Harry Elmer Barnes (1889 – 1968) once said:
“If trends continue as they have during the last fifteen years, we shall soon reach this point of no return, and can only anticipate interminable wars, disguised as noble gestures for peace.”
Historian Arnold Toynbee worried about WW III. Only pigmies in remote jungles, apes and ants might be left to carry on “the cultural traditions of mankind,” he said.
America wages permanent wars. It does so against enemies it creates. During the Cold War, Active Defense and AirLand Battle prepared strategies for how America would fight.
Soviet Russia was targeted. Today’s it’s modern day Russia. It’s China. AirSea Battle targets both countries. More on that below.
In 1998, US Space Command: Vision for 2020 discussed America’s grand strategy.
In 2000, DOD Joint Vision 2020 called for “full spectrum dominance” over all land, surface and sub-surface sea, air, space, electromagnetic spectrum and information systems.
It did so with enough overwhelming power to fight and win global wars against any adversary. Nuclear and other mass destruction weapons would be used preemptively.
In 1961, General Curtis LeMay believed nuclear war with Soviet Russia was inevitable. He wanted thousands of missiles launched preemptively. He called retaliation against major US cities a small price to pay.
At the same time, General Lyman Lemnitzer urged a surprise nuclear attack strategy. Jack Kennedy expressed disgust. He walked out of a National Security Council meeting. He wanted none of it.
He told Secretary of State Dean Rusk: “And we call ourselves the human race.”
Secretary of Defense McNamara categorically rejected LeMay and Lemnitzer. He should have fired them on the spot. Other extremists then and later urged the same lunacy.
Crazies have great influence today. Today’s weapons make earlier ones look like toys. Armageddon could happen. Rogue states can’t be trusted. America most of all.
Eisenhower warned;
“Against the acquisition of unwarranted influence.” He named the military-industrial complex.
“The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist,” he stressed.
Militarism writ large is the national pastime. It’s a national addiction. The business of America is war. It’s multiple wars. It’s permanent ones. It’s ravaging one nation after another.
It’s doing so for wealth, power, resource control, and unchallenged global dominance.
Armed Drones: President Obama's Favorite Weapon
President Barack Obama has received much credit for drawing down American involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan, but less attention has been paid to his administration's embrace of armed drones.
His expansion of covert drone strikes goes far beyond that of former President George W. Bush, and has blurred the line between warfare and assassination.
The classified processes used by the White House for approving these remote killings in foreign countries - countries which the U.S. is not officially at war with - has people questioning not only the Obama administration's tactics, but also the collateral damage of civilian casualties left in its wake.
America never was the “land of the free and home of the brave.” It’s a war on humanity society. It’s a “let ‘em eat cake” one.
It’s an out-of-control rogue state. It’s ideologically over-the-top. It spends more on militarism and wars than the rest of the world combined.
Doing so lets war profiteers gorge themselves at the public trough. Doing so makes peace impossible. Warrior nations eventually self-destruct. Nations that live by the sword die by it. America’s no exception.
“Is designed to develop force over the long-term. (It) seeks to provide decision makers with a wide range of options to counter aggression from hostile actors.
It targets China and Russia. It “reflects the US commitment to maintaining escalation advantage during conflict and sustaining security and prosperity in the global commons.
It’s “interoperable air and naval forces that can execute networked, integrated attacks-in-depth to disrupt, destroy, and defeat enemy anti-access area denial capabilities.”
“The Pentagon has concluded that the time has come to prepare for with China, and in a manner well beyond crafting the sort of contingency plans that are expected for with a wide range of possible confrontations,” he said.
"It’s a “momentous decision. It hasn’t received proper attention. America’s posture is largely Pentagon driven.
It stands out even more prominently because (a) the change in military posture may well lead to an arms race with China, which could culminate in a nuclear war; and (b) the economic condition of the United States requires a reduction in military spending, not a new arms race.”
“The start of a new term, and with it the appointment of new secretaries of State and Defense, provides an opportunity to review the United States’ China strategy and the military’s role in it.”
“This review is particularly important before the new preparations for war move from an operational concept to a militarization program that includes ordering high-cost weapons systems and forced restructuring.”
“History shows that once these thresholds are crossed, it is exceedingly difficult to change course.”
In September 2001, Congress approved the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF). It did so for “the use of United States Armed Forces against those responsible for the recent attacks launched against the United States.”
Carte blanche war-making authority was granted. America’s war on terror began. It’s waged on humanity. It does so out of control. It targets manufactured enemies at home and abroad.
It calls independent nations existential threats. Russia and China are targeted. They represent America’s [The Cabal New World Order's] final battleground.
Challenging them risks WW III. Obama’s no peacemaker. He’s a cold-blooded warrior. They threatens humanity’s survival. His 2010 Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) reflects Bush era strategy.
It’s old wine in new bottles. It “reserves the right” to use nuclear weapons preemptively. America’s only enemies are ones it invents. Peace is verboten. So is disarmament. They’re both non-starters.
Washington targets more nations to destroy. It invents reasons for doing so. It threatens humanity in the process. Preemptive nuclear war assures it. America’s lunatic fringe may launch what cooler heads deplore. Elements in it have mushroom shaped cloud delusions.
Nuclear war assures turning planet earth into an uninhabited wasteland. Toxic proliferation already is destroying life slowly.
The Federal Reserve Cartel: The Eight Families + 7 Not-So-Secret Homes Of Super Secret Societies
October 14 2016 | From: GlobalResearch / AtlasObscura The Four Horsemen of Banking (Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup and Wells Fargo) own the Four Horsemen of Oil (Exxon Mobil, Royal Dutch/Shell, BP and Chevron Texaco); in tandem with Deutsche Bank, BNP, Barclays and other European old money behemoths. But their monopoly over the global economy does not end at the edge of the oil patch.
According to company 10K filings to the SEC, the Four Horsemen of Banking are among the top ten stock holders of virtually every Fortune 500 corporation.
So who then are the stockholders in these money center banks?
This information is guarded much more closely. My queries to bank regulatory agencies regarding stock ownership in the top 25 US bank holding companies were given Freedom of Information Act status, before being denied on “national security” grounds. This is rather ironic, since many of the bank’s stockholders reside in Europe.
One important repository for the wealth of the global oligarchy that owns these bank holding companies is US Trust Corporation – founded in 1853 and now owned by Bank of America.
A recent US Trust Corporate Director and Honorary Trustee was Walter Rothschild. Other directors included Daniel Davison of JP Morgan Chase, Richard Tucker of Exxon Mobil, Daniel Roberts of Citigroup and Marshall Schwartz of Morgan Stanley.
J. W. McCallister, an oil industry insider with House of Saud connections, wrote in The Grim Reaper that information he acquired from Saudi bankers cited 80% ownership of the New York Federal Reserve Bank- by far the most powerful Fed branch - by just eight families, four of which reside in the US.
Jacob Rothschild and David Rockefeller kicking it
They are the Goldman Sachs, Rockefellers, Lehmans and Kuhn Loebs of New York; the Rothschilds of Paris and London; the Warburgs of Hamburg; the Lazards of Paris; and the Israel Moses Seifs of Rome.
CPA Thomas D. Schauf corroborates McCallister’s claims, adding that ten banks control all twelve Federal Reserve Bank branches.
He names N.M. Rothschild of London, Rothschild Bank of Berlin, Warburg Bank of Hamburg, Warburg Bank of Amsterdam, Lehman Brothers of New York, Lazard Brothers of Paris, Kuhn Loeb Bank of New York, Israel Moses Seif Bank of Italy, Goldman Sachs of New York and JP Morgan Chase Bank of New York.
Schauf lists William Rockefeller, Paul Warburg, Jacob Schiff and James Stillman as individuals who own large shares of the Fed. The Schiffs are insiders at Kuhn Loeb. The Stillmans are Citigroup insiders, who married into the Rockefeller clan at the turn of the century.
The Federal Reserve Board 1913
Eustace Mullins came to the same conclusions in his book The Secrets of the Federal Reserve, in which he displays charts connecting the Fed and its member banks to the families of Rothschild, Warburg, Rockefeller and the others.
The control that these banking families exert over the global economy cannot be overstated and is quite intentionally shrouded in secrecy. Their corporate media arm is quick to discredit any information exposing this private central banking cartel as “conspiracy theory”. Yet the facts remain.
The House of Morgan
The Federal Reserve Bank was born in 1913, the same year US banking scion J. Pierpont Morgan died and the Rockefeller Foundation was formed. The House of Morgan presided over American finance from the corner of Wall Street and Broad, acting as quasi-US central bank since 1838, when George Peabody founded it in London.
J.P. Morgan
Peabody was a business associate of the Rothschilds. In 1952 Fed researcher Eustace Mullins put forth the supposition that the Morgans were nothing more than Rothschild agents. Mullins wrote that the Rothschilds;
“…preferred to operate anonymously in the US behind the facade of J.P. Morgan & Company”.
Author Gabriel Kolko stated; “Morgan’s activities in 1895-1896 in selling US gold bonds in Europe were based on an alliance with the House of Rothschild.”
The Morgan financial octopus wrapped its tentacles quickly around the globe. Morgan Grenfell operated in London. Morgan et Ce ruled Paris. The Rothschild’s Lambert cousins set up Drexel & Company in Philadelphia.
The House of Morgan catered to the Astors, DuPonts, Guggenheims, Vanderbilts and Rockefellers. It financed the launch of AT&T, General Motors, General Electric and DuPont. Like the London-based Rothschild and Barings banks, Morgan became part of the power structure in many countries.
By 1890 the House of Morgan was lending to Egypt’s central bank, financing Russian railroads, floating Brazilian provincial government bonds and funding Argentine public works projects. A recession in 1893 enhanced Morgan’s power. That year Morgan saved the US government from a bank panic, forming a syndicate to prop up government reserves with a shipment of $62 million worth of Rothschild gold.
It's a little known fact the the Monopoly man was based on J.P. Morgan
Morgan was the driving force behind Western expansion in the US, financing and controlling West-bound railroads through voting trusts. In 1879 Cornelius Vanderbilt’s Morgan-financed New York Central Railroad gave preferential shipping rates to John D. Rockefeller’s budding Standard Oil monopoly, cementing the Rockefeller/Morgan relationship.
The House of Morgan now fell under Rothschild and Rockefeller family control. A New York Herald headline read, “Railroad Kings Form Gigantic Trust”. J. Pierpont Morgan, who once stated;
“Competition is a sin”, now opined gleefully, “Think of it. All competing railroad traffic west of St. Louis placed in the control of about thirty men."
Morgan and Edward Harriman’s banker Kuhn Loeb held a monopoly over the railroads, while banking dynasties Lehman, Goldman Sachs and Lazard joined the Rockefellers in controlling the US industrial base.
In 1903 Banker’s Trust was set up by the Eight Families. Benjamin Strong of Banker’s Trust was the first Governor of the New York Federal Reserve Bank.
The 1913 creation of the Fed fused the power of the Eight Families to the military and diplomatic might of the US government. If their overseas loans went unpaid, the oligarchs could now deploy US Marines to collect the debts. Morgan, Chase and Citibank formed an international lending syndicate.
The House of Morgan was cozy with the British House of Windsor and the Italian House of Savoy. The Kuhn Loebs, Warburgs, Lehmans, Lazards, Israel Moses Seifs and Goldman Sachs also had close ties to European royalty. By 1895 Morgan controlled the flow of gold in and out of the US.
The first American wave of mergers was in its infancy and was being promoted by the bankers. In 1897 there were sixty-nine industrial mergers. By 1899 there were twelve-hundred. In 1904 John Moody – founder of Moody’s Investor Services – said it was impossible to talk of Rockefeller and Morgan interests as separate.
Public distrust of the combine spread. Many considered them traitors working for European old money. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil, Andrew Carnegie’s US Steel and Edward Harriman’s railroads were all financed by banker Jacob Schiff at Kuhn Loeb, who worked closely with the European Rothschilds.
Several Western states banned the bankers. Populist preacher William Jennings Bryan was thrice the Democratic nominee for President from 1896 -1908. The central theme of his anti-imperialist campaign was that America was falling into a trap of “financial servitude to British capital”.
Teddy Roosevelt defeated Bryan in 1908, but was forced by this spreading populist wildfire to enact the Sherman Anti-Trust Act. He then went after the Standard Oil Trust.
In 1912 the Pujo hearings were held, addressing concentration of power on Wall Street. That same year Mrs. Edward Harriman sold her substantial shares in New York’s Guaranty Trust Bank to J.P. Morgan, creating Morgan Guaranty Trust. Judge Louis Brandeis convinced President Woodrow Wilson to call for an end to interlocking board directorates. In 1914 the Clayton Anti-Trust Act was passed.
Jack Morgan – J. Pierpont’s son and successor – responded by calling on Morgan clients Remington and Winchester to increase arms production. He argued that the US needed to enter WWI. Goaded by the Carnegie Foundation and other oligarchy fronts, Wilson accommodated.
As Charles Tansill wrote in America Goes to War;
“Even before the clash of arms, the French firm of Rothschild Freres cabled to Morgan & Company in New York suggesting the flotation of a loan of $100 million, a substantial part of which was to be left in the US to pay for French purchases of American goods.”
The House of Morgan financed half the US war effort, while receiving commissions for lining up contractors like GE, Du Pont, US Steel, Kennecott and ASARCO. All were Morgan clients.
Morgan also financed the British Boer War in South Africa and the Franco-Prussian War. The 1919 Paris Peace Conference was presided over by Morgan, which led both German and Allied reconstruction efforts.
In the 1930’s populism resurfaced in America after Goldman Sachs, Lehman Bank and others profited from the Crash of 1929. House Banking Committee Chairman Louis McFadden (D-NY) said of the Great Depression;,
“It was no accident. It was a carefully contrived occurrence…The international bankers sought to bring about a condition of despair here so they might emerge as rulers of us all”.
Sen. Gerald Nye (D-ND) chaired a munitions investigation in 1936. Nye concluded that the House of Morgan had plunged the US into WWI to protect loans and create a booming arms industry. Nye later produced a document titled The Next War, which cynically referred to “the old goddess of democracy trick”, through which Japan could be used to lure the US into WWII.
In 1937 Interior Secretary Harold Ickes warned of the influence of “America’s 60 Families”. Historian Ferdinand Lundberg later penned a book of the exact same title. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas decried;
“Morgan influence…the most pernicious one in industry and finance today.”
Jack Morgan responded by nudging the US towards WWII. Morgan had close relations with the Iwasaki and Dan families – Japan’s two wealthiest clans – who have owned Mitsubishi and Mitsui, respectively, since the companies emerged from 17th Century shogunates.
When Japan invaded Manchuria, slaughtering Chinese peasants at Nanking, Morgan downplayed the incident. Morgan also had close relations with Italian fascist Benito Mussolini, while German Nazi Dr. Hjalmer Schacht was a Morgan Bank liaison during WWII. After the war Morgan representatives met with Schacht at the Bank of International Settlements (BIS) in Basel, Switzerland.
The House of Rockefeller
BIS is the most powerful bank in the world, a global central bank for the Eight Families who control the private central banks of almost all Western and developing nations. The first President of BIS was Rockefeller banker Gates McGarrah - an official at Chase Manhattan and the Federal Reserve.
McGarrah was the grandfather of former CIA director Richard Helms. The Rockefellers - like the Morgans - had close ties to London. David Icke writes in Children of the Matrix, that the Rockefellers and Morgans were just “gofers” for the European Rothschilds.
John D. Rockefeller
BIS is owned by the Federal Reserve, Bank of England, Bank of Italy, Bank of Canada, Swiss National Bank, Nederlandsche Bank, Bundesbank and Bank of France.
Historian Carroll Quigley wrote in his epic book Tragedy and Hope that BIS was part of a plan;
“to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole…to be controlled in a feudalistic fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert by secret agreements.”
The US government had a historical distrust of BIS, lobbying unsuccessfully for its demise at the 1944 post-WWII Bretton Woods Conference. Instead the Eight Families’ power was exacerbated, with the Bretton Woods creation of the IMF and the World Bank. The US Federal Reserve only took shares in BIS in September 1994.
BIS holds at least 10% of monetary reserves for at least 80 of the world’s central banks, the IMF and other multilateral institutions. It serves as financial agent for international agreements, collects information on the global economy and serves as lender of last resort to prevent global financial collapse.
BIS promotes an agenda of monopoly capitalist fascism. It gave a bridge loan to Hungary in the 1990’s to ensure privatization of that country’s economy. It served as conduit for Eight Families funding of Adolf Hitler- led by the Warburg’s J. Henry Schroeder and Mendelsohn Bank of Amsterdam. Many researchers assert that BIS is at the nadir of global drug money laundering.
The Bank for International Settlements is the Mac Daddy at the top of the Worldwide Reserve Banking System, not just the US Federal Reserve
It is no coincidence that BIS is headquartered in Switzerland, favorite hiding place for the wealth of the global aristocracy and headquarters for the P-2 Italian Freemason’s Alpina Lodge and Nazi International. Other institutions which the Eight Families control include the World Economic Forum, the International Monetary Conference and the World Trade Organization.
Bretton Woods was a boon to the Eight Families. The IMF and World Bank were central to this “new world order”. In 1944 the first World Bank bonds were floated by Morgan Stanley and First Boston.
The French Lazard family became more involved in House of Morgan interests. Lazard Freres - France’s biggest investment bank- is owned by the Lazard and David-Weill families - old Genoese banking scions represented by Michelle Davive. A recent Chairman and CEO of Citigroup was Sanford Weill.
In 1968 Morgan Guaranty launched Euro-Clear, a Brussels-based bank clearing system for Eurodollar securities. It was the first such automated endeavor. Some took to calling Euro-Clear “The Beast”. Brussels serves as headquarters for the new European Central Bank and for NATO.
In 1973 Morgan officials met secretly in Bermuda to illegally resurrect the old House of Morgan, twenty years before Glass Steagal Act was repealed. Morgan and the Rockefellers provided the financial backing for Merrill Lynch, boosting it into the Big 5 of US investment banking. Merrill is now part of Bank of America.
John D. Rockefeller used his oil wealth to acquire Equitable Trust, which had gobbled up several large banks and corporations by the 1920’s.
The Great Depression helped consolidate Rockefeller’s power. His Chase Bank merged with Kuhn Loeb’s Manhattan Bank to form Chase Manhattan, cementing a long-time family relationship.
The Kuhn-Loeb’s had financed – along with Rothschilds – Rockefeller’s quest to become king of the oil patch. National City Bank of Cleveland provided John D. with the money needed to embark upon his monopolization of the US oil industry.
The bank was identified in Congressional hearings as being one of three Rothschild-owned banks in the US during the 1870’s, when Rockefeller first incorporated as Standard Oil of Ohio.
One Rockefeller Standard Oil partner was Edward Harkness, whose family came to control Chemical Bank. Another was James Stillman, whose family controlled Manufacturers Hanover Trust.
Both banks have merged under the JP Morgan Chase umbrella. Two of James Stillman’s daughters married two of William Rockefeller’s sons. The two families control a big chunk of Citigroup as well.
In the insurance business, the Rockefellers control Metropolitan Life, Equitable Life, Prudential and New York Life. Rockefeller banks control 25% of all assets of the 50 largest US commercial banks and 30% of all assets of the 50 largest insurance companies.
Insurance companies - the first in the US was launched by Freemasons through their Woodman’s of America - play a key role in the Bermuda drug money shuffle.
Companies under Rockefeller control include Exxon Mobil, Chevron Texaco, BP Amoco, Marathon Oil, Freeport McMoran, Quaker Oats, ASARCO, United, Delta, Northwest, ITT, International Harvester, Xerox, Boeing, Westinghouse, Hewlett-Packard, Honeywell, International Paper, Pfizer, Motorola, Monsanto, Union Carbide and General Foods.
The Rockefeller Foundation has close financial ties to both Ford and Carnegie Foundations. Other family philanthropic endeavors include Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, General Education Board, Rockefeller University and the University of Chicago - which churns out a steady stream of far right economists as apologists for international capital, including Milton Friedman.
The family owns 30 Rockefeller Plaza, where the national Christmas tree is lighted every year, and Rockefeller Center.
David Rockefeller was instrumental in the construction of the World Trade Center towers. The main Rockefeller family home is a hulking complex in upstate New York known as Pocantico Hills.
They also own a 32-room 5th Avenue duplex in Manhattan, a mansion in Washington, DC, Monte Sacro Ranch in Venezuela, coffee plantations in Ecuador, several farms in Brazil, an estate at Seal Harbor, Maine and resorts in the Caribbean, Hawaii and Puerto Rico.
Allen Dulles
The Dulles and Rockefeller families are cousins. Allen Dulles created the CIA, assisted the Nazis, covered up the Kennedy hit from his Warren Commission perch and struck a deal with the Muslim Brotherhood to create mind-controlled assassins.
Brother John Foster Dulles presided over the phony Goldman Sachs trusts before the 1929 stock market crash and helped his brother overthrow governments in Iran and Guatemala.
Both were Skull & Bones, Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) insiders and 33rd Degree Masons.
The Rockefellers were instrumental in forming the depopulation-oriented Club of Rome at their family estate in Bellagio, Italy.
Their Pocantico Hills estate gave birth to the Trilateral Commission. The family is a major funder of the eugenics movement which spawned Hitler, human cloning and the current DNA obsession in US scientific circles.
John Rockefeller Jr. headed the Population Council until his death. His namesake son is a Senator from West Virginia. Brother Winthrop Rockefeller was Lieutenant Governor of Arkansas and remains the most powerful man in that state.
In an October 1975 interview with Playboy magazine, Vice-President Nelson Rockefeller- who was also Governor of New York- articulated his family’s patronizing worldview;
“I am a great believer in planning- economic, social, political, military, total world planning.”
But of all the Rockefeller brothers, it is Trilateral Commission (TC) founder and Chase Manhattan Chairman David who has spearheaded the family’s fascist agenda on a global scale. He defended the Shah of Iran, the South African apartheid regime and the Chilean Pinochet junta.
He was the biggest financier of the CFR, the TC and (during the Vietnam War) the Committee for an Effective and Durable Peace in Asia- a contract bonanza for those who made their living off the conflict.
Nixon asked him to be Secretary of Treasury, but Rockefeller declined the job, knowing his power was much greater at the helm of the Chase. Author Gary Allen writes in The Rockefeller File that in 1973;
“David Rockefeller met with twenty-seven heads of state, including the rulers of Russia and Red China.”
Following the 1975 Nugan Hand Bank/CIA coup against Australian Prime Minister Gough Whitlam, his British Crown-appointed successor Malcolm Fraser sped to the US, where he met with President Gerald Ford after conferring with David Rockefeller.
7 Not-So-Secret Homes Of Secret Societies
In clandestine corners of the world, the elite come together in secrecy. Some of them don’t mind that we know of these society meetings, while others maintain that they do not organize at all.
Illustration by Miss Alice Heighes Donlevy of the "Secret Society Buildings of New Haven," with the former Skull & Bones headquarters at left center (circa 1869-1903)
Yet doormen speak to their friends, initiation rites are leaked, people peek in windows, chanting in far underground lairs can be heard by a passerby. Conspiracy theorists have long held that someone, and not the Fates, is manipulating our world, and perhaps in these secret societies the strings are being pulled.
Here is a list of seven groups so secret some members will never admit to their involvement, and their meeting places hiding in plain sight.
Ivy league Yale University is considered to be one of the most selective higher educational institutions in the United States, if not the world. Its motto lux et veritas translates to "light and truth." On the historic campus in New Haven, Connecticut, there is a building where "light and truth" are reserved for carefully selected members and alumni.
What is known about the Skull and Bones secret society is minimal. The organization started in 1832. An official roster of its members was published up until 1971. Bonesmen, as members are called, have been heads of corporations, senior government officials, Supreme Court justices, and even presidents.
Theories about what the Skull and Bones actually do range from its members controlling the Central Intelligence Agency, being a part of a global network aimed at world domination, to being a branch of the Illuminati.
It’s also unknown exactly what happens in The Tomb, the group's headquarters, but there are strange rumors of what is contained in the windowless sandstone building. The Egypto-Doric style of the structure makes it appear as an immense sepulcher.
The tomb is thought to hold secret documents containing the roster of all members, ritual details, as well as multiple stolen relics. Some of the bones rumored to be in The Tomb include the skulls of Geronimo, Pancho Villa, Martin Van Buren, and the gravestone of Elihu Yale, the school's founder. Bonesmen are also known to take other societies' belongings in a show of thievery and cunning known as crooking.
Oosterbeek, Netherlands (note that this is not the office of the organisation, but the place of it's inaugural meeting).
Hotel de Bilderberg
In November of 1954, 50 delegates from 11 countries in Western Europe and 11 Americans spent three days in Oosterbeek, Netherlands, at the Hotel de Bilderberg.
The purpose of the meeting was said to foster conversations between Europe and North America. Those in attendance included a prince, a prime minster, and the head of the CIA. Since that meeting, each year a group of international leaders in the fields of politics, business, media, and communications have met to discuss… we’re not exactly sure.
There is no agenda, no resolutions are proposed, no voting of any kind is executed, and no positions or policy statements are issued.
The meetings are held in a different location each year and each year the topics of the meeting are up for the general public to theorize over.
The roster of attendees is never officially made public, but there have been leaks over the years. Conspiracy theories abound, especially because of the group’s intense level of secrecy. Many believe the group is conspiring to impose capital domination, a world government, or a planned economy. What is certain is that the more prominent you are, the more likely you’ll be to get an invitation to next year’s Bilderberg conference.
Scientology is most visible today because of celebrity members like Tom Cruise and John Travolta, yet the organization has been aggressive over the years in tackling critics and maintaining its secrets. One of the most controversial religious groups, some characterize the movement as a cult.
Basic Scientology belief holds that humans are immortal beings who have reincarnated and have lived on other planets before finding themselves now on Earth. One of the things that makes the religion controversial is its assertive nature, often turning to character assassination or litigation in dealing with skeptics and critics who question their practices. The church is also extremely secretive, holding many of its teachings from members until they have made it through multiple levels.
Scientology operates several churches called Celebrity Centres that are opened to the public, but are primarily meant for "anyone with the power and vision to create a better world.” The Church of the Spiritual Technology, or CST, is reserved for the most trusted of members.
Many of these members manage elaborate bases including the Trementina Base. The official word from the church is that the base is a location used to preserve Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard’s writings, which are said to be engraved on steel sheets and encased in titanium cases. It’s thought that Trementina is more than just a location to archive Hubbard’s works, however.
Trementina contains underground dwellings and tunnels, but what’s most interesting about the base is what you see from the outside. Aerial photographs above the base show huge images dug into the Earth.
The images are that of the church’s logo. Former members have claimed that the symbols are to mark the return point for members when they travel into the future. Other members have stated that this is the place where Hubbard is supposed to go when he returns.
Established in 1776 in Bavaria, Germany, this group of freethinkers, humanists, and academics opposed superstition, prejudice, religion, and its influence over the public, and they supported the advancement of women.
The Illuminati were a shadowy group, believed capable of influencing movements in government and the arts. The group was infiltrated and shut down a decade after its founding, or so the official record goes. Conspiracy theorists have long been obsessed that the world has been controlled by the Illuminati for generations.
There are many modern groups that claim to be the descendants of the original Bavarian Illuminati; they go so far as to use the name “Illuminati” in their title, but there is no evidence that these recent organizations are tied to the original.
Besides its actions, what is a major mystery of this group is the location of its headquarters. Theorists have claimed many prominent locations are the headquarters of the Illuminati from Disney World in Orlando, Florida, the Mormon Temple in Salt Lake City, Utah, the Statue of Liberty in New York City, Big Ben in London, the Eiffel Tower in Paris, the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., and, among many others, the Vatican.
The theory that the Illuminati headquarters is located at the Vatican is especially interesting due to the group's opposition to the church. It's believed by conspiracy theorists that the church was long ago infiltrated by the society and so that would make its leader, the pope, one of the Illuminati's highest ranking members.
Today, the pope resides in a simple room at Domus Sanctae Marthae, a guest house adjacent to St. Peter's Basilica. The five-story building containing 106 suites and 22 single rooms is for clergy who are in town on official Holy See business, or perhaps for an Illuminati meeting or two.
The Order of the Temple of the East was founded between 1895 and 1906 in either Austria or Germany. It is believed wealthy industrialist, Carl Kellner, began the religious movement, but it was famed occultist Aleister Crowley whose name and additions to the group shrouded it in curiosity and mystery.
OTO was modeled somewhat after another secret society, Freemasonry. But Crowley added a layer, his own self-created belief system called Thelema. Thelema’s practices and beliefs are written out in a book titled The Book of Law and its core belief is: “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.”
Ideas from occultism, and Eastern and Western mysticism, found their way into Thelema and thus OTO. The religion is highly secretive and members move through the order in a series of rites and rituals, moving up levels in the forms of initiations. Levels have curious names such as Minerval, Master Magician, Illustrious Knight, Grandmaster of Light, and so on.
There are two components at the core of OTO: magical rituals, which have been rumored to include tantric sex, the summoning of angels and demons, and astral projection.
Then there is the gnostic mass, reminiscent of a Catholic mass only because it contains a host and wine toward the end. The gnostic mass includes elaborate costumes, and at the climax of the mass it's believed that the host turns into the Body of God and the wine the Blood of God.
There are multiple locations of worship called camps, oases, or lodges. The majority of them keep their locations secretive to the greater public. The relatively small location in Oakland is an oasis. They hold a weekly gnostic mass in a temple decorated in candles and Egyptian imagery.
It’s unknown exactly what takes place during initiation ceremonies and what knowledge is shared during these events. According to Crowley's autobiography, The Confessions of Aleister Crowley: "the OTO is in possession of one supreme secret. The whole of its system [is] directed towards communicating to its members, by progressively plain hints, this all-important instruction.”
The secret of this secret society is that many people believe in its existence, but scholarly claims have repetitively stated the group is a complete myth, constructed by the imagination of a madman.
The myth begins that the Priory of Sion was a group charged with protecting the descendants of Jesus of Nazareth and Mary Magdalene who eventually went on to settle in France.
It was leaked in the 1970s that the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris, the French National Library, was in possession of a file called Dossiers Secrets d'Henri Lobineau that pointed to the Priory of Sion being located in France.
The file contained an introduction, maps of France, genealogies, newspaper clippings, letters and a list of grand masters of the Priory of Sion that included Sir Isaac Newton, Victor Hugo, and Leonardo Da Vinci.
The authenticity of these files has been questioned ever since they were left at the library. Eventually, they were traced to Pierre Plantard. It is believed Plantard planted the document at the library in order to perpetuate an elaborate hoax. He himself claimed to be a descendant of Jesus' bloodline.
Academics went on to agree that the Priory of Sion was a hoax constructed by Plantard. Yet, books, articles, and movies continue to be made about this group. Whether or not there is a secret society dedicated to protecting a family descendant from biblical times we may never know.
Several manifestos were anonymously published in the early 17th century that told of legends, mysticism, alchemy, and the Order of the Temple of the Rosy Cross. One of these documents was the Fama Fraternitatis which was published in Cassel, Germany.
The Fama spoke of the 15th century German doctor and mystical philosopher Christian Rosenkreuz who traveled through parts of the Middle East where he learned esoteric wisdom, studying in places such as Turkey and Egypt.
There, he claimed to learn extensive knowledge regarding nature and the universe. When he returned, he attempted to share what he learned but he was dismissed. He then formed a like-minded group called the Fraternity of the Rose Cross.
The year of his birth and death remain shadowy, but some documents claim he lived over 106 years. The group upheld Christian beliefs, but strongly opposed Roman Catholicism, and was also said to have influenced Freemasonry along with hundreds of other groups, many of which have adopted titles with similar names throughout modern times.
At its simplest form, the group aimed to promote a “Universal Reformation of Mankind.” Some reports claim that the requirement for membership was that one must have been capable of using more than the average amount of brain power.
During Rosenkreuz’s life, the group was thought to have only consisted of a handful of members, each of whom was a doctor.
All members took an oath to remain bachelors, and also to treat the sick without payment and to find a replacement for themselves before they died. Interest in the group peaked between 1607 and 1616 with the appearances of the anonymous works that included the Fama Fraternitatis which ranged with content that included mysticism and apocalyptic warnings.
The Rosicricians were into their alchemy
Whether Rosenkreuz’s original idea continued is unknown. One of the hundreds of groups claiming to be tied to the original is the Ancient Mystical Order Rosea Crucis that has some connection to occultist Aleister Crowley. AMORC claims to be devoted to the “study of elusive mysteries of life and the universe.”
They utilize ideas from major philosophers, including Thales and Pythagoras, healing techniques, alchemy, symbolism, and mysticism. The group claims its history can be traced to pharaoh Thutmose III in 1477.
The AMORC headquarters is located at Rosicrucian Park in San Jose, California, which spans a city block and includes several structures. The park is home to elaborate gardens, a research library, a planetarium, a temple, and it houses the ashes of Harvey Spencer Lewis, founder of the secret society.
The Global Financial System Is About To Shift: Part I
October 13 2016 | From: TheMindUnleashed Behind all the chatter of who will be the United States’ next President, there is something much larger playing out. Something bigger than most people could even believe.
Though what you are about to read is indeed real and will soon be undeniable.
With almost all of the “real” money, that being gold, silver, metals, jewels and all the legitimate notes, bond and certificates, the nations of the Eastern hemisphere are poised to shift the entire global financial system back to the rightful owners of this massively large cache of assets.
What is known as the global collateral accounts, is something John F. Kennedy was working on opening up for humanity. These accounts are what the Bretton Woods agreement was based upon (though fraudulently). These accounts are what almost every nation and what all of the big banks have been unlawfully abusing.
Now though, an international alliance is working together to open these accounts for the benefit of humanity, which is being spearheaded by a man known as Neil Keenan. Here are answers from Neil Keenan directly to questions we have asked him.
Neil Keenan, John F Kennedy and President Soekarno
Related: To learn more about Neil Keenan and his work visit neilkeenan.com - in particular the History & Events Timeline
This has been done as to educate a larger audience on what the global collateral accounts are as well as to prepare that same audience for the large events that will be occurring in the very near future.
Q: For those that don’t know what the global collateral accounts are, can you give us an explanation of what they are and what purpose they are used for?
The term Global Collateral Accounts refers to the vast holdings of a Chinese consortium of depositors known as The Dragon Family and their legacy is centuries old. These physical assets are for the most part located in Asia in secure underground facilities comprising a total value in the order of 94 Quadrillion US Dollars.
Primarily the asset holdings are comprised of gold bullion, along with other precious metals and gemstones plus a great deal of paper currency, notes and bonds.
The Silk Road or Silk Route was an ancient network of trade routes that for centuries were central to cultural interaction through regions of the Asian continent connecting the East and West from China to the Mediterranean Sea
The accumulation of these assets began centuries ago, largely by way of the Silk Road trade routes which saw great wealth accumulated by those in the equatorial region where there was an abundance of resources and produce, that were purchased by people in other parts of the world – in gold.
These were the days when payments were made in tangible assets with real value – not FIAT currencies represented by worthless paper. There have been many attempts to steal from the asset pool of the Global Collateral Accounts over the centuries, and in part, the reason why these assets have come to be stored in bunkers in South East Asia, was for safe keeping.
Count Albert of the Dragon Family with Neil Keenan
The assets are watched over and protected by local family groups who are known as The Elders.Unfortunately some of these people, after a few generations in their role as guardians have come to confuse the terms “guardian” with the “depositor.”
Q: Who is / are the Dragon Family? What is their role with the global collateral accounts?
The Dragon Family is, in fact, a organization that operates between old families within China and Taiwan, above the political divide of the two independent Chinese Governments.
The Chinese are remarkable in this regard in that old family ties and functions supersede political arrangements which, though they might last for generations, are regarded as inconsequential over the passage of time to most Chinese.
Attached to this is the wealth of several nations. The Dragon Family abstains from any public view and knowledge but acts for the good and better benefit of the World and have had to deal with higher levels of the global financial Organizations, Committee of 300 and in particular, the Federal Reserve System.
The Mount Washington Hotel, situated in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, United States
The Golden Dragons (Dragon Family) signed an agreement with the BIS / Bretton Woods / China in 1944 in which their assets would be implemented as collateral in order to be used by the world at large for humanitarian purposes. At all times the Dragon Family have been considered as being the Depositors.
This agreement was not signed by the Committee of 300 and / or the Federal Reserve or anything as of any official status, but by the nations at large including the “United States” which was not a real government but a corporation controlled by foreign interests.
Additionally, the US government borrowed a huge amount of collateral assets from the Dragon Family many years ago. The base of the lent asset funds from the Dragon Family to the US Government were the Gold and Silver. Therefore the US government was able to issue huge amounts of USD as currencies (FRN’s) via the FRB system.
During the course of their relations over the last century, the Dragon Family has accumulated great wealth (and Trillions and Trillions in interest payments still owing), in the form of a variety of Notes, Bonds and Certificates that are an Obligation of the Federal Reserve System.
The Federal Reserve Bank of New York
These Bonds have values ranging in the many thousand of Trillions of United States dollars. The Western nations are run at the discretion of the Committee of 300 and a number of nefarious collectives with various factions and groups including “The hidden Hand” and “The Federal Reserve System” and many other such criminal outfits that worked towards maintaining control over the Western hemisphere and its people.
This essentially is where we end up with the NWO.
The Dragon Family’s investment was with respect to the best interests of the UN termed “Third World nations” and especially such berated nations, however the stated intentions never made it to manifestation in said lands; which was absolutely prevented by the Khazarian-run globalists who have been hiding within Judaism as cover and leveraging the anti-semitism as a crybaby diversion for centuries.
The Humanitarian accounts were illegally and fraudulently repatriated almost immediately upon signing of the Bretton Woods agreement and this has continued unabatedly almost o this day.
The financial doors have been closed to the cabal for a while and we are now observing the beginnings of a resistance-driven man-made collapse / subversion of Cabal control.
The Cabal-driven West have been laboriously attempting to engineer a financial collapse given that they control much of the food production and finance – thereby leaving you, the people with little or nothing other than starvation or slavery should they allow you to live only to be sucked dry by financial usury, unlawful taxation and the pharmaceutical industry, to name but three machinations within their armory of assault.
The United Nations Agenda 21, and now also Agenda 2030 states publicly and in their own writing for anyone to see that they wish to eliminate 80% of the people on the planet.
A final note here is that the theft of the Global Collateral Accounts by the West did not include the Dragon Family, therefore the East has waited a very long time to be finally in control of their own destiny without Western interference. Although the Cabal are attempting to create a Third World War so that everyone is taken down with them.
Q: Was JFK was working with President Sukarno of Indonesia to open the accounts?
Yes. In 1963, President John F. Kennedy entered into an Agreement with President Sukarno to provide the funds to allow the United States Treasury to print its own currency, thus subverting the “right” to print the currency held by the Federal Reserve. [Note: Some publications spell “Sukarno” as “Soekarno” but it should be made clear that both spellings refer to the same man, unless the author of any particular piece of writing is confused.]
JFK, Soekarno and Johnson
The Agreement would have transferred some 59,000 tons of gold to underpin this currency. The problem with this was that the US domestic currency would have then been backed by gold which would have been a violation of international agreements meant to stabilize currencies.
Pictures don’t lie. John Kennedy was emotionally high at this meeting, as was Sukarno, but unbeknownst to them, Vice President Johnson was a member of secret societies, the likes of which Kennedy had spoken against.
My Pentagon sources advised me that Johnson was involved in the murder of JFK. The entire scenario was set up not only because of what Kennedy was doing in terms of ending the Federal Reserve System and replacing it with the new United States Treasury currency, but also with regards to the dismantling of the CIA.
In addition it involved both Texaco and Standard Oil and their loss of income in West Papua.
In delivering all of the information that Johnson was getting from Kennedy and Sukarno in Washington D.C. to his cabal bosses, the Cabal managed to stop Kennedy from moving forward by assassinating him.
With their plans, the Cabal had to stop Kennedy because he wanted to take down the Illuminati et al and the Federal Reserve System. The daily reports to the Cabal from Lyndon Johnson in Jakarta, Indonesia, doomed Kennedy to his assassination.
For his painstaking efforts, a CIA coup saw Sukarno removed from presidency and replaced by General Suharto, who then imposed a lifetime of home imprisonment upon Sukarno.
Upon Kennedy’s return to the United States, he was assassinated in Dallas, Texas, Lyndon Johnson’s home state. Furthermore it has been reported that before JFK was even officially declared dead, Lyndon Johnson himself had been sworn in as the new President of the United States.
Now do you believe that Lee Harvey Oswald killed JFK? Absolutely not. Lyndon Johnson, George H.W. Bush and the Cabal were responsible for the assassination of JFK.
Lyndon Johnson
Eight days after signing the Green Hilton Memorial agreement with President Sukarno of Indonesia, President Kennedy was assassinated. President Johnson suspended the EO-11110 as issued by Kennedy and transferred the bullion to the Federal Reserve. In Indonesia, President Sukarno was gradually being placed under house arrest.
The Green Hilton Agreement was not implemented until 1968 when Sukarno fell from office and at a time when Global Trade made it imperative to have a Global Currency.
Q: What is your role with these accounts and how were you chosen to be involved?
It all started when I (Neil Keenan) was approached by the Dragon Family (DF), through a diplomat representative named Akihko Yamaguchi.
Akihko Yamaguchi and Neil Keenan
Because of the assistance and political connections that I had provided him with previously, Yamaguchi persistently sought out myself to provide direct services on his behalf related to international banking and trading transactions in furtherance of Dragon family humanitarian programs (which are to be implemented when the Global Collateral Accounts are lawfully opened).
Q: What is the Monaco Accords and what was accomplished there?
In August of 2011, myself and a very powerful political associate arranged a secret meeting of 57 global finance ministers (none from any Western nations) aboard a yacht in Monaco for the purpose of setting up a new worldwide, asset-backed financial system.
Word of the gathering reached the Rockefellers, the pre-eminent U.S. clan of that oligarchy, who dispatched Senator Jay Rockefeller to essentially “crash” the party as an uninvited guest.
I physically blocked Rockefeller at the gangplank. When Rockefeller demanded;
“Don’t you know who I am?” I responded, “Yes, you’re exactly the person we don’t want on this boat.”
After Rockefeller’s unceremonious ejection, the yacht was then buzzed by Blackhawk helicopters before French fighter jets gave a warning pass overhead, whereupon the helicopters retreated.
Within several months, the agreement realized from that meeting, the “Monaco Accords,” was made official by its co-hosts, and that document has now been signed by over 180 countries. This was an unprecedented collective step toward wresting control from the criminal planetary domination by the West. Out of this was born the BRICS alliance.
Note that Part 2 to this interview will be released on Thursday October 13th. Neil will answer how much gold is actually in existence with these accounts, what role the BRICS is playing, which governments and agencies he is working with and what role Vladimir Putin is playing on a global level.
In the meantime, check out these related articles:
This Was The Week The World Got Really Anxious About Globalization's Future
October 11 2016 | From: Bloomberg
Markets might never be the same again.
Weak global trade, fears that the U.K. is marching towards a hard Brexit, and polls indicating that the U.S. election remains a tighter call than markets are pricing in have led a bevy of analysts to redouble their warnings that a backlash over globalization is poised to roil global financial markets - with profound consequences for the real economy and investment strategies.
From the economists and politicians at the annual IMF meeting in Washington to strategists on Wall Street trying to advise clients, everyone seems to be pondering a future in which cooperation and global trade may look much different than they do now.
Brexit
Suggestions that the U.K. will prioritize control over its migration policy at the expense of open access to Europe's single market in negotiations to leave the European Union - a strategy that's being dubbed a "hard Brexit" - loomed large over global markets.
The U.K. government is “strongly supportive of open markets, free markets, open economies, free trade,” said Chancellor of the Exchequer Philip Hammond during a Bloomberg Television interview in New York on Thursday. “But we have a problem - and it’s not just a British problem, it’s a developed-world problem - in keeping our populations engaged and supportive of our market capitalism, our economic model."
Trade
Citing the rising anti-trade sentiment, analysts from Bank of America Merrill Lynch warned that:
“Events show nations are becoming less willing to cooperate, more willing to contest," and a backlash against inequality is likely to trigger more activist fiscal policies.
Looser government spending in developed countries - combined with trade protectionism and wealth redistribution - could reshape global investment strategies, unleashing a wave of inflation, the bank argued, amid a looming war against inequality.
U.S. Treasury Secretary Jack Lew did his part to push for more openness. During an interview in Washington on Thursday, he said that efforts to boost trade, combined with a more equitable distribution of the fruits of economic growth, are key to ensuring U.S. prosperity.
Rolling back on globalization would be counterproductive to any attempt to boost median incomes, he added.
Trump
Without mentioning him by name, Lew's comments appeared to nod to Donald Trump, who some believe could take the U.S. down a more isolationist trading path should he be elected president in November.
“The emergence of Donald Trump as a political force reflects a mood of growing discontent about immigration, globalization and the distribution of wealth," write analysts at Fathom Consulting, a London-based research firm.
Their central scenario is that a Trump administration might be benign for the U.S. economy.
“However, in our downside scenario, Donald Dark, global trade falls sharply and a global recession looms. In this world, isolationism wins, not just in the U.S., but globally," they caution.
Analysts at Standard Chartered Plc agree that the tail risks of a Trump presidency could be significant.
“The main risk with potentially tough negotiating tactics is that trade partners could panic, especially if global coordination evaporates."
They add that business confidence could take a big hit in this context.
“The global trade system could descend into a spiral of trade tariffs, reminiscent of what happened after the Smoot-Hawley tariff of 1930, and ultimately a trade war, possibly accompanied by foreign-exchange devaluations; this would be a ‘lose-lose’ deal for all."
Market participants are also concerned that populism could take root under a Hillary Clinton administration.
“We believe the liberal base’s demands on a Clinton Administration could lead to an overly expansive federal government with aggressive regulators," write analysts at Barclays Plc.
"If the GOP does not unify, Clinton may expand President Obama’s use of executive authority to accomplish her goals."
Managing Risks
No matter who wins in November, Citigroup Inc. Head FX Strategist Steven Englander warns that investors are failing to hedge against rising event risks, with the U.S. election serving as a possible stress test for global markets.
“If everyone is positioning to pull the trigger on positioning as soon as they know the outcome, the repressed volatility may emerge in a very sharp burst," he points out.
Amid political attacks on the apparent inequities generated by monetary policy in the U.K., sluggish trade challenging Chinese growth, and the rise of populist movements in Europe, there are plenty of reasons why market players should snap up volatility hedges, analysts say.
“In our view, volatility is going to heat up in the coming months given the U.S. election, China's potential response against a stronger currency, and Italian political risks," concluded Martin Enlund, chief currency strategist at Nordea Markets.
The Clinton Chronicles October 10 2016 | From: JeremiahFilms The Clinton Chronicles: An Investigation into the Alleged Criminal Activities of Bill Clinton is a 1994 film that accused Bill Clinton of a range of crimes. Back in '94 these criminal psychopaths were just getting warmed up, as history now attests...
Many people involved in the research and investigations reported by this film have been murdered or died under questionable circumstances.
The names and faces of the key players who Clinton used to build his Circle of Power - as well as those who got in his way and lost their jobs, reputations, virtue and lives!
From Whitewater to ADFA (Clinton political Machine).
From millions in drug smuggling in Mena, Arkansas. To Money laundering with the BCCI.
From Gennifer Flowers to Paula Jones.
From Vince Foster’s “Suicide” to the gangland slaying of private investigator Jerry Parks.
The documentary uncovers the shocking truth the controlled media and Clintons don’t want you to know!
How Can We Stop Drug Trafficking When It’s The CIA That’s Running The Show / The Philippines Fight The Cabal
October 9 2016 | From: Geopolitics
Historically, illegal drugs were being used to destroy sovereign countries, and by now the Philippines’ war on drugs is a regular headline by CIA funded journalists and media networks, and a constant object for criticism of the Soros’ Open Society Foundation funded pseudo-non-government organizations, for being brutal and violative of human rights.
Those same critics, however, failed to put their money where their mouth is, especially when it comes to helping the Duterte government rehabilitate close to a million drug surrendered.
They would rather focus our attention into the 3,700 deaths, some of which are the direct result of the decisive police action, and the rest were victims of the drug syndicates who are now cleaning their own ranks from squealers, i.e. those who have surrendered and subsequently named their suppliers.
The same bleeding hearts who chose to ignore the fact that the statistics related to crime are just the same as in past administrations.
Only this time it is the criminals who are dying, because once a poor brat is hooked into meth, he must do whatever he can get his fix for the day, which include cell phone snatching, daylight robbery, etc.
Other sordid crimes relating to meth addiction were also brought to light including cannibalism, and in the realm of politics, it has sent a former justice secretary to the present senate, on top of congressmen and mayors who are already funded with drug money for years.
In short, the Philippines’ war on drugs is a necessary measure that must be taken before the country plunges completely into another failed state.
Still at 100th day in office, the Duterte government is able to reduce the crime rate to 50% nationwide using only the national budget crafted by his predecessor.
The same budget, which does not include the establishment of rehabilitation centers necessary to help the projected 4 million drug dependents, and for whom the US, EU and UN “human rights advocates” could help more than just paying lip service to the 3,750 so called victims of extrajudicial killings.
To those who would rather criticize the sensible actions of the Philippine government that is enjoying 97% trust rating, are you really raising concerns over human rights vilolations, or just in it to protect the illegal drug industry?
CIA Drug Trafficking Exposed by Political Prisoner
The Real Drug Lords: A brief history of CIA involvement in the Drug Trade
1947 to 1951, France
According to Alfred W. McCoy in The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia, CIA arms, money, and disinformation enabled Corsican criminal syndicates in Marseille to wrestle control of labor unions from the Communist Party.
The Corsicans gained political influence and control over the docks - ideal conditions for cementing a long-term partnership with mafia drug distributors, which turned Marseille into the postwar heroin capital of the Western world. Marseille’s first heroin laboratones were opened in 1951, only months after the Corsicans took over the waterfront.
Early 1950s, Southeast Asia
The Nationalist Chinese army, organized by the CIA to wage war against Communist China, became the opium barons of The Golden Triangle (parts of Burma, Thailand and Laos), the world’s largest source of opium and heroin.
Air America, the ClA’s principal airline proprietary, flew the drugs all over Southeast Asia. (See Christopher Robbins, Air America, Avon Books, 1985, chapter 9)
1950s to early 1970s, Indochina
During U.S. military involvement in Laos and other parts of Indochina, Air America flew opium and heroin throughout the area. Many Gl’s in Vietnam became addicts. A laboratory built at CIA headquarters in northern Laos was used to refine heroin. After a decade of American military intervention, Southeast Asia had become the source of 70 percent of the world’s illicit opium and the major supplier of raw materials for America’s booming heroin market.
1973-80, Australia
The Nugan Hand Bank of Sydney was a CIA bank in all but name. Among its officers were a network of US generals, admirals and CIA men, including fommer CIA Director William Colby, who was also one of its lawyers.
With branches in Saudi Arabia, Europe, Southeast Asia, South America and the U.S., Nugan Hand Bank financed drug trafficking, money laundering and international arms dealings. In 1980, amidst several mysterious deaths, the bank collapsed, $50 million in debt. (See Jonathan Kwitny, The Crimes of Patriots: A True Tale of Dope, Dirty Money and the CIA, W.W. Norton & Co., 1 987.)
1970s and 1980s, Panama
For more than a decade, Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega was a highly paid CIA asset and collaborator, despite knowledge by U.S. drug authorities as early as 1971 that the general was heavily involved in drug trafficking and money laundering.
Noriega facilitated ”guns-for-drugs” flights for the contras, providing protection and pilots, as well as safe havens for drug cartel otficials, and discreet banking facilities. U.S. officials, including then-ClA Director William Webster and several DEA officers, sent Noriega letters of praise for efforts to thwart drug trafficking (albeit only against competitors of his Medellin Cartel patrons).
The U.S. government only turned against Noriega, invading Panama in December 1989 and kidnapping the general once they discovered he was providing intelligence and services to the Cubans and Sandinistas. Ironically drug trafficking through Panama increased after the US invasion. (John Dinges, Our Man in Panama, Random House, 1991; National Security Archive Documentation Packet The Contras, Cocaine, and Covert Operations.)
1980s, Central America
The San Jose Mercury News series documents just one thread of the interwoven operations linking the CIA, the contras and the cocaine cartels. Obsessed with overthrowing the leftist Sandinista government in Nicaragua, Reagan administration officials tolerated drug trafficking as long as the traffickers gave support to the contras.
In 1989, the Senate Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics, and International Operations (the Kerry committee) concluded a three-year investigation by stating:
“There was substantial evidence of drug smuggling through the war zones on the part of individual Contras, Contra suppliers, Contra pilots mercenaries who worked with the Contras, and Contra supporters throughout the region... U.S. officials involved in Central America failed to address the drug issue for fear of jeopardizing the war efforts against Nicaragua.
In each case, one or another agency of the U.S. govemment had intormation regarding the involvement either while it was occurring, or immediately thereafter. Senior U S policy makers were nit immune to the idea that drug money was a perfect solution to the Contras’ funding problems.”
- Drugs, Law Enforcement and Foreign Policy, a Report of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics and Intemational Operations, 1989
In Costa Rica, which served as the “Southern Front” for the contras (Honduras being the Northern Front), there were several different ClA-contra networks involved in drug trafficking. In addition to those servicing the Meneses-Blandon operation detailed by the Mercury News, and Noriega’s operation, there was CIA operative John Hull, whose farms along Costa Rica’s border with Nicaragua were the main staging area for the contras.
Hull and other ClA-connected contra supporters and pilots teamed up with George Morales, a major Miami-based Colombian drug trafficker who later admitted to giving $3 million in cash and several planes to contra leaders.
In 1989, after the Costa Rica government indicted Hull for drug trafficking, a DEA-hired plane clandestinely and illegally flew the CIA operative to Miami, via Haiti. The US repeatedly thwarted Costa Rican efforts to extradite Hull back to Costa Rica to stand trial.
Another Costa Rican-based drug ring involved a group of Cuban Amencans whom the CIA had hired as military trainers for the contras. Many had long been involved with the CIA and drug trafficking They used contra planes and a Costa Rican-based shrimp company, which laundered money for the CIA, to move cocaine to the U.S. Costa Rica was not the only route.
Guatemala, whose military intelligence service - closely associated with the CIA - harbored many drug traffickers, according to the DEA, was another way station along the cocaine highway.
Additionally, the Medellin Cartel’s Miami accountant, Ramon Milian Rodriguez, testified that he funneled nearly $10 million to Nicaraguan contras through long-time CIA operative Felix Rodriguez, who was based at Ilopango Air Force Base in El Salvador. The contras provided both protection and infrastructure (planes, pilots, airstrips, warehouses, front companies and banks) to these ClA-linked drug networks.
At least four transport companies under investigation for drug trafficking received US govemment contracts to carry non-lethal supplies to the contras. Southern Air Transport, “formerly” ClA-owned, and later under Pentagon contract, was involved in the drug running as well.
Cocaine-laden planes flew to Florida, Texas, Louisiana and other locations, including several militarv bases Designated as ‘Contra Craft,” these shipments were not to be inspected.
When some authority wasn’t clued in and made an arrest, powerful strings were pulled on behalf of dropping the case, acquittal, reduced sentence, or deportation.
1980s to early 1990s, Afghanistan
ClA-supported Moujahedeen rebels engaged heavily in drug trafficking while fighting against the Soviet-supported govemment and its plans to reform the very backward Afghan society. The Agency’s principal client was Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, one of the leading druglords and leading heroin refiner.
CIA supplied trucks and mules, which had carried arms into Afghanistan, were used to transport opium to laboratories along the Afghan Pakistan border.
The output provided up to one half of the heroin used annually in the United States and three-quarters of that used in Western Europe.
US officials admitted in 1990 that they had failed to investigate or take action against the drug operabon because of a desire not to offend their Pakistani and Afghan allies. In 1993, an official of the DEA called Afghanistan the new Colombia of the drug world.
Mid-1980s to early 1990s, Haiti
While working to keep key Haitian military and political leaders in power, the CIA turned a blind eye to their clients’ drug trafficking. In 1986, the Agency added some more names to its payroll by creating a new Haitian organization, the National Intelligence Service (SIN).
SIN was purportedly created to fight the cocaine trade, though SIN officers themselves engaged in the trafficking, a trade aided and abetted by some of the Haitian military and political leaders.
Washington’s Hidden Agenda: Restore the Drug Trade
In 2014 the Afghan opium cultivation has once again hit a record high, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime’s 2014 Afghan Opium Survey.
“In the course of the last four years, there has been a surge in Afghan opium production. The Vienna based UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) reveals that poppy cultivation in 2012 extended over an area of more than 154,000 hectares, an increase of 18% over 2011. A UNODC spokesperson confirmed in 2013 that opium production is heading towards record levels."
According to the 2012 Afghanistan Opium Survey released in November 2012 by the Ministry of Counter Narcotics (MCN) and the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). potential opium production in 2012 was of the order of 3,700 tons, a decline of 18 percent in relation to 2001, according to UNODC data.
There is reason to believe that this figure of 3,700 tons is grossly underestimated. Moreover, it contradicts the UNOCD’s own predictions of record harvests over an extended area of cultivation.
While bad weather and damaged crops may have played a role as suggested by the UNODC, based on historical trends, the potential production for an area of cultivation of 154,000 hectares, should be well in excess of 6000 tons. With 80,000 hectares in cultivation in 2003, production was already of the order of 3600 tons.
It is worth noting that UNODC has modified the concepts and figures on opium sales and heroin production, as outlined by the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA).
“A change in UN methodology in 2010 resulted in a sharp downward revision of Afghan heroin production estimates for 2004 to 2011. UNODC used to estimate that the entire global opium crop was processed into heroin, and provided global heroin production estimates on that basis.
Before 2010, a global conversion rate of about 10 kg of opium to 1 kg of heroin was used to estimate world heroin production (17). For instance, the estimated 4 620 tonnes of opium harvested worldwide in 2005 was thought to make it possible to manufacture 472 tonnes of heroin (UNODC, 2009a).
However, UNODC now estimates that a large proportion of the Afghan opium harvest is not processed into heroin or morphine but remains ‘available on the drug market as opium’
There is no evidence that a large percentage of opium production is no longer processed into heroin as claimed by the UN.
This revised UNODC methodology has served, – through the outright manipulation of statistical concepts – to artificially reduce the size of of the global trade in heroin.
According to the UNODC, quoted in the EMCDDA report:
“An estimated 3 400 tonnes of Afghan opium was not transformed into heroin or morphine in 2011. Compared with previous years, this is an exceptionally high proportion of the total crop, representing nearly 60 % of the Afghan opium harvest and close to 50 % of the global harvest in 2011."
What the UNODC, – whose mandate is to support the prevention of organized criminal activity – has done is to obfuscate the size and criminal nature of the Afghan drug trade, intimating – without evidence – that a large part of the opium is no longer channeled towards the illegal heroin marke.
In 2012 according to the UNODC, farmgate prices for opium were of the order of 196 per kg.
Each kg. of opium produces 100 grams of pure heroin. The US retail prices for heroin (with a low level of purity) is, according to UNODC of the order of $172 a gram. The price per gram of pure heroin is substantially higher.
The profits are largely reaped at the level of the international wholesale and retail markets of heroin as well as in the process of money laundering in Western banking institutions.
The revenues derived from the global trade in heroin constitute a multibillion dollar bonanza for financial institutions and organized crime.
The following article first published in May 2005 provides a background on the history of the Afghan opium trade which continues to this date to be protected by US-NATO occupation forces on behalf of powerful financial interests.
The Spoils of War: Afghanistan’s Multibillion Dollar Heroin Trade
Since the US led invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001, the Golden Crescent opium trade has soared. According to the US media, this lucrative contraband is protected by Osama, the Taliban, not to mention, of course, the regional warlords, in defiance of the “international community”.
The heroin business is said to be “filling the coffers of the Taliban”. In the words of the US State Department:
“Opium is a source of literally billions of dollars to extremist and criminal groups… [C]utting down the opium supply is central to establishing a secure and stable democracy, as well as winning the global war on terrorism,”
- Statement of Assistant Secretary of State Robert Charles. Congressional Hearing, 1 April 2004
According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), opium production in Afghanistan in 2003 is estimated at 3,600 tons, with an estimated area under cultivation of the order of 80,000 hectares. (UNODC at www.unodc.org/unodc ). An even larger bumper harvest is predicted for 2004.
The State Department suggests that up to 120 000 hectares were under cultivation in 2004. (Congressional Hearing, op cit):
“We could be on a path for a significant surge. Some observers indicate perhaps as much as 50 percent to 100 percent growth in the 2004 crop over the already troubling figures from last year.”
(Ibid)
“Operation Containment“
In response to the post-Taliban surge in opium production, the Bush administration has boosted its counter terrorism activities, while allocating substantial amounts of public money to the Drug Enforcement Administration’s West Asia initiative, dubbed “Operation Containment.”
The various reports and official statements are, of course, blended in with the usual “balanced” self critique that “the international community is not doing enough”, and that what we need is “transparency”.
The headlines are “Drugs, warlords and insecurity overshadow Afghanistan’s path to democracy”. In chorus, the US media is accusing the defunct “hard-line Islamic regime”, without even acknowledging that the Taliban – in collaboration with the United Nations – had imposed a successful ban on poppy cultivation in 2000.
Opium production declined by more than 90 per cent in 2001.
In fact the surge in opium cultivation production coincided with the onslaught of the US-led military operation and the downfall of the Taliban regime. From October through December 2001, farmers started to replant poppy on an extensive basis.
The success of Afghanistan’s 2000 drug eradication program under the Taliban had been acknowledged at the October 2001 session of the UN General Assembly (which took place barely a few days after the beginning of the 2001 bombing raids). No other UNODC member country was able to implement a comparable program:
“Turning first to drug control, I had expected to concentrate my remarks on the implications of the Taliban’s ban on opium poppy cultivation in areas under their control…
We now have the results of our annual ground survey of poppy cultivation in Afghanistan. This year’s production [2001] is around 185 tons.
This is down from the 3300 tons last year [2000], a decrease of over 94 per cent. Compared to the record harvest of 4700 tons two years ago, the decrease is well over 97 per cent.
Any decrease in illicit cultivation is welcomed, especially in cases like this when no displacement, locally or in other countries, took place to weaken the achievement.”
- Remarks on behalf of UNODC Executive Director at the UN General Assembly, Oct 2001
United Nations’ Coverup
In the wake of the US invasion, shift in rhetoric. UNODC is now acting as if the 2000 opium ban had never happened:
“The battle against narcotics cultivation has been fought and won in other countries and it [is] possible to do so here [in Afghanistan], with strong, democratic governance, international assistance and improved security and integrity.”
- Statement of the UNODC Representative in Afghanistan at the :February 2004 International Counter Narcotics Conference, www.unodc.org/pdf/afg
In fact, both Washington and the UNODC now claim that the objective of the Taliban in 2000 was not really “drug eradication” but a devious scheme to trigger “an artificial shortfall in supply”, which would drive up World prices of heroin.
Ironically, this twisted logic, which now forms part of a new “UN consensus”, is refuted by a report of the UNODC office in Pakistan, which confirmed, at the time, that there was no evidence of stockpiling by the Taliban. (Deseret News, Salt Lake City, Utah. 5 October 2003)
Washington’s Hidden Agenda: Restore the Drug Trade
In the wake of the 2001 US bombing of Afghanistan, the British government of Tony Blair was entrusted by the G-8 Group of leading industrial nations to carry out a drug eradication program, which would, in theory, allow Afghan farmers to switch out of poppy cultivation into alternative crops. The British were working out of Kabul in close liaison with the US DEA’s “Operation Containment”.
The UK sponsored crop eradication program is an obvious smokescreen. Since October 2001, opium poppy cultivation has skyrocketed. The presence of occupation forces in Afghanistan did not result in the eradication of poppy cultivation. Quite the opposite.
The Taliban prohibition had indeed caused “the beginning of a heroin shortage in Europe by the end of 2001″, as acknowledged by the UNODC.
Heroin is a multibillion dollar business supported by powerful interests, which requires a steady and secure commodity flow. One of the “hidden” objectives of the war was precisely to restore the CIA sponsored drug trade to its historical levels and exert direct control over the drug routes.
Immediately following the October 2001 invasion, opium markets were restored. Opium prices spiraled. By early 2002, the opium price (in dollars/kg) was almost 10 times higher than in 2000.
In 2001, under the Taliban opiate production stood at 185 tons, increasing to 3400 tons in 2002 under the US sponsored puppet regime of President Hamid Karzai.
While highlighting Karzai’s patriotic struggle against the Taliban, the media fails to mention that Karzai collaborated with the Taliban. He had also been on the payroll of a major US oil company, UNOCAL. In fact, since the mid-1990s, Hamid Karzai had acted as a consultant and lobbyist for UNOCAL in negotiations with the Taliban. According to the Saudi newspaper Al-Watan:
“Karzai has been a Central Intelligence Agency covert operator since the 1980s. He collaborated with the CIA in funneling U.S. aid to the Taliban as of 1994 when the Americans had secretly and through the Pakistanis [specifically the ISI] supported the Taliban’s assumption of power.”
- Quoted in Karen Talbot, U.S. Energy Giant Unocal Appoints Interim Government in Kabul, Global Outlook, No. 1, Spring 2002. p. 70. See also BBC Monitoring Service, 15 December 2001
History of the Golden Crescent Drug Trade
It is worth recalling the history of the Golden Crescent drug trade, which is intimately related to the CIA’s covert operations in the region since the onslaught of the Soviet-Afghan war and its aftermath.
Prior to the Soviet-Afghan war (1979-1989), opium production in Afghanistan and Pakistan was directed to small regional markets. There was no local production of heroin. (Alfred McCoy, Drug Fallout: the CIA’s Forty Year Complicity in the Narcotics Trade. The Progressive, 1 August 1997).
The Afghan narcotics economy was a carefully designed project of the CIA, supported by US foreign policy.
The story of the take down of the BCCI was told in the excellent film "The International"
As revealed in the Iran-Contra and Bank of Commerce and Credit International (BCCI) scandals, CIA covert operations in support of the Afghan Mujahideen had been funded through the laundering of drug money. “Dirty money” was recycled –through a number of banking institutions (in the Middle East) as well as through anonymous CIA shell companies –, into “covert money,” used to finance various insurgent groups during the Soviet-Afghan war, and its aftermath:
“Because the US wanted to supply the Mujahideen rebels in Afghanistan with stinger missiles and other military hardware it needed the full cooperation of Pakistan. By the mid-1980s, the CIA operation in Islamabad was one of the largest US intelligence stations in the World.
`If BCCI is such an embarrassment to the US that forthright investigations are not being pursued it has a lot to do with the blind eye the US turned to the heroin trafficking in Pakistan’, said a US intelligence officer."
(“The Dirtiest Bank of All,” Time, July 29, 1991, p. 22.)
Researcher Alfred McCoy’s study confirms that within two years of the onslaught of the CIA’s covert operation in Afghanistan in 1979;
“The Pakistan-Afghanistan borderlands became the world’s top heroin producer, supplying 60 per cent of U.S. demand. In Pakistan, the heroin-addict population went from near zero in 1979 to 1.2 million by 1985, a much steeper rise than in any other nation.
CIA assets again controlled this heroin trade. As the Mujahideen guerrillas seized territory inside Afghanistan, they ordered peasants to plant opium as a revolutionary tax.
Across the border in Pakistan, Afghan leaders and local syndicates under the protection of Pakistan Intelligence operated hundreds of heroin laboratories. During this decade of wide-open drug-dealing, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency in Islamabad failed to instigate major seizures or arrests.
U.S. officials had refused to investigate charges of heroin dealing by its Afghan allies because U.S. narcotics policy in Afghanistan has been subordinated to the war against Soviet influence there.
In 1995, the former CIA director of the Afghan operation, Charles Cogan, admitted the CIA had indeed sacrificed the drug war to fight the Cold War..."
"...‘Our main mission was to do as much damage as possible to the Soviets. We didn’t really have the resources or the time to devote to an investigation of the drug trade,’ I don’t think that we need to apologize for this. Every situation has its fallout.
There was fallout in terms of drugs, yes. But the main objective was accomplished. The Soviets left Afghanistan.’”
(McCoy, op cit)
The role of the CIA, which is amply documented, is not mentioned in official UNODC publications, which focus on internal social and political factors. Needless to say, the historical roots of the opium trade have been grossly distorted.
According to the UNODC, Afghanistan’s opium production has increased, more than 15-fold since 1979. In the wake of the Soviet-Afghan war, the growth of the narcotics economy has continued unabated. The Taliban, which were supported by the US, were initially instrumental in the further growth of opiate production until the 2000 opium ban.
This recycling of drug money was used to finance the post-Cold War insurgencies in Central Asia and the Balkans including Al Qaeda.
Narcotics: Second to Oil and the Arms Trade
The revenues generated from the CIA sponsored Afghan drug trade are sizeable. The Afghan trade in opiates constitutes a large share of the worldwide annual turnover of narcotics, which was estimated by the United Nations to be of the order of $400-500 billion.
(Douglas Keh, Drug Money in a Changing World, Technical document No. 4, 1998, Vienna UNDCP, p. 4. See also United Nations Drug Control Program, Report of the International Narcotics Control Board for 1999, E/INCB/1999/1 United Nations, Vienna 1999, p. 49-51, and Richard Lapper, UN Fears Growth of Heroin Trade, Financial Times, 24 February 2000).
At the time these UN figures were first brought out (1994), the (estimated) global trade in drugs was of the same order of magnitude as the global trade in oil.
The IMF estimated global money laundering to be between 590 billion and 1.5 trillion dollars a year, representing 2-5 percent of global GDP. (Asian Banker, 15 August 2003). A large share of global money laundering as estimated by the IMF is linked to the trade in narcotics.
Based on recent figures (2003), drug trafficking constitutes:
“The third biggest global commodity in cash terms after oil and the arms trade.”
- The Independent, 29 February 2004
Moreover, the above figures including those on money laundering, confirm that the bulk of the revenues associated with the global trade in narcotics are not appropriated by terrorist groups and warlords, as suggested by the UNODC report.
There are powerful business and financial interests behind narcotics. From this standpoint, geopolitical and military control over the drug routes is as strategic as oil and oil pipelines.
However, what distinguishes narcotics from legal commodity trade is that narcotics constitutes a major source of wealth formation not only for organised crime but also for the US intelligence apparatus, which increasingly constitutes a powerful actor in the spheres of finance and banking.
In turn, the CIA, which protects the drug trade, has developed complex business and undercover links to major criminal syndicates involved in the drug trade.
In other words, intelligence agencies and powerful business syndicates allied with organized crime, are competing for the strategic control over the heroin routes. The multi-billion dollar revenues of narcotics are deposited in the Western banking system.
Most of the large international banks together with their affiliates in the offshore banking havens launder large amounts of narco-dollars.
This trade can only prosper if the main actors involved in narcotics have “political friends in high places.” Legal and illegal undertakings are increasingly intertwined, the dividing line between “businesspeople” and criminals is blurred.
In turn, the relationship among criminals, politicians and members of the intelligence establishment has tainted the structures of the state and the role of its institutions.
Where does the money go? Who benefits from the Afghan opium trade?
This trade is characterized by a complex web of intermediaries. There are various stages of the drug trade, several interlocked markets, from the impoverished poppy farmer in Afghanistan to the wholesale and retail heroin markets in Western countries. In other words, there is a “hierarchy of prices” for opiates.
This hierarchy of prices is acknowledged by the US administration:
“Afghan heroin sells on the international narcotics market for 100 times the price farmers get for their opium right out of the field”.
(US State Department quoted by the Voice of America (VOA), 27 February 2004).
According to the UNODC, opium in Afghanistan generated in 2003 “an income of one billion US dollars for farmers and US$ 1.3 billion for traffickers, equivalent to over half of its national income.”
Consistent with these UNODC estimates, the average price for fresh opium was $350 a kg. (2002); the 2002 production was 3400 tons.
The UNDOC estimate, based on local farmgate and wholesale prices constitutes, however, a very small percentage of the total turnover of the multibillion dollar Afghan drug trade.
The UNODC, estimates “the total annual turn-over of international trade” in Afghan opiates at US$ 30 billion. An examination of the wholesale and retail prices for heroin in the Western countries suggests, however, that the total revenues generated, including those at the retail level, are substantially higher.
Wholesale Prices of Heroin in Western Countries
It is estimated that one kilo of opium produces approximately 100 grams of (pure) heroin. The US DEA confirms that;
“SWA [South West Asia meaning Afghanistan] heroin in New York City was selling in the late 1990s for $85,000 to $190,000 per kilogram wholesale with a 75 percent purity ratio."
- National Drug Intelligence Center
According to the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA):
“The price of SEA [South East Asian] heroin ranges from $70,000 to $100,000 per unit (700 grams) and the purity of SEA heroin ranges from 85 to 90 percent”
(ibid).
The SEA unit of 700 gr (85-90 % purity) translates into a wholesale price per kg. for pure heroin ranging between $115,000 and $163,000.
The DEA figures quoted above, while reflecting the situation in the 1990s, are broadly consistent with recent British figures. According to a report published in the Guardian (11 August 2002), the wholesale price of (pure) heroin in London (UK) was of the order of 50,000 pounds sterling, approximately $80,000 (2002).
Whereas as there is competition between different sources of heroin supply, it should be emphasized that Afghan heroin represents a rather small percentage of the US heroin market, which is largely supplied out of Colombia.
Retail Prices
United States
“The NYPD notes that retail heroin prices are down and purity is relatively high. Heroin previously sold for about $90 per gram but now sells for $65 to $70 per gram or less.
Anecdotal information from the NYPD indicates that purity for a bag of heroin commonly ranges from 50 to 80 percent but can be as low as 30 percent.
Information as of June 2000 indicates that bundles (10 bags) purchased by Dominican buyers from Dominican sellers in larger quantities (about 150 bundles) sold for as little as $40 each, or $55 each in Central Park.
DEA reports that an ounce of heroin usually sells for $2,500 to $5,000, a gram for $70 to $95, a bundle for $80 to $90, and a bag for $10. The DMP reports that the average heroin purity at the street level in 1999 was about 62 percent.”
The NYPD and DEA retail price figures seem consistent. The DEA price of $70-$95, with a purity of 62 percent translates into $112 to $153 per gram of pure heroin. The NYPD figures are roughly similar with perhaps lower estimates for purity.
It should be noted that when heroin is purchased in very small quantities, the retail price tends to be much higher. In the US, purchase is often by “the bag”; the typical bag according to Rocheleau and Boyum contains 25 milligrams of pure heroin.( Office of National Drug Control Policy )
A $10 dollar bag in NYC (according to the DEA figure quoted above) would convert into a price of $400 per gram, each bag containing 0.025gr. of pure heroin. (op cit). In other words, for very small purchases marketed by street pushers, the retail margin tends to be significantly higher. In the case of the $10 bag purchase, it is roughly 3 to 4 times the corresponding retail price per gram.($112-$153)
United Kingdom
In Britain, the retail street price per gram of heroin, according to British Police sources, “has fallen from £74 in 1997 to £61 [in 2004].” [i.e. from approximately $133 to $110, based on the 2004 rate of exchange] (Independent, 3 March 2004).
In some cities it was as low as £30-40 per gram with a low level of purity. (AAP News, 3 March 2004). According to Drugscope ( www.drugscope.org.uk ), the average price for a gram of heroin in Britain is between £40 and £90 ($72- $162 per gram) (The report does not mention purity). The street price of heroin was £60 per gram in April 2002 according to the National Criminal Intelligence Service.
The Hierarchy of Prices
We are dealing with a hierarchy of prices, from the farmgate price in the producing country, upwards, to the final retail street price. The latter is often 80-100 times the price paid to the farmer.
In other words, the opiate product transits through several markets from the producing country to the transshipment country(ies), to the consuming countries. In the latter, there are wide margins between “the landing price” at the point of entry, demanded by the drug cartels and the wholesale prices and the retail street prices, protected by Western organized crime.
The Global Proceeds of the Afghan Narcotics Trade
In Afghanistan, the reported production of 3,600 tons of opium in 2003 would allow for the production of approximately 360,000 kg of pure heroin. Gross revenues accruing to Afghan farmers are roughly estimated by the UNODC to be of the order of $1 billion, with 1.3 billion accruing to local traffickers.
When sold in Western markets at a heroin wholesale price of the order of $100,000 a kg (with a 70 percent purity ratio), the global wholesale proceeds (corresponding to 3600 tons of Afghan opium) would be of the order of 51.4 billion dollars.
The latter constitutes a conservative estimate based on the various figures for wholesale prices in the previous section.
The total proceeds of the Afghan narcotics trade (in terms of total value added) is estimated using the final heroin retail price. In other words, the retail value of the trade is ultimately the criterion for measuring the importance of the drug trade in terms of revenue generation and wealth formation.
A meaningful estimate of the retail value, however, is almost impossible to ascertain due to the fact that retail prices vary considerably within urban areas, from one city to another and between consuming countries, not to mention variations in purity and quality (see above).
The evidence on retail margins, namely the difference between wholesale and retail values in the consuming countries, nonetheless, suggests that a large share of the total (money) proceeds of the drug trade are generated at the retail level.
In other words, a significant portion of the proceeds of the drug trade accrues to criminal and business syndicates in Western countries involved in the local wholesale and retail narcotics markets. And the various criminal gangs involved in retail trade are invariably protected by the “corporate” crime syndicates.
90 percent of heroin consumed in the UK is from Afghanistan. Using the British retail price figure from UK police sources of $110 a gram (with an assumed 50 percent purity level), the total retail value of the Afghan narcotics trade in 2003 (3,600 tons of opium) would be the order of 79.2 billion dollars. The latter should be considered as a simulation rather than an estimate.
Under this assumption (simulation), a billion dollars gross revenue to the farmers in Afghanistan (2003) would generate global narcotics earnings, – accruing at various stages and in various markets – of the order of 79.2 billion dollars.
These global proceeds accrue to business syndicates, intelligence agencies, organized crime, financial institutions, wholesalers, retailers, etc. involved directly or indirectly in the drug trade.
In turn, the proceeds of this lucrative trade are deposited in Western banks, which constitute an essential mechanism in the laundering of dirty money.
A very small percentage accrues to farmers and traders in the producing country. Bear in mind that the net income accruing to Afghan farmers is but a fraction of the estimated 1 billion dollar amount. The latter does not include payments of farm inputs, interest on loans to money lenders, political protection, etc.
The Share of the Afghan Heroin in the Global Drug Market
Afghanistan produces over 70 percent of the global supply of heroin and heroin represents a sizeable fraction of the global narcotics market, estimated by the UN to be of the order of $400-500 billion.
There are no reliable estimates on the distribution of the global narcotics trade between the main categories: Cocaine, Opium/Heroin, Cannabis, Amphetamine Type Stimulants (ATS), Other Drugs.
The Laundering of Drug Money
The proceeds of the drug trade are deposited in the banking system. Drug money is laundered in the numerous offshore banking havens in Switzerland, Luxembourg, the British Channel Islands, the Cayman Islands and some 50 other locations around the globe.
It is here that the criminal syndicates involved in the drug trade and the representatives of the world’s largest commercial banks interact. Dirty money is deposited in these offshore havens, which are controlled by the major Western commercial banks.
The latter have a vested interest in maintaining and sustaining the drug trade. (For further details, see Michel Chossudovsky, The Crimes of Business and the Business of Crimes, Covert Action Quarterly, Fall 1996)
Once the money has been laundered, it can be recycled into bona fide investments not only in real estate, hotels, etc, but also in other areas such as the services economy and manufacturing. Dirty and covert money is also funneled into various financial instruments including the trade in derivatives, primary commodities, stocks, and government bonds.
Concluding Remarks: Criminalization of US Foreign Policy
US foreign policy supports the workings of a thriving criminal economy in which the demarcation between organized capital and organized crime has become increasingly blurred.
The heroin business is not “filling the coffers of the Taliban” as claimed by US government and the international community: quite the opposite!
The proceeds of this illegal trade are the source of wealth formation, largely reaped by powerful business/criminal interests within the Western countries. These interests are sustained by US foreign policy.
Decision-making in the US State Department, the CIA and the Pentagon is instrumental in supporting this highly profitable multibillion dollar trade, third in commodity value after oil and the arms trade.
The Afghan drug economy is “protected”.
The heroin trade was part of the war agenda. What this war has achieved is to restore a compliant narco-State, headed by a US appointed puppet.
The powerful financial interests behind narcotics are supported by the militarisation of the world’s major drug triangles (and transshipment routes), including the Golden Crescent and the Andean region of South America (under the so-called Andean Initiative).
Inflation: The Most Evil Threat = Governments Robbing Their Citizens
October 8 2016 | From: FinalWakeUpCall Inflation, is an invisible, secret tax that not even 1% of common people understand. It is dangerous and most of the time a fatal disease.
If not under control in time, it can destroy society. No government is willing to accept responsibility for causing inflation. They always find an excuse; such as greedy businessmen, selfish trade unions, spendthrift consumers, Arab sheiks that have raised the price of oil, bad weather, or anything else that seems plausible.
Although all these can temporarily produce higher prices for individual items; they cannot produce continuing inflation for one very simple reason; None of the above alleged culprits possesses a printing press, to turn out pieces of paper called money; None can legally authorise a bookkeeper to make entries on ledgers that are the equivalent of those pieces of paper.
Over time, the result will be an immensely lower standard of living, resulting from the declining purchasing power and increasing commodity prices. Real wages will be much lower, as employers will not readily increase wages to keep up with inflation.
Under a paper system without backing, the entire monetary system is controlled by the political class, which has the power to allocate capital or to deny it.
This implies that the people heading the world’s capital markets, rather than acting as capital allocators, have become mere speculative marionettes, whose strings are controlled by the well connected and the influential.
Inflation is a printing press phenomenon. The two important basic questions are:
Why do governments increase the quantity of money?
Why do they produce inflation when they understand the potential harm?
If the quantity of goods and services available for purchase – for short-term ‘output’ – were to increase as rapidly as the quantity of money, prices would tend to be stable.
Prices may fall gradually, as more became available, while people keep their wealth in the form of money. Inflation occurs when the quantity of money rises more rapidly than output and the more rapid the rise in the quantity of money, the greater the rate of inflation.
Output is limited by the physical and human resources available, and by the improvement in knowledge and capacity to use them. At best the output can grow only fairly slowly. The same is the case, although always temporarily and for a brief period of time, for money backed by a commodity. While, paper money has no limitation as does commodity-backed money.
Inflation is a Monetary Phenomenon:
In short; Inflation is primarily a monetary phenomenon, produced by a more rapid increase in the quantity of money than in output. Excessive monetary growth produces inflation, caused by governments. – In general, inflation is worse than a financial crisis.
Taxpayers’ money is spent for nothing without reform in sight; Increase in unemployment, as businesses go bankrupt. – Bankers that caused the 2008 financial crisis were bailed out with people’s money and their managers were left in charge who in turn were taking on even more risks with taxpayer’s deposits in order to rake up even larger bonuses.
Eventually these schemes will result in a massive inflation, never witnessed before. The debt is structural; it’s irresolvable, there is no way to repair this economy.
Inflation is Legalised Theft:
Inflation is nothing more than legalised theft by your government; inflation is only two percent, is what the Statistics suggest. But these numbers don’t show the truth. Today’s real inflation rate is probably closer to 9 %, maybe even higher.
Who knows? All published inflation data are a blatant lie, as these numbers are made up to suit the government.
Showing lower inflation in statistics looks better. The theft committed by governments is concealed.
When central banks print reserves far in excess of domestic savings, the result is inevitably inflation. The more they print, the more capital is available forinstitutions – central banks – to invest.
This creates massive asset inflation, in the price of assets, as central bankers buy – bonds, stocks, and real estate – to push economies upwards all around the world. – Instead of triggering an immediate currency flight, as seen in Argentina or Zimbabwe, this inflation has produced an investment-generated boom.
If additional government spending was financed either by taxes or by borrowing from the public, that would not lead to more rapid monetary growth. In this case the government would have more to spend, while the public would have less.
But the easy way out is increasing the quantity of money, because that’s more attractive since the public doesn’t understand the severe implications, and it seems like magic, like getting something for nothing! But the fact of the matter is that the holders of the money pay for the extra spending, as the extra money raises prices when it is injected into the economy.
Moreover, inflation indirectly yields extra revenue by automatically raising effective tax revenues, as income from the people goes up to compensate for inflation, and people are consequently pushed into higher tax rate brackets.
Additionally, there is the benefit of paying off debt with less valuable currency – less purchasing power – as less valuable units are paying for original units that were more valuable.
Reduction of Monetary Growth:
The cure for inflation is the reduction in the rate of monetary growth, as this is the cause of inflation. Eventually it is a curable disease. Although the bad effects – a temporarily lower economic growth, and higher unemployment would be felt first, the good effects – a lower to zero inflation – would come later.
This would result in a healthier economy, with the potential for rapid noninflationary growth.
But as usual there is the lack of a true desire to cure the addiction of free money, resulting in this disease. In a sense people enjoy inflation. Although they would like to see the prices of goods they buy go down, or at least stop going up, they are more than happy to see the prices of the things they own or sell go up.
Inflation is Destructive:
One reason inflation is so destructive is because while some people benefit greatly, other people suffer. Society is divided into winners and losers. The winners regard the good things that happen to them as the natural result of their own foresight, prudence, and initiative.
They regard the bad things; the rise of prices of goods purchased, as caused by forces outside their control. Almost everyone will say they are opposed to inflation. What they generally mean is that they are opposed to the bad things that have happened to them due to certain effects of inflation.
The paper value of homes is rising. With a mortgage, the interest rate generally is below the rate of inflation. As a result of this, inflation in effect is paying off the mortgage interest payments as well the principal. This effect is an advantage to the home owner, as his equity in the house goes up rapidly. The flip side of the coin is that an interest rate below inflation results in a loss for savers.
As inflation accelerates, rather sooner than later, it is causing so much damage to the fabric of society, by creating so much injustice, and suffering.
The Side-Effects:
Everywhere one looks it is repeatedly published that unemployment and slow growth are cures for inflation; that all alternativemeasures taken will result in more inflation or higher unemployment, which is nonsense. The truth is that slow growth and high unemployment are not cures for inflation. They are the side-effects of a successful cure of a diseased economy.
The general signal of increasing demand will be confused with the specific signals reflecting changes in relative demands. That is why the initial side effect of faster monetary growth is the appearance of prosperity and greater employment.
– When it is discovered that the rise in wages does not coincide with higher demand, the flaw in the system is discovered. Wages and prices are higher not because of higher demand, but primarily to allow for the rises in the pricesof goods they buy.
Subsequently people are off on a price-wage spiral that itself effectively is inflation, and by no means the cause of it. If monetary growth does not speed up faster, the initial stimulus to employment and output will be replaced by the opposite; both will go down in response to the higher prices and wages.
By the way; governments can actually not create jobs, they can only steal from people and give it to others.
If it were politically profitable and feasible to generate a 10% inflation rate, the temptation would be great if inflation indeed reached this level, to raise it to 11, or 12 or 15 %. Zero inflation is a politically feasible objective; 10% is not.
This is the verdict of experience. Nevertheless, central bankers create excessive quantities of money, as they tell us the world needs more inflation to fight deflationary forces, which basically is nonsense as the deflationary forces are the result of the increase of monetary supply.
The Best Solution to Create Inflation:
Moreover, if they want to create inflation, there is no need for excessive money printing. They can create inflation instantly byraising the price of gold, which is the easiest way to create inflation.
A higher dollar price for gold is practically the definition of inflation. The Fed would just declare the price of gold to be, say, $5,000 an ounce and make the price stick using the gold in Fort Knox – assuming it is still there? – Their printing press would maintain a two-way market.
The Fed could sell gold when it hits $5,050 an ounce and buy gold when it hits $4,950 an ounce. That’s a 1% band around the target price of $5,000 an ounce. The band and the use of physical gold would make the target price stick.
A higher price for gold is the same as a lower value for the dollar. The world of $5,000-per-ounce gold also means $10 per gallon gas at the station and $40 for a movie ticket. Nothing happens without consequences.
Santa Claus Doesn’t Exist:
Inflation, in contrast to what economic leaders lead us to believe, is not equivalent to Santa Claus. It can’t bring gifts to everyone. All it does is shift the benefits of the economy around. In the immortal words of President Obama: “inflation spreads the wealth around a little.”
Inflation penalises wage earners, savers, and retirees to the benefit of asset owners. It benefits debtors at the expense of creditors. There’s no net increase in the nation’s wealth. One group is merely taxed for the benefit of the other. This is sold as a benefit to the country by governments. They have to sell it to the people because without inflation they won’t be able to pay their bills.
However, wealth cannot be created by a printing press. This will cause price inflation, asset inflation, credit collapse – or a mixture of all three. Everyone knows this. Nevertheless, our leaders pretend otherwise.
If credit is expanded in excess of savings, it historically always ends in a collapse. So there should be no surprise. When creditors begin to ask the critical question: Can these debts really be financed? Will we get our savings back? If credit has been expanded radically beyond savings, as is the case today in the developed world, the answer is always NO.
It is true that dramatic increases in the money supply eventually lead to inflation. But the key word here is “eventually.” Sometimes it can take a while. The extent of the delay depends on general conditions, and a very important concept known as “monetary velocity.”
Inflation and deflation are not purely products of how much money is in the system. They are products of how fast this moneyis moving through the system.
When banks are lending, businesses are borrowing, and consumers are spending, money changes hands quickly. Under these conditions, the monetary velocity is high.
Conversely, when banks don’t lend the money, businesses are hunkered down, and consumers are saving or paying down debt, money does not change hands quickly. It moves slowly. If the economy grinds to a near halt, as is the case today, eventually money stops changing hands completely.
Inflation is not purely from an increase in the money supply. Sufficient monetary velocity is required to spur a general and persistent increase in the price of goods and services. Without velocity – if money doesn’t move through the system – there is no reason for prices to rise.
The point is that it’s not just about how many units are being printed. It’s about where those units go and how fast they are moving through the system. The end game may indeed be accelerating monetary velocity. The cumulative effect on the rise in prices and a spectacular loss of faith in the system will result in a decline in the desire for owning dollars will plummet, and that means hyperinflation.
How Much Money is in Circulation?
Ever wondered how much money exists? This video compares the world’s richest people, the biggest companies, physical currency, the gold market, the stock market, global debt, and more to give you a sense of the quantity of money that actually exists.
Smoking Gun For Christchurch Killer Quake: Hillary Clinton Emails Show Advance Warning Of Christchurch Earthquake
October 7 2016 | From: MediaWhores / TheContrail Recently releases Hillary Clinton emails show US State Department advanced knowledge of the big Christchurch Earthquake on 22nd February 2011. This appears to be proof that the killer earthquake was a planned disaster "And on cue..."
The first email sent by the State Department to head of the department Hillary Clinton was sent a full 6 hours before the actual quake hit. Washington being 18 hours behind NZST. The second email was sent as the quake hit.
On the presumption the emails are real – this proves advanced knowledge by the US State Department of the Christchurch Earthquakes.
Click on the image above to open a larger version in a new window
Clinton Christchurch Earthquakes Emails – Source, Wikileaks
Sources for these emails are being actively and aggressively blocked worldwide. It seems they even knew the size of the quake: 6.3 – a possible reference to the Freemasonic Kabbalah number 666. There is substantial evidence that the quake was in fact much bigger than 6.3 magnitude.
Interestingly – the US disaster relief team “FEMA” was also in Christchurch the week before the big earthquake, and they flew out just hours before the earthquake hit – leaving behind their head disaster coordinator…
If this all sounds unbelievable to you – you probably need to do some research on “HAARP” the radio wave technology being used to influence weather, storms and some say even earthquakes world wide – and nothing new, Tesla was using similar technology last century.
EMF conditions before the Christchurch Earthquake on 14/2/16
More Confessions Of An Economic Hit Man: "This Time, They’re Coming For Your Democracy"
October 7 2016 | From: ZeroHedge Twelve years ago, John Perkins published his book, “Confessions of an Economic Hit Man.” Today, he says “things have just gotten so much worse.”
Twelve years ago, John Perkins published his book, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, and it rapidly rose up The New York Times’ best-seller list.
In it, Perkins describes his career convincing heads of state to adopt economic policies that impoverished their countries and undermined democratic institutions. These policies helped to enrich tiny, local elite groups while padding the pockets of U.S.-based transnational corporations.
Perkins was recruited, he says, by the National Security Agency (NSA), but he worked for a private consulting company. His job as an undertrained, overpaid economist was to generate reports that justified lucrative contracts for U.S. corporations, while plunging vulnerable nations into debt.
Countries that didn’t cooperate saw the screws tightened on their economies. In Chile, for example, President Richard Nixon famously called on the CIA to “make the economy scream” to undermine the prospects of the democratically elected president, Salvador Allende.
If economic pressure and threats didn’t work, Perkins says, the jackals were called to either overthrow or assassinate the noncompliant heads of state. That is, indeed, what happened to Allende, with the backing of the CIA.
Perkins’ book has been controversial, and some have disputed some of his claims, including, for example, that the NSA was involved in activities beyond code making and breaking.
Perkins has just reissued his book with major updates. The basic premise of the book remains the same, but the update shows how the economic hit man approach has evolved in the last 12 years.
Among other things, U.S. cities are now on the target list. The combination of debt, enforced austerity, underinvestment, privatization, and the undermining of democratically elected governments is now happening here.
I couldn’t help but think about Flint, Michigan, under emergency management as I read The New Confessions of an Economic Hit Man.
I interviewed Perkins at his home in the Seattle area. In addition to being a recovering economic hit man, he is a grandfather and a founder and board member of Dream Change and The Pachamama Alliance, organizations that work for “a world that future generations will want to inherit.”
Sarah van Gelder: What’s changed in our world since you wrote the first Confessions of an Economic Hit Man?
John Perkins: Things have just gotten so much worse in the last 12 years since the first Confessions was written. Economic hit men and jackals have expanded tremendously, including the United States and Europe.
Back in my day we were pretty much limited to what we called the third world, or economically developing countries, but now it’s everywhere.
And in fact, the cancer of the corporate empire has metastasized into what I would call a failed global death economy. This is an economy that’s based on destroying the very resources upon which it depends, and upon the military. It’s become totally global, and it’s a failure.
van Gelder: So how has this switched from us being the beneficiaries of this hit-man economy, perhaps in the past, to us now being more of the victims of it?
Perkins: It’s been interesting because, in the past, the economic hit man economy was being propagated in order to make America wealthier and presumably to make people here better off, but as this whole process has expanded in the U.S. and Europe, what we’ve seen is a tremendous growth in the very wealthy at the expense of everybody else.
On a global basis we now know that 62 individuals have as many assets as half the world’s population.
We of course in the U.S. have seen how our government is frozen, it’s just not working. It’s controlled by the big corporations and they’ve really taken over. They’ve understood that the new market, the new resource, is the U.S. and Europe, and the incredibly awful things that have happened to Greece and Ireland and Iceland, are now happening here in the U.S.
We’re seeing this situation where we can have what statistically shows economic growth, and at the same time increased foreclosures on homes and unemployment.
van Gelder: Is this the same kind of dynamic about debt that leads to emergency managers who then turn over the reins of the economy to private enterprises? The same thing that you are seeing in third-world countries?
Perkins: Yes, when I was an economic hit man, one of the things that we did, we raised these huge loans for these countries, but the money never actually went to the countries, it went to our own corporations to build infrastructure in those countries.
And when the countries could not pay off their debt, we insisted that they privatize their water systems, their sewage systems, their electric systems.
Now we’re seeing that same thing happen in the United States. Flint, Michigan, is a very good example of that. This is not a U.S. empire, it’s a corporate empire protected and supported by the U.S. military and the CIA. But it is not an American empire, it’s not helping Americans. It’s exploiting us in the same way that we used to exploit all these other countries around the world.
van Gelder: So it seems like Americans are starting to get this. What is your sense about where the American public is in terms of readiness to do something?
Perkins: As I travel around the U.S., as I travel around the world, I see that people are really waking up. We’re getting it. We’re understanding that we live on a very fragile space station, and it’s got no shuttles; we can’t get off. We’ve got to fix it, we’ve got to take care of it, and we’re in the process of destroying it.
The big corporations are destroying it, but the big corporations are just run by people, and they’re vulnerable to us. If we really consider it, the market place is a democracy, if we just use it as such.
van Gelder: I want to push back on that one a little bit because so many corporations don’t sell to ordinary consumers, they sell to other companies or to governments, and so many corporations have such an entrenched reward system where if one person doesn’t perform by exploiting the earth they’ll simply get replaced with somebody else who does.
Perkins: I’ve recently been speaking at a number of corporate conferences. I hear time after time after time that many of them want to leave a green legacy. They’ve got children, they’ve got grandchildren, they understand we can’t go on like this.
So what they say is;
“Go out there, start consumer movements. What I want is to receive a hundred thousand emails from my customers saying, ’Hey, I love your product but I’m not going to buy it anymore until you pay your workers a fair wage in Indonesia, or wherever, or clean up the environment, or do something.’
And then I can take that to my board of directors and my big stockholders, to the people who really control whether I get hired or fired.”
van Gelder: I agree, and those campaigns, as you know, have been going on for decades now, and sometimes they have little incremental changes around the edge. But then we look back on it later and we see that there’s enormous resistance because of the profits to be made in continuing the system.
Perkins: I think we’ve seen tremendous changes, though. Just in the last few years, we’ve seen organic foods become very big. Twenty years ago they couldn’t make a go of it. We’ve seen women having bigger positions in corporations, and minorities, and we need to get better at this.
We’ve seen the labeling of many foods. GMOs aren’t included yet, but nutrition and calories and so forth are. And what we really need to do is convince corporations that they’ve got to have a new goal.
We’ve got to let corporations know what their job is: It’s to serve a public interest, and make a decent rate of return for investors. We need investors, but beyond that, every corporation should serve a public interest, should serve the earth, should serve future generations.
van Gelder: I want to ask you about the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and other trade deals. Is there any way that we can beat these things back so they don’t continue supercharging the corporate sphere at the expense of local democracies?
Perkins: They’re devastating; they give sovereignty to corporations over governments. It’s ridiculous.
We’re seeing terrible desperation from people in Central America trying to get away from a system that’s broken, primarily because our trade agreements and our policies toward Latin America have broken them.
And we’re seeing, of course, those similar things in the Middle East and in Africa, these waves of immigrants that are swarming into Europe from the Middle East. These terrible problems that have been created because of the greed of big corporations.
I was just in Central America and what we talk about in the U.S. as being an immigration problem is really a trade agreement problem.
They’re not allowed to impose tariffs under the trade agreements - NAFTA and CAFTA - but the U.S. is allowed to subsidize its farmers. Those governments can’t afford to subsidize their farmers. So our farmers can undercut theirs, and that’s destroyed the economies, and a number of other things, and that’s why we’ve got immigration problems.
van Gelder: Can you talk about the violence that people are fleeing in Central America, and how that links back to the role the U.S. has had there?
Perkins: Three or four years ago the CIA orchestrated a coup against the democratically elected president of Honduras, President Zelaya, because he stood up to Dole and Chiquita and some other big, global, basically U.S.-based corporations.
He wanted to raise the minimum wage to a reasonable level, and he wanted some land reform that would make sure that his own people were able to make money off their own land, rather than having big international corporations do it.
The big corporations couldn’t stand for this. He wasn’t assassinated but he was overthrown in a coup and sent to another country, and replaced by a terribly brutal dictator, and today Honduras is one of the most violent, homicidal countries in the hemisphere.
It’s frightening what we’ve done. And when that happens to a president, it sends a message to every other president throughout the hemisphere, and in fact throughout the world: Don’t mess with us.
Don’t mess with the big corporations. Either cooperate and get rich in the process, and have all your friends and family get rich in the process, or go get overthrown or assassinated. It’s a very strong message.
van Gelder: I wanted to ask about your time spent in Ecuador with indigenous people. I’m wondering if you could talk about how that experience has changed you?
Perkins: Many years ago when I was a Peace Corps volunteer in the Amazon with the Shuar indigenous people there, I was dying.
I got very ill, and my life was saved in one night by a shaman. I’d come out of business school this is 1968, ’69, and I had no idea what a shaman was, but it changed my life by helping me understand that what was killing me was a mindset - what they would call the dream.
I spent many years studying all this, and working with many different indigenous groups, and what I saw was the power of the mindset.
The shamans teach us - the indigenous people teach us - once you change the mindset, then it’s pretty easy to have the objective reality change around it. So, instead of the kind of economy we have now, a death economy, if we can change the mindset we can very quickly move into a life economy.
van Gelder: So what are the mechanisms by which a change in consciousness actually shifts things on the ground?
Perkins: Well, in my opinion the biggest catalyst that needs to go forward to change this is we’ve got to change the corporations. We’ve got to move from that goal that was stated by Milton Friedman in the 1970s, that the only responsibility of corporations is to maximize profits regardless of social and environmental costs.
We change the big corporations by telling them we’re not going to buy from you anymore unless you change your goal. No longer should your goal be to maximize profits regardless of social and environmental costs. Make a decent rate of return for your investors, but serve us, we the people, or we’re not buying from you.
van Gelder : You quote Tom Paine in your book: “If there must be trouble let it be in my day that my child may have peace.” Why did you decide to use that quote?
Perkins : Well, I think Tom Paine was brilliant in that statement. He understood how that would impact people. And he wrote that statement in December 1776.
Washington had lost just about every battle he ever fought; he wasn’t getting any support from the Continental Congress; they weren’t giving his men guns or ammunition or even blankets and shoes, and he was bogged down at Valley Forge. Paine realizes that he’s got to somehow write something that will rally people, and there’s nothing that rallies people more than to think about their children.
That to me is where we’re at right now. I’ve got a daughter and I’ve got an 8-year-old grandson. Bring on the trouble for me, OK, but let’s create a world they’re going to want to live in. And let’s understand that my 8-year-old grandson cannot have an environmentally sustainable and regenerative, socially just, fulfilling world unless every child on the planet has that.
And this is new. It used to be all we had to worry about was our local community, maybe our country. But we didn’t have to worry about the world. But what we know now is that we can’t have peace anywhere in the world, we can’t have peace in the U.S., unless everybody has peace.
Why Capitalism Creates Useless Jobs
October 6 2016 | From: Strikemag Ever had the feeling that your job might be made up? That the world would keep on turning if you weren’t doing that thing you do 9-5? Anthropology professor and best selling author David Graeber explored the phenomenon of bullshit jobs for our recent summer issue – everyone who’s employed should read carefully
In the year 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that technology would have advanced sufficiently by century’s end that countries like Great Britain or the United States would achieve a 15-hour work week.
There’s every reason to believe he was right. In technological terms, we are quite capable of this. And yet it didn’t happen. Instead, technology has been marshaled, if anything, to figure out ways to make us all work more. In order to achieve this, jobs have had to be created that are, effectively, pointless.
Huge swathes of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed. The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound.
It is a scar across our collective soul. Yet virtually no one talks about it.
Why did Keynes’ promised utopia – still being eagerly awaited in the ‘60s – never materialise? The standard line today is that he didn’t figure in the massive increase in consumerism.
Given the choice between less hours and more toys and pleasures, we’ve collectively chosen the latter. This presents a nice morality tale, but even a moment’s reflection shows it can’t really be true.
Yes, we have witnessed the creation of an endless variety of new jobs and industries since the ‘20s, but very few have anything to do with the production and distribution of sushi, iPhones, or fancy sneakers.
So what are these new jobs, precisely? A recent report comparing employment in the US between 1910 and 2000 gives us a clear picture (and I note, one pretty much exactly echoed in the UK). Over the course of the last century, the number of workers employed as domestic servants, in industry, and in the farm sector has collapsed dramatically.
At the same time, “professional, managerial, clerical, sales, and service workers” tripled, growing “from one-quarter to three-quarters of total employment.” In other words, productive jobs have, just as predicted, been largely automated away (even if you count industrial workers globally, including the toiling masses in India and China, such workers are still not nearly so large a percentage of the world population as they used to be).
But rather than allowing a massive reduction of working hours to free the world’s population to pursue their own projects, pleasures, visions, and ideas, we have seen the ballooning not even so much of the “service” sector as of the administrative sector, up to and including the creation of whole new industries like financial services or telemarketing, or the unprecedented expansion of sectors like corporate law, academic and health administration, human resources, and public relations.
And these numbers do not even reflect on all those people whose job is to provide administrative, technical, or security support for these industries, or for that matter the whole host of ancillary industries (dog-washers, all-night pizza deliverymen) that only exist because everyone else is spending so much of their time working in all the other ones.
These are what I propose to call “bullshit jobs.”
It’s as if someone were out there making up pointless jobs just for the sake of keeping us all working. And here, precisely, lies the mystery.
In capitalism, this is exactly what is not supposed to happen. Sure, in the old inefficient socialist states like the Soviet Union, where employment was considered both a right and a sacred duty, the system made up as many jobs as they had to (this is why in Soviet department stores it took three clerks to sell a piece of meat).
But, of course, this is the very sort of problem market competition is supposed to fix. According to economic theory, at least, the last thing a profit-seeking firm is going to do is shell out money to workers they don’t really need to employ. Still, somehow, it happens.
While corporations may engage in ruthless downsizing, the layoffs and speed-ups invariably fall on that class of people who are actually making, moving, fixing and maintaining things; through some strange alchemy no one can quite explain, the number of salaried paper-pushers ultimately seems to expand, and more and more employees find themselves, not unlike Soviet workers actually, working 40 or even 50 hour weeks on paper, but effectively working 15 hours just as Keynes predicted, since the rest of their time is spent organising or attending motivational seminars, updating their facebook profiles or downloading TV box-sets.
The answer clearly isn’t economic: it’s moral and political. The ruling class has figured out that a happy and productive population with free time on their hands is a mortal danger (think of what started to happen when this even began to be approximated in the ‘60s).
And, on the other hand, the feeling that work is a moral value in itself, and that anyone not willing to submit themselves to some kind of intense work discipline for most of their waking hours deserves nothing, is extraordinarily convenient for them.
Once, when contemplating the apparently endless growth of administrative responsibilities in British academic departments, I came up with one possible vision of hell. Hell is a collection of individuals who are spending the bulk of their time working on a task they don’t like and are not especially good at.
Say they were hired because they were excellent cabinet-makers, and then discover they are expected to spend a great deal of their time frying fish. Neither does the task really need to be done – at least, there’s only a very limited number of fish that need to be fried.
Yet somehow, they all become so obsessed with resentment at the thought that some of their co-workers might be spending more time making cabinets, and not doing their fair share of the fish-frying responsibilities, that before long there’s endless piles of useless badly cooked fish piling up all over the workshop and it’s all that anyone really does.
I think this is actually a pretty accurate description of the moral dynamics of our own economy.
Now, I realise any such argument is going to run into immediate objections:
“Who are you to say what jobs are really ‘necessary’? What’s necessary anyway? You’re an anthropology professor, what’s the ‘need’ for that?”
(And indeed a lot of tabloid readers would take the existence of my job as the very definition of wasteful social expenditure.)
And on one level, this is obviously true. There can be no objective measure of social value.
I would not presume to tell someone who is convinced they are making a meaningful contribution to the world that, really, they are not. But what about those people who are themselves convinced their jobs are meaningless? Not long ago I got back in touch with a school friend who I hadn’t seen since I was 12.
I was amazed to discover that in the interim, he had become first a poet, then the front man in an indie rock band. I’d heard some of his songs on the radio having no idea the singer was someone I actually knew. He was obviously brilliant, innovative, and his work had unquestionably brightened and improved the lives of people all over the world.
Yet, after a couple of unsuccessful albums, he’d lost his contract, and plagued with debts and a newborn daughter, ended up, as he put it, “taking the default choice of so many directionless folk: law school.”
Now he’s a corporate lawyer working in a prominent New York firm. He was the first to admit that his job was utterly meaningless, contributed nothing to the world, and, in his own estimation, should not really exist.
There’s a lot of questions one could ask here, starting with, what does it say about our society that it seems to generate an extremely limited demand for talented poet-musicians, but an apparently infinite demand for specialists in corporate law?
(Answer: if 1% of the population controls most of the disposable wealth, what we call “the market” reflects what they think is useful or important, not anybody else.)
But even more, it shows that most people in these jobs are ultimately aware of it. In fact, I’m not sure I’ve ever met a corporate lawyer who didn’t think their job was bullshit. The same goes for almost all the new industries outlined above.
There is a whole class of salaried professionals that, should you meet them at parties and admit that you do something that might be considered interesting (an anthropologist, for example), will want to avoid even discussing their line of work entirely.
Give them a few drinks, and they will launch into tirades about how pointless and stupid their job really is.
This is a profound psychological violence here. How can one even begin to speak of dignity in labour when one secretly feels one’s job should not exist? How can it not create a sense of deep rage and resentment.
Yet it is the peculiar genius of our society that its rulers have figured out a way, as in the case of the fish-fryers, to ensure that rage is directed precisely against those who actually do get to do meaningful work.
For instance: in our society, there seems a general rule that, the more obviously one’s work benefits other people, the less one is likely to be paid for it.
Again, an objective measure is hard to find, but one easy way to get a sense is to ask: what would happen were this entire class of people to simply disappear?
Say what you like about nurses, garbage collectors, or mechanics, it’s obvious that were they to vanish in a puff of smoke, the results would be immediate and catastrophic.
A world without teachers or dock-workers would soon be in trouble, and even one without science fiction writers or ska musicians would clearly be a lesser place.
It’s not entirely clear how humanity would suffer were all private equity CEOs, lobbyists, PR researchers, actuaries, telemarketers, bailiffs or legal consultants to similarly vanish. (Many suspect it might markedly improve.)
Yet apart from a handful of well-touted exceptions (doctors), the rule holds surprisingly well.
Even more perverse, there seems to be a broad sense that this is the way things should be. This is one of the secret strengths of right-wing populism.
You can see it when tabloids whip up resentment against tube workers for paralysing London during contract disputes: the very fact that tube workers can paralyse London shows that their work is actually necessary, but this seems to be precisely what annoys people.
It’s even clearer in the US, where Republicans have had remarkable success mobilizing resentment against school teachers, or auto workers (and not, significantly, against the school administrators or auto industry managers who actually cause the problems) for their supposedly bloated wages and benefits.
It’s as if they are being told “but you get to teach children! Or make cars! You get to have real jobs! And on top of that you have the nerve to also expect middle-class pensions and health care?”
If someone had designed a work regime perfectly suited to maintaining the power of finance capital, it’s hard to see how they could have done a better job.
Real, productive workers are relentlessly squeezed and exploited.
The remainder are divided between a terrorised stratum of the – universally reviled – unemployed and a larger stratum who are basically paid to do nothing, in positions designed to make them identify with the perspectives and sensibilities of the ruling class (managers, administrators, etc) – and particularly its financial avatars – but, at the same time, foster a simmering resentment against anyone whose work has clear and undeniable social value.
Clearly, the system was never consciously designed [actually you were right up until this statement]. It emerged from almost a century of trial and error. But it is the only explanation for why, despite our technological capacities, we are not all working 3-4 hour days.
Western Banks Crumble While Yuan Joins The IMF SDR Basket
October 5 2016 | From: Geopolitics The gradual Global Reset continues with the official inclusion of the Chinese Yuan (RMB) as prime alternative to the US dollar as global currency of exchange which should provide a smooth transition away from fiat dollar.
While this SDR inclusion was preannounced months ago, still the multiple investigations of fraudulent bank services, and the ongoing fall of the Big Banks suggest that the ongoing Global Reset will continue no matter the geopolitical noise, which are all part of the hybrid World War 3 being fought against the outgoing Nazionist Word Order.
Related: Bix Weir On Global Financial Collapse: It’s Happening, Right on Time When one considers the fact that the Chinese Yuan is backed with real, tangible hard assets, e.g. gold and industrial infrastructure, it would be very easy to say that the US dollar is doomed as it should be since its integrity and real value are nil at this point in time.
Yes, the Khazarian bankers can’t hide it anymore. They have a problem, a very big one, and they want to pass it on to the Western taxpayers, one more time.
Deutsche Bank Troubles Raise Fear of Global Shock
"Germany’s largest bank appears in danger, sending stock markets worldwide on a wild ride. Yet the biggest
source of worry is less about its finances than a vast tangle of unknowns - not least, whether Europe can muster the will to mount a rescue in the event of an emergency.
In short, fears that Europe lacks the cohesion to avoid a financial crisis may be enhancing the threat of one.
The immediate source of alarm is the health of Deutsche Bank, whose vast and sprawling operations, are entangled with the fates of investment houses from Tokyo to London to New York.
Deutsche is staring at a multibillion-dollar fine from the Justice Department for its enthusiastic participation in Wall Street’s festival of toxic mortgage products in the years leading up to financial crisis of 2008.
Given Deutsche’s myriad other troubles - a role in the manipulation of a financial benchmark, claims of trades that violated Russian sanctions and a generalized sense of confusion about its mission - the American pursuit of a stiff penalty comes at an inopportune time.
It heightens the sense that Deutsche - whose shares have lost more than half their value this year - needs to secure additional investment, lest it leave itself vulnerable to some new crisis."
- Deutsche Bank Troubles Raise Fear of Global Shock
Who will provide the additional investment if not the German people who will be forced to swallow a slew of legislated austerity measures later on?
But the bigger problem for the Banking Canal is: Deutsche bank is just one domino in the entire fraudulent fractional banking system that is visibly in turmoil, and it is expected to bring down the entire fiat financial system with it.
Why Deutsche Bank is Now the Biggest Worry in the Financial World
"Shares in Deutsche have lost more than half their value so far this year. The IMF hasn’t helped matters, saying in June that the bank is the greatest contributor to systemic risk in the world’s biggest lenders.
Q How is Deutsche Bank reacting?
A John Cryan, the Briton who became chief executive last summer, has set out a five-year restructuring plan that will cut about 15,000 of Deutsche’s 101,000-strong workforce. Its dividend has been suspended for two years, and Cryan expects to close dozens of overseas sites. It sold Abbey Life, its old portfolio of British life insurance products, for euros 1billion on Wednesday.
Q What else can the bank do?
A Rumours surfaced over the summer of a possible merger between Deutsche and Commerzbank, its biggest competitor, and more recently the idea of another multi-billion-euro rights issue has been floated. Again, these reports have been played down by the bank.
Deutsche also has the option to “switch off” regular coupon payments on its coco bonds, providing a small amount of breathing space. Analysts at Autonomous have also suggested that the bank could save euros 2.8billion by not paying staff bonuses."
However, the possible merger between Deutsche Bank and Commerzbank can only go as far as the next collapse…
Is Another German Bank in Trouble? Commerzbank to Cut 9,600 Jobs and Suspend Dividend
"Commerzbank, the second-biggest bank in Germany, has suspended its dividend and revealed more than 9,000 job losses as it tries to shore up its business in the face of ultra-low interest rates and sagging client activity.
The bank said its decision to cut almost one in five of its employees worldwide and merge two of its largest businesses will result in a €700m write-off and a loss for this quarter.
The bank’s Mittelstand division, seen as the engine room of Germany’s mid-sized corporate economy, will be combined with its corporate branch, while investment activity will be scaled back.
Commerzbank also warned that “ongoing weakness in the shipping markets” would push up its loan loss provisions in the coming months. The bank decided four years ago to exit the ship financing business but still has about €8bn on its books.
“We simply don’t earn enough money to lead the bank sustainably and successfully into the future. And this situation will get worse if we don’t do something about it,” chief executive Martin Zielke said in a draft note to employees, according to Reuters.
The bank will cease dividend payments “for the time being”, prompting analysts at RBC Capital Markets to scrap their forecasts for payments until at least 2018."
"ING Groep NV, the largest Netherlands lender, will announce thousands of job cuts at its investor day on Monday, Dutch newspaper Het Financieele Dagblad reported Friday, citing unidentified people with knowledge of the matter.
The reorganization will result in more central management and may generate billions of euros in savings, the paper said. Raymond Vermeulen, a spokesman for the Amsterdam-based bank, declined to comment on the report. The bank employs about 52,000 people, according to its website."
Stanford Endowment Joins Long List of College Funds Doing Poorly
"The Stanford University endowment posted a 0.4 percent loss on its investments for fiscal 2016, underperforming some large rivals but doing better than Harvard University’s 2.0 percent loss. The median return for foundations and endowments tracked by the Wilshire Trust Universe Comparison Service was negative 0.3 percent.
Harvard is the largest university endowment, with $35.7 billion in assets. Harvard president Drew Faust said the “disappointing” investment return would “constrain our budgets,’’ according to the Harvard Crimson.
Harvard Management Co. is seeking a new chief executive after the departure this summer of Stephen Blyth after a short, year-and-a-half stint. The endowment manager is under pressure to boost performance; Blyth had said it needed to produce at least a 5 percent return annually to meet its obligations to Harvard’s annual operating budget."
Reckoning Comes for U.S. Pension Funds as Investment Returns Lag
"The $1.9 trillion shortfall in U.S. state and local pension funds is poised to grow as near record-low bond yields and global stock-market turmoil reduce investment gains, increasing pressure on governments to put more money into the retirement systems.
With the Federal Reserve deciding to hold interest rates steady at its meeting Wednesday, the funds will continue to be squeezed by rock-bottom payouts on fixed-income securities just as stocks fall overseas and post only modest U.S. gains.
As a result, pensions in Illinois, Missouri and Hawaii this year have moved to roll back the assumed rate of return on their investments, joining the dozens that have taken that step over the past two years.
“There’s little light at the end of the tunnel as far as pension funding is concerned,” said Vikram Rai, head of municipal-bond strategy at Citigroup Inc. in New York.
“I expect funded ratios will drop further. It’ll require increased pension contributions on the part of the states and local government, but most state and local governments don’t have the ability to do so.”
This expanding financial time bomb is being exposed one more time with the US senate investigations on Wells Fargo’s highly deceptive sales strategies victimizing even its long-time customers.
Wells Fargo Problems Far From Over as Investigations and Lawsuits Expand
"Alex Polonsky was watching Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts lay into Wells Fargo’s chief executive, John Stumpf, on 20 September when he finally had enough.
He picked up the phone and called Jonathan Delshad, who would soon become his lawyer. Polonsky used to work for Wells Fargo, but according to his lawsuit, he was demoted and later terminated for not meeting his sales quotas.
The bank has recently come under scrutiny for such quotas after it was revealed that for years, thousands of its employees had been opening unauthorized accounts in order to meet them.
More than 2m such accounts were opened without customers’ permission and more than 5,300 Wells Fargo employees have been fired – with about 1,000 being dismissed each year over the past five years.
At the same time, employees like Polonsky were fired for not meeting their quotas."
Surely, the complete Western financial collapse will just be a matter of time, and contrary to some assertions, it’s not something that the Khazarian bankers are fretting much about.
They have already invested their loot in China, India and even in Russia. They have profited from every systemic shift which have happened before.
But unlike before, they will now have a two-pronged approach which assures their continued occupation of the Halls of Power in the West.
Aside from the simple transfer of financial assets to the “winning side” which they don’t have full control of anymore, they will also be using the event to install in the West what they have been eagerly egging on, and that is the full digitization of fiat currencies, and the full integration of European human resources into their quantum supercomputer AI-based economic system.
In order to effect this gigantic automated NWO plan, the United States has recently transferred its authority over the ICANN;
“A nonprofit organization that is responsible for coordinating the maintenance and procedures of several databases related to the namespaces of the Internet – thereby ensuring the network’s stable and secure operation...”
- to the United Nations, in addition to all measures already in the pipeline, e.g. drone squadron, surveillance mechanisms, armed police, etc.
This march towards Technocratic Dictatorship will continue unless the people in the US and Europe will take a decisive action against the PuppetMasters right in their own countries.
To make these regressive changes happen, the United Nations is already conditioning the minds of its subjects about “the 3rd leg of the global financial crisis – with prospect of epic debt defaults.”
UN Fears Third Leg of the Global Financial Crisis – With Prospect of Epic Debt Defaults
"The third leg of the world’s intractable depression is yet to come. If trade economists at the United Nations are right, the next traumatic episode may entail the greatest debt jubilee in history.
It may also prove to be the definitive crisis of globalized capitalism, the demise of the liberal free-market orthodoxies promoted for almost forty years by the Bretton Woods institutions, the OECD, and the Davos fraternity.
“Alarm bells have been ringing over the explosion of corporate debt levels in emerging economies, which now exceed $25 trillion. Damaging deflationary spirals cannot be ruled out,” said the annual report of the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD).
We know already that the poisonous side-effect of zero rates and quantitative easing in the US, Europe, and Japan was to flood developing nations with cheap credit, upsetting their internal chemistry and drawing them into a snare. What is less understood is just how destructive this has been.
Much of the money was wasted, skewed towards “highly cyclical and rent-based sectors of limited strategic importance for catching up,” it said.
Worse yet, these countries have imported the deformities of western finance before they are ready to cope with the consequences. This has undermined what UNCTAD calls the “profit-investment nexus” that ultimately drives growth and prosperity.
The extraordinary result is that some countries are slipping backwards, victims of “premature deindustrialisation”. Many of them have fallen further behind the rich world than they were in 1980 despite opening up their economies and following the global policy script diligently.
The middle income trap closed in on Latin America and the non-oil states of the Middle East a long time ago, but now it is beginning to close in such countries as Malaysia and Thailand, and in some respects China. “The benefits of a rushed integration into international financial markets post-2008 are fast evaporating,” it said.
If policymakers fail to mitigate the negative impacts of unchecked global market forces, then a turn to protectionism could trigger a vicious downward spiral for everyone.
… What is clear is that world will soon need a massive and coordinated spending push by governments to create demand and bring the broken global system back into equilibrium. UNCTAD is entirely right about that.
The key phrase of that article is “the next traumatic episode may entail the greatest debt jubilee in history” which may sound good until we realize that they are just resetting the same old fiat debt-based slavery system because the derivative bubble numbers are getting so large, it complicates the manipulations even more, much like they reset the calendar from BCE to CE, or AD, to hide those countless genocides that their bloodlines have committed thousands of years ago.
At the same time, and in addition to simplifying the whole corrosive system, what these economic gurus are trying to project is that economics and finance are so complicated, but the solution still lies within that same grossly defective monetary system of controlling resources.
There can never be anything better than this debt slavery quicksand in spite of the existence of exotic technologies that would render the whole economic system obsolete.
It must be known to all, that the progressive BRICS are not suppressing these same exotic technologies but are gradually raising global awareness to the fact, as some Russian scientists have already announced the discovery of an industrial method to produce any element, known and unknown, which runs counter to the economics of scarcity, at the press of a button.
China, for its part, is already manufacturing and selling HHO kits to increase the fuel efficiency of existing internal combustion engines, or eliminate the use of fossil fuels altogether.
A HHO system is basically a small device that uses electricity to release hydrogen based gas from water, called HHO, which is then directed into a vehicle’s air intake system. The “new air”, is enriched with hydrogen now – and it is highly explosive. This enriched air can now be mixed with less fuel in order to achieve the same explosive inside the engine. This is basically how HHO kits save fuel.
The dense fog of highly distractive lies and deceptions is covering both sides of the Atlantic. But here in Asia, the options are pretty clear, i.e. continued participation of the Globalist Empire, or the total separation through a parallel system of the BRICS Alliance’s New Silk Roads, CIPS bank transfer system, and a separate internet backbone.
But just like the Syrian crisis, the ultimate solution to the Western financial crisis is the total defeat of the Khazarian Criminal Syndicate which has full control of the Western governments, before the march towards global prosperity can commence in earnest.
$40 Billion US In Aid To Israel: For Whom And For What? + Documentary Reveals How Israel Convinces Americans: “Palestine Occupies Israel”
October 4 2016 | From: Sott / GlobalResearch / Various Recently, the United States just renewed military aid to Israel in a decade-long, $38 billion deal - the largest of its kind in American history.
It represents a significant increase in aid, roughly $3.8 billion a year - expected to be supplemented by additional assistance through US Congress - up from $3 billion per year previously.
The Atlantic in an article titled, Why Does the United States Give So Much Money to Israel?, attempted to explain the reasoning behind the otherwise unreasonable and unprecedented assistance by claiming:
“Defenders of the deal would say it's necessary. Dalton described the uptick in spending as a natural extension of the long-standing relationship between the United States and Israel, "as well as close ties between those countries and their peoples."
She described the "fraught neighborhood" surrounding Israel: war-torn Syria to the northeast, Hezbollah-influenced Lebanon to the north, and an Islamist insurgency in Egypt's Sinai to the south, all of which help explain the historically high promise of $5 billion in missile funding over the next 10 years."
However, experienced geopolitical analysts will point out that the United States does not have "friends," "allies," or "relationships" - only interests and those who serve them.
And while The Atlantic attempts to explain the deal as a means of maintaining a "relationship," it and other publications admit that there are "strings attached." If examined carefully, these strings reveals just what interests this supposed "relationship" serves.
CNBC would say just that in its article, Big US military aid package to Israel has strings attached, claiming:
“...it's structured so that more Israeli defense spending goes to U.S. companies. Israel's long-standing special arrangement for funds from the United States previously allowed Israel to spend 26 percent of the money in Israel - on Israeli-made defense products. But that provision is being phased out over the first five years of the deal."
In other words, the ten year, $38 billion aid package is first and foremost welfare for US defense contractors, not Israel whose own defense spending adds up to $16 billion per year - dwarfing annual US "aid." The deal is to encourage further Israeli dependency on America - dependency that lends Washington further leverage over both Israel and the region.
The purpose of aid and those who have arranged it on both the Israeli and American sides of the negotiating table is to continue directing Israel's domestic and foreign policy to suit America's interests, not the Israeli people's.
An Israel at peace with its neighbors in a stable Middle East and North Africa is an Israel that negates the supposed need of a US presence in the region. It also negates the need for such extravagant defense spending in both Israel and the United States.
CNBC would also reveal that the new assistance package would include provisions making it difficult for Israel to lobby for additional spending unless war broke out.
Considering the track record of various Israeli regimes, does one suppose this is an incentive for Israel to avoid conflict, or actively seek it out?
In every way the aid deal is meant to perpetuate unpopular regimes, unpopular and inhumane policies, as well as perpetuate conflict and human misery.
The role the US plays in "stabilizing" the Middle East is revealed instead as a constant conspiracy to overturn it.
US, Israel, and Saudi Arabia - Trifecta of Conflict and Instability
The only other nation in the Middle East sowing as much conflict and instability as Israel's current regime is Saudi Arabia. It has flooded Iraq and Syria with militant groups triggering years of devastating war as well as directly launched an extensive air and ground war against neighboring Yemen.
Saudi Arabia - like Israel - is the recipient of extensive US backing. While the US made history by granting Israel unprecedented foreign aid, it sealed with Saudi Arabia recently an equally historic and unprecedented weapons deal amounting to some $60 billion - a single deal significantly larger than the 10 year aid package the US is providing Israel.
Israel's Haaretz would report in its article, U.S. Announces $60b Arms Sale to Saudi Arabia, Says 'Israel Doesn't Object', that:
“The United States plans to sell up to $60 billion worth of military aircraft to Saudi Arabia, the U.S. State Department announced on Wednesday in a move designed to shore up a region overshadowed by Iran.
Andrew Shapiro, the assistant secretary of state for political-military affairs, told a news conference the U.S. administration did not anticipate any objections to the sale from Israel, traditionally wary of arms sales to nearby Arab countries."
Indeed, Israel does not object to US weapon deals with Saudi Arabia. Despite feigned adversity between the two regimes, the governments of Israel and Saudi Arabia work in tandem toward a singular regional vision with very few points of contention and with the common denominator being the way each nation's role enhances their joint sponsor - the United States - and its hegemony over the region.
It is then not surprising to see US-funded Israeli forces defending Saudi subsidized terrorists on the Golan Heights coordinating violence against Syrian forces throughout the destructive, ongoing Syrian conflict.
Unlike Saudi Arabia, which does not exist as a functioning legitimate nation-state beyond its petrodollars and its US-backed military power, Israel does possess the economic infrastructure and human capital to transition into a functioning, independent nation-state - if only its population can overcome the engineered strategy of tension that has ensnared it for decades and the regime behind it.
The United States' $38 billion is to ensure that regime remains in power for another 10 years, the strategy of tension continues to play out, and the Israeli people, as well as their neighbors are denied any opportunity to live in peace and move forward in progress for another decade to come.
Rather than underwriting Israel's security for the next decade, the US is ensuring Israel struggles under another 10 years of uncertainty, perpetually impending war, all while its regime continues to partner with neighboring regimes - including Saudi Arabia and Turkey - to undermine regional stability and further threaten the future of the Israeli people and the survival of the Israeli nation.
The Israeli regime's signing of yet another compromising, dependency-inducing aid package with the United States is proof once again that Israel's own government constitutes the Israeli nation's worst enemy.
Comment: Perhaps Israel has been given too little credit here for its manipulative controls, global infiltration and concentration of pathocracy.
Documentary Reveals How Israel Convinces Americans: “Palestine Occupies Israel”
In this episode of ‘Behind the Headline,’ host Mint Press Mnar Muhawesh meets Sut Jhally, an expert on media manipulation and propaganda. In the film ‘The Occupation of the American Mind,’ Jhally and others examine how high-paid spin doctors control the media message on Israel.
Following the Holocaust, the world community - led by the United States and Britain - sought to create a European Jewish-only state.
This humanitarian move, though, utterly failed in respecting the humanity of the land’s indigenous inhabitants - Christian and Muslim Palestinians.
Starting in December of 1947, their land and property was seized and destroyed to make way for the state of Israel, where white only European Jews would live . Over 750,000 Palestinians were expelled and over 10,000 were killed by the British and US armed Zionist militias, and later Israeli forces, during the Nakba, an Arabic word meaning “catastrophe.”
Those expelled by the Nakba and their Palestinian descendants who make up the world’s largest refugee population in the world are not allowed to return to their land.
That’s because the mainstream, corporate-owned media continues to spin a propaganda wheel that dehumanizes Palestinians and paints Israel as a beacon of democracy.
Meanwhile, special interest groups like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, buy their way into the hearts and minds of our elected officials. Ever wonder why Israel gets $3 billion in annual military funding from Uncle Sam? Connect the dots from the campaign contributions to the spending bills.
There’s a lot riding on our relationship with Israel: Apart from serving as a proxy for U.S. relations in the Middle East and Africa, Israel is America’s second-top destination for arms exports. Yep - the country’s that’s no bigger than the state of New Jersey is basically a black check for the military-industrial complex.
But not all Americans are on board with the notion of Israel as the victim of Palestinian oppression.
A new documentary, “The Occupation of the American Mind,” brings attention to how Israel’s public relations campaign has successfully manipulated the narrative of the Israel-Palestine conflict — in that, it’s not a conflict at all but a matter of modern-day colonialism, ethnic cleansing and apartheid.
Today I’m joined by Sut Jhally, executive producer of “The Occupation of the American Mind” and a professor of communication at the University of Massachusetts. The film was produced, written and directed by Loretta Alper and Jeremy Earp.
I asked Jhally to explain how Americans are being kept in the dark about Palestine, and how that prevents a mass movement against Israeli apartheid from forming in the U.S.
Learn more about the US war in Afghanistan fueling the worldwide heroin crisis, and Israel’s occupation of American minds:
What’s Happening Outside Keenan’s Reach - The Illegal Casinos Are Closing Down
October 3 2016 | From: Farouk Currently the global Stock Market capitalization stands about USD 69 Trillion, with an average daily turnover of around USD 190 Billion. The size of the international Bond Markets in outstanding issues is USD 140 Trillion and with daily trading volumes around USD 700 Billion.
Global Currency Trading dwarfs Stock and Bond Markets with an estimated turnover of USD 5.3 Trillion DAILY. And as this is essentially an unregulated market based on “pair swaps” (one currency swapped for another) it is impossible to estimate actual annual turnover and market capitalization.
The global Derivatives Market is another unregulated financial hedge market with an essentially an unknown number of bets being placed on any number of hedging situations associated with Stock, Bond, Commodity and/or Currency Market conditions. Global Derivative market size estimates vary between USD 800 Trillion to over USD 4-6 Quadrillion in outstanding bets most of which are backed by NOTHING.
And to all this can be added Commodity Exchanges, Credit Card Companies and interlocking International Corporations in various major economic sectors.
All of these markets are simple gambling operations. They produce virtually nothing except BETS in poorly or un-regulated markets dominated by Central Banks, major international banks, large hedge funds and trusts, pension funds and insurance companies who automatically trade using computer algorithms and direct collusions between these main traders resulting in price fixing scams.
There is no real “Free Market Trading”.
It is all “rigged”.
What would happen if all that daily traded money were to be spent on real productive development?
OH! I can hear the screams from Wall Street! “WE NEED FREE TRADING MARKETS!”
1,001 Excuses will come. Rats trying to save their sinking ship and their cushy jobs that produce nothing. Most of these shysters have never run a productive business and cannot see beyond their adrenalin gambling addictions and money playpens.
It is clear that the World is transitioning from the “Debt Slavery Model” to a newer paradigm of more equitable balancing of financial wealth, particularly within the Middle Class populations that are the productive backbone of all economies.
This will result in a reduction of funds flowing into gambling markets and an increase in funding real projects that produce real things.
We do not expect these global markets to close completely, except for Currency and Derivative Markets, but merely down-size their trading activities by channeling funds to productive or new investment opportunities and because currencies will be asset (GOLD) backed in accordance with the Paris Accords.
Stock Markets that have been FIAT INFLATED by Central Banks and the FED will have to fall as stocks and companies they represent will fall back to historic and real value levels.
Expect 50+% drops in US, European and Japanese stocks as a direct result of real revaluation and a major decline in bank liquidity to these markets resulting in margin calls and further downward pressures.
Bond markets will also fall because of the lack of market liquidity and corporate revaluations but will rebound with higher interest rates. Underwriting for new issues will be difficult but due to a lack of new issues, those that do get underwritten will enjoy higher margins and increased market demand. New Bonds may face a Seller’s Market if they can find underwriters.
The derivatives market is, in a word, gigantic, often estimated at more that $1.2 quadrillion. Some market analysts estimate the derivatives market at more than 10 times the size of the total world gross domestic product, or GDP. The reason the derivatives market is so large is because there are numerous derivatives available on virtually every possible type of investment asset, including equities, commodities, bonds and foreign currency exchange.
We do advocate closing down the Derivative Markets entirely as these produce only hedge bets currently far beyond the Global GDP and thus are absolutely un-recoverable. This is clearly bringing down the “Too Big To Bailout” Banks like Deutsche Bank who will collapse the entire derivatives market, not “IF”, but “When” it goes into receivership or financial restructuring.
Similarly, Currency Markets will be totally unnecessary once a country’s currency is gold backed and issues are pegged to that value or to the value of a single international reserve currency (International Trade Dollars issued by a new International Central Clearing Bank).
Currency Pegging eliminates trading margins and the ability of major financial players from influencing currency price movements. Gold and real asset backing together with internationally agreed currency revaluation rates essentially freezes exchange rates.
What these financial market changes will do is to release TRILLIONS in capital investments into real development projects globally.
This will sprout new industries in renewable and free energy, electric autonomous vehicles, vertical farming, sea ranching, cities in the sea, and advances in AI and virtual reality networking. These and many more are known technologies that just have yet to be fully financed. All that is about to change.
Generally through various financial redistribution programs and the Golden Dragon Family’s gold backing of all currencies, there will be a financial re-saturation of the Middle Class on a global basis.
Not everyone will be rich all of a sudden, but wealth dispersion at all lower levels will be gradually accomplished. Happy Days ahead for most of humanity.
Happy Days will not be coming to many Governments though. These governments will be kicked out as they were part of the primary cause for the raping of the middle classes through ever increasing taxation and over-spending.
The announcement of the US returning to its REPUBLiC roots will be the harbinger call for global political reform.
Neil Keenan is a very important pin prick in this Western Financial Fiat Bubble. His and his team’s efforts to reclaim control over the Global Collateral Accounts are fundamentally altering the Western Banking World by financially restructuring the underlying assets that the Western Banking is based on.
Before the ink dried on the Bretton Woods Agreement, the Western Banksters were already stealing and illegally using these account funds, legally negating and voiding the Agreement and any subsequently related agreements. The theft and abuse of these GCA’s is well documented, thus a day in Court can never be avoided (and that is coming soon).
Neil’s organizing the first BRICS boat trip has forever altered the financial World. A whole new financial structure has quickly emerged that almost all the countries of the World have now signed onto the BRICS Group, AIIB and its secure financial transfer network.
All countries are now well prepared for the gold backed RV’s and GCR’s that are to follow shortly.
Neil still has some unfinished business to attend to with officially taking charge of the Global Collateral Accounts (GCA).
That has been made much easier with the pending final ratification of the Paris Accords that now launches the global gold and asset backed currencies, RV’s and GCR’s as this causes a mandatory compliance and the abandonment of issuing fiat currencies.
The next step for Neil is to secure the GCA’s which is basically a legal battle of house cleaning with the FED, Bank of England, Bank of International Settlements, the top Swiss Banks and the rest of the European Banks and financial services organizations that have been illegally and fraudulently feeding at this financial trough for the past 50-years.
If there has ever been a bigger ball of string to unwind, this one takes top spot.
Neil’s job is not to pull the financial underpinnings out from under the Western financial empire, but is more to place the ownership of these financial institutions into the proper hands of those depositors whose money actually funded these institutions through the GCA’s.
This will most likely be some serious negotiations concerning transfers of ownership from those who illegally and fraudulent.
US Dollar Disaster Looms? China And Russian Currencies Break Away October 2 2016 | From: TheDailyBell / Various
Russia leaves the Dollar based monetary system and adopts a system of Sovereign Currency. The implications are phenomenal! “In 1990 the first priority of Washington and the IMF was to pressure Yeltsin and the Duma to “privatize” the State Bank of Russia, under a Constitutional amendment that mandated the new Central Bank of Russia, like the Federal Reserve or European Central Bank, be a purely monetarist entity whose only mandate is to control inflation and stabilize the Ruble. In effect, money creation in Russia was removed from state sovereignty and tied to the US dollar.”
Comment: Insiders report that the Cabal in the US is planning on dropping the US Dollar but before that they must have control over much of the gold in the Global Collateral Accounts, however this is not going to be allowed to happen.
2016: "The Stolypin club report advises to increase the investment, pumping up the economy with money from the state budget and by the issue of the Bank of Russia”. Putin decided to follow the Stolypin club advice as the new monetary policy of the country.
Money is changing fast and the US dollar is going to crash.
Here’s an excerpt from yet another recently published article (translated from the Russian) describing how the ruble may now evolve (here).
“We must nationalize the ruble. What does it mean? It means that we must separate the internal markets from the external ones.
… Thus, the first step for Russia is secession from the IMF and others similar institutions designed to keep the entire world in bondage. The dollar noose must be cut.
Now the amount of printed rubles will not be determined by how many dollars we have but by the actual needs of our economy.
… We have absolutely no need in the central bank in its current form, but we do need a financial regular.
Under any regime, it was the Treasury that performed this function. Let it remain the same now regardless of the official name. It may continue to be called the Central Bank. If the essence is changed, there is no need in changing plaques."
You can also see an article (here) that goes into this issue more deeply and claims that Putin has in mind backing a portion of the ruble with gold as well. (We should note there are claims the ruble is backed by gold already.)
The dramatic – historical – Russian currency changes (if these articles are accurate) seem a little difficult to discern in full at this moment, but obviously things are changing fast. And they are changing for China’s “money” as well. In fact, some have speculated China and Russia could launch a joint, gold-backed currency (here, see bottom of article).
At the beginning of October, the yuan joins the IMF’s SDR basket (here). This means that major international institutions can issue bonds payable in yuan (actually RMB, the Chinese external currency).
And that is just what has happened already. The World Bank is issuing a large yuan/RMB tranche and this will be the first of many (here).
Investors who want to place funds in RMB rather than dollars will use the new yuan/RMB-based instruments. The US will continue to print dollars but those dollars may not find a home abroad so easily. Instead they may circulate back into the US economy creating significant price inflation.
The US was able to do so much damage domestically and abroad because of its virtually unlimited spending power. It’s been able to prosecute endless, horrible wars and imprison up to five percent of its adult population at any one time.
Now things are changing. Between the Russian announcement and yuan/RMB convertibility, the US will gradually have more trouble printing money at will. Perhaps the corrupt military-industrial complex will be impelled to shrink and large-scale social programs like the wretched Obamacare will have more difficulty with funding as well.
We are well aware that the same banking influences that created the monstrous, modern state is ruining US and the West generally in order to build up a more febrile internationalism.
It seems natural, of course, as “directed history”always does. But it is not natural in the slightest. From what we can tell, it is pre-planned.
Remember both the IMF and the World Bank are controlled by the US. And yet it is these two organizations that are facilitating the rise of the yuan/RMB.
[Important Point: "Pre-planned" does not always mean by the Cabal, nor that if it was the Cabal who pre-planned it, that it will go their way - as numerous insiders will attest.]
Also, please pay attention to how Russia will issue rubles into the economic system (from the same translated article we quoted previously):
“How can we calculate [how many rubles Russia needs]? In exactly the same way as the United States calculates the amount of dollars needed for its economy. Just as the European Union does the same.
The best justification would be that from now on Russia issues rubles based on the value (in rubles) of all natural resources explored on its territory. It is quite amusing that subsequent steps are no rocket science; they are dictated by common sense itself. Since we are breaking down the disadvantageous system."
Putin may be taking a big step, but by circumventing his central bank (initially imposed by the West) he can be seen as moving toward more state control of Russian currency.
And for years, we have debated heatedly with people like Ellen Brown (here) who believe that federal governments can do a much better job of printing money than quasi-independent central banks. Good Lord! What’s wrong with a little monetary freedom?
All Putin has to do if he wants a healthy currency is declare that the new ruble will be backed by gold and that its issuance will be a private or regional matter.
Let a thousand gold mines bloom. Let the circulation of gold and its related paper notes travel up or down depending on quantity and demand – not the determinations of yet another shadowy, elite clique.
This is the way the US ran before the Civil War and created one of the world’s most prosperous and freest cultures. Those in the US live yet on the dregs of that “golden” period.
But this is not well understood. As time goes on the often-illiterate alternative media may join in hosannas for Putin’s upcoming currency shift. But, again, just because “Russia” will now control its currency instead of a central bank reporting to the IMF, doesn’t necessarily create a better system.
Of course, the argument will be made this sort of system is what Hitler installed in Nazi Germany in order to create the German “miracle” of the 1930s (which we are supposedly not able to talk about). But that system might have destroyed itself over time. Surely it would have.
To begin with, such systems may work very well. But since the “money” is being created by human deciders rather than the competitive market, distortions are inevitable. Price-fixing, which is what it is, never works.
And while we are making the point that this newfound ruble freedom may not be so profound as advertised, let us note that the advent of a currency war is being accompanied by military tension as well.
Conclusion: Whether such tensions are legitimate or dramatized is difficult to say. But given elite banking control of so much around the world, we would not be surprised if we are simply being exposed to a gigantic performance of sorts directed from the top down.Ironically, despite apparent “setbacks,” London’s City surely leads the way.
Related: Stocks jump, euro edges up as Deutsche Bank rebounds
Red Cross Built Exactly 6 Homes For Haiti With Nearly Half A Billion Dollars In Donations
October 1 2016 | From: Propublica / Various
The neighborhood of Campeche sprawls up a steep hillside in Haiti’s capital city, Port-au-Prince. Goats rustle in trash that goes forever uncollected. Children kick a deflated volleyball in a dusty lot below a wall with a hand-painted logo of the American Red Cross.
In late 2011, the Red Cross launched a multimillion-dollar project to transform the desperately poor area, which was hit hard by the earthquake that struck Haiti the year before. The main focus of the project — called LAMIKA, an acronym in Creole for “A Better Life in My Neighborhood” — was building hundreds of permanent homes.
Today, not one home has been built in Campeche. Many residents live in shacks made of rusty sheet metal, without access to drinkable water, electricity or basic sanitation. When it rains, their homes flood and residents bail out mud and water.
The Red Cross received an outpouring of donations after the quake, nearly half a billion dollars.
The group has publicly celebrated its work. But in fact, the Red Cross has repeatedly failed on the ground in Haiti. Confidential memos, emails from worried top officers, and accounts of a dozen frustrated and disappointed insiders show the charity has broken promises, squandered donations, and made dubious claims of success.
The Red Cross says it has provided homes to more than 130,000 people. But the actual number of permanent homes the group has built in all of Haiti: six.
After the earthquake, Red Cross CEO Gail McGovern unveiled ambitious plans to “develop brand-new communities.” None has ever been built.
Haitians outside a Red Cross field hospital in Carrefour, Haiti, on Dec. 14, 2010, 11 months after a magnitude 7.0 earthquake hit the country's capital, Port-au-Prince
Aid organizations from around the world have struggled after the earthquake in Haiti, the Western Hemisphere’s poorest country. But ProPublica and NPR’s investigation shows that many of the Red Cross’s failings in Haiti are of its own making.
They are also part of a larger pattern in which the organization has botched delivery of aid after disasters such as Superstorm Sandy. Despite its difficulties, the Red Cross remains the charityof choice for ordinary Americans and corporations alike after natural disasters.
One issue that has hindered the Red Cross’ work in Haiti is an overreliance on foreigners who could not speak French or Creole, current and former employees say.
In a blistering 2011 memo, the then-director of the Haiti program, Judith St. Fort, wrote that the group was failing in Haiti and that senior managers had made “very disturbing” remarks disparaging Haitian employees. St. Fort, who is Haitian American, wrote that the comments included, “he is the only hard working one among them” and “the ones that we have hired are not strong so we probably should not pay close attention to Haitian CVs.”
The Red Cross won’t disclose details of how it has spent the hundreds of millions of dollars donated for Haiti. But our reporting shows that less money reached those in need than the Red Cross has said.
Where did the half billion raised for Haiti go? The Red Cross won’t say.
Lacking the expertise to mount its own projects, the Red Cross ended up giving much of the money to other groups to do the work. Those groups took out a piece of every dollar to cover overhead and management. Even on the projects done by others, the Red Cross had its own significant expenses – in one case, adding up to a third of the project’s budget.
In statements, the Red Cross cited the challenges all groups have faced in post-quake Haiti, including the country’s dysfunctional land title system.
“Like many humanitarian organizations responding in Haiti, the American Red Cross met complications in relation to government coordination delays, disputes over land ownership, delays at Haitian customs, challenges finding qualified staff who were in short supply and high demand, and the cholera outbreak, among other challenges,” the charity said.
The group said it responded quickly to internal concerns, including hiring an expert to train staff on cultural competency after St. Fort’s memo.
Minouche Lamour, a member of the Community Platform for Development in Campeche, says she doesn't see how millions of dollars from the Red Cross could have been spent in her neighborhood
While the group won’t provide a breakdown of its projects, the Red Cross said it has done more than 100. The projects include repairing 4,000 homes, giving several thousand families temporary shelters, donating $44 million for food after the earthquake, and helping fund the construction of a hospital.
"Millions of Haitians are safer, healthier, more resilient, and better prepared for future disasters thanks to generous donations to the American Red Cross,” McGovern wrote in a recent report marking the fifth anniversary of the earthquake."
In other promotional materials, the Red Cross said it has helped “more than 4.5 million” individual Haitians “get back on their feet.”
Oops. Busted - The Order of St. John; a secret society under deep cover - hidden in plain sight, a classic esoteric 'laughing at the goyim who are too stupid to see' hallmark. Compare the St. John logo with the flag above. St. John is admittedly run by The Knights of Malta. Similarly, Red Cross has it's origins in the esoteric and was influenced by John D Rockefe;ler. While the Freemasons are lees inclined to admit their stewardship directly. Charities? Throw your money away if you like. It is quite well known nowadays that most of the money given to charity organisations never get's to where it was intended. Those pulling the strings simply play on peoples good nature
For those interested in the occult history of the Red Cross see: The Knights Templar
It has not provided details to back up the claim. And Jean-Max Bellerive, Haiti’s prime minister at the time of the earthquake, doubts the figure, pointing out the country’s entire population is only about 10 million.
"No, no,” Bellerive said of the Red Cross’ claim, “it’s not possible.”
When the earthquake struck Haiti in January 2010, the Red Cross was facing a crisis of its own. McGovern had become chief executive just 18 months earlier, inheriting a deficit and an organization that had faced scandals after 9/11 and Katrina.
Gail McGovern
Inside the Red Cross, the Haiti disaster was seen as “a spectacular fundraising opportunity,” recalled one former official who helped organize the effort. Michelle Obama, the NFL and a long list of celebrities appealed for donations to the group.
The Red Cross kept soliciting money well after it had enough for the emergency relief that is the group’s stock in trade. Doctors Without Borders, in contrast, stopped fundraising off the earthquake after it decided it had enough money. The donations to the Red Cross helped the group erase its more-than $100 million deficit.
The Red Cross ultimately raised far more than any other charity.
A year after the quake, McGovern announced that the Red Cross would use the donations to make a lasting impact in Haiti.
We asked the Red Cross to show us around its projects in Haiti so we could see the results of its work. It declined. So earlier this year we went to Campeche to see one of the group’s signature projects for ourselves.
Street vendors in the dusty neighborhood immediately pointed us to Jean Jean Flaubert, the head of a community group that the Red Cross set up as a local sounding board.
Sitting with us in their sparse one-room office, Flaubert and his colleagues grew angry talking about the Red Cross. They pointed to the lack of progress in the neighborhood and the healthy salaries paid to expatriate aid workers.
"What the Red Cross told us is that they are coming here to change Campeche. Totally change it,” said Flaubert.
“Now I do not understand the change that they are talking about. I think the Red Cross is working for themselves.”
The Red Cross’ initial plan said the focus would be building homes — an internal proposal put the number at 700. Each would have finished floors, toilets, showers, even rainwater collection systems. The houses were supposed to be finished in January 2013.
The Red Cross promised to build hundreds of new homes in Campeche but none have been built. Many residents still live in crude shacks. (Marie Arago, special to ProPublica)
None of that ever happened. Carline Noailles, who was the project’s manager in Washington, said it was endlessly delayed because the Red Cross “didn’t have the know-how.”
Another former official who worked on the Campeche project said, “Everything takes four times as long because it would be micromanaged from DC, and they had no development experience.”
Shown an English-language press release from the Red Cross website, Flaubert was stunned to learn of the project’s $24 million budget — and that it is due to end next year.
"Not only is [the Red Cross] not doing it,” Flaubert said, “now I’m learning that the Red Cross is leaving next year. I don’t understand that.”
(The Red Cross says it did tell community leaders about the end date. It also accused us of “creating ill will in the community which may give rise to a security incident.”)
The project has since been reshaped and downscaled. A road is being built. Some existing homes have received earthquake reinforcement and a few schools are being repaired. Some solar street lights have been installed, though many broke and residents say others are unreliable.
The group’s most recent press release on the project cites achievements such as training school children in disaster response.
The Red Cross said it has to scale back its housing plans because it couldn’t acquire the rights to land. No homes will be built.
Other Red Cross infrastructure projects also fizzled.
In January 2011, McGovern announced a $30 million partnership with the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID. The agency would build roads and other infrastructure in at least two locations where the Red Cross would build new homes.
But it took more than two and a half years, until August 2013, for the Red Cross just to sign an agreement with USAID on the program, and even that was for only one site. The program was ultimately canceled because of a land dispute.
A Government Accountability Office report attributed the severe delays to problems “in securing land title and because of turnover in Red Cross leadership” in its Haiti program.
Other groups also ran into trouble with land titles and other issues. But they also ultimately built 9,000 homes compared to the Red Cross’ six.
Asked about the Red Cross’ housing projects in Haiti, David Meltzer, the group’s general counsel and chief international officer, said changing conditions forced changes in plans. “If we had said, ‘All we’re going to do is build new homes,’ we’d still be looking for land,” he said.
The USAID project’s collapse left the Red Cross grasping for ways to spend money earmarked for it.
"Any ideas on how to spend the rest of this?? (Besides the wonderful helicopter idea?),” McGovern wrote to Meltzer in a November 2013 email obtained by ProPublica and NPR.
“Can we fund Conrad’s hospital? Or more to PiH[Partners in Health]? Any more shelter projects?”
Jean Jean Flaubert says the Red Cross promised to transform his neighborhood. “Now I do not understand the change that they are talking about,” he said. (Marie Arago, special to ProPublica)
It’s not clear what helicopter idea McGovern was referring to or if it was ever carried out. The Red Cross would say only that her comments were “grounded in the American Red Cross’ strategy and priorities, which focus on health and housing.”
Another signature project, known in Creole as “A More Resilient Great North,” is supposed to rehabilitate roads in poor, rural communities and to help them get clean water and sanitation.
But two years after it started, the $13 million effort has been faltering badly. An internal evaluation from March found residents were upset because nothing had been done to improve water access or infrastructure or to make “contributions of any sort to the well being of households,” the report said.
The Red Cross says 91% of donations went to help Haitians. That’s not true.
So much bad feeling built up in one area that the population “rejects the project.”
Instead of making concrete improvements to living conditions, the Red Cross has launched hand-washing education campaigns. The internal evaluation noted that these were “not effective when people had no access to water and no soap.” (The Red Cross declined to comment on the project.)
The group’s failures went beyond just infrastructure.
When a cholera epidemic raged through Haiti nine months after the quake, the biggest part of the Red Cross’ response — a plan to distribute soap and oral rehydration salts — was crippled by “internal issues that go unaddressed,” wrote the director of the Haiti program in her May 2011 memo.
Throughout that year, cholera was a steady killer. By September 2011, when the death toll had surpassed 6,000, the project was still listed as “very behind schedule” according to another internal document.
The Red Cross said in a statement that its cholera response, including a vaccination campaign, has continued for years and helped millions of Haitians.
But while other groups also struggled early responding to cholera, some performed well.
"None of these people had to die. That’s what upsets me,” said Paul Christian Namphy, a Haitian water and sanitation official who helped lead the effort to fight cholera. He says early failures by the Red Cross and other NGOs had a devastating impact.
“These numbers should have been zero.”
So why did the Red Cross’ efforts fall so short? It wasn’t just that Haiti is a hard place to work.
"They collected nearly half a billion dollars,” said a congressional staffer who helped oversee Haiti reconstruction.
“But they had a problem. And the problem was that they had absolutely no expertise.”
Lee Malany was in charge of the Red Cross’ shelter program in Haiti starting in 2010.
He remembers a meeting in Washington that fall where officials did not seem to have any idea how to spend millions of dollars set aside for housing. Malany says the officials wanted to know which projects would generate good publicity, not which projects would provide the most homes.
"When I walked out of that meeting I looked at the people that I was working with and said, ‘You know this is very disconcerting, this is depressing,’” he recalled.
The Red Cross said in a statement its Haiti program has never put publicity over delivering aid.
Malany resigned the next year from his job in Haiti.
"I said there’s no reason for me to stay here. I got on the plane and left.”
Transitional shelters like these on the outskirts of Port-Au-Prince, paid for by the Red Cross, typically last three to five years.
Sometimes it wasn’t a matter of expertise, but whether anybody was filling key jobs. An April 2012 organizational chart obtained by ProPublica and NPR lists 9 of 30 leadership positions in Haiti as vacant, including slots for experts on health and shelter.
The Red Cross said vacancies and turnover were inevitable because of “the security situation, separation from family for international staff, and the demanding nature of the work.”
The constant upheaval took a toll. Internal documents refer to repeated attempts over years to “finalize” and “complete” a strategic plan for the Haiti program, efforts that were delayed by changes in senior management. As late as March 2014, more than four years into a six-year program, an internal update cites a “revised strategy” still awaiting “final sign-off.”
The Red Cross says it provided homes to more than 130,000 Haitians. But they didn’t.
The Red Cross said settling on a plan early would have been a mistake. “It would be hard to create the perfect plan from the beginning in a complicated place like Haiti,” it said. “But we also need to begin, so we create plans that are continually revised.”
Those plans were further undermined by the Red Cross’ reliance on expats. Noailles, the Haitian development professional who worked for the Red Cross on the Campeche project, said expat staffers struggled in meetings with local officials.
"Going to meetings with the community when you don’t speak the language is not productive,” she said. "Sometimes, she recalled, expat staffers would skip such meetings altogether.
The Red Cross said it has “made it a priority to hire Haitians” despite lots of competition for local professionals, and that over 90 percent of its staff is Haitian. The charity said it used a local human resources firm to help.
Yet very few Haitians have made it into the group’s top echelons in Haiti, according to five current and former Red Cross staffers as well as staff lists obtained by ProPublica and NPR.
That not only affected the group’s ability to work in Haiti, it was also expensive.
According to an internal Red Cross budgeting document for the project in Campeche, the project manager – a position reserved for an expatriate – was entitled to allowances for housing, food and other expenses, home leave trips, R&R four times a year, and relocation expenses. In all, it added up to $140,000.
Compensation for a senior Haitian engineer — the top local position — was less than one-third of that, $42,000 a year.
Shelim Dorval, a Haitian administrator who worked for the Red Cross coordinating travel and housing for expatriate staffers, recalled thinking it was a waste to spend so much to bring in people with little knowledge of Haiti when locals were available.
"For each one of those expats, they were having high salaries, staying in a fancy house, and getting vacation trips back to their countries,” Dorval said.
“A lot of money was spent on those people who were not Haitian, who had nothing to do with Haiti. The money was just going back to the United States.”
Soon after the earthquake, McGovern, the Red Cross CEO, said the group would make sure donors knew exactly what happened to their money.
The Red Cross would “lead the effort in transparency,” she pledged. “We are happy to share the way we are spending our dollars.”
That hasn’t happened. The Red Cross’ public reports offer only broad categories about where $488 million in donations has gone. The biggest category is shelter, at about $170 million. The others include health, emergency relief and disaster preparedness.
After the earthquake, Red Cross CEO Gail McGovern unveiled plans to “develop brand-new communities.” None has ever been built.
It has declined repeated requests to disclose the specific projects, to explain how much money went to each or to say what the results of each project were.There is reason to doubt the Red Cross’ claims that it helped 4.5 million Haitians.
In other cases, the figures were low, and in others double-counting went uncorrected.
In describing its work, the Red Cross also conflates different types of aid, making it more difficult to assess the charity’s efforts in Haiti.
For example, while the Red Cross says it provided more than 130,000 people with homes, that includes thousands of people who were not actually given homes, but rather were “trained in proper construction techniques.” (That was first reported by the Haiti blog of the Center for Economic and Policy Research.)
The figure includes people who got short-term rental assistance or were housed in several thousand “transitional shelters,” which are temporary structures that can get eaten up by termites or tip over in storms.
It also includes modest improvements on 5,000 temporary shelters.The Red Cross also won’t break down what portion of donations went to overhead.
McGovern told CBS News a few months after the quake, “Minus the 9 cents overhead, 91 cents on the dollar will be going to Haiti.
And I give you my word and my commitment, I’m banking my integrity, my own personal sense of integrity on that statement.”
But the reality is that less money went to Haiti than 91 percent.
That’s because in addition to the Red Cross’ 9 percent
overhead, the other groups that got grants from the Red Cross also have their own overhead.
In one case, the Red Cross sent $6 million to the International Federation of the Red Cross for rental subsidies to help Haitians leave tent camps.
The IFRC then took out 26 percent for overhead and what the IFRC described as program-related “administration, finance, human resources” and similar costs.
Beyond all that, the Red Cross also spends another piece of each dollar for what it describes as “program costs incurred by the American Red Cross in managing” the projects done by other groups.
The American Red Cross’ management and other costs consumed an additional 24 percent of the money on one project, according to the group’s statements and internal documents. The actual work, upgrading shelters, was done by the Swiss and Spanish Red Cross societies.
"It’s a cycle of overhead,” said Jonathan Katz, the Associated Press reporter in Haiti at the time of the earthquake who tracked post-disaster spending for his book, The Big Truck That Went By.
“It was always going to be the American Red Cross taking a 9 percent cut, re-granting to another group, which would take out their cut.”
Given the results produced by the Red Cross’ projects in Haiti, Bellerive, the former prime minister, said he has a hard time fathoming what’s happened to donors’ money.
"Five hundred million dollars in Haiti is a lot of money,” he said. “I’m not a big mathematician, but I can make some additions. I know more or less the cost of things. Unless you don’t pay for the gasoline the same price I was paying, unless you pay people 20 times what I was paying them, unless the cost of the house you built was five times the cost I was paying, it doesn’t add up for me.”
A resident in a Port-Au-Prince transitional shelter paid for by the Red Cross.
This story was co-published with NPR. Mitzy-Lynn Hyacinthe contributed reporting. Design direction by David Sleight, production by Hannah Birch.
If you have information about the Red Cross or about other international aid projects, please email justin@propublica.org.
Can Russia Learn From Brazil’s Fate? Cabal Meddling In South America
October 1 2016 | From: PaulCraigRoberts / NewEasternOutlook / Various
William Engdahl recently explained how Washington used the corrupt Brazilian elite, which answers to Washington, to remove the duly elected President of Brazil, Dilma Rousseff, for representing the Brazilian people rather than the interests of Washington [see follow up article below].
Unable to see through the propaganda of unproven charges, Brazilians acquiesced in the removal of their protector, thereby providing the world another example of the impotence of democracy.
Everyone should read Engdahl’s article. He reports that part of the attack on Rousseff stemmed from Brazil’s economic problems deliberately created by US credit rating agencies as part of Washington’s attack to down grade Brazilian debt, which set off an attack on the Brazilian currency.
Brazil’s financial openness made Brazil an easy target to attack. One might hope that Vladimir Putin would take note of the cost of “economic openness.” Putin is a careful and thoughtful leader of Russia, but he is not an economist. He has confidence in neoliberal Elvira Nabiulina, Washington’s choice to head the Russian central bank.
...
Note: The rest of Paul Craig Robert's article has not been republished here. Whilst he is a very smart man on many matters the rest of this article demonstrates his fundmental lack of understanding of the central banking system. His belief that Russia needs to rely upon it's central bank, while it is still under the unfluence of the Rothschild cabal - is woefully misinformed.
He is right in the idea that any country would be better to rely on itself for financing itself - doing that by using a privately-owned foreign central bank is insane - and how we have come to be in this mess in the first place. Mr. Roberts is not playing the game with all of the pieces on this matter but you can read his full article here.
Washington Tries To Break BRICS – Rape Of Brazil Begins
Washington’s regime change machinery has for the time being succeeded in removing an important link in the alliance of large emerging nations by railroading through a Senate impeachment of the duly elected President, Dilma Rousseff.
On August 31 her Vice President Michel Temer was sworn in as President. In his first speech as president, the cynical Temer called for a government of “national salvation,” asking for the trust of the Brazilian people. He indicated plans to reform, and has also signaled his intention to overhaul the pension system and labor laws, and cut public spending, all themes beloved of Wall Street banks, of the International Monetary Fund and their Washington Consensus.
Now after less than three weeks at the job, Temer has unveiled plans for wholesale privatization of Brazil’s crown jewels, starting with oil. The planned Wall Street rape of Brazil is about to begin.
It’s important to keep in mind that elected President Rousseff was not convicted or even formally charged with any concrete act of corruption, even though the pro-oligarchy mainstream Brazil media, led by O’Globo Group of the billionaire Roberto Irineu Marinho, ran a media defamation campaign creating the basis to railroad Rousseff into formal impeachment before the Senate.
The shift took place after the opposition PMDB party of Temer on March 29 broke their coalition with Rousseff’s Workers’ Party, as accusations of Petrobras-linked corruption were made against Rousseff and former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
On August 31, 61 Senators voted to remove her while 20 voted against removal. The formal charge was “manipulation of the state budget” before the 2014 elections to hide the size of the deficit.
She vehemently denies the charge.
Indeed, the Senate issued its own expert report that concluded there was:
"No indication of direct or indirect action by Dilma” in any illegal budgetary maneuvers. According to the Associated Press, “Independent auditors hired by Brazil’s Senate said in a report released Monday that suspended President Dilma Rousseff didn’t engage in the creative accounting she was charged with at her impeachment trial.”
Under an honest system that would have ended the impeachment then and there. Not in Brazil.
In effect, she was impeached for the dramatic decline in the Brazilian economy, a decline deliberately pushed along as US credit rating agencies downgraded Brazilian debt, and international and mainstream Brazilian media kept the Petrobras corruption allegations in the spotlight.
Importantly, the Senate did not ban her from office for 8 years as Washington had hoped, and she has promised an electoral return. The Washington-steered Temer has until end of 2018 to deliver Brazil to Temer’s foreign masters before his term legally ends.
Notably, Temer himself was accused of corruption in the Petrobras state oil company investigations. He reportedly asked the then-head of the transportation unit of Petróleo Brasileiro SA in 2012 to arrange illegal campaign contributions to Temer’s party which was running a Washington-backed campaign to oust Rousseff’s Workers’ Party.
Then this June, only days into his serving as acting president, two of Temer’s own chosen ministers, including the Minister of Transparency, were forced to resign in response to allegations that they sought to subvert the probe into massive graft at Petrobras.
One of the two, Temer’s extremely close ally Romero Jucá, was caught on tape plotting Dilma’s impeachment as a way to shut down the ongoing Petrobras corruption investigation, as well as indicating that Brazil’s military, the media, and the courts were all participants in the impeachment plotting.
In brief, the removal of Dilma Rousseff and her Workers’ Party after 13 years in Brazil’s leadership was a new form of Color Revolution from Washington, one we might call a judicial coup by corrupt judges and congressmen.
Of the 594 members of the Congress, as the Toronto Globe and Mail reported, “318 are under investigation or face charges” while their target, President Rousseff, “herself faces no allegation of financial impropriety.”
The day after the first Lower House impeachment vote in April, a leading member of Temer’s PSDP party, Senator Aloysio Nunes, went to Washington, in a mission organized by former Bill Clinton Secretary of State Madeline Albright’s lobbying firm, Albright Stonebridge Group.
Nunes, as president of the Brazilian Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee, has repeatedly advocated that Brazil once again move closer to an alliance with the US and UK.
Madeline Albright, a Director of the leading US think-tank, Council on Foreign Relations, is also chair of the prime US Government “Color Revolution” NGO, the National Democratic Institute (NDI). Nothing fishy here, or? Nunes reportedly went to Washington to rally backing for Temer and the unfolding judicial coup against Rousseff.
A key player from the side of Washington, Rousseff’s de facto political executioner, was, once again, Vice President Joe Biden, the “Dick Cheney” dirty operator-in-chief in the Obama Administration.
Biden’s fateful Brazil trip
In May, 2013, US Vice President Joe Biden made a fateful visit to Brazil to meet with President Rousseff. In January 2011 Rousseff had succeeded her Workers’ Party mentor, Luis Inacio Lula da Silva, or Lula, who constitutionally was limited to two consecutive terms.
Biden went to Brazil to discuss oil with the new President. Relations between Lula and Washington had chilled as Lula backed Iran against US sanctions and came economically closer to China.
In late 2007 Petrobras had discovered what was estimated to be a mammoth new basin of high-quality oil on the Brazilian Continental Shelf offshore in the Santos Basin.
In total the Brazil Continental Shelf could contain over 100 billion barrels of oil, transforming the country into a major world oil and gas power, something Exxon and Chevron, the US oil giants wanted to control.
In 2009, according to leaked US diplomatic cables published by Wikileaks, the US Consulate in Rio wrote that Exxon and Chevron were trying in vain to alter a law advanced by Rousseff’s mentor and predecessor in her Brazilian Workers’ Party , President Luis Inacio Lula da Silva.
That 2009 law made the state-owned Petrobras chief operator of all offshore oil blocs. Washington and the US oil giants were not at all pleased at losing control over potentially the largest new world oil discovery in decades.
Lula had not only pushed ExxonMobil and Chevron out of the controlling position in favor of the state-owned Petrobras, but he also opened Brazilian oil exploration to the Chinese, since 2009 a core member of the BRICS developing nations with Brazil, Russia, India and South Africa.
In December, 2010 in one of his last acts as President, Lula oversaw signing of a deal between the Brazilian-Spanish energy company Repsol and China’s state-owned Sinopec. Sinopec formed a joint venture, Repsol Sinopec Brasil, investing more than $7.1 billion towards Repsol Brazil.
Already in 2005 Lula had approved formation of Sinopec International Petroleum Service of Brazil Ltd as part of a new strategic alliance between China and Brazil.
In 2012 in a joint exploration drilling, Repsol Sinopec Brasil, Norway’s Statoil and Petrobras made a major new discovery in Pão de Açúcar, the third in block BM-C-33, which includes the Seat and Gávea, the latter one of the world’s 10 largest discoveries in 2011. USA and British oil majors were nowhere to be seen.
Biden’s task was to sound out Lula’s successor, Rousseff, about reversing that exclusion of US major oil companies in favor of the Chinese. Biden also met with leading energy companies in Brazil including Petrobras.
While little was publicly said, Rousseff refused to reverse the 2009 oil law in a way that would be suitable to Biden, Washington and US oil majors. Days after Biden’s visit came the Snowden NSA revelations that the US had also spied on Rousseff and top officials of Petrobras.
She was livid and denounced the Obama Administration that September before the UN General Assembly for violating international law. She cancelled a planned Washington visit in protest. After that, US-Brazil relations took a dive.
After his May 2013 talks with Rousseff, Biden clearly gave her the kiss of death.
Before Biden’s May 2013 visit Dilma Rousseff had 70% of popularity rating. Less than two weeks after Biden left Brazil, nationwide protests by a very well-organized group called Movimento Passe Livre, over a nominal 10 cent bus fare increase, brought the country virtually to a halt and turned very violent.
The protests bore the hallmark of typical “Color Revolution” or Twitter social media destabilizations that seem to follow Biden wherever he makes a presence. Within weeks Rousseff’s popularity plummeted to 30%.
Washington had clearly sent a signal that Rousseff had to change course or face serious problems.
The Washington regime change machine, including its entire array of financial warfare operations ranging from a leaked PwC audit of Petrobras to Wall Street credit rating agency Standard & Poors’ downgrade of Brazil public debt to junk in September 2015, went into full action to remove Rousseff, a key backer of the BRICS New Development Bank and of an independent national development strategy for Brazil.
Selling the Crown Jewels
The man who has now manipulated himself into the Presidency, the corrupt Michel Temer, worked as an informer for Washington the entire time.
In documents released by Wikileaks, it was revealed that Temer was an informant to US intelligence since at least 2006, via telegrams to the US embassy in Brazil classified by the Embassy as “sensitive” and “for official use only.”
Washington’s man in Brazil, Temer, has lost no time appeasing his patrons in Wall Street. Even as acting President this May, Temer named Henrique Meirelles as Minister of Finance and Social Security.
Meirelles, a Harvard-educated former President of the Brazilian central bank, was President of BankBoston in the USA until 1999, and was with that bank in 1985 when it was found guilty of failing to report $1.2 billion in illegal cash transfers with Swiss banks.
Meirelles is now overseeing the planned selloff of Brazil’s “crown jewels” to international investors, a move that is intended to gravely undercut the power of the state in the economy.
Another of Temer’s key economic advisers is Paulo Leme, former IMF economist and now Goldman Sachs Managing Director of Emerging Markets Research. Wall Street is in the middle of the Temer-led economic rape of Brazil.
On September 13, Temer’s government unveiled a massive privatization program with the cynically misleading comment,
"It is clear the public sector cannot move forward alone on these projects. We are counting on the private sector.”
He omitted to say the private sector he meant were his patrons.
Temer unveiled plans that would complete the country’s largest privatization in decades. Conveniently, the process us to be completed by end of 2018, just before Temer’s term must end.
The influential US-Brazil Business Council detailed the privatization list on its website. The US-Brazil Business Council was founded forty years ago by Citigroup, Monsanto, Coca-Cola, Dow Chemicals and other US multinationals.
Tenders for the first round of concessions will be issued before the end of this year. They will include privatization of four airports and two port terminals, all auctioned in the first quarter of 2017.
Other concessions include five highways, one rail line, bidding on small oil blocks and a later round for large, mainly offshore, oil development blocks. As well the government will sell selected assets currently controlled by its Minerals Research Department plus six electric power distributors and three water treatment facilities.
The heart of his planned privatization are, not surprisingly, Joe Biden’s coveted state oil and gas companies along with chunks of the state Eletrobrás power company. Temer plans to get as much as $24 billion from the selloff. Fully $11 billion of the total are to come from sale of key oil and gas state holdings.
Of course, when state assets such as huge oil and gas resources are sold off to foreign interests in what will clearly be a distress sale, it is a one-off deal.
State oil and gas or electric power projects generate a continuing revenue stream many times any one-off privatization gains. Brazil’s economy is the ultimate loser in such privatization. Wall Street banks and multinationals are of course, as planned, the winner.
On September 19-21, according to the US-Brazil Business Council website, the Brazilian government’s key ministers for infrastructure including Minister Moreira Franco; Minister Fernando Bezerra Coelho Filho, Minister of Mines and Energy; and Minister Mauricio Quintella Lessa, Minister of Transport, Ports and Civil Aviation, will be in New York City to meet with Wall Street “infrastructure investors.”
This is Washington’s way, the way of the Wall Street Gods of Money, as I title one of my books. First, destroy any national leadership intent on genuine national development such as Dilma Rousseff.
Replace them with a vassal regime willing to do anything for money, including selling the crown jewels of their own nation as people like Anatoli Chubais did in Russia in the 1990’s under Boris Yeltsin’s “shock therapy.”
As reward for his behavior, Chubais today sits on the advisory board of JP MorganChase. What will Temer and associates get for their efforts remains to be seen. Washington for now has broken one of the BRICS that ultimately threaten her global hegemony. It is not likely to bring any lasting success if recent history is any guide.
F. William Engdahl is strategic risk consultant and lecturer, he holds a degree in politics from Princeton University and is a best-selling author on oil and geopolitics, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook.”
The War On Reality: How Globalists Occupy Your Mind To Control Everything
September 26 2016 | From: TheHealthRanger
There is a war going on for reality and the battlefield for that war is your consciousness.
Almost everything you see going on in society or frm official sources is fabricated or rigged. It's fictional. It's all designed to weave this artifical tapestry of beliefs and ideas and truths in your mind that actually are not true. They are not based on reality.
The point of this it to create a prison for your mind
that gives you the illusion of thinking you have freedome of thought, freedom of choice or that you live in a democracy when in reality thie entire system around you is all fabricated to force you into making certain decisions or taking certain actions or avoiding certain actions, all of which further the desires and the consolidation of power of the totalitarian regime in power...
Crash Predictor Ann Pettifor: 'We're No Longer Citizens, We're Customers'
September 24 2016 | From: RadioNewZealand
One of the few analysts to correctly predict the 2008 global financial crash says we need to start worrying about the economic attempts to turn citizens into consumers.
UK economist Ann Pettifor was also one of the leaders of the Jubilee 2000 debt campaign that successfully pushed to cancel $100 billion worth of debt owed by some of the world's poorest nations.
Ms Pettifor, the director of left-wing economic think tank Policy Research in Macroeconomics, has been in New Zealand to deliver public lectures on the current state of the financial world.
Speaking to Nine to Noon today, she said many of the current issues facing the world came from attempts by economists and the finance sector to 'marketise' society and to "turn us all into customers for everything".
"We're no longer citizens, we're no longer workers, we're customers, all along the line. And all of our relationships must, they argue, be marketised.
They're also turning us into 'rentiers', so when we rent out our house as part of Airbnb, or we rent out our car as part of Uber, we are learning that with the ownership of an asset, it becomes possible, almost effortlessly, to earn rent."
She said the global economy was increasingly about earning rent from money, property and any other assets people owned.
"We are using up everything we have to earn a bit more money, and that is partly because the way the system is geared, and those who do have assets are able to earn rent on those assets, whether it's interest rates or whatever, and those without assets are poor, and those people are cross, they are very cross."
Ms Pettifor said people were feeling increasingly desperate due to low wages and salaries.
"I'm not against people using Airbnb, and I understand why they are doing it, and the reason they are doing it is because they are getting poorer, because they cannot live on their existing income, because we don't pay wages or salaries that allow people to live a decent life. So they have to supplement that, with all of these additional marginal activities.
That's what's wrong with the way we have allowed the markets to take control of our economies and for the invisible hand to decide who gets what, is those who are left behind - and the left-behinders voted for Brexit, the left-behinders are voting for Trump, and they're voting for Le Pen, the fascist in France - we need to worry about that."
Former Kissinger CEO Says The World Is Run By 30 Families
September 24 2016 | From: Hiduth
A former CEO for Henry Kissinger has said that he believes just 30 families run the world, and that these families are the driving force behind the New World Order.
David Rothkopf, author of ‘Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making,’ and former CEO of Kissinger Associates, says that 30 families and their 6,000 minions control the entire human race of six billion people.
His findings mirror a study conducted by the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich which found that a mere 147 corporations (out of 40,000 studied) had real power and influence in the world economy. All of these 147 companies had interlocking Boards of Directors.
Currently, this One World Corporatocracy uses the United States and the European Union to consolidate and wield power over the entire globe. But there are vulnerabilities in the world of Wall Street Globalism. The EU appears to be disintegrating.
The ECB (European Central Bank) under the ex-Goldman Sachs VP Mario Draghi seems to be as suicidal as His Japanese counterpart. And America is stretched thin by its constant warfare. Russia Today said the US had military operations in 134 countries in 2014.
Wikileaks, Snowden and others have revealed way more truth than the public can digest.
The US has been funding Al Qaeda and ISIS. And now Putin has shown his superiority by being able to actually find ISIS and bomb them into oblivion.
The only economic and military advantage America had is about to disappear. Dr Michael Hudson wrote Super Imperialism in 1972. That was the year after Nixon closed the Gold Window on August 15, 1971 and the year before Henry Kissinger’s invention of the Petrodollar in 1973 after the Arab-Israeli war.
Hudson went to the Pentagon and the State Department in 1972 to explain that the US was making nations overseas pay for their occupation by American troops by accepting worthless Federal Reserve Notes in exchange for real goods and services.
When an American general finally understood what Dr Hudson was saying about foreigners paying for their own occupation, he exclaimed, “We’re ripping people off.”
The days when The Federal Reserve could print stacks of dollars to the moon and the Saudis could fund the US budget deficit with their oil revenues are rapidly coming to an end. Very soon American politicians will have to recognize that we can no longer afford all of those wars and forget about over 700 military bases overseas.
The American consumer will have to deal with the doubling of the price of imported goods. Of course that will mean a drastic drop in the American standard of living which will lead to instability at home. This cold light of economic reality will force America to either start WW III or go home.
Most sane people would like to avoid either a thermonuclear war with Russia or a conventional one as they have far superior weapons. American politicians and the Pentagon spent $400 billion on the F-35 which does not work. Russia is too poor to spend trillions of dollars on failed projects so the Elite can line their pockets at our expense.
What would be nice is for American voters to join with the citizens of Europe, Asia, Latin America, Africa and the Mideast in their revolt against Globalism. That is to say the workers of the world unite to end Global Occupation by Bankers.
The following describes an eleven point program to undo what has been done to us by design. But first I need to explain what causes Depressions.
Ask your friends what a Depression is. Most answers will describe the effects, such as, unemployment, starvation and bankruptcies. Depressions are solved by cancellation of debts either through discharge in bankruptcy court or by inflation devaluing the real value of the burden of debt.
The third alternative would be for the government to void Unpayable Debts as the Kings of ancient Babylon and Sumer did. We would need to devise a more sophisticated plan as those were relatively simpler agricultural societies.
I would like to make 11 suggestions which can both end a Depression and take down our Banker Occupied governments:
1) Offer $25,000 in debt cancellation to every adult US citizen who is not institutionalized. This should be an international effort so people in foreign countries will get equivalent amounts in pounds, euros and other local currencies.
This is to be financed by seizing the assets of financial war criminals that were stashed in Liechtenstein, the Cayman Islands and other such offshore money laundering centers.
We need to get the assets of the private banks and the account numbers of all the corporations and the trusts the criminals who declared war against us.
2) Seize all the assets of war criminals. A lot of assets have been converted into real estate. In America we also have problems with mortgages. To evade taxes and to intentionally create clouded titles to homes the war criminals created the Mortgage Electronic Registration System (MERS). I would suggest that MERS be made illegal and require all mortgages be registered at reduced rates at the local county courthouse. I would give everyone 90 days to register for a clear title.
I would also challenge the title to every property to show that it did not belong to a corporation or trust fund owned by a war criminal. For example, if a shopping mall is owned by a corporation, the actual people who own the shares must identify themselves.
The World Bank did a study of 213 banking scandals and found that 150 were traced bank to offshore trusts linked either to drug cartels or to the 30 or so families whose wealth has been fully invested in slave trading, drug smuggling and other crimes against humanity for centuries.
All of these assets need to be seized so we can cancel debts and get the economy moving again. We also need to take away their assets not just because they were stolen from us but to reduce their ability to wage war against us to zero.
We can take the seized real estate and use it to fund Social Security and stolen pension funds.
The seized stock and bond assets should also be used to fund public and private pensions and to cancel government debts. I would also use the tens of trillions of dollars in government agency assets listed at www.CAFR1.com to cancel debts and fund pensions.
3) All federal, sate and local government debt should be made illegal. President Lincoln (and Kennedy (both assassinated)) issued Greenbacks which bore no interest. Greenbacks eliminated the need for bonds to be issued.
4) I would issue a non-interest bearing currency in America and require the same of any foreign country that would want our assistance to cancel their government and personal debts.
It was the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 that allowed bankers to create money out of nothing and charge us interest.
That interest was designed to transfer all wealth from us to the bankers. It created Unpayable Debts which grow at exponential rates due to the law of compound interest.
Since prices are a ratio of the Money Supply to goods and services for sale, if we increase both at the same rate, we would have price stability. We could at current rates spend 535 billion dollars a year into circulation. We could create 535 billion dollars and spend it without raising taxes to pay for it. If we increased the GDP and the Money Supply to twice our current levels, then we could spend a trillion dollars a year into circulation while maintaining stable prices.
5) I would spend 200 billion dollars a year to repair America’s infrastructure. We have spent too much money on foreign wars so our infrastructure is collapsing.
I would divide up 100 billion dollars a year amongst the 50 states on a proportional basis so a state with 2% of the US population would get 2 billion dollars to spend on bridges, roads, dams, levees, water purification plants, sewers and school buildings. This would be matched by another 100 billion dollars in federal infrastructure repair.
6) I would make pensions illegal. A pension is a promise to pay you something in 20 or 30 years. These pension funds currently attract maggots seeking to feed on your retirement funds. I would pass a law saying that your employer must pay you this year for any money that was intended to be set aside for your retirement. This money would go into a retirement account in your name at a local cooperative trust. Neither politicians nor anyone from Wall Street should ever be allowed to touch your retirement funds.
7) Use those cooperative trusts to overpower Wall Street and the City of London. Allow them to offer low interest credit cards and consumer loans.
Let them issue simple life, fire and auto insurance. Plow the profits back into retirement funds. Commercial banks would be geared to small businesses.
8) To boost the economy release all of the secret government technology to new corporations that would receive the patents and a 5 billion dollar grant to bring cheap and abundant energy and other advances onto the market. If needed, they could trade patent rights for regions overseas in exchange for the machinery needed to produce products in America.
Shares should be issued to American citizens who are over 35. If a stock valued at $50 splits 6 times in 20 years, then it will be worth $3,200 and ten original shares would be valued at $32,000. They will need the extra growth in their stock portfolio more than couples 18 to 30 who have longer growth curves and can expect to retire with a million dollars in stocks.
Young people would no longer contribute to Social Security. Their employer would pay into their retirement account at their cooperative trust but they would pay nothing to Social Security.
If a married couple making no more than the minimum wage were able to set aside everything they paid into Social Security into a mutual fund, they would retire at age 65 with a million dollars. That had to be said for the benefit of those who do not understand money and compound growth.
9) Make fractional reserve banking illegal. In 1348 the people of Venice were on a gold standard. If you deposited one gold coin, the banker could loan 50 certificates said to be equal to 50 gold coins. The banker was allowed to collect interest on that paper note as if it were 50 gold coins.
This system collapsed even though the people had a gold standard. Bankers pay people to spread false doctrines about the gold standard. The bankers have stolen most of the gold and would love a return to the gold standard. But to function as money the medium of exchange must be plentiful enough so everyone can buy and sell.
The only way a gold standard could work is if we allowed bankers to loan out 100 or more paper certificates in exchange for each gold coin. That would impoverish us with interest payments on money the Bankers created out of nothing. Sound familiar?
10) Make property taxes on a primary residence illegal. A home should be one of the primary savings plans for retirement. Taxing homes harms taxpayers. It should no longer be the policy of the government to do harm to us.
Property tax revenues would be more than balanced by the cancellation of state and local debts and 200 billion dollars a year in federal capital grants. And all those new infrastructure workers will be paying taxes.
11) Establish an incomes policy. My goal is self-determination for the working class. The current government is bankrupting small businesses and the middle class while encouraging welfare dependency.
I would make the first $30,000 a year on a single person or $60,000 for a married couples tax free. I would give the custodial parent $600 a month for the first child and $400 a month for the second child. Nothing for additional children except in cases of twins and triplets.
I would also change the name of the IRS to Internal Revenue and Benefits Services. I would also take away their armed agents and their police powers. A separate police force would be responsible for arresting tax cheats. The IRS has killed too many innocent Americans for them to survive without a serious overhaul.
I would also pass a negative income tax. Under this system a person making $8.50 an hour would be paid $1.50 an additional hour by the employer from federal sources. Under this plan a married couple both working 40 hours a week would earn a guaranteed $40,160 a year tax free. If they had 2 children, they would receive $1,000 a month or $12,000 a year for a total of $52,160 tax free.
I would pay for this in part by ending the wars and the surveillance state. Someone said we spent 7 trillion dollars on wars we did not need after we allowed Israel to blow up the World Trade Center. I also would no longer allow bankers to steal 3 billion or more dollars a week from unaudited federal spending.
We should also eliminate a lot of federal, state and local jobs and even entire departments. We currently have 30 million federal, state and local government workers if you count contractors.
I would eliminate most tax deductions. I would trade your interest rate deduction on a home mortgage for the elimination of property taxes on a principal residence. And I would trade your tax exemptions for children by paying you $12,000 a year for the first two children.
Eliminating tax deductions would pay for a greater part of the reforms we need. Any deduction that gives you a thousand dollars gives others $100,000 in tax breaks.
An oil man once paid $17.95 in federal income tax on an income of $75,000,000. That was when tax rates were higher but deductions still shifted the burden to the middle class. By giving married couples $12,000 for children, we will make the flat rate tax fair for the middle class.
We need strong middle and working classes to counter the power of Wall Street. By creating our own currency and making home ownership more affordable and getting control of our retirement funds and savings in co-operative trusts, we will guarantee that the Elite stop all this nonsensical talk of killing a few billion of the common people.
US Global Hegemony Is Officially Dead
September 18 2016 | From: Geopolitics Humanity is now in the cusp for a massive globalwide revolution in engineering and scientific development as divisively regressive geopolitics are being shamed in the global stage, and instigations for new wars are effectively suppressed.
For the last 4 years, or so, railways and sea/airports were being built across Asia, and these projects will only accelerate in the coming months as the Khazarian transnational crime syndicate is being pinned down at every level.
…and Wikileaks will be releasing more exposé very soon, as former DND Secretary Colin Powell is being dragged to the Clinton email controversy.
Hitlery is just getting the update...
The massive resignations of bankers have already occurred four years ago, as punctuated by the World Bank president Zoellick’s own resignation months later and the Papal resignation in 2013.
And no matter how much it tries, NATO could not start a new war anywhere in the world. All of Eurasia are now poised to give their full support to the China-led “One Belt, One Road” massive economic programs to redevelop the planet for the benefit of all its inhabitants.
To White House’s surprise, Turkey pivoted towards its rival Kremlin in the middle of this year. The subsequent CIA military coup in cooperation with embedded 5th columnists inside Turkey was unsuccessful, due in part to a timely Russian intelligence report which gave Erdogan the upperhand early on.
But so far, the biggest geopolitical event this year is the epic expressed rejection of US interference in the ASEAN-China region.
US President Barack Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping (L) look on after formally joining the Paris Climate deal at Ruyi Hall at the West Lake State House in Hangzhou on September 3, 2016.The United States and China on September 3 formally joined the Paris climate deal, with US President Barack Obama hailing the accord as the “moment we finally decided to save our planet”. World leaders are gathering in Hangzhou for the 11th G20 Leaders Summit from September 4 to 5. / AFP / SAUL LOEB (Photo credit should read SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images)
Xi officially denied Obama the luxury of insulting Asia right on its doorsteps. The phrase “This is our country. This is our airport” being shouted against Obama’s entourage should summarize China’s assertion of its geopolitical and financial sovereignty. Forcing Obama to descend through the ass of Air Force One was just the icing on the cake.
China positively responded to the ASEAN Community’s establishment of a well-defined Code of Conduct in the West Philippine Sea to avoid miscommunications in the area, and all parties have agreed that the best way to find resolution in the conflict zone where an estimated $5 trillion of physical commerce passes annually, is only through dialogue, trade cooperation, and the sharing of natural resources in these contested areas, as it had been done for thousands of years prior to Western’s ”divide and conquer” intervention.
The straight talking Duterte complemented the whole covert and not-so-covert anti-Khazarian advances in the region by directly confronting Obama and Ba Ki Moon during the East Asian Summit, with photos of human rights violation against 600,000 Muslim Moro, 6,000 of whom were massacred and buried in a common pit, at the turn of the 20th century, which is the root cause of the secessionist movements in Southern Philippines.
Obama and Ban Ki Moon were caught off guard and the two found themselves out of ammunition to respond accordingly. Here’s the mainstream media summary of the event:
All headline hugging Duterte tirades prior to the ASEAN Summit 2016 were meant to underscore the fact that the Philippines is no longer a US vassal state.
To Duterte’s credit, Indonesia is buying up weapons after its Police Anti-Narcotics Chief Budi Waseso announced that the largest Muslim country in the region will duplicate Duterte’s methods of dealing with drug trafficking.
Duterte has just visited Indonesia in order to discuss the two countries’ coordination in the field of economics and terrorism. Both countries share a border where CIA-ISIS affiliated Abu Sayyaf is operating.
Here in the Philippines, it is our understanding that the Chinese government will eventually abide by the UNCLOS arbitral ruling in the future when the subject is already properly explained to its people, and if the Philippines maintains its independence from the US beyond Duterte’s presidency.
Ironically, China is a signatory to the UNCLOS, but not the perennial conflict instigator known as the United States.
All of these great milestones occurred “while Americans were busy watching the Kardashians.”
The official declaration of the Fall of the US Empire has been held in the peace loving countries of Asia.
It is now up to the Americans, and the entire Western population, to reciprocate what has been made here.
Global Financial Meltdown - One Of The Best Financial Crisis Documentary Films
September 17 2016 | From: RebelMystic Meltdown is a four-part investigation into a world of greed and recklessness that brought down the financial world. The show begins with the 2008 crash that pushed 30 million people into unemployment, brought countries to the edge of insolvency and turned the clock back to 1929.
It's a bloody good watch and goes into specific detail as to how the house of cards was built and subsequently fell.
Caveat Emptor.
But how did it all go so wrong? Lack of government regulation; easy lending in the US housing market meant anyone could qualify for a home loan with no government regulations in place. Also, London was competing with New York as the banking capital of the world. Gordon Brown, the British finance minister at the time, introduced "light touch regulation" - giving bankers a free hand in the marketplace.
Meltdown moves on to examine the epidemic of fear that caused the world's banks to stop lending and how the people began their fight back. Finally, it asks how the world can prepare for the next crisis even as it recognises that this one is far from over.
We hear about the sheikh who says the crash never happened; a Wall Street king charged with fraud; a congresswoman who wants to jail the bankers; and the world leaders who want a re-think of capitalism.
10 Biggest Corporations Make More Money Than Most Of World Combined
September 15 2016 | From: RT / Various The world’s top ten corporations, including Apple, Shell and Walmart, have a combined revenue that is greater than the combined income of the 180 “poorest” countries out of the world’s total 195 sovereign states.
The figures, which reveal that Walmart, Apple and Shell alone are now richer than Russia, Belgium and Sweden, were released by the campaign group Global Justice Now.
Sixty-nine of the world’s 100 top economic entities are now corporations instead of countries – a rise from last year’s staggering figure of 63. Out of the top 200 entities in the world, a whopping 153 were found to be corporations.
The US, China, Germany, Japan, France and the UK comprise the top six economic entities followed by Italy, Brazil and Canada.
“The vast wealth and power of corporations is at the heart of so many of the world’s problems – like inequality and climate change,” said Nick Dearden, director of Global Justice Now.
“The drive for short-term profits today seems to trump basic human rights for millions of people on the planet. These figures show the problem is getting worse,” he added.
The London-based campaign group released the figures in an effort to put increased pressure on the British government ahead of their working group with the UN.
The meeting, led by Ecuador, was established with the aim of working towards a binding treaty that would ensure “transnational corporations abide by the full range of human rights responsibilities”.
“The UK government has facilitated this rise in corporate power – through tax structures, trade deals and even aid programmes that help big business,” said Dearden.
The Corporation is a Canadian documentary film written by Joel Bakan, and directed by Mark Achbar and Jennifer Abbott. The documentary examines the modern-day corporation, considering its legal status as a class of person and evaluating its behavior towards society and the world at large as a psychiatrist might evaluate an ordinary person.
This is explored through specific examples. Bakan wrote the book, The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power, during the filming of the documentary.
Further to this, the documentary provides insighst into very poignant hostorical points, including the role of IBM in providing computational hardware and services to the Nazis - and some very interesting truths about the Nazi creation of Coca Cola's Fanta. Enjoy. If possible.
“We Are The Death Merchant Of The World”: Ex-Bush Official Lawrence Wilkerson Condemns Military-Industrial Complex
September 14 2016 | From: Salon / Various The military-industrial complex "is much more pernicious than Eisenhower ever thought," says the retired US colonel.
Col. Lawrence Wilkerson is tired of “the corporate interests that we go abroad to slay monsters for.”
As the former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, Wilkerson played an important role in the George W. Bush administration. In the years since, however, the former Bush official has established himself as a prominent critic of U.S. foreign policy.
“I think Smedley Butler was onto something,” explained Lawrence Wilkerson, in an extended interview with Salon.
In his day, in the early 20th century, Butler was the highest ranked and most honored official in the history of the U.S. Marine Corps. He helped lead wars throughout the world over a series of decades, before later becoming a vociferous opponent of American imperialism, declaring “war is a racket.”
Wilkerson spoke highly of Butler, referencing the late general’s famous quote:
“Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.”
“I think the problem that Smedley identified, quite eloquently actually,” Wilkerson said, “especially for a Marine - I had to say that as a soldier,” the retired Army colonel added with a laugh;
“I think the problem is much deeper and more profound today, and much more subtle and sophisticated.”
Today, the military-industrial complex “is much more pernicious than Eisenhower ever thought it would be,” Wilkerson warned.
In his farewell address in 1961, former President Dwight D. Eisenhower famously cautioned Americans that the military and corporate interests were increasingly working together, contrary to the best interests of the citizenry. He called this phenomenon the military-industrial complex.
As a case study of how the contemporary military-industrial complex works, Wilkerson pointed to leading weapons corporations like Lockheed Martin, and their work with draconian, repressive Western-allied regimes in the Gulf, or in inflaming tensions in Korea.
“Was Bill Clinton’s expansion of NATO - after George H. W. Bush and [his Secretary of State] James Baker had assured Gorbachev and then Yeltsin that we wouldn’t go an inch further east - was this for Lockheed Martin, and Raytheon, and Boeing, and others, to increase their network of potential weapon sales?” Wilkerson asked.
“You bet it was,” he answered.
“Is there a penchant on behalf of the Congress to bless the use of force more often than not because of the constituencies they have and the money they get from the defense contractors?” Wilkerson continued.
Again, he answered his own question: “You bet.”
“It’s not like Dick Cheney or someone like that went and said let’s have a war because we want to make money for Halliburton, but it is a pernicious on decision-making,” the former Bush official explained.
“And the fact that they donate so much money to congressional elections and to PACs and so forth is another pernicious influence.”
“Those who deny this are just being utterly naive, or they are complicit too,” Wilkerson added.
“And some of my best friends work for Lockheed Martin,” along with Raytheon, Boeing and Halliburton, he quipped.
Wilkerson - who in the same interview with Salon defended Edward Snowden, saying the whistle-blower performed an important service and did not endanger U.S. national security - was also intensely critical of the growing movement to “privatize public functions, like prisons.”
Col. Lawrence Wilkerson
“I fault us Republicans for this majorly,” he confessed - although a good many prominent Democrats have also jumped on the neoliberal bandwagon.
In a 2011 speech, for instance, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton declared, “It’s time for the United States to start thinking of Iraq as a business opportunity” for U.S. corporations.
Wilkerson lamented, “We’ve privatized the ultimate public function: war.”
“In many respects it is now private interests that benefit most from our use of military force,” he continued.
“Whether it’s private security contractors, that are still all over Iraq or Afghanistan, or it’s the bigger-known defense contractors, like the number one in the world, Lockheed Martin.”
Journalist Antony Loewenstein detailed how the U.S. privatized its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in another interview with Salon. There are an estimated 30,000 military contractors working for the Pentagon in Afghanistan today; they outnumber U.S. troops three-to-one. Thousands more are in Iraq.
Lockheed Martin simply “plans to sell every aspect of missile defense that it can,” regardless of whether it is needed, Wilkerson said. And what is best to maximize corporate interest is by no means necessarily the same as what is best for average citizens.
“We dwarf the Russians or anyone else who sells weapons in the world,” the retired Army colonel continued.
Putin Bans Rothschilds From Russia + Hungary Becomes First European Nation To Ban Rothschild Banks
September 13 2016 | From: NosComunicamos / WakingTimes / Various Brave Vladimir Putin has banned Jacob Rothschild and his New World Order banking cartel family from entering Russian territory “under any circumstances.
Putin recently reminded his cabinet that he paid off the Rothschild’s debt and “grabbed them by the scruff of the neck and kicked them out Russia’s back door.”
This meeting featured the President pounding his fist on the table and vowing to destroy the New World Order, and according to a Kremlin source Putin is making great strides towards this goal.
“They do not own the world, and they do not have carte blanch to do whatever they want. If we do not challenge them there will be other issues. We will not be bullied by them.”
It is understood that the Rothschild banking racket was a noose tied around the neck of the Russian economy. Once the knot was tightened, the economy would struggle and choke.
Early in his presidency he made a priority of uniting Russia socially, spiritually, and economically. He ordered the arrest of the Rothschild backed oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky who had made Rothschild, Henry Kissinger and Arthur Hartman directors of the Open Russia foundation.
He was so upset with the banksters in his temple, he tipped over their tables and drove them out with a whip.
A keen student of history, well versed in world affairs, the Russian President has studied the history of the world’s most elusive organisation and understands the central role their financial collaborators have played in fomenting the major international conflicts of the 20th century.
The New World Order’s invasive roots and branches keep spreading around the world, but President Putin has stopped them expanding into Russia. This is a major blow to their plans for world domination and now they view him as a real threat. He’s got them running scared, which is why he is degraded in the Western media at every opportunity.
The reality is that Putin is leading us towards a multi-polar world, far from the one government, one religion future plotted by the New World Order. When he took his forces into Syria to protect a sovereign state he further enhanced his reputation as a powerful leader.
People around the world have started to wake up and notice.
Putin's Eye-Opening Speech About US Foreign Policy
This video goes back to a Russian TV show in 2011, when Putin's foreign policy wasn't quite as clear to the Russian public as it is today. Nevertheless, he makes his stance known on US foreign policy, and notably, his feelings toward Mr McCain.
Hungary Becomes First European Nation To Ban Rothschild Banks
The name Rothschild is literally associated with wealth. This is because for over 200 years, the family has remained the most powerful and wealthy family in the world.
The head of Hungary’s central bank has called for the International Monetary Fund to close its office in Budapest
Most of the Rothschild fortune has been made in the world of banking, but investments in other industries, such as coal, real estate, and construction, have helped secure the family’s wealth and immense power.
One of the banks owned by the Rothschild group (the biggest banking group in the world) is the International Monetary Fund (IMF), AKA ’Imposing Misery and Famine’.
Not only does the group make money off usurious interest rates at the misfortune of crumbling economies, it literally owns Governments and people of power. Because it’s nearly impossible to escape the clutches of the banking group, news of IMF being booted from Hungary is being heralded as a victorious happening.
TapNewsWirereports that in 2008, Hungary survived economic turmoil by relying on a €20 billion ($26 billion) loan from the IMF and aid from the EU. This was before Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán was elected into office.
In 2013, however, the former economy minister and current central bank governor, Gyorgy Matolcsy, wrote a letter to IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde calling for the fund to close its representative office in Budapest. Matolcsy noted that it was “not necessary to maintain” it any longer. In addition, he said in July of 2016 that Hungary would repay the 2008 loan in full by the end of the year.
Prime Minister Orbán hasn’t had a good relationship with IMF since taking office, and this latest move has taken it to a new low. However, many are hailing Hungary’s decision to boot the IMF from the country as an intelligent decision.
“Paying the loan back early has meant Hungary have saved €11.7 million worth of interest expenses, but Gordan Bajnai, leader of the electoral alliance E14-PM, claimed that they had actually lost €44.86 million by March 2014 because of the early repayment as all they did was replace the loan from the [IMF] with a more expensive one, labelling the stunt as Propaganda.
And what made further nonsense; another loan at high interest rates was signed to finance a nuclear upgrade, which will mean not only higher repayments but also high electricity costs. But they do have economic sovereignty now.“
The central bank governor says that the government succeeded in pushing its budget deficit below the EU ceiling of 3% in GDP and reduced government debt. Though the EU Commission expected it to return to weak growth shortly after the decision, the unorthodox system of imposing heavy special taxes on large companies seems to be working for the country.
YourNewsWire relays that Iceland joined Hungary in 2014 when it paid back its $400 million loan ahead of schedule after the collapse of the banking sector in 2008.
In addition, Russia has refused to bow down to any Western puppeteer and gained financial independence in 2005.
The Transatlantic Trade & Investment Partnership (TTIP) Is Dead + Earthquakes
September 12 2016 | From: Geopolitics / VeteransToday This is one of those incremental changes that we can celebrate on, but it doesn’t mean that we can let our guards down already.
The enemy is very cunning and knows how and when to play dead only to rise at some opportune time in the future.
This has been the case of the banishment of the Jesuits in the mid-18th century. Look where in the pyramid they are now.
Mass actions against corporate tyranny should be decisive and perpetual. Even better, refuse all rigged political exercises, and legalized extortions.
Good News for the People of Europe: The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) Is Dead. Negotiations have Failed.
The German Minister of Economy and Vice-Chancellor, Mr. Sigmar Gabriel, a few days ago has declared that the European Union should not submit to the demands of the United States, referring to the negotiations on the TTIP (Transatlantic Trade and Investments Partnership). He said the negotiations failed. By saying so, he joined French Prime Minister, Manuel Valls, as well as French Secretary of State for External Trade, Mr. Matthias Fekl.
Negotiations started in 2013. After 14 ‘rounds’ of talks dealing with 27 points, no agreement has been reached, none whatsoever, leading to the conclusion that the deal is dead. Even though Mme. Merkel defended the treaty with all her heart up to the end of July 2016, both Germany and France now request a definite end to the negotiations.
The collapse of the TTIP is one of the best news for Europe – and I mean the people of Europe – in recent times; an initiative of the two major players in the EU.
This decision has several meanings:
1. European countries are gradually taking back their sovereignty from Brussels and decide for themselves what is good for them and for Europe;
2. With a failed TTIP Europe escapes, or avoids, being enslaved by US corporatism, financial institutions – and US legislation;
3. Europe may now continue making its proper policies on socioeconomy, environment, food safety, agriculture - and
4. Europe is now freer to pursue its own monetary policy. Under the grip of the TTIP, it would have been difficult, say impossible, to adopt a monetary policy outside of the Euro which many countries would like, openly or covertly – some without making a lot of noise for fear of being ‘reprimanded’ by Brussels.
The fact that authorities of both, France and Germany, stated in unison that the negotiations failed, is a sign that there is still a spirit of autonomy in Europe.
What is called ‘negotiations’ were never really negotiations – a give and take between equal partners. It was from the beginning a one-way street, where the exceptional nation imposed its rules. There was no way of getting the slightest concession from them – not an iota.
No doubt Washington had no intention to share any of the benefits of this ‘Free Trade Agreement’ with Europe.
The exceptional people wanted it all. For example, the term ‘Appelation Contrôlée’ for wine and cheese in France and other European countries, used to protect the farmers of a given region – would have disappeared. The US wanted everything to be open for the ever dictating ‘market’.
Nothing was to be clearly defined, as far as Europe was concerned. No transparence – just a vast base for cheating, consumers and nations.
TTIP talks were held in top secret, behind closed doors. Not even politicians, let alone the public at large which eventually would have had to bear the consequences of the deal, had access to the documents being ‘negotiated’. – It showed the Machiavellian nature of empire at its best.
China knew very well why they were not even interested in participating in the TPP (Transpacific Partnership), a similar trade agreement with eleven Pacific nations and the US.
Let’s recall the key point that would have meant disaster for Europe:
A private corporate tribunal that would have had supremacy over sovereign government legislation. For example, the tribunal could have imposed ‘sanctions’ or fines on governments, whose legislation, say for health, environmental protection and other social reasons, would have reduced corporations’ profit margins.
Similar in the banking sector, monetary policy would have been firmly dictated by the FED, Wall Street (i.e. Goldman Sachs – see Greece and the head of the ECB, a former GS exec) and the European Central Bank. This for now is still the case, but with an unsustainable and unreformable EU and Euro, both are destined to disappear sooner or later. It is likely that many countries are already quietly and clandestinely arranging for “Plan B” – preparing exit strategies. Indeed, since BREXIT, there are numerous political movements to this effect under way – and this not only in the most devastatingly affected southern European countries, but also in northern Europe.
Agriculture policy would have been dictated by Washington, especially with regard to GMOs and ag-subsidies. Monsanto and the like would have had free access to all of Europe, and none of the EU members could have passed legislation prohibiting genetically modified seeds.
Standards for health and nutrition would have been imposed by Washington, i.e. by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Most of these standards are considerably weaker than European equivalents, potentially exposing European citizens to greater health risks than current EU standards foresee.
Labor laws would have been weakened in according to US standards which foresee virtually no protection for workers. The Brussels imposed new labor law in France, dubbed as the ‘El Khomri law’, after the French Minister of Labor, Myriam El Khomri, would reduce significantly French labor rights, fought for and attained with decades of efforts – literally sweat and tears – by French workers and unions.
The new French labor law, signed as a decree by PM Manuel Valls under a dubious special provision in the Constitution (instead of being passed through Parliament), was a precursor for things to come in the rest of Europe – had the TTIP gone forward.
This controversial law is currently at the demand of more than 60 French Parliamentarians being reviewed by the French Conseil d’Etat (equivalent to other countries’ Supreme Court) and may quite possibly be either canceled or sent to Parliament for a decision. Now that the TTIP is dead, it is possible that the law will be repealed.
The day the TTIP died was a great day for Europe. Although Europe is far from being out of the woods. Her own problems keep piling up, many of them also a direct or indirect consequence of empire.
To mention just a few:
Immigration from US-NATO war-destroyed countries;
The never ending financial cum economic crisis;
The complete absence of solidarity among EU nations;
The lack of EU countries’ sovereignty; the missing EU Constitution giving member countries a common perspective and political agenda;
The increasing (‘false flag’) terror attacks throughout Europe; – and not least NATO – which through its aggression towards Russia is increasingly becoming a risk of war – of WWIII – that would for the third time in 100 years devastate Europe.
This time the rest of the world would very likely not be spared. Many countries are conscious of this danger and would like to get out of NATO, but don’t dare say so, because of fear from the boots of Washington.
Let’s hope the death of the TTIP will bring a new breeze of fresh air and ideas into European sovereignty.
Italy, The Phillipines And Oklahoma Get An Earthquake
If the tsunami in Sumatra in 2004 and the earthquakes in the Pacific Rim during 2011- 2012 taught me anything, it is that tsunamis and earthquakes happen for a reason.
As a recap, with regard to the former. The northern part of Sumatra was going to break away from the southern part and nationalize their oil resources and free themselves from ExxonMobil. They were the worst hit in the tsunami of 2004. To quote from Wikipedia:
"Aceh has substantial natural resources, including oil and natural gas; some estimates put Aceh gas reserves as being the largest in the world. Aceh was the closest point of land to the epicenter of the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami, which devastated much of the western coast of the province.
Approximately 170,000 Indonesians were killed or went missing in the disaster. The disaster helped precipitate the peace agreement between the government of Indonesia and the Free Aceh Movement (GAM).”
A little bit too convenient don’t you think?
With regard to the latter, the Pacific Rim and the countries within it just happen to also be party to the TPP agreements which Obama is attempting to get signed and sealed before he leaves office.
Christchurch earthquake, New Zealand
I have to conclude that the earthquakes and tsunamis that hit this region, two examples being Christchurch in February 2011 and Fukushima in March and April of that year, were and in many instances still are weather warfare and methods of persuasion against those who have attempted to resist the Pivot to Asia and the Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement.
With regards to the Fukushima catastrophe, most people outside the loop cannot conceive or accept that such evil could be perpetrated against the Japanese people. Those within the loop, many considered to be the “tin foil hat brigade,” are fully aware that such evil intentions are not out of the realm of the global, corporate fascist’s agenda.
Japan, the only country who has experienced a full frontal nuclear attack, not once, but twice, in spite of being in the process of surrendering at the end of WW2, has no such illusions.
“Imagine a private, global super court that empowers corporations to bend countries to their will.
Say a nation tries to prosecute a corrupt CEO or ban dangerous pollution. Imagine that a company could turn to this super court and sue the whole country for daring to interfere with its profits, demanding hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars as retribution.
Imagine that this court is so powerful that nations often must heed its rulings as if they came from their own supreme courts, with no meaningful way to appeal. That it operates unconstrained by precedent or any significant public oversight, often keeping its proceedings and sometimes even its decisions secret.
That the people who decide its cases are largely elite Western corporate attorneys who have a vested interest in expanding the court’s authority because they profit from it directly, arguing cases one day, and then sitting in judgment another. That some of them half-jokingly refer to themselves as “The Club” or “The Mafia.”
And imagine that the penalties this court has imposed have been so crushing - and its decisions so unpredictable - that some nations dare not risk a trial, responding to the mere threat of a lawsuit by offering vast concessions, such as rolling back their own laws or even wiping away the punishments of convicted criminals.
This system is already in place, operating behind closed doors in office buildings and conference rooms in cities around the world. Known as investor-state dispute settlement, or ISDS, it is written into a vast network of treaties that govern international trade and investment, including NAFTA and the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which Congress must soon decide whether to ratify.”
On the 24th of August 2016 an earthquake hit central Italy.
My condolences and sympathies go out to the Italians. But what interests me more here is the political and economic background noise. On the 5th of July an Italian minister said:
"A free trade deal being negotiated by the European Union and the United States is at a dead end and an agreement with Canada is also at risk.
I think (the TTIP deal) will fall through, and the agreement with Canada is at risk of doing the same. We have been negotiating it for too long,” Carlo Calenda, Italy’s industry minister said at an event in Rome.
Calenda said confidence in the negotiations was lacking.”
The TTIP is the EU-US equivalent of the Pacific Rim/ Pivot to Asia/ TPP agreements.
"The TTIP approval would see European markets invaded by approximately 1,300 chemical substances which are forbidden by European law. In fact, there are more than 80 pesticides that are used in the US whose production was blocked by the European Commission for being hazardous.
Moreover, there are animal growth hormones and genetically modified organisms among the banned substances which are allowed in the US. Other EU banned practices, such as feeding antibiotics to animals or washing chickens with chlorine are also permitted in the US…
As the Italian Department of Economic Development pointed out, it entails the counterfeiting of Italian products in the US and pushing the consumer to associate such products with the Italian original ones. According to the official body, about 75% of Italian products abroad are not authentic, and it damages Italian production. The signing of TTIP would bring Italian sounding products to Europe: another blow to Italian agro-food producers.”
With regard to the Phillipines they have had ongoing weather disasters.
Philippines' President Rodrigo Duterte
Before Typhoon Hagupit struck in 2014, the government voted not to allow a US military base in their country. Shortly afterwards a US military base was established. Since then they have had a number of earthquakes. The most recent on the 4th of September 2016.
Newly elected President Rodrigo Duterte is a mixed bag. He is cracking down on illegal drug trafficking, possibly paving the way for Big Pharma patents on narcotics such as opium. Heroin junkies that are increasing world wide are not the only market for this commodity, opium is an essential component in health care medication and pain relief for those who really need it.
It is also big money for anyone with a patent on this product and when freely available through drug traffickers undermines their profit margins.
So you have to wonder about the Philippine government’s “war on narco-politics,” and the killing of over 400 drug dealers that has reportedly led to an additional 500,000 turning themselves in…
Duterte: “I’ll really have you killed… My order is shoot to kill you. I don’t care about human rights, you better believe me….my mouth has no due process.”
Duterte has also promised the voters free wi-fi (more opportunity for Google and social media brainwashing), lower taxes, polygamy being legalised, (will pedophilia and child marriages also be included considering that child sex trafficking is rife in Asia?) and higher wages for government employees.
“Duterte has expressed interest in granting foreign investors access to sectors currently restricted to Philippine nationals and allowing them to own at least 70 percent and possibly up to 100 percent of companies they establish in the country, up from the current limit of 40 percent. Getting rid of the so-called 60:40 rule should pose a challenge, however, as it requires amending the country’s 1987 constitution."
Sectors that are currently heavily restricted to foreign access include:
Mass media and broadcasting
Retail trade
Domestic shipping
Pharmaceuticals
Advertising
Public services
Small-scale mining
Private security
Utilization of marine resources
While there is no guarantee that all or even many currently restricted industries will be opened to foreign investment if Duterte successfully amends the constitution, there could still be significant opportunities on the horizon in these largely untapped sectors.
Further, Duterte has also indicated support for joining the TPP, which in itself could require altering the constitution due to foreign ownership restrictions. However, it appears that he will maintain restrictions on foreign ownership of land, which is currently limited to long-term leasing.
Which makes me conclude that Duterte is a Trojan Horse.
In many of his campaign promises he has said that he will make congress “illegal.” This would pave the way towards getting rid of major obstacles and politicians that currently block TPP agreements and getting rid of foreign investment limitations as they currently stand.
If the newly appointed President, who shows all the signs of becoming yet another CIA Kissinger–type dictator and Pinochet/ Videla/ Suharto clone, does not succeed in bringing the country into compliance with corporate fascist monopolistic globalist ambitions, then a few more earthquakes and a couple more tornadoes just might be needed in order to get the message across.
Weather Warfare
"The significant expansion in America’s weather warfare arsenal, which is a priority of the Department of Defense is not a matter for debate or discussion.
While, environmentalists blame the Bush administration for not having signed the Kyoto protocol, the issue of ‘weather warfare’, namely the manipulation of weather patterns for military use is never mentioned."
The US Air Force has the capability of manipulating climate either for testing purposes or for outright military-intelligence use. These capabilities extend to the triggering of floods, hurricanes, droughts and earthquakes.
In recent years, large amounts of money have been allocated by the US Department of Defense to further developing and perfecting these capabilities.
"Weather modification will become a part of domestic and international security and could be done unilaterally… It could have offensive and defensive applications and even be used for deterrence purposes.
The ability to generate precipitation, fog, and storms on earth or to modify space weather, … and the production of artificial weather all are a part of an integrated set of technologies which can provide substantial increase in US, or degraded capability in an adversary, to achieve global awareness, reach, and power."
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US Air Force, Air University of the US Air Force, AF 2025 Final Report
“I think the reason that they do not want people to look too closely at Haiti is because Haiti is such a perfect example of what a Clinton administration would be. And I want people to keep in mind that we are heading toward a situation where we are going to have more planetary change disasters.
We are going to have more floods, we are going to have more hurricanes if Clinton becomes president and stays president for the next eight years.
We can expect that there might be a major hurricane that causes a major disaster in the Gulf for example and other kinds of disasters in the United States. In Haiti we have a pretty good idea how the Clintons would handle this…”
The strongest out of hundreds that have occurred since 2009. Other than their land what else does the Pawnee nation have that anyone could possibly want? Or have the Pawnee been too active in stopping the Dakota oil pipeline for comfort and is this an earthquake war?
“In what has become the largest gathering of Native Americans in more than 100 years, a coalition of dozens of tribes across the country oppose the pipeline’s construction, citing concerns that it would put the Missouri River – as well as the network of lakes and tributaries that the “Big Muddy” is connected to – at risk of contamination via oil spill and lead to the destruction of culturally significant sites for the Sioux tribes in the area.
Saturday’s clash began when a group of several hundred protestors gathered near construction crews on Saturday afternoon at a site close to the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation. The demonstrators aimed to act as a human shield against the pipeline’s further development, after the removal of topsoil from a 150-feet wide and 2-mile long portion of land caused “devastating” damage to the tribe’s sacred lands.”
“The Dakota Access pipeline is set to be constructed near the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in North Dakota, crossing under the Missouri River which is the only source of water to the reservation. The pipeline is planned to transport approximately 470,000 barrels of crude oil per day. The potential of oil leaks would contaminate the only source of water for the reservation.
While Dakota Access claims oil leaks are unlikely, an oil leak from a separate pipeline in North Dakota was discovered (8/15/16) to have leaked over 500 barrels of oil since the leak began on July 19, 2016. You can read the article here: http://bit.ly/2aVm5cv. A leak like this from the Dakota Access pipeline would leave the Standing Rock Sioux without any clean water.”
Or - are we talking natural gas reserves and Fracking in Green County, which the Pawnee would be correct in resisting.
Space Weather makes an “oh so brief reference” to it when covering the earthquake in Oklahoma at 1.50 mins and if you are not up to speed on the damage that Fracking does to the groundwater, soil, air and contributes to health hazards causing cancer for one, here is what Bernie Saunders thinks of it.
Does John Key Run The NZ Meth Trade? September 9 2016 | From: MediaWhores
Meth has never been so big in New Zealand, and John Key is the man pretending to lead the Country – so this seems like a fair question in our view, does John Key run the NZ meth industry?
Lets look at the evidence: New Zealand now has one of the highest meth usage rates in the World.
Obviously meth was introduced here prior to the bankers putting their puppet John Key in power, but it has grown and grown under the John Key regime, presumably because the John key regime wants it that way.
New Zealand has very easy borders to protect, being a small island Nation. There is no cocaine flooding the streets of NZ, because the shadow Government/ bankers do not want cocaine flooding the streets.
Same goes for ecstasy and other drugs, if the shadow government do not want it here, it is policed and kept out.
They even do a pretty good job policing marijuana, a weed that can be grown in the backyard, investing 10’s of millions each year in helicopters and police pulling out those plants Nationwide.
Somehow though they just can’t seem to be able to keep out the meth, or the precursors to make meth. Strange isn’t it?
Meth is obviously a huge business, not just in the estimated $50 million each week generated in cash sales, but it also creates a huge state / Crown run business in terms of policing, mental health, WINZ (the government’s biggest business), courts and jails.
An estimated $900 million generated in burglaries, crime, policing, court and jails each year as a direct result of the meth trade in NZ. Not to mention the insurance companies who make a killing off the burglaries and ever increasing premiums.
Its big big business, and the last thing the Crown wants, is for it to end.
Indeed in recent years the Nazi like government of John Key, along with all the other puppet Zionist regimes controlling the Western World, have implemented sweeping new spy laws which gives them the ‘right’ to spy on their own citizens.
Cell phone towers in every neighborhood pick up all text messages and cell phone calls made in that region, and the police & GCSB now have software which can go through and pick up any keywords they plug into the system e.g. meth, bag, hundy bag, point, puff, fire, burn, pipe, gram etc etc.
Not to mention the ability to categorize and identify those who regularly send strange text messages all night – another indication of possible meth dealers. Yet with all of those new spy laws and technology, the Government can’t seem to get the problem under control.
Ridiculous isn’t it. They could be doing huge busts everyday with that technology and quickly clean up every major dealer in every town – but they clearly choose not to.
Because business is good!
So clearly the state is allowing the meth trade in NZ – if not directly encouraging it via their WINZ payments and by allowing the same dairies Nationwide to sell the glass pipes for the past 15 + years – but that alone is not evidence that John Key runs the meth trade.
So is there any real evidence of this?
The Government clearly allows the meth trade, but could John Key be the man actually running it?
Numerous stories have made it clear that the Auckland Casino is a central hub for meth trafficking and money laundering – the Casino being one of John Key’s favorite projects, giving them tax cuts, funding and special grants to build bigger and bigger. Key is also a regular to the place, where many of NZ’s biggest meth lords gather to buy and sell and launder their profits.
Many of these meth lords are Chinese of course, and we all know John Key does a lot of business with the Chinese, selling us out to them each week. We also see wealthy Chinese ‘businessmen’ paying off and bribing our pathetic corrupt Justice system these days.
Still- that is not hard evidence that John Key is running the meth trade in NZ. Lets look at more evidence.
The posts below came from a Facebook thread doing the rounds the other week (source withheld for obvious reasons - these bastards are very dangerous people).
“Meth in New Zealand: All the meth leaders who have gangs underneath are meeting in the elite VIP sky casino room like citizen tan in yesterday’s herald 11/20 of China’s most wanted are now in New Zealand like citizen tan.
Shun Key knows they are here because they pay $ to meet him and approve their visas.
Shun Key knows what they are doing also. You can’t tell me Shun Key didn’t know Dotcom existed. Why is shun key protecting Chinese meth leaders? The bust on northland beach was sacrificed to get people off what is really happening with meth and Chinese in VIP room at casino”
“Again Auckland VIP casino room is potentially the most powerful meeting room in the country because they own MPs politicians and control Chinese policy by buying national party!
So the national party not winston in my opinion set that meth bust up to get heat off with meth because you have to show the media some wins now and then Correct?”
“I don’t trust anything re Key – he knows about the Auckland vip casino – he knows about citizen bill spending $128m at casino in a year he could have shut him down and sent him to China then for extradition why didn’t he ? Because the govt is in bed with these meth pushers at VIP casino somehow.
A lot of them are China’s fugitives committing money fraud and cleaning their dirty money here in housing and meth ! Two very very profitably industries monopolized by these wealthy Chinese fugitives who use front men trusts etc and they are controlling it all, while the national government protect them and even represent them in the media.“
So that blogger seems pretty sure John Key is in with the Chinese meth gangs. Still - no hard evidence of such.
The record bust of meth in Northland mentioned in the above posts seemed to go nowhere didn’t it? There was talk of a few arrests, then no court trial we have heard of. If the police were doing their jobs they should have been able to clean up the whole ring, but don’t think they did.
Someone also reported that one of the cars pulled up during that accidental bust was registered to the Masala restaurant chain. Winston Peters is apparently a good mate of many of those Indian businessmen, who are also famous for running visa and illegal worker scams. Perhaps the Indians are into the meth business also?
Seems everyone is really. Also interesting Winston Peters never mentioned NZ’s largest meth haul in his own electorate (having taken over post Mike Sabin). Perhaps Northland is the main gateway for the meth trade, and the bankers just put Winston in there to keep things going? Certainly strange he never mentioned it.
Perhaps someone should have searched Winston’s boat also?
And let’s not forget the previous top cop in Northland, Michael Blowers – in charge of the region’s “organised crime unit” lol – who stole millions of dollars of meth from a police evidence room and tried to sell it. What a bloody joke.
It seems fairly clear that meth is here because the establishment is hooked on – both the money and the actual drug. Fucking meth heads running the country.
And what about Mike Sabin?- Mike Sabin was the Government’s lead man in the “war on meth” via MethCon a government subsidized company.
Probably no accident they called it “Meth Con” in our view. Sabin was also chairman of the government’s powerful “Law and Order Select Committee” which meets with police each month to discuss problems and strategy.
He then went on to become the National MP for Northland but suddenly stepped down under a cloud of allegations and court appearances, all the details of which were suppressed. There was then a secret trial, more name suppression and eventually a promotion to a job running an International/ luxury gold course in the Far North, for a Chinese company.
The judiciary, media and government all did a stellar job keeping that whole story suppressed. Still – no hard evidence linking Mike Sabin to John Key and the meth trade. Just speculation and name suppression really.
Oddly enough, it was NZ author Greg Hallett who first said the NZ police and judiciary run the meth trade in NZ. This was before John Key came along, so perhaps it is possible that Key just took over the management of the meth trade from’ Hellin’ Clark (another criminal posing as a leader)? Lets look at that video...
Greg Hallett has also claimed online that Winston Peter’s was involved with the real Mr Asia – that being Peter Williams QC, and his heroin trafficking operations. No mention of Winston or John Key and the meth trade though.
So no hard evidence that it is John Key running it all – it appears more that it is the judiciary, Criminal Bar Association and the police who run the meth trade in NZ, and have done so since before John Key was placed here by the foreign bankers as a smiling dictator.
Having said that – it is impossible to think that John Key doesn’t know how the trade works and who is running it. Perhaps he even smokes it himself? His son Max Key has lost enough weight to be on meth, and his favorite DJ track is called “Cut me another line” (by his own admission).
Our conclusion is that there is reasonable grounds to suspect John Key is very close to the meth trade and meth traffickers operating in NZ – giving them a free pass to operate here and destroy our communities and Kiwi lives, because it is all just good business at the end of the day.
But we have no direct evidence yet that John Key is actually running the whole business.
Much like the Opium Wars in China, where the Zionist controlled British Government used opium to take over China and destroy their royal family, it seems clear that meth is being used to do the same in NZ - wiping out Kiwis and their communities while John Key sells everything off to the Chinese, on the instruction of his Zionist handlers – the Zionists being the people who have run the illicit drugs trades around the globe for at least the past 200 years… and John Key himself being a Zionist puppet leader in NZ.
And why are the Zionists selling NZ off to China you ask? Because it fits their globalization agenda, destroying all sovereign nations around the world, bringing them all under their new global corporate (fascist) control.
RIP #SarahHiggins, poor girl was mixing with the mafia.
But don’t panic – John Key had an alibi – he got his Son Max Key to film him cleaning his cars and put it online as soon as he heard the news .so he clearly had nothing to do with her death.
Left: Sarah Higgins and John Key.
Who Is Obama’s Boss? And Why It Matters September 8 2016 | From: JonRappoport
It’s called the Trilateral Commission, and its original stated goal was to create “a new international economic order"
Here is another question that has the same answer: who is in charge of destroying economies? Who keeps pushing new economy-destroying trade treaties, like the upcoming TPP? Who is in the business of killing jobs and hope? Who demands that these treaties must be ratified?
Who is breathing down Obama’s neck, as he stages a last-ditch effort to ratify the TPP and further bury US sovereignty under the weight of global corporations? Who demands that more US jobs disappear overseas and never come back?
One group has been virtually forgotten. Its influence is enormous. It has existed since 1973. It’s called the Trilateral Commission (TC).
Keep in mind that the original stated goal of the TC was to create “a new international economic order.”
In the run-up to his inauguration after the 2008 presidential election, Obama was tutored by the co-founder of the Trilateral Commission, Zbigniew Brzezinski.
Four years before birthing the TC with his boss of bosses, David Rockefeller, Brzezinski wrote:
“[The] nation state as a fundamental unit of man’s organized life has ceased to be the principal creative force. International banks and multinational corporations are acting and planning in terms that are far in advance of the political concepts of the nation state.”
Goodbye, separate nations.
Any doubt on the question of TC goals is answered by David Rockefeller himself, the founder of the TC, in his Memoirs (2003):
“Some even believe we are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and me as ‘internationalists’ and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure - one world, if you will. If that is the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it.”
Patrick Wood, author of Trilaterals Over Washington, points out there are only 87 members of the Trilateral Commission who live in America. Obama appointed eleven of them to posts in his administration.
For example:
Tim Geithner, Treasury Secretary
James Jones, National Security Advisor
Paul Volker, Chairman, Economic Recovery Committee
Dennis Blair, Director of National Intelligence
Here is the payoff. The US Trade Representative (appointed by Obama in 2013), who is responsible for negotiating the TPP with 11 other nations, is Michael Froman, a former member of the Trilateral Commission.
Don’t let the word “former” fool you. TC members resign when they take positions in the Executive Branch of government. And when they serve in vital positions, such as US Trade Representative, they aren’t there by accident. They’re TC operatives with a specific agenda.
I’m now going to print a stunning piece of forgotten history, a 1978 conversation between a US reporter and two members of the Trilateral Commission. (Source: Trilateralism: The Trilateral Commission and Elite Planning for World Management; ed. by Holly Sklar, 1980, South End Press, Pages 192-3).
The conversation was public knowledge at the time. Anyone who was anyone in Washington politics, in media, in think-tanks, had access to it. Understood its meaning.
But no one shouted from the rooftops. No one used the conversation to force a scandal. No one protested loudly.
The conversation revealed that the entire basis of the US Constitution had been torpedoed, that the people who were running US national policy (which includes trade treaties) were agents of an elite shadow group. No question about it.
And yet: official silence. Media silence. The Dept. of Justice made no moves, Congress undertook no serious inquiries, and the President, Jimmy Carter, issued no statements.
Carter was himself an agent of the Trilateral Commission in the White House. He had been plucked from obscurity by David Rockefeller, and through elite TC press connections, vaulted into the spotlight as a pre-eminent choice for the Presidency.
The 1978 conversation featured reporter, Jeremiah Novak, and two Trilateral Commission members, Karl Kaiser and Richard Cooper. The interview took up the issue of who exactly, during President Carter’s administration, was formulating US economic and political policy.
The careless and off-hand attitude of Trilateralists Kaiser and Cooper is astonishing. It’s as if they’re saying;
“What we’re revealing is already out in the open, it’s too late to do anything about it, why are you so worked up, we’ve already won…”
NOVAK (the reporter): Is it true that a private [Trilateral committee] led by Henry Owen of the US and made up of [Trilateral] representatives of the US, UK, West Germany, Japan, France and the EEC is coordinating the economic and political policies of the Trilateral countries [which would include the US]?
COOPER: Yes, they have met three times.
NOVAK: Yet, in your recent paper you state that this committee should remain informal because to formalize ‘this function might well prove offensive to some of the Trilateral and other countries which do not take part.’ Who are you afraid of?
KAISER: Many countries in Europe would resent the dominant role that West Germany plays at these [Trilateral] meetings.
COOPER: Many people still live in a world of separate nations, and they would resent such coordination [of policy].
NOVAK: But this [Trilateral] committee is essential to your whole policy. How can you keep it a secret or fail to try to get popular support [for its decisions on how Trilateral member nations will conduct their economic and political policies]?
COOPER: Well, I guess it’s the press’ job to publicize it.
NOVAK: Yes, but why doesn’t President Carter come out with it and tell the American people that [US] economic and political power is being coordinated by a [Trilateral] committee made up of Henry Owen and six others? After all, if [US] policy is being made on a multinational level, the people should know.
COOPER: President Carter and Secretary of State Vance have constantly alluded to this in their speeches. [a lie]
KAISER: It just hasn’t become an issue.
This interview slipped under the mainstream media radar, which is to say, it was buried.
US economic and political policy run by a committee of the Trilateral Commission - the Commission had been created in 1973 by David Rockefeller and his sidekick, Zbigniew Brzezinski.
When Carter won the presidential election, his aide, Hamilton Jordan, said that if after the inauguration, Cy Vance and Brzezinski came on board as secretary of state and national security adviser, “We’ve lost. And I’ll quit.”
Lost because both men were powerful members of the Trilateral Commission and their appointment to key positions would signal a surrender of White House control to the Commission.
Vance and Brzezinski were appointed secretary of state and national security adviser, as Jordan feared. But he didn’t quit. He became Carter’s chief of staff.
“The nation state as a fundamental unti of man's organized life has ceased to be the principal creative force: Internaiotnal banks and multinational corporations are acting and planning in terms that are far in advance of the political concepts of the nation-state.”
- 1972, 'Between Two Ages: America's Role in the Technetronic Era
Now consider the vast propaganda efforts of the past 40 years, on so many levels, to install the idea that all nations and peoples of the world are a single Collective.
From a very high level of political and economic power, this propaganda op has had the objective of grooming the population for a planet that is one coagulated mass, run and managed by one force. A central engine of that force is the Trilateral Commission.
How does a shadowy group like the TC accomplish its goal?
One basic strategy is: destabilize nations; ruin their economies; ratify trade treaties that effectively send millions and millions of manufacturing jobs off to places where virtual slave labor does the work; adding insult to injury, export the cheap products of those slave-factories back to the nations who lost the jobs and undercut their domestic manufacturers, forcing them to close their doors and fire still more employees.
And then solve that economic chaos by bringing order. What kind of order?
Eventually, one planet, with national borders erased, under one management system, with a planned global economy, “to restore stability,” “for the good of all, for lasting harmony.”
The top Trilateral players, in 2008, had their man in the White House, another formerly obscure individual like Jimmy Carter: Barack Obama. They had new trade treaties on the planning table. Obama was tasked with doing whatever was necessary to bring those treaties, like the TPP, home. To get them passed. To get them ratified. No excuses.
That’s why, over a year ago, when anti-TPP criticism and rhetoric were reaching a crescendo, when Obama was seeking Congressional fast-track authority for the treaty, he was in a sweat and a panic.
He and his cabinet were on the phones night and day, scrambling and scraping for votes in Congress. This was the Big One. This was why he was the President. To make this happen.
His Trilateral bosses were watching. These men run US policy, when and where it counts. They don’t like failure.
This is also why, after Obama was inaugurated for his first term, he shocked and astonished his own advisors, who expected him, as the first order of business, to address the unemployment issue in America.
He shocked them by ignoring the number-one concern of Americans, and instead decided to opt for his disastrous national health insurance policy - Obamacare.
Obama never had any intention of trying to dig America out of the crash of 2008.
That wasn’t why he was put in the Oval Office. He could, and would, pretend to bring back the economy, with fudged numbers and distorted standards.
But really and truly, create good-paying jobs for many, many Americans? Not on the TC agenda. Not in the cards.
It was counter-productive to the TC plan: torpedo the economy further.
Obama is on the move. He’s traveling to far-flung places, trying to shore up global consensus on the TPP treaty. His people are working around the clock to round up the necessary votes for TPP ratification in Congress.
Obama plans to sneak through the treaty during Congress’ lame-duck session after the November election, before newly elected Congressional members take office.
Pushing through Globalist trade treaties: this is why he was put in the White House. This is his appointed task. This is his real job. His bosses are watching.
“I pledge allegiance to the Trilateral Commission, and to the domination for which it stands, one planet, indivisible, with tyranny and poverty and top-down order for all…”
Imagine a private, global supercourt that empowers corporations to bend countries to their will.
Say a nation tries to prosecute a corrupt CEO or ban dangerous pollution. Imagine that a company could turn to this super court and sue the whole country for daring to interfere with its profits, demanding hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars as retribution.
Imagine that this court is so powerful that nations often must heed its rulings as if they came from their own supreme courts, with no meaningful way to appeal.
That it operates unconstrained by precedent or any significant public oversight, often keeping its proceedings and sometimes even its decisions secret.
That the people who decide its cases are largely elite Western corporate attorneys who have a vested interest in expanding the court’s authority because they profit from it directly, arguing cases one day and then sitting in judgment another.
That some of them half-jokingly refer to themselves as “The Club” or “The Mafia.”
And imagine that the penalties this court has imposed have been so crushing - and its decisions so unpredictable - that some nations dare not risk a trial, responding to the mere threat of a lawsuit by offering vast concessions, such as rolling back their own laws or even wiping away the punishments of convicted criminals.
This system is already in place, operating behind closed doors in office buildings and conference rooms in cities around the world.
Known as investor-state dispute settlement, or ISDS, it is written into a vast network of treaties that govern international trade and investment, including NAFTA and the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which Congress must soon decide whether to ratify.
These trade pacts have become a flashpoint in the US presidential campaign. But an 18-month BuzzFeed News investigation, spanning three continents and involving more than 200 interviews and tens of thousands of documents, many of them previously confidential, has exposed an obscure but immensely consequential feature of these trade treaties, the secret operations of these tribunals, and the ways that business has co-opted them to bring sovereign nations to heel.
The BuzzFeed News investigation explores four different aspects of ISDS. In coming days, it will show how the mere threat of an ISDS case can intimidate a nation into gutting its own laws, how some financial firms have transformed what was intended to be a system of justice into an engine of profit, and how America is surprisingly vulnerable to suits from foreign companies.
The series starts today with perhaps the least known and most jarring revelation:
Companies and executives accused or even convicted of crimes have escaped punishment by turning to this special forum. Based on exclusive reporting from the Middle East, Central America, and Asia, BuzzFeed News has found the following:
A Dubai real estate mogul and former business partner of Donald Trump [not that that means anything, he's had hundreds of business partners] was sentenced to prison for collaborating on a deal that would swindle the Egyptian people out of millions of dollars - but then he turned to ISDS and got his prison sentence wiped away.
In El Salvador, a court found that a factory had poisoned a village - including dozens of children - with lead, failing for years to take government-ordered steps to prevent the toxic metal from seeping out. But the factory owners’ lawyers used ISDS to help the company dodge a criminal conviction and the responsibility for cleaning up the area and providing needed medical care.
Two financiers convicted of embezzling more than $300 million from an Indonesian bank used an ISDS finding to fend off Interpol, shield their assets, and effectively nullify their punishment.
When the US Congress votes on whether to give final approval to the sprawling Trans-Pacific Partnership, which President Barack Obama staunchly supports, it will be deciding on a massive expansion of ISDS. Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton oppose the overall treaty, but they have focused mainly on what they say would be the loss of American jobs.
Clinton’s running mate, Tim Kaine, has voiced concern about ISDS in particular, and Sen. Elizabeth Warren has lambasted it. Last year, members of both houses of Congress tried to keep it out of the Pacific trade deal. They failed.
ISDS is basically binding arbitration on a global scale, designed to settle disputes between countries and foreign companies that do business within their borders. Different treaties can mandate slightly different rules, but the system is broadly the same.
When companies sue, their cases are usually heard in front of a tribunal of three arbitrators, often private attorneys. The business appoints one arbitrator and the country another, then both sides usually decide on the third together.
Conceived of in the 1950s, the system was intended to benefit both developing nations and the foreign companies that sought to invest in them.
The companies would gain a fair, neutral referee if a rogue regime seized their property or discriminated against them in favor of domestic companies. And the countries would gain the roads or hospitals or industries that those foreign corporations would, as a result, feel confident building.
“It works,” said Charles Brower, a longtime ISDS arbitrator. “Like any system of law, there will be disappointments; you’re dealing with human systems. But this system fundamentally produces as good justice as the federal courts of the United States.” [Not a benchmarch which should be aspired to.]
Charles Brower
He defended the lawyers who often serve as arbitrators, saying they:
"Are very aware of their responsibilities. Unlike politicians, we are up for election every minute of every day - somewhere in the world, somebody is trying to figure out whom to appoint in a case. We’re only as good as our reputations.”
As proof that ISDS delivers justice, Brower pointed to a wave of nationalizations by the Venezuelan government, many while Hugo Chávez was in charge, that led to:
"Huge awards against them for uncompensated expropriation.”
ISDS has not only put rapacious leaders on notice, its defenders say, but it has also encouraged investment, especially in poor countries, helping to raise overall economic development.
Some even say that it helps avoid gunboat diplomacy and tense international showdowns because countries have agreed on a forum where they can resolve disputes involving major investments.
But over the last two decades, ISDS has morphed from a rarely used last resort, designed for egregious cases of state theft or blatant discrimination, into a powerful tool that corporations brandish ever more frequently, often against broad public policies that they claim crimp profits.
Because the system is so secretive, it is not possible to know the total number of ISDS cases, but lawyers in the field say it is skyrocketing. Indeed, of the almost 700 publicly known cases across the last half century, more than a tenth were filed just last year.
Driving this expansion are the lawyers themselves. They have devised new and creative ways to deploy ISDS, and in the process bill millions to both the businesses and the governments they represent. At posh locales around the globe, members of The Club meet to swap strategies and drum up potential clients, some of which are household names, such as ExxonMobil or Eli Lilly, but many more of which are much lower profile.
In specialty publications, the lawyers suggest novel ways to use ISDS as leverage against governments. It’s a sort of sophisticated, international version of the plaintiff’s attorney TV ad or billboard: Has your business been harmed by an increase in mining royalties in Mali? Our experienced team of lawyers may be able to help.
A few of their ideas: Sue Libya for failing to protect an oil facility during a civil war. Sue Spain for reducing solar energy incentives as a severe recession forced the government to make budget cuts. Sue India for allowing a generic drug company to make a cheaper version of a cancer drug.
In a little-noticed 2014 dissent, US Chief Justice John Roberts warned that ISDS arbitration panels hold the alarming power to review a nation’s laws and “effectively annul the authoritative acts of its legislature, executive, and judiciary.” ISDS arbitrators, he continued, “can meet literally anywhere in the world” and “sit in judgment” on a nation’s “sovereign acts.”
That fate has not yet befallen the United States - but largely because of sheer luck, former government lawyers said.
In theory, ISDS arbitrators must follow the rules laid down in trade pacts.
But in practice, they have interpreted the vague language of many treaties as enshrining broad, unwritten rights far beyond protections against property seizures and blatant discrimination - even finding, in one case, a right to a “reasonable rate of return.”
Some entrepreneurial lawyers scout for ways to make money from ISDS.
Selvyn Seidel, an attorney who represented clients in ISDS suits, now runs a specialty firm, one that finds investors willing to fund promising suits for a cut of the eventual award.
Some lawyers, he said, monitor governments around the world in search of proposed laws and regulations that might spark objections from foreign companies.
"Huge awards against them for uncompensated expropriation.”
“You know it’s coming down the road,” he said, “so, in that year before it’s actually changed, you can line up the right claimants and the right law firms to bring a number of cases.”
The US officials who negotiated the Trans-Pacific Partnership have argued that it contains new ISDS safeguards, including opening up hearings and legal filings to the public.
The changes, however, have loopholes, and lawyers at some big firms are already advising clients how they might use the new deal to their benefit.
Opposition to ISDS is spreading across the political spectrum, with groups on the left and right attacking the system.
Around the world, a growing number of countries are pushing for reforms or pulling out entirely.
But most of the alarm has been focused on the potential use of ISDS by corporations to roll back public-interest laws, such as those banning the use of hazardous chemicals or raising the minimum wage.
The system’s usefulness as a shield for the criminal and the corrupt has remained virtually unknown.
Reviewing publicly available information for about 300 claims filed during the past five years, BuzzFeed News found more than 35 cases in which the company or executive seeking protection in ISDS was accused of criminal activity, including money laundering, embezzlement, stock manipulation, bribery, war profiteering, and fraud.
Among them: a bank in Cyprus that the US government accused of financing terrorism and organized crime, an oil company executive accused of embezzling millions from the impoverished African nation of Burundi, and the Russian oligarch known as “the Kremlin’s banker.”
Some are at the center of notorious scandals, from the billionaire accused of orchestrating a massive Ponzi scheme in Mauritius to multiple telecommunications tycoons charged in the ever-widening “2G scam” in India, which made it into Time magazine’s top 10 abuses of power, alongside Watergate.
The companies or executives involved in these cases either denied wrongdoing or did not respond to requests for comment.
Most of the 35-plus cases are still ongoing. But in at least eight of the cases, bringing an ISDS claim got results for the accused wrongdoers, including a multimillion-dollar award, a dropped criminal investigation, and dropped criminal charges. In another, the tribunal has directed the government to halt a criminal case while the arbitration is pending.
Of course, there are governments that don’t have clean hands themselves, and some claims by businesses have been justified. The legal systems of some countries are flagrantly unfair or riddled with corruption.
Moreover, authoritarian or kleptocratic regimes sometimes do use their justice systems as political weapons. For example, arbitrators ordered Russia to pay compensation after finding that Vladimir Putin and his administration had used criminal and tax proceedings to destroy his political rival Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s oil company.
Lawyers say that some governments, faced with a legitimate ISDS claim, will even trump up a criminal charge to deflect from their own wrongdoing. For example, arbitrators found there was evidence suggesting that Bolivia had launched a fraud case against mining-company executives as a ploy to get the company’s ISDS claim thrown out.
But even some members of The Club said they were concerned by how often credible allegations of criminality arise. Many ISDS lawyers say that the system helps promote the rule of law around the world.
If ISDS is seen as protecting criminals, they fear, it could delegitimize a system that is working well for many others.
One lawyer who regularly represents governments said he’s seen evidence of corporate criminality that he “couldn’t believe.”
Speaking on the condition that he not be named because he’s currently handling ISDS cases, he said;
“You have a lot of scuzzy sort-of thieves for whom this is a way to hit the jackpot.”
Read the full accounts of what happened in the cases of Egypt, El Salvador and Indonesia at: Buzzfeed
Be advised: If the TPPA / TTIP et al were ratified, it would be these pricks coming to rape our countries.
Monsanto Promoting Worldwide Infertility? + Academic GMO Shills Exposed: Fraud And Collusion With Monsanto September 6 2016 | From: Sott / NaturalNews
Monsanto has a long and infamous history of manufacturing and bringing to market such chemicals as DDT, Agent Orange, aspartame, Roundup and dioxin - chemical compounds from which society continues to feel the effects.
In an effort to distance the current corporation from past deeds, Monsanto refers to the company prior to 2002 as "the former Monsanto" in their news releases. However, nothing has really changed aside from their PR machine.
While Monsanto has branched into genetic engineering (GE) of plants, the sale of patented GE seeds simply feeds the need for the company's pesticides. Monsanto is STILL primarily a purveyor of toxins, not life.
Monsanto began forging a unique and financially advantageous relationship with the U.S. government starting with the company's involvement in the Manhattan Project that produced the first nuclear weapons during World War II. During the Vietnam War they were the leading producer of Agent Orange.
The specialization in the production and distribution of toxic chemicals continues today.
Their influence over government runs so deep that despite the fact 64 other countries have been labeling genetically engineered (GE) foods for years, the U.S. now has the distinction of being the first country to un-label GE foods at the urging of a company producing mass amounts of GE seeds.
Monsanto and Polychlorinated Biphenyls (PCBs)
In the latter part of the 1920s, Monsanto was the largest producer of PCBs. This chemical was used in lubricant for electric motors, hydraulic fluids and to insulate electrical equipment. Old fluorescent light fixtures and electrical appliances with PCB capacitors may still contain the chemical.
During the years PCB was manufactured and used, there were no controls placed on disposal. Since PCBs don't break down under many conditions, they are now widely distributed through the environment and have made the journey up the food chain.
Between the inception and distribution of the product and its subsequent ban in the late 1970s, an estimated 1.5 billion pounds were distributed in products around the world.
Monsanto was the primary manufacturer of PCBs in the U.S. under the trade name Aroclor. Health problems associated with exposure to the chemical were noted as early as 1933 when 23 of 24 workers at the production plant developed pustules, loss of energy and appetite, loss of libido and other skin disturbances.
According to Monsanto's public timeline, it was in 1966 that "Monsanto and others began to study PCB persistence in the environment." However, seven years earlier, Monsanto's assistant director of their Medical Department wrote:
“... [S]ufficient exposure, whether by inhalation of vapors or skin contact, can result in chloracne which I think we must assume could be an indication of a more systemic injury if the exposure were allowed to continue."
In 1967, Shell Oil called to inform Monsanto of press reports from Sweden, noting that PCBs were accumulating in mammals further up the food chain. Shell asked for PCB samples to perform their own analytical studies.
With full knowledge of the devastation expected to the environment and humanity, it wasn't until 11 years later, in 1977, that Monsanto reportedly pulled production on PCB.
PCBs Are Probable Human Carcinogens
The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the National Toxicology Program, and the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIEHS) have identified PCBs as either probable, potential or reasonably likely to cause cancer in humans.
If it seems like these agencies are couching their words, they are. Human studies have noted increased rates of liver cancer, gall bladder cancer, melanomas, gastrointestinal cancer, biliary tract cancer, brain cancer and breast cancer when individuals had higher levels of PCB chemicals in their blood and tissue.
However, the EPA limits the ability of researchers to link a chemical as a carcinogen unless there is conclusive proof. While this proof is evident in animal studies, you can't feed these chemicals to humans and record the results. Thus PCBs are a "probable" carcinogen in humans.
Other health effects from PCBs include:
Babies born with neurological and motor control delays including lower IQ, poor short-term memory and poor performance on standardized behavioral assessment tests
Disrupted sex hormones including shortened menstrual cycles, reduced sperm count and premature puberty
Imbalanced thyroid hormone affecting growth, intellectual and behavioral development
Immune effects, including children with more ear infections and chickenpox
Once PCBs are absorbed in the body they deposit in the fat tissue. They are not broken down or excreted. This means the number of PCBs build over time and move up the food chain. Smaller fish are eaten by larger ones and eventually land on your dinner table.
Chemical Poisoning Begins Before Birth
A recent study at the University of California demonstrated that PCBs are found in the blood of pregnant women. Before birth, the umbilical cord delivers approximately 300 quarts of blood to your baby every day.
Not long ago, researchers believed the placenta would shield your developing baby from most pollutants and chemicals. Now we know it does not.
The umbilical cord is a lifeline between mother and child, sustaining life and propelling growth. However, in recent research cord blood contained between 200 and 280 different chemicals; 180 were known carcinogens and 217 were toxic to the baby's developing nervous system.
The deposits of chemicals in your body or the body of your developing baby are called your "body burden" of chemicals and pollution.
A steady stream of chemicals from the environment during a critical time of organ and system development has a significant impact on the health of your child, both in infancy and as the child grows to adulthood.
Tracey Woodruff, Ph.D., director of the University of California San Francisco Program on Reproductive Health and the Environment, was quoted in a press release, saying:
“It was surprising and concerning to find so many chemicals in pregnant women without fully knowing the implications for pregnancy. Several of these chemicals in pregnant women were at the same concentrations that have been associated with negative effects in children from other studies.
In addition, exposure to multiple chemicals that can increase the risk of the same adverse health outcome can have a greater impact than exposure to just one chemical."
Butyl Benzyl Phthalate - Another Monsanto Product
Butyl benzyl phthalate (BBP), also manufactured by Monsanto, was recently implicated in cell fat storage. This specific phthalate was found in human fluids and had an effect on the accumulation of fat inside cells.
BBP is used in the manufacture of vinyl tile, as a plasticizer in PVC pipe, carpets, conveyer belts and weather stripping in your home and office.
Like other phthalates used in the production of plastics, BBP is not bound to the product and can be released into your environment. It may be absorbed by crops and move up the food chain. The biggest source of exposure is food.
Drive-through hamburgers and take-out pizzas may be increasing your intake of phthalates. The danger is not in the food itself but in the products used to handle it. The study analyzed data from nearly 9,000 individuals, finding the one-third who had eaten at a fast food restaurant had higher levels of two different phthalates.
Potentially, BBP may adversely affect your reproductive function. However, at lower doses it also has an effect on your kidneys, liver and pancreas. Increased risks of respiratory disorders and multiple myelomas have also been reported in people who have exposure to products manufactured with BBP. An increasing waistline from BBP exposure may also reduce your fertility.
Low Sperm Count and Infertility Affecting Animals and Humans
A 26-year study of fertility in dogs, published recently, has distinct similarities to infertility rates in humans. In this study, researchers evaluated the ejaculate of nearly 2,000 dogs. Over the 26 year period, they found a drop in sperm motility of 2.4 percent per year.
Additionally, both the semen and the testicles of castrated dogs contained by PCBs and phthalates, implicated in other studies to reduction in fertility. Phthalates have been implicated in both decreased sperm motility and quality of your sperm, affecting both fertility and the health of your children.
Researchers used dogs in this study as they live in the same environment as their owners, and often eat some of the same food. This correlation between sperm function and concentration, and environment and food in dogs and humans is significant.
In those 26 years there was also a rise in cryptorchidism in male pups (a condition where the testicles don't descend into the scrotum) born to stud dogs who experienced a decline in sperm quality and motility.
Cryptorchidism and undescended testicles, occurs at a rate of 1 in 20 term male human infants and 1 in 3 pre-term babies.
Problems with infertility are also affecting marine animals at the top of the food chain. In the western waters of the Atlantic, the last pod of Orcas are doomed to extinction. High levels of PCB have been found in the fat of over 1,000 dolphins and Orcas in the past 20 years. Now taking a toll on the animal's fertility, this pod of Orcas has not reproduced in the 19 years it has been under study.
Orcas were living in the North Sea until the 1960s. At that time PCB pollution peaked in the area and the Orca whales disappeared. The same happened in the Mediterranean Sea, where the whales flourished until the 1980s. This pod off the coast of the U.K. is the last living pod in that area.
Monsanto's Argument in PCB Lawsuits
Although Monsanto denies culpability and knowledge of the danger behind the chemical PCB, you'll discover internal documentation in this video that they did, in fact, know of the danger while manufacturing and distributing the product. Monsanto is currently embroiled in several lawsuits across eight cities and the argument is over who owns the rain. The cities are suing Monsanto in Federal Court, saying PCBs manufactured by Monsanto have polluted the San Francisco Bay.
Monsanto attorney Robert Howard argues that because the city does not own the water rights, the city does not have the right to sue. And, because the PCBs have not damaged city property, such as corroding pipes, Howard claims it is a state problem. Scott Fiske, attorney for three cities, countered with the city's regulatory interests in management of storm water as a fundamental function of the city.
While Fiske claims he can prove Monsanto knew the product was hazardous as early as 1969, Howard maintains the company should not be liable for the use of the chemicals it produced.
In 2001, Monsanto attorneys in the Owens v. Monsanto case, acknowledged only one health threat from exposure to PCBs: chloracne, and instead argued that since the entire planet has been contaminated, they are innocent of all liability. The attorney for Monsanto was quoted in the Chemical Industry Archives, saying:
“The truth is that PCBs are everywhere. They are in meat, they are in everyone in the courtroom, they are everywhere and they have been for a long time, along with a host of other substances."
The cities currently engaged in lawsuits against Monsanto for damage to the environment and waterways include Berkley, Oakland, San Jose, Portland, Spokane, Seattle, Long Beach and San Diego. All eight cities attempted to combine their cases against the agrochemical giant but were unsuccessful when one judge found the issues were different enough to warrant separate cases.
Monsanto's Deep Pockets
Monsanto petitioned the Federal Court to dismiss Portland's lawsuit, claiming it would countersue, adding years to the process. It is likely Monsanto would increase the scope of the case and include companies who used the product and released the PCBs.
Meanwhile, three plaintiffs in St. Louis received better news in May 2016 when a jury awarded them a total of $46.5 million, finding Monsanto negligent in the production of PCBs.
This suit claimed Monsanto sold PCBs even after it learned about the dangers, bringing to court internal documents dated 1955, which stated: "We know Aroclors [PCBs] are toxic but the actual limit has not been precisely defined."33 To date this win over Monsanto has been rare. Williams Kherkher, attorney for the plaintiffs, explained in EcoWatch:
“The only reason why this victory is rare is because no one has had the money to fight Monsanto."
Kherkher and other firms pooled their resources in this case and expect wins in upcoming lawsuits. The firm has accumulated the names of approximately 1,000 plaintiffs with claims against Monsanto and PCBs.
The House passed a compromise to the DARK Act that will force food distributors to disclose the presence of genetically engineered (GE) ingredients with a smartphone scan code. President Obama has signed the bill that removes states' rights for labeling GMOs. The bill is full of loopholes, which may allow genetically modified ingredients to slip through unannounced.
Genetically modified organisms (GMOs), aka GE foods, are live organisms whose genetic components have been artificially manipulated in a laboratory setting through creating unstable combinations of plant, animal, bacteria and even viral genes that do not occur in nature or through traditional crossbreeding methods.
GMO proponents claim that genetic engineering is "safe and beneficial," and that it advances the agricultural industry. They also say that GMOs help ensure the global food supply and sustainability.
But is there any truth to these claims? I believe not. For years, I've stated the belief that GMOs pose one of the greatest threats to life on the planet. Genetic engineering is NOT the safe and beneficial technology that it is touted to be.
The FDA cleared the way for GE Atlantic salmon to be farmed for human consumption. Thanks to added language in the federal spending bill, the product will require special labeling so at least consumers will have the ability to identify the GE salmon in stores. However, it's imperative ALL GE foods be labeled clearly without a smartphone scan code because not everyone owns a smartphone.
The FDA is threatening the existence of our food supply. We have to start taking action now. I urge you to share this article with friends and family. If we act together, we can make a difference and put an end to the absurdity.
When you see the QR code or so-called Smart Label on a food product, pass it by. Products bearing the Grocery Manufacturer's Association's (GMA) Smart Label mark are in all likelihood filled with pesticides and/or GMO ingredients.
The GMA's 300-plus members include chemical technology companies, GE seed and food and beverage companies. Monsanto, Dow and Coca-Cola are just some of the heavy-hitters in this powerful industry group, which has showed no qualms about doing whatever it takes to protect the interest of its members.
Don't waste your time searching through their website, which may or may not contain the information you're looking for. If they insist on wasting your time and making your shopping difficult, why reward them with a purchase?
A little known fact is that the GMA actually owns the "Smart Label" trademark that Congress has accepted as a so-called "compromise" to on-package GMO labeling, and that's another reason why I believe the Smart Label mark is the mark of those with something to hide, such as Monsanto.
Will you financially support a corrupt, toxic and unsustainable food system, or a healthy, regenerative one? There are many options available besides big-brand processed foods that are part of the "GMA's verified ring of deception."
You can:
Shop at local farms and farmers markets
Only buy products marked either "USDA 100 percent Organic" (which by law cannot contain GMOs), "100 percent Grass-Fed" or "Non-GMO Verified"
If you have a smartphone and you don't mind using it, download the OCA's Buycott app to quickly and easily identify the thousands of proprietary brands belonging to GMA members, so you can avoid them, as well as identify the names of ethical brands that deserve your patronage
Last but not least, encourage good companies to reject QR codes and to be transparent and clear with their labeling. This will eventually ensure that all GMO foods can easily be identified by the GMA's "verified ring of deception" mark that is the Smart Label.
Campbell's, Mars, Kellogg's, ConAgra and General Mills all vowed to voluntarily comply with Vermont's GMO labeling law by labeling all of their foods sold across the U.S.
Will their plans change now that the law has been passed by Congress and signed by the President? That remains to be seen, but if you like these companies, I would encourage you to reach out to them and ask them to remain steadfast in their promise.
Non-GMO Food Resources by Country
If you are searching for non-GMO foods, here is a list of trusted sites you can visit:
Few corporations in the world are as loathed - and as sinister - as Monsanto. But the threat it poses to people and planet could be reaching new heights, as the World Health Organization has recently upgraded Monsanto's main product as carcinogenic to humans. With protests against the agrochemical giant held in more than 40 countries in May, learn why the global movement against Monsanto is of critical importance to our future.
In this episode of The Empire Files, Abby Martin issues a scathing expose on the corporate polluter, chronicling it's rise to power, the collusion of its crimes by the US government and highlighting the serious danger it puts us in today.
Academic GMO Shills Exposed: Once-Secret Emails Reveal Gross Collusion With Monsanto, Academic Fraud At The Highest Levels Inside U.S. Universities
U.S. Right to Know (USRTK), a non-profit organization dedicated to exposing the fraud and corruption surrounding the food industry, launched an investigation into the intimate and unethical relationship between the biotech industry and university faculty and staff, which is used to manipulate public opinion about GMOs and to coerce the government into passing legislation supportive of Big Ag's patented seeds and pesticides.
The investigation, which is still ongoing, reveals how biotech industry giants Monsanto, DuPont, Syngenta, Dow AgroSciences and others, buy academics employed by taxpayer-funded universities to push GMOs and lobby Congress to pass legislation favorable of their products, with one of the most high-profile examples including attempts to derail states' rights to enact GMO-labeling laws.
The collusion between Big Food, its front groups and university staff has been exposed through thousands of emails and documents obtained through a USRTK Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, which was meticulously filed over a six-month period.
USRTK: Public deserves to know about flow of money and level of coordination between Big Ag and public university scientists
The FOIA request sought to obtain emails and documents from 43 public university faculty and staff to learn more about the biotech industry's public relations strategies. Records were requested from scientists, economists, law professors, extension specialists and communicators, all of whom are employed by taxpayer-funded public institutions and steadily promote GMO agriculture under the "independent" research.
Currently, USRTK has received thousands of documents in nine of their requests; however, much more information is expected to be released as FOIA requests continue to be answered.
The documents received thus far expose how the biotech industry funds expenses for university faculty to travel the globe promoting and defending GMOs and their associated pesticides, highlighting the shift that scientists have made from being researchers to being actors in Big Ag PR campaigns.
Named the "Biofortified boys" by Alicia Maluafiti, executive director of Hawaii Crop Improvement Association (HCIA), a biotech front group, the academics were awarded thousands, and in some cases, hundreds of thousands of dollars in unrestricted grant money.
Dr. Kevin Folta, professor and chairman of the Horticultural Sciences Department at the University of Florida, Gainesville, is one of the biotech industry's most cooperative "Biofortified boys." Emails show that Folta was enlisted to travel to Hawaii and later to Pennsylvania to "testify to government bodies to oppose proposed mandatory genetically modified labeling measures."
Folta has repeatedly denied ties to Monsanto or having accepted funds from them; however, newly released documents prove otherwise, exposing him as a bald-faced liar and attack dog for the biotech industry.
Sponsored and organized by the HCIA, which includes Monsanto, DuPont, Dow AgroSciences, Syngenta and BASF, Folta and others were recruited to meet with local business execs to lobby against Hawaii's proposed GMO-labeling law.
HCIA's Maluafiti writes:
"So please know that you are part of our overall public education strategy and specifically – how do we use your valuable time wisely while you are here in Hawaii (besides hitting the beaches!) I'd love to hear your thoughts. Aloha!"
A second email authored by Renee Kester, wife of Dow AgroSciences R&D Leader Kirby Kester, who is also president of the HCIA, thanks them for their support:
"First off I would like to thank you for all of the support you have given us over here in Hawaii with regards to our recent legislative battles, it means a lot to all of us over here."
Monsanto asks academics to author articles promoting GMOs
In an effort to influence "thought leaders and influencers," Monsanto reached out to Dr. Folta and other academics, asking them to author a series of pro-GMO policy briefs to be used for "outreach and engagement with policy makers and consumers." The briefs were to be promoted as being authored by "independent scientists."
Eric Sachs, the chief of Monsanto's global scientific affairs group wrote:
"The key to success is participation by all of you – recognized experts and leaders with the knowledge, reputation and communication experience needed to communicate authoritatively to the target groups."
"You represent an elite group whose credibility will be strengthened by working together."
Recognizing participants' careers are at stake, Sachs offers the academics assurance by promising that he will protect their "independence," as well as their reputations.
Some of the topics the academics were asked to write on include:
Meeting World Challenges (discuss how GMOs will save the world by addressing shrinking agricultural resources, food security, food affordability and environmental sustainability).
Stifling Innovation (discuss how GM crop regulations stifle technological advancements and prevent GMOs from improving overall quality of life).
Holding Activists Accountable– assigned to Kevin Folta (discuss how anti-GMO activist campaigns spread false information and if left unchallenged will limit consumer choice, increase food prices, decrease farmer viability and undermine global food security).
GM Crop Safety (address consumer and policy maker concerns that GM crops aren't tested for safety, convince public that they are proven safe).
Consequences of Rejecting GM Crops (address public health fears and political resistance and concerns about biodiversity and biological safety and intellectual property rights that create barriers to GM acceptance).
Sustainable Crop Systems(discuss how GM crop technology provides environmental benefits, increases yields and improves productivity).
Responsible Choice(highlight the role GM crop technology plays in ensuring increase production and how it balances our needs for food, feed, fiber and fuel). Academics were asked to include a "call to action," which would be used in the briefs to influence the public on a variety of platforms including social media, blogs, websites and allied organizations.
Montano enlists university scientists to pressure EPA to abandon proposed pesticide regulations
Documents reveal that Monsanto also used academics to put pressure on regulatory agencies like the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) – in one instance pressuring the EPA to abandon its proposal to tighten regulations regarding pesticide use on insect-resistant crops.
"Is there a coordinated plan to maintain pressure and emphasis on EPA's evolving regulations?" asked Sachs in an email to Dr. Bruce Chassy, a professor emeritus at the University of Illinois at Urbana - Champaign.
Sachs continued, "Have you considered having a small group of scientists request a meeting with Lisa Jackson [referring to the EPA's administrator at the time]?"
With the help of an industry lobbyist, Chassy was eventually able to set up a meeting with Jackson, after which the agency's proposal was ultimately dropped.
Stay tuned for more as Natural News continues to dissect documents exposing the incestuous relationship between the biotech industry and university scientists.
Related Articles:
The sheer volume of information exposing Monsanto is overwhelming - yet where are the mainstream media on this?
Owned and censored is where - impotent to report on anything but PR spin, lies, fluff and sports.
How To Stay Rich In Europe: Inherit Money For 700 Years September 5 2016 | From: Bloomberg
The richest Florentine families in 1427 still are: New research shows Europe leads the world in inherited wealth.
Lamberto Frescobaldi sets two wine glasses atop a wooden barrel in the spacious cellar of his company's winery in a 1,000-year-old castle not far from Florence. Uncorking a bottle of Nipozzano, he takes a sip and nods. The red that his family supplied to Michelangelo and Pope Leo X still tastes pretty darn good.
To Frescobaldi, 53, directing the family business is something of a trust. It’s a way to preserve a dynasty that began with wool traders in about the year 1000 and made its money financing the English crown almost 200 years later.
“You have to feel that what you have inherited, you actually do not own,” he said, seated on a wine cask.
“You only have to run it properly, and to carry on to something else.”
Maintaining inherited wealth has worked for generations of Frescobaldis over 700 years, and it has let the descendants of Jakob Fugger in Germany continue to run the social-housing complex the Emperor’s banker founded almost half a millennium ago.
It’s less of a blessing for Europe as a whole, where family fortunes are more prevalent than in the U.S. or Asia [not correct regarding Asia]. Their relatively high level is a sign of the continent’s low social mobility, keeping education, income and social connections from evolving over generations.
Lamberto Frescobaldi
The richest Florentine families today were already at the top of the socioeconomic ladder almost 600 years ago, according to a recent study by the Bank of Italy.
And research by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development shows that in many European countries, not only wealth and income but even occupations tend to be “sticky,” passed on from generation to generation.
More than one-third of Italy’s richest people inherited their fortunes, compared with just 29 percent in the U.S. and 2 percent in China, according to a 2014 study of the world’s billionaires by the Peterson Institute for International Economics. Germany has the highest share of inheritor-billionaires among developed economies, 65 percent. Overall, heirs and heiresses make up about half of Western Europe’s billionaires.
Europe’s income classes aren’t much more rigid than in the U.S. The lack of social mobility is more of a concern, though, because economic output and the number of available jobs are smaller.
The U.S. has grown 9.9 percent in real terms since 2007; the comparable figure for the European Union over the same period, based on Eurostat data, is 2.8 percent. Gross domestic product per capita in the EU is almost one-third lower than in the U.S when adjusted for purchasing power; the unemployment rate is nearly twice that of the U.S.
Because America’s economy is expanding, “they need more engineers, more chemists, more economists, more analysts, more bankers than in Europe,” said Antonio Schizzerotto, professor emeritus of sociology at the University of Trento and scientific director of the Research Institute for the Evaluation of Public Policies in the same city. “The number of positions open is higher than the number of ‘sons and daughters of.”’
At a time when some European economies are stalling, wealth and social inheritance must be closely watched because if inequality reaches a certain limit, it can further constrain countries' ability to revive growth, Schizzerotto said.
For Frescobaldi, the family patrimony can be summed up in one word: wine. His first experience with red came at the age of six, when he got drunk and fainted at a summer party with vineyard workers.
“I almost feel a little bit more like a trustee,'' said Fugger-Babenhausen, head of one the three surviving family branches that still run the housing complex through a foundation.
As for the family business, “I become very frugal in what I take for myself.”
“They couldn’t give me water, I was the son of the boss!” he said.
Today, after getting a degree in viticulture at the University of California, Davis, he chairs a company, Marchesi Frescobaldi Group, that produces 11 million bottles a year, one of the biggest in Italy. He even named his dog Brunello, after the Brunello di Montalcino the company makes.
Nipozzano Castle, owned by the Frescobaldi family
Before entering winemaking in 1308, the Frescobaldis were wool traders and bankers, financing King Edward I’s wars in Wales and France. The family - which also built Florence’s first-ever bridge, Santa Trinita -- also includes Girolamo Frescobaldi, one of the main composers of keyboard music in the late Renaissance and early Baroque periods, as well as poet Dino Frescobaldi.
The latter collected and conserved the first seven Canti of the Divine Comedy for Dante Alighieri when he was sent to exile, allowing him to complete the work.
The Frescobaldis’ long lineage is hardly unique in Florence, Tuscany’s capital. Bank of Italy researchers Guglielmo Barone and Sauro Mocetti compared tax records of Florentine taxpayers in 1427 and 2011 to track inter-generational mobility, and found that there was meaningful persistence of socioeconomic status across the centuries.
Piazza di Santa Croce in Florence
“The huge political, demographic and economic upheavals that have occurred in the city across the centuries were not able to untie the Gordian knot of socioeconomic inheritance,” the authors wrote.
Germany may be prone to even more concentrations of inherited wealth, research shows.
“In hardly any other country does social origin influence one’s income as much as in Germany,” wrote Marcel Fratzscher, head of the Berlin-based German Institute for Economic Research, in a recent book.
“The richest citizens are also those with the highest income. For to everyone who has, more shall be given.”
Count Alexander Fugger Babenhausen
Germany’s high share of family wealth is in part a consequence of a tax system that until this year allowed family-owned businesses - including a large proportion of the medium-sized companies that are the backbone of its economy - to pass on their financial assets while paying almost no estate tax.
Count Alexander Fugger-Babenhausen, a descendant of arguably Europe’s richest man in the 16th century, says maintaining the fortune’s integrity is a responsibility. The 34-year old returned to Germany to manage the family’s wealth and charitable activities after working in investment banking and private equity in London.
“It’s not the fast-lived, dynamic sector that forces you to take high risks,” he said at the Fuggerei, the affordable-housing complex founded by Jakob Fugger in 1521.
“In every decision we make for the Fuggerei, we try to consider that and be prudent. It would be disastrous if a mistake brought sustainability to an end after 19 generations.”
The Fuggerei social housing complex in Augsburg, Germany
Jakob Fugger ordered the construction of the Fuggerei to give back to his city, and try to save his soul in the meantime. Those living in the complex of cozy, two-story terrace houses pay a yearly rent of 0.88 euros, as per Fugger's decree that the cost be one Rhenish florin, and must make three daily prayers for the founder’s soul and family.
Similarly, the Frescobaldis, who since the Renaissance have commissioned works from artists such as Filippo Brunelleschi, have introduced a contemporary art award called “Artists for Frescobaldi.” For this project, 999 special bottles are produced every year and some of the proceeds are reinvested to support contemporary art.
A bronze bust of Jakob Fugger, founder of the Fuggerei social housing complex, stands in a communal garden area in Augsburg, Germany
The Fuggerei’s 140 apartments have survived innumerable wars and partial destruction during World War II. While they have been renovated, they still follow the original floor plans and feature some unique Renaissance decor, such as a lever-activated door-opening mechanism that in the past let tenants allow visitors in without leaving the apartment’s only heated room.
“I almost feel a little bit more like a trustee,'' said Fugger-Babenhausen, head of one the three surviving family branches that still run the housing complex through a foundation. As for the family business, “I become very frugal in what I take for myself.”
Wealth confiscation: The War on Cash and negative interest rates are radical and insane measures. They are a sign of desperation.
They are also huge threats to your financial security. Central planners are playing with fire and inviting a currency catastrophe. Most people have no idea what really happens when a currency collapses, let alone how to prepare.
Throughout the Western world the financial system has become an exploiter of the people and a deadweight loss on economies. There are only two possible solutions. One is to break the large banks up into smaller and local entities such as existed prior to the bank deregulation. The other is to nationalise them and operate them solely in the interest of the general welfare of the population.
However, the TBTF-banks are too powerful for either solution to be allowed to occur. But the greed, fraud, and self-serving behaviour of Western financial systems, aided and subsidised by governments, could be leading to such a complete breakdown of economic life, that the idea of a private financial system will become as unacceptable in the future as Nazism is today.
Meanwhile, it should be clear that the RKM-cabal want you to use money that they can easily control, tax, and confiscate and paper currency is getting in their way. Governments are instructed to confiscate your wealth, by steadily debasing the currency via printing money or in other words inflation. It’s a stealthy way to confiscate from savers and hard working people.
Imagine the car you have paid to someone before driving off. Imagine the rent to be paid to someone before moving into a home. When you pay someone to take their claim off your hands, you experience how much your money really is worth.
Eliminate Paper Currency:
Governments might collectively attempt to eliminate paper currency in favour of an electronic currency – transferred from party to party solely through licensed banks. Sound farfetched? Well, maybe, but what if the U.S. and EU agreed on an overall plan, and then suggest it to other governments?
On the face of it, this may seem like a conspiracy theory, but all governments would benefit from this control and would be likely to get on board. They might say that this will prove to be the only way out of their present economic problems.
And when your bank – the RKM-cabal – wants to confiscate your money, who will stop them from implementing the P-R-S myth: Problem – Reaction – Solution, that links the free movement of cash to terrorism, creating a consciousness that any movement of large sums of money suggests criminal activity?
– Designate a maximum amount of money that may be moved without reporting to some government investigatory agency; Periodically lower these limits; Accustom people to making all purchases, however small or large, with a bank card; Create a consciousness that the mere possession of cash is suspect, since it’s no longer necessary.
And thus start; the “War on Cash.”
Running out of Time:
Governments are running out of time. The one reason why they’d rush a programme that normally would be given more time for people to accept, is that they see a crash coming before the completion of their new programme to be implemented.
The next step is the intent of creating a definitive false flag event that demonstrates how physical cash is the primary means of funding evil acts in the world so that they can declare a date on which paper currency will become illegal. Until that date, it may be deposited into a bank.
Thereafter, it will become criminal to possess it. Once all cash has been deposited in the banks, negative interest rates will be increased, as interest rates can only be lowered further if cash currency is banned; Confiscation of deposits can then be implemented, as desired by banks, because recently the confiscation of deposits has been legalised in Canada, the U.S., New Zealand, the EU and other countries.;
Confiscate contents of selected safe deposit boxes; End voluntary taxation. All taxation will in future be by direct debit; Declare money to be the property of the State that issued it, as people are only allowed to trade with it, but it is not truly theirs. The State therefore can freeze or confiscate the funds in any account, if any crime is suspected.
Once completed, state wealth control will exist. This may seem a mere fiction. But then, less than a year ago, the War on Cash was regarded by only a few as being even within the realm of possibility, let alone right around the corner. Now it is accepted as being an unsettling reality.
If you have cash in a bank, don’t think of it as your own. This is not the case. It is wealth that you have loaned to the bank. In the near future, the bank, with governmental approval, will have the power to decide if and when they return all, or a part of this cash to you. They will set the rules as to how this decision will be determined and the rules will be changed periodically.
At least if you possess your money in cold, hard cash, they will have to come and physically get it from you. When it is ‘in the bank’ – existing in the form of electronic account balances – all they have to do is push a button.
That’s what happened in Cyprus. The banks were about to fall off the cliff so they confiscated deposits to help make themselves whole again. Who will stop the same thing from happening again wherever you may reside?
The judge is RKM appointed. The police are on the RKM’s payroll. The politicians are RKM bought and paid-off to do what is required by them. When cash is outlawed, only outlaws will have cash. And the best advice to you is; intend to be among them.
Escape Confiscation:
Seek alternatives, the’ War on Cash’ will be international, but it won’t be fully global. There will still be jurisdictions that, following tradition, will not fall in line with the world’s foremost powers. They will not wish to go off the same cliff as the others and will take a different course. They will be the safe havens for those people who seek to escape the collapsing system.
If you’re a resident of any country that’s presently going down this anti-cash road, move your money to a jurisdiction that has a consistent history of a stable government, low, or no direct taxation, and minimal interference or regulation of wealth; Convert your wealth into those forms of assets that are most difficult for greedy governments to confiscate, like ‘foreign-held’ precious metals and real estate.
Only a tiny fraction of the population owns gold. This wasn’t the case in 1933, when the U.S. was still on a variation of the original gold standard. This is why the government will probably not repeat the 1933 rip-off. It’s simply not worth the effort.
If governments want to confiscate wealth, it’s far more likely they will go for the easy option, by steadily debasing the currency by printing money, in other words: Inflation. It’s a stealthy way of confiscating from savers. This does not mean gold owners are invincible.
This time, governments are likely to try a new scam: taxing windfall profits on gold. This would make it much easier for governments to accomplish something similar to its 1933 heist. In short, they will apply a windfall taxation on profits they don’t like.
Click on the image above to open a larger version in a new window
The whole concept is a scam. It is camouflaged, legalized theft. – If the price of gold explodes, Parliaments will pass a Fair Share Gold Windfall Profit Tax Act, levying a tax of 80%, to 90%, or more on gold profits.
Fortunately, there are some practical steps be taken in order to protect yourself from this form of politically motivated expropriation. When such a law is discussed in Parliament, it’s time to sell your gold, or better still, move your gold beforehand into a tax-free jurisdiction zone.
What is most important is that governments cannot destroy gold’s value with reckless policies. Their destructive actions only lead people to buy more gold.
Ousting the Cabal:
Germany, after Turkey has turned its back on the Khazarians and NATO, with its largest European base in Ramstein, now the 2nd closure is, after the NATO base in Turkey, both of which are actively used by the Bushes and Clinton for drugs smuggling activities – include opium from Afghanistan into Western markets to prop up finances.
Good willing leaders in Germany decided to refuse this request and to allying themselves with the Russians. Effectively, joining the UK and Turkey in a Western led move against the RKM controlled US-government, while ordering citizens to stockpile 10 days’ worth of emergency food supplies in preparation for a war of independence, for which the German government is mobilising 600,000 militias.
So the good news is; Germany separates itself as a Khazarians vassal state.
Schnell! Schnell!
That is a huge blow to the RKM, after the first failed coup in Turkey earlier on. Expect similar moves in many other countries during this autumn, watch France, Italy, Japan, Saudi Arabia and Brazil among other countries that are going to follow.
Russia is aware of all this, and has mobilised itself too. Merkel appears to have lost effective power, accordance to statements made by her vice president on Sunday, and the Minster of Trade who said that TTIP is finished and off the table.
‘Mr. Brexit’ Nigel Farage Speaks at Donald Trump’s Rally in Jackson, MS - USA:
There is hope, as the ordinary people stand up and fight the big banks. We did it on June 23rd when we smashed the establishment. Not wanting to be run by a bunch of unelected old men in Brussels. They told us our economy would fall off a cliff. We might even well get WW3.
We reached those people that felt let down by government. We have taken back our country and our borders and self respect.
Obama came to tell the Brits not to leave. If I was an American citizen, I wouldn’t vote for Hillary Clinton, not even if she paid me. You can defeat Washington, by doing what we did in Britain by voting for change, and remember anything is possible, if enough decent people are prepared to stand up against the establishment.
U.S. Elites Are Losing All Their Power:
In the video below, Dr Willie explains that not if, but WHEN the United States Dollar loses its status as the Global Reserve Currency, the U.S. government will be forced to increase its activities in an area most don’t like to talk about: its narcotic sales.
The United States government does a tremendous amount of narcotic trafficking around the world, but it will be forced to do even more so, because their economy is already in a shambles, and their military still devours over $800 BILLION per year to be maintained.
Under Obama the economy has grown at an average of 1.5% annually, and that is using the numbers Obama provides, which means in all likelihood, that the economy has actually been shrinking throughout his entire term. It is known that Obama tends not to be honest about much of anything.
– Turkey has quietly turned East, and Germany is slowly following suit, frustrating NATO in the process, eliminating the largest NATO base in Europe, in Ramstein, Germany. This will be the second base to be withdrawn after Turkey, both bases heavily involved in drug trafficking for the Bushes and Clintons.
The Politics Of Negative Interest Rates
Yanis Varoufakis: Objects of desire come at a cost. Only bad things, like toxic waste, have a negative price, the equivalent of a fee payable to anyone willing to make them disappear. Does this mean that negative interest rates embody a new perspective on money – that it has gone “bad”?
In market economies, money is the measure of the value of goods and services. And the interest rate is the price of that metric – of money itself. When the price is zero, it makes no difference whether money is kept under a mattress or lent, because there is no cost to holding or borrowing cash.
But how can the price of money – which, after all, makes the world go round, or, as Karl Marx put it, “transforms all my incapacities into their contrary” – be zero? And how can it possibly ever become negative, as it now is in much of the global economy, with the world’s moneyed people “bribing” governments to borrow from them more than $5.5 trillion?
The answer can only be of a type that economists loathe: philosophical, political, and thus irreducible to neat positivist explanation. In other words, the answer must concern the essence of money.
In a farmers’ market, sellers with many unsold potatoes start dropping the price until a level is reached (possibly very low, but still positive) at which all of the potatoes are bought. In contrast, since the 2008 global financial crisis, every time the price of money has been reduced, demand for it falls and excess savings rise. Clearly, money is not like potatoes or any other well-defined “thing.”
To understand how money can be our societies’ supreme good while fetching a negative price, it helps to start with the realization that, unlike potatoes, money has no intrinsic private value. Its utility comes from what its holder can make others do. Money, to recall Lenin’s definition of politics, is about “who does what to whom.”
Imagine you are an entrepreneur with money in the bank, or have a bank eager to lend large sums to invest in your business. You spend sleepless nights wondering whether you should invest in a new product – that is, whether you should exploit your access to money to cause an array of others to work on your behalf.
In our current Great Deflation, what worries you most is your customers’ future purchasing power and sentiment. Will they be able and willing to buy your new product at high enough prices and quantities?
Suppose that, sleep-deprived, you then switch on the radio or TV only to hear that US Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen and European Central Bank President Mario Draghi are considering reducing interest rates further. Will you rejoice at the prospect that your financing costs will fall? Will you be motivated to invest your own money now that it earns lower (perhaps even negative) interest?
No and no. Your reaction is most likely to be one of alarm: “Oh, my God! If Janet and Mario are considering another interest-rate cut, they must have good reason to believe that demand will remain low!”
So you abandon your investment plan. “Better to borrow money at almost no cost,” you think, “and buy back a few more of my company’s shares, boost their price, earn more on the stock exchange, and bank the profits for the rainy days that are coming.”
And so it is that the price of money falls, even as the supply of it burgeons. Central bankers who never predicted the Great Deflation are now busily trying to find a way out with economic and econometric models that could never explain it, let alone point to solutions.
Unwilling to question the political dogma that central banks must be apolitical, they refuse to think of money as more than a “thing.” And so they continue the search for a technocratic fix to a problem crying out for a philosophically astute political solution.
It’s a futile quest. Once the price of money (interest rates) hit zero, central banks tried buying mountains of public and private debt from commercial banks to give them an incentive to lend freely. The ECB went so far as to pay banks to lend to business while, at the same time, punishing them for not lending (via negative interest rates for excess reserves).
But bankers and businesses, viewing these measures as desperate responses to self-fulfilling deflationary expectations, went on an investment strike, while using the central-bank money to inflate the prices of their own assets (stocks, art, real estate, and so forth).
This did nothing to defeat the Great Deflation; it only made the rich richer, an outcome that somehow reinforced central bankers’ belief in central bank independence.
Not all central bankers, thankfully, are incapable of responding creatively to the Great Deflation. Andy Haldane, Chief Economist at the Bank of England, has courageously suggested that all money should become digital, which would permit real-time negative interest rates to be imposed on all of us, thus forcing everyone to spend at once.
John Williams, President and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, recently argued that the Great Deflation could be beaten only by targeting the price level and nominal national income simultaneously – a New Deal-like approach featuring joint action by the Fed and the government.
What separates these central bankers from the herd is their readiness to jettison the myth of independent monetary policy, to accept that money is the most political of commodities, to challenge the sanctity of cash, and to concede that defeating the Great Deflation requires a progressive policy agenda.
Simone Weil once said, “If you want to know what a man is really like, take notice of how he acts when he loses money.”
Likewise, if we want to know what our societies are really like, we must take notice of how they react to negative interest rates.
Kim Dotcom Wins Bid To Livestream On YouTube His Extradition Appeal September 1 2016 | From: TVNZ
Internet entrepreneur Kim Dotcom has won a bid to livestream on YouTube his battle against extradition to the United States.
The 42-year-old Megaupload founder has this week returned to court to appeal a decision allowing him to be extradited from New Zealand over criminal copyright charges.
Comment: The final outcome of this court case here in New Zealand right now ultimately will decide the freedom of the entire global Internet as we know it!
On top of that, at issue is national sovereignty, and whether multinational corporations can be allowed to manipulate the sovereign laws of one country or through international trade agreements etc. to take precedence over the sovereign laws of another independent country – in this case New Zealand.
Incredibly, against strong opposition from the US Government yesterday, the judge is allowing this appeal trial to be live-streamed to the world on YouTube, starting today, but as yet, I haven’t been able to find it.
So all this means, if the live-streaming goes ahead, the multinational corporate media cannot CENSOR the truth about the case as they have been.
Today, the presiding judge gave permission for the entire six weeks of the appeal hearing to be broadcast on YouTube by a cameraman hired by Dotcom.
Between the direct effect on millions of Megaupload users as well as the precedent the case would set, the public interest merited complete coverage standard media channels could not provide, Dotcom's lawyer, Ron Mansfield, had argued at the High Court in Auckland.
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“This is a case of the internet age," he said.
Lawyers for the United States oppose the livestream, saying Dotcom was not sufficiently accountable for the coverage - as a media organisation would be - and that the footage could prejudice a criminal case in the US if the extradition went ahead.
But Justice Murray Gilbert allowed the stream to go ahead, on the grounds the comments and live-chat features for the video were disabled, the video was taken down after the trial and the broadcast was delayed for 20 minutes to avoid publishing of sensitive material.
"This is breaking new ground. New Zealand at the forefront of transparent justice! Leadership!" Dotcom tweeted moments later.
The livestream will start tomorrow. In December, Judge Nevin Dawson ruled Dotcom and his three associates - Mathias Ortmann, Finn Batato and Bram van der Kolk - had criminal charges to face in the US over their part in running file-sharing website Megaupload.
The four men face charges of conspiracy to commit racketeering, conspiracy to commit money laundering, wire fraud and two kinds of criminal copyright infringement based on an FBI investigation going back to 2010.
If extradited and found guilty in the US, the men could be up for decades in jail.
The Overthrow Of America - By Its Enemies Within August 30 2016 | From: Sott
My recent article exposes a brand new propaganda infomercial starring Angelina Jolie and 15 other high profile card-carrying members of the treasonous elitist "think tank" the Council on Foreign Relations.
I outed the its obvious attempt at an image makeover, upgrading its Mr. Burns-David Rockefeller image of wrinkled, old white men ruling the world to a new generation of bright young stars brilliantly working together to solve the planet's most daunting challenges and problems facing humanity in the 21st century.
Yet a brief US history of the last 100 years with a more detailed focus on the last decade and a half since 9/11 reveals the true story in plain sight of how infiltrated traitors within our own government have long had scheming eyes on their sinister prize of one world government tyranny.
But the story could just as easily begin the same year America's Founding Fathers signed the Declaration of Independence in July 1776. Another historically significant figure in Bavaria in southern Germany barely two months earlier was busy founding the secret Order of the Illuminati.
The son of a rabbi but trained in Jesuit tradition he later came to despise, German philosopher Adam Wieshaupt dabbled in Freemasonry and the Cabbala before developing his own secret society. With fellow Jewish [read: Khazarian Zionist] Rothschild money, they plotted an ambitious, highly subversive plan for their anti-Catholic secret society of elitists to implement global governance.
Influenced by both ancient Talmudic roots and Egyptian occult nearly two and a half centuries ago, prior to the United States even becoming a sovereign, independent nation, Weishaupt and his "illumined" order already identified the three major barriers deemed the true enemy of one world government.
For well over a century traitors within the US federal government have persistently sought to undermine and vanquish Weishaupt's three declared enemy obstacles to one world government - American citizens' love of God and their predominant Christian religion, patriotic love of country and national sovereignty, and love of family and parents that include private property inheritance.
What is striking is that Karl Marx in his Communist Manifesto also calls for abolishment of family, private property, countries/nationalities and religion as well. One world government is the fait accompli umbrella that unites Marxists, Zionists, Fabian Socialists, the United Nations, the EU, the Parliamentary Group for World Government, Trilateral Commission, CFR, Bilderberg Group, Trans-Pacific Partnership, the TTIP, the Vatican and the World Council of Churches.
Obviously this globalist agenda has been winning on all accounts, overcoming aforementioned barriers targeted centuries earlier. Subsequently with the direction this nation has taken since 9/11 under the Bush-Obama regime, the US populace is more confused, polarized and conflicted than ever before.
The ruling elite has historically used US Empire to do its dirty bidding as both global bully and nation exterminator. From behind a thinly veiled curtain, the CFR's been the Intel handler directing all US wars in a nonstop foreign policy conquest of global unipolar hegemony for the last 95 years now.
The same founders of the 1921 Council on Foreign Relations a few years earlier had deceitfully snuck through their secret Jekyll Island masterplan called the Federal Reserve Act as its financial WMD on the eve of Christmas Eve 1913 right after most Congress members had already left Washington on holiday break.
Thus a band of powerful thieves was stealthily successful in infiltrating the government and hijacking America on their way to destroying our democratic republic. For good measure, during that same fateful year that our republic took it first fatal blow, they also finagled passage of their unconstitutional "1%" Federal Income Tax Act when they took license to begin stealing, misappropriating and bleeding working class Americans dry while monopolizing mega-giant corporations enjoy tax-free, corporate welfare subsidies.
The US government oligarchy squeezes ten times more out of overburdened taxpayers for obscene corporate welfare programs than for welfare for America's most poverty-stricken families. The rich get richer while a growing disenfranchised class of Americans are thrown to the Wall Street wolves as purged useless eaters as part of the elite's eugenics endgame.
Once their Ponzi schemed 1913 Federal Reserve Act was in place, it took the parasitic traitors only a few months to began what was to become history's deadliest "war to end all wars" killing 17 million people. Little more than a decade later the bankers' intentionally manipulated the Great Depression and the treasonous failed coup of 1934 that "war is a racket" General Smedley Butler heroically stopped and exposed.
Then the banking vultures like George W's grandpa Prescott Bush turned to financing Hitler's rise to power in order to cause history's bloodiest of all wars in WWII killing over 60 million, followed immediately by the elite's contrived cold war against their next bankrolled enemy the Communists that included both the Korean and Vietnam Wars.
Fact based evidence clearly shows time and time again that all of America's wars have been brought to us exclusively by the bankster gangsters who hijacked our government a century ago and been in the driver's seat ever since.
In 1913 private bankers were able to seize control over America's money supply, allowing them to print it out of thin air and over the years loaning the government trillions of dollars the US taxpayers would forever be footing the bill to pay off interests on all those war loan debts and big government pork barrel spending that keep mounting into the colossal, unpayable US debt (standing at near $20 trillion that's doubled under Obama to match all previous presidencies combined!).
The corrupt system of thievery has taxpayers paying for wars that bankers create, always financing both sides as in Germany's pre-WWI militarization and the Bolshevik Revolution and later Hitler's prewar rise to power. Washington and its allies have been busted for all along secretly funding America's so called war on terror enemy - the al Qaeda/ISIS terrorists.
By elite design, virtually every military conflict in US history has been intentionally started by bankers using false flag operations as their deceptive pretext for nonstop war 93% of the time.
After inventing al Qaeda (then mujahedeen) as paid CIA mercenaries that proved instrumental in breaking up the Soviet Empire in the "graveyard of empires" Afghanistan throughout the 1980's, and again throughout the 90's balkanizing a shattered Yugoslavia into a half dozen broken pieces, Washington's Zionist neocons in control of foreign policy then decided to reinvent al Qaeda and their hitherto proxy war ally Osama bin Laden as the latest post-Soviet era bogeymen - Islamic terrorists.
Their inside 9/11 job along with their anthrax terrorism (produced in a federal lab) was then used to rush through their Patriot Act, already pre-penned by the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld war criminal chain gang to finish the task begun back in 1913 to destroy the US as a democratic republic . The same secret societies like the Freemasons, Skull and Bones disciples and CFR lifers that infiltrated and hijacked our federal government a century earlier are even more firmly in control today.
The Bush-Clinton-Obama crime cabal dynasty has been calling the shots ever since the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and they're currently in the final stages of implementing their long awaited one world government tyranny. Recognizing that Americans are finally catching on to their endless crime cabal debauchery, the globalists are rushing to their NWO finish line.
A year after 9/11-Patriot Act inside job, the Department of Homeland Security artificially emerged to ostensibly protect Americans, but like all things Orwellian, does exactly the opposite. As part of the bloated, self-serving, bureaucratic security state apparatus, and terminal cancer to our lost democratic republic, it's done little to none in stopping terrorism.
What it does do is purge any records linking the Muslim Brotherhood to terrorism. Local San Bernardino and nearby Orlando Fort Myers mosques that had connections to the alleged false flag shooters were ordered erased. DHS has been repeatedly caught bussing unvetted illegal aliens from Somalia and who knows where else.
The Orlando shooter was employed for nearly a decade at the world's largest private security company GS4 that's under contract with DHS transporting illegals from the border into America's heartland as part of its catch and release policy.
An eyewitness video captured a UPS plane under the cover of darkness flying in human cargo presumably from the Middle East, loading them onto 30 busses and whisking them away from the Harrisburg, PA airport. State governors are complaining Obama is secretly sending refugees into states without even notifying the governors.
With 6,227 Syrian refugees arriving this year as of July, Obama promised the UN he'd take in an additional 10,000 Syrians by the end of next month. Fulfilling promises to the global elite and UN obviously mean everything, unlike all his broken campaign promises like transparency to the American people. During Obama's first five years in office alone, green cards were issued to 680,000 immigrants arriving from Muslim nations.
Each year the US admits a quarter million Muslim migrants. Thanks to our treasonous commander-in-chief, unvetted and set free, ISIS cells in America are alive and well.
For the first time in a decade, near half the total refugees arriving in the US this year are Muslims outnumbering Christians. Obama's open border policy has DHS ordering Border Patrol officers to stand down, permitting known drug traffickers and MS13 criminal gang members to freely enter and commit crimes against Americans.
DHS is treasonously working with the UN to allow criminals and potential terrorists into our country at the same time DHS is targeting law abiding citizens who happen to be patriots, veterans, gun owners, constitutionalists and dissidents as its homegrown enemy.
Meanwhile, returning to those three sworn Illuminati enemies, through mass media propaganda and the likes of fourth wave feminism and the LBGT-PC agenda, the elite's been busily engaging in social engineering that has globally undermined male-female relations, confused gender roles and sexuality, and subsequently by design seriously weakened the family bond.
As a former licensed therapist working within the child welfare system, I can attest to deep state authoritarianism perpetrated by overzealous child protective services Nazis that wrongfully break up families and further abuse children who were my victimized clients.
Oppressive overreach in both education and social services at federal, state and county levels has clearly usurped autonomous rights of America's parents. The "progressive" idea being pushed nowadays insists that children no longer belong to their parents but the globalized community.
Much has been written about the subversive forces of social indoctrination heavily tainted in communist and socialist ideology now being so aggressively deployed by the so called progressive left. As an example, the Obama administration coerced 46 out of 50 states into accepting Common Core standards as a condition to receiving much needed federal aid funding.
The systemic brainwash of today's youth through a purposely dumbed down public education system is insidiously polluting impressionable young minds with Common Core garbage.
The collectivist dogma frowns upon individuality and individual achievement as one's value is only as good as one's contribution and benefit toward the collective group. Unthinking conformity, group mindset and the Political Correctness agenda have suppressed, stifled and supplanted critical thinking, innate creativity and natural inquiry in pursuit of truth that dare questions authority.
The brainwash factory in America goes to work early on in our schools to churn out mindless little robots who simply do what they're told as zombified cogs in the factory wheel, only to find out that when they graduate the factory's been closed, outsourced overseas for cheaper slave labor.
For over a decade US Homeland Security Department and FEMA have been recruiting and training America's clergy to align as deep state propagandist oppressors during a national emergency under martial law. Many religious leaders have sold out on both God and their flock of worshippers to covertly join forces with the feds' treasonous authoritarian tyranny.
In order to retain their 501c3 IRS tax-exempt status, churches, synagogues, temples and mosques across America have been co-opted into nefariously leading their religious followers to the eugenics slaughterhouse, consequently forcing pastors and clerics to betray their own spiritual principles and teachings as taught by Jesus, Muhammad, Buddha.
Per a whistleblowing pastor, FEMA enlisted the biblical passage Romans 13 as the preaching talking point to use in sermons to brainwash their congregations into blindly obeying both them and the federal authorities as preparation for the [intended] coming crises.
It's an over-the-top, all too obvious government ploy to turn community religious leaders into secret police enforcers, rehearsing preparedness for potential bio-terrorist attacks, natural as well as unnatural disasters, declared national emergencies and martial law.
Religious leaders will be counted on by the feds to help tame the "cowboy mentality" of American citizens determined to stand up for their property and Second Amendment rights when by executive order under martial law forced relocation, gun confiscation and property and livestock confiscation will be enforced.
The training sessions call upon the religious community to preach subservience well in advance of what's coming and that the planned forced relocation of citizens will be "for their own good," evoking benevolent Orwellian Big Brother assurance of guaranteed safety and protection as the lure to foster sheep-like obedience.
FEMA trainers emphasize that the program is part of a nationwide preparedness directive under the umbrella of the National Voluntary Organizations Active in Disaster (NVOAD) and ten years ago already had over 13,000 counties in the US on board. FEMA reps also reassure the religious leaders that they will receive full backup and cooperation from law enforcement at all levels when and where citizen resistance is encountered.
A year after this story broke mainstream television station KSLA 12 confirmed the existence of these Clergy Response Teams operating as extensions of the federal government to help quell civil unrest and rebellion under national emergency conditions.
Meanwhile while the feds have been brainwashing pastors to become martial law pacifiers, Obama's practically made it a sin to be a Christian in America. In the US military it literally is against the law to openly share your Christian faith, punishable by court martial. Obama has destroyed troop morale and devastated retention rates in the armed forces.
Biblical scenes and Merry Christmas greetings as an annual Americana tradition has been outlawed in communities across America, replaced by the contrite PC cliché "happy holidays." Daily prayer and a "God"-less Pledge of Allegiance has been surgically removed from every public education classroom across America.
The rigid intolerance enforced in the name of PC radicalism that's taken hold of America today shuns any display remotely Christian while going to extreme lengths not to offend Muslims seems oddly hypocritical, one-sided and unfair.
And to those who succumb to ignorance and hate toward 2 million plus Muslims around the world because the US hired a few Godless mercenary thugs to commit heinous atrocities for the US Empire of Chaos and Destruction of course makes no logical or moral sense either.
Obama's bizarre reaction last year to a Jordanian pilot burned alive by the Islamic State terrorists that he and Hillary created and the slaying and selling of children by ISIS is very telling.
He told Christians to "get off your high horse" in response to the ISIS savagery, adding that Christians committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ referring to the Crusades and Inquisition against Islam and hanging blacks during Jim Crowism.
But an astute critic asked, "Has he ever said ISIS has committed terrible deeds in the name of Muhammad?"
Despite his repeated actions that indicate otherwise, Obama insists that he's a Christian. But he has many doubters. In a poll taken last September, 29% of Americans (43% of the Republicans) think Obama is a Muslim while 43% of Americans believe he's a Christian.
Having been caught telling over a thousand proven lies, Obama is a pathological liar and psychopath. His notorious character is shady from the get-go, a complete fraud demonstrated by his refusal to produce a valid birth certificate to illegally using a dead immigrant's social security number issued in Connecticut where he's never lived. But then psychopaths lie all the time.
Barry and Micheal
It's their second nature, their Modus Operandi and a primary symptom of their mental illness that only feeds their self-serving drive for power, advantage and self-aggrandizement. Incapable of possessing either empathy or a moral conscience, hence Obama the actor's only capable of shedding those crocodile artificially induced tears.
As a condition of his and others like the Clintons and the Bushes, their callous, coldhearted, destructive actions that have harmed and murdered millions of humans produce zero guilt or remorse.
So no matter how many times Obama attempts to explain he's really a Christian, people pay far more attention to his actions speaking louder than any of his deceitful words. In a C-SPAN speech last year in Turkey as well as a 2008 ABC interview with George Stephenopoulos, Obama momentarily let his guard down and rare honest words slipped out. The 2008 "my Muslim faith" admission was immediately corrected by Democratic faithful George.
In addition to these faux pas, Obama once assured an Egyptian foreign minister that "I am a Muslim" and at another Islamic State dinner he uttered, "I am one of you." And once a Pakistani government minister asked Obama to be the world leader for all Muslims.
His alleged Kenyan biological father was Muslim and in his youth from 6-10 he lived as Barry Soetoro in the most Muslim populated country on earth Indonesia with a Muslim stepfather. His third grade teacher told the LA Times he was a Muslim, stating that he registered as such in school and attended Muslim classes.
Obama repeatedly omits Christian references to God and Creator when reciting historic passages like the Declaration of Independence. On a number of occasions he has mocked biblical scripture but even more frequently defends Islam. Before speaking at Georgetown and Notre Dame Universities, he ordered that the cross and religious symbols be covered yet whenever he visits mosques, he never requests a décor adjustment where Allah is posted everywhere.
Vatican court's highest ranking Cardinal Raymond Burke accuses Obama of being "hostile toward Christian civilization" and "promotes anti-life and anti-family policies." Recall Illuminati and Marxist foremost NWO enemies - family and religion.
If that's not enough to question where Obama's loyalty lies, his Kenyan half-brother Malik Obama is a known Muslim Brotherhood member affiliated with a group the State Department classifies as terrorist. That might also explain why Obama's DHS is wiping clean all incriminating records linking terrorism to Muslim Brotherhood.
Additionally, Obama's longtime senior advisor perhaps exerting the most influence and control over the president is Iran-born Muslim Valerie Jarrett.
Through a freedom of information request, Judicial Watch obtained FBI investigative files showing that Jarrett's father, father-in-law and maternal grandfather are/were Communists.
Fellow Chicagoan Valerie Jarrett and her family also have ties to Obama's old mentors terrorist Bill Ayers and Communist Frank Marshall Davis as well as the Muslim Brotherhood.
Last year former Admiral James "Ace" Lyons, Jr. went public accusing Barack Hussein Obama as anti-American, pro-Islamic, pro-Muslim Brotherhood, outing both Valerie Jarrett as well as CIA director John Brennan as Muslims.
According to a former FBI agent, Obama's choice of CIA director John Brennan converted to Muslim while stationed in Saudi Arabia years ago. A military intelligence whistleblower also outed the Muslim Brennan while he was CIA station chief in Jeddah maintaining that Brennan approved visas for the [supposed] 19 alleged 9/11 terrorists.
A couple of other credible sources have also come forth to further corroborate the veracity of these Muslim claims, among them former naval intelligence officer turned investigative journalist Wayne Madsen. Madsen contends that there's "growing evidence" the CIA director's a Wahhabist convert.
Also recall the highly suspicious death in June 2013 of muckraking journalist Michael Hastings who at the time was writing an expose on Brennan and US intelligence when his car was very likely remotely hacked and accelerated up to 80 MPH on an LA surface street before it suddenly exploded blowing the engine 100 feet from the charred body and vehicle.
A WikiLeaks leak from Stratfor, a CIA linked global intelligence firm, mentioned how Brennan was on "a witch hunt" against snooping journalists. A nervous Hastings knew he was being investigated by the FBI and even had asked a friend to borrow her car earlier that same day. Michael Hastings had written two very high profile, unflattering Rolling Stone articles on two prominent generals in charge of the Afghanistan War.
General Stanley McChrystal lost his job over Hastings' revealing portrayal and then a second piece on General David Petraeus who seven months earlier was forced to resign as Brennan's CIA predecessor after Petraeus' scandalous affair with his biographer broke. Again, truth becomes the enemy to dark evil forces.
Having a standing US president and US head of intelligence both treasonous Muslims covertly promoting terrorism around the world amounts to the worst breach of both national as well as global security this planet's ever known.
Understanding the profound damage being done to the world by these two partners-in-crime working in tandem, this The New York Times article noting how close Obama and Brennan are suddenly makes more sense:
"In the 67 years since the CIA was founded, few presidents have had as close a bond with their intelligence chiefs."
Other deeply disturbing influences on Obama's life are his mentors. His longtime mentor Bill Ayers who first got him started in politics is a well-known terrorist from the Weather Underground back in the 1960's and 70's that somehow managed to avoid jail time. Ayers told an FBI informant that had infiltrated his group that once Weather Underground overthrew the US government, 50 million Americans would need to be rounded up and taken to re-education camps.
With his white mother a CIA employee, his grandparents CIA assets and raised among CIA handlers in both Hawaii, Indonesia and perhaps his entire life, Obama was carefully groomed as the Manchurian president selected by the elite to suddenly catapult out of obscurity onto the national stage.
Early in Obama's life from adolescence into young adulthood his closest mentor (and possibly his biological father) was African American Communist, poet and journalist Frank Marshall Davis. Davis was a victim of racism and hated it and America for that reason. As an alternative to the racist pecking order of imperialistic elitism, Frank Marshall Davis turned to Communism Soviet Stalinism style where he believed a black man would be on a more equal footing.
During the time Obama knew him he'd become old and bitter. How much of that resentment and political ideology rubbed off on the young impressionable mulatto Barack struggling to find his blackness growing up in a white family without a black father? Probably quite a bit.
Obama mentions Frank (only by his first name) in his autobiography Dreams from My Father 22 times. But when it came time for his book to go audio in 2005 leading up to his run for presidency, Obama cunningly chose to totally erase Frank the Communist out of his life.
With a violent subversive white radical terrorist and an angry bitter black Stalinist Communist most influential in making him the man he is today, steeped and bred in Manchurian CIA candidacy to become the most "powerful" front man in the world as long as he on cue successfully destroys racist Christian America for his ruling masters, I'd say he's followed his script like the dutiful puppet he is to the T.
His horrendous track record at deceit speaks volumes that only his demonic handlers can be proud of.
By the way, as power hungry puppets spawned from the same criminally psychopathic pond, the Muslim Brotherhood waters still run deep in crime boss Hillary's shady world as well. Look no further than her right hand Muslim gal-pal who's been her top aide the last 20 years - Huma Abedin. When Huma was two-years old her family moved from Michigan to Saudi Arabia where she lived until 18, returning to America to attend college.
It turns out all the while Huma was working for Clinton, she also had a gig as assistant editor of the Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs from 1995 through 2008, a radical Sharia law publication where her Pakistani-born mother is editor out of offices in Jeddah. Mama Abedin also sits on the staff of an organization run by the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood.
The New York Post just ran a detailed article uncovering the family's extremist views endorsing female circumcision, opposing women's rights, attributing domestic violence to men's stress in the world and blamed 9/11 on the US. This shocker is just the latest from the scandal-ridden Clinton campaign.
While using a private internet server, Abedin helped Hillary sell off America to dangerous foreign interests. For more than a dozen years Huma Abedin worked for an organization whose stated objective is to infiltrate and conquer the West in the name of Islam.
The elite has seen to it that all its major players are in place to destroy the United States from within by traitors who secretly hate America. Welcome to New World Disorder [but it won't be allowed to run it's course].
While practicing Christianity openly under Obama's watch is becoming criminalized, or even displaying the American flag in front of your home on Flag Day can get you arrested, Obama and his Attorney General Loretta Lynch are making the politics of Political Correctness the new American law and religion.
Uttering statements that may potentially offend someone in the universe is fast becoming a crime. Being critical of Muslims, apartheid Israel, the LGBT agenda or the federal government are increasingly construed as so called hate crimes that could land you in prison, especially if uttered by potential "homegrown extremists" deemed enemies of the state.
The assault on free speech and flagrant violations of the US Constitution that they took sworn oaths to uphold and protect is overwhelming. The First Amendment right of free speech, freedom of religion, freedom of assembly for peaceful protest are no longer recognized as our rule of law, and exercising those rights increasingly runs the risk of being beaten, thrown in jail or even killed. Freedom of press amongst the 6-oligarch owned MSM mega-media corporations is completely nonexistent.
MSM puppets on each network read from the same disinformation script. And if the Trans-Pacific Partnership passes, the last vestige of a free press and free speech that still can be found on the internet will be totally censored, banned and lost. In this age of tyrannical deceit, truth becomes the enemy.
Our Fourth Amendment rights to unreasonable search and seizure as well as the right to privacy have been completely obliterated with electronic tracking and storing our every move, communicated utterance and transaction. Through civil asset forfeiture laws, police are able to legally rob us blind without warrants or probable cause, literally stealing our cash with no connection to any crime.
But now since May law enforcement has taken it a step further with new scanning devices electronically capable of snatching money right out of our bank accounts. Cops took more assets from Americans in 2014 than all the burglars combined. Eminent domain allows the government at any level from local to federal to steal our home and property not always for public use but for private development as well.
Executive Order 13603 authorizes Obama and his traitors to confiscate our 2nd Amendment right to bear firearms, to confiscate our stored food and water, our vehicles and all our property. Without pay until further notice, the presidential dictator can also literally conscript Americans into slavery.
2012 NDAA ended the 1878 Posse Comitatis law that prohibited US military from interfering in civil affairs. It authorizes military troops to break into our homes without warrant, without charges, arrest and imprison citizens without due process, without legal representation and without trial for an unlimited length of time... Gulag USA.
Bail-in laws give the criminal banksters the right to literally steal all our life savings right out of our "private" unsecured bank accounts. We're now living in a lawless age of New World Disorder where grand theft rape and pillaging everything American citizens always cherished as our freedoms are gone.
The treasonous traitors from within our own government have openly declared an apartheid war on Americans of every persuasion, color, creed, criminalizing anyone who demands accountability for the egregious acts of treason committed by agents from the federal as well as state and municipal levels.
After decades of war in the Middle East and North Africa, the globalists manufactured the migration crisis of near two million and counting (1.3 million in 2015 alone) in Europe and per Obama many more to come to America. The globalist plan is to weaken and destroy the West, creating such a clash of civilizations that a volatile enough racial and religious divide will foment race/religious civil wars.
Speaking of race war, in addition to being a top financier of Hillary's crooked path to a rigged presidency, billionaire George Soros first helped fund her and her assistant Nuland's illegal 2014 Ukraine coup, singlehandedly ushering in cold war 2 against Russia.
Backing the fascist corrupt Kiev regime, Soros, Hillary and Obama have caused the bloody civil war still raging in eastern Ukraine that could easily ignite World War III that Hillary promises to deliver. And in recent weeks the war in the Donbass region is intensifying.
A recently released CIA report has surfaced pointing the finger at Soros financing a series of bombing attacks in Czechoslovakia during 1986 and 1987 in efforts to overthrow the then Communist government. Meet the terrorist behind the terrorists who's been free to operate his paid for violence evil with impunity throughout the world now for 30 years.
Let us not forget Soros' evil misdeeds in America with his intention to incite race wars on US soil. He dropped 33 million in a single year to deploy his paid army of bussed in agitators and co-opted Black Lives Matter protesters to invade inner cities whenever Obama's coldblooded police force murder another unarmed black man.
With near weekly incidents now of police killing unarmed Americans and Intel handled MK Ultra patsies killing police, at this point Obama, Hillary and Soros' wet dream has almost been fulfilled. While racism exists in America, deep state is using it as an exploited, divide and conquer weapon to intentionally cause such out of control civil and racial violence that it will then be used as the convenient trigger for dictator Obama or dictator Hillary to declare martial law.
Comment: While it is true that police state USA is exacerbating racial tensions we would be doing BLM an injustice if we were to paint its existence with one Soros-dipped brush stroke. See this.
With ma and pa neighborhood stores selling made-in-America products long dead now, and America's malls fast becoming dying ghost towns minus a disappearing, once vibrant middle class, times ahead look mighty grim for America. All 133 Target stores in Canada were closed last year and 154 Walmarts in the US are boarded up under contract with Homeland Security, most likely waiting to be reopened when the SHTF as FEMA roundup processing centers.
With Obama dropping doom and gloom hints ominously warning Americans to be prepared for impending coming disasters, get ready for a series of rapid fire false flag crises, like a so called massive cyber-hack attack breaching America's bank security declaring on Friday a banker's holiday and inaccessibly frozen ATM's and private bank account assets on Monday.
Or an EMP attack that's been waiting to happen on America's extremely vulnerable power grid that the feds have known about for years but refuse to invest in infrastructure to protect the 90% of Americans who would likely die without electricity within 12 months.
Or the highly amplified weaponized cell towers capable of delivering non-thermal, radioactive heat that could fry us in our own backyard neighborhoods. Or the black ops Tesla inspired pulsar weapons technology related to HAARP weather warfare through diabolically staged unnatural disasters like earthquakes, volcanos, tsunamis, floods and droughts, combined with towers that resonate with brain frequencies for massive mind control using heavy metals as EMF conductors from geoengineered chemtrails.
Nuclear weapons could begin disappearing in Turkey into unaccounted hands potentially with ISIS fingerprints on them. After all, the US has consistently been the main supplier of terrorists' weapons - always "mysteriously" ending up in their hands.
Speaking of weapons and supplies, recent sightings of massive movement of UN military vehicles and weapons in the US have been sighted perfectly timed with recent authorization for UN troop deployment on US soil under backdoor stipulation to "protect" civilians but could just as easily kill us under martial law orders when they come to lock us up and confiscate our guns.
Or another flimsily veiled executive order signed on July 1st that authorizes new rules of engagement for deadly drones eradicating declared combatants moving amongst civilian populations that under Obama's loose definition could easily be applied to homegrown civilians believing in the sanctity of our US Constitution and national sovereignty.
The most eminent danger of them all posed by the elite's meticulously planned perfect storm of global economic collapse co-timed with World War III against Russia, China and Iran carrying the very real threat of nuclear annihilation [but again, this is very unlikely to eventuate].
This growing collection of extremely plausible doomsday scenarios seem as endless as the globalists' war on terror, except the terror being perpetrated on us is nothing short of premeditated human genocide by a Satan worshipping, pedophilia-addicted, trans-human elitist crime cabal syndicate.
When history keeps repeating itself, more than convincingly demonstrating that the ruling elite possesses both the criminal means and willful intention to purge 90% of the global population, while enslaving the rest under absolute tyrannical one world government control, it's time to wake up from this nightmare and start fighting back for our very lives.
Comment: Ultimately - the wost case scenario simply will not be allowed to happen. There are far too many contingency plans in place - BUT the masses need to be awakened to the full gravity of the situation and what was planned for them.
Joachim Hagopian is a West Point graduate and former US Army officer. He has written a manuscript based on his unique military experience entitled "Don't Let The Bastards Getcha Down." It examines and focuses on US international relations, leadership and national security issues. After the military, Joachim earned a master's degree in Clinical Psychology and worked as a licensed therapist in the mental health field with abused youth and adolescents for more than a quarter century. In recent years he has focused on his writing, becoming an alternative media journalist. His blog site is at: empireexposed.blogspot.co.
The Real Reason Your Rural Banks Are Closing Kiwis - It’s Not Lack Of Funds August 28 2016 | From: EnviroWatchRangitikei
Recent reports tell us that in spite of $1 billion Profit, Westpac is still looking to close 19 rural Branches. So it isn’t because they’re not making money.
Same scenario with Housing NZ. Those homes are being hocked off by the thousands currently, not because they are an encumbrance, in fact the Housing Corporation is/was running at a profit.
Cast your eye back to the late ’80s and the new Neoliberal rip-off economy that promised us they were working smarter amidst a whole palaver about restructuring aka structural adjustment that seemed to mysteriously only affect the workers and equally as mysteriously fatten the purses of the already wealthy. The gap is getting wider, watch.
These closures began back in the aforementioned late ’80s when banks, hospitals, pharmacies, postal, transport and medical services and so on, collapsed slowly, one by one, like a house of cards. Folks at the time put up a huge fight to retain these services and were successful for a time, however, they eventually closed.
The seemingly inevitable. And back then, like now, they were simply decisions from the top echelon in Wellington – economic priorities, not inevitabilities at all.
And slowly, as was the intended effect, folks drifted to the cities in order to support themselves and their families. Kiwis are resourceful and not lazy like the current regime would have you believe. We had full employment before the new banking / corporate government took control.
Slowly, as services were closed, the result of economic decisions in Wellington, people moved to the cities in order to support their families
If you would like to know the agenda behind those decisions you need to look at the UN Long Term Plan, called specifically Agenda 21 and Agenda 2030. It is very long hence few will have read it. However there are many commentaries / exposes / critiques of it online fortunately, by those who have read it cover to cover, notable people like ex Aussie politician, Anne Bressington.
This is the forward thinking plan that superficially looks great and touts sustainability and global cooperation. Be assured it is everything but. Look now at our District Councils, our Local Governing bodies and see how they flout the term sustainability (in practice that is).
Their websites however have all the right spin. People are now waking up to the fact and the reality that our nation is being in fact, severely polluted to the extent we can only swim safely in 40% of our rivers.
And so in line with this change of regime that has been creeping on us since the late ’80s
Mangaweka in the central North Island, a once thriving town, drastically affected historically by the closure of servicesand Rogernomics, the closure of facilities in rural areas is designed to drive us to the cities. Friends tell me their rates in the rural towns are far dearer than city rates … with less amenities.
If you take the time to research Agenda 21/30 you will see the long term plan – in short – is for us to live in high rise city apartments and riding bicycles for transport. That is the general shift that is in motion.
For a local expose of the plan visit our Agenda 21 / 30 in NZ pages. Dr Naomi Jacobs has written an ebook about it (downloadable from that page), triggered by the rising rates scenario (an increasingly familiar theme) in Kaipara in the North. No this is not conspiracy theory, it is a documented UN Agenda fact. You owe it to yourself to read it. It concerns you & your descendants.
Why Are Prices So High In New Zealand? + Homeless In New Zealand - Thousands Living In Garages And Cars August 27 2016 | From: MediaWhores / Aljazeera
Dear Leader Knows Best – and the Stats (Satanists) don’t lie.
Luciferian Zionists are incapable of speaking the truth
The media today are ‘debating’ why prices are so high in New Zealand. They have decided to ask the experts. The experts are all pretty sure there is no inflation. The Government told us so. And the experts all work for the Government – or for the banks, who run the Government.
Sounds like a story out of Soviet Russia doesn’t it?
Prices in NZ have in fact risen by at least 200% since the 2008 Global financial crisis. 400+ % on my favorite cheese, and my honey for example. 200% plus on housing, and power bills some say also. Yet somehow the ‘Government’ and the corporate media all agree that there hasn’t really been any inflation at all in the past 10 years.
It should be noted that wages and salaries are almost unchanged in that same period – in economics speak, this translates to “lower real wages” or the amount of purchasing power of your money / pay.
If prices are 200% or more up, and your wages remain the same – you might be experiencing budgeting problems.
And the bottom 5% will all be living in their cars. Which is precisely the case under this Soviet like John Key regime – who pose as “capitalists”.
We need to explain why those prices have been rising (money counterfeiting by the banks essentially) but first, lets consider the other thing putting upwards pressure on our prices – exports.
New Zealand is now feeding upwards of 60,00, 000 people overseas. That is how much food we produce – a massive amount. One of the biggest food producers per capita in the entire World.
We are a giant farm really, with some traffic jams in the middle. All of the very best food is exported to the likes of 5 star hotels across Asia and Europe, and thousands of tonnes more to supermarkets and chain stores all over.
You can of course buy anything you want here – but you just have to pay the same price as top corporate executives are offering for it in Tokyo and London.
If that makes you feel a little queasy, also keep in mind that most of the corporates shipping all of our food and resources overseas, are paying almost no tax these days. They all have advanced offshore licensing fees and trusts to launder the profit through to.
Assholes like Graeme Hart (above) are held up for us as some kind of hero – when he is in fact one of the single biggest causes of poverty in our modern day history.
In fact - Kiwis are now not only dealing with 100-200 % lower real wages these days but are also paying around 65% net taxes on their salaries and wages. That includes 20-30% income tax, 15% GST, ACC rates, petrol taxes, tobacco taxes, alcohol taxes, local rates, and on and on. Then thanks to “privatisation” you have to pay for most “Government Services” anyway.
It is in fact beyond madness – it is looking more and more like some type of Corporate Fourth Reich. A corporate holocaust being run by our Government in conjunction with their Corporate partners.
The Corporate Fourth Reich is apparently well underway in New Zealand – and under a Prime Minister who claims to be Jewish oddly enough. Zionists I hear some people refer to them as. Which looks suspiciously like the word Nazi to me.
Turns out now “the experts” in the media want to tax sugar as well. The poor can only afford cheap foods full of sugar these days. So the new tax is clearly designed to make their lives even harder. Fact is, if they had any interest in keeping people healthy, they would simply remove taxes off fruit and vegetables.
That is the reality of New Zealand these days – a small handful of apparently very well connected and financed people are doing just great, overseas trips, baches, overseas homes, etc – and everyone else is being slowly killed off via a scientifically designed and deployed corporate extermination program.
‘The others’ have nice large distilled water (h2o) treatment plants for them and their family, and everyone else is drinking sodium fluoride and chlorine – if they are lucky – the unlucky rate payers are actually dying from preventable diseases in their water supplies. This is apparently the new standard.
Interesting to note that no one has been held responsible for the Havelock North Water Crisis – these ‘leaders’ are now poisoning everyone and still get to keep their jobs.
Hapless sellout idiot and Mr. Agenda 21 New Zealand, Lawrence Yule expects to be re-elected and he cannot even tell 5,000 + people why they are sick for weeks from a poisoned water supply
One wonders how bad it is going to get?
One thing is for sure – the amount of crap that Kiwis are prepared to put up with has increased exponentially in just 25 years. Probably at the same rate as the size of their TV screens.
And why do we have inflation on our remaining food ? Mostly due to the money printing / counterfeiting operations of the foreign banks – that money you sign for and they lend you, at interest?
Yeah, it came out of thin air... a very sophisticated magic trick, that only certain qualified magicians are apparently allowed to do.
Homeless In New Zealand - Thousands Living In Garages And Cars
Once a pioneer of the social welfare state, New Zealand now has over 40,000 people who are homeless, forced to live in their cars and in garages as a result of rapid house price and rent rises and a shortage of social housing.
Al Jazeera correspondent Tarek Bazley visits South Auckland and meets two families – one with six children living in a derelict garage, the other who lived with three teenagers for months in their car – and charts the country’s fall from and egalitarian society to one with deep divisions of wealth.
Finally, The CIA Admits Covering Up JFK Assassination August 26 2016 | From: TrueActivist / Politico
Yes, the CIA Director Was Part of the JFK Assassination Cover-Up: Even if you have to wait over 50 years, eventually the truth will out. [While they have not admitted to everything - the redlinks below fill in the gaps.]
Suspicions that the CIA covered up JFK‘s murder have finally been confirmed, according to an explosive Politico report (further below) out this week.
Fifty-two years after the President’s death, declassified documents show that the CIA were in communication with alleged assassin Lee Harvey Oswald before JFK’s murder in 1963, and they were monitoring his mail since 1959.
Not only that but John McCone, who was Chief of the CIA at the time, allegedly hid evidence from the Warren commission, set up by Lyndon Johnson to investigate JFK’s assassination. The spymaster and other senior CIA officials are accused of withholding ‘incendiary’ information from the commission and therefore perverting the course of justice.
The CIA has admitted this.
The Politico report is based on evidence given by CIA historian David Robarge. He has claimed the cover-up was intended to keep the commission focused on:
"What the agency believed at the time was the best truth - that Lee Harvey Oswald, for as yet undetermined motives, had acted alone in killing John Kennedy.”
McCone directed the CIA to provide only “passive, reactive and selective” assistance to the Warren commission, meaning the investigation was severely compromised and did not follow up any other leads which may have been crucial in the search for truth.
Robarge also believes that John McCone, who died in 1991, withheld vital information relating to various CIA plots to assassinate Fidel Castro. The historian points out that these plots may well be linked to JFK‘s assassination - there’s a strong chance his murder was a revenge attack for CIA operations in Cuba - but McCone’s unwillingness to explore other potentialities outside of prime suspect Lee Harvey Oswald could have resulted in a grave miscarriage of justice.
JFK was America’s youngest ever and most charismatic President, and his death shocked the nation. Alternative murder theories are popular across the States:
A 2013 poll found that only 30% of Americans believe Oswald shot JFK, and that he acted alone. 61% believed that others were involved in a conspiracy (see the embedded video to find out why).
David Robarge first published these exclusive claims in a secret internal CIA magazine in 2013. His claims have now been declassified and can be publicly accessed here on the George Washington University’s National Security Archive.
Robarge has also written a biography of John McCone, but his book continues to be classified. What else might the historian have uncovered? Here’s hoping that the full truth of what happened in Dealy Plaza on that fateful day will very soon be common knowledge.
Yes, The CIA Director Was Part Of The JFK Assassination Cover-Up
John McCone was long suspected of withholding information from the Warren Commission. Now even the CIA says he did.
John McCone came to the CIA as an outsider. An industrialist and an engineer by training, he replaced veteran spymaster Allen Dulles as director of central intelligence in November 1961, after John F. Kennedy had forced out Dulles following the CIA’s bungled operation to oust Fidel Castro by invading Cuba’s Bay of Pigs.
McCone had one overriding mission: restore order at the besieged CIA. Kennedy hoped his management skills might prevent a future debacle, even if the Californian - mostly a stranger to the clubby, blue-blooded world of the men like Dulles who had always run the spy agency - faced a steep learning curve.
After JFK’s assassination in Dallas in November 1963, President Lyndon Johnson kept McCone in place at the CIA, and the CIA director became an important witness before the Warren Commission, the panel Johnson created to investigate Kennedy’s murder.
McCone pledged full cooperation with the commission, which was led by Chief Justice Earl Warren, and testified that the CIA had no evidence to suggest that Lee Harvey Oswald, the assassin, was part of any conspiracy, foreign or domestic.
In its final report, the commission came to agree with McCone’s depiction of Oswald, a former Marine and self-proclaimed Marxist, as a delusional lone wolf. But did McCone come close to perjury all those decades ago?
Did the onetime Washington outsider in fact hide agency secrets that might still rewrite the history of the assassination?
Even the CIA is now willing to raise these questions.
Half a century after JFK’s death, in a once-secret report written in 2013 by the CIA’s top in-house historian and quietly declassified last fall, the spy agency acknowledges what others were convinced of long ago:
That McCone and other senior CIA officials were “complicit” in keeping “incendiary” information from the Warren Commission.
According to the report by CIA historian David Robarge, McCone, who died in 1991, was at the heart of a:
"Benign cover-up” at the spy agency, intended to keep the commission focused on “what the Agency believed at the time was the ‘best truth’ - that Lee Harvey Oswald, for as yet undetermined motives, had acted alone in killing John Kennedy.”
The most important information that McCone withheld from the commission in its 1964 investigation, the report found, was the existence, for years, of CIA plots to assassinate Castro, some of which put the CIA in cahoots with the Mafia. Without this information, the commission never even knew to ask the question of whether Oswald had accomplices in Cuba or elsewhere who wanted Kennedy dead in retaliation for the Castro plots.
While raising no question about the essential findings of the Warren Commission, including that Oswald was the gunman in Dallas, the 2013 report is important because it comes close to an official CIA acknowledgement - half a century after the fact - of impropriety in the agency’s dealings with the commission.
The coverup by McCone and others may have been “benign,” in the report’s words, but it was a cover-up nonetheless, denying information to the commission that might have prompted a more aggressive investigation of Oswald’s potential Cuba ties.
Initially stamped “SECRET/NOFORN,” meaning it was not to be shared outside the agency or with foreign governments, Robarge’s report was originally published as an article in the CIA’s classified internal magazine, Studies in Intelligence, in September 2013, to mark the 50th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination.
The article, drawn from a still-classified 2005 biography of McCone written by Robarge, was declassified quietly last fall and is now available on the website of The George Washington University’s National Security Archive.
In a statement to POLITICO, the CIA said it decided to declassify the report “to highlight misconceptions about the CIA’s connection to JFK’s assassination,” including the still-popular conspiracy theory that the spy agency was somehow behind the assassination. (Articles in the CIA magazine are routinely declassified without fanfare after internal review.)
Robarge’s article says that McCone, quickly convinced after the assassination that Oswald had acted alone and that there was no foreign conspiracy involving Cuba or the Soviet Union, directed the agency to provide only “passive, reactive and selective” assistance to the Warren Commission.
This portrait of McCone suggests that he was much more hands-on in the CIA’s dealings with the commission - and in the agency’s post-assassination scrutiny of Oswald’s past - than had previously been known. The report quotes another senior CIA official, who heard McCone say that he intended to “handle the whole (commission) business myself, directly.”
The report offers no conclusion about McCone’s motivations, including why he would go to lengths to cover-up CIA activities that mostly predated his time at the agency. But it suggests that the Johnson White House might have directed McCone to hide the information.
McCone;“shared the administration’s interest in avoiding disclosures about covert actions that would circumstantially implicate [the] CIA in conspiracy theories and possibly lead to calls for a tough US response against the perpetrators of the assassination,” the article reads.
“If the commission did not know to ask about covert operations about Cuba, he was not going to give them any suggestions about where to look.”
In an interview, David Slawson, who was the Warren Commission’s chief staff investigator in searching for evidence of a foreign conspiracy, said he was not surprised to learn that McCone had personally withheld so much information from the investigation in 1964, especially about the Castro plots.
"I always assumed McCone must have known, because I always believed that loyalty and discipline in the CIA made any large-scale operation without the consent of the director impossible,” says Slawson, now 84 and a retired University of Southern California law professor.
He says he regrets that it had taken so long for the spy agency to acknowledge that McCone and others had seriously misled the commission. After half a century, Slawson says, “The world loses interest, because the assassination becomes just a matter of history to more and more people.”
The report identifies other tantalizing information that McCone did not reveal to the commission, including evidence that the CIA might somehow have been in communication with Oswald before 1963 and that the spy agency had secretly monitored Oswald’s mail after he attempted to defect to the Soviet Union in 1959.
The CIA mail-opening program, which was later determined to have been blatantly illegal, had the code name HTLINGUAL.
"It would be surprising if the DCI [director of central intelligence] were not told about the program” after the Kennedy assassination, the report reads.
“If not, his subordinates deceived him. If he did know about HTLINGUAL reporting on Oswald, he was not being forthright with the commission - presumably to protect an operation that was highly compartmented and, if disclosed, sure to arouse much controversy.”
John McCone
In the 1970s, when congressional investigations exposed the Castro plots, members of the Warren Commission and its staff expressed outrage that they had been denied the information in 1964. Had they known about the plots, they said, the commission would have been much more aggressive in trying to determine whether JFK’s murder was an act of retaliation by Castro or his supporters.
Weeks before the assassination, Oswald traveled to Mexico City and met there with spies for the Cuban and Soviet governments - a trip that CIA and FBI officials have long acknowledged was never adequately investigated. (Even so, Warren Commission staffers remain convinced today that Oswald was the lone gunman in Dallas, a view shared by ballistics experts who have studied the evidence.)
In congressional testimony in 1978, after public disclosures about the Castro plots, McCone claimed that he could not have shared information about the plots with the Warren Commission in 1964 because he was ignorant of the plots at the time. Other CIA officials;
"Withheld the information from me,” he said. “I have never been satisfied as to why they withheld the information.”
But the 2013 report concluded that “McCone’s testimony was neither frank nor accurate,” since it was later determined with certainty that he had been informed about the CIA-Mafia plots nine months before his appearance before the Warren Commission.
Robarge suggests the CIA is responsible for some of the harsh criticism commonly leveled at the Warren Commission for large gaps in its investigation of the president’s murder, including its failure to identify Oswald’s motive in the assassination and to pursue evidence that might have tied Oswald to accomplices outside the United States.
Dealey Plaza
For decades, opinion polls have shown that most Americans reject the commission’s findings and believe Oswald did not act alone. Four of the seven commissioners were members of Congress, and they spent the rest of their political careers badgered by accusations that they had been part of a coverup.
"The decision of McCone and Agency leaders in 1964 not to disclose information about CIA’s anti-Castro schemes might have done more to undermine the credibility of the commission than anything else that happened while it was conducting its investigation,” the report reads.
“In that sense - and in that sense alone - McCone may be regarded as a ‘co-conspirator’ in the JFK as sassination ‘cover-up.’”
If there was, indeed, a CIA “cover-up,” a member of the Warren Commission was apparently in on it: Allen Dulles, McCone’s predecessor, who ran the CIA when the spy agency hatched the plots to kill Castro.
"McCone does not appear to have any explicit, special understanding with Allen Dulles,” the 2013 report says. Still, McCone could “rest assured that his predecessor would keep a dutiful watch over Agency equities and work to keep the commission from pursuing provocative lines of investigation, such as lethal anti-Castro covert actions.”
(Johnson appointed Dulles to the commission at the recommendation of then-Attorney General Robert Kennedy.)
In fact it is doubtful that Castro had anything to do with the assassination of JFK other than being used as false flag cover. See the red related links for more detail
The 2013 report also draws attention to the contacts between McCone and Robert Kennedy in the days after the assassination. In the wake of the Bay of Pigs disaster in 1961, the attorney general was asked by his brother, the president, to direct the administration’s secret war against Castro, and Robert Kennedy’s friends and family acknowledged years later that he never stopped fearing that Castro was behind his brother’s death.
"McCone had frequent contact with Robert Kennedy during the painful days after the assassination,” the report says. “Their communication appears to have been verbal, informal and, evidently in McCone’s estimation, highly personal; no memoranda or transcripts exist or are known to have been made.”
“Because Robert Kennedy had overseen the Agency’s anti-Castro covert actions - including some of the assassination plans - his dealings with McCone about his brother’s murder had a special gravity,” the report continues.
“Did Castro kill the president because the president had tried to kill Castro? Had the administration’s obsession with Cuba inadvertently inspired a politicized sociopath to murder John Kennedy?”
The declassification of the bulk of the 2013 McCone report might suggest a new openness by the CIA in trying to resolve the lingering mysteries about the Kennedy assassination.
At the same time, there are 15 places in the public version of the report where the CIA has deleted sensitive information - sometimes individual names, sometimes whole sentences. It is an acknowledgement, it seems, that there are still secrets about the Kennedy assassination hidden in the agency’s files.
Obama Tries To Sneak Through TPP In Lame-Duck Congress / Trade Deals Getting Derailed August 24 2016 | From: JonRappoport / TheGuardian / Various
First: know that the TPP (Trans-Pacific Partnership) is a huge Globalist trade deal among 12 nations that would a) “phase out thousands of tariffs” (NY Times, 6/1/16) and b) set up corporate tribunals to punish nations that refuse to import goods (e.g., toxic pesticides, toxic medical drugs, GMOs).
In short, it’s a nightmare. Wiping out tariffs is the cornerstone of the Globalist agenda. It allows companies in industrial countries to move their factories to Third World hell holes, pay slave wages, ignore environmental conditions, and then export their products back to the countries they abandoned—with no tariffs. No taxes. No penalties.
The absence of tariffs is the gift that keeps on giving. It’s the ONLY way these corporations can exports products from their factories in the Third World and make a profit. It’s the un-level playing field. It creates a world run by and for mega-corporations.
Obama is the Rockefeller Globalists’ man in the White House. He’s tasked with pushing through Congressional ratification of the TPP, come hell or high water.
He sees hell on the horizon and the water is rising. If Trump wins, the TPP is likely toast. If Hillary wins, who knows what’ll happen? Her latest flip-flop was to come out against the TPP. That was her strategy as she tried to win over Bernie Sanders supporters. Sanders was virulently against the TPP treaty.
In other words, during the lame-duck session, all members of Congress who occupy office at this current moment will still be there, before the newly elected Congress (whoever they are) takes over. Obama calculates his best chance of passing the TPP is with the present membership of Congress.
Twilight Zone? You bet. Here’s the picture: the election is over, the newly elected Congress is ready to take charge in January, but in November, with the old Congress still there (the lame ducks), Obama will make his last-ditch stand to leave the US and 11 other Pacific nations with one final exploding disaster, as he moves to a lavish home near one of his favorite golf courses.
As we speak, he’s on a nationwide tour, drumming up support among recalcitrant Congressional members and fence sitters, offering whatever he can to turn the tide in his favor.
Imagine this: you’re a member of Congress who’s just been voted out of office. You’re still there in November, though, one of the lame ducks sitting in chambers, sipping good scotch, watching Law&Order reruns, boxing up mementos, playing poker, running out the string on your expense account. One of Obama’s people drops by to convince you to vote for the TPP.
What can he offer you? You’re done in Congress.
So whatever the deal is, chances are it’s going to be sleazy. Maybe you’d like a cushy gig with a big pharmaceutical company. Maybe you’d like a seat on the board of a Wall St. firm. Maybe you can score a great price on a house in the Bahamas. Maybe your ne’er-do-well son can get into Harvard, once he’s out of drug rehab. Maybe the video of you and that three-thousand-dollar hooker in a DC hotel will vanish… Whatever it takes.
Because of these Globalist trade deals, good jobs in the US have been running away like marathon runners from the starting line. But who cares? The sinking US economy is “a fact of life.” You’re a lame duck. You need comfort and gifts in the next phase of your life. Inside the Beltway, it’s make-a-deal all the time. Nothing new.
You need to grab whatever is on the table before you go out the door. By the process of Washington DC alchemy, lame ducks can become vultures and buzzards and even eagles.
Thank you, Mr. President. Your mission is nearly done. Thank you for this one final messianic miracle. The American worker is in your debt. Literally.
Protest Never Changes Anything? Look At How TTIP Has Been Derailed
People power has taken on big business over this transatlantic stitch-up and looks like winning. We should all be inspired
For those of us who want societies run in the interests of the majority rather than unaccountable corporate interests, this era can be best defined as an uphill struggle.
So when victories occur, they should be loudly trumpeted to encourage us in a wider fight against a powerful elite of big businesses, media organisations, politicians, bureaucrats and corporate-funded thinktanks.
Today is one such moment. The Transatlantic Trade Investment Partnership (TTIP) – that notorious proposed trade agreement that hands even more sweeping powers to corporate titans – lies wounded, perhaps fatally. It isn’t dead yet, but TTIP is a tangled wreckage that will be difficult to reassemble.
Those of us who campaigned against TTIP – not least fellow Guardian columnist George Monbiot – were dismissed as scaremongering. We said that TTIP would lead to a race to the bottom on everything from environmental to consumer protections, forcing us down to the lower level that exists in the United States. We warned that it would undermine our democracy and sovereignty, enabling corporate interests to use secret courts to block policies that they did not like.
Scaremongering, we were told. But hundreds of leaked documents from the negotiations reveal, in some ways, that the reality is worse – and now the French government has been forced to suggest it may block the agreement.
The documents imply that even craven European leaders believe the US demands go too far. As War on Want puts it, they show that TTIP would “open the door” to products currently banned in the EU “for public health and environmental reasons”.
As the documents reveal, there are now “irreconcilable” differences between the European Union’s and America’s positions. According to Greenpeace, “the EU position is very bad, and the US position is terrible”.
The documents show that the US is actively trying to dilute EU regulations on consumer and environmental protections. In future, for the EU to be even able to pass a regulation, it could be forced to involve both US authorities and US corporations, giving big businesses across the Atlantic the same input as those based in Europe.
With these damning revelations, the embattled French authorities have been forced to say they reject TTIP “at this stage”. President Hollande says France would refuse “the undermining of the essential principles of our agriculture, our culture, of mutual access to public markets”. And with the country’s trade representative saying that “there cannot be an agreement without France and much less against France”, TTIP currently has a bleak future indeed.
"David Cameron is [was] happy to undermine British sovereignty and democracy, as long as it is corporate interests who benefit"
There are a number of things we learn from this, all of which should lift hopes. First, people power pays off. European politicians and bureaucrats, quite rightly, would never have imagined that a trade agreement would inspire any interest, let alone mass protests.
Symptomatic of their contempt for the people they supposedly exist to serve, the negotiations over the most important aspects of the treaty were conducted in secret. Easy, then, to accuse anti-TTIP activists of “scaremongering” while revealing little of the reality publicly.
But rather than give up, activists across the continent organised. They toxified TTIP, forcing its designers on the defensive. Germany – the very heart of the European project – witnessed mass demonstrations with up to 250,000 people participating.
For all President Obama’s hope-change rhetoric, his administration – which zealously promoted TTIP – has all too often championed corporate interests. However, though Bernie Sanders is unlikely to become the Democratic nominee, the incredible movement behind him shows – particularly among younger Americans – a growing desire for a different sort of US.
Protesters wear masks of Barack Obama and Angela Merkel as they demonstrate against TTIP free trade agreement
In the coming months, those Europeans who have campaigned against TTIP should surely reach out to their American counterparts. Even if TTIP is defeated, we still live in a world in which major corporations often have greater power than nation states: only organised movements that cross borders can have any hope of challenging this unaccountable dominance.
From tax justice to climate change, the “protest never achieves anything” brigade have been proved wrong. Here’s a potential victory to relish, and build on.
Globalism: A Psychological GPS System For The Masses August 20 2016 | From: JonRappoport
Globalism presents a conception of space, in which billions of people fit into their “best slots.” That’s the theme. That’s the construct.
Of course, its proponents and bosses sell it as if the world couldn’t exist in any other form.
All isms operate in this fashion. Once the definition is laid down, the fictional field is laid out, and people are urged to navigate to their places.
“If you don’t, dire things will happen.” People aren’t generally aware of fictional spaces and their psychological impact. Therefore, they go along.
This is why a museum can be so instructive. A thousand paintings, each with its own area. I’m not talking about a place on a wall, I’m talking about interior space, which the artist invents and shapes on the canvas.
With Globalism, the space is all about establishing control and distribution points for goods and services. It’s about erasing borders and nations. It’s about co-opting the notion of a unified planet, in order to broadcast fake cheesy messages of universal “share and care.” It’s about every individual “having his place.”
When I began painting in 1962, one of the first things I noticed was the abundance of space - on each canvas. Waiting to be shaped. The psychological carry-over was enormous. The notion of “fitting into a position in life” disintegrated. It made no sense and had no impact.
Globalism is a hustle in a long, long line of planetary hustles. It erects a space and claims it is the future for all. It’s a minor, minor painting by a group of minor artists, hardly worthy of a spot on the wall of a second-rate museum.
If we were living in a reasonably aware society, many people would be asking themselves: “What space do I want to invent, and for what purpose?”
Which of course takes things back to the individual and his inner resources. And away from overarching ideologies with their perverse themes.
If you were a painter, what would you paint? That question is a lot like asking: if you could invent your future and all the space that comes with it, what would you do?
To come up with an answer, you don’t need any of the GPS reference points of Globalism. They would only be a hindrance.
They would be delusions, masking your power.
“Some even believe we are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and me as ‘internationalists’ and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure - one world, if you will. If that is the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it.”
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David Rockefeller, Memoirs, 2002
The man who wrote those words represents a family that has dominated banking, oil, modern medicine, behind-the-scenes politics, and powerhouses of Globalism (e.g., the Council on Foreign Relations) for a century.
Globalism asserts that no nation can be independent from “the family” of other nations, as if it were a matter of fact beyond dispute. A nation claiming its sovereignty thus becomes a lunatic traitor to the natural order of things.
What really binds nations to one another is propaganda, and treaties which are based on the same propaganda, resulting in engorged super-profits for mega-corporations.
Globalism is a secular piece of messianic hype. A Disneyesque altruism is the prow of the ship. Spend 10 minutes educating any street hustler on Globalist principles, and he would recognize it as a standard con.
Obama’s warning to the Brits, that their withdrawing from the Globalist European Union would put them at the back of the line in negotiating a separate trade treaty with the United States, was sheer fiction.
Britain, or any nation, that has goods to sell and a desire to buy will find trade partners. An agreement could be scratched out on a napkin over dinner.
Impending trade deals like the TPP and TTIP are thousands of pages and take so long to negotiate, because the heavy hitters at the table are looking for new ingenious ways to cut and paste the world into larger profits for themselves.
Globalism, hiding behind thousands of academic analyses, picks up jobs from one nation, where wages are reasonable and working conditions are tolerable, and dumps them in hell holes where wages are nearly invisible and conditions are poisonous.
It’s that simple, and any moron could see how the job-exporting nations would suffer…if by nations we meant people.
Instead of criminal corporations and criminal investors. But all this is layered over with “share and care” sop.
The United States government could repeal the NAFTA, CAFTA, and GATT trade treaties tomorrow, and throw current TPP and TTIP negotiating documents out the window…and all would be well. Better. Much better.
For instance, without NAFTA, US producers wouldn’t have been able to flood Mexico with cheap corn, throwing 1.5 million Mexican corn farmers into bankruptcy, leading many of them to cross the border and come to the US to find work.
No US President since Nixon has disturbed the march of Globalist “free trade.” All Presidents since then have been on board with the Rockefeller plan. And the US economy - which is to say, jobs - has thus faltered.
The 2008 financial crash was only one factor in the decline. The promise of cheap imports for sale in the US - the justification for free trade - doesn’t work when people here have no jobs and no purchasing power.
Major media, fronting for free-trade, have panicked over Donald Trump’s claim that he’ll reject Globalism. They would have panicked over Bernie Sander’s similar promise, if they thought he had any chance of defeating Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination. The media have their orders from on high - the deck is stacked, the cards were dealt long ago.
Hillary Clinton mouths pathetic and empty generalities about creating jobs. Small tax breaks for small businesses that “share profits with employees,” the “removal of government red tape,”“funding breakthroughs in scientific and medical research,” “expanding job training opportunities” - the truth is, her basic method for stimulating the economy has always been: find a war, any war, and fight it.
Now, let us consider The Individual. Is he just a tiny force pitted against a colossus?
No. Unless he sees himself that way. But what can he do?
First: find the thing within himself that defies the odds, supersedes the “normal response,” casts aside all ordinary formulations of what he is.
That thing, that power is imagination. Imagination has the ability to come up with solutions and strategies - on both a personal and planetary level - that have never been considered before. Imagination is the wild card.
Imagination belongs to The Individual.
The individual is not the group.
“Exercises and techniques for accessing and deploying imagination…these would be essential. Exercises that allow the individual to reinstate his basic creative position in life. Exercises that allow the individual to use his imagination in many different ways. Ramping up power.”
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Preliminary notes for Exit From the Matrix, Jon Rappoport
What does the individual have to offer? He has everything he is capable of doing, when he liberates himself from petty ideas and limitations about what he is. That journey of liberation is his own. It isn’t anybody else’s.
It is, as I’ve pointed out many times, a journey of imagination. Imagination lets a person know what could exist but doesn’t now exist. Imagination lets a person know what he could invent. Imagination lets a person know that, despite claims to the contrary, the future is open and unwritten.
Imagination lets a person know that he can think thoughts that have never been thought before. The journey of individual liberation is, therefore, much more than discovering what already exists in one’s own mind.
The world as it is, things as they are, Globalism as it is, collectivism, the group - this is the sensation of depleted imagination.
Of course, imagination never diminishes, it just waits. For you.
The deployment of imagination unlocks hidden energies. A power, sought after and never found in other endeavors, appears.
Imagination is larger than any universe. It needs no sanction from the world. It is not some secret form of physics. It is not religion. It is not cosmology. It is not any one picture of anything. It’s what you invent.
The Collective does not have imagination. It poaches on individuals with imagination. The Collective is a graveyard where imagination has been downgraded and forgotten.
Imagination soars. It is the individual at the edge of his own exploration.
Imagination was the source for the building of modern civilization. But then civilization became dedicated to itself AS THE GROUP.
The individual never goes away, and neither does his imagination. Imagination can light up a room, a house, a city, a nation, a planet, a galaxy, a universe.
So what will the individual do about Globalism?
The challenge isn’t going to be resolved by taking mere traditional approaches. It isn’t going to be solved by thinking along traditional lines. People tend to ask for answers - but what if the ordinary answers don’t work?
What if something else has to happen?
What if many individuals have to wake up to the range and scope and power of their own imaginations…and come up with new answers? What if that’s the case?
What if that’s the exit from the situation in which we find ourselves?
It IS the exit.
Soros Hacked: US Billionaire Manipulated Europeans Into Accepting Maidan
The bulk of George Soros' documents hacked and published on DC Leaks website shed the light on the magnates' meddling into Ukrainian affairs and shaping public opinion in Western Europe regarding the February coup of 2014 in Kiev through a series of projects and media campaigns.
DC Leaks' release of almost 2,576 files from groups run by US billionaire George Soros, has exposed the magnate's involvement in Ukraine's Euromaidan affairs as well as manipulation of public opinion in Western and Southern Europe in order to "legalize" the February 2014 coup in Kiev.
"The emergence of a New Ukraine carries with it the opportunity to reinvigorate the European project," read a 2015 document by the Open Society Initiative for Europe (OSIFE) entitled "The Ukraine debate in Western Europe."
"However, this is complicated by the reluctance of some EU actors to accept the Maidan revolution as democratic and the Ukrainian government as legitimate.
These actors have their own agendas - related to geopolitical and economic considerations with Russia - and will therefore be difficult to influence," the OSIFE document underscored, adding that "for other groups and individuals, on the political left and across various social movements, one can detect confusion regarding the state of affairs in Ukraine."
OSIFE specified that this "second group" comprised key opinion-makers, a number of traditional mainstream players, emerging political parties - especially in Southern Europe - such as M5S in Italy, Podemos in Spain and Syriza in Greece, and "a wide range of liberal NGOs in western Europe."
In order to tackle the "problem," the organization offered to kick off a series of initiatives aimed at shaping public opinion in the West regarding the Ukrainian affairs.
The document revealed that OSIFE pursued three major objectives.
First, it sought to "stimulate debate and doubt in those democratic left movements, parties and audiences of Western Europe where a negative perception of the transformation of Ukraine is hegemonic, or very preponderant."
Second, it wanted to "discredit the idea that the independence and integrity of Ukraine is an ideological cause of the Right."
Third, OSIFE intended to "influence the way information about Ukraine is heard and perceived in Southern Europe, especially among the group of doubters."
The issue was dramatically complicated by the fact that the major driving forces of the so-called "Euromaidan Revolution" of February 2014 were the Ukrainian far-right groups, most notably the nationalist All-Ukrainian Union Svoboda and Right Sector, founded by ultra-right Trident and the Ukrainian National Assembly-Ukrainian National Self-Defense (UNA-UNSO) paramilitary group.
You’re Looking At The Greatest Monetary Policy Experiment In History:
Lord Rothschild August 19 2016 | From: Geopolitics
Currently, the world is experiencing the greatest financial experiment ever in history. Those are the words of a Rothschild referring to the low interest rates, negative yields on government debt and quantitative easing…
…that have been implemented throughout their entire fiat banking system, i.e. most central banks on the planet, in order to mitigate the effects of the switch to asset-based financial instruments initiated by the BRICS Alliance.
Low interest rates, negative yields on government debt and quantitative easing are part of the biggest financial experiment in world history, and the consequences are yet unknown, says RIT Capital Partners Chairman Lord Rothschild.
“The six months under review have seen central bankers continuing what is surely the greatest experiment in monetary policy in the history of the world. We are therefore in uncharted waters and it is impossible to predict the unintended consequences of very low interest rates, with some 30 percent of global government debt at negative yields, combined with quantitative easing on a massive scale,” Rothschild writes in the company’s semi-annual financial report.
The banker notes this policy has led to a rapid growth of stock markets – US stocks have grown threefold since 2008 – with investments growing and volatility remaining low.
However, the real sector of economy didn’t enjoy such a profit, as “growth remains anemic, with weak demand and deflation in many parts of the developed world,” according to Rothschild.
The billionaire underlined that many risks remain for the global economy with the deteriorating geopolitical situation. Among those risks Rothschild included Britain’s vote to leave the European Union, the US presidential election, and China’s slowing economic growth. Another risk is global terrorism, which Rothschild says is a consequence of the continuing conflict in the Middle East.
According to a Bank of America Merrill Lynch report in June, interest rates in developed countries, in particular America’s 0.5 percent, are now at the lowest level in 5,000 years. In their battle against deflation, countries such as Sweden, Switzerland or Japan have even turned to negative key lending rates.
Another woe is negative yields on government bonds. In June, 10-year German government bonds dipped below 0 percent for the first time in history. Janus Capital has estimated that global yields are the lowest in 500 years, and the total amount of such bonds is $10 trillion. The investment group’s lead portfolio manager, Bill Gross, is calling it a “supernova that will explode one day.”
They can admit the experiment they’re doing on your lives because they know [most of you] you would do nothing about it.
An amusing but little known fact is that the characher of Montgomery Burns from The Simpsons was actually based on Jacob Rothschild
Banker John Key’s Corporate Repackaging Of War August 15 2016 | From: EnviroWatchRangitikei
With the upcoming ‘celebrations’ around the 2016 NZ DIA (NZ Defense Industry Association) Forum being held in Auckland on 16 - 17 November in conjunction with the RNZN 75th Anniversary celebrations, Operation Neptune, I took a peek at their website.
You can reserve your sponsorship spot with cocktails and trimmings for just $10,000.
This is an issue which has been raised on numerous occasions with progressive organizations and WSF activists: you cannot effectively confront neoliberalism and the New World Order elites and expect them to finance your activities.
“The NZ DIA was formed in 1993, as an industry development initiative. Its major emphasis today is on networking, and encouraging the membership to work together on developing joint approaches to defence projects in NZ and overseas”
Right there in the DIA’s mission statement is the strategic use of the word ‘defence’. The corporate bankers have need of war, it’s an integral part of the Rothschild banking empire, however, in order to not be too obvious, they need to sanitize it with ‘nicer’ words.
Profiteering from war is no conspiracy but documented fact.
Cheney’s Halliburton made $39.5 billion on the Iraq war. My elderly father who fought in one of the World Wars and was fortunate enough to return alive, had worked out that fact later in life… that “wars would never end because wars make money”. His oldest brother, a machine gunner, so deeply affected, he wept whenever he talked about war.
So, there on the DIA’s website is the standard tribute of poppies to these brave men who served as basically cannon fodder for the war machine, a machine peopled by those who never spent one minute in trenches and never experienced the terror of combat.
Remember Mrs Rothschild’s infamous words… “if my sons did not want war there would be none”.
Returning to the planned forum for November this year, Key’s corporation parading as a government (NZ is a US SEC registered corporation) put out a White Paper that was compiled we are told from the public’s and the academic community’s views, involving over 300 written submissions and meetings around the country. (See White Paper info here also).
I don’t particularly recall the road show, perhaps other readers do. Note the Ministry of Defence administers the Defence Act 1990, the era shortly after our nation became corporatized… courtesy of Rogernomics.
Corporations are about profits. We are told in the White Paper that “… terrorism remains an enduring global problem”.
Those who do their own research will know that the so called war on terror has been effectively drummed up since the very dodgy 9/11 attack that looked extremely like a controlled demolition.
And the current threat to security, ISIS, has equally dodgy origins (watch Truth Media: the Origin of ISIS for more info on that).
The war industry is ticking along quite nicely in Aotearoa with banker Key at the helm, and synchronising equally as nicely with his growing partnership with the US.
"The Government”[corporation] says Key,“has provided the Defence Force with a degree of funding certainty [$20 billion] that enables it to plan with confidence out to 2030 and beyond.”
Remember how ‘well’ they’ve managed the Christchurch disaster that they refer to in there. It’s an integral part of defence.
The ‘interdependence’ of planned global governance under Agenda 21/2030, already operative in both your Government and your Local Government
What I find particularly distasteful about this whole affair is the spin. One of my favourite investigative journalists John Pilger, describes their convoluted rhetoric so well in his essay, ‘Arming the World’ (in his book “Hidden Agendas” p 115). Describing the weapons (defence) industry he says:
“Refined absurdity is always close at hand in the arms business. It squeezes into bed with secrecy, corruption and stupendous greed”.
Asking what a British cluster bomb does (gleaming under “soft backlight, like the latest showroom Jaguar”) he is told they need his request in writing for MOD approval as the information is ‘classified’, the reason for which is also ‘classified’.
The cluster bomb, Pilger explains:
“Is not really a bomb at all, but an ‘area denial sub-munition’, a land mine in all but name. It is dropped from the air and explodes into forty-seven little mines, which are shaped like spiders."
These are scattered over a wide area and ‘deny’ life to anything that moves or grows.’ They’ve been found says Pilger, in Bosnia and Croatia where between two and four million mines threaten to main and kill long after the war ends.
These salesmen he says, have great difficulty saying words like ‘people’, ‘maim’ and ‘kill’. Describing a cluster bomb’s ‘effectiveness’ he cites the little girl who in a Vietnam village lost her family…
“My mother and father were lying there covered in blood, and my sister… had pieces of metal in her, and so did her doll’.
The corporates know it is wrong, trading in weapons (they’re not averse to supplying both sides), this is why they have difficulty with these words.
There is enough of old fashioned conscience there for them to need to cover their wording well, however not enough to stop the killing by curtailing their obscene greed.
They are therefore very adept at reframing and repackaging. And so the weapons trade becomes the defence trade.
Now if you have any doubt still about the money involved here, check out the these two exmples of sponsorhip pages for the upcoming conference. Corporate sponsorship of cocktails and food depending on your budget:
However, if you’re a bit strapped for cash, there’s always the $5,000 slot… minus cocktails and food.
A list of members of the NZ DIA can be seen here. You will see Fulton Hogan (that company that liberally sprays your streets and public places with carcinogenic glyphosate) along with Lockheed Martin and others. All proudly members of the Defence / Industry partnership.
And to put the proverbial icing on the cake, there are even awards for improvement to defence industry relationships.
“The Award will identify the Defence person or persons who have best contributed to building or improving the Defence / Industry relationship.
The aim of the Award is to publicly recognise good performance in this area and provide the opportunity for the NZ DIA and Defence to promote constructive and collegial relationships between Defence and Industry."
Your PM Key continues to tax himself and friends at 2.8%, continues to profit from your country’s indebtedness and the so called global war on terrorism, and is intent on the TPPA agreement which will give both he and his corporate friends even more control. Let’s face it, he is likely not too interested in changing any of the current status quo.
Rockefeller, Ford Foundations Behind World Social Forum (WSF): The Corporate Funding Of Social Activism August 14 2016 | From: GlobalResearch
This year the World Social Forum is being held in Montreal, regrouping committed social activists, anti-war collectives and prominent intellectuals.
Most of the participants are unaware that the WSF is funded by corporate foundations including Ford, Rockefeller, Tides, et al. Much of this funding is channelled to the WSF organizers under the helm of the WSF International Council.
This is an issue which has been raised on numerous occasions with progressive organizations and WSF activists: you cannot effectively confront neoliberalism and the New World Order elites and expect them to finance your activities.
The World Social Forum operating under the banner of “Another World is Possible” was founded in 2001 at its inaugural venue of Porto Alegre. Brazil.
From the outset in 2001, the WSF has been upheld as an international umbrella representing grassroots people’s organizations, committed to reversing the tide of globalization. Its stated intent is to challenge corporate capitalism and its dominant neoliberal economic agenda.
The World Social Forum at its inaugural meeting defined itself as a counter-offensive to the World Economic Forum (WEF) of business leaders and politicians which meets annually in Davos, Switzerland. The 2001 Porto Alegre WSF was held simultaneously with that of the WEF in Davos.
While there have been many important accomplishments of the WSF, largely as a result of the commitment of grassroots activists, the core leadership of WSF – rather than effectively confronting the New World Order elites– has (often unwittingly) have served their corporate interests. In this process, co-optation has been achieved through the corporate funding of the WSF.
Among the two major accomplishments are the participation of the WSF in the February 2003 Worldwide protest against the US led war on Iraq. The WSF has also supported progressive movements and governments, particularly in Latin America.
In contrast, at the Tunis 2013 WSF, the final declaration paid lip service to to the US sponsored “Syrian opposition”. Similarly the Al Qaeda affiliated Libya Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) which allegedly led the “Arab Spring” against the government of Muammar Gaddafi was tacitly upheld as a revolutionary force. Several workshops on Libya applauded Western military intervention.
From the outset in 2001, the World Social Forum was funded by governments and corporate foundations, including the Ford Foundation which has ties to US intelligence.
The anti-globalization movement is opposed to Wall Street and the Texas oil giants controlled by Rockefeller, et al. Yet the foundations and charities of Ford, Rockefeller et al will generously fund progressive anti-capitalist networks as well as environmentalists (opposed to Wall Street and Big Oil), etc. with a view to ultimately overseeing and shaping their various activities.
The mechanisms of “manufacturing dissent” require a manipulative environment, a process of arm-twisting and subtle co-optation of a small number of key individuals within “progressive organizations”, including anti-war coalitions, environmentalists and the anti-globalization movement. Many leaders of these organizations have in a sense betrayed their grassroots.
The corporations are funding dissent with a view to controlling dissent.
The Ford Foundation (which has links to the CIA) provided funding under its “Strengthening Global Civil Society” program during the first three years of the WSF.
When the WSF was held in Mumbai in 2004, the Indian WSF host committee declined support from the Ford Foundation. This in itself did not modify the WSF’s relationship to the donors. While the Ford Foundation formally withdrew, other foundations positioned themselves.
The WSF (among several sources of funding is supported by a consortium of corporate foundations under the advisory umbrella of Engaged Donors for Global Equity (EDGE).
This organization, which previously went under the name of The Funders Network on Trade and Globalization (FTNG), has played a central role in the funding of successive WSF venues. From the outset in 2001, it had an observer status on the WSF International Council.
In 2013, the Rockefeller Brothers representative Tom Kruse co-chaired EDGE’s program committee. At the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Kruse was responsible for “Global Governance” under the “Democratic Practice” program. Rockefeller Brothers grants to NGOs are approved under the “Strengthening Democracy in Global Governance” program, which is broadly similar to that put forth by the US State Department.
A representative of the Open Society Initiative for Europe currently sits on EDGE’s Board of directors. The Wallace Global Fund is also on its Board of Directors. The Wallace Global Fund is specialized in providing support to “mainstream” NGOs and “alternative media”, including Amnesty International, Democracy Now (which supports Hillary Clinton’s candidacy for president of the US).
Several members of the EDGE BoD, however, are from non-corporative and family foundations with a social mandate. (see below).
“From the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas (1994) to the Battle in Seattle (1999) to the creation of the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre (2001), the TINA years of Reagan and Thatcher (There Is No Alternative) have been replaced with the growing conviction that “another world is possible.
Counter-summits, global campaigns and social forums have been crucial spaces to articulate local struggles, share experiences and analyses, develop expertise, and build concrete forms of international solidarity among progressive movements for social, economic and ecological justice.”
But at the same time, there is an obvious contradiction: another world is not possible when the campaign against neoliberalism is financed by an alliance of corporate donors firmly committed to neoliberalism and the US-NATO military agenda.
The following is the EDGE Montreal WSF Communique. The donors not only fund the activities, they also influence the structure of the WSF venue, which was determined in Puerto Alegre in 2001, namely the decentralized and dispersed mosaic of “do it yourself” workshops.
Click on the image above to open a larger version in a new window
With regard to the Montreal WSF, the Consortium of Donors (EDGE) intent is:
“…to develop an intersectional space for funders and various movement partners – organizers thought leaders and practitioners – to build alignment by cultivating a shared understanding of the visions, values, principles and pathways of a “just transition.” (See edgefunders.org)
“Just Transition” implies that social activism has to conform to a “shared vision” with the corporate foundations, i.e. nothing which in a meaningful way might upset the elite structures of global capitalism.
From the standpoint of the corporate donors “investing in the WSF” constitutes a profitable (tax deductible) undertaking. It ensures that activism remains within the confines of ”constructive dialogue” and “critique” rather than confrontation. Any deviation immediately results in the curtailment of donor funding:
“Everything the [Ford] Foundation did could be regarded as “making the World safe for capitalism”, reducing social tensions by helping to comfort the afflicted, provide safety valves for the angry, and improve the functioning of government (McGeorge Bundy, National Security Advisor to Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson (1961-1966), President of the Ford Foundation, (1966-1979))
The limits of social dissent are thereby determined by the “governance structure” of the WSF, which was tacitly agreed upon with the funding agencies at the outset in 2001.
“No Leaders”
The WSF has no leaders. All the events are “self-organized”. The structure of debate and activism is part of an an “open space” (See y Francine Mestrum, The World Social Forum and its governance: a multi-headed monster, CADTM, 27 April 2013, at cadtm.org).
This compartmentalized structure is an obstacle to the development of a meaningful and articulate mass movement.
How best to control grassroots dissent against global capitalism?
Make sure that their leaders can be easily co-opted and that the rank and file will not develop “forms of international solidarity among progressive movements” (to use EDGE’s own words), which in any meaningful way might undermine the interests of corporate capital.
The mosaic of separate WSF workshops, the relative absence of plenary sessions, the creation of divisions within and between social movements, not to mention the absence of a cohesive and unified platform against the Wall Street corporate elites, against the fake US sponsored “global war on terrorism”, which has been used to justify and US-NATO’s ”humanitarian R2P interventions (Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, Libya, Ukraine, etc).
The corporate agenda is to “manufacture dissent”.“The limits of dissent” are established by the foundations and governments which ultimately finance this multimillion dollar venue.
The financing is twofold:
1. Core financing of the WSF Secretariat and the Costs of the WSF venue.
2. Many of the constituent NGOs which participate in the venue are recipients of donor and / or government support.
3. The WSF venue in Montreal also receives funding from the Government of Canada as well as from the Quebec provincial government.
What ultimately prevails is a ritual of dissent which does not threaten the New World Order. Those who attend the WSF from the grassroots are often misled by their leaders. Activists who do not share the WSF consensus will ultimately be excluded:
“By providing the funding and the policy framework to many concerned and dedicated people working within the non-profit sector, the ruling class is able to co-opt leadership from grassroots communities, …
and is able to make the funding, accounting, and evaluation components of the work so time consuming and onerous that social justice work is virtually impossible under these conditions”
-
Paul Kivel, You Call this Democracy, Who Benefits, Who Pays and Who Really Decides, 2004, p. 122
“Another World is Possible” is nonetheless an important concept, which characterizes the struggle of the peoples movements against global capitalism as well as the commitment of thousands of committed activists who are currently participated in the Montreal 2016 WSF.
Activism is being manipulated: ”Another World is Possible” cannot, however, be achieved under the auspices of the WSF which from the outset was funded by global capitalism and organized in close liaison with its corporate and government donors.
The important question for activists in Montreal:
Is it possible to build “an Alternative” to global capitalism, which challenges the hegemony of the Rockefellers et al and then asks the Rockefellers et al to foot the bill?
We call upon participants of the Montreal World Social Forum (WSF) to raise and debate these issues: the campaign against neoliberalism is financed by corporate foundations (and governments) which are firmly committed not only to the tenets of neoliberalism but also to the US-NATO led military agenda.
Why would they fund organizations which are actively campaigning against war and globalization? The answer is obvious.
Varoufakis’ Alert: Financialized Capital May Choose To Support Fascists + On The Need To Re-Boot The World Economy August 12 2016 | From: KiwiWatch / YanisVaroufakis / SOTT
Yanis Varoufakis had the audacity to tell the European banking and political elite something everyone else knows is true. ‘Greece is bankrupt we cannot pay!’ ‘Lets negotiate our way out of this’.
He was forced to resign after being let down by the current Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras who came to power to fight austerity and who folded to German banking demands. His thinking however is clear.
Varoufakis’ alert: financialized capital may choose to support fascists
Eric Draitser sits down with economist, and former Greek finance minister, Yanis Varoufakis to discuss the shifts in the political landscape of both Europe and the US, and what they mean for political activism and progressive politics.
Eric and Yanis discuss the nature of the EU and whether it can be reformed or democratized, as well as the forces at play within it. The conversation also touches on the US election as Yanis and Eric debate the utility of “lesser evil” politics, while also examining the ascendance of the fascist right in Europe and the US, with particular attention to the Brexit vote and its implications.
The bond bubble and potential economic collapse, the long view of the 2008 crisis, the importance of addressing climate change, the necessity of internationalism, and many other topics are discussed in this wide-ranging interview with one of the best economic minds in the world today.
Brexit is also an economic phenomenon. It’s not just a political revolt against the elites, against the EU, against the city of London – the bankers. The main reason why the English, not the British, the English working class voted to get out of the EU, is the slow burning recession.
The fact that living standards in almost every town outside of London, within England is depressed. You walk through city centers in Doncaster, in Leeds, in York and all you find is misery and desperation. A whole working class feels utterly abandoned by the elites, even by the Labor Party, the Social-Democrats, and this is the reason why Brexit won.
The period between 2010 and today can be seen from a Greek perspective as an experiment. Greece was a laboratory in which the globalized/financialized elites experimented with how they would try to deal with a crisis of their own making. And the experiment produced monsters.
One of these monsters is the neo-nazis of Golden Dawn. The Donald Trump experience is also quite intimately connected. The very notion that you have somebody like Trump running as candidate of one of the two major political parties in the US, back in 2010-2012 it would be absurd.
The cruel, vicious austerity policies that were created in the Greek laboratory were then exported to the rest of Europe. This experiment backfired because you can never deal with financial crisis through austerity.
This is one thing we’ve learned from the early 1930s which gave rise to the nazis in Germany. A period of deflation gave rise to the worst kind of xenophobic Right-Wing populism. And this is what we have in the form of the Golden Dawn thugs hitting Greece, Donald Trump in the US, the Right-Wing Brexiters in Britain.
What we have now is a bifurcation, word-wide not just in Greece, we are seeing the formation of two political blocs. One is very similar to the troika of creditors that we had to deal with in Greece last year, who crushed us in the end.
It’s a technocracy of globalized, financial capital, together with bureaucrats that want to spread their wings and power globally.
They also corporate Atlanticists, those who want to utilize brute force in order to become, or remain the policemen of the Cosmos. This political bloc of globalized, financialized Atlanticists have developed a capacity to be more tolerant with minorities, less tolerant with racism, quite relaxed about migration, as long as it doesn’t threaten their political capital.
In opposition to that, we have the xenophobic Populist Right, which is investing on racism, fear and nativist myths about the return to some kind of kingship within the nation-state where you erect walls around your country the riffraff away.
It is this toxic confrontation between the nativists xenophobic Populist Right and the financialized, globalized Atlanticists pack who don’t even know how to stabilize the world that they aspired to create.
This conflict is always going to give rise to rather unpleasant developments for the whole of humanity.
Hillary Clinton never was and never will be part of the Left. The Social-Democrats in Germany are part of the problem, not part of the solution.
We have an opportunity now to cease upon the way this global economic and political crisis is developing, in order to do what we failed to do in the 1930s. In other words, to create a solid, internationalist, progressive bloc that opposes the vicious cycle between the globalization elites and the xenophobic populist reaction to it.
Hillary Clinton is part of the problem. Hillary Clinton run an outrageously, scandalously, sinister campaign against Bernie Sanders. Hillary Clinton is in the pocket of the establishment. Hillary Clinton will probably start another war.
The crisis that hit us in 2008 has never gone away. It is simply transforming itself taking different guises and different parts of the world even within our own countries. One day it’s the crisis of banks, the next day it’s the crisis of real investment, the third day it’s the crisis of deteriorating the jobs’ quality and so on. But the crisis of Capitalism that hit us in 2008, just like the crisis of Capitalism that hit in 1929 did not go away until the beginning of the WWII.
If you look at the 1920s and 1930s, fascism became dominant, hegemonic and took over governments with mass support, only when industrial capital, at some point, in order to stem the rise of the Left Wing that was antithetical to capital’s interests, threw their lot in with the fascists. It was the support of industrialists in Germany and Italy that gave rise to the nazis and the fascist governments.
So far, the establishment, the financialized capital, military-industrial complex and so on, have not thrown the lot in with the fascists movements. It’s what keeping them from power, but we should not take it for granted that this won’t happen and we should be prepared.
For the full ull interview visit: CounterPunch
“The next step in the KM take-down plan for America is to build up a big totalitarian internal police force, which can be turned upon the American Masses to oppress and tyrannize them, when necessary."
On The Need To Re-Boot The World Economy
Interviewed by David de Jong, Bloomberg News
We spoke to Yanis Varoufakis about what it would take to get the global economy back on track and restore investor confidence. As you might expect, he had a very original perspective, and the economics to back it up.
Yanis Varoufakis on the European Constituion, Economic Disintegration and Orwellianism
In this video the former finance minister of Greece and founder of DiEM25 (Democracy in Europe Movement 2025), Yanis Varoufakis, provides us an insight into why the European constitution does not represent the people of Europe and lacks substance.
He also talks about disintegration of the European Union, what forces are driving its demise and how Orwellian language is used to hide this.
Do we have a constitution that represents the voice of the European people?
Could the EU disintegrate in the near future?
What are the observations that are pointing towards a disintegrating European Union?
Is Orwellianism being employed to deceive the population?
These questions and more are addressed in this video.
HSBC Global Head Of FX Cash Trading Arrested At JFK Airport July 22 2016 | From: ZeroHedge
A historic event took place today ago when Mark Johnson, the global head of cash FX at HSBC was arrested at JFK airport for his role in a "conspiracy to rig currency benchmarks", and specifically for frontrunning customer orders. He is the first person charged by the US in the ongoing FX rigging probe.
As Bloomberg reports, a "senior manager at HSBC Holdings Plc was arrested in New York for his role in a conspiracy to rig currency benchmarks, according to two people familiar with the matter, becoming the first person to be charged in the Justice Department’s three-year investigation into foreign-exchange rigging at global banks."
The DOJ adds that Mark Johnson, 50, a U.K. citizen and U.K. and U.S. resident, and Stuart Scott, 43, a U.K. citizen and resident, were charged by complaint with conspiracy to commit wire fraud. Johnson was arrested last night at JFK International Airport in Queens, New York, and will be arraigned later today before U.S. Magistrate Judge Lois Bloom of the Eastern District of New York.
From his bio: Johnson is global head of foreign exchange cash trading at HSBC, based in London. Prior to joining HSBC in 2010, he was founding managing partner and chief investment officer at Johnson Stewart Partners. Before that, he was global head of trading at Deutsche Bank.
More details:
Mark Johnson, HSBC’s global head of foreign exchange cash trading in London, was taken into custody at John F. Kennedy International Airport Tuesday and is scheduled to appear before a judge in federal court in Brooklyn Wednesday morning, said the people, who asked not to be named because the case hasn’t been made public. He’s charged with conspiracy to commit wire fraud, the people said.
According to Bloomberg, Johnson’s arrest comes more than a year after five global banks pleaded guilty to charges related to the rigging of currency benchmarks. HSBC, which wasn’t part of those criminal cases, in November 2014 agreed to pay $618 million in penalties to U.S. and British regulators to resolve currency manipulation allegations.
HSBC, which still faces investigations by the Justice Department and other authorities for the conduct, has set aside $1.3 billion for possible settlements, according to an August filing.
Rob Sherman, an HSBC spokesman, and Peter Carr, a Justice Department spokesman, declined to comment.
From the DOJ complaint:
“As alleged, the defendants placed personal and company profits ahead of their duties of trust and confidentiality owed to their client, and in doing so, defrauded their client of millions of dollars,” stated United States Attorney Capers.
“When questioned by their client about the higher price paid for their significant transaction, the defendants wove a web of lies designed to conceal the truth and divert attention away from their fraudulent trades.
The charges and arrest announced today reflect our steadfast commitment to hold accountable corporate executives and licensed professionals who use their positions to fraudulently enrich themselves.”
“The defendants allegedly betrayed their client’s confidence, and corruptly manipulated the foreign exchange market to benefit themselves and their bank,” said Assistant Attorney General Caldwell.
“This case demonstrates the Criminal Division’s commitment to hold corporate executives, including at the world’s largest and most sophisticated institutions, responsible for their crimes.”
The full details, as revealed in the DOJ complaint, allege that in November and December 2011, Johnson and Scott misused information provided to them by a client that hired HSBC to execute a foreign exchange transaction related to a planned sale of one of the client’s foreign subsidiaries.
HSBC was selected to execute the foreign exchange transaction – which was going to require converting approximately $3.5 billion in sales proceeds into British Pound Sterling – in October 2011.
HSBC’s agreement with the client required the bank to keep the details of the client’s planned transaction confidential. Instead, Johnson and Scott allegedly misused confidential information they received about the client’s transaction.
On multiple occasions, Johnson and Scott allegedly purchased Pound Sterling for HSBC’s “proprietary” accounts, which they held until the client’s planned transaction was executed.
The complaint alleges that, as part of the scheme, both Johnson and Scott made misrepresentations to the client about the planned foreign exchange transaction that concealed the self-serving nature of their actions.
Specifically, the complaint alleges that Johnson and Scott caused the $3.5 billion foreign exchange transaction to be executed in a manner that was designed to spike the price of the Pound Sterling, to the benefit of HSBC and at the expense of their client.
In total, HSBC allegedly generated profits of roughly $8,000,000 from its execution of the FX Transaction for the Victim Company, including profits generated from the front running conduct by Johnson, Scott, and other traders whom they directed.
...
Also on Tuesday, the U.S. Federal Reserve banned former UBS Group AG trader Matthew Gardiner from the banking industry for life for his role rigging currency benchmarks.
Gardiner used electronic chat rooms, with names including The Cartel and The Mafia, to facilitate the rigging of foreign-exchange benchmarks and to disclose confidential customer information to traders at other banks, the Fed said in astatement Tuesday. That matter is separate from the one involving Johnson, the people said.
Recall that DOJ unwillingness to prosecute HSBC was the ultimate catalyst that prompted former AG Eric Holder to admit that some banks are "too big to prosecute." Perhaps with this arrest things are slowly starting to change.
Now, if frontrunning clients is officially an arrest-worthy offense, we can't wait for the DOJ to unleash a crackdown on criminal HFT algos whose only purpose in "life" is to do just that.
Why The Whole Banking System Is A Scam - Godfrey Bloom MEP July 22 2016 | From: Europarle / UKIPMEPS
Strausberg, 21 May 2013.
Joint debate: Banking Union: Single national supervisory mechanism.
Serco: The Biggest Company You’ve Never Heard Of July 13 2016 | From: TheLibertyBeacon / Various
How Governments world-wide give away the freedoms and rights of their citizens to the Global - Military - Industrial - Complex:
When Governments “contract out” various services they are not responsible for end results, nor do they have to be transparent about any intended or unintended consequences.
Related:Serco to pay $8m to Corrections It is like putting “a germ of Fascism” in a Petri Dish and watching it grow. A Perfect experiment in tyranny.
The only problem is, it is not an experiment… it is today’s Reality for Humanity.
We offer a look at one of the biggest Global Government Contractors that impact your life every day without you knowing it. We start our report in the year 2009, when this Corporation started to really gain traction and attention. We will end with everything right up-to-date 2016.
Umbrella Corporation
Some have even likened Serco to the infamous Umbrella Corporation of the Resident Evil game and movie franchises, in that it's tentacles stretch all around the world into numbers markets and
industries.
Looking at the interests of Serco, it is not hard to see how such a parallel could be drawn:
The following video is a segment from the ABC's Australian production 'Hungry Beast' which identifies the multinational giant 'Serco Sodexo' as an intercontinental beast whose tentacles reach from boarder to boarder.
As the ABC point out Serco run the Australian prison and immigration detention centres, soon to be the largest operator of private prisons in the UK. They run half of London's Traffic Lights and all of Dublin's.
They are the largest Air Traffic Controllers in the World, multinational transportation services provider and hold a multitude of Defence Security Contracts across the globe. They even run everything from Schools to Greenwich Mean Time (GMT)
Serco runs navy patrol boats for the ADF, as well as search and salvage operations through their partnership with P&O which form Maritime Defense Services.
Serco runs two Australian Jails already, Acacia in WA and Borallon in Queensland
They’re one of the biggest companies In the UK for running electronic tagging of offenders under house arrest or parole.
Serco is in one of the two favored bid consortiums for the new Sydney metro rail line.
Serco has been labelled the “biggest company you’ve never heard of”.
It’s a private company, holding a huge number of government contracts for public services - everything from nuclear weapons defenses to out of hours doctors services. Serco is a UK company but has a global reach and chances are it’s running services near you.
And now for 2016. The following video was released by Serco as a business recruiting tool and of course the all important PR tool is not forgotten.
Serco Inc. is the Americas division of Serco Group, plc, one of the world’s leading and most admired service companies.
Serco serves Federal, state and local governments, along with the Canadian government and commercial customers.
We help our customers deliver vital services more efficiently, while increasing the satisfaction of their end customers.
Serco brings deep domain expertise and proven processes informed by over 50 years’ experience, with 100,000 people in 35 countries across the world, and over 10,000 in the Americas."
- Serco
We found Serco’s Military involvement of Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance of particular interest, as stated below in the following article/release from Serco.
With all of the “data bases” connected with the many Serco operations, you can be assured your name, your movements and daily actions are part “of the record” where you come into contact with their operations.
How George Soros Singlehandedly Created The European Refugee Crisis - And Why July 11 2016 | From: GarretGalland
Rothschild bag man George Soros could seamlessly step into the role as the real-life version of a super-villain in a James Bond novel. To give credit where credit is due, Stephen did the considerable leg work for this article and what he uncovered surprised even me.
George Soros is trading again. The 85-year-old political activist and philanthropist hit the headlines post-Brexit saying the event had “unleashed” a financial-market crisis.
Well, the crisis hasn’t hit Soros just yet. He was once again on the right side of the trade, taking a short position in troubled Deutsche Bank and betting against the S&P via a 2.1-million-share put option on the SPDR S&P 500 ETF.
More interestingly, Soros recently took out a $264 million position in Barrick Gold, whose share price has jumped over 14% since Brexit. Along with this trade, Soros has sold his positions in many of his traditional holdings.
Soros had recently announced he was coming out of retirement, again.
Click on the image above to see Soros lates trades online
First retiring in 2000, the only other time Soros has publicly re-entered the markets was in 2007, when he placed a number of bearish bets on US housing and ultimately made a profit of over $1 billion from the trades.
Since the 1980s, Soros has actively been pursuing a globalist agenda; he advances this agenda through his Open Society Foundations (OSF).
What is this globalist agenda, and where does it come from?
The Humble Beginnings
The globalist seed was sowed for young George by his father, Tivadar, a Jewish lawyer who was a strong proponent of Esperanto. Esperanto is a language created in 1887 by L.L. Zamenhof, a Polish eye doctor, for the purpose of “transcending national borders” and “overcoming the natural indifference of mankind.”
Tivadar taught young George Esperanto and forced him to speak it at home. In 1936, as Hitler was hosting the Olympics in Berlin, Tivadar changed the family name from Schwartz to Soros, an Esperanto word meaning “will soar.”
George Soros, who was born and raised in Budapest, Hungary, benefited greatly from his father’s decision.
Allegedly, in 1944, 14-year-old George Soros went to work for the invading Nazis. It is said that until the end of the war in 1945, he worked with a government official, helping him confiscate property from the local Jewish population.
In an 1998 interview with 60 Minutes, Soros described the year of German occupation as “the happiest time in my life.”
Soros’s Venture into Finance
When the war ended, Soros moved to London and in 1947 enrolled in the London School of Economics where he studied under Karl Popper, the Austrian-British philosopher who was one of the first proponents of an “Open Society.”
Soros then worked at several merchant banks in London before moving to New York in 1963. In 1970, he founded Soros Fund Management and in 1973 created the Quantum Fund in partnership with investor Jim Rogers.
The fund made annual returns of over 30%, cementing Soros’s reputation and putting him in a position of power—one he utilizes to this day to advance the agenda of his mentors.
The Currency Speculations That Threw Britain and Asia into Crisis
In the 1990s, Soros began a string of large bets against national currencies. The first was in 1992, when he sold short the pound sterling and made a $1 billion profit in a single day.
His next big currency speculation came in 1997. This time Soros singled out the Thai baht and, with heavy short-selling volume, destroyed the baht’s artificial peg to the US dollar, which started the Asian financial crisis.
“Humanitarian” Efforts
Today, Soros’s net worth stands at $23 billion. Since taking a back seat in his company, Soros Fund Management, in 2000, Soros has been focusing on his philanthropic efforts, which he carries out through the Open Society Foundations he founded in 1993.
So who does he donate to, and what causes does he support?
During the 1980s and 1990s, Soros used his extraordinary wealth to bankroll and fund revolutions in dozens of European nations, including Czechoslovakia, Croatia, and Yugoslavia. He achieved this by funneling money to political opposition parties, publishing houses, and independent media in these nations.
If you wonder why Soros meddled in these nations’ affairs, part of the answer may lie in the fact that during and after the chaos, he invested heavily in assets in each of the respective countries.
He then used Columbia University economist Jeffrey Sachs to advise the fledgling governments to privatize all public assets immediately, thus allowing Soros to sell the assets he had acquired during the turmoil into newly formed open markets.
Having succeeded in advancing his agenda in Europe through regime change - and profiting in the process - he soon turned his attention to the big stage, the United States.
The Big Time
In 2004, Soros stated;
"I deeply believe in the values of an open society. For the past 15 years I have been focusing my efforts abroad; now I am doing it in the United States.”
Since then, Soros has been funding groups such as:
The American Institute for Social Justice, whose aim is to “transform poor communities through lobbying for increased government spending on social programs”
The New America Foundation, whose aim is to “influence public opinion on such topics as environmentalism and global governance”
The Migration Policy Institute, whose aim is to “bring about an illegal immigrant resettlement policy and increase social welfare benefits for illegals”
Soros also uses his Open Society Foundations to funnel money to the progressive media outlet, Media Matters.
Soros funnels the money through a number of leftist groups, including the Tides Foundation, Center for American Progress, and the Democracy Alliance in order to circumvent the campaign finance laws he helped lobby for.
Why has Soros donated so much capital and effort to these organizations?For one simple reason: to buy political power.
Democratic politicians who go against the progressive narrative will see their funding cut and be attacked in media outlets such as Media Matters, which also directly contribute to mainstream sites such as NBC, Al Jazeera, and The New York Times.
Apart from the $5 billion Soros’s foundation has donated to groups like those cited above, he has also made huge contributions to the Democratic Party and its most prominent members, like Joe Biden, Barack Obama, and of course Bill and Hillary Clinton.
Best Friends with the Clintons
Soros’s relationship with the Clintons goes back to 1993, around the time when OSF was founded. They have become close friends, and their enduring relationship goes well beyond donor status.
According to the book, The Shadow Party, by Horowitz and Poe, at a 2004 “Take Back America” conference where Soros was speaking, the former first lady introduced him saying;
"[W]e need people like George Soros, who is fearless and willing to step up when it counts.”
Soros began supporting Hillary Clinton’s current presidential run in 2013, taking a senior role in the “Ready for Hillary” group.
Since then, Soros has donated over $15 million to pro-Clinton groups and Super PACs.
More recently, Soros has given more than $33 million to the Black Lives Matter group, which has been involved in outbreaks of social unrest in Ferguson, Missouri, and Baltimore, Maryland, in 2015.
Both of these incidents contributed to a worsening of race relations across America.
The same group heavily criticized Democratic contender Bernie Sanders for his alleged track record of supporting racial inequality, helping to undercut him as a competitive threat with one of Hillary Clinton’s most ardent constituencies.
This, of course, greatly enhances the clout Soros wields through the groups mentioned above. It is safe to assume that he is now able to drive Democratic policy, especially in an administration headed by Hillary Clinton.
Simply, what Soros wants, he gets. And it’s clear from his history that he wants to smudge away national borders and create the sort of globalist nightmare represented by the European Union.
In recent years, Soros has turned his attention back to Europe. Is it a coincidence that the continent is currently in economic and social disarray?
Another Home Run: the Ukrainian Conflict
There’s no doubt about Soros’s great influence on US foreign policy. In an October 1995 PBS interview with Charlie Rose, he said, “I do now have access [to US Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott]. There is no question. We actually work together [on Eastern European policy].”
Soros’s meddling reared its ugly head again in the Russia-Ukraine conflict, which began in early 2014.
In a May 2014 interview with CNN, Soros stated he was responsible for establishing a foundation in the Ukraine that ultimately led to the overthrow of the country’s elected leader and the installation of a junta handpicked by the US State Department, at the time headed by none other than Hillary Clinton:
CNN Host: First on Ukraine, one of the things that many people recognized about you was that you during the revolutions of 1989 funded a lot of dissident activities, civil society groups in Eastern Europe and Poland, the Czech Republic. Are you doing similar things in Ukraine?
Soros: Well, I set up a foundation in Ukraine before Ukraine became independent of Russia. And the foundation has been functioning ever since and played an important part in events now.
The war that ripped through the Ukrainian region of Donbass resulted in the deaths of over 10,000 people and the displacement of over 1.4 million people. As collateral damage, a Malaysia Airlines passenger jet was shot down, killing all 298 on board.
But once again Soros was there to profit from the chaos he helped create. His prize in Ukraine was the state-owned energy monopoly Naftogaz.
Soros again had his US cronies, Secretary of the Treasury Jack Lew and US consulting company McKinsey, advise the puppet government of Ukraine to privatize Naftogaz.
Although Soros’s exact stake in Naftogaz has not been disclosed, in a 2014 memo he pledged to invest up to $1 billion in Ukrainian businesses, but no other Ukrainian holdings have since been reported.
His Latest Success: The European Refugee Crisis
Soros’s agenda is fundamentally about the destruction of national borders. This has recently been shown very clearly with his funding of the European refugee crisis.
The refugee crisis has been blamed on the civil war currently raging in Syria. But did you ever wonder how all these people suddenly knew Europe would open its gates and let them in?
The refugee crisis is not a naturally occurring phenomenon. It coincided with OSF donating money to the US-based Migration Policy Institute and the Platform for International Cooperation on Undocumented Migrants, both Soros-sponsored organizations.
Both groups advocate the resettlement of third-world Muslims into Europe.
In 2015, a Sky News reporter found “Migrant Handbooks” on the Greek island of Lesbos. It was later revealed that the handbooks, which are written in Arabic, had been given to refugees before crossing the Mediterranean by a group called “Welcome to the EU.”
Welcome to the EU is funded by - you guessed it - the Open Society Foundations.
Soros has not only backed groups that advocate the resettlement of third-world migrants into Europe, he in fact is the architect of the “Merkel Plan.”
The massive Muslim integration into Europe is a Trojan Horse plan
The plan proposes that Germany should grant asylum to 500,000 Syrian refugees. It also states that Germany, along with other European nations, should agree to help Turkey, a country that’s 98% Muslim, gain visa-free travel within the EU starting in 2016.
Political Discourse
The refugee crisis has raised huge concern in European countries like Hungary. In response to 7,000 migrants entering Hungarian territory per day in 2015, the Hungarian government reestablished border control in order to keep the hordes of refugees from entering the country.
Of course this did not go down well with Soros and his close allies, the Clintons.
Bill Clinton has since come out and accused both Poland and Hungary of thinking “democracy is too much trouble” and wanting to have a “Putin-like authoritarian dictatorship.”
Seeing through Clinton’s comments, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán responded by saying:
"The remarks made about Hungary and Poland… have a political dimension. These are not accidental slips of the tongue.
And these slips or remarks have been multiplying since we are living in the era of the migrant crisis.
And we all know that behind the leaders of the Democratic Party, we have to see George Soros.”
He went on to say that “although the mouth belongs to Clinton, the voice belongs to Soros.”
Soros has since said of Orbán’s policy toward the migrants:
“His plan treats the protection of national borders as the objective and the refugees as an obstacle.
Our plan treats the protection of refugees as the objective and national borders as the obstacle.”
It’s hard to imagine that he could be any clearer in his globalist intentions.
So why is Soros going to such lengths to flood Europe with hordes of third-world Muslims? We can’t be sure, but it has recently come to light that Soros has taken a large series of “bearish derivative positions” against US stocks. Apparently, he thinks that causing chaos in Europe will spread the contagion to the United States, thus sending US markets spiraling downward.
The destruction of Europe through flooding it with millions of unassimilated Muslims is a direct plan to cause economic and social chaos on the Continent.
Another example of turmoil equaling profit for George Soros, who seems to have his tentacles in most geopolitical events.
We all understand correlation is not causation. However, given Soros’s extraordinary wealth, political connections, and his long track record of seeing and profiting from chaos, he is almost certainly a catalyst for much of the geopolitical turmoil now occurring.
He is intent on destroying national borders and creating a global governance structure with unlimited powers.
From his comments directed toward Viktor Orbán, we can see he clearly views national leaders as his juniors, expecting them to become puppets that sell his narrative to the ignorant masses.
Soros sees himself as a missionary carrying out the globalist agenda taught to him by his early mentors. He uses his vast political connections to influence government policy and create crises, both economic and social, to further this agenda.
By all appearances, Soros is conspiring against humanity and is hell-bent on the destruction of Western democracies.
To any rational thinker, some global events just don’t make sense. Why, for example, would Western democracies take in millions of people whose values are completely incompatible with their own?
When we look closely at the agenda being actively promoted by the leading globalist puppet master, George Soros, things become a little clearer.
On Soros & Gold
There is a naturally occurring and constant collaboration about shared interests occurring amongst the heads of governments, corporations, investment managers and all of the bottom feeders that survive off their scraps.
What is so interesting about Soros is that he is so obvious in his intentions and persistent in their pursuit. Given the consequences of his actions, it is also clear he’s a believer in moral relativism and that the ends justify the means.
That he turns a nice buck in his crusade for what certainly rhymes with a one-world government is a Soros hallmark.
“It allows me the money needed to fund my philanthropies” he might answer to the charges he is profiting from blood in the streets he was instrumental in spilling.
Going forward when something big is happening geopolitically, I am going to start my analysis by checking under rocks for signs of Soros.
At the beginning of this article we noted that Soros has gone big into American Barrick (ABX), a leading gold producer. As of the end of March it was his single largest holding at 7.36% of his overall portfolio.
As telling, he has dumped a lot of his more conventional stocks in recent months.
Given the man’s inside track – and active manipulations – you might want to take the hint and pick up some physical gold as an insurance policy against a systematic shock.
If you already own gold, I probably wouldn’t chase it here as it has had a good run of late. Ditto silver which is up 46% year to date. But if you don’t own some, adding precious metals to your portfolio as a long-term holding, even at today’s prices, makes sense.
As always with gold shares, it is important to remember a few things:
In most cases, these are speculations. That’s because their financial metrics often don’t line up with anything looking like a good value. What you are really betting on is a revaluation of the ounces of gold or silver a company is sitting on. Thus, if a company is sitting on one million ounces of gold and gold goes up by $100, the company just got a lot more valuable.
Never fall in love with a gold stock. Set a rational return goal and once hit, at least scrape your original investment off the table. That way you are playing with the casino’s money.
Also per my article last week, keep in mind that should gold stocks buck the trend in a future global equities correction, the money managers who own big positions in gold stocks will almost certainly dump their holdings in order to dress up the rest of their portfolios. As the trading volume in precious metals share is relatively thin, you want to beat them out the door.
Embrace the volatility. The low trading volume of most of these stocks is a key reason they have such explosive upside. Any significant uptick in investor interest can send a stock soaring.
Here Come the Clowns
Nothing comes close to the Get Out of Jail card handed by the clowns at the FBI to Hillary over her private email servers. This despite pretty much no one disputes she broke any number of federal laws of the sort which would have landed a lesser clown in jail.
To quote FBI Director James Comey;
"Although there is evidence of potential violations of the statutes regarding the handling of classified information, our judgment is that no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case.”
There is nuance in that statement. For starters, that there is evidence of violations. But also the stark political reality that no “reasonable prosecutor” would enforce the laws, considering who the perp is: the standard bearer for the Democrats going into this election.
Switzerland Follows Iceland In Declaring War Against The Banksters & Switzerland Withdraws Longstanding Application To Join EU July 6 2016 | From: WakingTimes / RT “If you want to continue to be slaves of the banks and pay the cost of your own slavery, then let bankers continue to create money and control credit.” - Josiah Stamp
Iceland has gained the admiration of populists in recent years by doing that which no other nation in the world seems to be willing or capable of doing: prosecuting criminal bankers for engineering financial collapse for profit. Their effective revolt against the banking class, who drove the tiny nation into economic crisis in 2008, is the brightest example yet that the world does not have to be indebted in perpetuity to an austere and criminal wealthy elite. In 2015, 26 Icelandic bankers were sentenced to prison and the government ordered a bank sale to benefit the citizenry.
Inspired by Iceland’s progress, activists in Switzerland are now making an important stand against the banking cartels and have successfully petitioned to bring an initiative to public referendum that would attack the private banks where it matters most: their power to lend money they don’t actually have, and to create money out of thin air.
"Switzerland will hold a referendum to decide whether to ban commercial banks from creating money.
The Swiss federal government confirmed that it would hold a plebiscite, after more than 110,000 people signed a petition calling for the central bank to be given sole power to create money in the financial system.
The campaign – led by the Swiss Sovereign Money movement and known as the Vollgeld initiative – is designed to limit financial speculation by requiring private banks to hold 100pc reserves against their deposits.”
Switzerland is in a key position to play a revolutionary role in changing how global banking functions. In addition to being the world’s safest harbor for storing wealth, it is also home to the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), a shadowy private company owned by many of the world’s central banks, and acting as a lender to the central banks.
The BIS is the very heart of global reserve banking, the policy that enables banks to lend money that does not actually exist in their bank deposits, but is instead literally created electronically from nothing whenever a bank extends a line of credit.
Reserve banking is the policy that guarantees insurmountable debt as the outcome of all financial transactions.
The Sovereign Money initiative in Switzerland aims to curb financial speculation, which is the intended and inevitable result of reserve banking, the tool that makes financial adventurism possible by supplying the banks with endless quantities of fiat money.
Limiting a bank’s ability to produce money from nothing would be a direct blow to the roots of the banking cartel, and would cripple their ability to manipulate the world economy. Here’s how it works, in rather simplified terms:
"…if we had access to the same computer terminals the banks have, we could magic in or out of existence all the imaginary stuff we are trained to think of as important – money – in whatever quantities we liked.
This is how it works: when they print quite a lot of this stuff there is a boom. When they print too much of it, there is inflation (actually, the printing of money is inflation). When they stop printing it or simply hold on to it, there is a depression.”
In Switzerland, 90% of all money in circulation is electronic, and for this, The National Bank of Switzerland has become the direct target of the Sovereign Money Campaign.
Swiss law has in the past required required banks to back all currency creation with collateral assets like physical silver or gold, however in recent decades the climate has changed, and, “due to the emergence of electronic payment transactions, banks have regained the opportunity to create their own money.”
The grass roots campaign said in a public statement regarding the intentions of the referendum, “banks won’t be able to create money for themselves any more, they’ll only be able to lend money that they have from savers or other banks.”
This is an interesting twist in the human saga of man vs. banks, and while it remains to be seen if the referendum passes or not, it must be pointed out that it does have its own problems, articulated by Sam Gerrans:
"… it does say that the central bank should be given sole right to create money. This would essentially leave the creation of money in the same hands as those who control the Federal Reserve or the Bank of England rather than allow them to farm out the process. But at least it shows that people are beginning to wake up to where the true power lies.
In the unlikely event that this grass-roots movement in Switzerland should get its way and its proposed legislation be enacted, and then begin to morph into something which really does threaten the banking elite, we must not be surprised if Switzerland is shortly discovered to be harboring weapons of mass destruction, or to have masterminded 9/11, or to be financing Islamic State.”
Part of the cultural conditioning of our time is an ingrained, pre-assumed dependency on sacred cow institutions like banking. Just like it is impossible for most Americans to envision a world without Democrats and Republicans, it is difficult for most people to imagine a world without predatory global banking.
This is not the only economic system we can imagine, and as Iceland has proven, people can regain control of their collective wealth, so perhaps this revolution will foment further in Switzerland, presenting a chance to at least bring greater awareness to the truth about central banking.
Switzerland Withdraws Longstanding Application To Join EU
The upper house of the Swiss parliament on has voted to invalidate its 1992 application to join the European Union, backing an earlier decision by the lower house.
The vote came just a week before Britain decided to leave the EU in a referendum.
Twenty-seven members of the upper house, the Council of States, voted to cancel Switzerland’s longstanding EU application, versus just 13 senators against. Two abstained.
In the aftermath of the vote, Switzerland will give formal notice to the EU to consider its application withdrawn, the country’s foreign minister, Didier Burkhalter, was quoted as saying by Neue Zürcher Zeitung.
The original motion was introduced by the conservative Swiss People’s Party MP, Lukas Reimann. It had already received overwhelming support from legislators in the lower house of parliament in March, with 126 National Council deputies voting in favor, and 46 against.
Thomas Minder, counsellor for the state of Schaffhausen and an active promoter of the concept of “Swissness,” said he was eager to “close the topic fast and painlessly”as only “a few lunatics” may want to join the EU now, he told the newspaper.
Hannes Germann, also representing Schaffhausen, highlighted the symbolic importance of the vote, comparing it to Iceland’s decision to drop its membership bid in 2015.
"Iceland had the courage and withdrew the application for membership, so no volcano erupted,”he said, jokingly.
Switzerland’s longstanding application to join the EU has not had a significant impact on the country’s politics for more than 20 years, as its accession negotiations have been suspended since 1992 in the wake of a referendum to join the European Economic Area, when the Swiss voted down the idea of closer ties with the EU.
Some politicians even argued that the vote was an unnecessary formal procedure that didn’t make much sense as Switzerland is no longer regarded by the EU as an official candidate to join the bloc.
Filippo Lombardi, from the Christian Democratic People’s Party, said that it was “not very clever to discuss it once again,” calling the debate about Switzerland’s accession at this stage “a bit ridiculous,” Neue Zürcher Zeitung reported.
Switzerland, never a member of EU, shares free trade with the union and free movement of people as part of the Schengen zone.
The timing of Switzerland’s reassurance of its sovereignty and independence from the EU institutions, if accidental, may come in handy for campaigners in the UK advocating a British exit from the EU. Polls show the UK’s referendum on EU membership, to be held in a week on June 23, as being extremely close, with Leave slightly in the lead.
Can Brexiters Overcome False Flag Murder & Rothschild UK Collapse Fearmongering? + Soros, Rothschild Warn Of Brexit Doom; Osborne Threatens With "Suspending" Market
June 24 2016 | From: Geopolitics / ZeroHedge We believe that the UK Brexit is just a small yet very important step towards freedom from the SuperState European Union that is managed by non-elected Khazarian Nazionists.
If successful, the people still have to deal with the bogus Saxe-Coburg- Gotha UK monarchy.
Nevertheless, the big guns of the Khazarian Mafia are in full force in making statements aimed at sowing fear into the public who “will suffer from an immediate and dramatic impact on financial markets, investment, prices and jobs,” once the Brexit campaign succeeds.
These doom and gloom scenario is peddled on top of the recent false flag murder of a drugged man who, according to mainstream press, even shouted “Britain First” in reference to the “most radical” group among the Brexit campaigners.
Truth be told, most citizens of the corporate monarchy of the United Kingdom don’t have enough information about the true purpose of the European Union. This topic is summarily dismissed in the mainstream media as being just another conspiracy theory.
That’s why a mere statement of “economic consequences” from a George Soros is enough to tremble the hell out of them. According to him;
“As opinion polls on the referendum result fluctuate, I want to offer a clear set of facts, based on my six decades of experience in financial markets, to help voters understand the very real consequences of a vote to leave the EU.
The Bank of England, the Institute for Fiscal Studies and the IMF have assessed the long-term economic consequences of Brexit. They suggest an income loss of £3,000 to £5,000 annually per household – once the British economy settles down to its new steady-state five years or so after Brexit. But there are some more immediate financial consequences that have hardly been mentioned in the referendum debate.
To start off, sterling is almost certain to fall steeply and quickly if there is a vote to leave – even more so after yesterday’s rebound as markets reacted to the shift in opinion polls towards remain. “
Remember, this is just a poll which they control and not the actual voting sentiments. But they are now conditioning the mind of a failure for the Brexit.
Now, if that is true, why would the likes of Soros and his master issue statements urging the people against Brexit if indeed the Leave campaign is losing?
“I would expect this devaluation to be bigger and more disruptive than the 15% devaluation that occurred in September 1992, when I was fortunate enough to make a substantial profit for my hedge fund investors, at the expense of the Bank of England and the British government.
It is reasonable to assume, given the expectations implied by the market pricing at present, that after a Brexit vote the pound would fall by at least 15% and possibly more than 20%, from its present level of $1.46 to below $1.15 (which would be between 25% and 30% below its pre-referendum trading range of $1.50 to $1.60).
If sterling fell to this level, then ironically one pound would be worth about one euro – a method of “joining the euro” that nobody in Britain would want.
Brexiters seem to recognise that a sharp devaluation would be almost inevitable after Brexit, but argue that this would be healthy, despite the big losses of purchasing power for British households. In 1992 the devaluation actually proved very helpful to the British economy, and subsequently I was even praised for my role in helping to bring it about.
But I don’t think the 1992 experience would be repeated. That devaluation was healthy because the government was relieved of its obligation to “defend” an overvalued pound with damagingly high interest rates after the breakdown of the exchange rate mechanism. This time, a large devaluation would be much less benign than in 1992, for at least three reasons.
…Today, there are speculative forces in the markets much bigger and more powerful. And they will be eager to exploit any miscalculations by the British government or British voters. A vote for Brexit would make some people very rich – but most voters considerably poorer.
The logic being that he is the expert in currency manipulation and people should listen to him. Against that rationale is the Iceland experience when they severed their monetary policies away from the vulture bankers.
Once the initial disruptions are contained, the more independent economy will strengthen itself as the fundamentals are stabilized.
And he is not part of the “speculative forces” he is talking about, that “will be eager to exploit any miscalculations by the British government or British voters.”
Yes, he considers a vote for Brexit as a miscalculation, as if he is really good with math when even his rise to prominence in world finance is only by the virtue of his having privileged access to information within a system that has been rigged also by his cohorts.
George Soros talks with Jim Flaherty, centre, and Peter Munk, right. Soros spoke to a crowd of Canada's business elite on Monday at the Canadian International Council gala.
The truth of the matter is, these Khazarian Mafiosi are afraid that the Brexit campaign might just win because their Brexit arguments are more level headed, and for the open minded that’s a positive way to move forward.
While the Remain campaign are dwelling mostly on pessimism as if the world would end with Brexit.
This Jacob Rothschild opinion piece came much earlier…
“Success stories in any field are built on one great idea. This was certainly the case with my forebear Mayer Amschel Rothschild, who at the end of the 18th century sent his five sons to the five financial capitals of Europe to set up the first truly international banking system, a “common market”.
Operating from London, Paris, Vienna, Naples and Frankfurt, the brothers, working together to exchange information and ideas, built an extraordinary business that operated across boundaries and cultures.
A hundred and fifty years later, the foundation of the EEC operated on similar principles, namely that we are stronger…”
With reference to the article’s title, when does evidence come before the action, i.e. Brexit?
The key message right there is the statement “We shouldn’t accept a diminished role on the world stage,” which is not addressed at the great people of great Britain but could only mean that the Rothschild dynasty is not ready yet to have a “diminished role” on their lives.
Here’s the kicker: Great Britain was already great before the European Union came into being. Most of all, the EU is collapsing whether Bexit succeeds or not. The only difference is, with Remain, Britons will be at the front seat when it happens.
This is the reason why the Rothschild camp is campaigning for Remain, for the UK taxpayers to absorb a major portion of the impact of the impending EU economic collapse.
To put it simply, the Rothschild dynasty is far more concerned on the accelerated collapse of their brainchild European Union through the Brexit, than being genuinely troubled over the fate of the UK.
Bear in mind, the collapse of these megacorporations masquerading as government entities doesn’t necessarily mean the collapse of your ability to survive. In fact, your life would be a lot better without these bankers and their stooges in your midst.
So, while the Remain campaigners are focusing on fear and pessimism, the Leave campaign is straightforward in reminding that Britain will become great again, alone.
It would become even greater once the true blooded Britons kicked out their bogus and useless monarchy, together with the Rothschild banking system, after the Brexit.
Of course, that’s a tall order, but as we say here in Asia,“A journey of a thousand miles, begins only with a single step.”
That single step, my British friends, is the Brexit.
The Big Guns Are Out: Soros, Rothschild Warn Of Brexit Doom; Osborne Threatens With "Suspending" Market
Recently, we recounted the story of "Black Wednesday" when on September 16, 1992, the UK was forced out of the EU’s exchange-rate mechanism, or ERM, when the BOE tapped out and allowed the British pound to float freely, leading to 15% losses in the sterling. As we noted, this was George Soros' infamous trade which "broke the Bank of England" and made the Hungarian richer by over $1.5 bilion.
24 years later Soros is back, and this time he is warning against the kind of devaluation that made him a billionaire and which he believes will be unleashed by Brexit, when in a Guardian Op-Ed he wrote that U.K. voters are “grossly underestimating” the true costs of a vote to leave the EU, saying that there would be an "immediate and dramatic impact on financial markets, investment, prices and jobs."
He predicts that the pound would decline "precipitously", seeing a gargantuan drop of at least 15% and possibly >20% to below $1.15. Considering it has now become trendy for analysts to come up with ever "doomier" forecasts of just how low cable would plunge in case of Brexit, we are surprised Soros stopped there.
Here Soros makes the distinction how the collapse in cable would be different from the one that made him richer by saying that this devaluation wouldn’t be “healthy” like the one in 1992 because BOE wouldn’t cut rates, U.K. has large current account deficit and devaluation unlikely to improve manufacturing exports this time. Just don't tell that to the BOJ, which would gladly leave the EU - twice if it had to - if it meant a 20% devaluation.
“Brexit would make some people very rich - but most voters considerably poorer”; “there are speculative forces in the, markets much bigger and more powerful" than the speculators that profited from the 1967 devaluation at Britain’s expense. "A vote to leave could see the week end with a Black Friday, and serious consequences for ordinary people."
“David Cameron, along with the Treasury, the Bank of England, the International Monetary Fund and others have been attacked by the leave campaign for exaggerating the economic risks of Brexit.
This criticism has been widely accepted by the British media and many financial analysts. As a result, British voters are now grossly underestimating the true costs of leaving.
As opinion polls on the referendum result fluctuate, I want to offer a clear set of facts, based on my six decades of experience in financial markets, to help voters understand the very real consequences of a vote to leave the EU."
Of course, Soros' set of facts may be clouded by his far greater equity stake in equity interests around Europe, and the globe, which would be drastially impacted by not only a Brexit, but by a European Union which is suddenly on the rocks.
From that point on, Soros' entire analysis is on the "worst case" scenario centered around a collapsing pound, something which most ironically every other central bank around the globe is so desperate to achieve:
“... Sterling is almost certain to fall steeply and quickly if there is a vote to leave– even more so after yesterday’s rebound as markets reacted to the shift in opinion polls towards remain.
I would expect this devaluation to be bigger and more disruptive than the 15% devaluation that occurred in September 1992, when I was fortunate enough to make a substantial profit for my hedge fund investors, at the expense of the Bank of England and the British government."
At least he is honest.
It is notable that Soros' warning comes just days after that of Jacob Rothschild himself who said in another Op-Ed, this time for The Times, that leaving the EU could lead to a "damaging and disorderly situation" in the UK as he urged Britons to vote 'remain'.
Just like Soros, Lord Rothschild, suddenly exhibiting a rare strain of humanitarian concern, said readers should not "risk the wellbeing of our country" and European countries are "better off together".
He said that "at present we enjoy being a permanent member of the UN security council and we are essential to the G8 and Commonwealth. But diplomacy, defence, the environment and our values of being a liberal democracy will all be at risk" adding that "I can see no good reason why we should accept our playing a diminished role on the world stage," especially if his own personal fortune would be jeopardized.
...
Finally, completing the doom loop, was none other than Chancellor George Osborne who, according to the Telegraph, "refused to rule out suspending trading on the London stock market if Britons vote to leave the European Union on Friday morning...
The threat from the Chancellor, made in an LBC radio interview on Monday evening, after the market had closed could force shares down in London as early as Tuesday morning."
“Iain Dale, the presenter, asked Mr Osborne: “If the financial markets do plummet on Friday would you have to consider suspending trading on the FTSE?”
The Chancellor responded: “Well look, the Bank of England and the Treasury – Governor Carney and myself – we have of course discussed contingency plans.
But the sensible thing is to keep those secret and make sure you are well prepared for whatever happens but if you set them all out in advance then you rather undermine the power of those plans.”
Pushed again on the contingency plans, Mr Osborne said: “I have a responsibility to the people listening to this programme to do all I can to protect them. “But I have to tell you that you cannot in the end protect people from the economic shock that leaving the EU would bring about.”
And in case the threat of shuttered markets was not enough, Osborne also hinted at imminent mass layoffs, suggesting that redundancy notices could be issued hours after Britons vote to leave the EU at the vote.
“Mr Osborne pointed to warnings from the London Stock Exchange there would be 100,000 job losses in the City after a Brexit.
Mr Osborne was challenged about whether redundancies warned by the bank JP Morgan could come as early as Friday – the day after the referendum. Mr Osborne replied: “I think that will start to happen very quickly, sadly.”
Amid all this gloom, Osborne presented the "only" alternative that would not lead to the imminent economic collapse he so forcefully imagines:
“He added that if the UK voted to remain there would be a “quick snap back” for the British economy, he said that “decisions will be taken and investment will come in”.
Asked if these redundancy notices would be issued on Friday morning if Britons vote to leave, Mr Osborne said: “That will start to happen very quickly sadly.”
Now if only the people will do what these noble public servants tell to do in their own best interest...
Finally, Osborne also played down claims he could be forced to leave the Treasury after the referendum amid anger form Tory backbenchers over the way he has campaigned, saying: “It’s really not about my job”.
Oh but is George, just like it is in Soros and Rothschild's own self interest for the people to vote "Remain." To suggest otherwise is naive, but it may also be irrelevant.
With very little time until the vote, the scaremongering tactic, not to mention the murder of an innocent woman, may have already done its job judging by the reveral in public opinion.
In any case, one can only hope that unlike the case of the failed Greek referendum where the people voted one way only to get the opposite, no matter how the Brits vote, it will truly represent the democratic will of the majority and that particular outcome is what they get.
Mainstream Media Finally Admits 72 Mass Banker ‘Suicides’ Were Likely A Vast Criminal Conspiracy June 22 2016 | From: HumansAreFree There is no question that this is a story that just won't die, even if 72 bankers in it’s path had to die before the story could get to this point. Hopefully no more will die before the wizard behind the curtain is finally revealed and brought to justice for his or her crimes… however that seems rather distant at the moment.
Jay Syrmopoulos is the original author of this particular article at Humans are Free, however, since I’ve been following this story since 2014 as well, I have supplemented his original article with previous findings of mine and the end result almost tripled the size of the article. At the bottom of this post, you’ll see several sections containing relevant and supporting links, the first section having seven stories I did on the mysterious banker “suicides.”
It's nice to see that what some were once ignorant enough to say looked like wild speculation, is now beginning to resemble a vast criminal conspiracy connected to the Libor, interest-rigging scandal as you can read in Jay’s article below.
First though, in the following video, Dahboo77 discusses an article by Dave Hodges of the Common Sense Show about the banker death phenomena. In addition to the banker deaths, Dahboo77 brings up the unexpected and sudden deaths of men like Andrew Breitbart, Tom Clancy, and Andrew Hastings (who’s covered more in detail below).
In the video you just saw, Dahboo77 claims all of those men went to their graves with stories untold. Was that by design? The next video titled, "Why Andrew Breitbart, Michael Hastings and Tom Clancy were Murdered" certainly makes the case that they were killed because they knew too much.
I’m going to go out on a limb and say that anyone reading an article about 72 high level bankers all dead from “mysterious suicides” is open to the idea that Dahboo77 mentions in the first video when he talks about how this is “all tied together,” and how, “it’s so obvious.”
There probably was a time when hearing about the global elites’ (also known as the Illuminati) master plan to enslave every man women and child on earth might have sounded like lunacy to you, but no more loony than 72 dead bankers, right? The skeptics can read some of my links at the bottom about HOW some of the dead bankers died.
That will erase any doubt. Dahboo77 also talks about moving toward the ultimate goal: One World Government with One World Currency, and he even mentions underground bunkers.
For those ready to open their eyes, Dahboo77 is correct… Every ounce of all of this ties together. There are many pieces we don't know, however the pieces that we have been able to put together are very frightening.
Much of it is detailed in the links that follow my video below (to the extent possible). My video explains what to expect both in the links that follow and the remainder of this crazy post.
To anyone out there rolling their eyes:
1. The families of the 72 dead aren’t rolling their eyes… This is VERY real for them
2. John F. Kennedy himself said he was aware of a plan to enslave every man, woman, and child, but before leaving office he planned to expose that plan. He was referring to the plan of the Illuminati. You see how well that worked out for him right?
Understand something: The bogeymen ARE real, they DO have a plan for humanity, and it's NOT good. There is so much information available to anyone willing to break free from the very same corporate media the bogeymen control, nut you have to unplug from the Matrix. I explain below.
What once looked like wild speculation is now beginning to resemble a vast criminal conspiracy connected to the Libor, interest-rigging scandal.
Over forty international bankers allegedly killed themselves over a two-year period in the wake of a major international scandal that implicated financial firms across the globe.
However, three of these seemingly unrelated suicides seem to share common threads related to their connections to Deutsche Bank.
These three banker suicides, in New York, London, and Siena, Italy, took place within 17 months of each other in 2013/14 in what investigators labeled as a series of unrelated suicides.
“In each case, the victim had a connection to a burgeoning global banking scandal, leaving more questions than answers as to the circumstances surrounding their deaths,” according to the New York Post.
“But all three men worked for, or did business with, Deutsche Bank.”
Financial regulators in both Europe and the U.S. in 2013 began a probe that would ultimately become known as the Libor scandal, in which London bankers conspired to rig the London Interbank Offered Rate, which determines the interest banks charged on mortgages, personal and auto loans.
The scandal rocked the financial world and cost a consortium of international banks, including Deutsche Bank, about $20 billion in fines.
David Rossi, a 51-year-old communications director at the world’s oldest bank, Italian Monte dei Paschi di Siena, which was on the brink of collapse due to heavy losses in the derivatives market in the 2008 financial crisis, fell to his death on March 6, 2013.
At the time of his death, Monte Paschi was being investigated for its handling of billions in these risky derivative bets involving Deutsche Bank and Merrill Lynch.
“A devastating security video shows Rossi landing on the pavement on his back, facing the building - an odd position more likely to occur when a body is pushed from a window.
“The footage shows the three-story fall didn’t kill Rossi instantly. For almost 20 minutes, the banker lay on the dimly lit cobblestones, occasionally moving an arm and leg.
“As he lay dying, two murky figures appear. Two men appear and one walks over to gaze at the banker. He offers no aid or comfort and doesn’t call for help before turning around and calmly walking out of the alley.”
About an hour later, a co-worker discovered Rossi’s body. The arms were bruised and he sustained a head wound that, according to the local medical examiner’s report, suggested there might have been a struggle prior to his fall.
Ultimately Italian authorities ruled Rossi’s death a suicide. Rossi’s widow, Antonella Tognazzi, protested vigorously at the suggestion her husband’s death was a suicide, telling the Italian press that her husband “knew too much.”
Tognazzi pointed to the alleged suicide note from Rossi as a prime example of the suspicious nature of his death. In the note, Rossi refers to Antonella Tognazzi as Toni, but according to Tognazzi, that was not something he ever called her.
In October 2014, two Monte Paschi executives were convicted of obstructing regulators and misleading investigators by Italian authorities over the bailed-out Italian bank’s finances in the wake of the acquisition of Banca Antonveneta – which was heavily financed by Deutsche Bank.
In January of this year, Italian authorities civilly implicated three Deutsche Bank executives, including Michele Faissola, the wealth management director of the German bank - charging them with colluding with Monte Paschi in falsifying accounts, manipulating the market and obstructing justice.
Another of the mysterious deaths being revisited is that of William Broeksmit, 58, a Deutsche Bank exec was found hanging from a dog leash tied to a door at his London home in January 2014.
Broeksmit was found among a mess of financial papers, with a number of notes to friends and family nearby. A Deutsche Bank colleague, Michele Faissola, was called and arrived minutes later and began suspiciously going through the financial documents and reading the suicide notes.
“Yes, he killed himself,” stepson Val Broeksmit told the NY Post.
“But there’s a question: could it be suicide by extortion, could it be suicide by pressure or saying if you don’t do this, we’re going to do this? There’s a couple suspicions I have.”
Broeksmit’s stepson still wonders what his father’s colleague was searching for amongst the mess of financial documents.
Adding to the suspicious nature of his stepfather’s death, Val provided the NY Post email messages revealing that prior to his death, Broeksmit had just messaged friends about his excitement for an upcoming ski vacation scheduled for one week later.
Although a clinical psychologist revealed Broeksmit had been treated due to being “very anxious about authorities investigating areas of the bank at which he worked,” his depression over the Libor scandal had subsided, as his doctor gave him a clean bill of health only a month before his death.
According to the report by the NY Post:
“A month before his death, William Broeksmit wrote - in what his son says shows his anger - to fellow executives, asking why he should take the lead on the sticky matter of the upcoming Federal Reserve-mandated stress test for the bank.
“He also questioned the 'generous' loan-loss numbers being used by the bank, afraid that federal regulators would see the bank was losing more on loans than the books showed. Large losses could lead the feds to slap the bank with restrictions.
Who is recommending that I do this? I am supposed to be an independent director and this puts me further into a role aligned with management,” he wrote.
New York City attorney, Calogero “Charles” Gambino, 41, was a married father of two, and Deutsche Bank’s in-house lawyer for 11 years at the bank’s downtown headquarters. Gambino primarily worked on defending the Deutsch Bank against Libor charges and other regulatory probes.
In October 2014, Gambino’s was found hanging from an upstairs balcony of his Brooklyn home, with a rope that was snaked through the banister and tied off on the newel post on the first floor. There was no note found and the family has steadfastly refused to comment on his death.
In his work as corporate counsel for Deutsche, Gambino had dealings with many of the bank’s European executives - including Michele Faissola and William Broeksmit and had intimate knowledge of the inner workings of the bank’s operations. Gambino’s death was ruled a suicide.
In the cases of Gambino, Rossi and Broeksmit, authorities seemingly never looked for, nor discovered, the apparent connections that reveal a deadly international criminal conspiracy at work.
However, authorities in Siena, Italy have recently exhumed the body of banker David Rossi, 51, and reopened their investigation into his death. They are expected to release their findings at the end of the month.
The common thread in each of these deaths is that all of the dead bankers had intimate knowledge of the international Libor scandal as it related to Deutsche Bank.
It seems apparent that these men were killed to ensure their silence, thus allowing those responsible for the interest rigging scandal within Deutsche to avoid responsibility.
An investment banker jumped to his death from a luxury apartment building in Manhattan. Authorities confirmed Thomas J. Hughes was 29-years-old.
A man leaping from a luxury lower Manhattan apartment building met a grisly end Thursday when he was decapitated after crashing into a railing, horrified witnesses said.
The unidentified man jumped from a West St. building at about 11 a.m., officials said. His body exploded apart after it hit the railing bordering Battery Place and the underpass that leads to FDR Drive - leaving stunned onlookers covered in blood.
“There were body parts all over the floor,” said Hans Peler, 48, manager of the GGMC parking garage, which stands just a few feet from the gory scene. “Blood was all over (my employee’s) shirt. I sent him straight home. He was very upset,” said Peler. “It’s terrible, man.”
Thomas J. Hughes, 29, a former Citigroup and UBS investment banker who joined the boutique shop of Moelis & Company in February, 2014.
Body parts may have also hit or bounced off a Honda CRV that stopped short on the roadway and remained at the scene, witnesses said. “I don’t know where he came from! I don’t know where he came from!” a passenger of the SUV was heard screaming.
Witness Mario Mroczkowski, 37, said the impact was so bad, the man’s body was left in pieces. “I got close, but when I looked, all I saw were body parts … guts everywhere,” Mroczkowski said. “He hit the railing and got his head cut off.”
Taxi driver Tony Santos, 45, was in his SUV in front of the Ritz-Carlton across the street when he was startled by the sound of the body’s impact. “I heard like a boom,” Santos said.
Hours after the apparent suicide, the man remained unidentified. Body parts were found under the CRV, witnesses said. Blood was found pooled under the car and spattered on both sides of the railing, witnesses said. “He’s a mess,” a police source said. “His face is barely decipherable.”
Witnesses believe the man jumped from the 18th floor of 1 West St., home of Ocean Luxury Residences where one-bedroom apartments go for up to $4,000 a month. At least one witness said he jumped from the roof of the 31-story building.
Styled after a 14th-century palace, 1 West St. has a Venetian-look lobby, fitness center and outdoor decks overlooking New York Harbor. Cops were investigating the man’s death Thursday afternoon.
Police investigate the grisly scene where Thomas J. Hughes leaped from a luxury apartment building near the Battery Tunnel Thursday.
At this point we have lost count of how many bankers have taken their own lives in the past year, despite stocks rising to all time highs and an artificial “wealth effecting” environment which if nobody else, benefits the banker class. We dread to think what happens to New York’s pavements once the central planners finally lose control.
The Astonishing List of 72 Top Bankers Dead - And No Natural Causes!
I’ve recently stumbled across a list of top bankers that have been killed in cold blood, died in “accidents” or have allegedly committed suicide.
In some of the cases, their deaths are so suspicious that the ‘suicide’ verdict is simply ridiculous, as you will see.
While searching for news reports documenting their deaths, I’ve managed to find a lot more cases of high ranking bankers that have been found dead in suspect circumstances. I’ve added the cases to the list and included the appropriate reference links.
Head Of The Illuminati Snake ~ Rothschild Estimated Worth: $300-$500 Trillion
1. Nov – Shawn Miller, 42, Citigroup managing director – found dead in bathtub with throat slashed. Murder weapon is missing. – Reference.
2. Oct – Edmund Reilly, 47, a trader at Midtown’s Vertical Group, threw himself in front of a speeding Long Island Rail Road commuter train. – Reference.
3. Jan – William ‘Bill’ Broeksmit, 58, HUNG/POSSIBLE SUICIDE.
4. June – Richard Gravino, 49, Application Team Lead, JP Morgan, SUDDEN DEATH cause unknown/pending
5. June – James McDonald – President & CEO of Rockefeller & Co – apparently self-inflicted, GUNSHOT WOUND
6. May – Thomas Schenkman, 42, Managing Director of Global Infrastructure, JP Morgan, SUDDEN DEATH, cause unknown/pending
7. May – Naseem Mubeen – Assistant Vice President ZBTL Bank, Islamabad, SUICIDE jumped
8. May – Daniel Leaf – senior manager at the Bank of Scotland/Saracen Fund Managers, FELL OFF A CLIFF
9. May – Nigel Sharvin – Senior Relationship Manager Ulster Bank manage portfolio of distressed businesses, ACCIDENTAL DROWNING
10. April – Lydia (no surname given) 52, France’s Bred-Banque-Populaire, SUICIDE jumped – Reference.
11. April – Li Jianhua, 49, Non-bank Financial Institutions Supervision Department of the regulator, HEART ATTACK
12. April – Benedict Philippens, Director/Manager Bank Ans-Saint-Nicolas, SHOT
13. April – Tanji Dewberry – Assistant Vice President, Credit Suisse, HOUSE FIRE
14. April – Amir Kess, co-founder and managing director Markstone Capital Group private equity fund, CYCLIST HIT BY CAR
15. April – Juergen Frick, 48, Bank Frick & Co. AG, SHOT Dead
Rothschild Billionaire Mahafarid Amir Khosravi, executed In Iran For bilking money then buying Iranian property for Agenda 21
16. April – Jan Peter Schmittmann – former CEO of Dutch Bank ABN Amro, (Possibly suicide, SHOT)
17. April – Andrew Jarzyk – Assistant Vice President, Commercial Banking at PNC Financial Services Group, MISSING/DEAD
18. March – Mohamed Hamwi – System Analyst at Trepp, a financial data and analytics firm, SHOT
19. March – Joseph Giampapa – JP Morgan lawyer, CYCLIST HIT BY MINIVAN
20. March – Kenneth Bellando, 28, (youngest) former JP Morgan, SUICIDE, allegedly jumping from his apartment building. – Reference.
Kenneth Bellando
21. Feb – John Ruiz Morgan Stanley, Municipal Debt Analyst, died suddenly, NO CAUSE GIVEN
22. Feb – Jason Alan Salais, 34, Information Technology specialist at JPMorgan, FOUND DEAD outside a Walgreens pharmacy
23. Feb – Autumn Radtke, CEO of First Meta Bitcoin, a cyber-currency exchange firm, “Suspected SUICIDE” – Reference.
24. Feb – James Stuart Jr., Former National Bank of Commerce CEO, FOUND DEAD.
25. Feb – Edmund (Eddie) Reilly, trader at Midtown’s Vertical Group, SUICIDE Previously Mentioned #2
26. Feb – Li Junjie, JP Morgan, Alleged SUICIDE after jumping from the JP Morgan HQ in Hong Kong – Reference.
27. Feb – Ryan Henry Crane, 37, Executive at JP Morgan, SUDDEN DEATH cause unknown – Reference.
28. Feb – Richard Talley - A coroner’s spokeswoman Thursday said Talley was found in his garage by a family member who called authorities. They said Talley died from seven or eight self-inflicted wounds from a nail gun fired into his torso and head. - Reference.
29. Jan – Gabriel Magee, 39, JP Morgan employee, dead after allegedly jumping from the rooftop of JP Morgan HQ in Europe.
30. July – Julian Knott, 45, JPMorgan Executive Director, Global Tier 3 Network Operations, allegedly shot his wife multiple times, then shot himself dead. – Reference.
31. Jan – Mike Dueker, Suicide - “Suicide” By 13 Meter Embankment (40-50 feet). He may have jumped over a 4-foot (1.2-meter) fence before falling down a 40- to 50-foot embankment.” – Reference.
Dueker worked at Seattle-based Russell for five years, and developed a business-cycle index that forecast economic performance. He was previously an assistant vice president and research economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. – Reference.
China Executes Keynesian Bankers aka; Rothschild Henchmen
32. Jan – Carl Slym, SUICIDE
33. Jan – Tim Dickenson, Communications Director at Swiss Re AG, SUDDEN DEATH cause unknown
34. Dec 2013 – Robert Wilson, a retired hedge fund founder, apparent SUICIDE leaped to his death from his 16th floor residence
35. Dec 2013 – Joseph . Ambrosio, age 34, Financial Analyst for J.P. Morgan, died suddenly from Acute Respiratory Syndrome
36. Dec 2013 – Benjamin Idim, CAR ACCIDENT
37. Dec 2013 – Susan Hewitt – Deutsche Bank, DROWNING
38. Nov 2013 – Patrick Sheehan, CAR ACCIDENT
39. Nov 2013 – Michael Anthony Turner, Career Banker, CAUSE UNKOWN
40. Nov 2013 – Venera Minakhmetova, Former Financial Analyst at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, CYCLIST HIT
41. Oct 2013 – Michael Burdin, SUICIDE
42. Oct 2013 – Ezdehar Husainat – former JP Morgan banker, killed in FREAK ACCIDENT when her SUV crushed her to death
43. Sept 2013 – Guy Ratovondrahona -Madagascar central bank, Sudden death – cause not confirmed
44. Aug 2013 – Pierre Wauthier, SUICIDE
45. Aug 2013 – Moritz Erhardt, SUICIDE
46. July 2013 Hussain Najadi, CEO of merchant bank AIAK Group, SHOT
47. July 2013 Carsten Schloter, SUICIDE
48. July 2013 Sascha Schornstein – RBS in its commodity finance, MISSING
49. April 2013 David William Waygood, SUICIDE
50. Mar 2013 – David Rossi – communications director of troubled Italian bank Monte dei Paschi di Siena (MPS), SUICIDE
51. Fang Fang – JP Morgan, China, DISGRACED
52. Nick Bagnall – Director at Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi, son accidentally killed himself while trying to re-enact a Tudor hanging
53. Robin Clark – RP Martin -Wolf of Shenfield City banker shot, SURVIVED
54. Kevin Bespolka – Citi Capital Advisors, Dresdner Bank, Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley, Seriously injured and son dead
55. Robert Wheeler, 49, a Deutsche Bank financial advisor, DISGRACED
56. Chris Latham – Bank of America, ON TRIAL, Murder for Hire
57. Igor Artamonov – West Siberian Bank of Sberbank, Daughter found dead (POSSIBLE SUICIDE)
58. Hector Sants, Barclays – resigned due to stress and exhaustion, after being told he risked more serious consequences to his health if he continued to work – a remarkable turnaround as the Church reportedly approached him two months later and was told he had made a full recovery.
59. April 21st Bruce A. Schaal, 63, died suddenly Banker in Twin Lakes for 35 years
60. April 20th Keith Barnish 58, Died Suddenly (Still working as Senior Managing Director at Doral Financial Corporation. Previously Bear Stearns, Bank of America Senior Vice President).
61. March 12th Jeffrey Corzine, 31, son of MF Global CEO and Chairman Jon Corzine involved in major banking crime was found dead in an apparent suicide.
62. Keiran Toman, 39, former banker who believed he was being stalked by a reality TV crew starved to death in a hotel room, after leaving the “do not disturb” sign on door for TWO weeks.
[Highly suspicious claims, as many of us probably know that the hotel cleaning staff will knock on the door after 24 hours and eventually enter the room if failing to respond]. An inquest was opened after his death in July 2010 but his family asked for a second hearing as they were not informed. Police found all of Mr Toman’s possessions in the room, but despite documents mentioning his family, failed to tell them he had died. — Reference.
63. Nicholas Austin, 49, A former bank manager from Hersden died after drinking antifreeze in an effort to “get high”. was found in a coma by his wife Lynn at their home in Blackthorne Road on October 5. He died the same day. – Reference.
“I took special note of the last one – he died drinking antifreeze in an attempt to “get high”! Funny one that is, as if a banker would be stupid enough to try that.
The list is shocking, I never saw so many suicides and car accidents. No gall bladder stones, cancer deaths, strokes, or simply falling ill, it is just a litany of action.
64. Melissa Millian, 54, Senior Vice President at MassMutual Financial Group, stabbed in the chest near a jogging alley in Connecticut – Reference.
65. Karl Slym, 51, Tata Motors managing director – not a banker, but a top official that could be connected somehow to the others – discovered dead on the fourth floor of the Shangri-La hotel in Bangkok.
66. Geert Tack was a private banker for ING and managed portfolios of wealthy clients in Blegium. The cause of death wasunknown at the time of the report, but he disappeared in mysterious circumstances, after driving his personal car to a garage from which he took a replacement car to an unknown destination. His body was found in November 2014 near the shores of the Ostend coast. – Reference.
67. Thieu Leenen, 64, Relatiemanager ABN/AMRO, Eindhoven, Nederland
68. Calogero Gambino, 41, Associate General Counsel and Managing Director at Deutsche Bank, America – Alleged SUICIDE by hanging – Reference.
69. Thierry Leyne, 48, banker at Anatevka S.A., Israël, “apparent SUICIDE”- Reference.
70. Tod Robert Edward, 51, Vice President of M&T Bank, Lancaster and Harrisburg Offices, and served as President of the Mortgage Banker’s Assn – died on August 31st, 2014, on Grindstone Island, Clayton, NY, from injuries sustained in an accident. – Reference.
72. Michael A. Tabacchi, 27, and his wife, Iran Pars Tabacchi, 41, were found dead Friday about 11:30 p.m. in the bedroom of their Closter home after a 911 call placed by the husband’s father, Bergen County Prosecutor John Molinelli said in an interview. – Reference.
Spark Boss Accuses Google Of 'Despicable Behaviour' June 19 2016 | From: NationalBusinessReview
Sorry, don't want to foist a story-based-on a tweet on NBR readers but I couldn't help but highlight Spark boss Simon Moutter's post on Twitter last night.
The chief executive retweeted an NBR story on Google NZ's latest financial filing, adding his own comment:
"Despicable behaviour – posting $10m revenue despite generating $67m annual ad revenue in NZ to offshore entity."
The $67 million is the estimate of Google's ad revenue booked in New Zealand in the Fairfax-NZME merger application – and the pair's figures seem in line with estimates by the IAB and others.
However, social media consultant Louis van Wyk hit back with a couple of good jabs, tweeting to NBR:
"So will Moutter put his money where his mouth is? Will Spark avoid Google ads in favour of supporting local media?"
And:
"Spark spends a lot on Facebook too. How much tax did Facebook pay in NZ?" [Answer: very little].
Mr van Wyk makes a good point. NBR has asked the Spark boss if he thinks his company should stop promoting itself through Google and Facebook ads, thereby helping to line the pockets of these profit-shifters.
Don't hold your breath for a boycott. Google and Facebook command a huge share of New Zealander's online attention. Spark would be cutting off its nose to spite its face.
Mr Moutter has previously called on the government to move faster on revenue and profit-shifting by multinationals (and, elsewhere noted that Google and other tech companies are now competitors to Spark with their "over-the-top" voice and video-conferencing services).
Australia and the UK have introduced so-called "Google tax" measures against such behaviour. The Spark boss says doing the same here would level the playing field. Revenue Minister Michael Woodhouse says a process is in train in alignment with an OECD initiative that could see tighter rules from July 2017.
With the separate investigation into offshore trusts wrapping up early, Mr Woodhouse might want to turn his attention to Mr Moutter's favourite topic (and remember, the Spark boss was part of the lobby that successfully pushed for the so-called "Netflix tax" or the new provision for offshore providers of online services to charge GST).
An overwhelming majority of NBR readers agree with Mr Moutter. However, NBR economics editor Rob Hosking is wary of policy being driven by "moral panic".
A Google spokeperson told NBR earlier this month:
"Google complies with the law in every country where we operate. We believe international forums like the OECD are the right places to decide tax rules for multinational businesses because everyone would benefit from a simpler and more transparent system.
Google’s average global corporate tax rate in recent years is around 19%, and we incurred taxes of more than US$3.3 billion in 2015."
The Destructive Effects Of Negative Interest Rates June 14 2016 | From:KiwiWatch
One of the best things that ever happened to me was my mother taught me to save from a very young age. Indeed when I first started primary school we had school banking where every pupil had a small Post Office bank book and every week someone from the Post Office appeared to do school banking.
We were encouraged to save our threepences (3 cents), sixpences (6 cents) and shillings (10 cents) from what ever jobs we had done for mum & dad over the past week. House jobs were normal play, no house keepers where we lived.
In those days my parents had lived through two world wars and the great depression of the 1930’s. They knew hardship and struggle. Our family was working class but in business albeit one that required hard labour.
They knew what thriftiness was all about, just to get by to raise their three children as best they could and school banking was part of that era of saving for a rainy day. They had lived through a period where the rainy day lasted years and years and poverty was reality for a huge number of people.
I can still recall the pleasure that I got once I was old enough to know what was going on from seeing the amount in my deposit book build up. Even more fun was it when at the end of the year someone else added some more shillings on top of my savings, my introduction to ‘interest’.
But this is no longer the way it is, central bankers have embarked on a grand manipulation, a manipulation that destroys the centuries old paradigm that those that save and accumulate savings are rewarded with interest by depositing the savings with institutions that are able to lend it to someone else who needs additional capital to expand a business or purchase a property and who will pay interest for the privilege of using funds they don’t have.
The paying of or charging of interest becomes a silent arbitor of risk: when interest is added to an investment decision by a borrower it has a governing effect on investment decision making.
But now in some countries banks are paying people to borrow whilst not rewarding the savers upon whose funds the advances are made. This is an absurdity.
Central bankers have manufactured a distortion and it simply doesn’t make sense. I still can’t get my head around it, even worse try to explain it to others.
Sure, I’m not an economist but I live in the real world and logically know that this financial experimentation will deliver unintended consequences and like all experiments those consequences will only become apparent after the fact. I never thought negative interest rates were even possible.
It is as though central bank activity is criminally working against everyone’s interests accept their own.
Such is the desperation of central bankers to avoid a recession or even another depression that they are simply doing everything they can to rig market outcomes, simultaneously not allowing the markets to be the free regulator of risk. Indeed so many comment that free markets no longer exist.
Financial derivatives appear to be the only instruments that can generate a positive return because you can bet against the market. Now central bankers, cornered by their own stupidity will watch as fundamental rules of saving, investment and return are destroyed.
We need to question why they would allow this to happen and who is going to profit from this. One thing I know is that they will be safe if a major blow out occurs.
It makes ‘saving for your retirement’ a questionable activity as the return on saved capital has been stolen by bankers from those who have saved or invested and effectively disbursed to the bankers all around the world. They pay virtually nothing now on deposits but they can embark on riskier lending activity that result in distortions and bubbles, particularly in asset markets.
Bonds, a conventional financial asset that are an integral part of any diversified portfolio now yield negative returns completely destroying the historical actuarial calculations that superannuation funds rely on to pay superannuitant pensions.
This too forces the funds to invest into riskier assets for return. Many super funds have calculated return in the 6-8%pa range but because the funds can barely generate yield they are now massively underfunded. Central banker manipulation of interest rates is responsible for this.
Peter Schiff of Euro Pacific capital sums negative interest rates:
“Negative interest rates are a disaster. It’s not working in Japan, it’s not working in Europe, it’s not going to work here. Just because it doesn’t work doesn’t mean we’re not going to do it, because everything we do doesn’t work and we do it anyway.
It shows desperation, that you’ve had all these central bankers lowering interest rates and expecting it to revive the economy. And then when they get down to zero, rather than admit that it didn’t work, because clearly if you go to zero and you still haven’t achieved your objective, maybe it doesn’t work.
Instead of admitting that they were wrong, they’re now going negative.”
It has allowed the distortion to impact global share markets and created a misallocation of capital such as acquisitions (companies taking over a competitor) and companies purchasing their own shares to (falsely) show an increase in earnings per share. In other words markets become distorted from reality bloated by cheap money that disguises underlying a competitive reality.
While US acquisition activity is through the roof it rarely adds value often muddying the earnings quality of the acquirer. With interest rates so low, companies are overpaying to grow. This poses problems for investors as it makes it more difficult to value a company that is bolted together with acquisitions.
Low interest rates have also led companies to spend money to buy back shares, often using cheap debt. Revenue growth has been anemic and the only way to grow earnings per share is by lowering the share count but those buybacks have added future trouble.
Instead the balance sheet of buy-back corporates holds a whole lot more debt that may backfire if / when interest rates are allowed to rise back to ‘normal’ levels. It now appears that companies that have completed aggressive share buy backs have actually under performed since 2011. Hard to explain.
Another unintended consequence is that is that it encourages banks to go out and make as many loans as they can forcing money to be lent to risky borrowers, presumably to fight the global deflationary environment.
It’s hard to see how this will end well. We are truly in uncharted territory. The bankers are well educated, but they’re doing something that’s never been done before. No one knows exactly what’s going to happen when they try to unwind it, but it stands to reason that it won’t be pretty.
Satan’s Credit Card: What The Mark Of The Beast Taught Me About The Future Of Money June 11 2016 | From: Buzzfeed
Silicon Valley has sold us on a cashless, cardless, walletless, supposedly frictionless future - but as I learned living in it for a month, we’re not quite there yet.
It’s the dead of winter in Stockholm and I’m sitting in a very small room inside the very inaptly named Calm Body Modification clinic. A few feet away sits the syringe that will, soon enough, plunge into the fat between my thumb and forefinger and deposit a glass-encased microchip roughly the size of an engorged grain of rice.
“You freaking out a little?” asks Calm’s proprietor, a heavily tattooed man named Chai, as he runs an alcohol-soaked cotton swab across my hand. “It’s all right. You’re getting a microchip implanted inside your body. It’d be weird if you weren’t freaking out a little bit.”Of Course It Fucking Hurts!, his T-shirt admonishes in bold type.
My choice to get microchipped was not ceremonial. It was neither a transhumanist statement nor the fulfillment of a childhood dream born of afternoons reading science fiction.
I was here in Stockholm, a city that’s supposedly left cash behind, to see out the extreme conclusion of a monthlong experiment to live without cash, physical credit cards, and, eventually, later in the month, state-backed currency altogether, in a bid to see for myself what the future of money - as is currently being written by Silicon Valley - might look like.
Chai and the writer at Calm Body Modification in Stockholm
Some of most powerful corporations in the world - Apple, Facebook, and Google; the Goliaths, the big guys, the companies that make the safest bets and rarely lose - are pouring resources and muscle into the payments industry, historically a complicated, low-margin business.
Meanwhile, companies like Uber and Airbnb have been forced to become payments giants themselves, helping to facilitate and process millions of transactions (and millions of dollars) each day.
A recent report from the auditor KPMG revealed that global investment in fintech - financial technology, that is - totaled $19.1 billion in 2015, a 106% jump compared to 2014; venture capital investment alone nearly quintupled between 2012 and last year.
In 2014, Americans spent more than $3.68 billion using tap-to-pay tech, according to eMarketer. In 2015, that number was $8.71 billion, and in 2019, it’s projected to hit $210.45 billion. As Apple CEO Tim Cook told (warned?) a crowd in the U.K. last November, “Your kids will not know what money is.”
To hear Silicon Valley tell it, the broken-in leather wallet is on life support. I wanted to pull the plug. Which is how, ultimately, I found myself in this sterile Swedish backroom staring down a syringe the size of a pipe cleaner. I was here because I wanted to see the future of money. But really, I just wanted to pay for some shit with a microchip in my hand.
The first thing you’ll notice if you ever decide to surrender your wallet is how damn many apps you’ll need in order to replace it. You’ll need a mobile credit card replacement - Apple Pay or Android Pay - for starters, but you’ll also need person-to-person payment apps like Venmo, PayPal, and Square Cash.
Then don’t forget the lesser-knowns: Dwolla, Tilt, Tab, LevelUp, SEQR, Popmoney, P2P Payments, and Flint. Then you might as well embrace the cryptocurrency of the future, bitcoin, by downloading Circle, Breadwallet, Coinbase, Fold, Gliph, Xapo, and Blockchain. You’ll also want to cover your bases with individual retailer payment apps like Starbucks, Walmart, USPS Mobile, Exxon Speedpass, and Shell Motorist, to name but a few.
Plus public and regular transit apps - Septa in Philadelphia, NJ Transit in New Jersey, Zipcar, Uber, Lyft. And because you have to eat and drink, Seamless, Drizly, Foodler, Saucey, Waitress, Munchery, and Sprig. The future is fractured.
This isn’t lost on Bryan Yeager, a senior analyst who covers payments for eMarketer.
"This kind of piecemeal fragmentation is probably one of the biggest inhibitors out there,” he said.
“I’ll be honest: It’s very confusing, not just to me, but to most customers. And it really erodes the value proposition that mobile payments are simpler.”
On a frigid January afternoon in Midtown Manhattan, just hours into my experiment, I found myself at 2 Bros., a red-tiled, fluorescent-lit pizza shop that operates with an aversion to frills.
As I made my way past a row of stainless steel ovens, I watched the patrons in front of me grab their glistening slices while wordlessly forking over mangled bills, as has been our country’s custom for a century and a half.
When my turn came to order, I croaked what was already my least-favorite phrase: “Do you, um, take Apple Pay?” The man behind the counter blinked four times before (wisely) declaring me a lost cause and moving to the next person in line.
This kind of bewildered rejection was fairly common. A change may be coming for money, but not everyone’s on board yet, and Yaeger’s entirely correct that the “simple” value proposition hasn’t entirely come to pass.
Paying with the wave of a phone, I found, pushes you toward extremes; to submit to the will of one of the major mobile wallets is to choose between big-box retailers and chain restaurants and small, niche luxury stores.
The only business in my Brooklyn neighborhood that took Apple Pay or Android Pay was a cafe where a large iced coffee runs upwards of $5; globally, most of the businesses that have signed on as Apple Pay partners are large national chains like Jamba Juice, Pep Boys, Best Buy, and Macy’s.
Partially for this reason, the primary way most Americans are currently experiencing the great fintech boom isn’t through Apple or Android Pay at all, but through proprietary payment apps from chains such as Target, Walmart, and Starbucks - as of last October, an astonishing 1 in 5 of all Starbucks transactions in the U.S. were done through the company’s mobile app.
Venmo screenshot
It wouldn’t be all that hard to live a fully functional - if possibly boring - cash-free consumer life by tapping and swiping the proprietary apps of our nation’s biggest stores.
If that doesn’t feel revolutionary or particularly futuristic, it’s because it’s not really meant to. But the future of mobile retail is assuredly dystopian.
Just ask Andy O’Dell, who works for Clutch, a marketing company that helps with consumer loyalty programs and deals with these kinds of mobile purchasing apps.
"Apple Pay and the Starbucks payment app have nothing to do with actual payments,” he told me.
“The power of payments and the future of these programs is in the data they generate.”
Imagine this future: Every day you go to Starbucks before work because it’s right near your house.
You use the app, and to ensure your reliable patronage, Starbucks coughs up a loyalty reward, giving you a free cup of coffee every 15 visits. Great deal, you say! O’Dell disagrees.
According to him, Starbucks is just hurting its margins by giving you something you’d already be buying. The real trick, he argued, is changing your behavior.
He offers a new scenario where this time, instead of a free coffee every 15 visits, you get a free danish - which you try and then realize it goes great with coffee.
So you start buying a danish once a week, then maybe twice a week, until it starts to feel like it was your idea all along.
In that case, O’Dell said;
Starbucks has “changed my behavior and captured more share of my wallet, and they’ve also given me more of what I want.”
“That’s terrifying,” I told him.
“But that’s the brave new world, man,” he shot back.
“Moving payments from plastic swipes to digital taps is going to change how companies influence your behavior. That’s what you’re asking, right? Well, that’s how we’re doing it.”
In this sense, the payments rush is, in no small part, a data rush. Creating a wallet that’s just a digital version of the one you keep in your pocket is not the endgame.
But figuring out where you shop, when you shop, and exactly what products you have an affinity for, and then bundling all that information in digestible chunks to inform the marketers of the world?
Being able to, as O’Dell puts it;
“Drive you to the outcome they want you to have like a rat in a maze by understanding, down to your personality, who you are?”
That’s disruption worth investing in [ ?! ].
For all its complexity and bureaucracy and importance, money, at its core, is really just information. When FDR weaned the United States off the gold standard in 1933, cash, no longer backed by physical gold, became an abstraction.
Today, that abstraction is pushed to new extremes: Not only does 92% of the money in the world exist as a series of ones and zeroes, but now it’s being transferred from place to place by any number of digital intermediaries looking to take a cut.
That process is complicated, but the key issue is trust. Money, argues David Wolman in The End of Money, is not much more than “a belief in a shared purpose, or at least a shared hallucination.”
This faith in the “particular religion” of cash has been at the center of standardized currencies since Kublai Khan, and the loss of that faith has been associated with every major economic catastrophe in history. But trust - especially when it comes to new forms of currency - takes time to build.
The first two weeks of my experiment, most people balked when I offered an alternative means of payment. “I’m a little worried this might not go through in time,” one server at a German beer hall told me when I asked if I could Venmo her for my bill.
A waiter at a different establishment scoffed when I tried to pay him or the restaurant via PayPal, suggesting his manager would think he was getting ripped off.
Yaeger sees this as standard for a nascent technology. “I kind of equate now to where things were 10 to 12 years ago with e-commerce,” he told me. “The concept of putting credit cards on a screen was new. Retailers and normal people were concerned about that. So innovative companies like PayPal and Amazon built that trust up over a decade while others slowly moved in.”
There are, of course, legitimate reasons not to trust these new forms of payment. Anyone who’s been mugged or lost a wallet knows cash is far from perfect, but this constellation of new digital payment products introduces a whole new category and scale of ways to get robbed, hacked, scammed, and screwed. Venmo - the social payment service that’s now transferring over $1 billion per month - may, in some ways, be the truest glimpse at a mobile payment future, but it’s not exactly entirely secure.
Smartphones can be as easily lost and stolen as wallets, but they’re also eminently breakable, orders of magnitude more expensive, and obsolete after two or three years. And the payment-apps landscape is still such that living cashlessly in 2016 means entering your credit card information or routing number into dozens of stand-alone apps, some of which look as if they’ve been built overnight by a high school computer science class.
All this risk and all this friction, in the service of…what, exactly? “Plastic works really well,” Randy Reddig, an entrepreneur who was a part of Square’s founding team, told me, taking a shot at what he called “mobile wallet hysteria.”
“I have a wallet right now in my pocket, and it’s great. It can feel like this is something that nobody is asking for. It’s solutioneering: Take something that exists just fine in the meatspace world and make it digital and somehow we’re all supposed to believe it’s better.”
Venmo screenshot
To Reddig, the true future of payments is revealing itself inside many of Silicon Valley’s biggest new companies.
Airbnb, he said, has one of the most sophisticated payments infrastructures of any company in the world, handling deposits and disbursements in hundreds of markets, many with different currencies.
“All the innovation around payments is a means to an end - table stakes,” he said.
“Uber has one of, if not the most used mobile payments methods in the world, and it was absolutely crucial - they had to do it to create the experience and service they wanted.
Payment technology created certainty for riders and drivers that they’d get paid - it facilitated trust.”
Much as the true value of a retailer’s mobile payment app is in the metadata it gobbles up, the real power of digital payments lies in the largely invisible infrastructure that undergirds them.
Fintech companies like Square aren’t exactly sexy, but they allow small businesses and individual merchants to process transactions without prohibitively expensive equipment or the fees that legacy credit companies charge.
“It’s about financial inclusion and serving real, normal people,” Reddig said.
“There is a lot of opportunity to build very profitable businesses that operate better than incumbents in transparency, great design, great user experience. Millennials don’t trust banks, but they trust Apple and Google.”
This is already happening, just outside the U.S. If fintech’s true believers think it’ll fundamentally change the way we live, the developing world is where their vision is revealing itself most clearly. In Kenya, for example, the payment messaging service M-Pesa has attracted over 13 million monthly active users (out of a population of 44.3 million).
As of last May, roughly 42% of Kenya’s GDP was transacted via M-Pesa, all without tying Kenyans to expensive, cumbersome bank accounts.
But more than that, M-Pesa has effectively invented a new form of credit that’s based on a history of reliable transactions from phone to phone, rather than through a bank.
In a world where 2.5 billion people don’t have bank accounts, systems like M-Pesa are set to leapfrog Western banking the same way much of the developing world skipped the desktop and went straight to the smartphone for its computing needs.
In reinventing money transfers, M-Pesa and its ilk offer more than a new way to pay - they are opportunity engines, offering the ability to build credit in a world that previously shut them out. And in the process, there are billions to be made in transfer fees.
By my third week, the cashless, frictionless future I’d hoped to live began to feel glitchy, burdensome, and alienating. I had to meticulously plan my every move hours or even days in advance - a haircut required me to convince my barber to start using Venmo, going out for a meal meant lining up a dining companion willing to submit to confused stares and drawn-out check-settling processes.
One January afternoon, I found myself trying to persuade a prodigiously bearded, flannel-shirt-wearing barista named Michael to allow me to pay him personally via Square Cash for a coffee, which he would then pay the register for. After a confession that this was all for a story from me and a pity laugh from him, Michael reached for his phone, but not before he locked eyes with me.
“I’m only doing this because I want you to write about how much this sucks for us,”he said.
He went on to talk about a popular coffee app called Cups, which allows customers to order and pay all inside the phone.
“It’s like, now everyone who comes in is a robot - they just stare at their phone and wait to have their name called. Nobody even looks at us,” he said.
At this point, replacing my wallet with a phone struck me as little more than a shallow gimmick, an academic exercise, like living in a house mid-construction, before the appliances work and the water and electricity have been switched on:
It’s entirely doable, and chances are no one’s going to get hurt, but that’s an awful reason to do anything. I needed something more drastic, which is how I found Hannes Sjoblad, who told me, with surprisingly little fanfare, that he could make me a cyborg.
When I contacted Sjoblad, whose LinkedIn profile lists him as the chief disruption officer at the Swedish biohacking group BioNyfiken, he’d been experimenting with NFC and RFID chip implants by hosting chipping parties for curious biohackers-to-be.
His xNT NFC chip is really just a prototype: Sjoblad’s implantees are guinea pigs testing out what they believe could become common uses for a technology that’s usually reserved for phones and credit cards.
Sjoblad himself uses his as a replacement for his house keys, business cards, and bike locks.
I asked him if I could use the chip - the same kind, more or less, that sits in and powers the Apple, Google, and Samsung Pay parts of our phones - to pay for things in a store; he wasn’t sure, but he knew a programmer who could link it to a bitcoin wallet.
We Skyped once and formalized plans to make me an implantee.
“I think when you meet us you’ll see that we’re pretty normal mainstream persons,” he told me over a grainy video chat. “We’re not like some underground den of hackers.” He let out the kind of nervous, mischievous laugh you might let slip if you ran an underground den of hackers.
Bitcoin can be mined by those who donate part of their computing power to help verify the peer-to-peer transactions going on in bitcoin’s ecosystem via the blockchain, which is a string of bundled past transactions. (It’s a bit like if you loaned part of your computer to your bank to help it process payments across the world and got a very tiny reward for the donation).
But bitcoin’s real beauty, according to its disciples, is that it’s not really governed by any entity, making it nonreversible, unfreezable, and anonymous, all with very low transaction fees. It’s a powerful idea, and bitcoin has been a bolded and underlined bullet point in every future-of-finance argument. But in 2016, almost eight years since its creation, using bitcoin is a world-class exercise in frustration.
If living without cards and cash meant planning all my purchases in painful detail, living without state-backed currency of any kind only exacerbated the problem.
To buy anything immediately out in the physical world, I had to use bitcoin to buy gift cards and then redeem them at the store for groceries, meals, and anything else.
When I ran out of toilet paper, I loaded up Gyft, a digital gift card site, and purchased a $15 CVS card, which I then redeemed for Cottonelle as the store opened - all told, a 45-minute ordeal.
Splitting the bill was impossible without a friend willing to set up their own bitcoin wallet, and sending money through bitcoin’s blockchain technology felt almost purposefully intimidating, with long, wonky wallet addresses, exchanges, and codes.
And again, there’s trust - using bitcoin means transferring real money into a volatile currency, which hit home when bitcoin’s value dropped almost 18% just hours after I converted $800 dollars to book a flight.
Though today bitcoin is niche but somewhat stable, it’s not exactly hard to imagine the whole thing melting down overnight.
(As a challenge, my editor tasked me with buying something “tangible” with bitcoin’s jokey, basically defunct cousin, Dogecoin: I was rejected by a meme memorabilia merchant on Etsy when I asked to pay for a mug with a cartoon frog using Dogecoin. A new low.)
But simply replacing paper dollars with digital ones isn’t the draw for bitcoin’s biggest advocates. Olaf Carlson-Wee, a 23-year-old early employee at the bitcoin startup Coinbase, has been living almost exclusively on bitcoin for three years.
“The exciting things are not where bitcoin competes with regular money,” he told me, “but where the tech is so radically different it creates new modes of behavior.”
Carlson-Wee sees apps like Apple Pay as “abstraction layers,” basically just a digital copy of a common credit card - unlike bitcoin, which is a whole new platform.
Adi Chikara, a strategist for 3Pillar Global who has been advising on and investing in companies using blockchain technology for years, sees its elegant, unbreakable cryptographic security as a new way to ensure trust.
In some scenarios, he argues, blockchain technology can act as a replacement for currency as a whole. Imagine a system where legal contracts are automatically executed through the blockchain - for example, your monthly car payments are directly linked to your ability to unlock your vehicle and put it in gear. The particulars are complicated, but blockchain has the potential to act as a powerful reinvention of 21st-century bartering.
It’s also, ultimately, maybe the only way to ever move past a state-backed currency.
“We had paper and it was backed by gold, and right now we’re trusting the government - but with the blockchain you may not necessarily need the state,” Chikara told me.
The early signs of this are around today - Circle, for example, is a peer-to-peer money transfer app, similar to Venmo, which is powered by the blockchain, meaning, unlike Venmo, the payments are instantaneous and can easily be converted into different currencies without fees.
Chikara readily admits we’re years, if not decades, away from a viable, universal blockchain-centric financial system. Like Venmo and Apple Pay and cash, bitcoin is still subject to human error, like in 2014, when the executive in charge of Mt. Gox, a popular cryptocurrency exchange, embezzled and lost hundreds of millions of dollars worth of bitcoin. But Chikara still proposes a scenario with no banks and no federal reserve.
“There is no printing of money,” he said. “It’s owned jointly by the people themselves, and they trust each other.” detoxification/protection."
Blockchain technology is already being tested by traders across the world and has been implemented in the Australian stock exchange. IBM, Nasdaq OMX, Intel, and Cisco are exploring the blockchain and blockchain-based open ledger projects for trading, along with banks like Wells Fargo and JPMorgan. And recently Goldman Sachs filed a patent for SETLCoin, the company’s very own blockchain-powered currency.
But perhaps the best description of bitcoin’s potential came from Coinbase co-founder Fred Ehrsam, who sees blockchain technology as nothing less than the most significant open platform since the web.
“We take what was once a highly controlled system and turn it into a software development problem where people can go nuts,” he said.
“And it becomes like the internet, where you have a big open network, people can build whatever they want. The market decides what’s good and what’s not. And before you know it, you have this great big open network that has all these great ideas on it and things can really start to get interesting.”
It was the beginning of week four and bitcoin had driven me deeper into my hermetic state -most of my purchases were being made online and my relation to the real world was almost exclusively conducted through a screen of some sort. I needed a change of scenery.
As it turns out, if you yammer about the future of money long enough, somebody is likely to tell you to go to Sweden and see it for yourself. There, among the bountiful sweaters, sunless winters, and impossibly good genes, is the closest thing you’ll find to a truly cashless society.
Just 20% of all consumer payments are conducted using cash in Sweden; according to a 2015 survey, only 2% of Sweden’s economy revolves around the ancient, dirty exchange of paper money and coins. I booked my flight rather painlessly using bitcoin (thanks, Expedia!) to figure out how and why 9 million polite socialists have beaten the rest of us to the paperless money future.
With its standing desks, glass-walled meeting rooms, and long corridors lined with stark black-and-white portraits, the office of Situation Stockholm looks like a startup. In fact, it’s almost the complete opposite: a 21-year-old glossy print magazine sold primarily by the city’s homeless population. The portraits on the wall are of the magazine’s vendors, who are, incidentally, some of the first pioneers of cashless street busking.
“A common response from presumptive customers was ‘Sorry, I don’t have any cash,’” Jenny Lindroth, an operations manager at the magazine, told me. “So we started to think of ways to take this cash business - a lot of our vendors don’t have bank accounts - digital.”
In 2007, Situation Stockholm started giving select vendors the ability to sell the magazine by having customers text a number, which would then add a charge to their cell phone bill. In 2013, the company bought card readers from a Swedish payment company called iZettle and sent its most reliable vendors out with them.
Situation Stockholm
According to
Since then, Situation Stockholm has seen an uptick in sales for vendors, as well as a newfound agency.
“People outside the country seem to think that it’s interesting or funny that homeless people have these phones and card readers, but it’s not really big news here in Sweden,” Lindroth said.
“It’s just common practice now - in Sweden you don’t have cash.”
Walking around Stockholm’s icy cobblestoned sidewalks and winding, low-arched alleyways, I found myself ducking into countless shops, bars, and konditori cafés, eavesdropping on checkout registers and craning my neck for a peek at local wallets.
Not once did I see a paper bill.
Paying by phone was commonplace, and I didn’t even get a weird look when I scanned a QR code at a grocery store checkout and wordlessly strolled away with my basket of smoked meats.
Jacob de Geer, the CEO of iZettle, Sweden’s cashlessness can be traced back to the early 1990s, when tax subsidies encouraged citizens to buy early personal computers en masse, thereby making the country extra technologically adventurous.
But all that early adoption hasn’t been easy for everyone. Swedish banks have drastically cut back on ATMs, raised cash transaction fees roughly 300% in the last four years, and made depositing as inconvenient as possible.
Recently, Lindroth witnessed an elderly woman being turned away at the bank after she attempted to deposit a large amount of cash she’d been storing at home.
“If she had transferred that money from her phone, she wouldn’t have been questioned in the same way.”
The problem, according to Björn Eriksson - a former head of the Swedish police and Interpol, and a prominent dissenting voice in the country’s rush to cashlessness - is not the end of paper money, but the speed of the transition, which is especially hard on older generations, those in rural areas, tourists, and new immigrants who come to the country without cards or bank accounts.
“It’s gotten so that some people are resorting to hiding money in their microwave because they have nowhere to put it,” Eriksson told me.
It can even be dangerous to public health: Just last September, Sweden’s highest court ruled against the Kronoberg County Health Authority and reprimanded them for not accepting cash as legal tender for medical services in all but two of their health clinics.
Access to new technology is never evenly distributed. And even those like iZettle’s de Geer, who are enabling and profiting from a digital payments revolution, have reservations about abandoning paper money outright:
“Everyone thinks I’d like to see the death of cash, but privacy is a big issue for all of us.
Cash’s benefit is privacy. There’s plenty that’s legal to buy out there that you don’t want everyone to know you’ve bought.” If America is headed down Sweden’s cashless path, we have much to learn from our Scandinavian friends. Or get comfortable finding stacks of twenties in the fridge next time you’re at grandma’s place.
Chai at the Calm Body Modification clinic
As I pushed through the door of Calm Body Modification, a bell tinkled amiably, as if to reaffirm the shop’s namesake. I looked up at the proprietors, tall men with all their exposed skin covered in tattoos. Above one, a sign advertised genital piercings for 1,000 kronor.
My piercer, Chai, and I retired to the backroom where my skewering would take place. “So now I’m going to tell you something you probably didn’t consider before,”he said, furrowing his brow.
“People - very conservative right-wing Christian types - might come after you for this. They see it as the Mark of the Beast. I just want you to be prepared.”I nodded like this is something I had expected to hear.
This comes from the Book of Revelation: “And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond to receive a mark on their right hand, or on their foreheads; and that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast or the number of his name.”
The passage essentially describes a closed economic system, where power is consolidated and financial gatekeepers can shut anyone out. It made for a potent metaphor. I’d spent the last three weeks in search of a connected, seamless future, but I found myself more separated than ever from the people around me.
Situation Stockholm
Around week two, I’d noticed how robotic my interactions had become during any financial transaction: walk into some reliable big-box establishment, mumble order, flash phone, move down the line.
Moments like my conversation at the coffee shop with Michael, the barista, heightened these concerns.
The brick-and-mortar world of commerce is in the midst of a rewiring - one that’s supposed to bring in more merchants and give consumers more access to what they want when they want it. But that means new behaviors, some of which are likely to be harmful.
New commerce apps and technology may have a lower barrier to entry than, say, credit cards, but many of these programs - like miles cards - reward you and work best when you’ve got money to spend.
And while much of fintech is billed as liberating us from the old ways and institutions, new gatekeepers are bound to emerge, in many respects, guiding us - perhaps unwittingly, at times - toward the outcomes that their data analysis has told them we want.
Bitcoin evangelists are optimistic, but the legacy banking system is as inescapable as it is flawed. Even today’s most disruptive money solutions are still reliant on traditional institutions.
While Kenya’s M-Pesa allows money to be transferred from phone to phone outside of banks using the cellular company Vodafone’s network, at the end of the day, the transferred money is still backed by the pooled accounts held in regulated commercial banks.
Bitcoin or blockchain-based currencies could free us from the tyranny of service fees and interest rates and all the regulations that complicate and ultimately exclude merchants and large populations from the global economy. Or bitcoin could be adopted by legacy institutions that will strip the technology of its open platforms and use it to create a slick, more efficient model of the current system.
The fumes from Chai’s alcohol swab jolted me back into the moment. “OK, just a slight pinch, here,” he said. “Sometimes it helps to look away.”
Being chipped was oddly anticlimactic. A trip to the doctor revealed that I hadn’t done anything too horrible to myself.
“Wait, you’re telling me I can unlock doors with that thing?” my physician cheerily inquired when I asked if I should be worried about my body rejecting the chip. “I might have to get one myself!”
Over the course of a few weeks, the whole thing became an afterthought; a piece of me that stored information, like a low-tech flash drive that I couldn’t misplace.
But there was still the problem of payments. I reached out to former Venmo employee and co-founder Iqram Magdon-Ismail, who then enlisted the help of Nuseir Yassin, another former Venmo employee, to help me become the first person to pay for a meal with his hand.
I asked Magdon-Ismail, who’d had a hand in building one of the most successful person-to-person money transferring apps, to explain the allure of the payments industry. “One side effect of this industry is that you make a lot of money if you move a lot of money,” he said.
“If you’re serving an underbanked community with a financial product, you get a couple hundred thousand users and you make a small return on each one of them - well, that’s a really good business, right there.”
“It’s a big pie,” eMarketer’s Yeager said of the money to be made in the payments space.
“It’s going to be around $100 billion by the end of this year, and that’s just retail mobile commerce.”
Similarly, Jeremy Allaire, who runs Circle, cited a study by the Aite research group suggesting that personal payments in the U.S. is a $1.2 trillion market, 90% of which is cash and checks.
“What if you can help introduce a new behavior?” he said of the opportunity to capture some of that money.
As Alex Rampell, a general partner and fintech investor at the Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, told me, the genius of Apple Pay isn’t in the “tap to pay in the physical world” at Whole Foods but the ability to store payment credentials and personal information for millions of cardholders and create a one-touch fingerprint payment method across the entire web.
If successful, Apple will have cemented itself as the most widely used and reliable online payment passport, allowing consumers to stop paying premiums at online retail giants like Amazon for the simple convenience of one-click payments.
And then, Rampell suspects, Apple will make the digital wallet available to developers.
“If Apple and Google are smart about this, they’ll encourage opening the wallet up as the next platform,” he said. “Imagine allowing budgeting apps like Mint to operate on top of the wallet so that they help you budget your finances in real time.
Or allowing lending companies to build a plugin to the Apple Wallet so every person who uses Apple Pay saves 50% on their interest rates? That could force a company like Capital One into bankruptcy by no fault of its own. And that’s a big, big deal.”
All that potential is intoxicating. Over the course of my month, I found myself unexpectedly buying into the possibilities of bitcoin, seduced by the ease of phone-waving payment. It feels good to be hopeful about these things, to imagine that there’s a way beyond crazy fees you never asked for - a way to replicate the safety, trust, and stability of banks without their consolidation of power and bureaucracy.
But disrupting at software speeds in the physical world means feeling growing pains - usually important, ignore-at-your-own-peril signals - without having time to consider and interpret them. It turns progressive early adopters like those in Sweden into a system that can exclude its elderly and consolidate power in a handful of banks, all in the name of some kind of progress.
The future of money is coming - there’s no stopping it. But there is a matter of control, of receiving the future incrementally and responsibly.
Weeks passed and normal life returned, save for the still-unused microchip in my left hand. It had become a life raft for the experiment, which had largely failed to yield the kinds of aha moments I had assumed I’d be having when I locked away my wallet.
And despite the hype and the influx of money and the feeling that everything is just about to change, it’s going to take real time.
(It’s very much worth noting that just in the week before this story was published, the fintech peer-to-peer lending darling Lending Club’s CEO resigned over an internal probe concerning improper loan sales; a security breach in a Hong Kong cryptocurrency exchange resulted in the loss of at least $2.14 million; and the massive retailer-led consortium MCX has significantly delayed - perhaps killed - the rollout of its digital wallet, CurrentC, to “concentrate more heavily” on other non-mobile-commerce areas of the financial sector.)
That’s because today’s fintech is more evolutionary than it is revolutionary. And when this change does happen, it will do so on the backs of a new generation that isn’t just asking for a new money model but is demanding it. Buying a sandwich with my fist isn’t some paradigm shift - it’s a stand-in for something weightier: a future that feels just a bit less recognizable.
One April morning, my inbox pinged. I’d given Yassin full access to my Venmo account, after which he set up a server linked to my unique Venmo payment key. Now his code was working in test runs.
We picked a restaurant - a Sri Lankan place on New York’s Lower East Side that’s partly owned by Magdon-Ismail and of course accepts Venmo - and Yassin coded the chip so that it would launch a website on the merchant’s device when scanned.
The site would trigger a payment from my Venmo account with an automatic 20% tip. All I’d need was my hand.
We got to the restaurant a bit after noon on a cold, rainy Monday. Absentmindedly forking spicy lamb into my mouth, I was sure we’d be derailed by a glitch or a bug.
Word of the impending hand payment spread in the cramped restaurant. Our waiter, a friendly guy in a flat-brimmed Yankees cap and a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles T-shirt, was excited but announced his skepticism. “This is crazy, dude,” he said, half excitedly, half exasperatedly.
When the bill came, I ambled up to the counter of the cramped restaurant as the other diners craned their necks.
Our waiter held out the phone as I thrust my clammy fist forward. Nothing registered. My stomach dropped. He waved the phone like a metal detector around the whole of my fist.
Finally, a beep. We locked eyes, pupils dilated. Numbers were input. Another beep. Then, the ching of a cash register.
If the story that the US government told us about 9/11 were true, why did the government destroy the evidence, lie to the 9/11 Commission, and prevent a real investigation?
The clear and indisputable answer is that if the evidence had not been destroyed and a real investigation had occurred, the conclusion would have been that 9/11 was an inside job designed to give the neoconservatives their “new Pearl Harbor” necessary to launch their wars in the Middle East.
The extraordinary gullibility of the American people is responsible for 15 years of warfare, destroyed countries, and millions of dead, maimed, orphaned, and displaced people, and for the rise of a police state in the United States. The ignorance and gullibility of the American people are responsible for these massive crimes against humanity and for Americans’ loss of their constitutionall protections.
Presumption of a Cover-Up …
Judges and lawyers know that – if someone intentionally destroys evidence – he’s probably trying to hide his crime. American law has long recognized that destruction of evidence raises a presumption of guilt for the person who destroyed the evidence.
So what does it mean when the US government intentionally destroyed massive amounts of evidence related to 9/11?
(The Defense Department has also farmed out most of the work of both prosecuting and defending the surviving 9/11 suspects to the same private company. And the heads of the military tribunal prosecuting the 9/11 suspects said that the trials must be rigged so that there are no acquittals.)
“Daniel Marcus, a law professor at American University who served as general counsel for the Sept. 11 commission and was involved in the discussions about interviews with Al Qaeda leaders, said he had heard nothing about any tapes being destroyed."
If tapes were destroyed, he said, “it’s a big deal, it’s a very big deal,” because it could amount to obstruction of justice to withhold evidence being sought in criminal or fact-finding investigations."
The 9/11 Commissioners concluded that officials from the Pentagon lied to the Commission, and considered recommending criminal charges for such false statements.
Soviet-Style “Minders”
The chairs of both the 9/11 Commission and the Official Congressional Inquiry into 9/11 said that Soviet-style government “minders” obstructed the investigation into 9/11 by intimidating witnesses (and see this).
In other words, the minders obstructed witnesses from openly and candidly talking about what they knew.
This executive director, who controlled what the Commission did and did not analyze, then limited the scope of the Commission’s inquiry so that the overwhelming majority of questions about 9/11 remained unasked (see this and this).
The administration then starved the commission of funds. The government spent $175 million – over $300 million in today’s dollars – investigating the Challenger space shuttle disaster. It spent $152 million on the the Columbia disaster investigation. It spent $30 million investigating the Monica Lewinsky scandal. But the government only authorized $15 million for the 9/11 Commission.
Moreover, as reported by ACLU, FireDogLake, RawStory and many others, declassified documents shows that Senior Bush administration officials sternly cautioned the 9/11 Commission against probing too deeply into the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.
The 9-11 Commission took this warning to heart, and refused to examine virtually any evidence which contradicted the administration’s official version of events. As stated by the State Department’s Coordinator for Counterterrorism – who was the point man for the U.S. government’s international counterterrorism policy in the first term of the Bush administration – “there were things the [9/11] commissions wanted to know about and things they didn’t want to know about.“
Saudi Role
Investigation into Saudi government aid to 9/11 conspirators was also obstructed.
For example, Philip Shenon – the 20-year New York Times reporter who wrote a book on the 9/11 Commission – reports:
“The [911] commissioner said the renewed public debate could force a spotlight on a mostly unknown chapter of the history of the 9/11 commission: behind closed doors, members of the panel’s staff fiercely protested the way the material about the Saudis was presented in the final report, saying it underplayed or ignored evidence that Saudi officials – especially at lower levels of the government – were part of an al-Qaida support network that had been tasked to assist the hijackers after they arrived in the US.
In fact, there were repeated showdowns, especially over the Saudis, between the staff and the commission’s hard-charging executive director, University of Virginia historian Philip Zelikow, who joined the Bush administration as a senior adviser to the secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, after leaving the commission.
The staff included experienced investigators from the FBI, the Department of Justice and the CIA, as well as the congressional staffer who was the principal author of the 28 pages.
Zelikow fired a staffer, who had repeatedly protested over limitations on the Saudi investigation, after she obtained a copy of the 28 pages outside of official channels.
Other staffers described an angry scene late one night, near the end of the investigation, when two investigators who focused on the Saudi allegations were forced to rush back to the commission’s offices after midnight after learning to their astonishment that some of the most compelling evidence about a Saudi tie to 9/11 was being edited out of the report or was being pushed to tiny, barely readable footnotes and endnotes.
The staff protests were mostly overruled.
***
But Kean, Hamilton and Zelikow clearly do not speak for a number of the other commissioners, who have repeatedly suggested they are uncomfortable with the perception that the commission exonerated Saudi Arabia and who have joined in calling for public release of the 28 pages."
Indeed, an FBI informant hosted and rented a room to two hijackers in 2000. Specifically, investigators for the Congressional Joint Inquiry discovered that an FBI informant had hosted and even rented a room to two hijackers in 2000 and that, when the Inquiry sought to interview the informant, the FBI refused outright, and then hid him in an unknown location, and that a high-level FBI official stated these blocking maneuvers were undertaken under orders from the White House.
“Senator Bob Graham, the Florida Democrat who is a former chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, accused the White House on Tuesday of covering up evidence.
The accusation stems from the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s refusal to allow investigators for a Congressional inquiry and the independent Sept. 11 commission to interview an informant, Abdussattar Shaikh, who had been the landlord in San Diego of two Sept. 11 hijackers."
The former head of fire science and engineering for the agency responsible for finding out why the Twin Towers and World Trade Center 7 collapsed on 9/11 (the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology) – who is one of the world’s leading fire science researchers and safety engineers, with a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering – wrote that evidence necessary to determine the cause of the collapse of the World Trade Centers was being destroyed. And see this.
The government has also refused to release the computer models showing how the trade centers fell, making it impossible for anyone to double-check its assumptions.
Whether you believe the Twin Towers and World Trade Center building 7 were brought down with explosives or by airplanes and fires, destroying evidence prevented engineers and scientists from figuring out what went wrong… to prevent skyscrapers from collapsing in the future.
9/11 Commissioners Disgusted… and Call For a New Investigation
The 9/11 Commissioners publicly expressed anger at cover ups and obstructions of justice by the government into a real 9/11 investigation:
The Senior Counsel to the 9/11 Commission (John Farmer) – who led the 9/11 staff’s inquiry – said “At some level of the government, at some point in time…there was an agreement not to tell the truth about what happened“. He also said “I was shocked at how different the truth was from the way it was described. The tapes told a radically different story from what had been told to us and the public for two years. This is not spin. This is not true.”
The Co-Chair of the congressional investigation into 9/11 – Bob Graham – and 9/11 Commissioner and former Senator Bob Kerrey are calling for either a “PERMANENT 9/11 commission” or a new 9/11 investigation to get to the bottom of it
9/11 Commissioner John Lehman says that a new investigation should be “vigorously pursued“
Planting False Evidence
Planting false evidence is another act which creates presumption of guilt.
Much of the 9/11 Commission Report was based upon the testimony of people who were tortured
At least four of the people whose interrogation figured in the 9/11 Commission Report have claimed that they told interrogators information as a way to stop being “tortured”
One of the Commission’s main sources of information was tortured until he agreed to sign a confession that he was NOT EVEN ALLOWED TO READ
The 9/11 Commission itself doubted the accuracy of the torture confessions, and yet kept their doubts to themselves
Pulitzer-prize winning reporter Seymour Hersh – who broke the Iraq torture and Vietnam massacre stories – writes:
“Many of the investigators believe that some of the initial clues that were uncovered about the terrorists’ identities and preparations, such as flight manuals, were meant to be found.
A former high-level intelligence official told me, “Whatever trail was left was left deliberately - for the F.B.I. to chase“.
Panama Papers Show How Rich United States Clients Hid Millions Abroad June 8 2016 | From: NewYorkTimes
Over the years, William R. Ponsoldt had earned tens of millions of dollars building a string of successful companies. He had renovated apartment buildings in the New York City area.
Panama City, Panama, home to the law firm Mossack Fonseca. A trove of the firm’s internal documents, known as the Panama Papers, have shaken the financial world.
Bred Arabian horses. Run a yacht club in the Bahamas, a rock quarry in Michigan, an auto-parts company in Canada, even a multibillion-dollar hedge fund.
Related: IRD poised to pounce as Panama Papers go public
Now, as he neared retirement, Mr. Ponsoldt, of Jensen Beach, Fla., had a special request for Mossack Fonseca, a Panama-based law firm well placed in the world of offshore finance: How could he confidentially shift his money into overseas bank accounts and use them to buy real estate and move funds to his children?
“He is the manager of one of the richest hedge funds in the world,” a lawyer at Mossack Fonseca wrote when the firm was introduced to Mr. Ponsoldt in 2004.
“Primary objective is to maintain the utmost confidentiality and ideally to open bank accounts without disclosing his name as a private person.”
In summary, the firm explained: “He needs asset protection schemes, which we are trying to sell him.”
Thus began a relationship that would last at least through 2015 as Mossack Fonseca managed eight shell companies and a foundation on the family’s behalf, moving at least $134 million through seven banks in six countries - little of which could be traced directly to Mr. Ponsoldt or his children.
These transactions and others like them for a stable of wealthy clients from the United States are outlined in extraordinary detail in the trove of internal Mossack Fonseca documents known as the Panama Papers. The materials were obtained by the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, and have now been shared with The New York Times.
How the Panama-based law firm set up offshore corporations, foundations and bank accounts for wealthy clients:
In recent weeks, the papers’ revelations about Mossack Fonseca’s international clientele have shaken the financial world. The Times’s examination of the files found that Mossack Fonseca also had at least 2,400 United States-based clients over the past decade, and set up at least 2,800 companies on their behalf in the British Virgin Islands, Panama, the Seychelles and other jurisdictions that specialize in helping hide wealth.
Many of these transactions were legal; there are legitimate reasons to create offshore accounts, particularly when setting up a business overseas or buying real estate in a foreign country.
But the documents - confidential emails, copies of passports, ledgers of bank transactions and even the various code names used to refer to clients - show that the firm did much more than simply create offshore shell companies and accounts. For many of its American clients, Mossack Fonseca offered a how-to guide of sorts on skirting or evading United States tax and financial disclosure laws.
“Primary objective is to maintain the utmost confidentiality and ideally to open bank accounts without disclosing his name as a private person.”
- An email from a Mossack Fonseca lawyer
These included locating an individual from a “tax-convenient” jurisdiction to be the straw man owner of an offshore account, concealing the true American owner, or encouraging one client it knew was a United States resident to use his foreign passports to open accounts offshore, again to avoid scrutiny from regulators, the documents show.
If the compliance department at one foreign bank contacted by Mossack Fonseca on behalf of its clients started to ask too many questions about who owned the account, the firm simply turned to other, less inquisitive banks.
And even though the law firm said publicly that it would not work with clients convicted of crimes or whose financial activities raised “red flags,” several individuals in the United States with criminal records were able to turn to Mossack Fonseca to open new companies offshore, the documents show.
Federal law allows United States citizens to transfer money overseas, but these foreign holdings must be declared to the Treasury Department, and any taxes on capital gains, interest or dividends must be paid - just as if the money had been invested domestically. Federal officials estimate that the government loses between $40 billion and $70 billion a year in unpaid taxes on offshore holdings.
Experts in federal tax law, money laundering and offshore accounts - asked by The Times to examine certain documents or at least to identify legal issues raised by the money management techniques that Mossack Fonseca advocated - said the law firm at times had come up with creative, but apparently legal, strategies to save clients money.
A common tactic: selling real estate as a shift of corporate assets, instead of as a piece of property subject to transfer taxes.
While the experts were reluctant to declare that the law firm or its clients had broken any laws given that no charges have been filed, they said they were surprised at how explicitly Mossack Fonseca had offered advice that appeared carefully crafted to help its clients evade United States tax laws.
For many of its American clients, Mossack Fonseca offered a how-to guide of sorts on skirting or evading United States tax and financial disclosure laws.
“The more correspondence that you have between a U.S. person and a bank or law firm discussing tax issues and efforts at concealment, the stronger the government will see it as a potential case worth prosecuting,” said Kevin M. Downing, the lead Justice Department prosecutor in the UBS offshore banking and tax evasion cases, now at the Washington law firm Miller & Chevalier.
Mossack Fonseca has said repeatedly in recent weeks that its lawyers and staff members have honored international tax and banking laws, and that it is the victim in this case of an illegal hacking attack.
But presented with summaries of several cases by The Times, Mossack Fonseca did not try to explain its actions. It simply said that its standards had improved in recent years, as rules internationally had tightened.
“Our significantly expanded compliance office today not only evaluates new client candidates, but also existing accounts, and especially those that were established prior to the new international regulatory regime coming into effect,” a spokeswoman said in a written statement, referring to a 2010 law passed by Congress.
“It wasn’t always this way.”
The firm’s American client list does not appear to include the sort of high-profile political figures who have emerged from reporting on the Panama Papers in many other countries around the world.
But the services offered by Mossack Fonseca, with 500 employees in more than 30 offices worldwide, were in high demand by the rich and famous in the United States.
In 2001, Sanford I. Weill, then the chief of Citigroup, set up an offshore account called April Fool for his yacht. Alfonso Soriano, a former Major League Baseball All-Star player with the Yankees and other teams, had a Panamanian corporation created for him.
John E. Akridge III, a leading real estate developer in Washington, flew to Panama to meet with Mossack Fonseca lawyers, who in 2011 created the Cyclops Family Foundation in Panama, along with a related bank account.
A spokesman for Mr. Weill said the accounts were used for legitimate purposes, and “appropriate disclosures were filed.” Mr. Akridge and Mr. Soriano did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
For its best customers, like the Ponsoldts, who declined repeated requests to discuss their work with Mossack Fonseca, the firm’s ministrations went far beyond legal services and banking.
It acted as a concierge for “all details regarding your properties and worldwide business affairs,” for example, helping the family confidentially purchase (and dispose of) luxury condominiums at resort destinations and even arranging repairs for a car stored at a vacation home and hiring a contractor to fix broken poolside tiles, the documents show.
“You deserve the best Mr. Ponsoldt, and we will try to help you the most we can,” the firm explained in an email.
The firm’s American clients often expressed disbelief at how much they could lighten their tax burden by using the techniques advocated by Mossack Fonseca.
“At hearing that he can make nearly $8 million per year just on tax savings,” a client from Pennsylvania “was now wide awaken,” a Mossack Fonseca staff member wrote.
“I could even detect sweats coming down from his forehead and his cheeks were beginning to blush with crimson excitement. Noticing his interest, I went in for the kill.”
Black Hole for Assets
In 2006, using a secret email account set up by Mossack Fonseca so his correspondence would not be traced by the authorities, a businessman from Washington State asked a common question among the firm’s potential American clients:
“How does a US citizen legally get funds to Panama without the knowledge of the US government and how can those funds be profitably invested without the US government knowing about them?”
The reply came from Ramsés Owens, then a partner who helped run the firm’s trust division, offering clients “effective solutions to enhance your privacy, protect your wealth.” Mr. Owens laid out a basic menu of services: a package deal setting up an offshore company in what he promised would be a relatively cheap and quick transaction.
“We have right now a special offer by which we create a Private Foundation/company combination for a flat fee of US$4,500.00,” Mr. Owens said.
“It includes Charter Documents, Regulations, nominee officers and directors, bank account and management of funds, provision of authorized signatories, neutral phone and fax numbers and mail forwarding services for both the private foundation and its underlying company.”
With this legal structure in place, Mr. Owens went on to explain, any money placed in these accounts would essentially go into a black hole.
“If we create a Private Foundation and the underlying company for you, the funds become completely private (US cannot know) as soon as the funds are deposited under a bank account or investment account in the name of the underlying company or the private foundation,”he wrote.
The benefits of such an arrangement were numerous, he added, detailing how the client could effectively evade United States tax laws while protecting himself - and the firm.
“You can take the money in cash, you can do a bad investment; you can purchase something and not receive anything (an expensive piano, an expensive software),”Mr. Owens wrote.
“You can receive an invoice from Panama or any other location and that would justify some of the outgoing moneys. You can also declare everything to the tax administration.
Any decision you make, please be aware that you will have to sign a ‘disclaimer’ to us. We can only ‘suggest,’ but the final decision to take the money out of the country is fully yours, and under the professional opinion of someone in USA.”
This was the sort of menu sold to the Ponsoldt family - in a very big way.
William Ponsoldt, now 74, had come to Mossack Fonseca with hundreds of millions of dollars in assets, the firm’s staff estimated in “due diligence” memos that also laid out how he had become so wealthy.
“He has started off in the seventies purchasing run-down apartment buildings in New York, in order to refurbish and sell them off,” noted one memo from 2007, shortly after the firm had started to handle the family’s investment accounts.
“Having done this for a while he spread out to various businesses and his CV is the typical profile of a serial entrepreneur.”
The memo went on to list nine businesses he had created, taken over or helped run, including Glas Aire Industries Group, an automotive parts supplier; Zeus Energy Resources, a Texas oil-drilling company; Regency Affiliates, which owned a Michigan rock mine; and Pegasus Ranch, one of the country’s largest Arabian-horse-breeding operations.
Few American clients, the records show, demanded and received as much attention as Mr. Ponsoldt and two of his children, Tracey and Christopher, each of whom was assigned a secret email account and a code name - “father,” “daughter” and “son.” Mossack Fonseca’s “V.I.P. service” consisted of everything from securing lunch reservations at a popular French bistro in Panama City to pressing the government to make an exception and grant Mr. Ponsoldt and his wife Panamanian passports.
Over the years, tens of millions of dollars flowed into a series of shell companies - Escutcheon Investment, with its money at the Banca Privada in the Pyrenees principality of Andorra; Probity Investments, with deposits at Andbanc Grup Agricol, also in Andorra; Royal Pacific Investments, with deposits at Balboa Securities in Panama; and Valdano Investments Group, with deposits at Berenberg Bank in Switzerland, among others, the bank records and other documents show.
An email from Christopher Ponsoldt, code-named “son,” to a Mossack Fonseca lawyer. Employees of the Panama law firm were named as officers of shell companies created to conceal any links between the assets and the Ponsoldt family.
Mossack Fonseca employees were named as the companies’ officers, avoiding whenever possible any link to the Ponsoldt family. The firm even asked a Hong Kong branch of Barclays, the international bank, to override its rules for proof of the so-called beneficial owners of the accounts.
“This is a very special client of ours,” a Mossack Fonseca lawyer wrote, conceding that the firm had intentionally created such a maze of companies so it “leaves us in the position to legally argue that our client is NOT the owner of the structure.” It was not clear if the bank complied.
The most important part of this elaborate structure was an entity called the Edenstone Foundation.
Panama has long specialized in creating unusual foundations like Edenstone that are neither subject to Panamanian taxes nor required to support charitable causes. They do, however, allow the investors who “contribute” their financing to shield themselves from legal claims in the United States.
In secret meetings documented in the Panama Papers, Mossack Fonseca named the Ponsoldt family as the beneficiary, through the foundation, of the money placed in bank accounts around the world.
Among the early requests: confidentially transfer $800,000 from “father” to “son,” meaning moving the money to yet another offshore account - called LBFH of Panama - which Mossack Fonseca had set up on Christopher Ponsoldt’s behalf with bank accounts in Andorra and Panama.
One motivation for Christopher Ponsoldt to stash money overseas in accounts not traceable to him: He owned a dirt racetrack in Florida, and he was concerned racers “may get hurt and might then try to sue him for damages,” the law firm notes on his case file said.
“Please notify me when the money is deposited in American dollars,” Christopher Ponsoldt wrote to the law firm a few months after his father’s accounts had been set up and $800,000 was in the process of being transferred to another offshore account Christopher Ponsoldt controlled via the firm.
“I want to have U.S. dollars, Australian Dollars, Indian Real’s and some kind of China index, to be determined.”
Mossack Fonseca agreed to “prepare a service agreement” between two of the legal entities it managed for the family, to make it look as if there were an actual expenditure of money for a business purpose.
“After receiving the money, we will explain to them the nature of this transaction without giving details of your name,”the firm explained to William Ponsoldt, regarding the Caribbean bank through which the money was moving to his son.
“Please let us know if you agree with this and if you will instruct the relevant parties to execute the wire transfer.”
Federal law generally limits such tax-free transfers between family members to $14,000 a year.
But for this transfer, described as a “pre-inheritance distribution,” the documents give no indication that any United States gift taxes were paid, as would most likely have been required, said Jack Blum, a lawyer and expert in international tax evasion who served for more than a decade as a consultant to the Internal Revenue Service.
“This is one way in which people with a lot of money step away from being average,” Mr. Blum said after reviewing the documents.
-
Jack Blum, a former I.R.S. consultant
Christopher Ponsoldt declined to comment. “I am sorry, I can’t help you,” he said before hanging up.
Tracey Ponsoldt Powers, William Ponsoldt’s daughter, approached the firm in October 2008 with an urgent request for help in secretly moving some of her family’s money to Panama and then into gold coins. She feared political developments at home.
“I feel VERY unsettled with this election and how the media is censoring information and spinning the American Public to vote Obama,” she wrote to Mr. Owens at Mossack Fonseca.
“It is so obvious to me, that they are setting us up with a Socialist - but most people can’t see it happening before their eyes! It’s like propaganda that is brainwashing Americans to forget the Principles of Hard Work, Ingenuity, Risk and Boundless Success!”
Mr. Owens suggested shifting the money into a “charity” account, controlled by the firm on the family’s behalf, in increments of less than $100,000, so it would not be detected.
Tracey Ponsoldt Powers, code-named “daughter,” approached Mossack Fonseca in October 2008 because she was concerned about the potential election of Barack Obama as president. Around then, William Ponsoldt had the firm move $100,000 to a Swiss account for his daughter.
Separately, that same month, William Ponsoldt moved $100,000 from a company Mossack Fonseca controlled on his behalf into the name of his daughter. This was confirmed in an email from Mossack Fonseca to the code name “daughter.”
“The USD 100.000 is deposited as call Money with high liquidity at Berenberg Bank Schweiz, Zürich,”said the email, which added: “Your Father initiated this process as you know. We will treat you with the same esteem and conditions and service as the family is used to.”
The subsequent series of complicated transfers - money from the account would eventually be used by Mossack Fonseca in 2013 at Ms. Powers’s request to buy real estate - would be a challenge for American enforcement authorities, Mr. Blum said.
“Simply by constructing all this in such a complex way, they make it extremely hard for enforcement officials to ever have resources to reconstruct what taxes should have been paid,” he said. “What this is all about is obscuring the trail.”
Ms. Powers did not respond to a series of calls and emails, and then declined to answer questions when reached on a cellphone.
“I have no idea what you are talking about,” she said before hanging up.
‘Live This Potential Risk’
Across the United States, Mossack Fonseca picked up clients who had similarly urgent and delicate demands.
For more than 30 years as the founder of Boston Capital Ventures, Harald Joachim von der Goltz has built a reputation as a savvy investor in emerging companies.
What few know, however, is that over roughly that same span of time and with the help of Mossack Fonseca, Mr. von der Goltz has also come to command a vast offshore empire: interconnected corporations, foundations and bank accounts with about $70 million in assets, according to internal emails.
A lawyer for Mr. von der Goltz said the beneficial owner of all of the trusts and accounts is Mr. von der Goltz’s 100-year-old mother, who resides in Guatemala. One document also suggests that the tens of millions of dollars in the accounts originally came from businesses operated by Mr. von der Goltz’s father.
But numerous other documents prepared by Mossack Fonseca and signed by Mr. von der Goltz list him as the founder, manager and “first beneficiary” of the foundation that controls most of the family’s wealth. Mr. von der Goltz also put assets from companies he helped operate into the accounts, documents show.
Most important, Mossack Fonseca registered Mr. von der Goltz as a resident of Guatemala, which tax experts said could help him protect the family money from certain United States tax obligations.
“MF Trust has registered Harald Joachim von der Goltz as a client of Guatemala. However, we know he lives in Miami; and makes his residence for 5 months of the year in Boston,” Mr. Owens, the Mossack Fonseca partner, wrote in an email in 2009 to top executives at the firm.
The firm recognized that claiming the Guatemala residency represented a risk, but considered it a risk worth taking, given Mr. von der Goltz’s importance to the firm.
“My suggestion: Leave everything as it is with von der Goltz, i.e. stay and live this potential risk, we might prefer to send money orders and cashier’s checks, which have a slightly lower risk than bank transfers. It’s all well done, customer understands well and accepts it as is,” Mr. Owens wrote.
“I agree with your suggestion on my part,” responded Ramón Fonseca, one of the firm’s founders.
Ramón Fonseca, one of the firm’s founders, in April in his office in Panama City. Documents show he agreed with a suggestion to accept a client’s residency in Guatemala despite the risk and the knowledge that the client lived in the United States.
Money was frequently transferred from several of the offshore accounts to accounts in the United States to fund investments at Mr. von der Goltz’s firm, the documents show. A foundation paid for his daughter’s education, as well as his granddaughter’s high school tuition.
In a 2008 email, Mr. von der Goltz’s Boston-based accountant asked executives at Mossack Fonseca to wire money from Mr. von der Goltz’s mother, Erika.
“Erika would like to make a gift to Tica of $100,000 for his birthday. She hadn’t given him anything,” the email said, providing an account for Mr. von der Goltz at Espírito Santo Bank in Miami.
“Ohh, yes, I know ERIKA wants it to be done quickly, we will proceed,” Mr. Owens responded before confirming that the money should be moved as requested.
Legal experts consulted by The Times said it was difficult to determine definitively if the arrangements related to Mr. von der Goltz violated United States laws. But they said such moves were commonly used by investors seeking to hide their assets and evade federal taxes.
“There is reason to question if she was really directing that shift of money,” Mr. Blum said, referring to Mr. von der Goltz’s mother.
In a statement, Mr. von der Goltz said the companies were established for legal purposes, and that both he and the companies were compliant with United States tax and reporting requirements.
“There has never been any illegal activity associated with these companies,” the statement said.
Other case files examined by The Times show how Mossack Fonseca may have turned a blind eye in the vetting process while helping Kjell Gunnar Finstad, a Texas resident, set up an oil company offshore in 2013.
Mossack Fonseca has long maintained that it will not work for individuals with criminal records or whose conduct raises “red flags” during its due-diligence process. But the firm somehow either missed or overlooked Mr. Finstad’s past when it conducted a background search of potential directors for the new offshore oil company, OK Terra Energy, which was run out of Houston but registered in the British Virgin Islands.
Three years earlier, Mr. Finstad, the company’s controlling partner and lead investor, had been convicted in Norway for various breaches of securities and accounting laws involving a company called Norex Group. The case was major news in Norway.
The records examined by The Times show that Mossack Fonseca collected a copy of Mr. Finstad’s passport, and conducted a basic internet search and a cursory background check. But there is no mention of the fraud case, and no discussion of whether to proceed with setting up the new company, in light of Mr. Finstad’s involvement.
Reached at his office in Texas and asked about the Panama Papers, Mr. Finstad said only, “I don’t want to talk about that.”
For another client, Mossack Fonseca offered a special service for a premium price.
Marianna Olszewski, the New York City-based author of “Live It, Love It, Earn It: A Woman’s Guide to Financial Freedom,” wanted to shift $1 million held by HSBC in Guernsey to a new overseas account. The catch? She did not want her name to appear anywhere near the transaction.
Mr. Owens, the Mossack Fonseca lawyer, again offered a solution. Mossack Fonseca would locate what he called a “natural person nominee” in a “tax-convenient” jurisdiction to stand in for Ms. Olszewski as the owner of the account.
“The Natural Person Trustee is a service which is very sensitive,” Mr. Owens wrote.
“We need to hire the Natural Person Nominee, pay him, make him sign lots of documents to cover us, make him sign resignations, make him get some proofs evidencing that he has the economic capacity to place such amount of moneys, letters of reference, proof of domicile, etc., etc.”
The process, he suggested, would cost her at least $17,500.
Ms. Olszewski approved the maneuver - only to see the firm, at one point, accidentally disclose her name to the banks involved.
“Ramses, Please call me ASAP!! This is important!!!!” she wrote to Mr. Owens.
“HSBC said someone said marianna olszewski is the principal / beneficary! Who has done this!! I need you to call me immediately and tell them hsbc that was a mistake!!!!!!!!!! This is not good and I asked you NOT to do this! this is why we have this structure.”
Mr. Owens sought to calm her down, saying that Mossack Fonseca could tell the bank that the natural person nominee actually controlled the account. “This can be solved,” he wrote.
Ramsés Owens, then a lawyer with Mossack Fonseca, explained the concept of a “natural person trustee” to Marianna Olszewski in an email.
Ms. Olszewski sent a panicky email to Mr. Owens upon discovering that her name had been disclosed to a bank involved in a transfer of her assets.
Mr. Owens did not tell his client the identity of the natural person nominee, saying simply;
“We would appoint a UK citizen residing in Panama since 50 years ago, engineer, entrepreneur,” as they needed someone who would be expected to have such a large amount of money available to transfer.
Twelve days later, Mr. Owens sent HSBC a copy of a passport for a man named Edmund James Ward.
“Kindly please find hereto attached the due diligence documents of the beneficial owner,” said the email sent to HSBC, noting that “the documents duly correct.”
The $1 million from Ms. Olszewski was then transferred to the new accounts, with an assurance that she need not worry.
“If for any reason something happens, please also bear in mind that Mossfon is covered by insurance policies for US$10 Million (per event),”Mr. Owens wrote. “We have never used our insurance policy to cover a ‘fraud,’ or something like this.”
The use of a stand-in to hide the true ownership of an account is one of the remaining illegal ploys favored by Americans today as international banks, under pressure from the United States, demand proof of account ownership, said Jeffrey Neiman, a former federal prosecutor from Miami who specialized in criminal tax offenses, adding that he could not comment directly on this case. “The fact that a law firm was willing to do this legitimizes the process for their clients,” he said.
A Firm’s Inner Doubts
Many of the client files - like those for Mr. Weill, the banker; Mr. Soriano, the ballplayer; and Mr. Akridge, the developer - contain little information on the purpose of the offshore accounts, or how they were used after they were set up, making it impossible, based on the records available, to assess whether they were used legitimately.
But the experts who reviewed some of the documents related to the Ponsoldts, Mr. von der Goltz and Ms. Olszewski said that the firm itself seemed to realize it was taking risks.
“They were not always sure themselves which side of the line they were on at any given moment,” said Ross S. Delston, a former federal banking regulator who now specializes in combating money-laundering efforts.
“It is apparent that members of the firm were aware they were treading very close to the line.”
In 2013, Mossack Fonseca advised Ms. Olszewski to seek outside counsel and consider reporting herself to the I.R.S., warning of possible “severe” repercussions if she did not. The warning came in the wake of a Justice Department investigation of the role that certain Swiss banks had played in helping United States citizens evade federal taxes.
Records show that Mossack Fonseca had been paid at least $102,000 over nine years to help Ms. Olszewski handle various transactions.
Ms. Olszewski took the firm’s advice, and belatedly disclosed her accounts to the I.R.S., the documents show. And by 2014, she asked Mossack Fonseca to shut down her accounts and offshore entities, which collectively held at least $1.7 million.
“I’m in complete compliance with all my U.S. tax and reporting requirements,” Ms. Olszewski said in an emailed statement when The Times asked about the accounts.
In a second statement, she said she had relied on the advice of legal counsel to establish a trust for her family while living abroad. “I am confident that I have acted properly,” she added, “and any insinuation otherwise is false.”
Reached by telephone in late May, Mr. Owens, who is no longer with the law firm, said only, “Regretfully, I cannot speak about individual clients or my time at Mossack Fonseca.”
Mossack Fonseca sent a series of similar and increasingly dire warnings to the Ponsoldts in 2013 and 2014, telling them that they had to provide a Swiss bank with documentation that they had paid all required United States taxes - or face possible investigation.
“Neither your ex Trustees nor us would like to be involved into any measure the US Department of Justice might try to enforce,” the firm wrote. “In this regard, again we strongly urge you to take the necessary steps to avoid any negative consequences for you as well as us.”
The records examined by The Times give no indication whether the Ponsoldts complied, and family members would not say when asked.
“I don’t know what you are talking about,” Christopher Ponsoldt said in a second brief conversation before he again hung up.
Former Morgan Stanley Chief Asia Economist: "Don't Listen To The Ruling Elite, The World Economy Is In Real Trouble" June 6 2016 | From: ZeroHedge
Andy Xie says the world's elite that are attending the G7, G20, Davos and other wasteful meetings are wrong to try to pin the blame for the turmoil on people’s psychology; all signs point to a prolonged period of global stagnation and instability.
Andy Xie says the world's elite that are attending the G7, G20, Davos and other wasteful meetings are wrong to try to pin the blame for the turmoil on people’s psychology; all signs point to a prolonged period of global stagnation and instability.
Before the current G7 meetings waste of time, The G20 working group meeting in Shanghai didn’t come up with any constructive proposals for reviving the global economy and, instead, complained that the recent market turmoil didn’t reflect the “underlying fundamentals of the global economy”.
The oil price has declined by 70 per cent since June 2014, while the Brazilian real has halved, and the Russian rouble is down by 60 per cent. The global economy is on the cusp of another recession, and these important people blamed it all on some sort of psychological problem of the people.
Over the past two decades, the global economy has been blessed with the entry and participation of 800 million hard-working Chinese, plus the information revolution. The pie should have increased enough in size to make most people happier. Yet, the opposite has happened.
The world has gone from one crisis to another. People are complaining everywhere. This is due to mismanagement by the very people who attend the G20 meetings, the Davos boondoggle, and so many other global meetings that waste taxpayers’ money and put inept leaders in the limelight.
One major complaint that people have is that the system is rigged – that is, the rising income concentration is not due to free market competition, but a rigged system that favours the politically powerful.
This is largely true. The new billionaires over the past two decades have come mostly from finance and property. Few made it the way Steve Jobs or Bill Gates did, creating something that makes people more productive.
The most important factor in the rigged system is monetary policy being used to pump up financial markets in the name of stimulating growth for people’s benefit.
This is essentially the trickle-down wealth effect, that is, making some people in the financial food chain rich while the spillover gives people a few crumbs.
Yet, instead of crumbs, the wealth effect has pumped up property prices in Manhattan, London and Hong Kong, as well as the price of modern art. Essentially, the wealth effect has stayed within the small circle of the wealthy. And these people show up at Davos to congratulate policymakers on their “successes”.
Wasting resources is an equally important factor in making the global economy weak and prone to crisis. After the 2008 financial crisis, the US government and Federal Reserve spent trillions of dollars to bail out the people who created the crisis. Instead of facing bankruptcy and jail, these people have become richer than ever. Predictably, they have used their resources to rig the system further.
After 2008, when Beijing launched a massive investment push, the global ruling elite all praised China for saving the global economy. China has increased credit by over US$20 trillion to finance the construction of factories and homes. However, investment does not guarantee final demand.
The process of building up a factory creates demand. But, when it is completed, it needs to sell its goods to someone. What China did was build even more factories to keep this factory occupied. This Ponzi scheme couldn’t last long. We are just seeing the beginning of its devastating consequences.
China’s overinvestment has pumped up commodity prices, which has led to another Ponzi scheme. As major central banks cut interest rates to zero, credit demand didn’t respond in general, as businesses didn’t see growing demand from people who were suffering income erosion.
The commodity boom justified credit demand for the time being. Trillions of dollars were poured into the energy sector, and trillions more into other commodity industries. Businesses in emerging economies that were pumped up by rising commodity prices borrowed US$9 trillion.
This mountain of debt is floating on a commodity Ponzi scheme that is floating on China’s investment Ponzi scheme. Its bursting is just the beginning. Its impact on the global financial system could be bigger than the 2008 financial crisis.
In addition to the bursting of the global commodity bubble, China’s overcapacity bubble will kill global capital expenditure for many years to come. Even though Chinese investment isn’t growing like before, investment at half of gross domestic product is still adding overcapacity by over US$1 trillion per year – the problem is getting bigger.
All indications are that China wants to export the overcapacity. And why not? China overinvested to bail out the global economy. It shouldn’t pay the whole price for the mistake.
China’s strategy would lead to de-industrialisation in most of the world, in particular middle-income emerging economies. Weak capital expenditure would lead to weak employment and labour income. The resulting bankruptcies may further weaken the global credit system.
The global economy is facing years of stagnation, deflation and financial crises. The current economic managers will resort to the same tricks of pumping up the financial markets with liquidity, to no avail. In the meantime, political instability will spread around the world. It will take a long time for the right leaders to emerge.
Initially, populists will win. Their policies, unfortunately, will focus on protectionism and rolling back the World Trade Organisation system.
That will lead to further economic turmoil in the global economy. Protectionism may suddenly jump-start inflation that will quickly become hyperinflation, which would certainly lead to violent revolutions.
The world is on the cusp of a prolonged period of stagnation and instability. Our ruling elite is blaming it on people seeing things. Their strategy is to change people’s psychology. Unfortunately for them, the world is catching fire and that fire will eventually reach their Davos chalets.
Wikileaks Asks If This Is The "Smoking Gun" Email That Will Bring Down Hillary + The Full List Of 92 Paychecks Hillary Collected From Wall Street June 4 2016 | From: ZeroHedge / NewPatriotsBlog
All along Hillary Clinton has pled that when it comes to her violation of Federal regulations, she was at worst naive, hardly malicious and - as of recently - merely doing what each of her state department predecessors has done.
And she has been very careful to make it clear that she never purposefully and intentionally "stripped" confidentialdata in order to send it through her unsecured server as such an act would imply not only a breach of email retention policy, but a willful abuse of confidential documents.
Well, moments ago Wikileaks unveiled what it believes may be the FBI's "smoking gun" in its case against Hillary. In a tweet, Wikileaks highlights one specific email and asks "Is this email the FBI's star exhibit against Hillary Clinton ("H")? "
The Full List Of 92 Paychecks Hillary Collected From Wall Street
The media’s going nuts that Hillary Clinton took three big paychecks for three speeches at Goldman Sachs. At $225,000 a pops that’s pretty good scratch – but it’s just the tip of the iceberg.
She’s been very, very busy, raking in millions in a three-year stretch since she left her post as the Secretary of State. Her defense? It varies from “It’swhat they offered me” to the hilarious, “I happen to think we need more conversations about what’s going on in the world.”
Pricey “conversations” indeed.
Here’s a list of the 92 “conversations” that Clinton has had in just the past three years. The total: $21.7 million.
Click on the image above top open a larger version in a new window
She’s been very, very busy. What did Hillary promise in all these speeches?
What was her advice to Deutche Bank, Cisco and the Council of Insurance Agents? What did she tell eBay? Or the “American CampingAssociation” and why on earth would the American Camping Association pay $260,000 to hear from Hillary?
Has she ever been camping? We may never know because she refuses to tell us.
What Hillary discloses to us peasants is on a “need to know” basis only. H/T: zerohedge, Hannity.com
Not Just Surveillance: 3 Current Phenomena Exposing 1984 As An Instruction Manual For The State June 3 2016 | From: TheFreeThoughtProject
Assessing current conditions in the United States, it would be next to impossible not to grasp innumerable parallels to George Orwell’s dystopic portent, 1984.
Though other fictional dystopias could similarly elicit comparisons to the dark turn taken by American empire, aspects of 1984’s creepy authoritarian nightmare ring all-too-true.
And Big Brother-like surveillance - though undoubtedly relevant - imparts only the most obvious, and therefore least pertinent, connection on the list.
War Is Peace
“Oceania was at war with Eastasia: Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia,” Orwell wrote of two of the three remaining nation-states on the planet. Though it analogizes Russia’s mercurial relationship with Nazi Germany, the same volatility aptly fits U.S. involvement in the Middle East - where, though propaganda would purport a decisive enemy, the truth remains far murkier.
A constant state of undeclared but active war rules foreign policy - driven almost exclusively by the war machine’s profiteering from plundering of foreign lands’ natural resources.
Big Oil, Big Pharma, and the multi-faceted defense industry have experienced exponential profits since perpetual war became the de facto basis of foreign policy - and Big Banks share in the reward. But all of this war requires the U.S. government maintain support from the public - and what better way to win them over than appeal to fear of the Other?
When John Brady Kiesling, a career diplomat, tendered his letter of resignation to Secretary of State Colin Powell, he piercingly criticized the warped factors driving both American domestic and foreign policy surrounding the needless war in Iraq - with barbs unfortunately equally applicable today:
“We spread disproportionate terror and confusion in the public mind, arbitrarily linking the unrelated problems of terrorism and Iraq. The result, and perhaps the motive, is to justify a vast misallocation of shrinking public wealth to the military and to weaken the safeguards that protect American citizens from the heavy hand of government. September 11 did not do as much damage to the fabric of American society as we seem determined to [do] to ourselves […]
“Has ‘oderint dum metuant’ [Let them hate so long as they fear] really become our motto?”
After the attacks of September 11, 2001, it became immediately evident American government had its jackpot ticket for war in perpetuity - the only necessary condition being wool sufficiently ambiguous to cover the public’s eyes in fear.
Since that time, under the guise of national security, Big Brother-like domestic surveillance has become so thoroughly entrenched in our lives as to be virtually ignored by the general populace.
As a necessary and insidious outgrowth of massive spying, the government attempts to cultivate fearful citizen-spies, by employing the not-at-all ominous If You See Something, Say Something catchphrase-titled program. Of course, the government arm responsible for this and other programs - the overarching Department of Homeland Security - seems ripped directly from the pages of 1984.
"Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind,”Orwell noted in his 1946 essay, “Politics and the English Language.”
This observation aptly summarizes U.S. war propaganda in its entirety - with a constant government-backed corporate media blitz surrounding the war on terror shaping public perception of what constitutes terrorism, and who, a terrorist.
Betting on Americans’ cognitive dissonance, historical amnesia, and tacit acceptance of spoon-fed, baseless patriotism, the government doesn’t often find barriers to inculcating a blanket support for obtuse military missions. War so saturates every aspect of life, when the Pentagon announced last week forces had already been on the ground in Yemen for two weeks, the public instead trained its focus to the latest installation of Captain America.
And nevermind the detail that ground support of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates in Yemen would be allocated for fighting al-Qaeda - a different faction of the same group the U.S. currently employs as somehow less dangerous terrorists to assist deposing Syrian president Bashar al-Assad.
Moderate rebels is thus the Newspeak term for terrorists the American empire finds usable - making terrorist and terrorism utterly conditional terms.
Of course, the government failed to explain how a war on the concept of terrorism should play out if that terrorism depends on circumstance - or, more accurately, whim - but once instituted, paranoia surrounding the word opened the floodgates for battling terrorism inside the United States.
Exactly as Orwell cautioned in 1984 - and precisely as Kiesling’s foreboding resignation letter predicted it would.
Freedom Is Slavery
How does a government persuade its citizens their enslavement would be desirable and beneficial? Frame it as necessary protection against any threat to their fundamental security - and implement more contentious aspects of said servitude in palatable microsteps.
Fear of terrorism - or, more directly, xenophobia - constitutes sufficient reason for many to cast off basic human rights through increasingly invasive laws and governance.
Legislation, however, isn’t by far the sole vehicle available to the government.
In a culture so utterly imbued in paranoia, neighbors aren’t only willing to spy on neighbors - or complete strangers, to that end - they’re willing to alert law enforcement should they observe … Something.
One perfect example of the absurdity of the If You See Something, Say Something citizen spy program occurred this week when a woman, suspicious of cryptic notes penned by the person seated next to her on an American Airlines flight, decided to Say Something.
The flight was delayed for over two hours, the FBI was called, and an egregious commentary on paranoia and xenophobic profiling in the U.S. became one of an unfortunate many for the history books.
This unbelievably unaware woman told on acclaimed University of Pennsylvania economics professor, Guido Menzio - who had been scribbling a complex math formula in a notebook.
Menzio posted his experience on Facebook, describing his encounter with the FBI after being briefly pulled from the plane, writing:
“They ask me about my neighbor. I tell them I noticed nothing strange. They tell me she thought I was a terrorist because I was writing strange things on a piece of paper. I laugh. I bring them back to the plane. I show them my math.”
Menzio, to the unnamed woman, was guilty of terrorism because his Italian ancestry gifted him with darker complexion and hair, and because her lack of education and state conditioning caused her to see dark terrorist plots in mathematical formulae - possibly, and disturbingly, because she mistook it for Arabic.
Restrictions on travel aren’t limited to fearful passengers, either, as the notoriously invasive Transportation Security Administration has made air travel an almost unbearably onerous task. A recent report predicts grueling airport delays due to the combination of a 10 percent reduction in TSA staff and a 15 percent increase in the number of expected travelers.
Though a PreCheck program is offered by the TSA, people simply aren’t signing on - likely because they’re forced to submit to an even more invasive background check. And it isn’t as if the TSA has a stunning success rate in thwarting terror attacks, either - though it does have a successful track record for restricting freedom of travel.
While the government would like you to believe TSA safety measures protect the country from terrorism, evidence lies with a far more laughable reality - like the time a CNN journalist once had her container of pimento cheese confiscated by agents. Another report indicated the underpaid and understaffed TSA is largely incompetent. Congressman Stephen Lynch explained;
“We had folks - this was a testing exercise, so we had folks going in there with guns on their ankles, and other weapons on their persons, and there was a 95 percent failure rate.”
Essentially, terrorist paranoia is working exactly per the Dept. of Homeland Security’s design - otherwise ordinary Americans are now guilty, simply by being present. Guilty of being non-white. Guilty of speaking a language other than English. Guilty of math. Guilty of possession of cheese spread.
But most of all, guilty under the system that would rather pit neighbor against neighbor - lest those neighbors realize they have more in common with one another than with the powers claiming to have their security in mind - because that realization might bring anger, dissent, and potentially action to topple those powers-that-be.
And entirely different dystopic restrictions on travel - harkening almost exactly to the 1930s Nazi Germany that so influenced Orwell - can be found in police checkpoints.
Of dubious legality, law enforcement checkpoints for everything from drunk driving to heroin - to seatbelts - have become commonplace around the U.S.
In the name of safety, police bottleneck traffic, test sobriety, search cars, write revenue-generating tickets, and even arrest those found ‘guilty’ or who try to avoid the trap.
And this lack of the ability to travel freely- the basic right to mobility without restriction - is only one highly specific example of coercion as the new norm.
Entire books could be justifiably penned to discuss the ridiculousness of licensing requirements - summarized briefly as the state taking a right away from you in order to give it back to you at an often red-tape-heavy price.
In the dystopic new millennium, the State requires children to seek permitting for such traditional activities as shoveling snow or setting up their own lemonade stands - and alarmingly have been shut down for failing to do so.
You don’t even have to be accused, much less charged, with a crime to have your own property and cash seized - or more accurately, stolen - by the State, which it then may use for whatever shady purpose it chooses.
This unchecked policing-for-profit scheme has created a freakishly telling figure, as described by The Free Thought Project, “law enforcement in America has stolen $600,000,000 more from Americans than actual criminal burglars.”
Freedom to simply live one’s life, without harming another, has been co-opted by a State hell bent on maintaining slavish control of its people.
Ignorance Is Strength
Considering at least one of the aforementioned examples would be sufficiently blood-boiling to even those who consider themselves ‘law-abiding’ or ‘patriotic,’ the State also has in place multiple strategies to thwart the dissemination of accurate, truthful information - thus preemptively quashing dissent.
State indoctrination begins early with compulsory schooling beating the victor’s history into impressionable, young minds. William Blum, journalist, author, and CIA and U.S. foreign policy critic, describes in his book, America’s Deadliest Export: Democracy - The Truth About US Foreign Policy and Everything Else, how indoctrination has so insidiously usurped education as to be imperceptible to the unaware [emphasis added]:
"American leaders have convinced a majority of the American people of the benevolence of their government’s foreign policy. To have persuaded Americans of this, as well as a multitude of other people throughout the world - in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary … - must surely rank as one of the most outstanding feats of propaganda and indoctrination in all of history […]
“It is not at all uncommon to grow to adulthood in the United States, even graduate from university, and not be seriously exposed to opinions significantly contrary to these prevailing myths, and know remarkably little about the exceptionally harmful foreign policy of the government.
It’s one thing for historical myths to rise in the absence of a written history of a particular period, such as our beliefs concerning the Neanderthals; but much odder is the rise of such myths in the face of a plethora of historical documents, testimony, films and books.”
Indoctrination stands as perhaps the most powerful tool a State could wield without imposing actual, physical violence. Patriotism often acts as a means of self-policing - whereby a populace relentlessly criticizes any segment not wholly on board with devotion to that State.
Orwell also keenly understood this, as is clear in 1984’s protagonist, Winston Smith’s description of the youngest citizens of Ingsoc (an abbreviation for English Socialism - the governmental ideology firmly entrenched in that ‘fictional’ time period).
“Nearly all children nowadays were horrible. What was worst of all was that by means of such organizations as the Spies they were systematically turned into ungovernable little savages, and yet this produced in them no tendency whatever to rebel against the discipline of the Party.
On the contrary, they adored the Party and everything connected with it. The songs, the processions, the banners, the hiking, the drilling with dummy rifles, the yelling of slogans, the worship of Big Brother - it was all a sort of glorious game to them.”
When the State manages to hoodwink millions of people, facilitating an imperialist empire isn’t a cumbersome task. Blum analogizes the American people to “the children of a Mafia boss who do not know what their father does for a living, and don’t want to know, but then wonder why someone just threw a firebomb through the living room window.”
Endlessly frustrating those who have taken advantage of self-education in the age of information, arguments proffered by government propaganda - such as waging wars to bring about peace, or that the U.S. aggressively and violently invades other countries for democracy and freedom - take root with no basis in reality.
Belief other nations will steal our (already nonexistent) Democracy if we don’t invade them first insidiously infiltrates even learned segments of the population.
Though such inexplicable reasoning readily evidences justifications necessary for popular support when the U.S. spontaneously violates international law concerning war, the people still believe the lie - in great part, thanks to corporate media’s incessant confirmation of American exceptionalism.
Ignorance of the breadth of American imperialism - the reality of its plundering resources around the planet, its actions as an enforcement arm of the plutocratic corporatocracy, and the violence it employs on innocent civilians wherever it chooses - remain unknown to the majority in this country.
With essentially all information available a click away, this ignorance amounts to little more than a flat denial of reality. Saying ‘my government would never do that’ might be one thing, but refusing to investigate whether or not the statement holds weight is essentially admitting the government takes precedence over truth.
“Do you begin to see, then, what kind of world we are creating?" Orwell wrote in the dystopic classic.
“It is the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic Utopias that the old reformers imagined. A world of fear and treachery and torment, a world of trampling and of being trampled upon, a world which will grow not less but more merciless as it refines itself. Progress in our world will be progress toward more pain."
But the American indoctrination of ignorance most chillingly corresponds with a particular passage from 1984 - one marking the self-imposed homogeneity of a people scrambling over one another to exemplify patriotism.
“The ideal set up by the Party was something huge, terrible, and glittering - a world of steel and concrete, of monstrous machines and terrifying weapons - a nation of warriors and fanatics, marching forward in perfect unity, all thinking the same thoughts and shouting the same slogans, perpetually working, fighting, triumphing, persecuting - three hundred million people all with the same face.”
Much of what Orwell proffered as dystopic fiction has since manifested - perhaps not so much, as is popularly believed, because the government took the novel as an instruction manual. But because 1984’s dire warning seems so inconceivable, perhaps most people have yet to realize its darker portents have already come to pass.
Protagonist Winston Smith ultimately succumbs to the lure of Big Brother and the State - but it remains up for debate whether the authoritarian nightmare will take as firm a chokehold on the United States.
To resist such a reality is the work of a true protagonist - not through violence or destruction, but through seeking a lesser ignorance. The lynchpin to Orwell’s dystopia, and to the current one, is the perception of ignorance as strength. War is most certainly not Peace to a well-informed populace, nor is Freedom Slavery.
It is up to us to plant the seeds of knowledge which will inevitably grow into that well-informed populace who will then see the reality of the horrid path we’ve since embarked. Tis the nature of humanity to err, but we’ve managed to be resilient nonetheless - sometimes the hardest path is the only way there.
In 2012, Barack Obama warned that the United States would fall into a depression if Ron Paul’s plan to cut $1 trillion from the federal budget were enacted.
Wait, I beg your pardon. It wasn’t Obama who warned that budget cuts would lead to a depression.
It was Mitt Romney. Romney went on to become the nominee of the self-described free-market party.
An ideological rout is complete when both sides of respectable opinion take its basic ideas for granted. That’s how complete the Keynesian victory has been.
In fact, Keynesianism had swept the boards a decade before Romney was even born.
The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, the seminal treatise by John Maynard Keynes, appeared during the Great Depression, a time when a great many people were beginning to doubt the merits and resilience of capitalism.
It was a work of economic theory, but its boosters insisted that it also offered practical answers to urgent, contemporary questions like: how had the Depression occurred, and why was it lasting so long?
The answer to both questions, according to Keynes and his followers, was the same: not enough government intervention.
Now as Murray N. Rothbard showed in his 1963 book America’s Great Depression, and as Lionel Robbins and others had written at the time, the Depression had certainly not been caused by too little government intervention. It was caused by the world’s government-privileged central banks, and it was prolonged by the various quack remedies that governments kept trotting out.
But that wasn’t a thesis governments were eager to hear. Government officials were rather more attracted to the message Keynes was sending them:
The free market can lead to depressions, and prosperity requires more government spending and intervention.
Let’s say a brief word about the book that launched this ideological revolution. If I may put it kindly, the General Theory was not the kind of text one might expect to sweep the boards.
Paul Samuelson, who went on to become one of the most notable American popularizers of Keynesianism, admitted in a candid moment that when he first read the book, he “did not at all understand what it was about.” “I think I am giving away no secrets,” he went on, “when I solemnly aver - upon the basis of vivid personal recollection - that no one else in Cambridge, Massachusetts, really knew what it was all about for some twelve to eighteen months after publication.”
The General Theory, he said;
"Is a badly written book, poorly organized; any layman who, beguiled by the author’s previous reputation bought the book, was cheated of his five shillings. It is not well suited for classroom use.
It is arrogant, bad-tempered, polemical, and not overly generous in its acknowledgments. It abounds in mares’ nests and confusions. … In short, it is a work of genius."
Murray N. Rothbard, who after the death of Ludwig von Mises was considered the dean of the Austrian school of economics, wrote several major economic critiques of Keynes, along with a lengthy and revealing biographical essay about the man.
The first of these critiques came in the form of an essay written when Murray was just 21 years old: “Spotlight on Keynesian Economics.” The second appeared in his 1962 treatise Man, Economy and State,and the third as a chapter in his book For a New Liberty.
Murray minced no words, referring to Keynesianism as:
"The most successful and pernicious hoax in the history of economic thought.”
“All of the Keynesian thinking,” he added, “is a tissue of distortions, fallacies, and drastically unrealistic assumptions.”
Beyond the problems with the Keynesian system were the unfortunate traits of Keynes himself. I will let Murray describe them to you:
"The first was his overweening egotism, which assured him that he could handle all intellectual problems quickly and accurately and led him to scorn any general principles that might curb his unbridled ego. The second was his strong sense that he was born into, and destined to be a leader of, Great Britain’s ruling elite...
The third element was his deep hatred and contempt for the values and virtues of the bourgeoisie, for conventional morality, for savings and thrift, and for the basic institutions of family life."
While a student at Cambridge University, Keynes belonged to an exclusive and secretive group called the Apostles. This membership fed his egotism and his contempt for others. He wrote in a private letter:
"Is it monomania - this colossal moral superiority that we feel? I get the feeling that most of the rest [of the world outside the Apostles] never see anything at all - too stupid or too wicked.”
As a young man, Keynes and his friends became what he himself described as “immoralists.” In a 1938 paper called “My Early Beliefs,” he wrote:
"We entirely repudiated a personal liability on us to obey general rules. We claimed the right to judge every individual case on its merits, and the wisdom to do so successfully.
This was a very important part of our faith, violently and aggressively held, and for the outer world it was our most obvious and dangerous characteristic. We repudiated entirely customary morals, conventions and traditional wisdom. We were, that is to say, in the strict sense of the term, immoralists."
Keynes was 55 years old when he delivered that paper. And even at that advanced stage of his life he could affirm that immoralism is:
"Still my religion under the surface… I remain and always will remain an immoralist.”
In economics, Keynes exhibited the same kind of approach he had taken toward philosophy and life in general. “I am afraid of ‘principle,’” he told a parliamentary committee in 1930. That, of course, is the attitude of anyone who craves influence and the exercise of power; principle would only get in the way of these things.
Thus, Keynes supported free trade, then turned on a dime in 1931 and became a protectionist, then during World War II favored free trade again. As Murray puts it, “Never did any soul-searching or even hesitation hobble his lightning-fast changes.”
The General Theory broke down the world’s population into several groups, each with its own characteristics. Here Keynes was able to vent his lifelong hatreds.
First, there was the great mass of consumers, dumb and robotic, whose consumption decisions were fixed and determined by outside forces, such that Keynes could reduce them to a “consumption function.”
Then there was a subset of consumers, the bourgeois savers, whom Keynes especially despised. In the past, such people had been praised for their thrift, which made possible the investment that raised living standards.
But the Keynesian system severed the link between savings and investment, claiming that the two had nothing to do with each other. Savings were, in fact, a drag on the system, Keynes said, and could generate recessions and depressions.
Thus, did Keynes dethrone the bourgeoisie and their traditional claim to moral respectability. Thrift was foolishness, not wisdom.
The third group was the investors. Here Keynes was somewhat more favorable. The activities of these people could not be reduced to a mathematical function.
They were dynamic and free. Unfortunately, they were also given to wild, irrational swings in behavior and outlook. These irrational swings set the economy on a roller coaster.
And now we arrive at a fourth and final group. This group is supremely rational, economically knowledgeable, and indispensable to economic stability.
This group can override the foolish decisions of the others and keep the economy from falling into depressions or inflationary excess.
You probably won’t be shocked to learn that the far-seeing wizards who comprise Keynes’s fourth group are government officials.
To understand exactly what Keynes expected government officials to do, let’s say a brief word about the economic system Keynes developed in the General Theory.
His primary claim is that the market economy is given to a chronic state of underemployment of resources.
If it is not to descend into and remain mired in depression, it requires the wise supervision and interventions of the political class.
Again, we may safely reject the possibility that the political classes of the Western world embraced Keynesianism because politicians had made a profound study of the works of Keynes. To the contrary, Keynesianism appealed to two overriding motivations of government officials: their need to appear indispensable, and their urge to wield power.
Keynesianism dangled these ideas before the political class, who in turn responded like salivating dogs. There wasn’t anything more romantic or dignified to it than that, I am sorry to report.
By the early 1970s, however, Keynesian economics had suffered a devastating blow. Or, to adopt Murray’s more colorful phrase, it had become “dead from the neck up.”
Keynesianism could not account for the stagflation, or inflationary recession, that the US experienced in the ’70s.
It was supposed to be the role of the Keynesian planners to steer the economy in such a way as to avoid the twin threats of an overheating, inflationary economy and an underperforming, depressed economy.
During a boom, Keynesian planners were to “sop up excess purchasing power” by raising taxes and taking spending out of the economy.
During a depression, Keynesians were to lower taxes and increase government spending in order to inject spending into the economy.
But in an inflationary recession, this entire approach had to be thrown out.
The inflationary part meant spending had to be reduced, but the recession part meant spending had to be increased.
How, Murray asked, could the Keynesian planners do both at once?
They couldn’t, of course, which is why Keynesianism began to wane in the 1970s, though it has made an unwelcome comeback since the 2008 financial crisis.
Murray had dismantled the Keynesian system on a more fundamental level in Man, Economy, and State.
He showed that the relationships between large economic aggregates that Keynesians posited, and which were essential to their system, did not hold after all. And he exploded the major concepts employed in the Keynesian analysis: the consumption function, the multiplier, and the accelerator, for starters.
Now, why does any of this matter today?
The errors of Keynes have empowered sociopathic political classes all over the world and deprived the world of the economic progress we would otherwise have enjoyed.
Japan is a great example of Keynesian devastation: the Nikkei 225, which hit 38,500 in 1990, has never managed to reach even half that level since. A quarter century ago the index of industrial production in Japan was at 96.8; after 25 years of aggressive Keynesian policy that gave Japan the highest debt-to-GDP ratio in the world, the index of industrial production is … still 96.8.
The United States, meanwhile, has had sixteen years of fiscal stimulus or preposterously low-interest rates, all of which Keynesians have cheered. The result? Two million fewer breadwinner jobs than when Bill Clinton left office.
No amount of stimulus ever seems to be quite enough. And when the stimulus fails, the blinkered Keynesian establishment can only think to double down, never to question the policy itself.
"Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone.”
- John Maynard Keynes
But there is an alternative, and it’s the one Murray N. Rothbard and Ludwig von Mises championed: the Austrian school of economics and its analysis of the pure market economy.
Against the entire edifice of establishment opinion, the Mises Institute stands as a rebuke. To the dissidents, to the intellectually curious, to those inclined to be skeptical of so-called experts who have brought us nothing but ruin, the Mises Institute has been a beacon.
We have trained an entire generation of Austrian scholars, journalists, and financial professionals. We put in the hard work so that when a catastrophe like the 2008 crisis occurred, an Austrian response was ready.
But with your help, we can do so much more. The Keynesians are pretending they have everything under control, but we know that’s a fantasy.
An even greater opportunity than 2008 awaits us, and we want to help guide public opinion and train a cadre of bright young scholars for that day. With your help, we can, at last, awaken from the Keynesian nightmare.
As the Korean translator of an Austrian text put it;
"Keynes must die so the economy may live.”
With your help, we can hasten that glorious day.
Saudi Press: The United States Blew Up World Trade Center To Create ‘War On Terror’ May 25 2016 | From: Breitbart
This is happening in real time. Last week the US Senate voted to allow the Saudi's to be sued for 9/11. Now we have Saudia Arabia coming out and saying the US alone created 9/11. Cabal infighting escalating?
The Saudi press is still furious over the U.S. Senate’s unanimous vote approving a bill that allows the families of 9/11 victims to sue Saudi Arabia. This time, the London-based Al-Hayat daily has claimed that the U.S. planned the attacks on the World Trade Center in order to create a global war on terror.
The article, written by Saudi legal expert Katib al-Shammari and translated by MEMRI, claims that American threats to expose documents that prove Saudi involvement in the attacks are part of a long-standing U.S. policy that he calls “victory by means of archives.”
Al-Shammari claims that the U.S. chooses to keep some cards close to its chest in order to use them at a later date. One example is choosing not to invade Iraq in the 1990s and keeping its leader, Saddam Hussein, alive to use as “a bargaining chip” against other Gulf States. Only once Shi’ism threatened to sweep the region did America act to get rid of Hussein “since they no longer saw him as an ace up their sleeve.”
[Comment: This is not to say that 9/11 was solely a machination of the United States Government. The Saudi's were involved - but it was not them alone of course. Israel and it's Mossad were also involved. Ultimately, it was not so much an effort of particular countries, rather it was driven by the 'Illuminati' NWO 'Cabal' agenda which operates beyond national boundaries.]
He claims that the 9/11 attacks were another such card, enabling the U.S. to blame whoever suited its needs at a particular time; first it blamed Al-Qaeda and the Taliban, then Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq, and now Saudi Arabia.
“September 11 is one of winning cards in the American archives, because all the wise people in the world who are experts on American policy and who analyze the images and the videos [of 9/11] agree unanimously that what happened in the [Twin] Towers was a purely American action, planned and carried out within the U.S.
Proof of this is the sequence of continuous explosions that dramatically ripped through both buildings … Expert structural engineers demolished them with explosives, while the planes crashing [into them] only gave the green light for the detonation – they were not the reason for the collapse.
But the U.S. still spreads blame in all directions."
The intention of the attacks, writes al-Shammari in his conspiracy article, was to create “an obscure enemy – terrorism – which became what American presidents blamed for all their mistakes” and that would provide justification for any “dirty operation” in other countries.
The terror label was applied to Muslims even though it was Muslims who helped America defeat the Soviets and bring an end to the Cold War, he writes.
The problem, asserts al-Shammari, is that the U.S. must always find a new impetus to have an adversary, for “the nature of the U.S. is that it cannot exist without an enemy.”
Al-Shammari’s article comes amid a torrent of vociferous articles in the Saudi press that range from accusing the U.S. of being “schizophrenic” and in cahoots with Iran to publishing warnings that if passed, the “Satanic” bill would “open the gates of hell.”
What Would Happen If We Just Gave People Money? May 22 2016 | From: FiveThirtyEight
Daniel Straub remembers the night he got hooked on basic income. He had invited Götz Werner, a billionaire owner of a German drugstore chain, to give an independent talk in Zurich, where Straub was working as a project manager for a think tank.
He had read an article about the radical proposal to unconditionally guarantee citizens an income and spent a few years casually researching the idea.
Straub had heard Werner was a good speaker on the topic, and that night in 2009 he was indeed excellent at connecting with the audience, a sold-out house of 200. “It was a very intense evening; people were paying attention,” Straub recalled.
Werner posed a pair of simple questions to the crowd: What do you really want to do with your life? Are you doing what you really want to do?
Whatever the answers, he suggested basic income was the means to achieve those goals. The idea is as simple as it is radical: Rather than concern itself with managing myriad social welfare and unemployment insurance programs, the government would instead regularly cut a no-strings-attached check to each citizen. No conditions. No questions.
Everyone, rich or poor, employed or out of work would get the same amount of money. This arrangement would provide a path toward a new way of living: If people no longer had to worry about making ends meet, they could pursue the lives they want to live.
Straub had studied business, international policy and psychology at school and spent years working for IBM, the International Red Cross and a Montessori school. Basic income “struck a nerve,” he said.
“People are burned out more than ever. You come to Switzerland and talk to people, they aren’t happy. They fear for their jobs. There is a gap between the economic possibility in this country and the quality of life.”
After Werner’s talk, Straub quit his job at the think tank and began to campaign for a basic income full time. He and a few hundred volunteers gathered 126,000 signatures over two years to force a referendum, now slated for June 5, to amend the Swiss Constitution to guarantee a basic income to all citizens. (The suggested amount is 2,500 Swiss francs per month, or about $1,700 after adjusting for the cost of living.)
Switzerland is one of the world’s richest countries, and compared to the United States, it offers far more generous health care and education to its citizens. But supporters of the referendum think the government can provide even more security.
“We limit ourselves too much,” Straub said. “I’m interested in consciousness, expanding consciousness. And basic income is a wonderful tool for that - it challenges a lot of assumptions we have.”
The entirety of the Swiss government opposes the referendum, citing potential effects on people’s willingness to work and the huge fiscal costs as reasons to vote “no.” Even Straub and his fellow supporters don’t expect it to pass. But he’s excited by the enthusiasm, and media attention, he’s seen for the idea in the past few years. Just getting on the ballot “was a moment of hope, for me and for a lot of other people,” he said. “It was a moment of departure.”
He’s right that interest in basic income is spreading across the world. Finland and the Netherlands are developing plans to study the idea. Canada will likely see an experiment in Ontario, if not on a national level. In France, several members of Parliament have supported running an experiment, and the finance minister is open to it. And in January, Sam Altman, the president of Y Combinator, announced that the San Francisco-based startup fund was organizing a basic income study in the U.S.
“In the last five years we’ve taken on a new respectability. But in the last two years it has become an avalanche,” said Guy Standing, a British economist who co-founded the Basic Income Earth Network in 1986 to promote debate and research on the topic. Initially a small cabal of young economists, philosophers and activists, BIEN has grown into the largest hub for basic income supporters - a global network with national organizations in 23 countries.
Basic income, Standing says, is more than good policy. He calls it “essential,” given that more and more people in developed economies are living “a life of chronic economic insecurity.” He sees this insecurity fueling populist politicians, boosting far-right parties across Europe and the rise of Donald Trump in the U.S. Economic stagnation increases the appeal of extreme politicians, and unless those insecurities are addressed, Standing said, that appeal is only going to get stronger.
The economic uncertainty surrounding basic income is huge, and the politics of bringing such a program about on a large scale are daunting.
But something makes this radical proposal so exciting that people and governments are increasingly willing to try it. Basic income challenges our notions of the social safety net, the relationship between work and income, and how to adapt to technological change.
That makes it one of the most audacious social policy experiments in modern history. It could fail disastrously, or it could change everything for the better. Basic income has attracted a motley crew of supporters, spanning the ideological spectrum. Efficiency-minded libertarians like the idea of streamlining the bureaucracy of the welfare state.
Silicon Valley techies hope a guaranteed income would cushion the blow as automation replaces human jobs.
Those with a more utopian bent, such as the organizers of the Swiss referendum, want to open up more options, to let people create art and free the world of what Straub calls “bullshit jobs.”
Critics of the idea say it’s too expensive, would encourage people to stop working and possibly tank a country’s economy. It’s thought to be a political non-starter, too, especially in countries less wealthy and with less generous welfare states than Switzerland.
And because basic income proposes a radical reform to the existing welfare system - one that many progressives, at least in the United States, have been defending tooth and nail over the last 30 years - it makes anti-poverty advocates nervous. Max Sawicky, a former economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank in the U.S., outlined a progressive case against basic income in 2013, calling it a “distraction” from raising the minimum wage, guaranteeing full employment, rolling back Clinton-era welfare reforms and supporting unions - all policies, he argues, “more in keeping with our current system and our political culture.”
Both lovers and haters of basic income often miss an important point: We don’t have great data on how it would work or what would happen if it did. Similar policies were tested in both Canada and the U.S. in the 1960s and ’70s, but studies of their effects were either flawed or abandoned.
“To be honest, a full long-term universal basic income has never been tried, let alone rigorously evaluated,” said Michael Faye, the co-founder and executive chairman of Give Directly, a nonprofit that has pioneered direct cash transfers to the extreme poor, primarily in Kenya and Uganda.1
Earlier this month, Faye announced Give Directly’s plan to launch a large basic income pilot in Kenya, giving at least 6,000 people a guaranteed income for 10 to 15 years. They hope to find out what happens when everyone in a randomly selected place receives a guaranteed basic income for a long period - something that has never been done before.
Experiments like this are important for our understanding of how basic income would work. But the idea has always been about politics as much as economics. Until we have more evidence, the best thing basic income has going for it is its broad appeal - after all, who doesn’t like free money?
Basic income is not a single idea but a family of closely related ideas, which go by an assortment of names: universal basic income, unconditional basic income, social dividend, guaranteed annual income, citizen’s income, negative income tax, etc. But the core motivation - to address social ills by just giving people money - has a long history.
Thomas Paine, the intellectual founding father and pamphleteer, outlined a plan in his 1797 essay “Agrarian Justice” to create a national fund making payments of 15 pounds sterling to each adult over 21 years old.
In the early 20th century, socialists and labor activists took up the cause, arguing basic income could empower workers and transform economies: British philosopher Bertrand Russell backed it, along with those in the social credit movement in Britain; left-wing Louisiana Gov. Huey Long supported it while pushing to “Share the Wealth.”
But basic income never really caught on. In the U.S., the New Deal - which focused on boosting employment through public works projects, expanded workers’ rights and new forms of social assistance like Social Security - was the approach that won out instead.
In the 1960s, basic income became intertwined with the civil rights movement and the War on Poverty. Martin Luther King, Jr. was a fan. In his 1967 book “Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?” King wrote:
"I am now convinced that the simplest approach will prove to be the most effective - the solution to poverty is to abolish it directly by a now widely discussed measure: the guaranteed income.”
Around the same time, its appeal expanded rightward. Libertarian economist Milton Friedman began to advocate for a negative income tax, whereby those earning below a certain threshold would get money from the government instead of paying taxes.
At the end of the ’60s, President Richard Nixon’s plan for a partial basic income passed the House of Representatives before stalling in the Senate. No longer a proposal of bleeding-heart lefties, basic income was endorsed by a slew of notable economists (including several who went on to nab Nobel Prizes).
But by the early 1980s, enthusiasm had petered out again. Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher took power in the U.S. and Britain, riding a wave of conservative backlash to expansive government programs. The tenor of debate shifted from improving the welfare state to cutting it.
Those receiving government assistance were called lazy, if not corrupt. “Welfare queen” entered the lexicon and President Bill Clinton promised to end welfare as we know it. Progressives and anti-poverty advocates went on the defensive. Basic income was tabled, if not forgotten.
In the U.S., we’re left with a patchwork benefits system, an indecipherable alphabet soup of programs: SNAP, TANF, CHIP, Section 8, EITC, WIC, SSDI. The U.S. government spends nearly $1 trillion across dozens of separate programs at the state and federal level,2 as this byzantine diagram from the House Ways and Means Committee shows. This all requires enormous administrative oversight on the part of the government, and it requires the ability to navigate multiple agencies on the part of recipients.
The problems with this system go beyond its complicated structure. Because eligibility for most social assistance is based on income (or is “means-tested”), recipients lose their benefits as they earn more income - this is often labeled the “welfare trap” or “poverty trap.” For example: A family of four can’t qualify for food stamps if it earns more than $31,536. These benefit phase-outs, or “cliffs,” essentially create steep marginal tax rates on the poor.
Even welfare advocates are critical of the incentives embedded in this system. “If you’re a dollar over, you can’t get assistance,” said Wessita McKinley, founder and director of Sistas United, a nonprofit working with individuals in poverty around the Washington, D.C., area. “Sometimes it feels like a governmental control; you’re on a leash, and you can only go so far.”
Basic income promises an escape from the welfare trap - all the benefits would be the same, regardless of circumstance. And by cutting a single check for the same amount of money, it could dramatically reduce administrative costs.
“The money we spend on welfare will be better spent - more productive for the kind of ends we want - if we spend it through a basic income,” said Matt Zwolinski, a philosophy professor at the University of San Diego and one of the most prominent libertarian advocates for basic income.
Despite squeamishness at the idea of government “handouts,” some libertarians see basic income as a more efficient replacement for current social programs, one that would streamline the welfare bureaucracy and reduce costs overall.
He also argues that basic income is superior on moral grounds. People could spend their money however they want. No longer would food stamp recipients, for example, be constrained to using their benefits to buy food, or even certain types of food.
“There is something objectionable about paternalism: treating adults as children who need to have their decisions made for them,” Zwolinski said.
A basic income could be any amount, but estimates typically begin with how much is currently spent on social assistance programs (that’s more or less how the Swiss basic income advocates arrived at 2,500 Swiss francs).
This method is practical for both quantitative and political reasons: It’s fairly simple to evaluate existing social spending and to advocate basic income as a replacement. It’s harder, amid government austerity, to argue for more generous benefits, though many supporters of basic income would like to see spending increase.
Welfare spending varies widely from country to country. In 2011, per capita public social spending in the U.S. totaled about $700 per month, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a group composed mostly of rich countries.
This includes some programs commonly thought of as welfare, like food stamps and housing vouchers and bigger expenses like pensions (Social Security) and health care (Medicaid and Medicare). Among 35 OECD countries, the U.S. ranks 11th in this kind of social spending.
These figures are just a floor for a basic income; other economists researching the idea envision something “high enough to ensure a material existence and participation in society,” said Valerija Korosec in an email. Korosec is a sociologist at the Institute of Macroeconomic Analysis and Development in Slovenia, and the author of the first proposal for a basic income in her country.
She suggests a target between the current poverty level and as high as 60 percent of the median income. Yes, that would require a huge increase in government revenues and thus, most likely, a big hike in tax rates to fund the redistribution as basic income.
Replacing existing benefits with a single, universal check also raises eyebrows among advocates for the poor who might otherwise be friendly to the basic income idea. “There are some benefits that could be made universal … but there are some benefits that are targeted to people in need,” said Deborah Weinstein, the executive director of the Coalition on Human Needs, a Washington, D.C.-based anti-poverty alliance. People with disabilities, for example, “have requirements that not everyone has.”
Even if you could agree on an amount, there are other economic costs. The biggest concern among critics is that with a guaranteed basic income, too many people would stop working, or would be deterred from working more than they already do. It’s not clear exactly what work effects would materialize under a basic income scheme. However, over the last 50 years there have been numerous attempts to study this question.
Between 1968 and 1980, the U.S. ran four major negative income tax experiments in which families were assigned into treatment and control groups, given cash and tracked over several years.
The experiments were located all over: in New Jersey and Pennsylvania; Iowa and North Carolina; Gary, Indiana; and, the largest, in Seattle and Denver.
“We learned an enormous amount from those experiments,” said Karl Widerquist, a Georgetown University-Qatar professor who has studied the NIT experiments extensively.
But the results “were a political failure.”
The core question unanswered by either side: What is an acceptable decline in work?
Unsurprisingly, work effort did decline. Some NIT recipients cut back their hours, but the declines were modest: no more than 5 to 7 percent among primary earners, and a bit more for secondary earners.
But participants quitting altogether didn’t happen, and people who did cut back their hours used their newly available time to pursue other goals, including going to school.
“Some of the experimenters said that they were unable to find even a single instance of labor-market withdrawal,” wrote Widerquist in his 2005 paper summarizing the studies.
While the purpose of the NIT pilots was to observe changes in work effort, an unrelated phenomenon caught the eye of critics: divorce. Controversy erupted when data from the Seattle and Denver studies seemed to show an increase in the divorce rate among participants (those findings were later discovered to be the result of a statistical error).
The press spun wild stories, and the political credibility of NIT - and of basic income, for that matter - began to unravel. Sen. Harrison Williams of New Jersey threatened to prosecute families in the experiments with welfare fraud. The experiments were allowed to run their course but the divorce controversy and concerns about work disincentives effectively killed the momentum behind the program.
As time has passed, the interpretation of these experiments has become more positive. While work declined, it fell by a modest amount. That gives hope to advocates, who cite these studies as evidence that basic income can be implemented with few economic side effects. “I don’t worry as much about work disincentives as some other people,” said Zwolinski, the libertarian advocate.
The original seed planted by Friedman’s negative income tax idea eventually blossomed into the Earned Income Tax Credit, thought by both conservative and liberal economists to be one of the more effective anti-poverty programs in the U.S. because it manages to encourage work while avoiding the benefits cliff. The argument for a basic income as an anti-poverty program over something like the EITC is that it would be easier to administer.
What do we know about giving a guaranteed income to everyone? Not much. Negative income tax policies such as the EITC target specific groups, usually the poor. They have been tested. But basic income is often pitched as universal - everyone would get the same amount, regardless of their circumstances.
And that has never been examined in a rigorous way.
The closest research we have to how a universal basic income could work comes from a small town in Canada.
From 1974 to 1979, the Canadian government partnered with the province of Manitoba to run an experiment on the idea of providing a minimum income to residents.
The result was MINCOME, a guaranteed annual income offered to every eligible family in Dauphin, a prairie town of about 10,000, and smaller numbers of residents in Winnipeg and some rural communities throughout the province.3
MINCOME remains one of the most influential studies of basic income in a rich-world country.
Evelyn Forget, now an economist at the University of Manitoba, was a student in Toronto at the time. “I knew this was happening in Manitoba.
I just stopped hearing about it,” she said. When Canada’s governing party changed midway through the MINCOME experiment, funding dried up and the researchers were told to archive their data for later analysis.
No database was created, and the results of MINCOME were not examined.The closest research we have to how a universal basic income could work comes from a small town in Canada.
From 1974 to 1979, the Canadian government partnered with the province of Manitoba to run an experiment on the idea of providing a minimum income to residents. The result was MINCOME, a guaranteed annual income offered to every eligible family in Dauphin, a prairie town of about 10,000, and smaller numbers of residents in Winnipeg and some rural communities throughout the province.3 MINCOME remains one of the most influential studies of basic income in a rich-world country.
Evelyn Forget, now an economist at the University of Manitoba, was a student in Toronto at the time. “I knew this was happening in Manitoba. I just stopped hearing about it,” she said. When Canada’s governing party changed midway through the MINCOME experiment, funding dried up and the researchers were told to archive their data for later analysis. No database was created, and the results of MINCOME were not examined.
Decades later, Forget started digging for the data. She unearthed 1,800 dusty cardboard boxes - with information on each family receiving MINCOME - at Canada’s National Archives. Forget digitized the materials and matched MINCOME records with those in the database of Canada’s universal health insurance program, which was introduced around the same time.
That allowed her to compare the health of those receiving MINCOME to the health of similar people who didn’t. It resulted in a blockbuster research paper, decades in the making: “The Town With No Poverty,” published in 2011.
Families receiving MINCOME had fewer hospitalizations, accidents and injuries, Forget found. Mental health hospitalizations fell dramatically. And the high school completion rate ticked up during the years of the experiment, with 16-to-18-year-old boys, in particular, more likely to finish school. Younger adolescent girls were less likely to give birth before age 25, and when they did, they had fewer kids.
The program brought most recipients above Canada’s poverty line. And the employment effects in Dauphin were modest. “For primary earners - those with full-time jobs - there was virtually no decline” in work, Forget said. “Nobody was quitting their jobs.” Cash from the government eased families’ economic anxiety, allowing them to invest in their health and plan over a longer horizon.
MINCOME is now serving as inspiration for basic income’s comeback in Canada. The Liberal Party, which recently swept to power behind Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, is seriously flirting with the idea. There are severalpopular petitions to add it to the party’s platform, and a Liberal-dominated committee in Parliament is recommending the federal government study the idea. In its 2016 budget, the provincial government of Ontario announced plans to conduct a basic income pilot this year.
The U.S. negative income tax experiments and the Canadian MINCOME pilot, while useful, can only tell us so much about what happens when you give people free money. One reason is that they don’t meet rigorous modern standards for randomized control trials, the gold-standard of experiments. A number of basic income experiments popping up around the world are designed to get better data.
Give Directly, which is launching the basic income pilot in Kenya, has previously run RCTs to examine the effects of giving cash unconditionally; those experiments have shown that cash works wonders, and the peer-reviewed results have won over economists. The children of recipients are healthier and get more education; adults earn more income by using the cash to plan investments over a longer horizon; spending on alcohol and other vices - a worry some critics of cash grants raise - stays flat or even declines.
Give Directly’s work has gained broad acclaim as a more efficient and effective form of charity. “We have learned a lot about the positive impacts of cash transfer programs,” Faye, the group’s executive chairman, said. But taking the next step requires addressing many more questions that haven’t even begun to be answered: “Should the transfer be one-time or recurrent? How long should the transfer last? What is the right amount?”
Give Directly’s analysis of previous basic income experiments finds them coming up short. A bullet-proof experiment on basic income should be universal, randomized, long term and basic (that is, the income should be sufficient to live on). No experiment has met all four: Some are basic, but not randomized; some are randomized, but not universal; and so on.
The MINCOME pilot, for instance, was randomized and basic but lasted less than five years. The U.S. negative income tax experiments were similarly limited. Some highly touted experiments, including in Namibia and India, either weren’t randomized or didn’t provide enough income to be called basic. (Give Directly has a detailed breakdown of why every basic income experiment attempted so far has failed to be rigorous.)
With basic income’s credibility on the line, Faye worries a flimsy study could be worse than none at all. He points to the excitement over microfinance as an instance where evidence later disappointed expectations. Basic income should avoid letting anecdote get ahead of the data.
“There is no empirical evidence on whether basic income works or not,” said Markus Kanerva, the founder of Tänk, a think tank working with the Finnish government’s social security agency to design and prepare the implementation of a basic income pilot. The study has been promised 20 million euros over two years and could provide a partial basic income up to 750 euros per month to more than 1,000 Finnish citizens.
Researchers in the Netherlands have a similar aspiration to run a rigorous randomized controlled trial of basic income in municipalities around the country. Just don’t call it basic income. “For political strategy reasons, they’re staying away from the term ‘basic income,’ ” said Jurgen De Wispelaere, a research fellow at the University of Tampere in Finland, who is in contact with those running the Dutch experiments.
Instead, the pilots are billed as “trust experiments” and the basic income is often called a “citizen’s wage.” The cities of Utrecht, with a population over 300,000, and Tilburg, at over 200,000, are the largest Dutch municipalities planning to conduct an experiment. Two other major municipalities are on board but are waiting to get a green light from the minister of social affairs; and 15 smaller municipalities are hoping to get clearance, too.
It’s not just governments and charities attracted to the idea of basic income. The private sector is curious, too. Silicon Valley in particular. These enthusiasts are motivated less by an interest in improving the welfare state and more by a desire to guard against much bigger economic changes coming down the pike.
In a much-written-about 2013 paper, two Oxford economists estimated that 47 percent of all U.S. jobs were at risk of computerization. Increasingly, technologists envision basic income as a “hack,” or fix, to the system - it offers a way of coping with an economic future dominated by automation, a fallback plan for when most human labor isn’t valued or needed.
“We think there could be a possibility where 95 percent - or a vast majority- of people won’t be able to contribute to the workforce,” said Matt Krisiloff, the manager of Y Combinator’s basic income project.
“We need to start preparing for that transformation.”
Sam Altman, Y Combinator’s president, committed $10 million personally toward YC Research, out of which this experiment will be run. Plans are still in early development but the study will “most likely be a randomized control trial,” said Krisiloff. That means giving cash to randomly selected Americans, hopefully over a long period.
“To really do this well, you’d have to do it on a large swath of the nation,” Krisiloff acknowledged. The ultimate goal, he hinted, will be to inspire some local or state government to launch a basic income pilot of its own.
“Basic income is about wanting to embrace automation,” said Albert Wenger, a partner at the venture capital firm Union Square Ventures. In his forthcoming book “World After Capital,” Wenger argues scarcity has driven epoch shifts: The invention of agriculture changed the scarcity from food to land; the Enlightenment and subsequent industrial developments shifted scarcity from land to capital; but as computers and the internet have transformed us into an information society, capital is no longer scarce.
“We have enough physical capital in the world. but it’s unequally distributed,” Wenger said. The last big scarcity is attention.
“What are we actually spending our time on, both collectively and individually?”
Wenger wants less time spent on tasks that could be automated and more time spent on issues he thinks are insufficiently addressed: fighting climate change, exploring space, preventing the next global pandemic.
Like the backers of basic income in Switzerland, he thinks providing for basic needs will allow innovation to flourish.
With a basic income, he said, “you’re put in charge of your time. You’ll have 100 percent of your time available to you.”
Cameron Ottens wasn’t going to wait on some government or company to run an experiment. “There is some steam behind basic income,” he said, so he wanted to “start the ball rolling.” For some hard-core advocates, basic income is less about pure science than living a lifestyle.
Ottens is a co-founder of My Basic Income, a San Francisco-based, one-year basic income raffle.
Yes, that’s right - anyone can enter, for free, to win a basic income of $1,250 per month for a year. My Basic Income successfully raised $15,000 and plans to raffle it off at the end of April or in early May. The group plans to track the winner as a case study in what a basic income can free us up to do. The idea has already attracted interest from sweepstakes and raffle enthusiasts who may not know much about basic income but like a free shot at $15,000.
Others have crowdfunded their own basic income. About two years ago, Scott Santens, a New Orleans-based writer, discovered Patreon, a Kickstarter-like crowdfunding site with a focus on creative types.
It enables musicians, artists and niche bloggers to raise money directly from their fans. He took as his starting goal to raise enough to live on $1,000 per month; it took about a year to reach that goal, but at the end of last November he hit $12,000 and hasn’t looked back. Since then, he’s been living entirely off his personally crowdfunded basic income.
Popular interest in basic income has exploded, affording him the opportunity to fund a basic income for himself, mostly from fans of his writing - about basic income. Santens sees the rapid change happening in the world as driving this curiosity.
“We have all this technology, and it scares some people. You’re thinking, when is my job going to be eliminated?”
In this context, Santens believes basic income will be “extremely impactful.” “We’re going away from a traditional, 40-hour per week economy… there is going to be a lot more flexibility and variety in what we’re doing,” he said.
From Switzerland to the Netherlands to Kenya to Silicon Valley, a mixture of insecurity and curiosity are driving interest in basic income, but its dominant ideology - and appeal - is utopian. The core existential struggle lurking in the debates over basic income centers on what meaning work holds in our lives.
Straub, the Swiss referendum organizer, remembers his great-grandfather working 10 hours per day, six days per week. That kind of toil is no longer necessary, nor desirable. The dream of a world where we produce more than we need has come true.
Back when he was gathering signatures in 2012, he would joke about the supposedly impending Mayan apocalypse as a way to engage listeners on the core questions of basic income, questions he thinks still resonate: “Well, if the world really was going to end, how would you live this year? Why don’t you live your life like that?
“The market economy is great, but we want to substitute it with another system - take it to the next level,” he said. The big picture is about changing how we live.
“This is a paradigm shift, and we want a referendum on that paradigm shift.”
In this video chat, Andrew Flowers and Ben Casselman discuss basic income and respond to questions and comments raised by readers:
Anonymous Strikes The Heart Of The Empire - Takes Down U.S. Federal Reserve Bank May 21 2016 | From: TheFreeThoughtProject
After announcing a global call to arms against the “corrupt global banking cartel,” the hacker collective known as Anonymous, in conjunction with numerous other hacktivist groups, have taken over 20 central banks offline, including striking at the heart of the Western imperialist empire; the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, the Bank of England and the Bank of France.
A press release by Anonymous explained in the intentions behind the operation know as #OpIcarus:
"The banks have been getting away with murder, fraud, conspiracy, war profiteering, money laundering for terrorists and drug cartels, have put millions of people out on the street without food or shelter and have successfully bought all our governments to help keep us silenced.
We represent the voice of the voiceless. We are uniting to make a stand. The central banks which were attacked in recent days were attacked to remind people that the biggest threat we face to an open and free society is the banks. The bankers are the problem and #OpIcarus is the solution.”
Operation Icarus was relaunched in conjunction with a video release announcing the beginning of a “30-day campaign against central bank sites across the world.”
Since that time, the scope and magnitude of the attacks have increased exponentially, with Anonymous, Ghost Squad Hackers, a number of Sec groups and BannedOffline coordinating attacks - each focusing on separate financial institutions in an effort to maximize the number of targets hit.
Some individuals have expressed reservations about Anonymous attacking the central banking system – thinking that this will in some way impact their individual accounts held in the banks. In an exclusive interview with The Free Thought Project, an Anonymous member explained that this operation is directed solely at the 1%:
"We would just like to make it very clear that all targets of #OpIcarus have been Rothschild and BIS central owned banks. In fact most of the targets so far such as Guernsey, Cyprus, Panama, Jordan, British Virgin Isles, etc are in the top 10 places of tax havens for the elite.
No on-line consumer accounts were harmed, no ATM’s were blocked and no personal client data was leaked. This has been a protest against the Central Banks and the 1% - no innocent or poor people were harmed.”
The operation began with an initial attack on the Central Bank of Greece and was quickly followed up with a similar DDoS attack on the Central Bank of Cyprus. Last weekend, hackers reportedly targeted the Central Bank of the Dominican Republic, the Dutch Central Bank, the Central Bank of Maldives, and Guernsey Financial Services Commission, according to the official @OpIcarus Twitter account, which has been taken offline - presumably by Twitter. The National Bank of Panama and the Central Bank of Kenya were also reportedly targeted a day later, according to hacking news publication HackRead.
Additionally, reported Ghost Squad Hacker, s1ege also tweeted about taking the Central Bank of Bosnia-Herzegovina offline and provided a screenshot to verify.
The Twitter account @BannedOffline also reported the Central Bank of Mexico had succumbed to a DDoS attack by the hacking collective. The online hacktivist groups have continued to conduct a series of high-powered distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, which forced the website of Central Bank of Jordan, Central Bank of South Korea, Bank of Compagnie, Monegasque and the Central Bank of Montenegro offline.
On Saturday, hackers conducted a series of 250 Gbps DDoS attacks on the Bank of France, Central Bank of the United Arab Emirates, Central Bank of Tunisia, Central Bank of Trinidad and Tobago and Philippine National Bank. The recent attack, on Monday morning, took down the Central Bank of Iraq.
In the most high-profile hacks thus far, during OpIcarus, the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, the Bank of England and the Bank of France all fell victim to separate cyber attacks.
In an exclusive interview with The Free Thought Project, an Anonymous representative explained:
"OpIcarus in support of Nuit Debout took the bank of France off line throughout the day as we continue to address the corruption of the banking elite.
We are acting on behalf of the countless victims and the voiceless as the banking cartels continue their agenda of buying the governments while selling out the people they are supposed to govern. This Op in no way is meant to harm or disrupt the common person and their day-to-day activities.
We are you, we may be your neighbors, those you pass in the street and we are the working class. A Filipino hacker within Anonymous was also able to disrupt services in the Philippines as an act of protest against his nation’s corrupt and brutal government.
We will not and cannot sit by idly while the banking systems strip man of his dignity.”
Anonymous has released a list of institutions the collective plans to target, which is divided into four sections; websites associated with the U.S. Federal Reserve, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), sites owned by the World Bank, and over 150 sites associated with national banks around the globe.
In two weeks, OpIcarus hackers have hit dozens of financial institutions listed in their online manifesto.
Any questions about whether the hacktivists would be able to take out some of the more high-profile institutions seem to have been answered with the recent successful attacks on the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank in Boston, the Bank of France and the Bank of England - the central banks of the U.K. and France.
The attack on the Bank of England was unique from the previous attacks, as it reportedly took down the internal email server.
"While the impact on the individual targets of the DDoS attack campaign, ‘OpIcarus’ is unclear; obstructing or eliminating the availability of email servers is significant.
In an online world any type of service outage is barely tolerated, especially in the banking industry where transactions and communications are often time-sensitive, and account security is of utmost importance.”
Make no mistake that this operation has already been extremely effective - evolving and growing rapidly. In the world of high finance time is money, and every minute that a bank is forced offline it is losing potential revenue, which in turn hurts the bottom line of those that support the imperial war machine.
Thus far, all targeted banks have refused to comment on the damage inflicted by the continuous cyber attacks.
Khazarian Crime Syndicate: The Rotten Society We Live In May 17 2016 | From: FinalWakeUpCall
An Evaluation of Crimes Against Humanity:
Jacob Rothschild lounging with David Rockefeller. Sorry to fuck up your shit boys.
Most of the Khazarian committed crimes over the last centuries are ingrained in humanity and are seen as business as usual. These crimes are so unbelievable deceitful and corrupt why they require additional explanation in waking up everyone, because we all are victim of this grand scale fraud on a daily basis.
Frauds that have been set in motion so long ago that nobody even recognise these as crime.
The real power in the world is not the elected government that is employed by the people to serve the people, but it is the Illuminati controlled banking world that manipulates every one of us. Politicians supported by party funds, big business contributions, campaign funds, etc. are owned and controlled by these criminals.
They are hired and brainwashed being motivated to support new rules of law that facilitate the Khazarians to penetrate their network into society even deeper, and secure continuation of their fraud.
Their fake money represents priority; keeping revenue short ensures laws are ‘revised’ and the money from the middle class flows to the rich.
Contrary real money has to have value of itself, as it is used as exchange for other things of value. This kind of money cannot be manipulated.
Inconceivable Fraud;
Inconceivable quantity of fraud has engulfed the world over the last hundreds of years, enacted in particular through the criminal banks and governmental services corporations, with extended tentacles to the farthest reaches of the globe.
This vast criminality cannot be defeated by the efforts of one or even thirty nations, as these crimes have been replicated in almost all countries throughout the world with the same results, those must be addressed as a global issue and resolved in favour of the people, because the people have not authorised nor benefited from these criminal activities caused by the Central Banksters and their corporate affiliates.
All people have been victimised along with the rest of the world, by the wrong doings and fiduciary trust fraud on an inconceivable scale.
The people of the western world, Japan and Australia have been all but destroyed by the British Controlled Federal United States and their endless warmongering and deceitful deliberate money value manipulations through inflation.
Over the last one hundred years alone the US dollar, and mutatis mutandis all other major paper currencies have been devalued by over 98%, as direct result of reckless, criminal, unlawful and fiduciary trust fraud on the part of central banksters and their banking cartels.
In order to grasp the enormity of the perpetuated crime and fraud upon all of us, it is important to know that most of it is accomplished through the corporate banks and government services corporations, presented as legalised banking institutions and the so called ‘elected governments’ that instead of serving the people, are simply hired contractors of the British Crown in the City of London.
All these corporations are owned by foreign “Bloodline” families. They are private corporation, most of them franchisees of the privately owned Bank of London located in the City of London, a private Khazarian Mafia nation-state with its own ambassadors and police. The City of London is not part of the UK and doesn’t pay taxes.
The Rothschild Banking family used covert maleficent operations to extract illegally enormous amounts of money with which they bought the UK. They expanded their private central banking kingdom, and became the functional head of the Khazarian Mafia, the World’s leading Organised Crime Syndicate.
It is known that the RKM private central banking system is international, and functions like an octopus with many tentacles.
The only reason people pay taxes is because the RKM Banksters have transformed each country into their own police state with their “owned” judicial system, and their ability to use their unbridled power of the boot in your face and threatened imprisonment to force compliance.
It is of the highest priority to rooting out these criminals and imposters responsible for all of today’s misère the world is in. These banks and governments are all foreign Khazarian controlled corporations, contractors, and agencies that are responsible for the mismanagement of the greatest part of the world.
Royalty is Involved:
Her Royal Majesty Elizabeth II and her predecessors with the Lords of the Admiralty, the Lord Mayor of London, and their predecessors have betrayed their Sacred Trust and have been in breach of trust with respect to the corporate Nations Trust for at least over the last 150 years.
Sorry if this bursts anyone's bubble but the supposedly lovely, harmless, perfunctual old woman is in actual fact a viscious bitch that finds it most pleasing that everyone loves her; despite the fact she and her duplicitous, inbred family of criminals have been fucking you over for as long as they have been around. It's an illuminati-type thing that will not make any sense to most, but hey that's what these hapless charlatans do. Not to mention the most hideous posit that they do indeed want 90% of you dead. These people are not "elite" - they are nothing more than common psychopathic criminals.
Comment: The Rothschilds sit above the Windsors in the scheme of things. Matters are becoming unstuck. And oh, how unbecoming. It has come to our attention that a leading member of the Rothschild family noted that it seemed a shame that the family had put so much effort into forming a world only to destroy it. Interesting. Not all is in alignment.
And as all western nations are involved in this same fraud scheme, this demonstrates the international conspiracy to control and defraud entire nations.
Insomuch the Holy See has declared and strived to build a Global Estate Trust on the Convocation of 1537 that includes all nations within that trust and endeavour to establish Global Jurisdiction and common government services for all nations, with other words the New World order.
In fact, this obliges the Holy See to obtain a peaceful resolution and enforce the return of people’s property assets. If the Holy See doesn’t correct and stop this systematic fraud against humanity the Global Estate Trust will also stand in breach of trust.
The Vatican:
Actually the Holy See and the Vatican have been instrumental in converting all national governments on the planet into national corporations deceitfully with the same name in capital letters, operating in the international jurisdiction of the sea and the Roman Curia that made all those fraudulent manipulations a legal fiction.
It now is the unique responsibility of the Holy See and Pope Francis to correct this breach of trust and the mismanagement of the corporate nations, as they in the first place are responsible for their creation.
Debt Fraud:
The private Federal Reserve bank, the United States Inc. the United Nations Inc. and their agents and contractors have acted as criminals and these companies should be liquidated with their offending subcontractors and agencies. Because these enterprises have never been authorised by the people to offer us credit or using our assets or private estates for the security of debts of any governmental services corporation whatsoever.
They pretend that we the living people are responsible for paying of their debts as they made us deceptively corporations named trust, with the same name in capital letters, to be plundered by the banking cartels, when in fact those that created all this are responsible.
They are merely using deceptively similar names and exercising what appears to be public office for their private benefit.
The Federal Reserve and central banks are running the bankrupt incorporated nations as a bankrupt pass-through to purposefully advance vast sums of credit based on people’s assets and their respective earthly nation, and use this fraud scheme in exchange for establishing unseen bonds against us the people, while our property and assets serve as security as part of the overall fraud designed to entrap people’s assets and credit for the benefit of the criminals.
They made the fraud scheme complex and long term, hidden by deceptive covers of sham to create lucrative fraud schemes, carried out over decades and even centuries on a mindboggling scale.
The Federal Reserve and central banks unlawfully converted private accounts of millions of people into corporate accounts, technically belonging to corporate contractors simply named after living people, to facilitate the seizure of these accounts that banks unlawfully convert into accounts belonging to the central banks without disclosure, and eventually being converted into ownership of the IMF, all executed without people’s knowledge or consent.
Fortunately, the Germans are beginning to understand that their country is not sovereign as it should be, but a corporate vassal state of Washington DC, and that their chancellor Angela Merkel serves those crooks and their financial interests, and not the interests of the Germans.
The Holy See:
The abuses of the corporations continue and have reached legendary proportions while still there is no comprehensive statement from the Holy See revealing the fictitious nature of these entities that have been spawned under its auspices and without public denunciation of criminality, and there is no visible undertaking to punish, regulate, or liquidate them.
The Holy See officially has been informed for about a decade of the illegal and immoral actions against humanity and against humanity’s lawful government, which has been on going since the 1800’s, as all these acts have been accomplished by fraud and deceit.
All these illegally established corporations must be liquidated without harming the millions of innocents who have been misrepresented and mischaracterised by them as willing contractors. Unfortunately, many people still don’t have a clue what has been done in their names and assets, and never have had the opportunity to respond.
It is at the Pope’s discretion that these evil men continue their actions unopposed and each day drag more innocent people into the web as accomplices-after-the-fact and still many others fall victim to this system of lies.
Mortgage Lending:
As a matter of fact the bank also unlawfully has converted your “mortgage” and mortgage contract into “negotiable instruments” showing your signature. You may have noticed that nobody representing the bank ever signed any of this type of paperwork. The only signatures appearing are yours.
The first thing the bank does beyond stealing your mortgage contract, is qualifying it to be a ‘Promissory Note’, underconditions of deceit and non-disclosure in order to create a conduit loan – not a home loan – between you and unknown investors, usually money markets or institutional investors, and then they place you in default by never transferring “your” mortgage into a Real estate mortgage investment conduit, called REMIC.
This negligence on their part means that “you” are always in default from the moment the paperwork is signed no matter what you do or how much you pay or how timely you are about paying.
It also means that they aren’t providing you with a “home loan”, but they also are cheating the institutional investors. The banks play both ends of the loan game. They are cheating you and are cheating the investors and they get away with this because politicians are stupid, corrupt, and most of the time bought.
Corrupt politicians and “governmental services corporations” run by banks have sold us out. The bankers make money at our expense. They steal people blind, and enslave them for their profit, and invent legitimacy by buying the judges. So it is time to permanently shut down these banks.
Did You Know?
Did you know that your national identity theft has occurred?
Did you know that all the mortgages already have been paid off, but these bankster crooks are continuing to bill clients for non-existent debts and to take them to phoney corporate courts and steal their private property and deceive investors on the stock market?
Did you know that they are using private commercial mercenaries paid for with our taxes to steal us blind and instigate wars? This isn’t a matter of politics. This is crime and conflict of interest, pure and simple, committed against humanity.
Wake Up folks and let’s get our legitimate world back out of the hands of these criminals!
Promissory Note and Mortgage Contract Fraud:
A promissory note is basically an IOU that contains the promise to repay the loan, as well as the terms for repayment. The purpose of the mortgage or deed of trust is to provide security for the loan that is evidenced by a promissory note.
It is legitimately proven that banks and lending institutes organised under the same system, never give anything of equitable value in exchange for the Promissory Notes and mortgage contracts that they obtain.
And this relates to debt collectors as well. Under contract law all you have to do is ask them to show you the contract that you signed with them agreeing you are liable to any debt. No contract. No debt. F*ck off. The entire debt collection industry is a SCAM
This demonstrates the basic fraud process; the banks create the credit for they loan out of thin air simply by entering numbers in a ledger and that credit is based on the borrower’s ownassets – not the bank’s assets.
The bank loans nothing of value of its own! All these institutions act under the same system. As evidenced by jurisprudence from a court case that confirms that banks gave no equitable consideration, and that no valid contract ever existed. This establishes the motive for the bank’s deceit.
They were able to obtain funds equal to the entire amount of the loan from the borrower without his/her knowledge. This enabled the banks to deposit the borrower’s own funds in a bank account and write a check off those funds back to the borrower, thus creating the illusion that they gave the borrower a loan of the bank’s own assets.
For moneylending is this common practice, it’s an on going systematic fraud, committed by the crime syndicate in cooperation with the courts, law enforcement agencies, and magistrates.
5 Most Powerful Families that Control the World:
Farage: The people’s army of bloggers will prevail over anti-democratic but fascist EU
Rothschild Bank Now Under Criminal Investigation Over Missing $4 Billion In Global Corruption Probe May 16 2016 | From: DCclothesline
Last year the veil of invincibility seemingly came off the secretive Rothschild banking empire, as Baron David de Rothschild and his company the Rothschild Financial Services Group were indicted by French prosecutors for allegedly defrauding British pensioners in a scheme that saw large sums of money embezzled.
Only two months ago, we reported on the Swiss branch of the Edmond de Rothschild Group announcing that they were the target of a French criminal probe “regarding a business relationship managed by a former employee.”
Now, the Luxembourg unit of Rothschild banking empire is being investigated by the Luxembourg state prosecutors office — alleged to have sent hundreds of millions of dollars to an account at a bank in Luxembourg that originated from 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB).
The fund, 1MBD, was established by Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak in 2009 as a government investment fund. There have been widespread accusations of corruption surrounding Razak after $1 billion dollars in deposits into his personal bank accounts were revealed.
The deposits totaled hundreds of millions of dollars more than had previously been exposed by probes into state fund 1MDB, according to the Wall Street Journal.
The Luxembourg investigation stems from an international probe of money that may have flowed from the Malaysian government investment fund, which is at the center of various worldwide corruption probes.
"The Luxembourg unit of Edmond de Rothschild Group, a private bank that manages money on behalf of wealthy clients, said it is “cooperating” with an official investigation of money that may have flowed from a Malaysian government investment fund at the center of various world-wide corruption probes…
The Luxembourg investigation widens probes of 1MDB already under way by authorities in Switzerland, Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong and Abu Dhabi.
Swiss authorities said in January that 1MDB-related losses from misappropriation could reach $4 billion. The Luxembourg prosecutor said its case was connected to the investigation in Switzerland.
1MDB was created to invest in local energy and real-estate projects to boost the Malaysian economy. The fund amassed $11 billion in debt which it has struggled to repay. Last July,The Wall Street Journal reported that almost $700 million was transferred to Mr. Najib’s bank accounts via a web of entities, money which investigators believe originated with 1MDB.
1MDB has denied sending money to Mr. Najib’s accounts and denied wrongdoing and said it is cooperating with probes."
“Edmond de Rothschild Europe is actively cooperating in the judicial proceedings,” a spokeswoman for the Edmond de Rothschild Group told the WSJ.
The Edmond de Rothschild Group oversees roughly $164 billion in assets, according to Bloomberg. The private bank and asset management firm to the elite was founded by Edmond de Rothschild in Paris in 1953.
Baron Edmond de Rothschild
Edmond’s son Benjamin de Rothschild succeeded his father as head of the group in 1997. Last year, Benjamin appointed his wife, Ariane, chairwoman of the executive committee. The Swiss unit traces its roots to the acquisition of Banque Privee in Geneva in 1965.
"The Rothschild Family as we know it is descended from Mayer Amschel Rothschild, who was born in what is now Frankfurt, Germany. The son of Jewish moneychanger and trader Amschel Moses Rothschild, Mayer Amschel Rothschild was the fourth of 8 children, and went on to establish a huge international banking empire.
Through his 5 sons, Mayer Amschel Rothschild expanded his banking business, which was founded in the 1760s, to international areas and, as such, managed to bequeath his huge wealth, unlike many rich members of the Jewish community at the time.
Mayer Amschel’s 5 sons were each stationed at one of the major European financial centres, one in Frankfurt, London, Naples, Vienna, and Paris.
This passing on of Mayer Amschel’s wealth and business meant that his sons could continue to build on the foundations of their father’s success. In the 19th century the Rothschild Family were at the height of their powers, and were known all around the financial world.
Their great fortune and ingenious business minds meant that they carried great power during this time. They utilised this power by affecting some very significant events in human history in order to profit greatly from it.
This included backing the British forces with huge sums of money during the Napoleonic Wars (more on that later) and funding Brazil’s claim for independence from Portugal."
The Rothschild banking dynasty is a family line that has been accused of pulling the political strings of many different governments through their control of various economic systems throughout the world.
Historically, there is ample evidence to show that the family has used insider trading to bilk money from both private and public funds.
Towards the end of the Napoleonic Wars, in 1813, Nathan Mayer Rothschild saw Napoleon’s war efforts as a threat to his business practices and decided to step in to help defeat the French conqueror. He became the most important financier of the British war effort pouring the equivalent of $900 million dollars in today’s dollars in 1815 alone.
The defeat of Napoleon, and subsequent ending of the Napoleonic Wars, which started in 1803 and raged throughout the continent for 12 years before finally coming to an end in 1815.
During the Battle of Waterloo in the Napoleonic wars, Nathan Rothschild was responsible for one of the oldest cases of “insider trading,” which led to the Rothschild family robbing a whole nation blind. When the battle of Waterloo took place in 1815, horse messengers were the fastest method of communicating information.
The Rothschild’s took advantage of this by having their own spies on the frontlines of the battle that would then expedite the information to the family faster than the messengers used by the military.
When the British won the battle, Nathan Rothschild, was, of course, the first to know, and he immediately went to the stock exchange and started selling stocks while putting out the rumor that the French had won the war. This created a panic on the floor of the stock exchange and investors all over England began frantically selling their stocks.
With the price of all stocks plummeting Rothschild was able to buy out the whole English market for a fraction of its cost. When word returned that the English had actually been victorious, the value of the market soared, and overnight Nathan Rothschild expanded his family’s wealth and cemented their position as one of the richest, and most influential families in the world.
Although the Rothschild family now keeps a very low public profile, they still have significant business operations across a wide spectrum of sectors.
While you may not find any one particular Rothschild on the Forbes’ most rich list, the family is estimated to control $1 trillion dollars in assets across the globe, thus having a strong voice across the geopolitical spectrum that many perceive as a hidden hand manipulating events silently from behind a veil of virtual secrecy and silence.
Foreign Control Of New Zealand: Key Facts May 13 2016 | From: CAFCA
Foreign direct investment (ownership of companies) in New Zealand increased from $15.7 billion in March 1989 to $110.6 billion at March 2015 – over seven times.
As a proportion of the total output of the economy, Gross Domestic Product, it has risen from 22% to 46%.
Ownership of overseas companies by New Zealand residents has not grown as fast over that period (over five times) so net foreign direct investment has grown eight and a half times from a net liability of $8.8 billion to $74.6 billion, and as a percentage of GDP multiplied two and half times from 13% of GDP to 31%.
Foreign Direct Investment from International Investment Position, National Accounts, Statistics New Zealand, InfoShare series IIP088AA. GDP from National Accounts, Statistics New Zealand, InfoShare series SNE038AA.
Foreign owners controlled 33% of the share market in 2015. In 1989, the figure was 19% and it was estimated to be below 5% in 1986.
At March 2014, they owned an estimated 29% of all equity (shareholdings) and 37% of privately owned equity, including shares not listed on the stock exchange.
Foreign investors owned 27% (or $355 billion) of wealth in New Zealand whose commercial net value totalled $1.3 trillion at March 2015.
This comprised housing, land, other property, plant, equipment and financial assets owned directly or indirectly by households, government and foreign investors. New Zealand residents owned a further $202 billion of investments abroad. (These totals exclude wealth held by non-profit organisations, shared natural wealth such as rivers, and human and social capital.)
1986, 1987, 2012, 2014: "Brian Gaynor: New Zealanders buy back their sharemarket", New Zealand Herald, 19 October 2013; and "Brian Gaynor: Potential problems in NZX's high level of foreign investment", New Zealand Herald, 31 January 2015; 1989-1997: "Corporate Governance Research on New Zealand Listed Companies", by Mark Fox, Gordon Walker and Alma Pekmezovic, Arizona Journal of International & Comparative Law Vol. 29, No. 1, 2012, Table 4, p.16. 1997-2010: "Savings and the Equity Market" - JBWere submission to the Savings Working Group, November 2010, p.2. 2011: GS Annual NZX ownership survey. 2013, 15: "Who We Are - NZ's Capital Markets - NZX", accessed 3 April 2016. Equity estimates are non-official estimates provided by Statistics New Zealand. Wealth is calculated from Reserve Bank series C22: Household balance sheet; Treasury's Fiscal Time Series; Statistics New Zealand's International Investment Position: Directional basis stock of direct investment by country (Annual-Mar), InfoShare series IIP081AA.
In 2015, the OIO approved the sale of 75,008 hectares of freehold rural land and 4,889 hectares of leases and other interests in land to foreigners. About 43,000 hectares of the freehold land and 4,000 hectares of the leases and other interests in land were from one foreign investor to another.
In the decade 2006 to 2015, the average was 124,012 hectares of freehold and 42,044 hectares of leases and other interests in land approved for sale. Statistics on sales of land to overseas interests are poorly recorded and incomplete.
Our best estimate is that in 2011 at least 8.7 percent of New Zealand farmland including forestry, or 1.3 million hectares, was foreign-owned or controlled and it could have reached 10 percent.
In 2014, the OIO approved the sale of 38,120 hectares of freehold rural land and 2,671 hectares of leases and other interests in land to foreigners. About 12,000 hectares of the freehold land and 1,000 hectares of the leases and other interests in land were from one foreign investor to another.
In the decade 2005 to 2014, the average was 131,488 hectares of freehold and 43,162 hectares of leases and other interests in land approved for sale. Statistics on sales of land to overseas interests are poorly recorded and incomplete. Our best estimate is that in 2011 at least 8.7 percent of New Zealand farmland including forestry, or 1.3 million hectares, was foreign-owned or controlled and it could have reached 10 percent.
Overseas Investment Commission and Overseas Investment Office.
"Overseas Ownership Of Land: Far Greater Than The 1% The PM Claims", by Bill Rosenberg (www.converge.org.nz)
Statistics NZ figures, as of March 2015, list the biggest foreign owners of New Zealand companies as being from, in decreasing order: Australia, US, Hong Kong, UK, Singapore, Japan, Canada, Netherlands, British Virgin Islands, Ireland, Cayman Islands, China, Switzerland, Norway and France.
All had over $160m in foreign direct investment in New Zealand. These accounted for 96% of foreign direct investment in New Zealand and Australia alone accounts for 52%. British Virgin Islands and Cayman Islands are tax havens, and a Statistics New Zealand study showed that in 2010, large proportions of the foreign direct investment from the Netherlands, Singapore, Hong Kong and tax havens was in fact from other countries, led by the UK, US, Germany and Canada.
In 2015, Other tax havens with investments in New Zealand companies include Vanuatu, Channel Islands, Liechtenstein, Bermuda and the Bahamas, but for all except Bermuda, the value of their holdings has been suppressed as “confidential”.
Bermuda has shown a negative investment in New Zealand companies since 2009 (negative $1.8 billion in 2015). So has Germany since 2013. Negative investment suggests that the companies may have been loaded with debt to their parents or are technically insolvent.
International Investment Position, Statistics New Zealand: Directional basis stock of direct investment by country (Annual-Mar), InfoShare series IIP081AA. Note that these statistics are compiled on a different basis from those also from Statistics New Zealand above, so the total, $97.4b, does not match. These are compiled on a "directional" basis, based on ultimate nationality of ownership; the above are on a "balance sheet" basis, based on residency of the company. Industry statistics below are also compiled on a directional basis.
Mallika Kelkar. (2011). "The ultimate sources of foreign direct investment (p. 19). Presented at the New Zealand Association of Economists (NZAE) Conference, Wellington, New Zealand. Retrieved from stats.govt.nz
The Financial and insurance services sector, which includes the four big Australian owned banks, accounted for by far the biggest part of foreign ownership of New Zealand companies by industry in March 2015, with $32.1 billion. Next was Manufacturing at $14.7 billion.
Other industries having more than $1 billion of foreign investment were in decreasing size, Agriculture, forestry, and fishing; Retail trade; Wholesale trade; Electricity, gas, water and waste services; Rental, hiring and real estate services; Professional, scientific and technical services; Mining; Information media and telecommunications; and Health care and social assistance.
$16.6 billion was unable to be allocated to an industry because of the way foreign direct investment is estimated, or was suppressed as being confidential.
Source: International Investment Position, Directional basis stock of direct investment by industry (Annual-Mar), InfoShare series IIP080AA - Statistics New Zealand. See note regarding country statistics.
Transnational corporations (TNCs) make massive profits out of New Zealand. These can truly be called New Zealand's biggest invisible export. In the year to March 2015, they were $9.0 billion. Over the last decade they have averaged more than the combined exports of seafood and milk powder.
In the decade 2006-2015, TNCs made $77.5 billion in profits from New Zealand, an average rate of profit after tax on their shareholdings of 12.5% (12.0% in the year to March 2015). Only 26% was reinvested (only 15% in the year to March 2015). Profits have averaged twice the increase in foreign direct investment holdings each year.
Balance of Payments: Current account primary income (Annual-Mar), InfoShare Series BOP058AA; Current account investment income by sector (Annual-Mar), InfoShare series BOP059AA; and Balance of payments major components (Annual-Mar), InfoShare series BOP055AA – Statistics New Zealand.
Another $7.9 billion left New Zealand in the year to March 2015 made up of investment income from debt and smaller shareholdings (portfolio investment), making a total $16.9 billion. Over the last decade this has averaged more than the combined dairy and forest product exports.
Related: International Ownership of New Zealand Banks
More than two out of every five dollars of the $16.9 billion went to the owners of New Zealand's banking sector: $6.9 billion. The investment income from overseas ownership of the banking sector ("Deposit taking corporations") after taking account of its small investment income from abroad, accounted for four out of every five dollars of New Zealand's current account deficit in the year to March 2015: $6.5 billion compared to $8.1 billion.
The investment income deficit (income on New Zealand investment overseas less income on foreign investment in New Zealand) has been greater than the current account deficit for all but two years since 1989, which further increases New Zealand's foreign liabilities.
Exports: Key Statistics Table 7.04 - Value of principal exports (excl re-exports), InfoShare series EXP005AA - Statistics New Zealand.
Foreign investors are not great for employment - they only employ 17% of the workforce (down from 21% in 2000), despite owning a large proportion of the economy. Foreign ownership does not guarantee more jobs. In fact, it quite often adds to unemployment. TNCs have made tens of thousands jobless.
Business demography statistics: Enterprises by industry and overseas equity 2000-15, Statistics New Zealand, available in NZ.Stat.
Foreign ownership does nothing to improve New Zealand's foreign debt problem. In 1989, total private and public foreign debt stood at $47.5 billion, equivalent to about two-thirds of New Zealand's Gross Domestic Product, and worth $86.4 billion in March 2015 dollars.
As of March 2015, it was $246.2 billion (or $270.9 billion including derivatives), equivalent to 102% of New Zealand's Gross Domestic Product despite being helped out temporarily by $20.2 billion of insurance claims for the Canterbury earthquakes and all of the asset sales and takeovers.
Source: Statistics New Zealand as follows: International investment position (IIP) (Annual-Mar) – InfoShare series IIP088AA; External lending and debt by sector and relationship (Annual-Mar) – InfoShare series IIP078AA; International non-equity financial instruments by sector (Annual-Mar) – InfoShare series IIP074AA;
New Zealand's A&L - Level 3 Components (Discontinued March 2000) (Annual-Mar) – InfoShare series IIP007AA; GDP(P), Nominal, Actual, Total (Annual-Mar) – InfoShare series SNE038AA; overseas reinsurance claims from the Canterbury earthquakes – http://tinyurl.com/j9kmree
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