Categories » ‘Debt Bubble’
April 9th, 2013 by olddog
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/31/opinion/sunday/sundown-in-america.html?pagewanted=1&_r=3&hp&
By DAVID A. STOCKMAN
GREENWICH, Conn.
The Dow Jones and Standard & Poor’s 500 indexes reached record highs on Thursday, having completely erased the losses since the stock market’s last peak, in 2007. But instead of cheering, we should be very afraid.
Over the last 13 years, the stock market has twice crashed and touched off a recession: American households lost $5 trillion in the 2000 dot-com bust and more than $7 trillion in the 2007 housing crash. Sooner or later — within a few years, I predict — this latest Wall Street bubble, inflated by an egregious flood of phony money from the Federal Reserve rather than real economic gains, will explode, too.
Since the S.&P. 500 first reached its current level, in March 2000, the mad money printers at the Federal Reserve have expanded their balance sheet sixfold (to $3.2 trillion from $500 billion). Yet during that stretch, economic output has grown by an average of 1.7 percent a year (the slowest since the Civil War); real business investment has crawled forward at only 0.8 percent per year; and the payroll job count has crept up at a negligible 0.1 percent annually. Real median family income growth has dropped 8 percent, and the number of full-time middle class jobs, 6 percent. The real net worth of the “bottom” 90 percent has dropped by one-fourth. The number of food stamp and disability aid recipients has more than doubled, to 59 million, about one in five Americans.
So the Main Street economy is failing while Washington is piling a soaring debt burden on our descendants, unable to rein in either the warfare state or the welfare state or raise the taxes needed to pay the nation’s bills. By default, the Fed has resorted to a radical, uncharted spree of money printing. But the flood of liquidity, instead of spurring banks to lend and corporations to spend, has stayed trapped in the canyons of Wall Street, where it is inflating yet another unsustainable bubble.
When it bursts, there will be no new round of bailouts like the ones the banks got in 2008. Instead, America will descend into an era of zero-sum austerity and virulent political conflict, extinguishing even today’s feeble remnants of economic growth.
THIS dyspeptic prospect results from the fact that we are now state-wrecked. With only brief interruptions, we’ve had eight decades of increasingly frenetic fiscal and monetary policy activism intended to counter the cyclical bumps and grinds of the free market and its purported tendency to underproduce jobs and economic output. The toll has been heavy.
As the federal government and its central-bank sidekick, the Fed, have groped for one goal after another — smoothing out the business cycle, minimizing inflation and unemployment at the same time, rolling out a giant social insurance blanket, promoting homeownership, subsidizing medical care, propping up old industries (agriculture, automobiles) and fostering new ones (“clean” energy, biotechnology) and, above all, bailing out Wall Street — they have now succumbed to overload, overreach and outside capture by powerful interests. The modern Keynesian state is broke, paralyzed and mired in empty ritual incantations about stimulating “demand,” even as it fosters a mutant crony capitalism that periodically lavishes the top 1 percent with speculative windfalls.
The culprits are bipartisan, though you’d never guess that from the blather that passes for political discourse these days. The state-wreck originated in 1933, when Franklin D. Roosevelt opted for fiat money (currency not fundamentally backed by gold), economic nationalism and capitalist cartels in agriculture and industry.
Under the exigencies of World War II (which did far more to end the Depression than the New Deal did), the state got hugely bloated, but remarkably, the bloat was put into brief remission during a midcentury golden era of sound money and fiscal rectitude with Dwight D. Eisenhower in the White House and William McChesney Martin Jr. at the Fed.
Then came Lyndon B. Johnson’s “guns and butter” excesses, which were intensified over one perfidious weekend at Camp David, Md., in 1971, when Richard M. Nixon essentially defaulted on the nation’s debt obligations by finally ending the convertibility of gold to the dollar. That one act — arguably a sin graver than Watergate — meant the end of national financial discipline and the start of a four-decade spree during which we have lived high on the hog, running a cumulative $8 trillion current-account deficit. In effect, America underwent an internal leveraged buyout, raising our ratio of total debt (public and private) to economic output to about 3.6 from its historic level of about 1.6. Hence the $30 trillion in excess debt (more than half the total debt, $56 trillion) that hangs over the American economy today.
This explosion of borrowing was the stepchild of the floating-money contraption deposited in the Nixon White House by Milton Friedman, the supposed hero of free-market economics who in fact sowed the seed for a never-ending expansion of the money supply. The Fed, which celebrates its centenary this year, fueled a roaring inflation in goods and commodities during the 1970s that was brought under control only by the iron resolve of Paul A. Volcker, its chairman from 1979 to 1987.
Under his successor, the lapsed hero Alan Greenspan, the Fed dropped Friedman’s penurious rules for monetary expansion, keeping interest rates too low for too long and flooding Wall Street with freshly minted cash. What became known as the “Greenspan put” — the implicit assumption that the Fed would step in if asset prices dropped, as they did after the 1987 stock-market crash — was reinforced by the Fed’s unforgivable 1998 bailout of the hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management.
That Mr. Greenspan’s loose monetary policies didn’t set off inflation was only because domestic prices for goods and labor were crushed by the huge flow of imports from the factories of Asia. By offshoring America’s tradable-goods sector, the Fed kept the Consumer Price Index contained, but also permitted the excess liquidity to foster a roaring inflation in financial assets. Mr. Greenspan’s pandering incited the greatest equity boom in history, with the stock market rising fivefold between the 1987 crash and the 2000 dot-com bust.
Soon Americans stopped saving and consumed everything they earned and all they could borrow. The Asians, burned by their own 1997 financial crisis, were happy to oblige us. They — China and Japan above all — accumulated huge dollar reserves, transforming their central banks into a string of monetary roach motels where sovereign debt goes in but never comes out. We’ve been living on borrowed time — and spending Asians’ borrowed dimes.
This dynamic reinforced the Reaganite shibboleth that “deficits don’t matter” and the fact that nearly $5 trillion of the nation’s $12 trillion in “publicly held” debt is actually sequestered in the vaults of central banks. The destruction of fiscal rectitude under Ronald Reagan — one reason I resigned as his budget chief in 1985 — was the greatest of his many dramatic acts. It created a template for the Republicans’ utter abandonment of the balanced-budget policies of Calvin Coolidge and allowed George W. Bush to dive into the deep end, bankrupting the nation through two misbegotten and unfinanced wars, a giant expansion of Medicare and a tax-cutting spree for the wealthy that turned K Street lobbyists into the de facto office of national tax policy. In effect, the G.O.P. embraced Keynesianism — for the wealthy.
The explosion of the housing market, abetted by phony credit ratings, securitization shenanigans and willful malpractice by mortgage lenders, originators and brokers, has been well documented. Less known is the balance-sheet explosion among the top 10 Wall Street banks during the eight years ending in 2008. Though their tiny sliver of equity capital hardly grew, their dependence on unstable “hot money” soared as the regulatory harness the Glass-Steagall Act had wisely imposed during the Depression was totally dismantled.
Within weeks of the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy in September 2008, Washington, with Wall Street’s gun to its head, propped up the remnants of this financial mess in a panic-stricken melee of bailouts and money-printing that is the single most shameful chapter in American financial history.
There was never a remote threat of a Great Depression 2.0 or of a financial nuclear winter, contrary to the dire warnings of Ben S. Bernanke, the Fed chairman since 2006. The Great Fear — manifested by the stock market plunge when the House voted down the TARP bailout before caving and passing it — was purely another Wall Street concoction. Had President Bush and his Goldman Sachs adviser (a k a Treasury Secretary) Henry M. Paulson Jr. stood firm, the crisis would have burned out on its own and meted out to speculators the losses they so richly deserved. The Main Street banking system was never in serious jeopardy, ATMs were not going dark and the money market industry was not imploding.
Instead, the White House, Congress and the Fed, under Mr. Bush and then President Obama, made a series of desperate, reckless maneuvers that were not only unnecessary but ruinous. The auto bailouts, for example, simply shifted jobs around — particularly to the aging, electorally vital Rust Belt — rather than saving them. The “green energy” component of Mr. Obama’s stimulus was mainly a nearly $1 billion giveaway to crony capitalists, like the venture capitalist John Doerr and the self-proclaimed outer-space visionary Elon Musk, to make new toys for the affluent.
Less than 5 percent of the $800 billion Obama stimulus went to the truly needy for food stamps, earned-income tax credits and other forms of poverty relief. The preponderant share ended up in money dumps to state and local governments, pork-barrel infrastructure projects, business tax loopholes and indiscriminate middle-class tax cuts. The Democratic Keynesians, as intellectually bankrupt as their Republican counterparts (though less hypocritical), had no solution beyond handing out borrowed money to consumers, hoping they would buy a lawn mower, a flat-screen TV or, at least, dinner at Red Lobster.
But even Mr. Obama’s hopelessly glib policies could not match the audacity of the Fed, which dropped interest rates to zero and then digitally printed new money at the astounding rate of $600 million per hour. Fast-money speculators have been “purchasing” giant piles of Treasury debt and mortgage-backed securities, almost entirely by using short-term overnight money borrowed at essentially zero cost, thanks to the Fed. Uncle Ben has lined their pockets.
If and when the Fed — which now promises to get unemployment below 6.5 percent as long as inflation doesn’t exceed 2.5 percent — even hints at shrinking its balance sheet, it will elicit a tidal wave of sell orders, because even a modest drop in bond prices would destroy the arbitrageurs’ profits. Notwithstanding Mr. Bernanke’s assurances about eventually, gradually making a smooth exit, the Fed is domiciled in a monetary prison of its own making.
While the Fed fiddles, Congress burns. Self-titled fiscal hawks like Paul D. Ryan, the chairman of the House Budget Committee, are terrified of telling the truth: that the 10-year deficit is actually $15 trillion to $20 trillion, far larger than the Congressional Budget Office’s estimate of $7 trillion. Its latest forecast, which imagines 16.4 million new jobs in the next decade, compared with only 2.5 million in the last 10 years, is only one of the more extreme examples of Washington’s delusions.
Even a supposedly “bold” measure — linking the cost-of-living adjustment for Social Security payments to a different kind of inflation index — would save just $200 billion over a decade, amounting to hardly 1 percent of the problem. Mr. Ryan’s latest budget shamelessly gives Social Security and Medicare a 10-year pass, notwithstanding that a fair portion of their nearly $19 trillion cost over that decade would go to the affluent elderly. At the same time, his proposal for draconian 30 percent cuts over a decade on the $7 trillion safety net — Medicaid, food stamps and the earned-income tax credit — is another front in the G.O.P.’s war against the 99 percent.
Without any changes, over the next decade or so, the gross federal debt, now nearly $17 trillion, will hurtle toward $30 trillion and soar to 150 percent of gross domestic product from around 105 percent today. Since our constitutional stasis rules out any prospect of a “grand bargain,” the nation’s fiscal collapse will play out incrementally, like a Greek/Cypriot tragedy, in carefully choreographed crises over debt ceilings, continuing resolutions and temporary budgetary patches.
The future is bleak. The greatest construction boom in recorded history — China’s money dump on infrastructure over the last 15 years — is slowing. Brazil, India, Russia, Turkey, South Africa and all the other growing middle-income nations cannot make up for the shortfall in demand. The American machinery of monetary and fiscal stimulus has reached its limits. Japan is sinking into old-age bankruptcy and Europe into welfare-state senescence. The new rulers enthroned in Beijing last year know that after two decades of wild lending, speculation and building, even they will face a day of reckoning, too.
Indebtedness Dwarfs the Economy
MULTIMEDIA FEATURE: A Gallery of Economic Villains and Heroes
A gallery of “heroes” who championed sound money and fiscal rectitude and “villains” who led the United States down the path of insolvency.
THE state-wreck ahead is a far cry from the “Great Moderation” proclaimed in 2004 by Mr. Bernanke, who predicted that prosperity would be everlasting because the Fed had tamed the business cycle and, as late as March 2007, testified that the impact of the subprime meltdown “seems likely to be contained.” Instead of moderation, what’s at hand is a Great Deformation, arising from a rogue central bank that has abetted the Wall Street casino, crucified savers on a cross of zero interest rates and fueled a global commodity bubble that erodes Main Street living standards through rising food and energy prices — a form of inflation that the Fed fecklessly disregards in calculating inflation.
These policies have brought America to an end-stage metastasis. The way out would be so radical it can’t happen. It would necessitate a sweeping divorce of the state and the market economy. It would require a renunciation of crony capitalism and its first cousin: Keynesian economics in all its forms. The state would need to get out of the business of imperial hubris, economic uplift and social insurance and shift its focus to managing and financing an effective, affordable, means-tested safety net.
All this would require drastic deflation of the realm of politics and the abolition of incumbency itself, because the machinery of the state and the machinery of re-election have become conterminous. Prying them apart would entail sweeping constitutional surgery: amendments to give the president and members of Congress a single six-year term, with no re-election; providing 100 percent public financing for candidates; strictly limiting the duration of campaigns (say, to eight weeks); and prohibiting, for life, lobbying by anyone who has been on a legislative or executive payroll. It would also require overturning Citizens United and mandating that Congress pass a balanced budget, or face an automatic sequester of spending.
It would also require purging the corrosive financialization that has turned the economy into a giant casino since the 1970s. This would mean putting the great Wall Street banks out in the cold to compete as at-risk free enterprises, without access to cheap Fed loans or deposit insurance. Banks would be able to take deposits and make commercial loans, but be banned from trading, underwriting and money management in all its forms.
It would require, finally, benching the Fed’s central planners, and restoring the central bank’s original mission: to provide liquidity in times of crisis but never to buy government debt or try to micromanage the economy. Getting the Fed out of the financial markets is the only way to put free markets and genuine wealth creation back into capitalism.
That, of course, will never happen because there are trillions of dollars of assets, from Shanghai skyscrapers to Fortune 1000 stocks to the latest housing market “recovery,” artificially propped up by the Fed’s interest-rate repression. The United States is broke — fiscally, morally, intellectually — and the Fed has incited a global currency war (Japan just signed up, the Brazilians and Chinese are angry, and the German-dominated euro zone is crumbling) that will soon overwhelm it. When the latest bubble pops, there will be nothing to stop the collapse. If this sounds like advice to get out of the markets and hide out in cash, it is.
David A. Stockman is a former Republican congressman from Michigan, President Ronald Reagan’s budget director from 1981to 1985 and the author, most recently, of “The Great Deformation: The Corruption of Capitalism in America.”
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February 25th, 2013 by olddog
http://www.thedailybell.com/28742/Anthony-Wile-And-the-Antidote-to-the-Great-Fiscal-and-Monetary-Crisis-Is
By Anthony Wile
"Fiscal trouble ahead for most future retirees." Or so the Washington Post tells us in a recent column explaining why future retirees (Baby Boomers) are headed for considerable trouble. Grim reading, actually.
For the first time since the New Deal, a majority of Americans are headed toward a retirement in which they will be financially worse off than their parents, jeopardizing a long era of improved living standards for the nation's elderly, according to a growing consensus of new research.
This is worth commenting on because it only illustrates a larger point we've made a number of times: The system is broken and if you listen to mainstream financial advice you're going to end up homeless on a soup line hoping for dinner.
What is pernicious about articles like this one, in my humble view, is that they purport to be telling the truth but don't provide either context or historical accuracy. Here's more from the Post article:
The Great Recession and the weak recovery darkened the retirement picture for significant numbers of Americans. And the full extent of the damage is only now being grasped by experts and policymakers. There was already mounting concern for the long-term security of the country's rapidly graying population. Then the downturn destroyed 40 percent of Americans' personal wealth, while creating a long period of high unemployment and an environment in which savings accounts pay almost no interest. Although the surging stock market is approaching record highs, most of these gains are flowing to well-off Americans who already are in relatively good shape for retirement.
Liberal and conservative economists worry that the decline in retirement prospects marks a historic shift in a country that previously has fostered generations of improvement in the lives of the elderly. It is likely to have far-reaching implications, as an increasing number of retirees may be forced to double up with younger relatives or turn to social-service programs for support. "This is the first time that Americans are going to be relatively worse off than their parents or grandparents in old age," said Teresa Ghilarducci, director of the Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis at the New School for Social Research.
Advocates for older Americans are calling on the federal government to bolster Social Security benefits or to create a new layer of retirement help for future retirees. Others want employers and the government to do more to encourage retirement savings and to discourage workers from using the money for non-retirement purposes.
But those calls have been overwhelmed by concern about the nation's fast-growing long-term debt, which has left many policy-makers focused on ways to trim Social Security and other retirement benefits rather than increase them. The economic downturn exacerbated long-term factors that were already eroding the financial standing of aging Americans: an inexorable rise in health-care costs, growing debt among older Americans and a shift in responsibility from employers to workers to plan for retirement.
The article never explains the "Great Recession" but merely asserts it – like a fact of life. We are supposed to accept that these things occur without searching for the cause. But those who don't understand history are doomed to repeat it.
There were, of course, those who understood quite clearly what was about to happen. They did their best to warn us but the powers-that-be (and general population) remained complacent. Late in 2007, things took a turn for the worse. The economy began to crash and by 2008 the devastation had spread to the rest of the world and the "sovereign" debt crisis had begun to afflict Europe.
In Greece, Spain, Portugal – most of Southern and Eastern Europe – retirements have been reduced or have evaporated entirely as a result of the "Great Recession." In the US, tens of millions lost 50 percent of their life savings or more in the ongoing crashes of 2007 and 2008. And today, tens of millions more don't have anything else to lose.
While once children could have supported their aged parents, the current crisis has reduced the employment prospects for young people in much of Europe to nearly nil. None of this was expected by those involved but a lot of it was predicted by those who understood monetary history and were aware of its goals.
One can argue, of course, that this was part of a larger Money Power strategy to create a fiat dollar – and shove the world toward a single currency. If so, then the rest of the West's (especially the US's) monetary history makes a lot of sense. Sovereign overspending was utilized to generate the justification for a deal with Japan. Japan would buy US treasuries and US consumers would purchase Japanese products.
This elevated some Japanese companies to world class status and also made Japan a more consumerist and Westernized society. The same sort of thing happened in China in the later 1990s and 2000s. Africa is apparently next on the list to be consolidated. In each instance, a case is made for the transformative effects of capitalism but unfortunately, it is not capitalism that is being created but a kind corporatist mercantilism.
The Washington Post article seems to yearn for the past, when government programs were seen as helpful and effective. Here's the important graf:
The precarious situation comes after a long period of change that improved life for the nation's seniors starting with the enactment of Social Security in 1935. By the 1960s, retirees also benefitted from universal health insurance through Medicare and Medicaid, sharp increases in Social Security benefits and new protections enacted by the federal government for workers who received traditional pensions, which for decades were a standard employee benefit. The changes rescued millions of retirees from poverty, while lifting millions of others to prosperous retirements symbolized by vacation cruises, recreational vehicles and second homes. But now problems for future retirees seem to be closing in from all sides.
You see? This is a sentiment that is beyond simplistic. It is dangerous. The more that people put their trust – and financial health – into the proverbial hands of the state, the more apt they are to end up without the security they've counted on. We can see this today. It is not a hypothesis but a reality.
Historically speaking, modern corporatist states are not run for citizens' benefit. The concern that is expressed, the dialogue that is being presented every day, are merely distractions. Think of how many billions of words have been written about Western retirements, how to save for the future and how to invest in a profitable way. Despite all that has been talked about, written and otherwise presented, the current system is wrecked and people's prospects are getting worse not better.
Lately, I've noticed an uptick in people's positive emotional response to the markets and the economy. But the same misinformation and economic manipulation that occurred before is occurring now. Central banks have dumped tens of trillions into the larger marketplace and when that money begins to circulate rates will have to be raised and recoveries, such as they are, will be cut short. The dollar reserve system itself must be seen as in a kind of terminal decline as well. Sorry, folks.
Let price inflation move up even a little, and the carrying costs of US debt will likely become insupportable. These trends simply aren't being explained on a regular basis. Instead, we get alarmed articles about how a US "savings deficit" has to yield to targeted, government oriented financial programs. Alternatively, we get widely publicized policy battles about deficit reduction and continued and expanded "austerity." But neither government programs nor austerity will help salvage the larger economy, in my opinion.
Here's the good news, though: You don't have to worry about it.
There are practical steps you can take to help yourself. Some of them you'll find right within the pages of this website, TheDailyBell.com. Don't wait for government. Don't keep hoping that bureaucratic "wonkery" will come to the rescue. Recognize you have to do it yourself.
There are, of course, certain kinds of equity opportunities that you can invest in – if you can find a trusted advisor. And there are – or should be – steps you can take to move some of your holdings offshore and into precious metals or even real estate. There are plenty of other positive steps you can take on your own and within your community to ensure your and your family's safety.
We are still being taught to look toward government for the solution to our private retirement dilemmas and general prosperity. The last century should have taught us that this is a chimera – what we like to call a dominant social theme – that government and public spending are a substitute for individual responsibility.
Unfortunately, no matter how many articles are written, or how much is broadcast, reality doesn't change. The person responsible for you is … you. And if you are to have a good and hopefully prosperous life, you will have to take action to make it so.
OLDDOGS COMMENTS
What can I say when I cannot convince my children, or my wife, that every dollar you can spare must go into silver. Either bars and coins or coins only depending on the amount of your funds. Gold is a good place for savvy investors but the average blue collar worker with three or four hundred thousand saved and invested, is at a disadvantage over how and when to buy and sell. Also, every middle class investor has been brain washed into looking for return on investment. In good times that is the way to go, but this is a time for preserving your assets, not increasing them. The powers that be, are manipulating both metals as much as they can, but silver has always been the commodity that carried through to the end. Gold, by its very nature is more attractive to the powers that be, and will continue to fluctuate violently before the bankers lose control of it. Silver by contrast is the poor investor’s salvation, as it has always been the most stable in the long run of any commodity. Don’t take my word for it, as there are hundreds of knowledgeable advisers on the net. Sort them out according to common sense and put your money in silver before you lose it all. Paper investments are going to be toilet paper investments before this is over.
Right now, anyone who has stocked up on ammunition is making a killing, but the days of buying it cheap and in quantity are long gone. Ditto for most other necessities of life. Those who have waited have lost the chance to survive and prosper. If you take any of this advise to heart, make this your highest concern, If you don’t have it, you don’t own it. Take possession of your silver and protect it with your life. Stay away from paper instruments. They are paper dollars in disguise.
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January 28th, 2013 by olddog
http://www.newswithviews.com/Vieira/edwin254.htm
By Dr. Edwin Vieira, Jr., Ph.D., J.D.
December 17, 2012
NewsWithViews.com
Well, Ladies and Gentlemen in the ethereal realm, once again another natural disaster—Hurricane Sandy in this case—has exposed the insouciance, ineptitude, and incompetence of America’s incestuously inbred political class. Not only have these worthies and their minions in all of the self-aggrandizing “homeland-security agencies” proven quite unprepared to protect Americans from the effects of the storm in an adequate and timely manner; but also over the years they have even actively discouraged common Americans from taking the steps to protect themselves that should have been obvious to anyone with an IQ higher than his age. And if a mere hurricane—a type of natural disaster with which Americans have long had experience—striking just one part of this country overtaxes the skills of these “homeland-security experts”, what will transpire when the monetary and banking systems collapse throughout the land?
The answer to this question is, of course, that unmitigated chaos will reign supreme, particularly in urban areas.
The way to deal with that problem is, however, not to blabber about how supposedly “this country is finished” (as all too many disconsolate patriots do)—or to propose such desperate expedients as “secession”, which will not by itself guarantee preparedness, and the possible success of which depends in the first instance upon the most heightened form of preparedness. Rather, the correct recourse is to start revitalizing “the Militia of the several States”, State by State, immediately if not sooner. In which event, this country will be preserved, and appeals to “secession” (and other pie-in-the-sky political panaceas) will be recognized as unnecessary.
As readers of my columns are well aware, I have been urging revitalization of the Militia for many years—and, each and every year, some new catastrophes wrought by Nature or outrages perpetrated by rogue public officials have proven the wisdom of, and the increasingly urgent need for taking, that course of action.
The American people, however, cannot be expected to do what they are not equipped to do. How can Americans revitalize their Militia, when they know next to nothing about the Militia? Well, everyone is familiar with the old saying: “Give a man a fish, and you feed him for that one day. Teach a man to fish, and he can feed himself every day thereafter.” In the spirit of that homespun advice, I have completed a definitive study, entitled The Sword and Sovereignty: The Constitutional Principles of “the Militia of the several States”, which should provide every reader with all of the information requisite to understand the origin of the Militia, their special place under the Declaration of Independence and within the Constitution’s federal system, and why (as the Second Amendment declares) they are “necessary to the security of a free State”. Not optional, but necessary.
Among other topics covered in its 1,944 pages of text, The Sword and Sovereignty explains:
• how the Militia would serve as the ultimate embodiments and instruments of WE THE PEOPLE’S authority under the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution;
• how the Militia would enable to States to enforce federalism through constitutional interposition against rogue agents of the General Government;
• how the Militia would enable a patriotic President of the United States to fulfill his constitutional duty to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed” against those combinations that now threaten this country’s independence and well-being, but are too powerful to be suppressed through the normal course of honest judicial proceedings;
• how the Militia would expose and punish usurpations of power and mal-administration by rogue and incompetent public officials at every level of the federal system;
• how the Militia would provide the indispensable “checks and balances” against a rogue “standing army” and “military-industrial complex”;
• how the Militia would eliminate all “gun control” that did not specifically promote “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms”;
• how the Militia would put a stop to the present-day rampages of police brutality once and for all, in the most swift, sure, and severe manner possible;
• how the Militia would guarantee the conduct of honest elections; and, last but not least,
• how the Militia would establish in the most expeditious fashion an economically sound and constitutional alternative currency and structure of new free-market prices in anticipation of the inevitable collapse of the Federal Reserve System’s fascistic banking cartel.
Time being of the essence, and the costs of printing a first-quality book of this size being what they are, I have arranged for an electronic version of The Sword and Sovereignty to be produced on a CD. The disk contains the full 2,304 pages of introductory material, text, authorities cited in the footnotes, and endnotes in PDF format accessible with Adobe Reader 6.0 (or some later version). This presentation allows for use of the standard PDF search feature, which many people have suggested would be desirable.
The Sword and Sovereignty is now available exclusively through amazon.com.
© 2012 Edwin Vieira, Jr. – All Rights Reserved
Edwin Vieira, Jr., holds four degrees from Harvard: A.B. (Harvard College), A.M. and Ph.D. (Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences), and J.D. (Harvard Law School).
For more than thirty years he has practiced law, with emphasis on constitutional issues. In the Supreme Court of the United States he successfully argued or briefed the cases leading to the landmark decisions Abood v. Detroit Board of Education, Chicago Teachers Union v. Hudson, and Communications Workers of America v. Beck, which established constitutional and statutory limitations on the uses to which labor unions, in both the private and the public sectors, may apply fees extracted from nonunion workers as a condition of their employment.
He has written numerous monographs and articles in scholarly journals, and lectured throughout the county. His most recent work on money and banking is the two-volumePieces of Eight: The Monetary Powers and Disabilities of the United States Constitution (2002), the most comprehensive study in existence of American monetary law and history viewed from a constitutional perspective.www.piecesofeight.us
He is also the co-author (under a nom de plume) of the political novel CRA$HMAKER: A Federal Affaire (2000), a not-so-fictional story of an engineered crash of the Federal Reserve System, and the political upheaval it causes.www.crashmaker.com
His latest book is: "How To Dethrone the Imperial Judiciary" … and Constitutional "Homeland Security," Volume One, The Nation in Arms…
He can be reached at his new address:
52 Stonegate Court
Front Royal, VA 22630.
OLDDOGS COMMENTS
Buy a copy or two of this PDF book, study it and give a copy to your local sheriff. It will be the smartest thing you can do to help save our country.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Sword-Sovereignty-Constitutional-Principles/dp/0967175941/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1355723460&sr=8-1&keywords=The%2BSword%2Band%2BSovereignty%2BCD
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January 25th, 2013 by olddog
http://www.newyorkdailysun.com/only-
rebellion-can-save-america/1490
Written by Lawrence Sellin
The US federal government has strayed so far from the Constitution and the rule of law that it can now be considered rogue and illegitimate.
The thoroughly irresponsible rate of government spending projected over the next twenty-five years will drive federal debt to unsustainable levels. The country is heading for a financial meltdown and economic ruin.
The Republican Party is inept and impotent and cannot provide the necessary political opposition to the crimes and unconstitutional policies of the Obama regime or stand against the rampant voter fraud which is now polluting the electoral process. There is a report claiming that the Republican Party signed a legal agreement with the Democrat Party in 1982 not to pursue suspected vote fraud. If there is no guarantee of election integrity, then elections become only window dressing for tyranny.
Barack Obama is an illegal President and unindicted felon. Congress, the American media and the courts are engaged in a criminal conspiracy to conceal their complicity in perpetrating the Obama fraud on the American people. Law enforcement and our elected officials have chosen to risk the survival of the country rather than risk the truth.
According to recent reports, Obama continues to use a Social Security Number (SSN) not issued to him, in the process, committing numerous counts of social security fraud. The SSN Obama uses, issued in Connecticut, a state where he never lived, does not pass a check with E-Verify, the electronic system the U.S. Citizenship and Immigrations Services of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has created to verify whether or not prospective employees have the required authorization to work legally in the United States. It appears that the SSN Obama uses, was actually issued to a Harrison J. Bounel, born in 1890. Once issued, a SSN is never reissued to another individual. Why isn’t any of that evidence investigated? It is because Barack Obama is protected by a dishonest media and criminally complicit federal officials and, unlike ordinary Americans, he is above the law.
The US no longer has representative government. Members of Congress seek election not to uphold the Constitution and serve the American people, but to obtain power and to use that power to accrue professional and financial benefits for themselves and their major supporters. All the traditional means for the American people to seek the redress of grievances have now been blocked by a corrupt government composed of a self-absorbed permanent political elite unaccountable to the people.
The status quo is no longer defensible. Unless there is a significant reversal soon, it is only a matter of time that a catastrophe will be upon us, which will inevitably lead to national collapse and fragmentation.
All unconstitutional and unlawful policies of the Obama regime must be opposed, obstructed and undermined. The Democrat Party and their radical left-wing supporters must be aggressively and continuously confronted. The Republican Party must be defunded and its leadership replaced. The purveyors of disinformation and propaganda represented by most of the mainstream media must be professionally destroyed.
A county by county battle is the means by which the American people can restore the Constitution, establish responsible fiscal policies and take back control of the political process and the government. Patriots need to organize locally outside of the party apparatus to exert political pressure and prepare for armed defense, if necessary. No county officials, in particular the Sheriff, should be elected or maintained in office, who do not fully honor their oath to support and defend the Constitution.
Fundamental to this effort are the rights guaranteed under the Second Amendment. Each county should establish elements of an organized and disciplined Constitutional Army with sufficient arms and ammunition to maintain a status of independence and individual liberty from anyone who might attempt to abuse them.
It is indeed ironic that the Mexican border made maximally porous by the Obama regime may become the route of choice for weapon and ammunition resupply, a Fast and Furious in reverse, capable of making gun control about as successful as the national prohibition of alcohol (1920-33), another failed “noble experiment” undertaken to reduce crime and solve social problems.
Efforts should be directed towards decreasing the influence of the federal government in county affairs, cooperating with federal officials and agencies only when it benefits local citizens. Counties should maximize the consumption of federal resources and overburdening federal agencies administratively while at the same time reducing or delaying taxes paid to the federal government. County residents should forcefully shun, oppose or drive out of business, individuals or media outlets, which support the criminal Obama regime.
“Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did, and it never will. Find out just what people will submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue until they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.” — Frederick Douglass, August 4, 1857.
Author Bio
Lawrence Sellin, Ph.D. is a retired colonel with 29 years of service in the US Army Reserve and a veteran of Afghanistan and Iraq. Colonel Sellin is the author of “Afghanistan and the Culture of Military Leadership“. He receives email at lawrence.sellin@gmail.com.
OLDDOGS COMMENTS
HOORAY FOR SELLIN!
NOW WE KNOW THERE IS AT LEAST ONE COURAGEOUS MAN LEFT IN AMERICA.
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January 22nd, 2013 by olddog
http://lewrockwell.com/orig6/anderson-r7.1.1.html
Recently by Robert Anderson: What Will the Doctors Do?
by Robert Anderson
Silence rarely conveys knowledge, especially when it’s the result of intimidation. There are moments when it’s prudent to remain silent, but hardly when you’re in the midst of a gun ownership debate. The political classes, and its anti-gun proponents, are today engaged in a massive legal assault on citizen gun ownership through regulation and/or abolition. Their arguments are well known and much has been written on the subject, both in favor and in opposition to the idea.
Unfortunately, silence due to "political correctness" is hampering a frank and honest discussion of the fundamental issue of citizen gun ownership. While gun ownership for personal protection or sporting uses are being heatedly defended, these are only secondary considerations to the more critical concern over citizen ownership of guns. The preeminent and fundamental case for gun ownership by citizens is to secure and preserve the means for individuals to safeguard their lives and property from a potentially threatening oppressive government.
Of course this tends to sound paranoid, for after all, most citizens today view our government as a responsive political institution, primarily engaged in helping its citizens to secure a better quality of life. Such common sentiments about one’s government are not new. Even the Germans shared such a view of their own government at the beginning of the 20th century. So, to express concerns today that our politicians and bureaucrats could someday turn against their own citizens and inflict violent harm upon them is harshly condemned by many as being ludicrous.
After all, many politicians and anti-gun proponents today are convinced no democratic government could ever become so oppressive and dictatorial, certainly not our own. But what we believe and what may prove true are not always the same. We know the face of the future is forever veiled by the hand of God and none of us can ever know with certainty where we’re headed. But acquiring an understanding of the past is another matter, and we’d all be wise to heed it. Too often the past is prologue to the future so it’s always prudent to remind ourselves of Edmund Burke’s famous line, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." And it’s equally important to remind ourselves that the essence of government is a sovereign power with a monopoly over initiating force upon others, a coercive power which has become deadly and violent many times throughout the ages.
For anti-gun proponents to ignore the ravages of 20th century history and believe today’s citizens should be denied the means to protect themselves from the risk of future oppressive tyranny is both dangerous and foolhardy. Have we forgotten how Germany, Russia, and China disarmed their citizens in the 20th century, and shortly thereafter their governments slaughtered tens of millions of their own citizens? Have we forgotten the "killing fields" of Cambodia where disarmed citizens were slaughtered close to annihilation in the 1970’s by their own government? Those slaughtered were the helpless victims of their well-intentioned citizen ancestors who acquiesced to government mandated gun control.
Of course, today’s anti-gun proponents and their political allies will argue, those places were all different and such horrors could never happen in our country, so why do our citizens need to own guns? Indeed, citizens may not need guns to secure their lives and property from our government today, but can anyone argue with certainty that future citizens will never need guns for that purpose? After all, today’s anti-gun proponents are essentially betting on the lives of future citizens, and while making such a costless bet among themselves, do so by placing a deadly bet on the lives of future citizens, should their bet today prove horribly wrong tomorrow!
Every decision imposes costs in our imperfect world, and the issue of citizens owning guns is no exception. We all know gun ownership will surely bring some harm as long as evil and ignorance remain a part of the human condition. Without question, guns will continue to be used in many gruesome and horrible murders by deranged and evil people. But peaceful citizens must have the means to protect themselves from not only the isolated acts of criminals but also from an oppressive government tomorrow with the capacity for evil mass murder. These threats far outweigh any perceived "benefit" from permitting an intrusive government to disarm its citizens today. Such a threatened act, at the very least, would transform future citizens into helpless victims, should an evil authoritarian government someday try to subdue them.
Citizen gun ownership is ultimately a form of "insurance" for a future, unknowable risk. Switzerland, as well as our own country, has acknowledged and practiced this form of "insurance" for a long time. We all know gun ownership by citizens can impose heavy costs, but they are costs dwarfed by the greater horror of millions of future citizens being denied any means to defend themselves against an evil government slaughtering them with impunity.
We would like to believe such a future scenario unimaginable, but we know it’s not, as our violent 20th century history has tragically reminded us. Governments murdering millions of their own citizens have inflicted monstrous horrors in our lifetimes, and there is nothing in the history of the human experience to give absolute assurance it will not happen again. The drafters of our Constitution understood this, and hopefully today’s citizens will remember it, even though mentioning such a horror makes people uncomfortable, a reaction usually encountered when discussing unpleasant truths.
Finally, there are few instances in a citizen’s relationship with government where non-intervention in their personal affairs is more vital than with gun ownership. The Second Amendment was established as a safeguard for citizens, should the government they created ever become evil and oppressive, to have an effective means to defend themselves against that government. With that thought in mind, what would be more devastating than for a future evil government to possess individual records on every citizen who owns a gun, what kind of guns they own, and where he lives? Draw your own conclusions: Is it either prudent or wise to surrender individual gun ownership information to any government today which could become your evil oppressor tomorrow? Can’t happen? Tell it to the Germans and Russians a century ago!
January 14, 2013
OLDDOGS COMMENTS
IF YOU’RE NOT
AFRAID
OF OUR FEDERAL
GOVERNMENT
IT’S BECAUSE
YOU’RE STUPID!
Obama only wants military leaders
who will fire on U.S. citizens
http://fromthetrenchesworldreport.com/shock-
claim-obama-only-wants-military-leaders-who-
will-fire-on-u-s-citizens/32343/
Examiner – by Dave Gibson
On Monday, renowned author and humanitarian Dr. Jim Garrow made a shocking claim about what we can expect to see in Obama’s second term.
Garrow made the following Facebook post:
I have just been informed by a former senior military leader that Obama is using a new “litmus test” in determining who will stay and who must go in his military leaders. Get ready to explode folks. “The new litmus test of leadership in the military is if they will fire on US citizens or not.” Those who will not are being removed.
So, who is the source?
Garrow replied: “The man who told me this is one of America’s foremost military heroes.”
Understand, this is not coming from Alex Jones or Jesse Ventura, or from anyone else the left often dismisses with great ease.
Garrow is a well-respected activist and has spent much of his life rescuing infant girls from China, babies who would be killed under that country’s one-child policy. He was also nominated for Nobel Peace Prize for his work.
His bio on Amazon.com reads:
Dr. James Garrow is the author of The Pink Pagoda: One Man’s Quest to End Gendercide in China. He has spent over $25 million over the past sixteen years rescuing an estimated 40,000 baby Chinese girls from near-certain death under China’s one-child-per-couple policy by facilitating international adoptions. He is the founder and executive director of the Bethune Institute’s Pink Pagoda schools, private English-immersion schools for Chinese children. Today he runs 168 schools with nearly 6,300 employees.
This comes on the heels of Sunday’s report in the Washington Free Beacon (WFB) that the head of Central Command, Marine Corps Gen. James Mattis is being dismissed by Obama and will leave his post in March.
The WFB article states:
“Word on the national security street is that General James Mattis is being given the bum’s rush out of his job as commander of Central Command, and is being told to vacate his office several months earlier than planned.”
Did Gen. Mattis refuse to “fire on U.S. citizens?”
http://www.examiner.com/article/shock-claim-obama
-only-wants-military-leaders-who-will-fire-on-u-s-
citizens?cid=db_articles
Thanks to TransAm for this article.
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January 4th, 2013 by olddog
http://speaklibertynow.com/2012/12/30/declaration-independence/
When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and/or of nature’s God(s) entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
The federal government headquartered in Washington, DC, having promised to the several states that, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances,” hath reneged on this vow. Several religions are banned, (1) multiple channels of the press eradicated, (2) and protest rights have been trampled upon. (3)
That federal government, having promised, “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed,” hath infringed on the right of the people to keep and bear arms. (4) In this manner, that federal government not only infringes on the regulations set forth by the second constitutional amendment, it secures that its militia feels little need to be regulated by the other amendments.
That federal government, having promised, “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or Affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized,” hath, unwarranted, infringed on the security of our papers. (5)
That federal government, having promised, “No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation,” hath compelled those suspected of crimes to bear witness against themselves (6) (7). It hath deprived the citizens of these several states of lives, liberty, and property without the due process of law. (8) (9) It hath taken private property for public use without just compensation. (10)
That federal government, having promised, “In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence,” hath denied the right to trial by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed in matters concerning income taxation. (11)
That federal government, having promised, “In Suits at common law, where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars, the right of trial by jury shall be preserved, and no fact tried by a jury, shall be otherwise re-examined in any Court of the United States, than according to the rules of the common law,” hath denied this due process. (12)
That federal government, having promised, “Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted,” hath imposed excessive fines (13) and cruel and unusual punishments. (14)
We, therefore, the representatives of [insert your state here], in general congress, assembled, appealing to the rule of natural law for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the name, and by authority of the good people of [insert your state here], solemnly publish and declare, that [insert your state here] of right ought to be a free and independent state; that it is absolved from all allegiance to the federal government in Washington, DC, and that all political connection between them and the federal government in Washington, DC, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as a free and independent state, it has the full power to levy war, conclude peace, contract alliances, establish commerce, and to do all other acts and things which independent states may of right do.
OLDDOGS COMMENTS
I pray that it does not need be said, this document needs to be forwarded to your State Representatives for them to complete, sign, and present to the Federal Government, as the Constitution is a contract with the States and not with the general population of America. The results will surely convince you that a revolution is our only choice, and State Secession the outcome.
(1) http://academiccommons.columbia.edu/catalog/ac:137583
(2) http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-20023918-93.html
(3) http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/06/honoring-americas-veterans-act-obama_n_1748454.html
(4) http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=29197
(5) http://www.aclu.org/blog/national-security/video-nsa-whistleblower-explains-how-us-government-spying-every-single
(6) http://blogs.findlaw.com/technologist/2012/01/judge-orders-woman-to-decrypt-laptop-finds-no-5th-amendment-issue.html
(7) http://www.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2011/08/19/11-55712.pdf
(8) http://scholarship.law.campbell.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1325&context=clr
(9) http://www.salon.com/2011/10/20/the_killing_of_awlakis_16_year_old_son/
(10) http://scholarship.law.duke.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1072&context=delpf
(11) http://www.cato.org/pubs/tbb/tbb-0204-2.html
(12) http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20111208/08225217010/breaking-news-feds-falsely-censor-popular-blog-over-year-deny-all-due-process-hide-all-details.shtml
(13) http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/10/business/energy-environment/companies-face-fines-for-not-using-unavailable-biofuel.html?_r=2&nl=todaysheadlines&adxnnl=1&emc=tha25&adxnnlx=1356896321-/euT09nPoa0bGXDwG9Pm5Q
(14) http://www.aclu.org/human-rights/mother-american-torture-victim-jose-padilla-brings-case-international-human-rights
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January 1st, 2013 by olddog
01 01 13 A TERRIFYING VISION OF AMERICA
The Coming Terror and A Power to Change the World
http://www.newswithviews.com/McGuire/paul154.htm
Paul McGuire
The year 2013 is going to bring unprecedented social anarchy, riots, food shortages, more mass shootings, political upheaval, economic crisis and a radical transformation of our nation. As the late Dr. Francis Schaeffer said, about thirty years ago, “An authoritarian government either from the right or left will rise to manage the chaos.”
Most of what we are seeing now fits the precise historical patterns of what happen in places like Nazi Germany, where Adolph Hitler murdered over seven million people in concentration camps. The German Jews, as well as the Christians were in such a state of psychological denial, that they repeatedly said, “It can’t happen here.” When they walking into the gas chambers, they insisted they were just getting a shower.
What is it that prevents people from seeing the obvious either on a personal level or a national level? There are a number of factors in this psychological process. First, self-deception and cognitive dissonance. A mother cannot bear the thought of her little daughter being molested by her husband, so she pretends not to notice the evidence. Finally she disassociates from the reality.
On a national level, many times the people, especially the youth, have been deliberately dumbed down through social engineering. They simply do not understand the historical patterns and how they repeat themselves. In addition, through social engineering they have been brainwashed into accepting a system of reality, rather than reality itself.
Finally, the science of mass mind control is used to program the people, through the media, entertainment, legal drugs, pornography, education and entertainment. Aldous Huxley, H.G.Wells and Thomas Pynchon and others wrote about this in their books like, The Shape of Things to Come, Brave New World, and Gravity’s Rainbow. The science of mass mind control came from Nimrod and the ancient occult religions of Babylon. They operated both spiritually and scientifically. Today scientific and spiritual mind control are so advanced that the average person does not know that they exist, let alone how advanced they have become. In America today the vast percentage of the population is under scientific mind control, where they have been programmed and live in a trance state. This is one of the primary reasons that they cannot see the obvious; they have been scientifically brainwashed. In addition to that, they live in denial and cognitive dissonance.
A key element in the science of occult-based mind control (all mind control is occult-based) is trauma-based programming. The mind is controlled through a series of traumatic shocks viewed on television or the Internet, experienced in the sociological environment, or through highly advanced technologies like EMF waves, subliminal programming, silent sound, microchip implants, drugs and mass occult rituals along with occult symbolism. Recent examples of this would be the Olympic Ceremony in Great Britain, which enacted a Satanic ritual, disguised as entertainment, with blatant Luciferian symbols that go back to Babylon. A large percentage of rock’n’roll concerts and performers perform occult rituals along with mind control. The Illuminati symbolism is blatant if you understand the meaning of the symbols.
Modern rock’n’roll concerts are simply mass occult worship. The ancient occult worship of occult gods like Molech consisted of the use of mind-altering drugs, hypnotic rhythms in the music, and sexual immorality, which were designed to summon their gods or various entities. Everything we just discussed not only programs people through occult-based programming, but acts as a powerful mechanism for mass mind control. Since the fundamental consciousness of people has been altered, they live in hypnotic and trance states, doing what they have been conditioned to do.
In addition, all of this produces spiritual deception through false messiahs and false teachers, which the Apostle Paul warned about when he referred to the Great Delusion and the Apostasy in the last days. According to the Biblical view, the world is quickly heading towards a one world government, a one world economic system, and a one world religion that is headed up by two beasts, the Antichrist and the False Prophet.
It is not an accident that Sir Francis Bacon, a Rosicrucian, planned for America to be the center of a new world order and a “New Atlantis” before America was settled. The Rosicrucian occult movement has its roots in the occult religions of ancient Babylon. The Rosicrucians became the Illuminati and it is the Illuminati who are the Satanic elite who rule the world. As I have said in numerous articles, the Illuminati pyramid on the back of the U.S. dollar is a template or occult blueprint for what is coming soon. The eagle which is really the occult bird, the Phoenix, is a symbol of the new world order rising from the ashes of chaos. The Illuminati slogan is, “Order Out of Chaos.” The rock’n’roll band, Led Zepellin, sang their famous lyrics, “Is the new world rising, from the shambles of the old?”
All of the chaos we see in our society is essentially manufactured. It is designed to lead us into the new world order. The dollar is deliberately being devalued in order to bring in a new world currency called the “Phoenix.” The occult-based elite hope to do this by 2018.
So the question is after reading this, “What can you do about it?” The person under mind control automatically says, “nothing.” But the spirit that God placed in man and the Spirit of God itself says “All things are possible.” God knew before the beginning of time about the chaos that is happening now. He downloaded into the human consciousness everything that is needed to overcome the spiritual darkness. God knew before the beginning of time that you would be here for such a time as this.
That means you came into this world to fulfill a purpose and that purpose is not to be a slave in the occult-pyramid system. In addition you must know that He has given you the opportunity to use Hispower to overcome evil. When that power is accessed by belief you then become a carrier of an energy force that is more powerful than anything in the Universe. What is called the First Great Awakening, tapped into that power and transformed America at its birth.
A Third Great Awakening is a release of cosmic energy from another dimension where the Personal God rules. Through belief and turning to Him as the Source, men and women can call down supernaturalpower from this dimension or invisible realm. In our nation today, it is scientifically possible to release what is called the dunamis, from which we get our word dynamite. When this all-powerful explosive force is released in the invisible realm, it sends a shockwave of power so strong, that entities called thekosmokratos are overwhelmed. Therefore it is possible to enter 2013, not as a victim, but as a conqueror. The choice is yours.
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December 29th, 2012 by olddog
Jim Willie is always at the top of my list of important reads. This one is exceptionally good and discusses what appears to be the new flow of the tides of fortune. I believe the U.S. dollar is being isolated – and I believe it’s one thing the egos of the high and mighty just can’t bring themselves to perceive and, thus, prepare for it. This is one of Willie’s best columns, in my opinion. Marilyn Barnewall
|
Jim Willie: The Coming Isolation of the USDollar
December 27, 2012 By The Doc
By Jim Willie, GoldenJackass.com
The typical human reaction to any infection, vermin, danger, or toxicity is to stand back, to isolate the agent, to trap it, to prevent its further spread or release, then to remove it in a safe secure way if possible using trained professionals. Eventually decisions must be made on the level of acceptable risk on the removal, like what is willing to be lost or damaged or killed in the process. Risk analysis, cost trade-offs, and minimization decisions must be evaluated and executed. The toxic agent in global trade, global banking, and global bond market is the USDollar. In 2009, the Jackass began making a certain firm point. Those nations that depart from the entire USDollar system early will be the leading nations in the next chapter, with stronger foundations, richer solvency, emerging economies, healthier financial markets, efficient credit engines, growing wealth, stronger political helm activity, and better functioning systems generally. Imagine a contaminated blood system that infects, corrupts, and destroys all interior organs from the spread of the toxin. Those nations that stick with the crumbling USDollar system stubbornly will find a horrible fate with devastating effects, rampant economic damage, broken financial markets, sputtering credit engines, tremendous loss of wealth, wrecked supply lines, poverty spreading like wildfire, ruined political structures, social disorder, isolation from the rest of the world, and a fast ticket to the Third World. That is EXACTLY what is happening in the last several months. A division has begun, as the East has been busily installing the next generation platforms, as related to trade, banking, and commercial integration.
2013 Silver Eagles As Low as $2.59 Over Spot at SDBullion!
NEW ASIAN TRADE ZONE
The division between East and West actually accelerated when the extremely ill-advised decision for Iran sanctions was made by an increasingly desperate United States Govt and its handler on the Southern Med. The division continues, matures, and develops with each passing month. It has become a story, as the Eurasia trade zone concept has been born. It has a long way to go, but Asia however has made great strides lately in unifying commerce. The climax event of the Asian trade zone conference held in Vietnam could not have been more important, as they rejected the US-led plan. The Asians partners and players even rejected the United States from the entire Asian trade zone, but did include Australia and New Zealand. The incredibly stupid naive US-led plan, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, attempted to create a trade zone with Asia which would have blocked China. Imagine the incredibly obtuse blockheaded maneuver of trying to have all of Asia not conduct facilitated trade with China, its leading trade partner. Talk about shooting both legs and genital region with a double barreled shotgun! This is the signal flare of US political stupidity that has turned highly destructive for the USEconomy and its people. Such failed leadership and counter-productive initiatives will push the US into the Third World even faster than previously thought possible. The isolation is firming quickly. Most of Asia does not wish for strong trade ties with the United States, most likely since they do not see mutual benefit. They see a ravaging appetite to grab capital.
A Paradigm Shift is taking place, and the ASEAN-China summit gave proof positive in a seminal event of the vast changes in progress. The United States just suffered its worst humiliation ever as a nation on the Eastern global stage. It was exceeded only by the humiliation for a US president personally. The story went uncovered by the lapdog inept US press. The late November Asian summit meeting held in Phnom Penh included 15 Asian nations, which represent half the world’s population. They decided to form a Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership that excludes the United States. The Asians are pushing to isolate the United States. Regard it as punishment for hegemony, or a reaction to prevent further capital drainage, or to protect from central bank abuse, or to wall off continued bond fraud export, or to defend against military aggression. Regard it as confirmation that China is the regional leader in Asia, even for military security. Regard it as a response to banker criminality, or simply for being totally full to the brim of American corruption and arrogance and abuse of position, led by creation of the USDollar as an elaborate weapon and credit card whose balance is never to be repaid. Abuse of power and sponsored financial corruption will have extreme consequences in the reshaping of global commerce and banking. The US will be isolated, so as to protect the rest of the world from its fascist exhibitions and deep manifestations.
FLUSHED NATION
The shift is in progress, and the American people have no idea what is happening. They are too pre-occupied by the agency torture of the population, urgently needed to remove guns and to create the police state. Current events are heinous and genocide on large scale and small scale. Any comments will be limited on the orchestrated travesty, travails, and tragedy. They all have one traceable element, which connects to a certain Virginia suburb where an intelligent pillbox operates in the shadows with puppet strings to the press networks and maybe Hollywood. The security agencies turned to the dark side years ago, with full devotion to narcotics, money laundering, and collusion with the castle dwellers. When the Praetorian Guard plots to bring about a police state, the only words that come to mind are disaster, disorder, mayhem, betrayal, degradation, death. Their tools are psychotropic drugs, violent training, weather altering devices, and basic sabotage. Treason is the calling card unfortunately for much of the US leadership class, whether banking, politics, economics, pharmaceuticals, or news networks. Think Syndicate, as my work has described for several years. The United States with its harsh new visa policies, molestation at airports, heavily defended borders, sponsored gun running, has shown a vicious visible visceral fascist streak that has begun to bring memories of the national socialists of Central Europe 70 and 80 years ago. They are back, stronger than ever, not having been eliminated. They were instead assimilated within the banking and security organizations, able to plant seeds which germinated with the sons in offspring. Two sons became presidents.
DEUTSCHE MARK GONE
In the 1960 and 1970 and even 1980 decades, the favorite currencies off the standardized tables of commerce were the USDollar and DeutscheMark. At one time in the Soviet Union and the Soviet Bloc of Eastern Europe, more USDollars and DMarks were in circulation than official Russian Rubles or Polish Zlotys or Hungarian Forints or whatever. Those years are long gone, as in long gone, all paper alternatives lousy. Under a strange bizarre compromise arranged to assimilate East Germany and to conceal the French sovereign debt, the Euro Monetary Union and the common Euro currency was born. It is now in the process of disintegrating. So the powerfully strong and stable German DMark went away. Back in those decades, only limited travel was done by the Jackass, confined to a honeymoon in France and Switzerland with a cold woman no longer inflicting her plague-like touch in my life. The Jackass deals exclusively in Latin currency of paper and human variety. No exposure to alternative currency held under the table was discovered in beach locations to the south or modest hotels in the green hills to the north. But friends reported stories. My older brother spent two months in Germany and Czechoslavakia, with ample stories of hoarded USDollars and DMarks. Store owners and wise families were eager to obtain USD and DM currency, even young kids. He and some ambitious friends heard stories of vast black market activity in Russia, where the US$100 bill was a favorite. In that era, Gold was not an item of pursuit or stored wealth. Times have changed radically, and Gold is the new store of value.
Times have changed with the sunset of the DMark and the toxicity of the USDollar. The people, the shop keepers, the business men, the small financial firms, they all have been turned upside down in recent years as they struggle to find a safe place to store wealth. Money has been corrupted. The purveyors of money have lost control by accelerating its supply by central banks, lost control of bank solvency, lost control of anything remotely acting like an honest tether to money itself. As a result, all those people, the shop keepers, the business men, the small financial firms, have been discovering Gold & Silver bars and coins. Their combined actions have resulted in an implicit isolation of the USDollar, even an isolation of the Southern European sovereign debt. Swiss havens have grown, in parallel with Gold havens. The toxic monetary plague has been identified, and its toxic sources too. They are the US Federal Reserve and the Euro Central Bank. They are ruining money, undermining wealth, and destabilizing the entire world related to wealth, banking, commerce, and economies. The armies of people, the shop keepers, the business men, the small financial firms, are working to isolate the USDollar as toxic agent in a demonstration of survival.
FREEDOM FROM DELUSION
Many bright people within the gold community cling to hope, harbor delusions, and maintain expectations, none of which have much value in the fast changing world of fascist entanglement and full integration. The Jackass has operated without delusions, firmly in belief that the corrupt systems would flourish. That viewpoint and operating principle has proved to be correct since 2004 when the Hat Trick Letter began to spout deeply disturbing forecasts. One after the other, most of the forecasts have indeed occurred, to the detriment of the nation and its systems and its society at large. No pleasure has come from forecasting a wrecked housing market (burdened by lax underwriting and bond fraud) or a broken insolvent banking system (from bond losses and dependent upon money laundering) or a desperate chronically USGovt budget (dragged down by adopted socialism and sacred war costs) or a spreading Southern European bond crisis (addressed only by higher subordinated toxic paper).
No pleasure is taken from seeing vast legions of struggling Americans, including a few close friends, who have lost jobs, lost homes, lost savings, lost pensions, and lost a valuable sense of security, as they continue to hang on. Many might actually find the warmth of the official camps, only to disappear later on. Argentina and Chile had their desaparecidos, and so will the United States. My ugly expectation is that before their bodies are incinerated, vital organs will be extracted for black market gains. Inoculations upon entry will assure them of good health and fully functioning organs. Later, vaccines will infect them, just like with the swine flu vaccine. By the way, in Costa Rica a brief story to enlighten on vaccines. In early 2008, the Jackass advised a couple families with numerous children and cousins in school to reject the swine flu vaccine that was promoted by the school authorities at the urging of US officials. They took my advice after their confidence was won on several other matters. Only one of about 20 children took the vaccine. She has been sick with a mysterious cerebral disease for over two years. My mention of searching for Guillain Barre symptoms has not helped. The mothers are grateful, as they did not understand at first my emotional outburst to discourage following the school advice. The official US camps will involve forced vaccines. Later on, false stories will be promulgated that the dead bodies were the result of already sick people entering the camps for quarantine purposes. In reality, the people would only have suffered from hunger and exposure and despair.
Hope is not part of my forecasts, but rather the reality of the corrupt human power game mindset. The US banking, economic, and political leaders can easily be expected to continue their corrupt games, with easy forward calls. No expectation of USGovt regulatory agencies is part of my forecasts, but rather the reality of their nearly perfect track record of big bank loyalty and fraud protection. The US regulators can easily be expected to continue their corrupt games, with easy forward calls. Clinging to precious metals mining stocks is not part of my forecasts, a decision made back in early 2008. They are bound in paper wealth, subject to inflation in share dilution just like the USDollar, vulnerable to jurisdictional confiscations, and at the mercy of labor unions whose production is increasingly halted. Unfortunately, too many fine people within the gold community, including GATA, hold firm on hope, regulators, and mining stocks. Not here! The major financial networks rely upon advertisement revenue from Wall Street, fund managers, an market exchanges. GATA has a business model that has one key vulnerability, with strong links to the mining firms. It has tainted their viewpoint sadly. My support of GATA is firm on challenge of USDollar legitimacy before the Supreme Court, on challenge of US regulators to enforce the law, on challenge of the big banks to prove their solvency, on challenge of the central bank to reveal their activity. But the Jackass does not expect the Supreme Court to ever rule the USDollar as illegal, nor the US regulators to ever enforce the law, nor the big banks to ever remove themselves from corruption, nor the central bank to ever conduct business in opposition to the biggest banks under supranational orders.
My personal background has taught me well that a corrupt system never corrects itself. Instead, it spins out of control with broken platforms, layered mechanisms to impose its servitude and influence, complete with side projects to illicitly support itself. See the theft of Iraq gold and theft of Libyan gold. Their people will never again see that wealth. The US system will remain broken until it collapses, never to be corrected until after its collapse.
The Jackass does not align with the expectation of mining stock rise. The stocks are paper wealth in a new era of paper wealth implosion, during which inflation of shares through dilution is rampant. My full expectation is for physical metal prices for Gold & Silver to rise, while mining stocks continue to fall in value from dilution and reduced metal output. The leverage is a mirage when large deposits are seized by desperate foreign governments in need of income. What on earth is complicated about understanding this point?? The leverage is a mirage when workers are the focal breakdown point for a higher cost of living. If workers cannot afford to feed their families and survive, mine output will suffer. What on earth is complicated about understanding this point?? The leverage is a mirage when rising mine operation costs must be handled, by the simple practice of share dilution. Combine with regular executive stock options, and the dilution on stock shares is huge. What on earth is complicated about understanding this point??
POWERFUL CORRUPTION INERTIA
Corruption Inertia is a principle firmly believed in when Jackass forecasts must be made. The corruption will continue with firm immutable momentum, without an external force acting as agent of change. At times, this is simple science. When colleagues introduce hope and what must be, the OFF button is engaged quickly here in my office. Their views are out of touch with reality. Corruption will persist as long as the Syndicate continues to hold power. It will remain the constant while the USDept Justice remains, while the USDept Treasury remains, while the US Regulators remain, even while the US debt rating agencies remain. They all support the current system. They are all subject to momentum pressures. Only an external force will result in change. When the USDollar is further isolated, that change will come. To expect change from the inside due to internal forces is lunatic, kind of like expecting an alcoholic to change on his own from an awakening. Al Capone was removed not from inside the Chicago crime boss conference of dons. He was brought down by external forces related to income tax. The world will similarly reject the USDollar for its tax on the system, unwanted, discarded as a toxic agent.
PROTECTION FROM THREAT TO WEALTH
Again, delusion works well when fashioning a creepy little shell of existence to protect oneself from the psychological damage of a predatory government syndicate or security agency apparatus. The Jackass mocks such defense mechanisms, since a guarantee for poverty and misery. The vast legions of Americans will soon awaken to find their jobs are hanging by threads, their wealth either vanished or converted to USTreasury Bonds by force, their liberties long gone, and their ability to seek out foreign lands for residence curtailed. In fact, one nation after another is actually banning acceptance of Americans for bank accounts. See Switzerland, Panama, and Hong Kong. The US subjects are seen as persona non grata not for their own characteristics, but for the passport they hold from the United States. The USGovt as lord acts like syndicate bullies, agents to abuse embassy privileges, with imposed extra legal paperwork like an extra burden. The isolation is not only of the United States, but of its citizens, whose business is not desired. Hence the Americans will increasingly be trapped in the US along with their money. The Jackass response to threat is not to embrace delusion, and not to seek a blanket to cover my head in the basement quarters. Instead, the response has been to head for the hills with pockets filled.
People, both clients and colleague, inquire when the Gold price will rise with vigor, when the mining stocks will rise with gusto. They remind that with all the central bank debasement of currency from Zero Interest Rate Policy and Quantitative Easing, the ultra-cheap, artificially cheap, desperate cheap money to finance USGovt debt should make the Gold price zoom upwards with each QE official announcement. My answer is quite simple. Each new QE program gives the dark forces more motivation to slam the gold price with naked shorts in sale of paper gold and paper silver. To be sure, the true value of Gold and the true value of Silver is higher, but it is not reflected in the COMEX price. That market is the epitome of corruption. If they were in charge of measuring fevers, they would place the thermometers on ice. Instead, a vast divergence comes between the paper Gold price and metal Gold price. Unless and until the Gold market is freed from corruption and freed from the shackles of Wall Street and London and Swiss influence, it will continue to be suppressed. My full expectation is not for the system to correct itself from within. Instead, the COMEX seeks out new sources of supply, like the GLD Exchange Traded Fund. It is probably far more gutted than publicly stated. It has been converted into a bullion bank central repository for easy raided inventory. The Gold price will not rise from internal forces to push up value, in response to central bank monetary policy or shortage of COMEX inventory. The Gold price will rise from external forces in USDollar isolation, along with isolation of the big banks in the US and London. Their gold inventory will be removed, returned, and drained. In time, the USDollar will widely be rejected in trade.
THE NEW ISOLATION HAS BEGUN
The process of isolation is not just now beginning. It is a process well along. In fact, it has been told that immediately following the Lehman Brothers death (a deliberate exploited execution) and the adoption of toxic vats by the USGovt in the form of Fannie Mae and AIG, the major foreign players located primarily in the East began to feverishly prepare for new platforms on trade and banking. They sought to develop an alternative. For the last 20 to 25 years, a backwards principal has been at work. It dictated that the USDollar would prevail in reserves management, actually the USTBond as vehicle. The rules for trade surplus recycle were constructed to lean toward usage of the USTBonds. Therefore, the global trade would be dominated by USDollars. In other words, banking would dictate trade settlement. That is backwards, and keenly exhibits the brute force of the USDollar hegemony. Also the crude oil payments have been standardized in USDollars, ever since the Saudis cut a major deal with the USGovt and UKGovt in the mid-1970 decade after the famous embargo. Protection came to the Saudi regime and Persian Gulf emirates, in return for exclusive USDollar payment on trade for oil. The Petro-Dollar defacto standard is the primary plank behind the USDollar global trade patterns shown for over three decades. It is coming to an end, a sunset.
IRAN SEMINAL EVENT
The Iranian sanctions put forth by the USGovt and adopted by the EuroZone nations have contributed more to unwinding the USDollar trade system than any event in decades. It sounded the death knell for the USDollar. It hastened numerous nations to seek a US$ alternative. It provided a fertile environment to fashion new trade settlement mechanisms. It pushed Turkey into acting as a gold bullion intermediary role in the provision of gold for usage in trade settlement. See their role with India and Iran, fully described in the December Hat Trick Letter. When an independent highly reliable gold trader source was asked to confirm the role of Turkey as a test case in developing gold based trade settlement, he gave a tacit confirmation. He has mentioned Turkey in past conversations over the last couple years frequently. Just as Turkey was a swing nation in the NATO alliance against the Soviet Union, Turkey will serve in my view as a critical swing nation in the movement to create a non-US$ trade settlement system. The new system will be decentralized, meaning not funneled through the major banks, not passing through the USFed as clearing house. Turkey will be essential in the formation of the Eurasia trade zone. First comes the Asian trade zone (the US excluded), and next comes the hand shake between the Asians and Europeans to create Eurasia. Some folks have expressed doubt toward the arrival of a vast trans-continental trade region. They seem painfully unaware of an incredible network of railway lines connecting Russia to Germany and China, and of a incredible network of liquified natural gas lines connecting Russia with all of Europe and Central Asia. Across the new trade zone and its diverse commerce, the USDollar will not be at the center. It is in fact being isolated, since it is a toxic agent. Everything US$-based is crumbling, from currencies to bonds to banks to credit lines to economies.
CHINESE YUAN BILATERAL CURRENCY SWAPS
The advent of barter has come. It has not been noticed by the incredibly distracted, misled, deceived, poorly trained, mentally challenged, and myopic American public. They read about a currency swap accord, give it no emphasis or importance, and then turn to the fund manager opinions on rotating stocks from one sector to the next. They read about a workaround to the Iran sanctions, express some puppet-like response of anger or disgust, and then turn to IPOs and stories on Google, Apple, and Facebook shares. They do not even read about the failed Trans Pacific Partnership, since it did not make it onto the financial pages. Sadly, the Jackass is slowly adopting a cold view that vast swaths of the US populace will suffer from a Darwinian event. Their home equity has vanished. Their job security has vanished, unless they work for defense contractors. Their pension funds have been damaged. Their wealth has been over 90% dedicated to paper securities in very obedient fashion. The great majority has dismissed the arguments for sound money or gold investments. Some have a pitifully small portion devoted to hard assets like perhaps some energy companies. Only those who adopt a Gold strategy will survive the powerful storm underway, as it intensifies. Great wealth is being destroyed, and only Gold & Silver will enable that survival by the construction of lifeboats. Paper wealth is being blown away, as only hard metal assets will prevail. Add energy and farmlands.
When people ask about the best allocation, my standard response is at least 90% precious metals, the rest to energy deposits, but not actually stocks, perhaps farmland if possible. The best diversification in my view is for laddering of silver purchases, starting at $10/oz and moving to $15/oz then $20/oz and finally to $25/oz with continued accumulation at $30/oz and above. Gold will win the monetary war, but Silver will take the greatest gains. Gold is fine for a more stable long-term protection against toxic paper wealth, but my ongoing objection is that the New York, London, and Swiss syndicate centers play too many games. Silver is subject to global shortages, vast industrial demand, non-replaceable usage, and a much more dangerous situation that the powerful dark forces cannot manage. Silver coins will be widely used in commerce, while Gold bars will thrive in banking transactions. Besides, killing werewolves is the zinger factor with silver bullets.
China has made numerous bilateral swap accords with other nations. As the label indicates, they are deals cut between China and another nation to freely use Chinese Yuan from a credited account that will retain equilibrium. So far many nations have signed up and even renewed deals. The list of nations includes Brazil, Russia, Japan, and India. One might be correct to include all of Asia on the list, as nations like South Korea and Taiwan and Vietnam freely trade in Yuan transactions. The first major signal that the bilateral swaps have taken hold sufficiently to undermine the USDollar through a new trade foundation will be the complete arena of Asian trade being conducted in Yuan transactions. They have no need for USDollars in trade. They see their USTBonds held in reserves under management as vulnerable to serious loss. They see their USTBonds held as subject to grand debasement from USFed central bank monetary policy itself. They see their USTBonds held as supported by Weimar machinery in hyper-drive. They see their USTBonds held as part of a corrupted Wall Street arena and its vast trappings. They see their USTBonds held as prisoner to the USGovt debt battles and a potential crush victim on a fall from the fiscal cliff.
The Chinese bilateral swap accords are actually barter deals. They often represent rather balanced trade, unlike with what the nations have set up with the United States. Unless nations purchase enormous lots of military hardware, they have little need for US products. Hence the end result is a bigger batch of toxic USTBonds to purchase in order to balance the accounts and to avoid the local foreign currency exchange rate from rising enough to damage their export trade. The bilateral swap accords work to create numerous two-way ties as part of a latticework that eventually will form a transnational fabric without the USDollar as nuclear cores in each connection weld. The bilateral swaps are barter without the name in a direct confrontation against the USDollar and its catbird seat. That seat, once a throne, is being dismantled. The latticework of bilateral swaps has created the critical mass of a global blanket with no centralized control room, no choke points with bank transactions, no SWIFT code ticket taker. The bilateral swap accords work to build a critical mass that isolates the USDollar from an entirely new foundation for trade. The USDollar is being isolated.
COMEX PRESSURE POINT
The COMEX is under constant unrelenting pressure. They must shift around ill-gotten precious metal inventory in order to avoid a default. That would be embarrassing. The main device for maintaining order at the COMEX continues to be naked shorting of futures contracts, a blatantly corrupt practice. The naked short ambushes occur with greater frequency in recent months. The arrival of Scotia Mocatta as a provider of gold supply and naked short commitments will kill them eventually, as they have made a deal with the devils. The overnight dispatch of silver from the US to London has grown enormous. One can only suspect that the raids of GLD gold inventory and SLV silver inventory is much greater than is estimated even by its most ardent critics. The illicit sources for COMEX precious metal are fast drying up.
The new wrinkle to render damage to the COMEX is the arrival of the Shanghai Gold Exchange. The graphic displays the differential, a basis for potential arbitrage. Complex arrangements can be constructed that take advantage of the differential, basically buying the gold metal in New York, finding a way to make it available in Shanghai, where it is sold at a $20 to $30 higher price. The end result of the arbitrage is high volume drainage of gold in New York. The snapshot below is taken from December 7th. Several other snapshots are available, with similar price spreads. Finally COMEX based in New York, a major nucleus of corrupt financial markets, has some competition. Expect the spread to widen, the opportunity for arbitrage to grow, and pressure to build for a breakdown.
Sadly for the evil camp, they are fast running out of sources. They stole the entire MF Global private accounts, denied the clients their legal right to receive silver in delivery, and received legal protection by the USGovt and Appellate courts, after changing the law applied to financial firm liquidation instead of brokerage firm liquidation. It was a blatant maneuver that has depleted the COMEX of a major slice of legitimate business. The subsequent similar raid on PFG-Best had an echo effect, adding to the removal of COMEX clientele. The end result is that the risk hedge trade is finding ways to conduct their business without use of the indescribably corrupt COMEX. So the COMEX is being isolated in risk hedging just like the USDollar in global trade.
PETRO-DOLLAR SUNSET
The upcoming Petro-Dollar sunset has very uncertain timing indications. The assassination of Prince Bandar in Saudi Arabia, followed by the potential incapacitation of King Abdullah could work to weaken the foundation of the Petro-Dollar itself. Back in April 2010, the Saudis and other main Persian Gulf nations struck a deal with Russia and China for protection in the gulf region. That accord was not given much emphasis anywhere, nor publicity. But to the Jackass, who had a source at the meeting, the event signaled the sunset of the Petro-Dollar defacto standard. The Saudis would turn to Asia for protection and security, at a time when their crude oil trade was growing with Eastern nations, and when the North American production was made more available for the US demand in markets. The day is nigh where the Saudis accept non-US$ payments for crude oil. They might first accept Chinese Yuan, then Japanese Yen, then Korean won, then Gold itself through big Turkish bazaars. The Petro-Dollar is being isolated for sunset, and will be a key event is the removal of the USDollar as center for global trade settlement. Also, the Saudi regime in my view does not have much longer to survive. Numerous companies and financial firms and export facilitators have exited from the United Arab Emirates in preparation for the fall of the House of Saud. The Saudi Arabian royals have unstable neighbors in every border, especially Bahrain, Iraq, and Yemen.
WILD CARD FACTORS
Numerous wild cards float on the global trade table. Bank strictures head the list, with imposed rules on account reporting abroad, with tax information requirements, and with capital controls. It is harder each month to move large amounts of funds. The forms to complete have become onerous and imposing, acting like implicit restrictions. It is harder each month to use simple bank cards at ATM machines. With a simple rule change, the banks cannot complete these transactions. The organized and patterned restrictions work to trap USDollars within the local US borders. Consider it an internal mechanism to assist the global isolation of the USDollar.
LOST GLOBAL RESERVE STATUS
The described isolation on numerous fronts, whether trade or COMEX or banks, all work toward the elimination of the toxic agent in the USDollar. The world wants a more just, more functional, more efficient, more equitable global trade system. The United States has abused its global reserve custodian position too long. The world is fighting vigorously to remove it. The usage of the USDollar as a credit card to finance its consumption binge without ability to pay will come to an end. The usage of the USDollar as a device to enable powerful aggression in war to advance syndicate interests like vertically integrated narcotics will come to an end. The usage of the USDollar as a banking monopoly device will come to an end. The usage of the USDollar as an instrument for bond fraud will come to an end. The usage of the USDollar as a free lunch device to finance the USGovt deficit will come to an end. When the USDollar is no longer the global reserve currency, the door to the Third World will be opened wide. When the USDollar is no longer the global reserve currency, the supply lines will be interrupted to the USEconomy, giving off a prominent Third World stench. When the USDollar is no longer the global reserve currency, the price inflation effect will become a national topic of grand debate and extreme anger. When the USDollar is no longer the global reserve currency, the United States as a nation will experience tremendous additional isolation and hardship, as most Third World nations do. The level of corruption within the USGovt and US banking corner offices is already far more entrenched than any Third World nation. The vote fraud for US national elections is equally prevalent, but more sophisticated.
When the USDollar is no longer the global reserve currency, the Gold Standard will be right around the corner, if not already in the implementation stage. The Gold price will react quickly to the removal of the USDollar from its prized perch of abuse. The center of the new trade settlement system will be GOLD, which is not even being discussed by the enlightened denizens of the gold community. It will be the basis of the Letters of Credit, in the form of gold trade notes. The short-term credit that facilitates trade will have a truly magnificent grand Gold core. The common agreement will be to make the Gold price at least $5000 per ounce, probably closer to $7000 per ounce. They will in the process dismiss, overrun, and put into oblivion the COMEX and the LBMA, rendering them to the scrap heap of irrelevance.
THE HAT TRICK LETTER PROFITS IN THE CURRENT CRISIS.
From subscribers and readers:
At least 30 recently on correct forecasts regarding the bailout parade, numerous nationalization deals such as for Fannie Mae and the grand Mortgage Rescue.
“A Paradigm change is occurring for sure. Your reports and analysis are historic documents, allowing future generations to have an accurate account of what and why things went wrong so badly. There is no other written account that strings things along on the timeline, as your writings do. I share them with a handful of incredibly influential people whose decisions are greatly impacted by having the information in the Jackass format. The system is coming apart on such a mega scale that it is difficult to wrap one’s head around where all this will end. But then, the universe strives for equilibrium and all will eventually balance out.”
(The Voice, a European gold trader source)
“It has been my hope that the financial collapse would occur within a slower time frame, like a year from now. I have followed your articles on various sites for a while, and have to say that you are very perceptive and accurate as well as analytical. You have been more accurate, detailed and thorough than others, and your Big Picture analysis is usually spot on. I have noticed that it often becomes public news 3 to 6 months later. It is not easy connecting all the dots and understanding the implications one event has on everything else, then interweaving all the threads to grasp that big picture. I don’t usually spend the money for a subscription,
but I feel your information is vital to know.”
(KathyN from Arizona)
Jim Willie CB is a statistical analyst in marketing research and retail forecasting. He holds a PhD in Statistics. His career has stretched over 25 years. He aspires to thrive in the financial editor world, unencumbered by the limitations of economic credentials.
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December 26th, 2012 by olddog
http://www.pakalertpress.com
TRUTHER DECEMBER 26, 2012 1
Will this be the last normal holiday season that Americans ever experience? To many Americans, such a notion would be absolutely inconceivable. After all, in the affluent areas of the country restaurants and malls are absolutely packed. Beautiful holiday decorations are seemingly everywhere this time of the year and children all over the United States are breathlessly awaiting the arrival of Santa Claus. Even though poverty is exploding to unprecedented levels, most families will still have mountains of presents under their Christmas trees. Of course a whole lot of those presents were purchased with credit cards, but people don’t like to talk about that. It kind of spoils the illusion. Sadly, the truth is that our entire economy is a giant illusion. The extreme prosperity that we have been enjoying has been fueled by debt, and any future prosperity that we will experience is completely dependent on our ability to go into even more debt. The total amount of debt in our economy is almost 10 times larger than it was just 30 years ago, but we don’t like to think about that too much. Most Americans are way too busy living the good life to be bothered with “doom and gloom”. Well, get ready to say goodbye to normal. As history has shown us, no financial bubble lasts forever, and time is rapidly running out for us.
You know that the hour is late when even mainstream news sources start publishing articles with titles such as this: “Will 2013 Mark the Beginning of American Decline?“
That article appeared on Bloomberg.com the other day, and it was written by Simon Johnson, a former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund. He is convinced that a day of reckoning is coming for U.S. government finances, and he seems resigned to the fact that we will not be ready when that day arrives…
“Sooner or later, it will be America’s turn to fall out of favor with investors and to see its own interest rates rise. It is hard to know when that day will come, or precisely what pressures the country will face.
Let me only venture one forecast: We will not be ready.”
Other analysts are far more pessimistic. For example, the following is what Gerald Celente said about the “bond bubble” during a recent interview with King World News…
Eric King: “Gerald, I wanted to take a look at this upcoming issue you have coming out. (In here it says,) ‘Bonds Away! The bond bomb is ready to explode … threatening to make the real estate and dot-com bubbles, and even the Great Recession, look like market corrections.’ Can you talk about that?”
Celente: “Yes. This piece is being penned by Dr. Paul Craig Roberts, the former Assistant Treasury Secretary under Ronald Reagan. And he is convinced that the bond bubble is about to burst. This cannot continue to go on the way it is. Everyone knows that the whole game is rigged, and so is this….”
“The whole game is rigged. It’s ready to go down, and Dr. Paul Craig Roberts believes it’s ‘Bonds Away’ in 2013 as the bond bubble explodes and brings about a financial disaster even worse than the Great Depression.”
Eric King: “He’s saying here it’s a road to financial collapse that we are going to head down when this thing bursts.”
Celente: “It is. Because the whole world is being propped up by these phony bonds and it’s going to collapse. It has to happen. Interest rates are going to start going up, and when they do the bond bubble explodes. You cannot keep interest rates at zero for this amount of time and expect anything other than disaster to follow.”
For much more on all this, you can listen to another excellent interview with Gerald Celente right here.
Our politicians just assume that we will be able to borrow trillions upon trillions of dollars far into the future at super low interest rates, but that is a very dangerous assumption.
As I noted the other day, the average rate of interest on U.S. government debt was 2.534 percent at the end of November. If that number just rose to where it was about a decade earlier we would be in a massive amount of trouble.
Back in the year 2000, the average rate of interest on U.S. government debt was 6.638 percent. If we were at that level today, the U.S. government would be paying out more than a trillion dollars a year just in interest on the national debt.
But our politicians just keep borrowing and spending as if we could do this forever.
From the time that George Washington was inaugurated (1789) to the time that George W. Bush was inaugurated (2001), the U.S. government accumulated about 5.7 trillion dollars of debt.
During the first four years of the Obama administration, the U.S. government accumulated about 5.7 trillion dollars of debt.
How can anyone support this kind of insanity?
You can see an excellent video demonstrating the vastness of our national debt right here. In the end, all of this debt will absolutely destroy the U.S. dollar, our economic system and the bright futures that our children and our grandchildren were supposed to have.
As if all of that was not enough to be concerned about, there is also the threat that Wall Street could implode at any time. Most Americans have no idea that Wall Street has been transformed into the largest casino in the history of the world. The “too big to fail” banks are the ringleaders, and the derivatives bubble hangs over our financial system like a “sword of Damocles” that could fall at virtually any moment.
Everything will remain fine as long as the spiral of derivatives that our bankers have constructed remains perfectly balanced. But if something happens and it becomes unbalanced and starts to collapse, the consequences could be unlike anything we have ever seen before.
A recent Zero Hedge article entitled “1000x Systemic Leverage: $600 Trillion In Gross Derivatives ‘Backed’ By $600 Billion In Collateral” detailed how there is barely any collateral backing up the hundreds of trillions of dollars of derivatives that are out there…
But a bigger question is what is the actual collateral backing this gargantuan market which is about 10 times greater than the world’s combined GDP, because as the “derivative” name implies all this exposure is backed on some dedicated, real assets, somewhere. Luckily, the IMF recently released a discussion note titled “Shadow Banking: Economics and Policy” where quietly hidden in one of the appendices it answers precisely this critical question. The bottom line: $600 trillion in gross notional derivatives backed by a tiny $600 billion in real assets: a whopping 0.1% margin requirement! Surely nothing can possibly go wrong with this amount of unprecedented 1000x systemic leverage.
Our entire economy has become a giant pyramid of debt, risk and leverage. At some point there is going to be a giant crash. When that happens, people are going to become very desperate.
When people become very desperate, they often accept “solutions” that they were not willing to consider previously.
We need to learn some lessons from history. This is exactly the kind of thing that happened back in the 1930s.
For example, an elderly woman named Kitty Werthmann is telling audiences what life was like in Austria back in the late 1930s…
“In 1938, Austria was in deep Depression. Nearly one-third of our workforce was unemployed. We had 25 percent inflation and 25 percent bank loan interest rates.”
“Farmers and business people were declaring bankruptcy daily. Young people were going from house to house begging for food. Not that they didn’t want to work; there simply weren’t any jobs.”
The Austrian people were really hurting and they were desperate for answers. When Hitler came to them with “solutions”, they were ready to embrace him with open arms…
“We looked to our neighbor on the north, Germany, where Hitler had been in power since 1933.” she recalls. “We had been told that they didn’t have unemployment or crime, and they had a high standard of living.”
“Nothing was ever said about persecution of any group – Jewish or otherwise. We were led to believe that everyone in Germany was happy. We wanted the same way of life in Austria. We were promised that a vote for Hitler would mean the end of unemployment and help for the family. Hitler also said that businesses would be assisted, and farmers would get their farms back.” "Ninety-eight percent of the population voted to annex Austria to Germany and have Hitler for our ruler.”
“We were overjoyed,” remembers Kitty, “and for three days we danced in the streets and had candlelight parades. The new government opened up big field kitchens and everyone was fed.”
Sadly, America is already starting to go down the same path in many ways. If you doubt this, you can read the rest of her account right here.
Right now, things are still relatively good in America. Yes, there are a whole host of economic numbers that look really bad, but what we are experiencing right now is nothing compared to the horrific economic pain that is coming.
When our economy finally crashes, nobody is going to be able to press a button and restore things to how they were previously. We will be told that we have to “adjust” and consider “new solutions” to our “new challenges”. Someday we will look back on the good life that we were enjoying in 2010, 2011 and 2012 and wish that we could go back to those days.
So enjoy the relative peacefulness and prosperity of these times while you still can. A horrific economic collapse is on the way, and once it strikes none of our lives will ever be the same.
Michael Snyder’s post first appeared on his blog, The Economic Collapse.
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December 12th, 2012 by olddog
http://www.thedailybell.com/28438/Power-Elite-Bans-Classic-Books-in-US-Seeks-Exclusive-Narrative
by Staff Report
Catcher in the Rye dropped from US school curriculum … Schools in America are to drop classic books such as Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird and JD Salinger's Catcher in the Rye from their curriculum in favor of 'informational texts'. American literature classics are to be replaced by insulation manuals and plant inventories in US classrooms by 2014. A new school curriculum which will affect 46 out of 50 states will make it compulsory for at least 70 per cent of books studied to be non-fiction, in an effort to ready pupils for the workplace. – RT
Dominant Social Theme: Telling stories is so "last year."
Free-Market Analysis: Fahrenheit 451 and other books about censorship got it wrong. The powers-that-be don't want to ban books, they want to ban STORIES.
This is the inescapable conclusion for those of us who believe in directed history. Over the past decade of covering the world for various proprietary blogs, it's become clear to us that most human events are manipulated by a small, sociopathic elite that controls central banking around the world.
Whether such control existed in previous millennia we are not in a position to say. But it would be our perspective – avoiding a discussion of past civilizations – that the overt control of Money Power has been growing, not diminishing, of late.
Of course, perhaps these things go in cycles. In that case it is our misfortune to live at the very apex of one such cycle and our good fortune to see – thanks to the Internet Reformation – that it is ending.
How do we know it is ending? Because the top elites are increasingly turning to the bluntest weapons in their fight to maintain power. Economic depression, military conflict and authoritarian democracy are all modern tools of repression and control. The idea is to create world government and nothing is to stop that progression.
By far the most ubiquitous method of control and persuasion is what we call the dominant social theme. This is usually a scarcity-based meme disseminated by the power elite via its controlled think tanks, media and universities and then acted on via its globalist facilities and political methodologies.
Scarcity–based memes are STORIES aimed at the middle class and designed to frighten people into giving up wealth and power to specially designed internationalist institutions. Food, water and energy scarcity along with overpopulation and various military and terrorist "threats" are the favorite tools of the top elites. None of the disseminated tales are true.
But it doesn't matter whether they are true or not. The propagation and saturation of these stories – fables – are most important to the narrative that the elites want to establish.
The chief narrative is that of the "small world." The world is to be seen as inevitably becoming "one." It is an ineluctable ascension to be desired and nurtured. It is, of course, for this reason that all talk of previous high civilizations is squelched. Whether they existed or not is not debatable, as the debate will never be held.
There is only one civilization. It was launched 5,000 years ago and world government will be its crowning glory.
This is the story. This is the narrative. There cannot be any other. And it is not enough for the elites to control the CONVERSATION. Now, apparently, they want to control the story line, as well.
Of course, one could argue that with books like Catcher in the Rye they control the story line anyway. But apparently, informal control was not enough. Now the control is to be formalized. If stories are to be written, they will be written by approved authors. If they are to be read, it will be within a predetermined cordon sanitaire.
There are to be no other gods but the god of the single story – the ONE … the single, all-encompassing plotline leading inevitably towards a gaily decorated single world with one ruling, elite authority. After which, from what we can tell, genocide will begin in earnest. Here's more from the RT article:
Books such as JD Salinger's Catcher in the Rye and Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird will be replaced by "informational texts" approved by the Common Core State Standards.
Suggested non-fiction texts include Recommended Levels of Insulation by the US Environmental Protection Agency, and the Invasive Plant Inventory, by California's Invasive Plant Council.
The new educational standards have the backing of the influential National Governors' Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers, and are being part-funded by a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation …
Supporters of the directive argue that it will help pupils to develop the ability to write concisely and factually, which will be more useful in the workplace than a knowledge of Shakespeare.
Poor Bill Gates! A man who once dreamt of controlling his own US$100 billion fortune, he was attacked by the US government over a putative monopoly and then stripped of control of his resources and even his professional aspirations by a banking elite that will not tolerate any other monetary control but its own.
This is the reason its button man, Warren Buffett has been going from wealthy individual to wealthy individual like a honey bee, seeking to sip the sweet nectar of their vast good fortune by suggesting full scale donations to charities he controls. It is not an eleemosynary exercise but one of confiscation.
The top elite controls trillions but mere billionaires are not to be allowed. They must "give back" to the community. You see, in the brave new world of the Elite Narrative, a mere billionaire is nothing but the lowliest peon, someone to be efficiently reduced to penury. He or she is not to leave funds to family but instead to worthy charities and reputable causes.
This is what Bill Gates now confronts. After building one of the most successful companies in the world he now finds himself denuded of his fortune while his name is attached to the blackest kind of medical engineering via vaccinations and now – if this article is correct – the initiation of purposeful illiteracy.
It is ever thus these days. Cross the top elites and they will efficiently strip you of your resources and then blacken your name by association. They do this by manipulating the sociopolitical and economic narrative. This is why storytellers are in such demand and why the ability to tell a convincing story is a ticket to wealth, fame and power in the modern day.
It is why such tales are ever more strictly controlled, as well. Copyright and other legal engineering is brought to bear to ensure that the narratives produced and disseminated are the approved ones.
It is for this reason what we call the Internet Reformation has been such a setback to the power elite. The carefully crafted universe that has descended on the world like a gigantic bubble has been pricked. As it has collapsed, truth has leaked in.
We try to purvey some of that truth every day and so do others. We would even argue a critical mass has been reached and there is nothing much the elites can do to control the narrative anymore. They are trying, too, of course. But as happened with the Gutenberg press, once the truth emerges it tends to sweep the field.
It must be a waking nightmare for the top elites. Much of the progress of the past century has been undone. Memes have been exposed. Promotions have been capsized.
Terror and intimidation are going to have to be substituted for mind control and promotional suasion.
And, of course, censorship, too. The narratives of modern civilization are now seen as too powerful to be left in the hands of amateurs.
It's kind of pitiful, actually. It has no chance of working. Tale telling is as powerful a drive as sex or hunger. It cannot be controlled by regulation or a change in curriculum.
Conclusion: It is a testimony to their desperation and a further affirmation of the power of the Internet Reformation.
OLDDOGS COMMENTS
Let the reader beware! There will be no let up in media manipulation, and without the people participating in the internet reformation, the elite will use government to control what you can learn, and what they are doing to us. Get involved, and forward the Daily Bell and other news sources to your friends and family.
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December 2nd, 2012 by olddog
http://www.thedailybell.com/28386/Ron-Holland-Fiscal-Cliff-Austerity-Just-Another-Meme-Designed-to-Steal-What-is-Yours
"Since a politician never believes what he says, he is quite surprised to be taken at his word." – Charles De Gaulle
In my home country, the United States, we are watching the German and EU austerity demands destroy economies, social structures and entire nations all to protect the leading banking elites and their profits. In 2013 the false meme of austerity is also coming to the United States. Leading GOP politicians are now announcing plans to break their No Tax pledges just as we warned they would. After all, the word and honor of all but a very few senators and house members means nothing once election season ends.
Of course, common sense tells us that all governments need to spend and borrow less but they never will. After all, the long running recession/depression of the West means less tax revenue to governments because the taxable income of individual citizens is down dramatically.
The austerity meme is the false crisis solution being propagandized by the power elite in order to build public support for benefit cuts and wealth confiscation. This fake austerity solution sounds reasonable but it isn't because governments will continue to spend and borrow. They plan to make up the difference by cutting government services and programs and increasing taxes to draconian confiscatory levels.
Equal Opportunity For Once
While the top echelons of government bureaucrats just like the privileged big business corporate elites will be exempt except for minor personal tax increases, the burden will as always fall on the poor and middle classes.
The only good news is throughout the West many low- and middle-level government employees and bureaucrats will finally get a bitter taste of what they have been dishing out to those of us in the productive private sector for decades. There are few new jobs available in the private sector and private industry will seldom hire ex-government employees, for obvious reasons.
This means those on the government dole, whether working, on welfare programs or in unions, will do anything to keep their checks coming. Therefore, as part of the "necessary" austerity measures their generous healthcare and retirement plans can be cut, as well as salaries, as most of these wards of the state will still vote for the big government parties. They have no other alternatives. Thus, their core constituency status will remain while they now take their turn being screwed.
Simply watch what is happening to benefits, healthcare and retirement benefits in Greece, Italy and Spain and you'll see the future in the United States.
Benefit Theft
Many in the US will find themselves increasingly "means tested" out of their promised and guaranteed Social Security benefits and forced back into permanent life-long contributions.
Austerity is just another word for nothing left to lose to the government. It will end when your wealth, benefits and assets are gone. This false meme will be replaced with another once all of the available wealth, income and gold can be taken and your promised benefits cut to whatever degree possible short of generating violence and revolution.
Therefore, any supposed credibility in the success of politically enforced austerity is just another excuse to get more of your hard earned dollars. Like democracy, global warming and Keynesian economics, this is just another scam meme to con you out of personal wealth and liberties.
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November 30th, 2012 by olddog
http://www.apfn.net/doc-100_bankruptcy.htm
United States Congressional Record, March 17, 1993 Vol. 33, page H-1303
Speaker-Rep. James Traficant, Jr. (Ohio) addressing the House:
(Quote) "Mr. Speaker, we are here now in chapter 11… Members of Congress are official trustees presiding over the greatest reorganization of any Bankrupt entity in world history, the U.S. Government. We are setting forth hopefully, a blueprint for our future. There are some who say it is a coroner's report that will lead to our demise.
It is an established fact that the United States Federal Government has been dissolved by the Emergency Banking Act, March 9, 1933, 48 Stat. 1, Public Law 89-719; declared by President Roosevelt, being bankrupt and insolvent. H.J.R. 192, 73rd Congress m session June 5, 1933 – Joint Resolution To Suspend The Gold Standard and Abrogate The Gold Clause dissolved the Sovereign Authority of the United States and the official capacities of all United States Governmental Offices, Officers, and
Departments and is further evidence that the United States Federal Government exists today in name only.
The receivers of the United States Bankruptcy are the International Bankers, via the United Nations, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. All United States Offices, Officials, and Departments are now operating within a de facto status in name only under Emergency War Powers.
With the Constitutional Republican form of Government now dissolved, the receivers of the Bankruptcy have adopted a new form of government for the United States. This new form of government is known as a Democracy, being an established Socialist/Communist order under a new governor for America. This act was instituted and established by transferring and/or placing the Office of the Secretary of Treasury to that of the Governor of the International Monetary Fund.
Public Law 94-564, page 8, Section H.R. 13955 reads in part:
"The U.S. Secretary of Treasury receives no compensation for representing the United States."
Gold and silver were such a powerful money during the founding of the united states of America, that the founding fathers declared that only gold or silver coins can be "money" in America. Since gold and silver coinage were heavy and inconvenient for a lot of transactions, they were stored inbanks and a claim check was issued as a money substitute. People traded their coupons as money, or "currency." Currency is not money, but a money substitute. Redeemable currency must promise to pay a dollar equivalent in gold or silver money. Federal Reserve Notes (FRNs) make no such promises, and are not "money." A Federal Reserve Note is a debt obligation of the federal United States government, not "money?'
The federal United States government and the U.S. Congress were not and have never been authorized by the Constitution for the united states of America to issue currency of any kind, but only lawful money, -gold and silver coin. It is essential that we comprehend the distinction between real money and paper money substitute. One cannot get rich by accumulating money
substitutes, one can only get deeper into debt. We the People no longer have any "money." Most Americans have not been paid any "money" for a very long time, perhaps not in their entire life. Now do you comprehend why you feel broke? Now, do you understand why you are "bankrupt," along with the rest of the country?
Federal Reserve Notes (FRNs) are unsigned checks written on a closed account. FRNs are an inflatable paper system designed to create debt through inflation (devaluation of currency). when ever there is an increase of the supply of a money substitute in the economy without a corresponding increase in the gold and silver backing, inflation occurs.
Inflation is an invisible form of taxation that irresponsible governments inflict on their citizens. The Federal Reserve Bank who controls the supply and movement of FRNs has everybody fooled. They have access to an unlimited supply of FRNs, paying only for the printing costs of what they need. FRNs are nothing more than promissory notes for U.S. Treasury securities
(T-Bills) – a promise to pay the debt to the Federal Reserve Bank.
There is a fundamental difference between "paying" and "discharging" a debt. To pay a debt, you must pay with value or substance (i.e. gold, silver, barter or a commodity). With FRNs, you can only discharge a debt. You cannot pay a debt with a debt currency system. You cannot service a debt with a currency that has no backing in value or substance. No contract in
Common law is valid unless it involves an exchange of "good & valuable consideration." Un-payable debt transfers power and control to the sovereign power structure that has no interest in money, law, equity or justice because they have so much wealth already.
Their lust is for power and control. Since the inception of central banking, they have controlled the fates of nations.
The Federal Reserve System is based on the Canon law and the principles of sovereignty protected in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. In fact, the international bankers used a "Canon Law Trust" as their model, adding stock and naming it a "Joint Stock Trust." The U.S. Congress had passed a law making it illegal for any legal "person" to duplicate a "Joint Stock Trust" in 1873. The Federal Reserve Act was legislated post-facto (to 1870), although post-facto laws are strictly forbidden by the Constitution. [1:9:3]
The Federal Reserve System is a sovereign power structure separate and distinct from the federal United States government. The Federal Reserve is a maritime lender, and/or maritime insurance underwriter to the federal United States operating exclusively under Admiralty/Maritime law. The lender or underwriter bears the risks, and the Maritime law compelling specific
performance in paying the interest, or premiums are the same.
Assets of the debtor can also be hypothecated (to pledge something as a security without taking possession of it.) as security by the lender or underwriter. The Federal Reserve Act stipulated that the interest on the debt was to be paid in gold. There was no stipulation in the Federal Reserve Act for ever paying the principle.
Prior to 1913, most Americans owned clear, allodial title to property, free and clear of any liens or mortgages until the Federal Reserve Act (1913) "Hypothecated" all property within the federal United States to the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve, -in which the Trustees (stockholders) held legal title. The U.S. citizen (tenant, franchisee) was registered as a
"beneficiary" of the trust via his/her birth certificate. In 1933, the federal United States hypothecated all of the present and future properties, assets and labor of their "subjects," the 14th Amendment U.S. citizen, to the Federal Reserve System.
In return, the Federal Reserve System agreed to extend the federal United States corporation all the credit "money substitute" it needed. Like any other debtor, the federal United States government had to assign collateral and security to their creditors as a condition of the loan. Since the federal United States didn't have any assets, they assigned the private property of their "economic slaves", the U.S. citizens as collateral against the un-payable federal debt. They also pledged the unincorporated federal territories, national parks forests, birth certificates, and nonprofit organizations, as collateral against the federal debt. All has already been transferred as payment to the international bankers.
Unwittingly, America has returned to its pre-American Revolution, feudal roots whereby all land is held by a sovereign and the common people had no rights to hold allodial title to property. Once again, We the People are the tenants and sharecroppers renting our own property from a Sovereign in the guise of the Federal Reserve Bank. We the people have exchanged one master
for another.
This has been going on for over eighty years without the "informed knowledge" of the American people, without a voice protesting loud enough. Now it's easy to grasp why America is fundamentally bankrupt.
Why don't more people own their properties outright?
Why are 90% of Americans mortgaged to the hilt and have little or no assets after all debts and liabilities have been paid?
Why does it feel like you are working harder and harder and getting less and less?
We are reaping what has been sown, and the results of our harvest is a painful bankruptcy, and a foreclosure on American property, precious liberties, and a way of life. Few of our elected representatives in Washington, D.C. have dared to tell the truth. The federal United States is bankrupt. Our children will inherit this un-payable debt, and the tyranny to enforce paying it.
America has become completely bankrupt in world leadership, financial credit and its reputation for courage, vision and human rights. This is an undeclared economic war, bankruptcy, and economic slavery of the most corrupt order! Wake up America! Take back your Country."
OLDDOGS COMMENTS
Are you connecting the dots now, fellow patriots? Now you should understand why your house deed identifies you as a tenet. Now, you should understand why your so called elected representatives don’t give a flip what you think or say. Now you should understand who controls the elections and everything else in this land of slaves. Land of the free, and the home of the brave, MY ASS! I would bet there is not one in fifty thousand of you willing to get even. Support the three percent, as they are your only hope of regaining your freedom. Support the alternative media, we are your only source of truth. OR, you can kiss ass with the local tyrants in law enforcement. That is, until they are ordered to round you up and transport you to a detention center. SEE, http://anationbeguiled.wordpress.com/2012/11/30/800-concentration-camps-in-the-usa/
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November 29th, 2012 by olddog
http://www.pakalertpress.com
By Truther
By recklessly printing, borrowing and spending money, our authorities are absolutely shredding confidence in the U.S. dollar. The rest of the world is watching this nonsense, and at some point they are going to give up on the U.S. dollar and throw their hands up in the air. When that happens, it is going to be absolutely catastrophic for the U.S. economy. Right now, we export a lot of our inflation. Each year, we buy far more from the rest of the world than they buy from us, and so the rest of the world ends up with giant piles of U.S. dollars. This works out pretty well for them, because the U.S. dollar is the primary reserve currency of the world and is used in international trade far more than any other currency is. Back in 1999, the percentage of foreign exchange reserves in U.S. dollars peaked at 71 percent, and since then it has slid back to 62.2 percent. But that is still an overwhelming amount. We can print, borrow and spend like crazy because the rest of the world is there to soak up our excess dollars because they need them to trade with one another. But what will happen someday if the rest of the world decides to reject the U.S. dollar? At that point we would see a tsunami of U.S. dollars come flooding back to this country. Just take a moment and think of the worst superstorm that you can possibly imagine, and then replace every drop of rain with a dollar bill. The giant currency superstorm that will eventually hit this nation will be far worse than that.
Most Americans don’t realize that there are far more dollars in use in the rest of the world than in the United States itself. The following is from a scholarly article by Linda Goldberg…
The dollar is a major form of cash currency around the world. The majority of dollar banknotes are estimated to be held outside the US. More than 70% of hundred-dollar notes and nearly 60% of twenty- and fifty-dollar notes are held abroad, while two-thirds of all US banknotes have been in circulation outside the country since 1990
For decades we have been exporting gigantic quantities of our currency.
So what would happen if that process suddenly reversed and massive piles of dollars started coming back into the country?
It is frightening to think about.
Well, I guess the key is to get the rest of the world to continue to have confidence in the U.S. dollar so that will never happen, right?
Unfortunately, there are lots of signs that the rest of the world is accelerating their move away from the U.S. dollar.
For example, it was recently announced that the BRICS countries are developing their own version of the World Bank…
The BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) bloc has begun planning its own development bank and a new bailout fund which would be created by pooling together an estimated $240 billion in foreign exchange reserves, according to diplomatic sources. To get a sense of how significant the proposed fund would be, the fund would be larger than the combined Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of about 150 countries, according to Russia and India Report.
And as I noted in a previous article, over the past few years there have been a whole host of new international currency agreements that encourage the use of national currencies over the U.S. dollar. The following are just a few examples…
1. China and Germany (See Here)
2. China and Russia (See Here)
3. China and Brazil (See Here)
4. China and Australia (See Here)
5. China and Japan (See Here)
6. India and Japan (See Here)
7. Iran and Russia (See Here)
8. China and Chile (See Here)
9. China and the United Arab Emirates (See Here)
10. China, Brazil, Russia, India and South Africa (See Here)
Will this movement soon become a stampede away from the U.S. dollar?
That is a very important question.
But you don’t hear anything about this in the U.S. media and our politicians are not talking about this at all.
Meanwhile, our “leaders” seem to be doing everything that they can to destroy confidence in the U.S. dollar. The Federal Reserve is printing money like there is no tomorrow, and the federal governmentcontinues to run up trillion dollar deficits year after year.
They do not seem to understand that they are systematically destroying the U.S. financial system.
Other world leaders get it. For example, Russian President Vladimir Putin once said the following…
“Unreasonable expansion of the budget deficit, accumulation of the national debt – are as destructive as an adventurous stock market game.
During the time of the Soviet Union the role of the state in economy was made absolute, which eventually lead to the total non-competitiveness of the economy. That lesson cost us very dearly. I am sure no one would want history to repeat itself.”
Wow.
Why can’t most of our politicians see how destructive debt is?
What the federal government continues to do is absolutely insane. The national debt increased by more than 24 billion dollars on the day after Thanksgiving this year. But utter disaster has not struck yet, and most Americans are not really that concerned about the debt. So things just keep rolling along.
And of course our national debt of $16,309,738,056,362.44 is nothing when compared to the future liabilities that our federal government is facing. Just check out what a recent article in the Wall Street Journal had to say about all this…
The actual liabilities of the federal government—including Social Security, Medicare, and federal employees’ future retirement benefits—already exceed $86.8 trillion, or 550% of GDP. For the year ending Dec. 31, 2011, the annual accrued expense of Medicare and Social Security was $7 trillion. Nothing like that figure is used in calculating the deficit. In reality, the reported budget deficit is less than one-fifth of the more accurate figure.
Other economists paint an even gloomier picture. According to economist Niall Ferguson, the U.S. government is facing future unfunded liabilities of 238 trillion dollars.
So where are we going to get all that money?
Well, why don’t we just print more money than ever before so that the U.S. government can borrow and spend more money than ever before?
Don’t laugh. That is actually what some of the top economists in the country are actually recommending.
The most famous economic journalist in the entire country, Paul Krugman of the New York Times, is boldly proclaiming that the solution to all of our problems is to print, borrow and spend a lot more money. He insists that there is no reason to fear that the giant mountain of debt that we are accumulating will someday collapse the system…
For we have our own currency — and almost all of our debt, both private and public, is denominated in dollars. So our government, unlike the Greek government, literally can’t run out of money. After all, it can print the stuff. So there’s almost no risk that America will default on its debt — I’d say no risk at all if it weren’t for the possibility that Republicans would once again try to hold the nation hostage over the debt ceiling.
But if the U.S. government prints money to pay its bills, won’t that lead to inflation? No, not if the economy is still depressed.
Now, it’s true that investors might start to expect higher inflation some years down the road. They might also push down the value of the dollar. Both of these things, however, would actually help rather than hurt the U.S. economy right now: expected inflation would discourage corporations and families from sitting on cash, while a weaker dollar would make our exports more competitive.
Of course what he is prescribing is complete and utter madness.
At some point this con game is going to collapse and the rest of the world is going to say a big, fat, resounding “NO” to the U.S. dollar.
Why should they continue to use a currency that is becoming extremely unstable and that is constantly being manipulated?
And when the rest of the world rejects the U.S. dollar, the value of the dollar will drop like a rock because there will be far less global demand for it.
In addition, if the rest of the world is not using the U.S. dollar for trade any longer, other nations will cease to soak up our excess currency and huge mountains of our currency that are floating around out there will start flooding back to our shores.
At that point we will be looking at inflation unlike anything we have ever seen before. The era of cheap imports will be over and we will pay far more for everything from oil to the foreign-made plastic trinkets that we buy at Wal-Mart.
Most Americans don’t even know what a “reserve currency” is, but when the U.S. dollar loses reserve currency status it is going to unleash a nightmare that most economists cannot even imagine.
So enjoy this holiday season while you can. There are still lots and lots of cheap imports filling the shelves of our stores.
Once the coming giant currency superstorm strikes, we will dearly wish for the good old days of 2012.
Yes, the U.S. dollar is alive and ticking for now. But at the pace that our authorities are abusing it, I would not say that things are looking good for a long and healthy lifespan.
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November 28th, 2012 by olddog
http://www.cnbc.com/id/49880480/
By: Michael Ivanovitch
President, MSI Global
When, towards the end of World War II, the British economist John Maynard Keynes led his country’s delegation to negotiate in Bretton Woods the IMF’s charter (articles of agreement), he argued that the stability of the international monetary system and world economy required that surplus and deficit countries should be held equally responsible to balance their trade accounts.
Keynes feared that America, relatively unscathed after nearly five years of brutal conflict, would be flooding Europe with its exports, creating a shortage of dollars and obstructing the recovery of a starving and war-ravaged continent.
As it turned out, Keynes’s worries about the possibility that America would selfishly pursue mercantilist policies were misplaced. Washington quickly moved to help Europe get back on its feet with a $13 billion Marshall Plan (formally known as the European Recovery Program) and kept its markets open for European goods and services.
During the three years of the Marshall Plan, the economies of 17 European countries benefiting from its assistance grew between 15 percent and 20 percent, and, largely as a result of growing imports from Europe, the U.S. trade balance recorded its first postwar trade deficit of $2.3 billion (0.2 percent of GDP) in 1971.
The US Remains Engine of World Economy
The U.S. is still the largest buyer of goods and services produced around the world. In the first nine months of this year, America’s trade deficit with China, Japan and Germany accounted for nearly two-thirds of its $559 billion trade gap.
Keynes must be turning in his grave: Even with a feeble 2.3 percent GDP growth, America is the engine of world economy, while the second, third and fourth-largest world economies are living off their trade surpluses with the U.S. and the rest of the world.
Those wondering about what went wrong with the world economy should look no further. With their huge trade surpluses, ranging from $86 billion (Japan) to $217 billion (Germany), these three countries – one-fourth of world GDP – are making no net contribution to global economic growth. Worse: they are, in fact, a drag on world economy.
And there is no end to this. Almost by design, Japan and Germany are export-led economies. Neither country wants to abandon this growth strategy by generating more demand and output from their domestic spending. China apparently wants to get off the export bandwagon, but it will take some time to significantly change the composition of its economic growth.
Japan’s Structurally Weak Domestic Demand
In terms of Keynes’s argument for symmetry in trade adjustment obligations of deficit and surplus countries, Japan has been – and still is – the most difficult case. Over the last 10 years, for example, about one-half of Japan’s economic growth came from its trade surpluses. During that period, exports – 8 percent of GDP – grew at an average annual rate of 6 percent, while household consumption – 60 percent of GDP – edged up only 0.9 percent.
These numbers clearly show that it is almost impossible to grow on the basis of domestic demand if its largest component is in virtual stagnation. And Tokyo is not doing much to change that. Ever since the “bubble economy” burst in the early 1990s, a succession of Japanese governments chose to finance public sector investments – about 4 percent of GDP – by building the proverbial “bridges and highways to nowhere” instead of stimulating household consumption. No wonder the economy largely stagnated over the last 20 years with an average annual growth of less than 1 percent.
(Read More: What Will Save the Japanese Economy?)
Admittedly, it is difficult to stimulate private consumption in an economy with declining and rapidly aging population. A study, published last January by Japan's National Institute of Population and Social Security Research, forecasts that the country's population will shrink by one-third over the next 50 years as a result of an alarmingly low birthrate of 1.39 per woman of childbearing age. The study also shows that, at this point, it looks like a mission impossible to even slow down the population decline, because Japan would have to raise its birthrate to 2.1 per woman.
It is obvious that to stabilize the economy Japan would have to address, with a great sense of urgency, the problem of its worsening demography. Only a steadily rising trend in net family formation and birthrates would underpin private consumption and residential investment (63 percent of GDP) to gradually wean the economy off its excessive dependence on export sales.
But that, unfortunately, does not seem likely anytime soon. Barring more dangerous developments in Sino-Japanese relations, Japan’s sinking exports to China (down 14 percent in the year to September) will just be dumped somewhere else.
China’s Slowly Changing Growth Patterns
China will probably do better than Japan in changing the current structure of its economy. With an apparent determination to anchor economic growth around household consumption and investments, Beijing wants to minimize trade frictions with the U.S. and Europe as it becomes one of the key players in world commerce and finance.
These changes will take time, though. One has to remember that most of China’s manufacturing sector was set up to serve exports, based on low wages and a favorable tax treatment of joint ventures with foreign companies.
Still, some important changes are happening already. Rapidly escalating wage and non-wage labor costs are making China increasingly expensive as a manufacturing export base. Some European companies are even repatriating their manufacturing from China due to the shortage – and rapidly rising costs – of skilled labor.
China’s current growth patterns are also likely to change as the planned reduction of large income inequalities and a more extensive welfare system – two of China’s new leader’s top priorities – are likely to stimulate household consumption (a relatively small 35 percent of GDP) since families would have to save less for education, healthcare and retirement.
(Read More: Why China’s New Conservative Leaders Will Be Reformists)
And while these structural changes are taking hold, China’s trading partners could sell more of their products and services by insisting on better access to Chinese markets. Beijing will have to yield because its own companies are seeking to establish trading and manufacturing positions in various countries around the world.
Obama’s Wrong Number in Europe
While China’s large trade surpluses are a relatively recent problem, Germany’s systematically export-led economy has been a destabilizing factor for Europe and the rest of the world since the early 1970s.
(Read More: Why the US-China Trade Spat Is Just Political Posturing)
President Obama learned all about it when he was trying to rev up the U.S. economy during his election campaign. Apparently thinking that he solved former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s old riddle – “Who do I call if I want to call Europe” – Obama hit the wall when he rang up that number in Berlin to ask for less austerity and more economic stimulus to protect one-fifth of American exports to the E.U.
Not only did the German Chancellor Merkel refuse to oblige, but she also haughtily dismissed American entreaties by saying that “it made no sense to be adding new debt to old debt.” And all that from a lady Obama decorated with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, America’s highest civilian honor, in June 2011.
But Obama was right to ask Germany to buy more from its trading partners, because Germany had plenty of room to stimulate the economy and stop living off the rest of the world. With a virtually balanced budget, record trade surpluses (6 percent of GDP), stable and low inflation, and borrowing costs of its public sector at a record-low 1.3 percent, Germany should temper its austerity mantra and buy more goods and services from some of the hard-pressed and heavily indebted euro zone countries.
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Germany, of course, won’t do that. A low unemployment rate, and a relatively placid social scene, will again allow Germany to ride out the euro zone recession on the back of exports.
Don’t Hold Your Breath for the G20
What can be done about the fact that 25 percent of the world economy makes no net contribution to global economic growth and acts as a drag on the economies of its trading partners? The answer is: not much, if anything.
The irony is that the world has a forum to deal with such problems. The G20 – a group of the world’s 20 leading economies, representing 90 percent of global GDP and two-thirds of the world population – has been set up to promote economic growth through better coordination of economic policies. In other words, through policies designed to reduce destabilizing trade imbalances in the world economy.
The need to implement better coordination of macroeconomic policies was one of the key decisions of the G20 meeting in the Mexican resort of Los Cabos last June. And what happened?
The G20 sherpas (representatives of the heads of state and government) had nothing to say about that when they met in late October to monitor the implementation of their bosses’ decisions, because there were no coordinated policy measures to support the weakening world economy undermined by excessively unbalanced trade flows.
The sherpas nevertheless congratulated themselves on the “good work” and passed the baton to Russians who will take on the G20 presidency next January.
But expect no more to be done in the imperial splendor of Saint-Petersburg’s Constantin Palace in September 2013 than the repeat of empty talk – at great taxpayers’ expense – of previous meetings.
That will suit Beijing, Tokyo and Berlin just fine. As in the past, they know they can bet on one thing and win: Driven by an extraordinarily loose monetary policy, the U.S. economy will continue to be their main export market for the foreseeable future.
Michael Ivanovitch is president of MSI Global, a New York-based economic research company. He also served as a senior economist at the OECD in Paris, international economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and taught economics at Columbia
© 2012 CNBC.com
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November 19th, 2012 by olddog
THIS IS WHY OLDDOG SUPPORTS SECESSION
http://www.globalresearch.ca/september-11-2001-the-crimes-of-war-committed-in-the-name-of-911/5311561
By Prof Michel Chossudovsky
Global Research,
September 11, 2001: The Crimes of War Committed “in the Name of 9/11″
Initiating a Legal Procedure against the Perpetrators of 9/11
International Conference on “9/11 Revisited – Seeking the Truth”
Perdana Global Peace Foundation (PGPF)
Kuala Lumpur, November 2012
Introduction
The tragic events of September 11, 2001 constitute a fundamental landmark in American history, a decisive watershed, a breaking point. Millions of people have been misled regarding the causes and consequences of 9/11.
September 11 2001 opens up an era of crisis, upheaval and militarization of American society. The post September 11, 2001 era is marked by the outright criminalization of the US State, including its judicial, foreign policy, national security and intelligence apparatus.
9/11 marks the onslaught of the “Global War on Terrorism” (GWOT), used as a pretext and a justification by the US and its NATO allies to carry out a “war without borders”, a global war of conquest.
A far-reaching overhaul of US military doctrine was launched in the wake of 9/11.
9/11 was also a stepping stone towards the relentless repeal of civil liberties, the militarization of law enforcement and the inauguration of “Police State USA”.
In assessing the crimes associated with 9/11 in the context of a legal procedure, we must distinguish between those associated with the actual event, namely the loss of life and the destruction of property, from the crimes committed in the aftermath of September 11, 2001 “in the name of 9/11″. The latter build upon the former. We are dealing with two related dimensions of criminality. The crimes committed in the name of 9/11 involving acts of war are far-reaching, resulting in the deaths of millions of people as well as the destruction of entire countries.
The 9/11 event in itself– which becomes symbolic– is used to justify the onslaught of the post 9/11 US-NATO military agenda, under the banner of the “Global War on Terrorism” (GWOT), not to mention the ushering in of the Homeland police state and the repeal of civil liberties.
The crimes committed in the name of 9/11 broadly consist in two intimately related processes:
1. The launching of the “Global War on Terrorism” (GWOT), used as a pretext and a justification to Wage a War of Conquest. This GWOT mandate was used to justify the 2001 and 2003 invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. The GWOT mandate has since extended its grip to a large number of countries in Africa, the Middle East and Southeast Asia, where the US and its NATO allies are intervening selectively under a counterterrorism mandate.
2. The derogation of civil liberties and the instatement of an Orwellian police state apparatus within Western countries. In the US, the introduction of the PATRIOT legislation and the establishment of the Department of Homeland Security in the immediate wake of the 9/11 attacks set the stage for the subsequent restructuring of the judicial and law enforcement apparatus, culminating in the legalisation of extrajudicial assassinations under an alleged counter-terrorism mandate.
The 9/11 attacks constitute what is referred to in intelligence parlance to as a “massive casualty producing event” conducive to the deaths of civilians.
The dramatic loss of life on the morning of 9/11 resulting from an initial criminal act is used as a pretext and a justification to wage an all out war of retribution, in the name of 9/11 against the alleged perpetrators of 9/11, namely the “state sponsors of terrorism”, including Afghanistan, Iraq as well as Iran.
We are dealing with a diabolical and criminal project. The civilian deaths resulting from the 911 attacks are an instrument of war propaganda, applied to build a consensus in favor of an outright war of global domination.
The perpetrators of war propaganda are complicit in the conduct of extensive war crimes, in that they readily justify acts of war as counter-terrorism and/or humanitarian operations (R2P) launched to protect civilians.
The “Just War” (Jus ad Bellum) concept prevails: The killing of civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq are “rightfully” undertaken in retribution for the deaths incurred on 9/11.
Evidence is fabricated to the effect that the “state sponsors of terrorism” had committed, on the morning of 9/11, an outright act of war against the United States.
Realities are turned upside down. The US and its allies are the victims of foreign aggression. America’s crimes of war in Afghanistan and Iraq are committed in the name of 9/11 under a counter terrorism mandate.
The 9/11 attacks are used to harness public opinion into supporting a war without borders. Endless wars of aggression under the humanitarian cloak of “counter-terrorism” are set in motion.
Chronology of Events
At eleven o’clock, on the morning of September 11, the Bush administration had already announced that Al Qaeda was responsible for the attacks on the World Trade Center (WTC) and the Pentagon. This assertion was made prior to the conduct of an in-depth police investigation.
CIA Director George Tenet stated that same morning that Osama bin Laden had the capacity to plan “multiple attacks with little or no warning.”
Secretary of State Colin Powell called the attacks “an act of war” and President Bush confirmed in an evening televised address to the Nation that he would “make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those [foreign governments] who harbor them”.
Former CIA Director James Woolsey, without mentioning Afghanistan, pointed his finger at “state sponsorship,” implying the complicity of one or more foreign governments. In the words of former National Security Adviser, Lawrence Eagleburger, “I think we will show when we get attacked like this, we are terrible in our strength and in our retribution.”
That same evening at 9:30 pm, a “War Cabinet” was formed integrated by a select number of top intelligence and military advisors. And at 11:00 pm, at the end of that historic meeting at the White House, the “War on Terrorism” was officially launched.
The war cabinet had decided to launch an an illegal and criminal war on Afghanistan, based on essentially two interrelated concepts:
1. The 9/11 attacks although allegedly conducted by Al Qaeda were upheld as an all out military attack by a foreign power.
2. Afghanistan in allegedly supporting Al Qaeda, was responsible for an act of military aggression directed against the United States of America.
The tragic events of 9/11 provided the required justification to wage war on Afghanistan on “humanitarian grounds”, with the full support of World public opinion and the endorsement of the “international community”. Several prominent “progressive” intellectuals made a case for “retaliation against terrorism”, on moral and ethical grounds. In taking on this stance they provided legitimacy to the conduct of war crimes. The “just cause” military doctrine (jus ad bellum) was accepted and upheld at face value as a legitimate response to 9/11.
In the wake of 9/11, the antiwar movement was completely isolated. The trade unions and civil society organizations had swallowed the media lies and government propaganda. They had accepted a war of retribution against Afghanistan, an impoverished country in Central Asia of 30 million people.
The myth of the “outside enemy” and the threat of “Islamic terrorists” was the cornerstone of the Bush administration’s military doctrine, used as a pretext to invade Afghanistan and Iraq, not to mention the repeal of civil liberties and constitutional government in America. The post 9/11 era was also characterised by the development of Islamophobia, including routine ethnic profiling directed against Muslims.
Where was Osama bin Laden on September 11, 2001?
Is there any proof to the effect that Osama bin Laden, the bogeyman, coordinated the 9/11 attacks as claimed in the official 9/11 narrative?
According to CBS news (Dan Rather, January 28, 2002), “Enemy Number One” was admitted to the urology ward of a Pakistani military hospital in Rawalpindi on September 10, 2001, courtesy of America’s indefectible ally Pakistan. Rawalpindi is the Headquarters of the Pakistani military including its intelligence apparatus. He could have been arrested at short notice which would have “saved us a lot of trouble”, but then we would not have had an Osama Legend, which has fed the news chain as well as presidential speeches in the course of the last eleven years.
DAN RATHER. As the United states and its allies in the war on terrorism press the hunt for Osama bin Laden, CBS News has exclusive information tonight about where bin Laden was and what he was doing in the last hours before his followers struck the United States September 11.
This is the result of hard-nosed investigative reporting by a team of CBS news journalists, and by one of the best foreign correspondents in the business, CBS`s Barry Petersen. Here is his report.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE) BARRY PETERSEN, CBS CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Everyone remembers what happened on September 11. Here`s the story of what may have happened the night before. It is a tale as twisted as the hunt for Osama bin Laden.
CBS News has been told that the night before the September 11 terrorist attack, Osama bin Laden was in Pakistan. He was getting medical treatment with the support of the very military that days later pledged its backing for the U.S. war on terror in Afghanistan. (transcript of CBS report, see
http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/CBS203A.html , see also
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/01/28/eveningnews/main325887.shtml
CBS News footage of the Rawalpindi, Pakistan, hospital where bin Laden was allegedly treated the day before 9/11. [Source: CBS News]
The foregoing CBS report which is of utmost relevance indicates two obvious facts:
1. Osama bin Laden could not reasonably have coordinated the 9/11 attacks from his hospital bed;
2. The hospital was under the jurisdiction of the Pakistani Armed Forces, which has close links to the Pentagon. Osama bin Laden’s whereabouts were known to both the Pakistani and US military.
U.S. military and intelligence advisers based in Rawalpindi. were working closely with their Pakistani counterparts. Again, no attempt was made to arrest America’s best known fugitive. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld claimed, at the time, that the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden were unknown. According to Rumsfeld: “Its like looking for a needle in a stack of hay”.
Recovering from his hospital treatment in Rawalpindi on the 11th of September, how could Osama have coordinated the 9/11 attacks?
How could Afghanistan be made responsible for these attacks by Al Qaeda? Bin Laden is a national of Saudi Arabia who, according to CBS News, was not in Afghanistan, but in Pakistan at the time of the attacks.
September 12, 2001: The Invasion of Afghanistan: NATO’s Doctrine of Collective Security
The immediate response of the US and its NATO allies to the 9/11 attacks was to the declare a war of retribution against Afghanistan on the grounds that the Taliban government was protecting “terror mastermind” Osama bin Laden, who at the time of the attacks was in Pakistan, protected by the Pakistani military and intelligence apparatus. In a bitter irony, the Pakistani government and military, which had facilitated bin Laden’s hospitalization in Rawalpindi on September 10, offered to assist the US in “going after bin Laden”. An agreement to this effect was reached on September 12 in Washington between the head of Pakistan’s military Intelligence (ISI) General Mahmoud Ahmed and Secretary Colin Powell.
Parroting official statements, the Western media mantra on September 12, 2001 had already approved the launching of “punitive actions” directed against civilian targets in Afghanistan. In the words of William Saffire writing in the New York Times: “When we reasonably determine our attackers’ bases and camps, we must pulverize them — minimizing but accepting the risk of collateral damage” — and act overtly or covertly to destabilize terror’s national hosts”.
By allegedly harboring bin Laden, the Afghan government was complicit, according to both the US administration and NATO, for having waged an act of war against the United States.
This decision was taken by the Bush-Cheney war cabinet in the evening of September 11, 2001. It was based on the presumption, “confirmed” by the head of the CIA that Al Qaeda was behind the attacks.
On the following morning, September 12, 2001, NATO’s Atlantic Council meeting in Brussels, endorsed the Bush administration’s declaration of war on Afghanistan (taken by the war cabinet at 11pm on September 11), invoking Article 5 of the Washington Treaty.
Meanwhile, on two occasions in the course of September 2001, the Afghan government –through diplomatic channels– offered to hand over Osama Bin laden to US Justice. These overtures were turned down by president Bush, on the grounds that America “does not negotiate with terrorists”.
The War on Afghanistan: First Stage of the “Global War on Terrorism”
The war on Afghanistan was launched 26 days later on the morning of October 7, 2001. The timing of this war begs the question: how long does it take to plan and implement a major theater war several thousand miles away.
Military analysts will confirm that a major theater war takes months and months, up to a year or more of advanced preparations. Confirmed by press reports, the war on Afghanistan was already in an advanced state of readiness prior to September 11, 2001, which begs the question of foreknowledge of the 9/11 attacks.
In other words, the 9/11 attacks were used as a means to trigger a military agenda which was already on the drawing board of both the Pentagon and NATO.
The repeal of civil liberties in America was launched in parallel with the bombing and invasion of Afghanistan. Immediately following 9/11, the PATRIOT legislation was adopted. The Homeland Security apparatus was launched, with a view to “protecting Americans against terrorists”. This post-911 legal and institutional framework had been carefully crafted prior to the 9/11 attacks.
Article 5 of the Washington Treaty: NATO’s Legal Argument
In invoking Article 5 on the morning of September 12, 2001, NATO’s Atlantic Council endorsed a criminal military agenda, in derogation of international law.
The legal argument used by Washington and NATO to invade Afghanistan was that the September 11 attacks constituted an undeclared “armed attack” “from abroad” by an unnamed foreign power, and that consequently “the laws of war” apply, allowing the nation under attack, to strike back in the name of “self-defense”.
On the morning of September 12, 2001, NATO’s North Atlantic Council meeting in Brussels, responded to the decision of the War Cabinet taken a few hours earlier at 11pm on 9/11, adopted the following resolution:
“if it is determined that the [September 11, 2001] attack against the United States was directed from abroad [Afghanistan] against “The North Atlantic area“, it shall be regarded as an action covered by Article 5 of the Washington Treaty”. (emphasis added)
In this regard, Article 5 of the Washington Treaty stipulates that if:
“The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them, in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defence recognised by Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations, will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.” (NATO,
What is Article 5, NATO Topics – NATO and the Scourge of Terrorism, accessed 24 November 2009, emphasis added)
An act of war by a foreign nation (Afghanistan) against a member of the Atlantic Alliance (the USA) was considered as an act of war against all members under NATO’s doctrine of collective security.
Under no stretch of the imagination, can the attack on the World Trade Center and Pentagon be categorized as an act of war by a foreign country. But nobody seemed to have raised this issue.
“Use of Armed Force” only “If It is Determined…”
There was an “if” in the September 12 resolution. Article 5 would apply only if it is determined that Afghanistan as a Nation State was complicit or behind the 9/11 attacks.
In practice, the “if” had already been waived prior to 9/11. The entire NATO arsenal was already on a war footing. In military terms, NATO and the US were already in an advanced state of readiness. Known to military analysts, but never revealed in the Western media, the implementation of a large scale theater war takes at least one year of advanced operational planning, prior to the launching of an invasion.
The use of article 5 of the Washington Treaty had in all likelihood been contemplated by military planners, as a pretext for waging war, prior to 9/11.
There was, however, no official declaration of war on September 12th. The Alliance waited until 3 days before the invasion to declare war on Afghanistan, an impoverished country which by no stretch of the imagination could have launched an attack against a member state of “The North Atlantic area”.
The September 12 resolution of the Atlantic Council required “determination” and corroborating evidence, that:
1) Al Qaeda led by Osama bin Laden with the support of a foreign power had ordered the “attack from abroad” on the United States of America;
2) The terrorist attacks of 9/11 constituted a bona fide military operation (under the provisions of Article 5) by an alleged foreign country (Afghanistan) against a NATO member state, and consequently against all NATO member states under the doctrine of collective security:
“Article 5 and the case of the terrorist attacks against the United States: The United States has been the object of brutal terrorist attacks. It immediately consulted with the other members of the Alliance. The Alliance determined that the US had been the object of an armed attack. The Alliance therefore agreed that if it was determined that this attack was directed from abroad, it would be regarded as covered by Article 5. NATO Secretary General, Lord Robertson, subsequently informed the Secretary-General of the United Nations of the Alliance’s decision.
Article 5 has thus been invoked, but no determination has yet been made whether the attack against the United States was directed from abroad.
If such a determination is made, each Ally will then consider what assistance it should provide. In practice, there will be consultations among the Allies. Any collective action by NATO will be decided by the North Atlantic Council. The United States can also carry out independent actions, consistent with its rights and obligations under the UN Charter.
Allies can provide any form of assistance they deem necessary to respond to the situation. This assistance is not necessarily military and depends on the material resources of each country. Each individual member determines how it will contribute and will consult with the other members, bearing in mind that the ultimate aim is to “to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area”.
By invoking Article 5, NATO members have shown their solidarity toward the United States and condemned, in the strongest possible way, the terrorist attacks against the United States on 11 September.
If the conditions are met for the application of Article 5, NATO Allies will decide how to assist the United States.
(Many Allies have clearly offered emergency assistance). Each Ally is obliged to assist the United States by taking forward, individually and in concert with other Allies, such action as it deems necessary. This is an individual obligation on each Ally and each Ally is responsible for determining what it deems necessary in these particular circumstances.
No collective action will be taken by NATO until further consultations are held and further decisions are made by the the North Atlantic Council.
(NATO, NATO Topics – NATO and the Scourge of Terrorism, accessed 24 November 2009, emphasis added)
The Mysterious Frank Taylor Report
The final decision to invoke Article 5 in relation to the 9/11 attacks came three weeks later upon the submission to the NATO Council of a mysterious classified report by a US State Department official named Frank Taylor. The report was submitted to NATO on October 2nd, 5 days before the commencement of the bombing and invasion of Afghanistan.
Frank Taylor was working in the US State Department. He had been entrusted with the writing of a brief to establish whether the US “had been attacked from abroad”, pursuant to the North Atlantic Council’s resolution of September 12 2001.
US Ambassador at Large and Co-ordinator for Counter-terrorism Frank Taylor briefed the North Atlantic Council on October 2nd, five days before the commencement of the bombings.
On October 2nd he handed his brief to NATO “on the results of investigations into the 11 September attacks… ” NATO – Topic: Terrorism, NATO and the fight against Terrorism, accessed 24 November 2009).
The classified report was not released to the media. And to this date, to our knowledge, it has remained classified.
NATO’s Secretary General Lord Robertson casually summarised the substance of the Frank Taylor report in a press release:
“This morning, the United States briefed the North Atlantic Council on the results of the investigation into who was responsible for the horrific terrorist attacks which took place on September 11.
The briefing was given by Ambassador Frank Taylor, the United States Department of State Coordinator for Counter-terrorism.
This morning’s briefing follows those offered by United States Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage and United States Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, and illustrates the commitment of the United States to maintain close cooperation with Allies.
Today’s was classified briefing and so I cannot give you all the details.
Briefings are also being given directly by the United States to the Allies in their capitals.
The briefing addressed the events of September 11 themselves, the results of the investigation so far, what is known about Osama bin Laden and the al-Qaida organisation and their involvement in the attacks and in previous terrorist activity, and the links between al-Qaida and the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.
The facts are clear and compelling. The information presented points conclusively to an al-Qaida role in the September 11 attacks.
We know that the individuals who carried out these attacks were part of the world-wide terrorist network of al-Qaida, headed by Osama bin Laden and his key lieutenants and protected by the Taliban.
On the basis of this briefing, it has now been determined that the attack against the United States on September 11 was directed from abroad and shall therefore be regarded as an action covered by Article 5 of the Washington Treaty, which states that an armed attack on one or more of the Allies in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all.
I want to reiterate that the United States of America can rely on the full support of its 18 NATO Allies in the campaign against terrorism.” (Lord Robertson, NATO Secretary General, statement to the NATO Council, State Department, Appendix H, Multinational Response to September 11 NATO Press http://www.state.gov/documents/organization/10313.pdf, accessed 24 November 2009, emphasis added)
In other words, 2 days before the actual commencement of the bombing campaign on October 7, the North Atlantic Council decided, based on the information provided by Frank Taylor to the Council “that the attacks were directed from abroad” by Al Qaeda, headed by Osama bin Laden, thereby requiring an action on the part of NATO under Article 5 of the Washington Treaty ( NATO – Topic: Terrorism, NATO and the fight against Terrorism, accessed 24 November 2009):
NATO action under article 5, was outlined in an October 4 decision, 3 days before the commencement of the bombings.
Two days later, on 4 October, NATO agreed on eight measures in support the United States, which were tantamount to an illegal declaration of war on Afghanistan: to enhance intelligence sharing and co-operation, both bilaterally and in appropriate NATO bodies, relating to the threats posed by terrorism and the actions to be taken against it; to provide, individually or collectively, as appropriate and according to their capabilities, [military] assistance to Allies and other states which are or may be subject to increased terrorist threats as a result of their support for the campaign against terrorism;
to take necessary measures to provide increased security for facilities of the United States and other Allies on their territory; to backfill selected Allied assets in NATO’s area of responsibility that are required to directly support operations against terrorism; to provide blanket overflight clearances for the United States and other Allies’ aircraft, in accordance with the necessary air traffic arrangements and national procedures, for military flights related to operations against terrorism; to provide access for the United States and other Allies to ports and airfields on the territory of NATO nations for operations against terrorism, including for refuelling, in accordance with national procedures; that the Alliance is ready to deploy elements of its Standing Naval Forces to the Eastern Mediterranean in order to provide a NATO presence and demonstrate resolve; and that the Alliance is similarly ready to deploy elements of its NATO Airborne Early Warning Force to support operations against terrorism.
NATO – Topic: Terrorism, NATO and the fight against Terrorism, accessed 24 November 2009
Press reports of Frank Taylor’s brief to the NATO Council were scanty. The invocation of Article 5, five days before the bombings commenced, was barely mentioned. The media consensus was: “all roads lead to Bin Laden” as if bin Laden was a Nation State which had attacked America.
What stands out are outright lies and fabrications. Moreover, prior to October 2nd, NATO had no pretext under Article 5 of the Washington Treaty to intervene militarily in Afghanistan.
The pretext was provided by Frank Taylor’s classified report, which was not made public.
The two UN Security Council resolutions adopted in the course of September 2001, did not, under any circumstances, provide a justification for the invasion and illegal occupation of a UN member country of 28 million people. (see Security Council resolution 1368 (2001) Threats to international peace and security caused by terrorist acts, Security Council resolution 1373 (2001) Threats to international peace and security caused by terrorist acts).
UNSC Resolution 1373 (2001) called for prevention and suppression of terrorist acts, as well suppression of the financing of terrorism:
“(e) Ensure that any person who participates in the financing, planning, preparation or perpetration of terrorist acts or in supporting terrorist acts is brought to justice and ensure that, in addition to any other measures against them, such terrorist acts are established as serious criminal offences in domestic laws and regulations and that the punishment duly reflects the seriousness of such terrorist acts;
3. Calls upon all States to:
“(a) Find ways of intensifying and accelerating the exchange of operational information, especially regarding actions or movements of terrorist persons or networks; forged or falsified travel documents; traffic in arms, explosives or sensitive materials; use of communications technologies by terrorist groups; and the threat posed by the possession of weapons of mass destruction by terrorist groups;
“(b) Exchange information in accordance with international and domestic law and cooperate on administrative and judicial matters to prevent the commission of terrorist acts;
“(c) Cooperate, particularly through bilateral and multilateral arrangements and agreements, to prevent and suppress terrorist attacks and take action against perpetrators of such acts;
“4. Notes with concern the close connection between international terrorism and transnational organized crime, illicit drugs, money-laundering, illegal arms-trafficking, and illegal movement of nuclear, chemical, biological and other potentially deadly materials, and in this regard emphasizes the need to enhance coordination of efforts on national, subregional, regional and international levels in order to strengthen a global response to this serious challenge and threat to international security;
“5. Declares that acts, methods, and practices of terrorism are contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations and that knowingly financing, planning and inciting terrorist acts are also contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations (excerpts of UNSC Resolution 1373 (2001, See also UN Press Release SC 7178
SECURITY COUNCIL UNANIMOUSLY ADOPTS WIDE-RANGING ANTI-TERRORISM RESOLUTION; CALLS FOR SUPPRESSING FINANCING, IMPROVING INTERNATIONAL COOPERATION,
Security Council, 4385th Meeting, September 2001)
Nowhere in this resolution is there any mention of military action against a UN member State.
The US led war on Afghanistan, using 9/11 as a pretext and a justification is illegal and criminal.
The US and NATO heads of state and heads of government from 2001 to the present are complicit in the launching of a criminal and illegal war.
The Big Lie: Al Qaeda Made in America
Amply documented but rarely mentioned by the mainstream media, Al Qaeda is a creation of the CIA going back to the Soviet- Afghan war. This was a known fact, corroborated by numerous sources including official documents of the US Congress, which the mainstream media chose to either dismiss or ignore. The intelligence community had time and again acknowledged that they had indeed supported Osama bin Laden, but that in the wake of the Cold War: “he turned against us”.
Both the 9/11 Commission Report as well as the Western media have largely upheld the “outside enemy” mythology, heralding Al Qaeda as the “mastermind” organization behind the 9/11 attacks. The official 9/11 narrative has not only distorted the causes underling the collapse of the World Trade Center buildings, it has also erased the historical record of US covert support to international terrorism, while creating the illusion that America and “Western Civilization” are threatened.
Without an “outside enemy”, there could be no “Global War on Terrorism”. The entire national security agenda would collapse “like a deck of cards”. The war criminals in high office would have no leg to stand on.
After 9/11, the campaign of media disinformation served not only to drown the truth but also to kill much of the historical evidence on how this illusive Al Qaeda “outside enemy” had been fabricated and transformed into “Enemy Number One”.
This is why a legal procedure directed against the actual perpetrators of 9/11 is absolutely essential.
History of Al Qaeda
Important to the understanding of 9/11, US intelligence is the unspoken architect of “Islamic terrorism” going back to the heyday of the Soviet-Afghan war.
Bin Laden was 22 years old and was trained in a CIA sponsored guerrilla training camp. Education in Afghanistan in the years preceding the Soviet-Afghan war was largely secular. With religious textbooks produced in Nebraska, the number of CIA sponsored religious schools (madrasahs) increased from 2,500 in 1980 to over 39,000.
“Advertisements, paid for from CIA funds, were placed in newspapers and newsletters around the world offering inducements and motivations to join the [Islamic] Jihad.” (Pervez Hoodbhoy, Peace Research, 1 May 2005)
”The United States spent millions of dollars to supply Afghan schoolchildren with textbooks filled with violent images and militant Islamic teachings…The primers, which were filled with talk of jihad and featured drawings of guns, bullets, soldiers and mines, have served since then as the Afghan school system’s core curriculum. Even the Taliban used the American-produced books,..”, (Washington Post, 23 March 2002)
Under the Reagan administration, US foreign policy evolved towards the unconditional support and endorsement of the Islamic “freedom fighters”. This endorsement has not in any way been modified.
In a twisted irony, throughout the post 911 era, US intelligence in liaison with Britain’s MI6, an Israel’s Mossad, continues to provide covert support to the radical Islamist organization allegedly responsible for the 9/11 attacks. Al Qaeda and its various affiliated groups including the Libya Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) and factions within the Free Syria Army (FSA) are directly supported by the US and NATO.
In a bitter irony, the US and its allies claim to be waging a “war on terrorism” against the alleged architects of 9/11, while also using Al Qaeda operatives as their foot-soldiers.
Front row, from left: Major Gen. Hamid Gul, director general of Pakistan’s
Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI), Director of Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)
Willian Webster; Deputy Director for Operations Clair George; an ISI colonel; and senior CIA official,
Milt Bearden at a Mujahideen training camp in North-West Frontier Province of Pakistan in 1987.
Ronald Reagan meets Afghan Mujahideen Commanders at the White House in 1985 (Reagan Archives)
Iraq: Alleged State Sponsor of the 9/11 Attacks
The formulation of a war of retribution conducted in the name of 9/11 was not limited to Afghanistan.
In the course of 2002, leading up to the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, “Osama bin Laden” and “Weapons of Mass Destruction” statements circulated profusely in the news chain. While Washington’s official position was that Saddam Hussein was not behind the 9/11 attacks, insinuations abounded both in presidential speeches as well as in the Western media. According to Bush, in an October 2002 press conference:
The threat comes from Iraq. It arises directly from the Iraqi regime’s own actions — its history of aggression, and its drive toward an arsenal of terror.
We also must never forget the most vivid events of recent history. On September the 11th, 2001, America felt its vulnerability — even to threats that gather on the other side of the earth. We resolved then, and we are resolved today, to confront every threat, from any source [Iraq], that could bring sudden terror and suffering to America. President Bush Outlines Iraqi Threat, October 7, 2002)
Barely two weeks before the invasion of Iraq, September 11, 2001 was mentioned abundantly by president Bush. In the weeks leading up to the March invasion, 45 percent of Americans believed Saddam Hussein was “personally involved” in the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. (See . The impact of Bush linking 9/11 and Iraq / The Christian Science Monitor – CSMonitor.com, March 14, 2003)
Meanwhile, a new terrorist mastermind had emerged: Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi.
In Colin Powell’s historic address to the United Nations Security Council, in February 2003, detailed “documentation” on a sinister relationship between Saddam Hussein and Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi was presented, focussing on his ability to produce deadly chemical, biological and radiological weapons, with the full support and endorsement of the secular Baathist regime. The implication of Colin’s Powell’s assertions, which were totally fabricated, was that Saddam Hussein and an Al Qaeda affiliated organization had joined hands in the production of WMD in Northern Iraq and that the Hussein government was a “state sponsor” of terrorism.
The main thrust of the disinformation campaign continued in the wake of the March 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq. It consisted in presenting the Iraqi resistance movement as “terrorists”. The image of “terrorists opposed to democracy” fighting US “peacekeepers” appeared on television screens and news tabloids across the globe.
Iran: Condemned by a New York City Court for Supporting Al Qaeda in the 9/11 Attacks
In the wake of the Iraq invasion, the same alleged “state sponsorship” of terrorism accusations emerged in relation to Iran.
In December 2011, the Islamic Republic of Iran was condemned by a Manhattan court, for its alleged role in supporting Al Qaeda in the 9/11 attacks.
The investigation into Tehran’s alleged role was launched in 2004, pursuant to a recommendation of the 9/11 Commission “regarding an apparent link between Iran, Hezbollah, and the 9/11 hijackers”. The 9/11 Commission’s recommendation was that this “apparent link” required “further investigation by the U.S. government.” (9/11 Commission Report , p. 241). (See Iran 911 Case ).
In the December 2011 court judgment (Havlish v. Iran) “U.S. District Judge George B. Daniels ruled that Iran and Hezbollah materially and directly supported al Qaeda in the September 11, 2001 attacks and are legally responsible for damages to hundreds of family members of 9/11 victims who are plaintiffs in the case”.
According to the plaintiffs attorneys “Iran, Hezbollah, and al Qaeda formed a terror alliance in the early 1990s. Citing their national security and intelligence experts, the attorneys explained “how the pragmatic terror leaders overcame the Sunni-Shi’a divide in order to confront the U.S. (the “Great Satan”) and Israel (the “Lesser Satan”)”. Iran and Hezbollah allegedly provided “training to members of al Qaeda in, among other things, the use of explosives to destroy large buildings.” (See Iran 911 Case ).
This judicial procedure is nothing more than another vicious weapon in the fabricated “War on Terror” to be used against another Muslim country, with a view to destabilizing Iran as well as justifying ongoing military threats. It also says a lot more about the people behind the lawsuit than about the accused. The expert witnesses who testified against Iran are very active in warmongering neocon circles. They belong to a web of architects of the 21st century Middle-Eastern wars, ranging from high profile propagandists to intelligence and military officers, including former U.S. officials.
But what makes this case absurd is that in September 2011, a few months before the judgment, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has questioned the official 9/11 narrative, was accused by Al-Qaeda leaders of “spreading conspiracy theories about the 9/11 attacks”. The semi-official media outlet of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, insisted that al-Qaeda “had been behind the attacks and criticised the Iranian president for discrediting the terrorist group.” (See Julie Levesque, Iran Accused of being behind 9/11 Attacks. U.S. Court Judgment, December 2011 (Havlish v. Iran),
Global Research, May 11, 2012)
Al Qaeda: US-NATO Foot-soldiers
Ironically, while Washington accuses Afghanistan, Iraq and Iran of complicity in the 9/11 attacks, the historical record and evidence indelibly point to the “state sponsorship” of Al Qaeda by the CIA, MI6 and their intelligence counterparts in Pakistan, Qatar and Saudi Arabia.
Realities are turned upside down. Al Qaeda death squads have been recruited to wage America’s humanitarian wars throughout the Middle East an d North Africa.
In Syria Al Qaeda units were recruited by NATO and the Turkish High command: “Also discussed in Brussels and Ankara, our sources report, is a campaign to enlist thousands of Muslim volunteers in Middle East countries and the Muslim world to fight alongside the Syrian rebels.” (http://www.debka.com/article/21255/ Debkafile, August 31, 2011).
In Libya, jihadists from Afghanistan trained by the CIA were dispatched to fight with the “pro-democracy” rebels under the helm of “former” Libya Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) Commander Abdel Hakim Belhadj:
Western policy makers admit that NATO’s operations in Libya have played the primary role in emboldening Al Qaeda’s AQIM faction (Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb). The Fortune 500-funded Brookings Institution’s Bruce Riedel in his article, “The New Al Qaeda Menace,” admits that AQIM is now heavily armed thanks to NATO’s intervention in Libya, and that AQIM’s base in Mali, North Africa, serves as a staging ground for terrorist activities across the region. http://www.globalresearch.ca/al-qaeda-and-natos-pan-arab-terrorist-blitzkrieg/
“Crimes against Civilization”
9/11 mythology has been the mainstay of war propaganda, which in itself constitutes a criminal act under international law.
Fiction prevails over reality. For propaganda to be effective, public opinion must firmly endorse the official 9/11 narrative to the effect that Al Qaeda was behind the attacks. A well organized structure of media disinformation is required to reach this objective. Perpetuating the 9/11 Legend also requires defying as well smearing the 9/11 Truth Movement.
Throughout the post 9/11 era, a panoply of Al Qaeda related events and circumstances is presented to public opinion on a daily basis. These include terrorist threats, warnings and attacks, police investigations, insurgencies and counter-insurgencies, country-level regime change, social conflict, sectarian violence, racism, religious divisions, Islamic thought, Western values, etc.
Muslims are presented as the perpetrators of the 9/11, thereby unleashing a Worldwide demonization campaign.
In turn, 9/11, Al Qaeda – War on Terrorism rhetoric permeates political discourse at all levels of government, including bipartisan debate on Capitol Hill, in committees of the House and the Senate, at the British House of Commons, and, lest we forget, at the United Nations Security Council. All these various bodies are complicit in a criminal project.
September 11 and Al Qaeda concepts, repeated ad nauseam have potentially traumatic impacts on the human mind and the ability of normal human beings to analyze and comprehend the “real outside World” of war, politics and the economic crisis.
What is at stake is human consciousness and comprehension based on concepts and facts.
With September 11 there are no verifiable “facts” and “concepts”, because 9/11 as well as Al Qaeda have evolved into a media mythology, a legend, an invented ideological construct, used as an unsubtle tool of war propaganda.
Al Qaeda constitutes a stylized, fake and almost folkloric abstraction of terrorism, which permeates the inner consciousness of millions of people around the World.
Reference to Al Qaeda has become a dogma, a belief, which most people espouse unconditionally. According to the media, “Muslims were behind the attacks”, thereby justifying a war of retribution against Muslim countries.
Racism and Islamophobia are an integral part of war propaganda.
Is this political indoctrination? Is it brain-washing? If so what is the underlying objective?
People’s capacity to independently analyse World events, as well as address causal relationships pertaining to politics and society, is significantly impaired. That is the objective!
The routine use of 9/11 and Al Qaeda to generate blanket explanations of complex political events is meant to create confusion.
It prevents people from thinking. It strikes at the core of human values. In a sense, it destroys civilization.
All of these complex Al Qaeda related occurrences are explained by politicians, the corporate media, Hollywood and the Washington think tanks under a single blanket “bad guys” heading, in which Al Qaeda is casually and repeatedly pinpointed as “the cause” of numerous terror events around the World.
The criminality underlying post 9/11 propaganda is of much broader nature, affecting people’s mindsets, redefining fundamental social, political and institutional relations.
“Crimes against Civilization” have been committed.
9/11 mythology precipitates the World into barbarity.
Copyright © 2012 Global Research
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November 17th, 2012 by olddog
http://www.pakalertpress.com/2012/11/17/why-the-states-
must-secede-to-save-america-2/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_
medium=email&utm_campaign=
Feed%3A+pakalert+%28Pak+Alert+Press%29
Declaration of Independence 2.0: Restoring the Republic
Infowars
Radio host Alex Jones today called for a secondAmerican Revolution led by states who would secede from the federal government and reconstitute the Republic under the terms of theDeclaration of Independence, bill of rights and constitution. (Read the transcript here).
The call for Americans to rally behind a restoration of the Republic and the bill of rights comes on the back of a burgeoning secessionist movement that has swept the country with residents from all 50 states submitting petitions to the White House calling for states to withdraw from the union and form their own independent governments. The petitions have received a combined number of signatures totaling over a million.
During his nationwide broadcast today, Jones laid out the battle plan for secession, emphasizing that states must first secede from the federal government, which has gone rogue, and then use the terms of the Declaration of Independence to restore the Republic, not create a new country.
Jones stressed that he was calling for a cultural restoration in the spirit of the bill of rights – a newly unified America under the Constitution – and not a violent overthrow, noting that it was the states that created the Constitution and the federal government in the first place.
Jones noted that the only course to restoring liberty was clear – “To follow the founding document of the Republic, the Declaration of Independence, wherein it is clearly stated that it is the right and the duty of the American people, when their government becomes destructive and tyrannical, to abolish and reconstitute it in a form that protects our liberties.”
“We are not calling for secession to form new separate countries, we are calling for secession because the states created the Constitution, bill of rights and federal government, and the federal government itself has been hijacked by foreign special interests – mainly banking cartels,” said Jones.
“I am calling for people to be educated about how we can secede to restore the Republic,” said Jones, warning that the media was attempting to characterize the entire movement as a plot to bring down America when in fact America has already been captured and taken over by the political and financial elite.
“This is the states putting their foot down and saying we are going to reconstitute the federal government under the bill of rights and constitution, we’re going to kick out the bureaucrats, the lobbyists, the foreign criminals, and the Federal Reserve who have taken over,” explained Jones.
The radio host also put the call out for Congressman Ron Paul to head up such a movement and utilize his vast network of grass roots liberty-loving activists to lead the charge, as well as using his contacts in each state to begin the process of secession in the legislature.
Harvard constitutional law scholar and adviser to Ron Paul, Edwin Viera, appeared on the syndicated radio broadcast and agreed with Alex Jones’ constitutional battle plan, with the declaration of independence as the centerpiece of legal authority.
Ron Paul’s former congressional chief of staff and founder of the Von Mises institute, Lew Rockwell, also appeared on the special broadcast and concurred with Jones’ strategy that now is the time to launch our offensive and restore the republic.
The right of the people to reconstitute their government if it becomes oppressive and onerous is clearly outlined in the Declaration of Independence.
“That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”
Preamble, Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776.
In the aftermath of petitions from all 50 states to secede being posted on the White House website and signed by over a million Americans, the secessionist movement has been portrayed as anti-American, unpatriotic and even treasonous. In reality, as Ron Paul has emphasized, it is as American as apple pie and George Washington.
The most popular petition out of all 50 that have been posted on the White House website applies to Texas and reads as follows;
“The US continues to suffer economic difficulties stemming from the federal government’s neglect to reform domestic and foreign spending. The citizens of the US suffer from blatant abuses of their rights such as the NDAA, the TSA, etc. Given that the state of Texas maintains a balanced budget and is the 15th largest economy in the world, it is practically feasible for Texas to withdraw from the union, and to do so would protect it’s citizens’ standard of living and re-secure their rights and liberties in accordance with the original ideas and beliefs of our founding fathers which are no longer being reflected by the federal government.”
The call for states to secede from the union, one now backed by over a million Americans, is part of a wider disenfranchisement with how the country has been infested and hijacked by a crony political elite and the principles of the founders decimated.
As over a million Americans express their disenfranchisement with the federal government by supporting a secessionist movement that has spread like wildfire, it is time to call for a new declaration of independence and a new commitment to restore the Republic in the face of an enemy that has subverted America from within.
The United States government has been seized by domestic and foreign banking cartels. This fact is so transparently obvious that talking heads on CNBC now laugh about it.
While Americans are being told to brace for tax hikes, spending cuts and a myriad of other austerity measures, the Federal Reserve has been sending trillions of dollars to foreign banks.
The federal government is supposed to represent the states, but it doesn’t, it represents the interests of the political and banking elite who themselves have no allegiance whatsoever to America.
Infowars is calling on patriots to start a movement to draft Ron Paul as the head of a brand new effort to restore the Republic, restore the bill of rights and opt out of the counterfeit America the banking elite has subverted and fashioned to serve their own interests.
The establishment media is already demonizing the secessionist movement as a rag-tag group of fringe kooks and paranoid racists, when in reality as the Daily Caller uncovered, it is comprised of former Marines, parents, business owners and ordinary mechanics.
Meanwhile, Obama supporters and other statists have called on the government to punish those putting their signatures to the secession petitions by having them stripped of their citizenship, deported and exiled.
It’s time to re-assert the narrative on secession and put it in its proper context, which is not an infantile reaction to the fact that Barack Obama won the election, but an expression of extreme uneasiness at the direction in which the country is heading, a widespread discontent that has been ongoing for long before Obama even took office, and a new commitment calling on states to nullify unconstitutional laws andregulations and secede from the increasingly tyrannical federal government.
Watch Ron Paul’s farewell speech below in which he skewers authoritarianism in all its forms and captures the true spirit of liberty which should drive the movement to secede from the federal government and reconstitute America under the Declaration of Independence.
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November 15th, 2012 by olddog
http://dailycaller.com/2012/11/14/white-house-secede-petitions-
reach-660000-signatures-50-state-participation/#ixzz2CHRiUIpa
David Martosko
Less than a week after a New Orleans suburbanite petitioned the White House to allow Louisiana to secede from the United States, petitions from seven states have collected enough signatures to trigger a promised review from the Obama administration.
By 6:00 a.m. EST Wednesday, more than 675,000 digital signatures appeared on 69 separate secession petitions covering all 50 states, according to a Daily Caller analysis of requests lodged with the White House’s “We the People” online petition system.
A petition from Vermont, where talk of secession is a regular feature of political life, was the final entry.
Petitions from Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, North Carolina, Tennessee and Texas residents have accrued at least 25,000 signatures, the number the Obama administration says it will reward with a staff review of online proposals. (RELATED: Will Texas secede? Petition triggers White House review)
The Texas petition leads all others by a wide margin. Shortly before 9:00 a.m. EST Wednesday, it had attracted 94,700 signatures. But a spokesperson for Gov. Rick Perry said Tuesday afternoon that he does not support the idea of his state striking out on its own.
“Gov. Perry believes in the greatness of our Union and nothing should be done to change it. But he also shares the frustrations many Americans have with our federal government,” according to a statement from the governor’s office.
A backlash Monday night saw requests filed with the White House to strip citizenship rights from Americans who signed petitions to help states secede. (RELATED: Anti-secession forces fight back with White House deportation petitions)
And in a similar nose-thumbing aimed at Texas’ conservative majority, progressives from the liberal state capital of Austin responded Monday with a petition to secede from their state if Texas as a whole should decide to leave the Union.
Late Tuesday a second group of Texans, this one from Houston, lodged their own White House petition. Secession-minded Texans, they wrote, “are mentally deficient and [we] do not want them representing us. We would like more education in our state to eradicate their disease.”
Houstonian “Kimberly F” — The White House does not provide last names — submitted the petition. She told The DC in an email that ”we need both sides presented, or we all look like a bunch of fools.”
A group from El Paso, too, wants no part of an independent Texas. “Allow the city of El Paso to secede from the state of Texas,” their petition reads. “El Paso is tired of being a second class city within Texas.”
But smaller petitions like theirs are a political side show of a political side show. One effort, aimed at Missourians, called for a nationwide catered pizza party to celebrate when the Show Me State left the U.S. (RELATED: Pizza party! White House petition silliness gets cheesy)
States whose active petitions have not yet reached the 25,000 signature threshold include
Alaska, Arkansas, Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware,
Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland,
Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana,
Nebraska, Nevada,New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York,
North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island,
South Carolina, South Dakota, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington,
West Virginia, Wisconsin and Wyoming.
OLDDOGS COMMENTS
For all of you naysayers out there, America was never intended to be a nation, it was supposed to be a confederation of independent States that retained their own sovereignty, and the federal government was to have limited responsibilities. However, over time the dull and ignorant drank the kool-aid of unity and now we have a tyrant deciding which direction to wipe our backside. That’s not advice, it’s an order, and I for one do not need that kind of bulling in my life. If American’s had enough common sense to read history and figure out why we should be sovereign States, we would not be in this mess. We are not fooled by this exercise, and expected severe blowback when we signed up, so let it come we don’t give a shit.
THIS KIND OF CRAP IS THE RESULT OF THE FEDS
INTERVENTION IN LOCAL LAW ENFORCEMENT
Florida man describes being shot by police Taser as he sprayed fire with garden hose
BY KAMEEL STANLEY TAMPA BAY TIMES
PINELLAS PARK – The fire was all around Dan Jensen.
He could see it. He could smell it. He could hear it.
It was close enough to touch. It was burning down his neighbor's house. It was creeping toward Jensen's own fence 10 feet away, and he started spraying the fire with his hose.
Police ordered Jensen to get back, and he complied.
But after a few minutes passed without firefighters arriving, a frustrated Jensen stepped forward and leaned down to grab the skinny gray garden hose once again.
That's when he heard the order.
"Hit 'em! Take him down! Tase him!"
Within moments, Jensen was on the ground. He felt electric.
"It was all over me," Jensen said. "Crawling all over me."
The 42-year-old commercial fisherman is still struggling to comprehend exactly how things deteriorated so quickly Thursday. He said he doesn't understand why police shot him with a Taser that night as he tried to battle a house fire at 3420 Beechwood Ter. N.
Jensen's family, friends and neighbors have been quick to defend him and accuse police of crossing a line.
"It was wrong," he said. "There's no way around it. … I was fighting a fire. I wasn't fighting police. I thought they were here to help me. Instead, they hurt me."
Police said they can sympathize with the stress Jensen was under. But they said he put himself and officers in danger when he refused to back down from fighting the fire.
Pinellas Park Capt. Sanfield Forseth told the Tampa Bay Times authorities could have even charged Jensen with obstruction, but decided against it.
Jensen's attorney, Heidi Imhof, said she believes authorities are trying to deflect attention from their actions that night. She called the Taser use "excessive force."
"They can't just Taser anyone," she said. "He's an unarmed person on his private property trying to fight a fire."
Imhof said the officers had other options. They could have yanked Jensen away, she said, or just turned off the water.
The agency's policy says officers must issue a warning before using a Taser, "except when such warning could provide a tactical advantage to the subject."
Imhof said her client was never warned.
Jensen said he's "disappointed" in police.
He said that when they arrived on the scene, they told him to back off and let insurance take care of it. He did for a few minutes but grew impatient and irate. He picked up the hose again because he thought firefighters weren't getting there soon enough.
Officials told the Times it took six minutes for fire fighters to respond.
"That's my home," Jensen said Monday, his voice breaking. "That's my family."
Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/11/13/3094917_
florida-man-describes-being-shot.html#storylink=addthis#storylink=cpy
CONTINUE LEARNING AT http://anationbeguiled.wordpress.com
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November 12th, 2012 by olddog
http://www.zombie-slayer.com/neal/
Neal Ross
The title of this piece is something I have been asking myself for quite some time now. I know that I am not the only one who sees it, but sometimes I feel as though I am among an ever diminishing few who can see that our country is slowly but surely self destructing. In 1781 Thomas Jefferson provided us a hint as to what could bring this about. From his Notes on the State of Virginia, " It is the manners and spirit of a people which preserve a republic in vigor. A degeneracy in these is a canker which soon eats to the heart of its laws and constitution."
Be ye Republican or Democrat, like it or not, our country was founded upon certain principles which allowed us to become great among nations. As long as we adhered to those principles, did not tinker with the plan so to speak, we would continue to be great. But, unfortunately we have forgotten those principles and allowed evil and corrupt men to gain the seats of power, resulting in the mess we now find ourselves in.
In an essay published in 1748, Samuel Adams stated that "[N]either the wisest constitution nor the wisest laws will secure the liberty and happiness of a people whose manners are universally corrupt. He therefore is the truest friend to the liberty of his country who tries most to promote its virtue, and who, so far as his power and influence extend, will not suffer a man to be chosen into any office of power and trust who is not a wise and virtuous man."
That job, the selecting of wise and virtuous men, was bestowed upon us, the electorate. But, how are we to accomplish it with any level of proficiency when the majority of the populace are totally ignorant of the principles upon which this country was founded, and when we allow our emotions or needs dictate who we will cast our votes for?
Now I am not saying people today are stupid, but they are ignorant. Being ignorant simply means that they are lacking knowledge or education in general or in a specific subject. But whose fault is that when knowledge is readily available? Whose fault is that when people will spend all day glued to a television watching sporting events, but they won't take the time to pick up a book and read something that may educate and inform them?
To put it plainly, the fault lies with us, the American people. We have allowed our government to grow into this monstrous beast that devours our liberty and seeks to enslave us. We have not held those whose job it was to protect our rights and liberty accountable.
It doesn't matter who is in office, I always hear two things, and they are quite similar. First, people say that the guy in office inherited this mess from the guy before him, and secondly, we have to give the guy a chance to fix the mess left to him by his predecessor.
That alone shows how ignorant people are as to how our system of government was supposed to function. According to the Constitution the president cannot create law, that power is delegated solely to Congress. The president can either sign a bill into law, or veto it, nothing more. So, when people cast their vote for a presidential candidate, be they Republican or Democrat, based upon all the things this person says they will do, then they do not know how our government is supposed to work. Instead they should be voting for Senators and members of the House who will push forward bills to do these things.
However, like it or not, we are a nation of laws, with the Constitution being the Supreme Law of the land. In the 1866 Supreme Court case of Ex Parte Milligan, the court ruled, " The Constitution of the United States is a law for rulers and people, equally in war and in peace, and covers with the shield of its protection all classes of men, at all times, and under all circumstances. No doctrine, involving more pernicious consequences, was ever invented by the wit of men than that any of its provisions can be suspended during any of the great exigencies of government. Such a doctrine leads directly to anarchy or despotism."
As I was growing up I would walk down the hall and pass a framed needlepoint that my mother had made and hung on the wall. I later found out that it was a quote taken from John F. Kennedy's Inaugural Address. It said, " And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you ask what you can do for your country." How many people go to the polls today and cast their vote with that thought in mind?
There is a quote that is supposedly attributed to a Scottish Lawyer named Alexander Fraser Tytler which best describes the process that is occurring in America today, " A democracy will continue to exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury. From then on, the majority always votes for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship." With our nation currently being $16 trillion in debt, I would say we are well on our way to fulfilling that prediction.
Again, who is to blame for all this? You could say it is our elected officials, but that is like saying who is responsible for an unruly kid, the child, or the parents whose job it was to watch him and discipline him when he misbehaves?
So, how did all this happen, how did we let the greatest country on earth to go from a land where our rights and liberty was of paramount importance to a land where we are controlled and regulated by the very agents who are sworn to protect our rights? It is pretty simple, and can be summed up by something Josef Stalin once said, " America is like a healthy body and its resistance is threefold: its patriotism, its morality, and its spiritual life. If we can undermine these three areas, America will collapse from within."
You may be saying that communism died with the fall of the Berlin wall and the ensuing collapse of the Soviet Union. Not so! Just because a person does not come down sick does not mean that viruses do not surround them. Communism is alive and well, and is slowly destroying this country.
I know that many of those reading this do not remember the height of the Cold War, but one of the Soviet Leaders, Nikita Khrushchev once said ," I once said, "We will bury you," and I got into trouble with it. Of course we will not bury you with a shovel. Your own working class will bury you."
There was a guy named Ernest Cuneo, who aside from being a professional football player, was a lawyer, newspaperman, and intelligence liaison. In 1969 he wrote that, in his farewell address, Vladimir Lenin stated, " Take your example from the good housewife who finds use for even a broken shoestring. A good Communist finds use for everything, and nothing is more useful than a useful idiot." And believe me, America is full of useful idiots these days.
I wonder, how many people have sat down and read the 10 Planks of the Communist Manifesto? In this pamphlet Marx talks about how a capitalist society would eventually be replaced by socialism, and then eventually communism. In Section Two of his manifesto, Marx lists 10 things that must occur for socialism, and eventually communism, to take over in a capitalist society. Take a few moments to think about these things, and then ask yourself where America is headed.
1. Abolition of private property and the application of all rents of land to public purposes.
What do you think the Bureau of Land Management and all the zoning laws are about? Do some research into allodial titles as well if you think YOU truly own your land.
2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.
And yet we constantly hear that the rich, or the bourgeoisie as Marx called them, are not paying their fair share.
3. Abolition of all rights of inheretance.
We're on our way with this with estate taxes or probate laws.
4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.
What have I been writing about for all these years? The Patriot Act, the Military Commissions Act, NDAA, all designed to label ANYONE who disagrees with the policy of their government as a terrorist threat, (rebel).
5. Centralization of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly.
Two words, Federal Reserve.
6. Centralization of the means of communications and transportation in the hands of the State.
Here again we have the Department of Transportation, the Federal Aviation Administration, the Interstate Commerce Commission, and the Federal Communications Commission, not to mention a whole slew of Presidential Executive Orders, which I have also written about in the past.
7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the state, the bringing into cultivation of waste lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.
Department of Agriculture, the Department of Commerce and Labor, Department of the Interior, the EPA, Bureau of Land Management, Bureau of Reclamation, National Park Service all sound like governmental control of the land to me.
8. Equal liability of all to labor. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.
Does minimum wage sound familiar? How about these volunteer work forces President Obama mentioned during his first run at president in 08? What about Labor Unions, don't they sound like industrial armies in that they 'urge' their members to vote for certain laws or candidates?
9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries, gradual abolition of the distinction between town and country, by a more equitable distribution of population over the country.
What about the slow death of privately owned farms and the growth of huge entities like Monsanto? Or you could check out the Planning Reorganization Act of 1949, and Executive Orders 11,647 and 11731 as well as Public Law 89-136 all of which provide for forced relocation and forced sterilization programs.
10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children's factory labor in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production.
This is where they screwed us over royally, and I'd like to take a bit more time discussing this one.
Almost every single founding father, at one point or another, discussed the importance of educating the people as to the values of liberty and the principles upon which our republic was founded.
Samuel Adams said, " No people will tamely surrender their Liberties, nor can any be easily subdued, when knowledge is diffused and Virtue is preserved."
John Adams said, "Children should be educated and instructed in the principles of freedom."
Dr. Benjamin Rush said, " Freedom can exist only in the society of knowledge. Without learning, men are incapable of knowing their rights."
Noah Webster said, " Every child in America should be acquainted with his own country. He should read books that furnish him with ideas that will be useful to him in life and practice. As soon as he opens his lips, he should rehearse the history of his own country."
James Madison said, " Knowledge will forever govern ignorance; and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives. Learned Institutions ought to be favorite objects with every free people. They throw that light over the public mind which is the best security against crafty and dangerous encroachments on the public liberty."
Thomas Jefferson said, " I think by far the most important bill in our whole code is that for the diffusion of knowledge among the people. No other sure foundation can be devised, for the preservation of freedom and happiness…"
And finally, James Monroe, the fifth President of the United States for those who may not have heard his name before, once said, " It is only when the people become ignorant and corrupt, when they degenerate into a populace, that they are incapable of exercising their sovereignty. Usurpation is then an easy attainment, and an usurper soon found. The people themselves become the willing instruments of their own debasement and ruin."
So you tell me, pupils of the public indoctrination, I mean education system, how well do YOU understand the Constitution and the Bill of Rights? The easiest way for a government to assume powers over the people they are supposed to represent is if the people do not know the limits to the powers of their government in the first place. If government gains control of the educational system, they can dictate how much our children are taught about the principles upon which this nation was founded. We trusted government to do what is right, to educate our kids regarding these vital principles, but government let us down. While we were too busy watching TV whole generations of kids have been indoctrinated into these socialist principles and now we have an army of voting youth who are of the belief that it is, in fact, the government's responsibility to take care of them, to make the playing field level for everyone. And if you care to look it up, that is what communism is all about, creating a society where everyone is equal.
You may think that by voting Republican or Democrat you are changing directions this country takes, but you would be wrong. Since 1945 the Democrats have had complete control of government; the Presidency and both houses of Congress eleven times. Twice have the Republicans enjoyed such an advantage. Yet, on fourteen other occasions there were divisions among the powers of government. In some instance there was a Republican President with the Democrats having control of Congress, or vice versa. Other times the Democrats would hold the Senate, while the Republicans controlled the House.
So you can't blame either party, because a sitting president has the authority to veto any legislation which is destructive to the principles upon which this country was founded. Sitting members of Congress can vote against any law which violates the Constitutional limits to their power or infringes upon our rights. Yet NONE of this has happened. BOTH parties are equally to blame, and we are more to blame because we cared more about what was on TV than reading the writings of our founders and voting according to our conscience, and not for the lesser of two evils.
And remember what Stalin said about our resistance being threefold? Well think about the spiritual life of this nation. Look to see how God has been chased out of our schools, our thoughts, and our hearts. Is it any wonder this country is falling apart at the seams?
From his Notes on the State of Virginia Thomas Jefferson said, " All the powers of government, legislative, executive, and judiciary, result to the legislative body…The concentrating these in the same hands is precisely the definition of despotic government. It will be no alleviation that these powers will be exercised by a plurality of hands, and not by a single one. 173 despots would surely be as oppressive as one." He may as well have been talking about the 535 members of Congress and the one President we have in our federal government, as they all seek the same thing, more power for them, and more bondage for us.
And finally, this would not be complete if I did not mention the subject of immigration. I know that you all believe in this whole theory that this nation was built by immigrants. But in Federalist 2, John Jay had something to say about that. He stated, " With equal pleasure I have as often taken notice that Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people–a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs, and who, by their joint counsels, arms, and efforts, fighting side by side throughout a long and bloody war, have nobly established general liberty and independence."
Now you look at the influx of immigrants into this country today, both legal and illegal, do they all have the same religion, the same language, the same thoughts on the principles of government, and the same in our manners and customs? I think not.
From the Children of the Crucible, Theodore Roosevelt said, "From the melting pot of life in this free land all men and woman of all nations who come hither emerge as Americans and nothing else. They must have renounced completely and without reserve all allegiance to the land from which they or their forefathers came. And it is a binding duty on every citizen of this country in every important crisis to act solidly with all his fellow Americans, having regard only to the honor and interest of America, treating every other nation purely on its conduct in that crisis, without reference to his ancestral predilections or antipathies. If he does not act, he is false to the teachings and lives of Washington and Lincoln; he is not entitled to any part or lot in our country and he should be sent out of it."
But no, we must be politically correct, we must practice multiculturalism and respect the traditions of our immigrants. Would their country do the same for us? No, this is America and by God if they come here they play by our rules or they can go home! So what we have is not a melting pot where all immigrants come out as Americans, but an ethnic mix where people come here expecting America to provide them with all the benefits they have not worked a day in their life to earn, and at the same time they walk around protesting how bad this country is. It makes me sick!
But there we have it, that is what has gone wrong in America. There are two final quotes that I would like to leave you with as I close out this long winded tirade. First, from the Declaration of the Causes and Necessities of Taking Up Arms, " Honor, justice, and humanity, forbid us tamely to surrender that freedom which we received from our gallant ancestors, and which our innocent posterity have a right to receive from us. We cannot endure the infamy and guilt of resigning succeeding generations to that wretchedness which inevitably awaits them if we basely entail hereditary bondage on them." And secondly, John Adams once said, "But a Constitution of Government once changed from Freedom, can never be restored. Liberty, once lost, is lost forever."
Well, there you have it, what has gone wrong with our founders experiment as to whether a people could be trusted to govern themselves. This last election, in which Barack Obama readily won over Mitt Romney, (not that Mitt Romney was such a great choice either), proved how far this country has fallen. When a candidate whose job performance has been pathetic, at best, who still has unanswered questions as to his eligibility to even hold office, who has two current scandals to resolve, both resulting in the loss of American lives, (the Benghazi attack and the death of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry), yet can easily be re-elected, it shows that the majority of the voting public are totally ignorant as to what this country stands/stood for.
America, you will be held accountable for what you have allowed to happen, either in this life, or the next. For America HAS fallen, our constitution is all but dead, and the fat lady is warming up, getting ready to take the stage.
Comments may be sent to: bonsai@syix.com
If you have any comments, please post them here: http://www.zombie-slayer.com/neal/
OLDDOGS COMMENTS
Neal is probably the best of citizen commentators, and has the highest regard for our freedom as anyone I have ever met, or read. All citizens regardless of intelligence or education WOULD DO WELL to learn from his articles, and then email him with your support. Those of you who disagree with his logic and knowledge WOULD DO WELL to kiss my ass, and go to hell. I’m sick of American degeneracy. When the cowards are hurting bad enough, just maybe, they will defend their freedom. But, I’m not holding my breath.
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November 10th, 2012 by olddog
THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA HAS ABUSED ITS POWER, AND THE ALTERNATIVE MEDIA IS DEMANDING ACCOUNTABILITY
http://www.pakalertpress.com
1. Hyper-attention On A Particular Event, Issue, and Mantra.
The mainstream media exclusively focuses on a single storyline about an event or an issue, which has the effect of marginalizing other points of view that are equally valid, if not more so. Narratives, not facts and objective data, have taken center stage in the aspiring journalist’s mind. Journalists and editors who oversee the making of the news play the same role as screenwriters in the filmmaking process. Their power stems from the fact that the public looks at news as “real,” whereas they know movies are totally fake. But news in the United States and the West is the farthest thing from being real.
Journalists who are in the service of the U.S. intelligence community and other government intelligence agencies are messengers for power. Their job is to repeat government narratives and government mantras. For example, Al-Qaeda is a mantra, not an international terror organization that is at war with America. Read, “Al Qaeda And Human Consciousness: Al Qaeda, Al Qaeda. . . . An Incessant And Repetitive Public Discourse,” by Prof Michel Chossudovsky. The “Arab Spring” is another mantra that Washington has used to fulfill its foreign policy objectives in the Middle East.
The latest mantra that the mainstream media is using in a domestic context is the “fiscal cliff.” Media messengers for the tyrannical establishment do not discuss how the Federal Reserve’s private moneymachine, Wall Street bailouts, and the military-industrial complex’s wars have caused the skyrocketing of U.S. debt. They just keep repeating “fiscal cliff,” and then offer bipartisan solutions that will benefit the banksters in power while destroying the living standards of middle class taxpayers and workers.
By focusing on the “fiscal cliff,” rather than the Grand Canyon of Deception that is the unconstitutionalFederal Reserve system, the mainstream media legitimizes the looting and pillaging of the American people by the transnational banksters.
2. Production of Fake News Reports.
War propaganda is not a new feature of warfare, but the modern Western mass media has taken this art to its highest technological development. What the American, Israeli, and Western media accomplished on the day of September 11, 2001, is simply astonishing. 9/11 was a riveting Hollywood production, from start to finish, from morning to nightfall. It made Hitler’s propaganda team weep from the beyond. But the official 9/11 story is just one example of how news is manufactured by the government in tandem with the press.
Examples abound in Syria. Propaganda stations like CNN, Al Jazeera, and BBC have reported on fake massacres by the Syrian government, made up the size of anti-Assad protests, and generally exaggerated the intensity of the hatred for Assad within Syria. We cannot rely on the official number of the people who have died in the conflict because the malicious media routinely makes up figures and repeats them until they become accredited as facts.
Up to now, the Western media has painted a very rosy picture of the anti-Assad “rebels” who are foreign-funded Jihadist terrorists, while minimizing the suffering and needless deaths of Assad’s supporters like Syrian-Palestinian actor Mohamad Rafea.
We can clearly see that the revolution in Syria is an imagined revolution and not a real revolution. The Arab Spring is not like an organic plague that spreads from country to country. The U.S., Turkey, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia transported the Arab Spring into Syria, and it met resistance from the politically aware Syrian people and the powerful Syrian state. This is natural because there was never a demand for a violent Jihadi revolution in Syria. The anti-government sentiments in Syria never reached the level of despair, unlike in Egypt, Bahrain, and other countries in the region.
3. Omission of Facts and Alternative Opinions.
Since the mainstream media operates in a politically constructed universe, facts that contradict the word of the U.S. government are suppressed. The integrity of the fake universe is preserved at the cost of destroying the real universe.
Those who have a different opinion of events that transformed America like 9/11 and the 2008 bankster bailout are ridiculed as crazy. When you express alternative opinions that conflict with the official narratives of the U.S. government you are accused of being paranoid, conspiracy theorizing, aiding Al-Qaeda, and drumming up fear for ratings. To learn more about how media propaganda against dissent works, read,“The Propaganda Battlefield: Militants Abroad, Conspiracy Theorists At Home.”
Canceling out reality may work for a while, but it has the last word. It is getting harder for the mainstream media to ridicule independent investigators as conspiracy theorists for pointing out that the U.S. and its dictatorial allies are sponsoring Jihadi terrorism against Syria. Even mainline journalists are beginning to admit it. How can they not? It is pretty tough to cover-up reality.
There are videos of Jihadist mercenaries mass executing civilians and the Western media spin machine is powerless in the face of this kind of explosive evidence. They will just look foolish if they say mass executions by anti-government terrorists isn’t happening and that all the blame for the crisis in Syria falls on Assad’s shoulders.
4. Mass Indoctrination of The Public Through Myth and Ritual.
The example of the 9/11 ritual proves that we think mythically, not rationally. It is easy for a totalitarian government with vast media resources to condition the public and put it under a spell indefinitely. The trouble arises with the arrival of a competing narrative, one that is actually based on scientific facts as opposed to propaganda.
But a sustained media campaign to brainwash the public in combination with the trauma of terror can effectively keep the public under the government’s spell for a very long time. Read, “Seven Ways Events Like 7/7 Empower Socialized Warfare,” to learn about the effectiveness of false flag terrorism. Also, read,“7 Reasons Washington’s Grand Counter-Terrorism Myths Persist In The Face of Evidence.”
What is it about mass public rituals that galvanize political leaders and embolden them to take radical action that otherwise would not be accepted by the majority of the public? They are trigger events that create mass panic and chaos, resulting in greater government power over the minds of spellbound citizens. Martin S. Day, author of the book, ‘The Many Meanings of Myth,’ says there are six sociological purposes of cultural and social rituals, and you can read them here.
When an entire civilization is emotionally and intellectually invested in a particular myth, it is nearly impossible to divorce the civilization from the myth. How has the 9/11 myth benefited Western civilization? In terms of war, the West has been politically able to wage aggression against numerous innocent countries in the Middle East by holding up the 9/11 myth to the rest of the world as a moral justification for its war crimes.
But America and the West has also been destroyed because of the 9/11 myth and the illegitimate global war on terrorism. Economically, politically, morally, intellectually, and spiritually, Western governments are reaching the point of bankruptcy.
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November 9th, 2012 by olddog
http://www.thecommonsenseshow.com/
THE TRUTH NO LONGER MATTERS,
SO SHUT UP AND DRINK THE KOOL AID
By Dave Hodges
How does a President who used an ambassador to run guns through the CIA, to al-Qaeda, and then was complicit in his murder and then fired two senior military officers who tried to save the Ambassador’s life and then manage to get himself re-elected to the highest office in the land? Well, in a word, ignorance is the answer. I fear that America is about ready to pay a steep price for her slumbering ways.
The abovementioned transgression should be enough to put Obama in irons for the next 30 years. Yet, the American people rewarded him with another presidential term..
After you read the following short list of Obama transgressions against the Constitution and the American people, ask yourself how safe do you feel with four more years of Obama?
Obama is not even a citizen of the United States, as determined by several researchers including Maricopa County, Arizona Sheriff, Joe Arpaio. Obama’s long form birth certificate was declared a forgery. Yet, America elected this illegal alien to a second term.
Under the Obama presidency, America has seen her national debt double and financial collapse is right around the corner. We have seen our allies jump ship in record numbers. We have over half the country on welfare. The Obama administration paid 22 billion dollars to help GM relocate most of its operations to China after the American people bailed GM out in 2008. Half of all college graduates cannot find fulltime work and most are saddled with crippling debt through their predatory college student loans.
Obama has closed a multitude of coal plants, thus making energy prices skyrocket. He has funded Solyndra and Pat Stryker’s Abound Solar with our tax money, to the tune of over a billion dollars, and not one kilowatt of solar energy was produced. The President is now leading the newest energy scam in the bio-fuel industry, namely, algae in which our nation is subsidizing millions, and soon to be billions to algae proponents including Warren Buffet, George Soros and Al Gore. The one thing that these men don’t tell you is that it takes 300 gallons of water to produce one gallon of algae gasoline. And of course, under Obama, gas prices have more than doubled.
Obama’s depopulation leanings are expressed in his national health care law which, in one fell swoop, placed nearly 20% of the economy under socialist control. Under Obama-care, birth control services are mandatory. Lifestyles which do not add to the birthrate are honored (eg transsexual) and given preferential treatment by the Obama administration. Obama’s health care death panels will help America continue its slide in life-expectancy where we are presently 51st in the world despite spending 10 times more than the next dozen nations combined!
It is clear that Obama is not a Christian and honors every faith but the worship of Jesus Christ. Obama has kneeled at the feet of our enemies and I believe that he ultimately serves humanity’s greatest enemy, Satan.
The President pushed for the NDAA which allows him to disappear and murder political opponents and critics such as Andrew Breitbart. Obama’s executive order entitled the National Defense Resources Preparedness, allows Obama, at the stroke of the pen, to enact civilian conscription and food confiscation along with the complete control of all industry by government. Under Obama, FEMA camps became operationalized and staffed. Does anyone ask why? Additionally, the TSA has taken its VIPR program to the streets in order to sexually assault more Americans in the name of liberty. If Obama has this much power at the end of his first term, what nightmare scenario will come in his second term?
As I have previously, Obama is an avowed Communist. Former communist party leader, Frank Davis was his father. Obama had his Harvard education paid for and had his political career launched by former Weathermen Underground thugs, Bernardine Dorne and Bill Ayers. Obama was raised to be a communist and now this despot has four more years to make the White House more like Red Square.
What could we have been thinking on election day? The fact is we were not thinking .The 47% of the people who are on Obama’s welfare voted to keep the federal gravy train rolling. Many of the 65% of young adults who cannot find Great Britain on a map, believe Obama when he says we can spend our way out of a depression. We are the victims of our own ignorance.
Nero fiddled while Rome burned. Obama will likely be golfing the day our economy becomes insolvent under his leadership. And that is when, the 80-90% of ignorant Americans will soon come to learn what many of us in the alternative medial already know, Obama passed the NDAA, The National Resources Preparedness and the death panels of Obama-care for a reason. Coupled with the fact that Obama has issued ten times more executive orders than all of the Presidents combined in our entire history which sets up the potential for a total dictatorship in his next 4 years in which I predict we will see absolute government by presidential decree. Be afraid America, be very afraid.
READ THIS!
Obama signed an executive order to create virtual dictatorship
“When government fears the people, there is liberty. When the people fear the government, there is tyranny”.
Thomas Jefferson
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