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thegente

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  1. http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-05-13/collectivists-hate-individuality-tribalism-and-fast-and-furious-7 THIS IS AN EXCELLENT ARTICLE: Collectivists Hate Individuality, Tribalism, And 'Fast And Furious 7'? on 05/13/2015 21:00 -0400 ETC Federal Reserve Reality Reuters inShare Submitted by Brandon Smith via Alt-Market.com, Sometimes in the liberty movement — with discussions of potential collapse, war, revolution, social destabilization, etc. — it is easy to get so caught up in the peripheral conflict between the elites and the citizenry that we forget what the whole thing is really about. That is to say, we tend to overlook the very core of the conflict that is shaping our epoch. Some would say that it is a simple matter of good versus evil. I don’t necessarily disagree, but good and evil are not defined methodologies; rather, they are inherent archetypes — facts born in the minds and hearts of all men. It’s a gift of comprehension from something greater than ourselves. They are felt, rather than defined, and attempts by institutions (religious, scientific, legal or otherwise) to force morality away from intuitive reason and into a realm of artificial hierarchical and mathematical standards tend to lead only to even more imbalance, destruction, innocent deaths and general immorality. There have been many nightmare regimes throughout history that have claimed to understand and obey moral “laws” and standards while at the same time having no personal or spiritual connection to those standards. In other words, some of the most heinous acts of immorality are often stamped with the approval of supposedly moral social and governmental institutions. This is why a person who calls himself a moral Christian, a moral Muslim, a moral atheist, a moral legislator, a moral conservative, a moral liberal, a moral social justice warrior, etc. is not necessarily a person who ultimately acts with moral conviction. It is not enough for one to memorize and follow the code of a belief system or legal system blindly. One must also understand the tenets of inborn natural law and of the human soul that make those codes meaningful (if they have retained any meaning), or he will eventually fall prey to the vicious calamities of dogma and the collective shadow. If I were to examine the core methodologies that are at odds in our society today, I would have to say that the whole fight comes down not only to good versus evil, but to collectivism versus individualism. The same demands of understanding also apply to this dichotomy. Nearly all human beings naturally gravitate toward social structures. This is not under debate. The best of us seek to work with others for the betterment of our own position in terms of survival and success, but also the betterment of our species as a whole, if possible. Beyond this, people often find solace and a sense of epiphany when discovering connections to others; the act of recognition and shared experience that is in itself a religious experience. This is what I would call “community,” as opposed to “collectivism.” Collectivism is a bastardization and manipulation of the inherent desire most people have to build connections to those around them. It takes the concept of community to the extreme end of the spectrum, and in the process, removes all that was originally good about it. In a collectivist system, individualism becomes a threat and a detriment to the functionality of society. In a community, individualism is seen as a valuable resource that brings a diversity of ideas, skills and unique views, making the group stronger. Collectivism believes the hive mind is more efficient. Community believes voluntary action and individual achievement makes society healthier in the long run. Our culture in general today is being bombarded with messages that aggrandize collectivism and stigmatize community and individualism. This is not by mere chance; it is in fact a program of indoctrination. I came across a rather strange and in some ways hilarious example of this while sifting through the propaganda platform known as Reuters. As most liberty movement activists are well aware, Reuters is a longtime haven for Fabian socialists who despise honest reporting (to them media is a means of controlling the populace, not informing it) and who consistently inject concepts of collectivist (i.e., globalist) ideology into their articles. The Reuters opinion piece linked here and written by Lynn Stuart Parramore presents itself as a kind of social examination of film and its reflection of the decline of American civilization. Rather oddly, the film chosen as a litmus test was “Fast And Furious 7.” Yes, that’s right. The “Fast and Furious” franchise apparently contains social commentary so disturbing to Reuters’ contributing “cultural theorists” that they felt compelled to write a short thesis on it. First, I would like to point out that when I first read the article the original title was “‘Fast decline of postwar America & furious desire to cling to ‘family.’” It appears that Reuters has since “amended” the title to stand out a little less as a collectivist expose. Just to be clear, I have no interest in discussing the content of the “Furious 7″ film. My commentary will focus not on the film but on Reuters’ commentary regarding the film...if that makes sense to you. So what about the newest Furious film has the collectivists so concerned? As the article states, “something alarming lurks at the heart of ‘Furious 7.'” The film’s depiction of America as an economically wounded nation in which good men cannot find a means to make an honest and adequate living doesn’t seem to bother them as much as the response of the main characters to such circumstances. The article almost revels in the postwar degradation of American living standards, outlining how fiscal decline has led to the disruption of the American family and posits that the golden era of the 1950’s economic boom is a relic, erased by the rise of a severe “haves and have-nots” division in the American class sphere. This is, of course, a decidedly simplistic view that appeals more to Marxists than to anyone with true knowledge of the breakdown of the U.S. Reuters takes issue with “Furious 7″ because of what it refers to as the “1950’s fantasy” narrative it clings to, in which the heroes long for a return to the middle-class dream, turning away from the corrupt structure of the system and reverting to the “tribalism” of families and posses. The “myth of the posse,” they state, “ignores the interconnectedness of the broader society” and “the idea of a common culture of citizenship recedes into the background, as does faith in a society based on shared principles of justice.” I find this conclusion rather fascinating in its collectivist bias. We are led to believe by Parramore’s article that it is the “Ayn Randian” code of contemporary economics and market efficiency that has led America astray. To put it simply, the free market did this to us. This is the great lie promoted ad nauseam by collectivists today — collectivists who would like to divert blame for economic failure on more individualistic market ideals. The reality is that America has NOT supported free market methods for at least a century. The advent of parasitic central banking as an economic core in the Federal Reserve and constant government intervention and regulation that have only destroyed small business rather than kept large businesses in check has caused the very negative financial environment that Parramore at least recognizes as the source of our ills. Corporations themselves exist only because of government regulatory license, after all, but you won’t ever catch Reuters criticizing that. It was collectivism and the rise of the statist model that bled America dry, not free-market methods that have not existed in this country for more than 100 years. The delusion that free markets are the problem was the same delusion that helped bring down Occupy Wall Street; the movement failed in part because its foundational philosophy was built on disinformation that rang false with otherwise sympathetic people. So an action movie presents a competing model to collectivism, because collectivism has always been the problem, despite what Reuters has to say. That model is a return to classic human community in the form of family and “tribalism” where regular individuals matter, a point the Reuters article subtly mocks as a “fantasy.” But here we find the collectivists using the kind of rhetoric one would come to expect from social Marxists. The article continues: "When the personal posse replaces civic spirit, and the us-against-them mentality prevails, monsters can breed…" "This is what is now happening in many corners of the world, where neglected groups have formed posses positively bloodthirsty in their quest to assert that they matter on the global stage to show they are not just victims of a rigged game…" I’m not exactly sure what “bloodthirsty groups” Parramore is referring to as “posses,” but I suspect this is a reference to the rise of ISIS, among others. And here we find the Fabian socialist-style propaganda at play. You see, the Fabian ideology is the driving force behind globalization — the same globalization that triggered the vast downward slide in American prosperity; the same globalization that has generated anger and dissension among the downtrodden and poverty-stricken; the same globalization that has created artificial economic interdependency among nations and the domino effect of fiscal crisis around the globe; and the same globalization that has led to the predominance of covert agencies, covert agencies which have been funding “bloodthirsty posses” like ISIS for decades. And the source philosophy behind globalization has always been collectivism — the “interconnectedness of broader society” that Parramore proclaims as lost in the pages of the “Furious 7″ screenplay. Parramore ends with a stark warning to us all: "… a return to tribal instincts and the letting go of the broader common bonds and the welfare of the greater human family has a dark side. It is ultimately a dangerous road to travel." Those of us who support the idea of localized community (i.e., tribalism) and the value of the individual over the arbitrary collective are, supposedly, playing with fire; and we should be scared, very scared. We would not want to be labeled as “bloodthirsty monsters” hell-bent on disturbing the tranquility of the “greater human family.” Oh, boy. When I read this kind of agenda-based garbage, I am reminded of the insanity of slightly more open social Marxists, such as feminists, who have through dishonorable tactics conjured an atmosphere of collective and legal pressure designed not to present a better argument, but to make all opposing arguments a sin against the group. That is to say, social Marxists do not have a better argument, so their only option is to make rational counterarguments socially taboo or even illegal. If you want to know where social Marxism (collectivism) is headed, this is it: the labeling of individualistic philosophies as dangerous thought crimes and tribal communities as time bombs waiting to explode in the face of the wider global village. They desperately hope to conquer the world by dictating not only national boundaries and civil liberties, but the very moral code by which society and individuals function. They wish to bypass natural law with fear, fear that the collective will find you abhorrent and barbaric if you do not believe exactly as they believe. Individualism will one day be the new misogyny. Think of it this way: If an undoubtedly forgettable movie like “Furious 7″ can’t even portray a fictional step away from the abyss of collectivist cultism without a prophecy of doom from Reuters, then is anyone really safe from these lunatics?
  2. Right folks, this all just Kabuki for the zombie sheeple...the Dems are pulling a fake out so that once they do shove this stinker down the American public's throat, they can say, "well, WE TRIED"...and sadly most of the idiots out there will fall for it...AGAIN. It does seem more and more folks are waking up everyday though. But I do think things are about to get much, much worse before they get better here in the US.
  3. Thanks RV, I posted some more on that. People need to wake the fook up!!! http://dinarvets.com/forums/index.php?/topic/201221-jp-morgan-begins-to-ban-cash/
  4. http://www.economicpolicyjournal.com/2015/04/the-bankster-war-on-cash-jpmorganchase.html Tuesday, April 21, 2015 The Bankster War on Cash; JPMorganChase Begins to Prohibit the Storage of Cash in Its Safety Deposit Boxes Letters are apparently going out to some JPMoragnChase customers announcing that cash will be prohibited from being stored in the bank's safety deposit boxes. At the Collectors Universe message board, a commenter reports: My mother has a SDB at a Chase branch with one of my siblings as co-signers. Last week they got a letter outlining a number of changes to the lease agreement, including this: "Contents of the box: You agree not to store any cash or coins other than those found to have a collectible value." Another change is that signatures will no longer be accepted to access the box. The next time they go in they have to bring two forms of ID and they will be issued a four-digit pin number that will be used to access the box then and in the future. Professor Joseph Salerno of the Mises Institute writes: As of March, Chase began restricting the use of cash in selected markets, including Greater Cleveland. The new policy restricts borrowers from using cash to make payments on credit cards, mortgages, equity lines, and auto loans. Chase even goes as far as to prohibit the storage of cash in its safe deposit boxes . In a letter to its customers dated April 1, 2015 pertaining to its “Updated Safe Deposit Box Lease Agreement,” one of the highlighted items reads: “You agree not to store any cash or coins other than those found to have a collectible value.” Just last week, Citigroup's top economist, Willem Buiter, wrote a report calling for the abolishment of cash as a sound policy. Hide your wallets, the banksters are on the move. MORE: http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-04-16/another-shill-statism-central-planning-demands-cash-ban Citigroup's Gold "Expert" Demands A Cash Ban inShare26 Late last year, Grexit "expert" Willem Buiter decided that he was a greater expert on the topic of monetary metals than on geopolitics by stating that "Gold Is A 6,000 Year Old Bubble." Now, he has decided that after gold, it is best to just do away with any physical currency altogether and the time to ban cash has arrived. Submitted by Pater Tenebrarum via Acting-Man blog, Citigroup’s Chief Economist Joins the Cash Ban BandwagonWe have discussed the views of Citigroup’s chief economist Willem Buiter previously in these pages (see “A Dose of Buiternomics” for details), on occasion of his coming out as a supporter of assorted monetary cranks, such as Silvio Gesell, to name one. Not to put too fine a point to it, Buiter is a monetary crank too. Buiter is always shilling for more central bank intervention, and it seems no plan can ever be too silly or too extreme for him. In fact, he seems to have made the propagation of utterly crazy ideas his trademark. Buiter has now joined one of his famous colleagues, Kenneth Rogoff, another intellectual enamored with central planning, in clamoring for a cash ban (for our discussion of Rogoff, see “Meet Kenneth Rogoff, Unreconstructed Statist”). Both Buiter and Rogoff want to make it impossible for citizens to escape the latest depredations of central bankers, such as the imposition of negative interest rates. This is to be done by forcing them to keep their money in accounts at fractionally reserved banks. If Buiter gets his way, there won’t be a WSOP final table with piles of cash anymore. Photo credit: David Becker / Las Vegas Review-Journal As Bloomberg reports: “The world’s central banks have a problem. When economic conditions worsen, they react by reducing interest rates in order to stimulate the economy. But, as has happened across the world in recent years, there comes a point where those central banks run out of room to cut — they can bring interest rates to zero, but reducing them further below that is fraught with problems, the biggest of which is cash in the economy. In a new piece, Citi’s Willem Buiter looks at this problem, which is known as the effective lower bound (ELB) on nominal interest rates. Fundamentally, the ELB problem comes down to cash. According to Buiter, the ELB only exists at all due to the existence of cash, which is a bearer instrument that pays zero nominal rates. Why have your money on deposit at a negative rate that reduces your wealth when you can have it in cash and suffer no reduction? Cash therefore gives people an easy and effective way of avoiding negative nominal rates. Buiter’s note suggests three ways to address this problem: Abolish currency. Tax currency. Remove the fixed exchange rate between currency and central bank reserves/deposits. Yes, Buiter’s solution to cash’s ability to allow people to avoid negative deposit rates is to abolish cash altogether. (Note that he’s far from being the first to float this idea. Ken Rogoff has given his endorsement to the idea as well, as have others.) Before looking at the practicalities of abolishing currency, we should first look at whether it could ever be necessary. Due to the costs of holding large amounts of cash, Buiter puts the actual nominal rate at which the move to cash makes sense as closer to -100bp. So, in order for a cash abolition to become necessary, central banks would need to be in a position where they wished to set nominal rates much lower than that. Buiter does not have to go far to find an example of where a central bank may have wanted to set interest rates much lower to -100bp. He uses (a fairly aggressive) Taylor Rule to show that Federal Reserve rates should have been as low as -6 percent during the financial crisis.” (emphasis added) As mentioned above, no meddling by a central bank is ever too extreme or too crazy for Mr. Buiter. Here is his ridiculous “Taylor rule” chart (the conclusions of which by the way would be vehemently disputed by none other than Mr. Taylor himself). Buiter’s ridiculous chart asserting that a “negative interest rate of 6% would have been needed” in 2008-2010, via Citigroup, Bloomberg. This nice gentlemen who wants to either “abolish cash” or “tax currency” for the good of us all, is a typical example of the modern-day viciously statist intellectual (h/t, Hans-Hermann Hoppe), who constantly pines for the authorities to implement social engineering on a grand scale. As long as they implement his plan, everything will be great. Not Bothered by ConcernsBloomberg tells us that “Buiter is aware that his idea may a bit controversial”. What a relief. He even lists the disadvantages of abolishing cash, only to dismiss them out of hand. With the exception of one crucial point, he is mainly erecting straw men. “Buiter is aware that his idea may be somewhat controversial, so he goes to the effort of listing the disadvantages of abolishing cash. Abolishing currency will constitute a noticeable change in many people’s lives and change often tends to be resisted. Currency use remains high among the poor and some older people. (Buiter suggests that keeping low-denomination cash in circulation — nothing larger than $5 — might solve this.) Central banks and governments would lose seigniorage revenue. Abolishing currency would inevitably be associated with a loss of privacy and create risks of excessive intrusion by the government. Switching exclusively to electronic payments may create new security and operational risks. Buiter dismisses each of these concerns in turn, finishing with: In summary, we therefore conclude that the arguments against abolishing currency seem rather weak. Whatever the strength of the arguments, the chances of an administration taking the decision to abolish cash seem vanishingly small. We are surprised by the optimism expressed by Bloomberg that “the chances of an administration taking the decision to abolish cash seem vanishingly small”. We believe that governments all over the so-called “free world” are working feverishly to make a ban of cash currency a reality. Naturally, we couldn’t care less about the “seignorage” revenue of the State. In our opinion central banks shouldn’t even exist, and “seignorage” is nothing but a euphemism for outright theft. It’s a nice touch that Buiter also doesn’t want to “throw seniors under the bus” and gives a brief thought to the poor as well. Why would any of them ever need anything more than a $5 note? That someone like Buiter doesn’t find it difficult to dismiss the concern that “abolishing currency would inevitably be associated with a loss of privacy and create risks of excessive intrusion by the government” is no surprise, but it is indeed a legitimate concern. Under the cover of the “war on drugs” and lately the even bigger government-sponsored racket known as the “war on terror”, financial privacy has been all but eradicated already. Willem Buiter, shill for statism and central planning, here seen at the Council for Foreign Relations. Did we mention that we believe he’s an atrocious economist? Photo credit: Bloomberg Needless to say, we dispute the idea that central banks should ever impose negative interest rates. This policy is revolting economic nonsense that greatly harms the economy. As we have previously pointed out, given that the natural rate of interest can never be zero or negative, it is an inescapable conclusion that any imposition of negative market rates will end up destroying scarce capital and leave society poorer. Lastly, Buiter fails to list one counterargument that we believe is extremely important. Since he works for a charter member of the world’s most powerful banking cartel, this is no big surprise either. We will make up for his oversight. The 2008 crisis has not shown that anyone needs “negative interest rates” as Buiter erroneously claims. It has mainly shown how rickety and de facto insolvent the fractionally reserved banking system really is. If not for the introduction of an accounting trick (under immense political pressure, the FASB allowed the banks to dispense with mark-to-market accounting, which suddenly made them “whole” again), a huge taxpayer bailout and money printing by the central bank on an unprecedented scale (in the post WW2 era), several of the biggest banks would have gone the way of Lehman. It was a good reminder that although fiduciary media – deposit money that is not backed by standard money – are part of the money supply in the broader sense, their main characteristic is that they exist only in the form of accounting entries. Hence, fractionally reserved banks are at all times insolvent, since they cannot possibly pay all demand deposits on demand. This obvious violation of what once used to be a bailment contract has been sanctioned by the courts in the 19th century under the influence of banking interests. If one considers how deposit money is multiplied under this system, it should be obvious that the scheme is fundamentally fraudulent. It goes against the grain of legal traditions that have been well-established in Western culture since antiquity. If cash were to be banned, people could no longer opt out from this system. Bank runs would no longer be possible at all. While a bank run these days only gives one government scrip that is itself an irredeemable liability of a central bank, it is at least slightly more “real” than the accounting entry known as deposit money. Most importantly, cash can insure one against a bank going under, or the breakdown of the entire banking system, which is always a potential danger. Banks would obviously love a cash ban – quite possibly they are the only ones who would love it even more than governments. ConclusionWe keep being bombarded by moves to restrict the use of cash and demands to ban it altogether. These demands seem to mainly revolve around two arguments: one is that “only criminals need cash”, which is on a par with the absurd assertion that we should all be fine with Stasi-like ubiquitous government surveillance “if we have nothing to hide”. The other one is that a cash ban would make life easier for the central planners who are actively undermining the economy with their policy of debasement. We would argue that central banking and fiat money have done more than enough harm already and that the eradication of financial privacy has gone way too far. Money and banking should be freed from the clutches of government-directed monopolization and cartelization and should be returned to the free market. Addendum:One of our readers has sent us a few links concerning recent examples of the war on cash waged by governments the world over, which we reproduce below. Indeed, there is little cause for optimism on this score. Given this increase in attempts to restrict the use of cash, the danger that possession of gold will one day be declared illegal again can no longer be so easily dismissed either.
  5. http://www.naturalnews.com/045172_conspiracy_theories_rational_thought_corporate_collusion.html# Refreshing rationality: Why NOT believing in conspiracies is a sure sign of mental retardation Saturday, May 17, 2014 by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger 9,420 46 (NaturalNews) The phrase "conspiracy theorist" is a derogatory smear phrase thrown at someone in an attempt to paint them as a lunatic. It's a tactic frequently used by modern-day thought police in a desperate attempt to demand "Don't go there!" But let's step back for a rational moment and ask the commonsense question: Are there really NO conspiracies in our world? The Attorney General of South Carolina would surely disagree with such a blanket statement. After all, he sued five pharmaceutical companies for conducting a price-fixing conspiracy to defraud the state of Medicaid money. Similarly, in 2008, a federal judge ruled that three pharmaceutical companies artificially marked up their prices in order to defraud Medicare. In fact, dozens of U.S. states have filed suit against pharmaceutical companies for actions that are conspiracies: conspiracy to engage in price fixing, conspiracy to bribe doctors, conspiracy to defraud the state and so on. The massive drug company GlaxoSmithKline, even more, plead guilty to a massive criminal fraud case involving a global conspiracy to bribe doctors into prescribing more GSK drugs. And this is just the tip of the iceberg. A deeper look into the criminality of just the drug industry alone reveals a widespread pattern of conspiratorial behavior to defraud the public and commit felony crimes in the name of "medicine." What is a conspiracy, exactly?As any state or federal prosecutor will gladly tell you, a "conspiracy" is simply when two or more people plot to commit an act of deceit (or a crime). Thus, when three hoodlums plan to rob the local Quickie Mart, they are engaged in a "conspiracy" and will likely be charged with a "conspiracy to commit armed robbery" in addition to the different crime of "armed robbery." The fact that they planned it with several friends makes it a "conspiracy" worthy of additional felony charges, you see. When these charges are brought up in court, the judge doesn't look at the prosecutor and say, "You are a conspiracy theorist!" That would be absurd. The idea, then, that there is no such thing as a conspiracy is flatly ludicrous. And people who condemn others as being "conspiracy theorists" only make themselves look mentally impaired. To live in our modern world which is full of collusion and conspiracy -- and yet somehow DENY the existence of any conspiracies at all -- is an admission of a damaged brain. Of course there are conspiracies, and when people analyze those conspiracies, they are "theorizing" about what happened. This is, in fact, precisely the job that police detectives and FBI agents carry out almost daily. Most police detectives are, in reality, "conspiracy investigators" and analysts. There are endless examples of real conspiraciesAuto manufacturers routinely conspire to cover up mechanical defects that put customer lives at risk. Even National Public Radio lays out the full timeline of the General Motors conspiracy to hide the problem with its faulty ignition switches. Last year, food corporations conspired with the Grocery Manufacturers of America (the GMA) to commit money laundering crimes in Washington state in order to funnel money into a campaign to defeat GMO labeling there. The FDA conspired with a drug manufacturer to keep a deadly diabetes drug called Rezulin on the market in the USA even after safety regulators pulled the product in Europe. Similarly, the corrupt, criminal-minded operators of mainstream science journals conspired in a particularly evil way to railroad Dr. Andrew Wakefield with provably false accusations about the nature of his research into the side effects of vaccines. The GMO Seralini study has been similarly railroaded by a genuine conspiracy of evil, corrupt science journal editors who routinely conspire to suppress all the science they don't want to be seen by the public. Fortunately, 150 other scientists have come to support Seralini with a global condemnation of the obviously contrived scientific censorship. We live in a world of such deception and collusion that, frankly stated, it's hard to find a large institution (such as medicine, agriculture or the war industry) which isn't involved in some sort of conspiracy at some level. What is a "conspiracy theorist?The pejorative "conspiracy theorist" is meant to demean and ridicule skeptics of official stories. Most so-called "conspiracy theorists" are really skeptics, by definition. They're skeptical of what the government tells them. They're skeptical of the claim that drug companies are really only interested in helping humankind and have no desire to make money. They're skeptical that food corporations are telling them the truth about what's in their food. And they're also skeptical of anything coming out of Washington D.C., regardless of which party happens to be in power at the time. People who are not skeptics of "official stories" tend to be dull-minded. To believe everything these institutions tell you is a sign of mental retardation. To ask questions, on the other hand, is a sign of higher intelligence and wisdom. Skeptics of official stories, it turns out, also have the support of history on their side. How many times has it later been revealed that the American people were lied to by the very institutions we were supposed to trust? For example, it is an historical fact that 98 million Americans were injected with hidden cancer viruses which were later found in polio vaccines strongly recommended by the CDC. In an effort to cover that up and rewrite history, the CDC later scrubbed all accounts of that history from its website, pretending it never happened. That's more than a cover-up; it's an Orwellian-style conspiracy to selectively rewrite history and deny Americans any memory of a monumental, deadly error made by the CDC in collusion with the vaccine industry. According to two former Merck virologists, that company conspired to fake the results of its vaccine tests by spiking test samples with animal antibodies, thereby falsely distorting the results to make the vaccine appear effective. The two virologists filed a False Claims Act with the federal government detailing the conspiracy, saying: Merck also added animal antibodies to blood samples to achieve more favorable test results, though it knew that the human immune system would never produce such antibodies, and that the antibodies created a laboratory testing scenario that "did not in any way correspond to, correlate with, or represent real life ... virus neutralization in vaccinated people..." Conspiracies of money and big banksEvery month, the Federal Reserve conspires to steal a portion of your wealth through "quantitative easing" -- an irresponsible money creation scheme that devalues all the currency already in circulation (i.e. the money in your bank account). The money the Fed creates is, not surprisingly, handed over to the big Wall Street banks -- the same banks that received a jaw-dropping $29 trillion in "bailout money" since the near-collapse of U.S. banking in late 2008. Why did this bailout money go to the banks instead of the American people? Because powerful people sat in dark rooms and colluded to send the money to the most influential banks. A conspiracy, in other words, by definition. Had that same amount of money been equally distributed across the U.S. population, the Fed would have distributed nearly $100,000 to each and every citizen in America; man, woman and child. But instead of enriching the population, the banking bailout burdened the population with the debt now owed to the Fed by future taxpayers. Every $1 trillion created by the Fed, after all, is $1 trillion "loaned" to the U.S. Treasury which must somehow be repaid. In truth, the minute you start to investigate how money is created, why the Federal Reserve is a private banking cartel and why the big banks get all the bailout money, you run head-first into genuine conspiracies almost from the outset. When you look up the word "conspiracy" in a dictionary, it should probably say, "See Banking and Finance." Our world is full of conspiracies because it's full of people who deceiveThe reason conspiracies are real is because humanity is a race capable of extreme deception. As long as there are people whose actions are based in greed, jealousy and a desire to dominate others, there will be real conspiracies plotted and operating across every sector of society. The correct term for "conspiracy theorist" should really be "conspiracy analyst." Most of the people who are skeptical of official stories are, in fact, analyzing conspiracies in an attempt to understand what really happened and what took place behind closed doors. A highly-recommended book the delves into this matter in more detail is the five-star-rated masterpiece Official Stories: Counter-Arguments for a Culture in Need by Liam Scheff. This book will open the minds of those who still have the cognitive capability remaining to grasp it. (Sadly, the injection of mercury into babies in the form of vaccines has damaged so many brains across America that many people are now cognitively incapable of rational thought.) And remember: the next time someone flings the phrase "conspiracy theorist" in your direction, simply know that they are effectively wearing a DUNCE hat on their heads by admitting they have failed to acknowledge that true conspiracies are rather commonplace. That's not merely a theory, either: it's a statement of fact. Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/045172_conspiracy_theories_rational_thought_corporate_collusion.html##ixzz3XWmDWIaf
  6. Good for her...if any one isn't familiar with the ECB, they are Europe's version of our delightful Federal Reserve, and are screwing Europe exactly how the Fed screws us.
  7. Agreed Dive! if we just lay down and roll over, it makes it that much easier for the elite control and enslave us. All it takes is enough Americans to wake up, and then we would have enough critical mass to really makes things happen...
  8. http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-04-13/politicians-manipulated-crowd Politicians & The Manipulated Crowd 04/13/2015 23:00 -0400 inShare Submitted by Bob Livinston via PersonalLiberty.com, Life and happiness in this life under any political system directly depend upon how much our individuality (versus the crowd) is retained and to what extent we throw off manipulated illusions. The more we are immersed into the mass mind (the crowd), the more we are manipulated and the more dependent on authority (government) we become. Every thrust of this nebulous thing called society is calculated to drive us into the dependent, mindless herd with automatic response to authority. Often, we ponder why we get closer and closer to total authoritarianism, regardless of whom we vote for. The simple, but unrecognizable, answer is that we are unconsciously manipulated. We are born into a system that prescribes our thought processes, beginning with the first words we learn. As we grow into adults, we reach a state of existence and mental evolvement where we are shackled with a subtle and invisible system of myth and counter-myth. We can be and are incarcerated with our minds. We imagine happiness as we exist within the confines of our prescribed mental parameters. In fact, we live out our physical lives and never come close to freedom of choice. It is impossible to make choices when all options are prescribed by the system — options that channel us into the service of the state. Not one American in a million discovers that he lives under deception and illusion and that he is victimized by the power of repeated words and phrases. Our lives and property are plundered simply because we don’t know that we don’t know. Our thought system enslaves us far more than would a conquering army. I have wondered for years why only a few people have escaped the net, while millions never do. There is apparently some gene or filter that allows a few people to see truths and overcome their conditioning. It grants them the courage to stand up to the crowd and to resist the ridicule and oppression that comes with opposing conventional wisdom. The creation of the mass mind and/or mass consciousness is the secret weapon of the ruling elite. The more one’s mind is immersed into the crowd, of course, the more one loses his individuality and independence of thought. The more we become a part of the crowd, the more dependent we become on authority. And the more dependent we become, the more defensive we are when presented with new information contrary to “conventional wisdom.” Simply stated, the crowd syndrome inoculates us against reality. Yes, I believe that the psychological phenomenon of group consciousness is a created strategy for population control. It certainly appears to be an ironclad protection system for the elite, who by all definitions are the natural enemies of the people. What exactly is group consciousness? Group consciousness is all the teachings of “brotherhood” in all of its forms and expressions. When our dominant thoughts center on the group rather than our own ego or individuality, we have been psychologically integrated into the mass mind. Therefore, we are necessarily dependent on the system. This is a subtle and sophisticated people-control strategy that allows unseen authority to manipulate the masses at will. It is, on the other hand, hyper-individualism that escapes the mental system along with authoritarian control. Why are the elite natural enemies of the people? The elite are a parasite class ruling through manipulation propaganda. They are nonproducers, and they pay nothing for what they get. They create imaginary money (numbers), and use it to make pretend payment for goods and services. They camouflage their fraud with “income taxes” and double speak about national debt and balanced budgets. Police power is in the hands of the elite so that modern governments can be defined as one word: force. By virtue of the fact that the elite (government and the banksters) has the power to create money, all wealth flows away from the producers to the nonproducers. Modern money (nonsubstance) expropriates wealth. Translated, this simply means that one class of people perpetually steals from the other class. This makes them natural enemies. If you “buy” my labor and my goods and services with money that you create (get for nothing), you are stealing from me. This system is the cause of all political and social evil in America, but it is hidden with political oratory and hypocritical welfare benevolence. Common sense tells any sober mind that the political establishment cannot give you anything except that which it steals from you. This is clearly a fact of reality, but the mesmerized crowd has no sense of cause and effect. This can be explained only by the fact that the crowd (the people) are in a state of hypnosis and, therefore, do not possess conscious control of their minds. Mass hypnosis is not just a state of stupor, but a well-defined system of behavior modification and absolute control. People in an altered state of consciousness will act against their best interests and dissipate their mental and physical energy on political myths and counter-myths. While in a state of hypnosis or learned behavior, obvious stupidity and self-denial becomes “politically correct.” To the conscious mind, this is madness and confounds communication between the hypnotized and the conscious person. Most of you have experienced this breakdown in trying to communicate with people around you. What is obvious to you is invisible to those under hypnosis. Fewer and fewer people have any cognitive imperative to question the system because hypnosis and learned behavior are transferred from one generation to another. False beliefs are self-perpetuating and feed upon one another. The more generations accepting myths, the more reinforcing they become. Religion in the generic sense is a very classic example of this. Religion is a manipulative psychic system (phenomenon). Just as magnetism and electricity have a positive and a negative, amorality needs morality. Amorality is dependent upon morality. Politicians and governments are amoral. They could not exist without the self-sacrificing morality of the people. In other words, crooks and politicians do not feed upon each other. They feed upon honest people or people with morality. For example, when you go into a “court of law” and swear to tell the truth, the system is using your morality to convict you and entangle you. That explains why there are laws against lying to government agents investigating crimes real and perceived. All of this is a reminder that the next political election will bring no benefits to the people — regardless of which party holds power — any more than the past political election or political elections have for several generations past.
  9. Right on Jim. Until people actually wake up and begin to firstly acknowledge, then address the true issues plaguing our country, nothing will change. Elections are kabuki for the sheeple, the next president has already been selected by the Council on Foreign Relations, bankers and corporate elite, which unfortunately for everyone will probably be Shillary, she will do exactly as her masters tell her. We need to start looking outside both parties for options/solutions, both Dems/Repub parties are nothing more than co-opted puppet factories....
  10. ANOTHER ARTICLE ON HOW AND WHY OUR COUNTRY IS IN THE MESS IT'S IN, GOOD READ: http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-04-07/how-america-became-oligarchy How America Became An Oligarchy on 04/07/2015 22:30 -0400 Australia Bank of England Central Banks China Global Economy Greece Money Supply Quantitative Easing inShare Submitted by Ellen Brown via The Web of Debt blog, According to a new study from Princeton University, American democracy no longer exists. Using data from over 1,800 policy initiatives from 1981 to 2002, researchers Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page concluded that rich, well-connected individuals on the political scene now steer the direction of the country, regardless of – or even against – the will of the majority of voters. America’s political system has transformed from a democracy into an oligarchy, where power is wielded by wealthy elites. "The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don’t. . . . You have owners." - George Carlin, The American Dream “Making the world safe for democracy” was President Woodrow Wilson’s rationale for World War I, and it has been used to justify American military intervention ever since. Can we justify sending troops into other countries to spread a political system we cannot maintain at home? The Magna Carta, considered the first Bill of Rights in the Western world, established the rights of nobles as against the king. But the doctrine that “all men are created equal” – that all people have “certain inalienable rights,” including “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” – is an American original. And those rights, supposedly insured by the Bill of Rights, have the right to vote at their core. We have the right to vote but the voters’ collective will no longer prevails. In Greece, the left-wing populist Syriza Party came out of nowhere to take the presidential election by storm; and in Spain, the populist Podemos Party appears poised to do the same. But for over a century, no third-party candidate has had any chance of winning a US presidential election. We have a two-party winner-take-all system, in which our choice is between two candidates, both of whom necessarily cater to big money. It takes big money just to put on the mass media campaigns required to win an election involving 240 million people of voting age. In state and local elections, third party candidates have sometimes won. In a modest-sized city, candidates can actually influence the vote by going door to door, passing out flyers and bumper stickers, giving local presentations, and getting on local radio and TV. But in a national election, those efforts are easily trumped by the mass media. And local governments too are beholden to big money. When governments of any size need to borrow money, the megabanks in a position to supply it can generally dictate the terms. Even in Greece, where the populist Syriza Party managed to prevail in January, the anti-austerity platform of the new government is being throttled by the moneylenders who have the government in a chokehold. How did we lose our democracy? Were the Founding Fathers remiss in leaving something out of the Constitution? Or have we simply gotten too big to be governed by majority vote? Democracy’s Rise and Fall The stages of the capture of democracy by big money are traced in a paper called “The Collapse of Democratic Nation States” by theologian and environmentalist Dr. John Cobb. Going back several centuries, he points to the rise of private banking, which usurped the power to create money from governments: Today the vast majority of the money supply in Western countries is created by private bankers. That tradition goes back to the 17th century, when the privately-owned Bank of England, the mother of all central banks, negotiated the right to print England’s money after Parliament stripped that power from the Crown. When King William needed money to fight a war, he had to borrow. The government as borrower then became servant of the lender. The influence of money was greatly enhanced by the emergence of private banking. The banks are able to create money and so to lend amounts far in excess of their actual wealth. This control of money-creation . . . has given banks overwhelming control over human affairs. In the United States, Wall Street makes most of the truly important decisions that are directly attributed to Washington. In America, however, the colonists defied the Bank of England and issued their own paper scrip; and they thrived. When King George forbade that practice, the colonists rebelled. They won the Revolution but lost the power to create their own money supply, when they opted for gold rather than paper money as their official means of exchange. Gold was in limited supply and was controlled by the bankers, who surreptitiously expanded the money supply by issuing multiple banknotes against a limited supply of gold. This was the system euphemistically called “fractional reserve” banking, meaning only a fraction of the gold necessary to back the banks’ privately-issued notes was actually held in their vaults. These notes were lent at interest, putting citizens and the government in debt to bankers who created the notes with a printing press. It was something the government could have done itself debt-free, and the American colonies had done with great success until England went to war to stop them. President Abraham Lincoln revived the colonists’ paper money system when he issued the Treasury notes called “Greenbacks” that helped the Union win the Civil War. But Lincoln was assassinated, and the Greenback issues were discontinued. In every presidential election between 1872 and 1896, there was a third national party running on a platform of financial reform. Typically organized under the auspices of labor or farmer organizations, these were parties of the people rather than the banks. They included the Populist Party, the Greenback and Greenback Labor Parties, the Labor Reform Party, the Antimonopolist Party, and the Union Labor Party. They advocated expanding the national currency to meet the needs of trade, reform of the banking system, and democratic control of the financial system. The Populist movement of the 1890s represented the last serious challenge to the bankers’ monopoly over the right to create the nation’s money. According to monetary historian Murray Rothbard, politics after the turn of the century became a struggle between two competing banking giants, the Morgans and the Rockefellers. The parties sometimes changed hands, but the puppeteers pulling the strings were always one of these two big-money players. In All the Presidents’ Bankers, Nomi Prins names six banking giants and associated banking families that have dominated politics for over a century. No popular third party candidates have a real chance of prevailing, because they have to compete with two entrenched parties funded by these massively powerful Wall Street banks. Democracy Succumbs to Globalization In an earlier era, notes Dr. Cobb, wealthy landowners were able to control democracies by restricting government participation to the propertied class. When those restrictions were removed, big money controlled elections by other means: Control of the media and financial leverage over elected officials then enabled those other curbs on democracy we know today, including high barriers to ballot placement for third parties and their elimination from presidential debates, vote suppression, registration restrictions, identification laws, voter roll purges, gerrymandering, computer voting, and secrecy in government. First, running for office became expensive, so that those who seek office require wealthy sponsors to whom they are then beholden. Second, the great majority of voters have little independent knowledge of those for whom they vote or of the issues to be dealt with. Their judgments are, accordingly, dependent on what they learn from the mass media. These media, in turn, are controlled by moneyed interests. The final blow to democracy, says Dr. Cobb, was “globalization” – an expanding global market that overrides national interests: The most glaring example today is the secret twelve-country trade agreement called the Trans-Pacific Partnership. If it goes through, the TPP will dramatically expand the power of multinational corporations to use closed-door tribunals to challenge and supersede domestic laws, including environmental, labor, health and other protections. [T]oday’s global economy is fully transnational. The money power is not much interested in boundaries between states and generally works to reduce their influence on markets and investments. . . . Thus transnational corporations inherently work to undermine nation states, whether they are democratic or not. Looking at Alternatives Some critics ask whether our system of making decisions by a mass popular vote easily manipulated by the paid-for media is the most effective way of governing on behalf of the people. In an interesting Ted Talk, political scientist Eric Li makes a compelling case for the system of “meritocracy” that has been quite successful in China. In America Beyond Capitalism, Prof. Gar Alperovitz argues that the US is simply too big to operate as a democracy at the national level. Excluding Canada and Australia, which have large empty landmasses, the United States is larger geographically than all the other advanced industrial countries of the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) combined. He proposes what he calls “The Pluralist Commonwealth”: a system anchored in the reconstruction of communities and the democratization of wealth. It involves plural forms of cooperative and common ownership beginning with decentralization and moving to higher levels of regional and national coordination when necessary. He is co-chair along with James Gustav Speth of an initiative called The Next System Project, which seeks to help open a far-ranging discussion of how to move beyond the failing traditional political-economic systems of both left and Right.. Dr. Alperovitz quotes Prof. Donald Livingston, who asked in 2002: Taking Back Our Power What value is there in continuing to prop up a union of this monstrous size? . . . [T]here are ample resources in the American federal tradition to justify states’ and local communities’ recalling, out of their own sovereignty, powers they have allowed the central government to usurp. If governments are recalling their sovereign powers, they might start with the power to create money, which was usurped by private interests while the people were asleep at the wheel. State and local governments are not allowed to print their own currencies; but they can own banks, and all depository banks create money when they make loans, as the Bank of England recently acknowledged. The federal government could take back the power to create the national money supply by issuing its own Treasury notes as Abraham Lincoln did. Alternatively, it could issue some very large denomination coins as authorized in the Constitution; or it could nationalize the central bank and use quantitative easing to fund infrastructure, education, job creation, and social services, responding to the needs of the people rather than the banks. The freedom to vote carries little weight without economic freedom – the freedom to work and to have food, shelter, education, medical care and a decent retirement. President Franklin Roosevelt maintained that we need an Economic Bill of Rights. If our elected representatives were not beholden to the moneylenders, they might be able both to pass such a bill and to come up with the money to fund it.
  11. THIS IS A GREAT ARTICLE THAT SHINES A LIGHT ON PROBABLY THE NUMBER 1 REASON OUR COUNTRY IS BROKE AND GOING DOWN THE TUBES, IT'S BASICALLY THIEVERY BY CENTRAL BANKS: http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-04-07/america-bankrupt-and-borrowed-time TO VIEW THE GRAPHS AND CHART, CLICK ON THE LINK, IT WOULDN'T LET ME BRING THEM OVER: America: Bankrupt And On Borrowed Time 04/07/2015 17:00 -0400 Capital Expenditures Fail fixed Market Conditions Money Supply Reality inShare Submitted by Thad Beversdorf via First Rebuttal blog, Thomas Jefferson is credited with the following sage advice, “The central bank is an institution of the most deadly hostility existing against the Principles and form of our Constitution. I am an Enemy to all banks discounting bills or notes for anything but Coin. If the American People allow private banks to control the issuance of their currency, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the People of all their Property until their Children will wake up homeless on the continent their Fathers conquered.” And so it seems sometimes the answer is right in front of us all along and we just fail to see it. We hear a lot of talk these days about inflation. For decades the western world has been misled about a necessity for inflation to grow an economy. This is entirely false. Inflation has no relevance to economic growth; inflation is a depressive force on an economy and it can only come by way of increased money supply. The apex of the discussion is that price increase does not equate to inflation. Inflation is but one of two paths for rising prices. More specifically, prices can rise by way of supply/demand fundamentals of an asset itself and by way of supply/demand fundamentals of the currency form being used to transact the underlying asset. The prior will raise prices in all currency forms while the latter, being inflation, will raise prices only in that relevant currency. For inflation to occur demand for a given currency must decline relative to its supply. This can happen if consumers lose faith in a currency and thus demand less of it, or by governments increasing supply without proportional increases in demand. The latter is exactly what we’ve seen over the past 100 years but to such a grotesque degree over the past 8 years that it may have actually shattered the foundation of the economy of which it was driving. This is precisely the chain reaction that Thomas Jefferson had warned us would result from a private central banking system. Once the economy is broken an epidemic of resource misallocation leads to an immense narrowing of income distribution, ultimately paralyzing the velocity of money; the result being an income-less society save for an elite slice. This leads to mass public and consumer debt creation in an effort to stave off the collapsing natural demand that ultimately ends in deflation when the debt efforts, after a short reprise, actually hasten the collapsing demand by hammering the final nail in the budgetary coffin. At such a point deflation is essentially infinite as people are willing to trade anything for a dollar to purchase food, or inflation is infinite as people will simply circumvent dollars and barter; an interesting paradox that in practice will be a moot point given the vast majority will have nothing to trade for food or dollars because ownership is no longer a reality. It seems then, that Jefferson’s prediction is theoretically sound, but let’s see if we can find any empirical evidence to either support or refute his cautionary message. We know that dollar inflation has been approximately 2400% since 1913, 2000% of that devaluation coming subsequent to 1971 when Nixon moved to a pure fiat currency. The reason we moved to a fiat currency is to remove the restriction on money supply that is inherent to a convertible currency. We can see in the next chart that inflation is directly linked to money supply, which has seen around 1700% increase since 1971. This ‘easy’ money accelerated significantly around the mid 1990′s and this has led to a misallocation of resources. To see this, let’s look at the relationship between corporate fixed capital expenditures and dividends. The idea being that fixed capital expenditures are economically productive meaning they lead to economic expansion, whereas dividends divert cash off corporate balance sheets and thus detract from capital expenditures, having a contractionary force on the economy. The above chart clearly depicts a significant change in the economy’s allocation of corporate resources at the same time money printing accelerated. Fixed capital investment was a much larger share of GDP than dividends up until the mid 1990′s when that began to reverse. Again moving to a market environment that promotes a contracting rather than expansionary economic process. We should be able to see this effect actually taking place via declining capacity utilization. As a result of that we should then see declining labour participation rate and declining incomes from slack in the labour market. Looking at the data this is exactly what we find. Notice that all three indicators begin to trend downward around 1998, shortly after (and one could suggest as a direct result of) the resource misallocation that began a few years earlier in the mid 1990′s. The next link in this chain should be an expansion of consumer loans in an attempt to offset the resulting demand deterioration from the weakening job market conditions. We find abundant empirical evidence in the above charts showing an acceleration of consumer debt during the mid 1990′s and again around 2009. And this is perfectly in line with our theory and so we seem to be on the right track. Now the obvious result of massive increases in consumer debt is that ownership is being replaced by indebtedness. That is, to a great extent now we rent or borrower our assets as opposed to owning them. In the above chart we see that home ownership is now back to the level it was before we ended Bretton Woods in 1971. And it’s not just housing, today about 75% of new car sales are being financed and with longer maturities than ever before. In short, ownership of the 2 major assets typical to the traditional American family has been on a sharp decline for the past 10 years with no signs of slowing. The American dream is built on ownership because it represents substantive progress by way of building a family’s net worth. A net worth that has declined by 40% since 2007 for all but the very top of the economic food chain. But it’s not only the American dream that is in retreat. The reality is that over the past 8 years increases in public debt have outgrown increases in GDP. The nation is borrowing more than it’s producing and spending more than it’s collecting every quarter. A trend that is to continue and to worsen each and every new year according to the CBO’s own projections. Where does this leave America and really the rest of the western world whose data will mirror the US? Bankrupt and on borrowed time.
  12. Right on Jim, it's all just Kabuki to keep American sheeple divided and unaware of their true agenda= total fleecing and subjugation of the American people. It isn't just Obama, he's just the sock-puppet center stage...still cracks me how people still think he's pulling all the strings and get all bent out shape every time they hear his name mentioned. Think Big banks, Fed, Goldman-Sachs, MIC and you are on the right trail...politicians are merely the tools that these groups use to keep Americans fighting over weekly scandals without actually realizing how badly they and their future progeny are being screwed. FOLLOW THE MONEY FOLKS!!!!!!!!
  13. Tried to upload the original document, but couldn't for some reason...thx Machine
  14. Govt hard at work ensuring they can throw anyone in jail for "suspected terrorism"...
  15. Jim, the first thing that hit my mind when I heard about the crash was that days earlier Germany had joined with the BRiCS development bank, and this was payback for that. Just like the Charlie Hebdo attack in France after they did the warship deal with Russia. TPTB aren't even very good at covering this stuff up anymore...all the while the Muslim scapegoat meme gets drilled into the minds of people everywhere. If people would just think critically for two seconds rather than reacting with emotions and religious fervor, and regurgitating MSM drivel, we might actually be able to find the truth in all this somewhere. Are all Muslims bad? NO. Are there extremist Muslim committing atrocities that need to be brought to heel? Yes. With that said, they should start in Saudi Arabia and Qatar, the ones who fund 95% of these groups including ISIS.
  16. Thanks all for your replies, much appreciated. Here's another great article on how they ruling class willfully deceives us in order to control the population and stay in power: http://www.thetruthaboutthelaw.com/they-promote-every-side-to-constantly-keep-people-confused-so-you-can-never-tell-what-is-real/ SORRY, FOR SOME REASON IT WILL NOT ALLOW ME TO PASTE THE ARTICLE CONTENT HERE
  17. LONG, BUT VERY INTERESTING READ... http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-03-26/why-banksters-hate-peace Home » Blogs » George Washington's blog Who's Behind All of the Wars? Submitted by George Washington on 03/26/2015 15:09 -0400 American Express Barclays BBH Bear Stearns Central Banks China Deutsche Bank Federal Reserve Federal Reserve Bank France Germany Goldman Sachs goldman sachs Iran Iraq Joseph Stiglitz Mexico Middle East national security Saudi Arabia Trade War United Kingdom Volatility White House World Bank inShare Image by Terry Robinson Bankers hate peace … Lee Fang reports: The President of Stanford University (David Starr Jordan) reported that banksters are the true power behind the throne, and that – for many centuries – they’ve made their fortunes by financing war. The possibility of an Iran nuclear deal depressing weapons sales was raised by Myles Walton, an analyst from Germany’s Deutsche Bank, during a Lockheed earnings call this past January 27. Walton asked Marillyn Hewson, the chief executive of Lockheed Martin, if an Iran agreement could “impede what you see as progress in foreign military sales.” Financial industry analysts such as Walton use earnings calls as an opportunity to ask publicly-traded corporations like Lockheed about issues that might harm profitability. Hewson replied that “that really isn’t coming up,” but stressed that “volatility all around the region” should continue to bring in new business. According to Hewson, “A lot of volatility, a lot of instability, a lot of things that are happening” in both the Middle East and the Asia-Pacific region means both are “growth areas” for Lockheed Martin. The Deutsche Bank-Lockheed exchange “underscores a longstanding truism of the weapons trade: war — or the threat of war — is good for the arms business,” says William Hartung, director of the Arms & Security Project at the Center for International Policy. Hartung observed that Hewson described the normalization of relations with Iran not as a positive development for the future, but as an “impediment.” “And Hewson’s response,” Hartung adds, “which in essence is ‘don’t worry, there’s plenty of instability to go around,’ shows the perverse incentive structure that is at the heart of the international arms market.” Former managing director of Goldman Sachs – and head of the international analytics group at Bear Stearns in London (Nomi Prins) – notes: Indeed, JP Morgan also purchased control over America’s leading 25 newspapers in order to propagandize US public opinion in favor of US entry into World War 1. Throughout the century that I examined, which began with the Panic of 1907 … what I found by accessing the archives of each president is that through many events and periods, particular bankers were in constant communication [with the White House] — not just about financial and economic policy, and by extension trade policy, but also about aspects of World War I, or World War II, or the Cold War, in terms of the expansion that America was undergoing as a superpower in the world, politically, buoyed by the financial expansion of the banking community. *** In the beginning of World War I, Woodrow Wilson had adopted initially a policy of neutrality. But the Morgan Bank, which was the most powerful bank at the time, and which wound up funding over 75 percent of the financing for the allied forces during World War I … pushed Wilson out of neutrality sooner than he might have done, because of their desire to be involved on one side of the war. Now, on the other side of that war, for example, was the National City Bank, which, though they worked with Morgan in financing the French and the British, they also didn’t have a problem working with financing some things on the German side, as did Chase … When Eisenhower became president … the U.S. was undergoing this expansion by providing, under his doctrine, military aid and support to countries [under] the so-called threat of being taken over by communism … What bankers did was they opened up hubs, in areas such as Cuba, in areas such as Beirut and Lebanon, where the U.S. also wanted to gain a stronghold in their Cold War fight against the Soviet Union. And so the juxtaposition of finance and foreign policy were very much aligned. So in the ‘70s, it became less aligned, because though America was pursuing foreign policy initiatives in terms of expansion, the bankers found oil, and they made an extreme effort to activate relationships in the Middle East, that then the U.S. government followed. For example, in Saudi Arabia and so forth, they get access to oil money, and then recycle it into Latin American debt and other forms of lending throughout the globe. So that situation led the U.S. government. The U.S. Senate’s Special Committee on Investigation of the Munitions Industry found connections between the wartime profits of the banking and munitions industries to America’s involvement in World War I. Specifically, the Committee reported that between 1915 and January 1917, the United States lent Germany 27 million dollars, and in the same period, it lent to the United Kingdom and its allies 2.3 billion dollars, almost 100 times as much, and so the US entered the war so that the lenders would get repaid by their biggest debtors: The UK and its allies. Subsequently, many big banks funded the Nazis. BBC reported in 1998: The New York Daily News noted the same year: Barclays Bank has agreed to pay $3.6m to Jews whose assets were seized from French branches of the British-based bank during World War II. *** Chase Manhattan Bank, which has acknowledged seizing about 100 accounts held by Jews in its Paris branch during World War II ….”Recently unclassified reports from the US Treasury about the activities of Chase in Paris in the 1940s indicate that the local branch worked “in close collaboration with the German authorities” in freezing Jewish assets. The relationship between Chase and the Nazis apparently was so cozy that Carlos Niedermann, the Chase branch chief in Paris, wrote his supervisor in Manhattan that the bank enjoyed “very special esteem” with top German officials and “a rapid expansion of deposits,” according to Newsweek. Niedermann’s letter was written in May 1942 five months after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and the U.S. also went to war with Germany. The BBC reported in 1999: One of Britain’s main newspapers – the Guardian – reported in 2004: A French government commission, investigating the seizure of Jewish bank accounts during the Second World War, says five American banks Chase Manhattan, J.P Morgan, Guaranty Trust Co. of New York, Bank of the City of New York and American Express had taken part. It says their Paris branches handed over to the Nazi occupiers about one-hundred such accounts. Indeed, banks often finance both sides of wars: George Bush’s grandfather [and George H.W. Bush’s father], the late US senator Prescott Bush, was a director and shareholder of companies that profited from their involvement with the financial backers of Nazi Germany. The Guardian has obtained confirmation from newly discovered files in the US National Archives that a firm of which Prescott Bush was a director was involved with the financial architects of Nazism. His business dealings … continued until his company’s assets were seized in 1942 under the Trading with the Enemy Act *** The documents reveal that the firm he worked for, Brown Brothers Harriman (BBH), acted as a US base for the German industrialist, Fritz Thyssen, who helped finance Hitler in the 1930s before falling out with him at the end of the decade. The Guardian has seen evidence that shows Bush was the director of the New York-based Union Banking Corporation (UBC) that represented Thyssen’s US interests and he continued to work for the bank after America entered the war. *** Bush was a founding member of the bank [uBC] … The bank was set up by Harriman and Bush’s father-in-law to provide a US bank for the Thyssens, Germany’s most powerful industrial family. *** By the late 1930s, Brown Brothers Harriman, which claimed to be the world’s largest private investment bank, and UBC had bought and shipped millions of dollars of gold, fuel, steel, coal and US treasury bonds to Germany, both feeding and financing Hitler’s build-up to war. Between 1931 and 1933 UBC bought more than $8m worth of gold, of which $3m was shipped abroad. According to documents seen by the Guardian, after UBC was set up it transferred $2m to BBH accounts and between 1924 and 1940 the assets of UBC hovered around $3m, dropping to $1m only on a few occasions. *** UBC was caught red-handed operating a American shell company for the Thyssen family eight months after America had entered the war and that this was the bank that had partly financed Hitler’s rise to power. And they are one of the main sources of financing for nuclear weapons. (The San Francisco Chronicle also documents that leading financiers Rockefeller, Carnegie and Harriman also funded Nazi eugenics programs … but that’s a story for another day.) The Federal Reserve and other central banks also help to start wars by financing them. Thomas Jefferson and the father of free market capitalism, Adam Smith, both noted that the financing wars by banks led to more – and longer – wars. And America apparently considers economic rivalry to be a basis for war, and is using the military to contain China’s growing economic influence. Multi-billionaire investor Hugo Salinas Price says: Senior CNBC editor John Carney noted: What happened to [Libya’s] Mr. Gaddafi, many speculate the real reason he was ousted was that he was planning an all-African currency for conducting trade. The same thing happened to him that happened to Saddam because the US doesn’t want any solid competing currency out there vs the dollar. You know Gaddafi was talking about a gold dinar. Is this the first time a revolutionary group has created a central bank while it is still in the midst of fighting the entrenched political power? It certainly seems to indicate how extraordinarily powerful central bankers have become in our era. Robert Wenzel of Economic Policy Journal thinks the central banking initiative reveals that foreign powers may have a strong influence over the rebels. This suggests we have a bit more than a ragtag bunch of rebels running around and that there are some pretty sophisticated influences. “I have never before heard of a central bank being created in just a matter of weeks out of a popular uprising,” Wenzel writes. Indeed, many claim that recent wars have really been about bringing all countries into the fold of Western central banking, and that the wars against Middle Eastern countries are really about forcing them into the dollar and private central banking. The most decorated American military man in history said that war is a racket, and noted: The big banks have also been laundering money for terrorists. The big bank employee who blew the whistle on the banks’ money laundering for terrorists and drug cartels says that the giant bank is still aiding terrorists, saying: Let us not forget the bankers who financed the great war. If anyone had the cream of the profits it was the bankers. He also said: The public needs to know that money is still being funneled through HSBC to directly buy guns and bullets to kill our soldiers …. Banks financing … terrorists affects every single American. And see this. It is disgusting that our banks are STILL financing terror on 9/11 2013. According to the BBC and other sources, Prescott Bush, JP Morgan and other leading financiers also funded a coup against President Franklin Roosevelt in an attempt – basically – to implement fascism in the U.S. See this, this, this and this. Kevin Zeese writes: Americans are recognizing the link between the military-industrial complex and the Wall Street oligarchs—a connection that goes back to the beginning of the modern U.S. empire. Banks have always profited from war because the debt created by banks results in ongoing war profit for big finance; and because wars have been used to open countries to U.S. corporate and banking interests. Secretary of State, William Jennings Bryan wrote: “the large banking interests were deeply interested in the world war because of the wide opportunities for large profits.” Many historians now recognize that a hidden history for U.S. entry into World War I was to protect U.S. investors. U.S. commercial interests had invested heavily in European allies before the war: “By 1915, American neutrality was being criticized as bankers and merchants began to loan money and offer credits to the warring parties, although the Central Powers received far less. Between 1915 and April 1917, the Allies received 85 times the amount loaned to Germany.” The total dollars loaned to all Allied borrowers during this period was $2,581,300,000. The bankers saw that if Germany won, their loans to European allies would not be repaid. The leading U.S. banker of the era, J.P. Morgan and his associates did everything they could to push the United States into the war on the side of England and France. Morgan said: “We agreed that we should do all that was lawfully in our power to help the Allies win the war as soon as possible.” President Woodrow Wilson, who campaigned saying he would keep the United States out of war, seems to have entered the war to protect U.S. banks’ investments in Europe. The most decorated Marine in history, Smedley Butler, described fighting for U.S. banks in many of the wars he fought in. He said: “I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.” In Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, John Perkins describes how World Bank and IMF loans are used to generate profits for U.S. business and saddle countries with huge debts that allow the United States to control them. It is not surprising that former civilian military leaders like Robert McNamara and Paul Wolfowitz went on to head the World Bank. These nations’ debt to international banks ensures they are controlled by the United States, which pressures them into joining the “coalition of the willing” that helped invade Iraq or allowing U.S. military bases on their land. If countries refuse to “honor” their debts, the CIA or Department of Defense enforces U.S. political will through coups or military action. *** More and more people are indeed seeing the connection between corporate banksterism and militarism …. Indeed, all wars are bankers’ wars. War Makes Banks RichWars are the fastest way for banks to create more debt … and therefore to make more profit. No wonder they love war. After all, the banking system is founded upon the counter-intuitive but indisputable fact that banks create loans first, and then create deposits later. In other words, virtually all money is actually created as debt. For example, in a hearing held on September 30, 1941 in the House Committee on Banking and Currency, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve (Mariner S. Eccles) said: And Robert H. Hemphill, Credit Manager of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, said: That is what our money system is. If there were no debts in our money system, there wouldn’t be any money. Debt (from the borrower’s perspective) owed to banks is profit and income from the bank’s perspective. In other words, banks are in the business of creating more debt … i.e. finding more people who want to borrow larger sums. If all the bank loans were paid, no one could have a bank deposit, and there would not be a dollar of coin or currency in circulation. This is a staggering thought. We are completely dependent on the commercial Banks. Someone has to borrow every dollar we have in circulation, cash or credit. If the Banks create ample synthetic money we are prosperous; if not, we starve. We are absolutely without a permanent money system. When one gets a complete grasp of the picture, the tragic absurdity of our hopeless position is almost incredible, but there it is. It is the most important subject intelligent persons can investigate and reflect upon. It is so important that our present civilization may collapse unless it becomes widely understood and the defects remedied very soon. Debt is central to our banking system. Indeed, Federal Reserve chairman Greenspan was so worried that the U.S. would pay off it’s debt, that he suggested tax cuts for the wealthy to increase the debt. What does this have to do with war? War is the most efficient debt-creation machine. For starters, wars are very expensive. For example, Nobel prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz estimated in 2008 that the Iraq war could cost America up to $5 trillion dollars. A study by Brown University’s Watson Institute for International Studies says the Iraq war costs could exceed $6 trillion, when interest payments to the banks are taken into account. This is nothing new … but has been going on for thousands of years. As a Cambridge University Press treatise on ancient Athens notes: Financing wars is expensive business, and the scope for initiative was regularly extended by borrowing. So wars have been a huge – and regular – way for banks to create debt for kings and presidents who want to try to expand their empires. Major General Smedley Butler – the most decorated Marine in American history – was right when he said: Let us not forget the bankers who financed the great war. If anyone had the cream of the profits it was the bankers. War is also good for banks because a lot of material, equipment, buildings and infrastructure get destroyed in war. So countries go into massive debt to finance war, and then borrow a ton more to rebuild. The advent of central banks hasn’t changed this formula. Specifically, the big banks (“primary dealers”) loan money to the Fed, and charge interest for the loan. So when a nation like the U.S. gets into a war, the Fed pumps out money for the war effort based upon loans from the primary dealers, who make a killing in interest payments from the Fed. War Is Horrible for the American PeopleTop economists say that war is destroying our economy. But war is great for the super-elites … so they want to keep it going. And America’s never-ending wars are hurting our national security. Never-ending wars are also destroying our freedom. The Founding Fathers warned against standing armies, saying that they destroy freedom. (update). Perversely, our government – which is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the big banks – treats anti-war sentiment – or protest of big banks (and here) – as terrorism.
  18. WELL said Jim!! I thought feedom of speech was one of the things that Americans hold dear above all else, but it appears to me that far too many on this forum ha ve become polarized with a one-sided view of things in the world, and simply knee-jerk attack anyone with a differing, or unpopular opinion without at least breaking things down logically and discussing them as adults...I don't agree with much of what Umbertino posts, but I do take the time to read and think on what he has shared.....Thanks Umbert, and keep 'em coming!!
  19. http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-03-20/justice-department-rolls-out-early-form-capital-controls-america Zero Hedge ReadsActing Man Alt-Market Bearish News Boom Bust Blog Capitalist Exploits China Financial Markets Chris Martenson's Blog Contrary Investor Credit Writedowns Daneric's Elliott Waves DealBook Demonocracy Dr. Housing Bubble ETF Daily News ETF Digest First Rebuttal ForexLive Gains Pains & Capital Global Economic Analysis Hedge Accordingly Implode-Explode Investing Contrarian Jesse's Cafe Americain Liberty Blitzkrieg Market Folly Market Montage Max Keiser Minyanville Mises Institute Naked Capitalism Of Two Minds Oil Price Rebooting Capitalism Shanky's Tech Blog Slope of Hope StealthFlation Stratfor TF Metals Report The Burning Platform The Daily Crux The Economic Populist The Hammerstone Group The Market Ticker The Trader The Underground Investor The Vineyard Of The Saker Themis Trading Trim Tabs Blog Value Walk Variant Perception View From The Bridge Wolf Street Home Justice Department Rolls Out An Early Form Of Capital Controls In America Submitted by Tyler Durden on 03/21/2015 17:51 -0400 Greece None Reality Rosenberg inShare Something stunning took place earlier this week, and it quietly snuck by, unnoticed by anyone as the "all important" FOMC meeting was looming. That something could have been taken straight out of the playbook of either Cyprus, or Greece, or the USSR "evil empire", or all three. This is how the WSJ explained it: The U.S. Justice Department’s criminal head said banks may need to go beyond filing suspicious activity reports when they encounter a risky customer. “The vast majority of financial institutions file suspicious activity reports when they suspect that an account is connected to nefarious activity,” said assistant attorney general Leslie Caldwell in a Monday speech, according to prepared remarks. “But, in appropriate cases, we encourage those institutions to consider whether to take more action: specifically, to alert law enforcement authorities about the problem.” The remarks indicate that banks may be expected to do more than just file SARs, a responsibility that itself can be expensive and time-consuming. Some banks already have close relationships with law enforcement, said Kevin Rosenberg, chair of Goldberg Lowenstein & Weatherwax LLP’s government investigation and white collar litigation group. Ms. Caldwell’s remarks “speak to moving forward in a more collaborative way,” said Mr. Rosenberg. A tip-off from a bank about a suspicious customer could lead law enforcement to seize funds or start an investigation, Ms. Caldwell said. What does this mean, and why is it so critical? Simon Black of International Man explains: * * * Justice Department rolls out an early form of capital controls in America Imagine going to the bank to withdraw some cash. Having some cash on hand is always a prudent strategy, and especially today when more and more bank deposits are creeping into negative territory, meaning that you have to pay the banks for the privilege that they gamble with your money. You tell the teller that you’d like to withdraw $5,000 from your account. She hesitates nervously and wants to know why. You try to politely let her know that that’s none of the bank’s business as it’s your money. The teller disappears for a few minutes, leaving you waiting. When she returns she tells you that you can collect your money in a few days as they don’t have it on hand at the moment. Slightly irritated because of the inconvenience, you head home. But as you pull into your driveway later there’s an unexpected surprise waiting for you: two police officers would like to have a word with you about your intended withdrawal earlier… If this sounds far-fetched, think again. Because it could very well become a reality in the Land of the Free if the Justice Department gets its way. Earlier this week, a senior official from the Justice Department spoke to a group of bankers about the need for them to rat out their customers to the police. What a lot of people don’t realize is that banks are already unpaid government spies. Federal regulations in the Land of the Free REQUIRE banks to file ‘suspicious activity reports’ or SARs on their customers. And it’s not optional. Banks have minimum quotas of SARs they need to fill out and submit to the federal government. If they don’t file enough SARs, they can be fined. They can lose their banking charter. And yes, bank executives and directors can even be imprisoned for noncompliance. This is the nature of the financial system in the Land of the Free. And chances are, your banker has filled one out on you—they submitted 1.6 MILLION SARs in 2013 alone. But now the Justice Department is saying that SARs aren’t enough. Now, whenever banks suspect something ‘suspicious’ is going on, they want them to pick up the phone and call the cops: “[W]e encourage those institutions to consider whether to take more action: specifically, to alert law enforcement authorities about the problem, who may be able to seize the funds, initiate an investigation, or take other proactive steps.” So what exactly constitutes ‘suspicious activity’? Basically anything. According to the handbook for the Federal Financial Institution Examination Council, banks are required to file a SAR with respect to: “Transactions conducted or attempted by, at, or through the bank (or an affiliate) and aggregating $5,000 or more…” It’s utterly obscene. According to the Justice Department, going to the bank and withdrawing $5,000 should potentially prompt a banker to rat you out to the police. This may be a very early form of capital controls in the Land of the Free. This is the subject of today’s Podcast. You can listen in here.
  20. Well said Dwitte, and for those who can't see it, this Chicago site was not put there to round up ganbangers and everyday criminals. It was to silence those the State deems "terrorist" without due process. And the way they word things these days ANYONE can be labeled a "terorrist". Just another totolitarian tool to silence dissent, and make people comply with absurd laws without question. And if you don't think that YOU could be labeled a "terrorist" THINK AGAIN: http://themindunleashed.org/2013/10/12-ways-fbi-has-radically-expanded-and.html https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/07/23/blacklisted/ http://www.dailypaul.com/278025/15-ridiculous-ways-to-get-the-fbi-terrorist-watch-list
  21. What if it wasn't a "coincidence" Shabs? Ever think this may have been an inside job? I don't think we will ever know the truth, but I put NOTHING past our govt, or the real string pullers controlling the puppets. Question everything I say... Someboday negged you, so I evened you out Shabs...
  22. Don't think anyone is denying that a few planes crashed into the WTC, or saying that no one died, just questioning the original narrative from our "ever truthful" and "benevolent" leaders...
  23. Amazed that people still even give that broken record windbag the time of day, let alone actually believe any of "top-secret" contacts or his horse-shyte fairytales....good grief.
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