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Gary Edwards

Operation Sleeping Giant: "Breaking The Silver Manipulation Barrier" by Brandon Smith - 0 views

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    Written in August of 2011, this article continues to be an important guideline to understanding Gold and Silver prices, and the efforts of Banksters to manipulate these competing forms of monetary exchange to the US Dollar.  Good stuff.  And i did write Brandon a proposal for a mobile application connecting PayPal to the Storage Vault Depositories he sites in this article (based on the GOLD app design i provided to Tino in 2008). excerpt: China Competes With The Comex As of this summer China now has its own Comex, called the Hong Kong Mercantile Exchange. The exchange opened for trade on May 18th (the CME's incredible margin hikes in silver began only weeks before, which suggests to me that they were trying to preempt the positive effects the HKMEX would have on metals). The HKMEX moved into action only five months after the Chinese Pan American Gold Exchange was instituted. The exchange issues its own ETF's in gold and silver. These securities, though, are not based on leverage or derivatives like most Comex based ETFs. The bottom line; the Comex global monopoly on commodities trade is over: How To Break The Barrier Methods for smaller investors to fight back against the market manipulations of large banks have been sparse, and often limited to desperate appeals to the CFTC and the government, who are bought and paid for, and who have no intention of ever stopping global financiers from dragging their unwashed behinds across the face of the planet. Relying on bureaucrats to mend the wounds they themselves encouraged or inflicted is foolhardy, to say the least. Top down solutions are NOT an option now, and I'm not sure if they ever were. This leaves us with only one other choice; to fix the problem with our own hands from the bottom up. This is, of course, easier said than done… In the case of silver manipulation, what we are faced with is an unprecedented effort to subvert and suppress an alternative system so that the mainstream system can continue to
Gary Edwards

75 Economic Numbers From 2012 That Are Almost Too Crazy To Believe - 0 views

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    Thanks to Marbux we have this extraordinary collection of facts and figures describing the economic catastrophe that has hit the USA.  excerpt: "What a year 2012 has been!  The mainstream media continues to tell us what a "great job" the Obama administration and the Federal Reserve are doing of managing the economy, but meanwhile things just continue to get even worse for the poor and the middle class.  It is imperative that we educate the American people about the true condition of our economy and about why all of this is happening.  If nothing is done, our debt problems will continue to get worse, millions of jobs will continue to leave the country, small businesses will continue to be suffocated, the middle class will continue to collapse, and poverty in the United States will continue to explode.  Just "tweaking" things slightly is not going to fix our economy.  We need a fundamental change in direction.  Right now we are living in a bubble of debt-fueled false prosperity that allows us to continue to consume far more wealth than we produce, but when that bubble bursts we are going to experience the most painful economic "adjustment" that America has ever gone through.  We need to be able to explain to our fellow Americans what is coming, why it is coming and what needs to be done.  Hopefully the crazy economic numbers that I have included in this article will be shocking enough to wake some people up. The end of the year is a time when people tend to gather with family and friends more than they do during the rest of the year.  Hopefully many of you will use the list below as a tool to help start some conversations about the coming economic collapse with your loved ones.  Sadly, most Americans still tend to doubt that we are heading into economic oblivion.  So if you have someone among your family and friends that believes that everything is going to be "just fine", just show them these numbers.  They are a good summary of the problems that the U
Gary Edwards

Obama's Hidden Past - YouTube - 0 views

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    12 minutes of rapid fire facts.  Put on a time line, Obama's claims about who he is and where he has been just don't add up.  Stunning stuff, including some new revelations regarding both the Obama's license to practice Law.  And that claim about the Saudi's donating $20 Million to Harvard to get Obama in and graduated is incredible.  Listen for yourself.  I'm stunned.  And I've been following this stuff since day one.
Gary Edwards

Clinton Body Count - 0 views

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    The infamous list of Clinton associates mysteriously found dead.  The dead bodies associated with the Clintons is well worth reviewing on this the eve of congressional testimony from the many Benghazi Whistleblowers.   Just speculation, but i'm in the camp of those who believe that the Benghazi Massacre was an arranged kidnapping gone bad.  The idea was to kidnap Libyan Ambassador Christopher Stevens, and trade him for the blind Sheikh, Oamr Abdel-Rahman - the man behind the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.   Ever since the Muslim Brotherhood took over Egypt, and did so with the assistance of Obama, President Morsi has been lobbying Obama to release and return the blind Sheikh.  In fact, Morsi's first statement as President of Egypt was to promise the Muslim Brotherhood that he would secure the release of the blind Sheikh.  For sure not something Obama could do without some sort of compelling pretext.  Hence the kidnapping plot. Hard to figure out what went wrong with the grand plan. There was never an embassy or consulate in Benghazi. The facilities in Benghazi served as a logistics center for arms and weapons transfers from Libya ultimately destined for the anti-Assad - Muslim Brotherhood terrorists in Syria. It was used by the "State Department's CIA," which is quite different than the actual CIA, to collect and store all the weapons Obama had supplied the Libyan rebels with in their efforts to overthrow Ghadaffi.  And then there's the 20,000 (400 tons worth) heat seeking surface-to-air (SA-7's) missles that Ghaddafi had amassed. Just prior to his kidnapping, Ambassador Stevens was meeting with the Turkish Consul General Ali Sait Akin to arrange another shipment of the captured arms.   The al-Qaeda linked Lybian Islamiuc Fighting Group, headed by Abdelhakim Belhadj, also coveted those weapons.  But this group was supposedly disbanded when Ghadaffi was killed!    It was Belhadj's guys that killed Ambassador Stevens, even though Belhadj him
Gary Edwards

Is martial law the ultimate goal? - Tea Party Command Center - 0 views

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    "During President Obama's first term he laid the ground work. President Obama issued over 900 executive orders, many dealing with martial law. As the Supreme Court already opinioned when looking at President Lincolns use of martial law, "Martial law ... destroys every guarantee of the Constitution.". This means when martial law is declared we as Americans have no rights at all. During President Obama's first term he wrote Executive Orders granting the government the power to take over all communications media, electrical power, gas, petroleum, fuels and minerals. He also wrote an Executive Order where the government can take over all modes of transportation and control of the highways and sea ports. That means Obama can confiscate your horse, your donkeys, your bicycle or even your riding lawn mower. All forms of transportation. Executive orders signed by Obama also include railroads, inland water ways, public storage facilities, airports and airplanes including commercial planes can all be taken over by the government." Executive Orders have also been signed allowing the government to mobilize civilians into work brigades under government supervision. To take over all health education and welfare functions. To allow the Housing and Finance Authority to relocate and establish new locations for populations, AND grants authority to the Department of Justice to enforce the plans set out in Executive Orders, to institute Industrial support, to establish judicial and legislative liaison, to control all aliens, to operate penal and correctional institutions, and to advise and assist the President. An Executive order has also been signed which allows the Federal Emergency Preparedness Agency to develop plans to establish control over the mechanisms of production and distribution of energy sources, wages, salaries, credit, and the flow of money in U.S. financial institutions in any undefined national emergency. It also provides that when the president declares a state of
Gary Edwards

GunControlLegislation.pdf - 1 views

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    The association of County Sheriffs of Colorado has issued a position paper on Gun Control Legislation detailing the reasons for their opposing such legislation.  It's a very well written statement walking through each of the arguments put forward by socialists arguing to take away the Constitutional Rights of American citizens.  The bottom line of the Sheriffs however is stated in the headline:  "The Second Amendment is not a guideline but rather a right".  The Sheriffs also emphasis that they are Oath Keepers sworn to uphold and protect the Constitution of the United States and State of Colorado.  They believe that the Second Amendment guarantees the right of the people to keep and bear arms and that this right shall not be infringed.   One might add that the rights of the people are God given natural rights.  The Constitution was written to guarantee that the government not infringe in any way on those rights. "The County Sheriffs of Colorado will not waiver in our defense of the Constitution and will stand to preserve every constituent's right to possess a firearm." Good stuff.  I wonder what the County Sheriffs of California believe?  Are they Oath Keepers too?
Gary Edwards

Tocqueville's Warning to America: The Dangers of Despotism - 0 views

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    "The words of Alexis de Tocqueville in Book Four, Chapter VI of Democracy America are particularly poignant: I had remarked during my stay in the United States, that a democratic state of society, similar to that of the Americans, might offer singular facilities for the establishment of despotism... I think, then, that the species of oppression by which democratic nations are menaced is unlike anything which ever before existed in the world: our contemporaries will find no prototype of it in their memories. I seek in vain for an expression which will accurately convey the whole of the idea I have formed of it, the old words despotism and tyranny are inappropriate: the thing itself is new, and since I cannot name, I must attempt to define it. I seek to trace the novel features under which despotism may appear in the world. The first thing that strikes the observation is an innumerable multitude of men, all equal and alike, incessantly endeavoring to procure the petty and paltry pleasures with which they glut their lives. Each of them, living apart, is as a stranger to the fate of all the rest,--his children and his private friends constitute to him the whole of mankind; as for the rest of his fellow-citizens, he is close to them, but he sees them not;--he touches them, but he feels them not; he exists but in himself and for himself alone; and if his kindred still remain to him, he may be said at any rate to have lost his country. Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications, and to watch over their gate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent, if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. For their happiness such a government willingly la
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    "An elective despotism was not the government we fought for." - James Madison
Gary Edwards

Still the Law of the Land? - The Constitution - 0 views

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    Heritage Foundation white paper: Forward: The commemoration of the bicentennial of the United States Constitution should be an occasion of festivity tempered by solemn gratitude for the gift our Founding Fathers bequeathed to us. But if the Constitution is to survive as something more than an abstract symbol - a parchment counterpart of the Statue of Liberty - the celebration must also be the occasion for broadened public awareness of the principles of constitutional government. For the anniversary comes at a time of grave crisis in our constitutional history. The federal judiciary, originally designed as part of a carefully balanced mechanism in which it shared guardianship of the Constitution with the executive, the two houses of Congress, and the state governments, has gradually taken sole custody unto itself, proclaiming that its decisions and not the Constitution are the supreme law of the land. What is even more dangerous, the Supreme Court has, during the last two or three decades, become progressively more blatant in disregarding the Constitution and arriving at decisions on the basis of the justices' ideological predilections in regard to "social progress" and "human dignity." These usurpations are compatible neither with the idea of constitutional government nor with the ideal of a government of laws. All the essays in this volume are, in one way or another, addressed to this problem, its ramifications, and its implications. They are the product of long, deep, and careful research and reflection; but, though they are appropriately cast in the muted tones of scholarship, collectively they sound an alarm bell in the night. Every thinking and public-spirited American can learn from their message. For two centuries the Constitution has provided the American people with a framework of limited government, designed for liberty. It is up to us to preserve that framework for our posterity, even as the Founders created it for theirs. Next year we will celebr
Paul Merrell

GCHQ taps fibre-optic cables for secret access to world's communications | UK news | gu... - 0 views

  • Britain's spy agency GCHQ has secretly gained access to the network of cables which carry the world's phone calls and internet traffic and has started to process vast streams of sensitive personal information which it is sharing with its American partner, the National Security Agency (NSA).The sheer scale of the agency's ambition is reflected in the titles of its two principal components: Mastering the Internet and Global Telecoms Exploitation, aimed at scooping up as much online and telephone traffic as possible. This is all being carried out without any form of public acknowledgement or debate.One key innovation has been GCHQ's ability to tap into and store huge volumes of data drawn from fibre-optic cables for up to 30 days so that it can be sifted and analysed. That operation, codenamed Tempora, has been running for some 18 months.
  • GCHQ and the NSA are consequently able to access and process vast quantities of communications between entirely innocent people, as well as targeted suspects.This includes recordings of phone calls, the content of email messages, entries on Facebook and the history of any internet user's access to websites – all of which is deemed legal, even though the warrant system was supposed to limit interception to a specified range of targets.The existence of the programme has been disclosed in documents shown to the Guardian by the NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden as part of his attempt to expose what he has called "the largest programme of suspicionless surveillance in human history"."It's not just a US problem. The UK has a huge dog in this fight," Snowden told the Guardian. "They [GCHQ] are worse than the US."
  • However, on Friday a source with knowledge of intelligence argued that the data was collected legally under a system of safeguards, and had provided material that had led to significant breakthroughs in detecting and preventing serious crime.Britain's technical capacity to tap into the cables that carry the world's communications – referred to in the documents as special source exploitation – has made GCHQ an intelligence superpower.By 2010, two years after the project was first trialled, it was able to boast it had the "biggest internet access" of any member of the Five Eyes electronic eavesdropping alliance, comprising the US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.UK officials could also claim GCHQ "produces larger amounts of metadata than NSA". (Metadata describes basic information on who has been contacting whom, without detailing the content.)By May last year 300 analysts from GCHQ, and 250 from the NSA, had been assigned to sift through the flood of data.The Americans were given guidelines for its use, but were told in legal briefings by GCHQ lawyers: "We have a light oversight regime compared with the US".
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  • When it came to judging the necessity and proportionality of what they were allowed to look for, would-be American users were told it was "your call".The Guardian understands that a total of 850,000 NSA employees and US private contractors with top secret clearance had access to GCHQ databases.
  • For the 2 billion users of the world wide web, Tempora represents a window on to their everyday lives, sucking up every form of communication from the fibre-optic cables that ring the world.The NSA has meanwhile opened a second window, in the form of the Prism operation, revealed earlier this month by the Guardian, from which it secured access to the internal systems of global companies that service the internet.The GCHQ mass tapping operation has been built up over five years by attaching intercept probes to transatlantic fibre-optic cables where they land on British shores carrying data to western Europe from telephone exchanges and internet servers in north America.This was done under secret agreements with commercial companies, described in one document as "intercept partners".The papers seen by the Guardian suggest some companies have been paid for the cost of their co-operation and GCHQ went to great lengths to keep their names secret. They were assigned "sensitive relationship teams" and staff were urged in one internal guidance paper to disguise the origin of "special source" material in their reports for fear that the role of the companies as intercept partners would cause "high-level political fallout".
  • The GCHQ documents that the Guardian has seen illustrate a constant effort to build up storage capacity at the stations at Cheltenham, Bude and at one overseas location, as well a search for ways to maintain the agency's comparative advantage as the world's leading communications companies increasingly route their cables through Asia to cut costs. Meanwhile, technical work is ongoing to expand GCHQ's capacity to ingest data from new super cables carrying data at 100 gigabits a second. As one training slide told new users: "You are in an enviable position – have fun and make the most of it."
  • The categories of material have included fraud, drug trafficking and terrorism, but the criteria at any one time are secret and are not subject to any public debate. GCHQ's compliance with the certificates is audited by the agency itself, but the results of those audits are also secret.An indication of how broad the dragnet can be was laid bare in advice from GCHQ's lawyers, who said it would be impossible to list the total number of people targeted because "this would be an infinite list which we couldn't manage".There is an investigatory powers tribunal to look into complaints that the data gathered by GCHQ has been improperly used, but the agency reassured NSA analysts in the early days of the programme, in 2009: "So far they have always found in our favour".
  • Historically, the spy agencies have intercepted international communications by focusing on microwave towers and satellites. The NSA's intercept station at Menwith Hill in North Yorkshire played a leading role in this. One internal document quotes the head of the NSA, Lieutenant General Keith Alexander, on a visit to Menwith Hill in June 2008, asking: "Why can't we collect all the signals all the time? Sounds like a good summer project for Menwith."By then, however, satellite interception accounted for only a small part of the network traffic. Most of it now travels on fibre-optic cables, and the UK's position on the western edge of Europe gave it natural access to cables emerging from the Atlantic.
  • The processing centres apply a series of sophisticated computer programmes in order to filter the material through what is known as MVR – massive volume reduction. The first filter immediately rejects high-volume, low-value traffic, such as peer-to-peer downloads, which reduces the volume by about 30%. Others pull out packets of information relating to "selectors" – search terms including subjects, phone numbers and email addresses of interest. Some 40,000 of these were chosen by GCHQ and 31,000 by the NSA. Most of the information extracted is "content", such as recordings of phone calls or the substance of email messages. The rest is metadata.
  • "The criteria are security, terror, organised crime. And economic well-being. There's an auditing process to go back through the logs and see if it was justified or not. The vast majority of the data is discarded without being looked at … we simply don't have the resources."However, the legitimacy of the operation is in doubt. According to GCHQ's legal advice, it was given the go-ahead by applying old law to new technology. The 2000 Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (Ripa) requires the tapping of defined targets to be authorised by a warrant signed by the home secretary or foreign secretary.However, an obscure clause allows the foreign secretary to sign a certificate for the interception of broad categories of material, as long as one end of the monitored communications is abroad. But the nature of modern fibre-optic communications means that a proportion of internal UK traffic is relayed abroad and then returns through the cables.
  • British spy agency collects and stores vast quantities of global email messages, Facebook posts, internet histories and calls, and shares them with NSA, latest documents from Edward Snowden reveal
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    Note particularly that the Brit criteria adds economic data to the list of categories categories the NSA trawls for and shares its data with the U.S. NSA. Both agencies claim to be targeting foreigners, so now we're into the "we surveil your citizens; you surveil our citizens, then we'll share the results" scenario that leaves both sides of the pond with a superficial excuse to say "we don't surveil our own citizens, just foreigners." But it's just ring-around-the-rosy. 850,000 NSA employees and U.S. private contractors with access to GCHQ surveillance databases.  Lots more in the article that I didn't highlight.
Paul Merrell

The Alamo II: Texans Up in Arms over TransCanada Land Grab - 0 views

  • Texans are having nightmares of a Niger Delta nature, and while they have always been the friends of Big Oil, TransCanada is changing the rules of the game in a legally-aided land grab that will test just how tough Texans are.
  • The lawsuits against TransCanada are piling up to the dismay of the Keystone XL pipeline project, which has been beleaguered by political, socio-economic, environmental and legal woes at every step from its US origins in Montana to its final destination point in south Texas. No one thought Texas would be part of the problem: Texans love their pipelines. Why the change of heart, then? The simplest answer is that Texans love their pipelines because Big Oil has been paying big bucks for the privilege of running them through Texas farmland, but TransCanada is bullying them out of their fair share. This is how it works: TransCanada makes an unacceptably low offer for the land it needs; the landowner rejects the offer; TransCanada gets the land condemned in court; then it legally acquires the land for a fraction of its original offer. Condemning land is not a new tactic by Big Oil, but while US oil companies have traditionally kept this to a minimum, TransCanada has taken far too much advantage of this legal loophole to get what it wants. According to CNBC.com, the Canadian company has so far condemned over 100 tracts of land out of the 800 tracts it has acquired for the pipeline in Texas.
  • Since Texans are being forced to give up their land for peanuts for the bigger picture “common good”, let’s look at why they aren’t buying it and why they don’t feel any less patriotic for their opinion. (Common good in this case meaning “national interest”)
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  • First of all, Texans point out that TransCanada is a foreign company that does not feel obliged necessarily to use American steel for its pipeline construction. According to media reports, a large percentage of the steel used for construction is imported. They also balk at the idea that much of the tar sands oil refined it Texas will be exported via the Gulf of Mexico. If the US is going to export its crude oil that should mean that it is producing more than it needs. In other words, the US must achieve oil independence before it starts exporting oil; otherwise it’s moving away from rather than toward independence. Every good Texan knows this. The US is producing about 6.2 million bpd this year, and consuming twice that. To the Texan mind, foreign-company plus exports does not add up to a reduction of US independence on foreign oil. It only adds up to revenues for TransCanada and Big Oil.
  • What is most interesting is that Texans will end up making Keystone XL a bipartisan issue. Previously, anyone who balked at Keystone XL environmental and socio-economic risks was a tree-hugging hippie. Anyone supporting Keystone XL was a Big Oil “yes man” with no respect for the environment. With Texans now up in arms over Keystone XL thanks to TransCanada, the debate will metamorphose into something more rational. The Texans, in their own unique way, will bring legitimacy to this debate. After all, no one could accuse them of being tree-hugging liberals. Texans want Keystone, they want pipelines, but they won’t stand for being cut out of the “common good” equation. To this end, some landowners are opening the gates to activists to stage protests, and this has so far ended in a handful of arrests.
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    Keep your eye on this battle. It sounds like the same conditions that led to the farmer uprising over the Minnesota Powerline Project in the late 70s. < http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CU_project_controversy#Organizations_formed_to_fight_the_power_line >.   In that fiasco, farmers occupied tower construction sites, tore down towers, shot out over 10K power line insulators, and sprayed hog manure on the state police using manure spreaders, on and on. And the establishment couldn't get a single criminal conviction because juries simply refused to find accused protesters guilty. A good time was had by all. 'Twas a marvelous rebellion, going well beyond passive resistance to include rampant sabotage. Will Texas farmers and ranchers follow that lead? It sounds like they may be.    
Paul Merrell

Deustche Bank Brokers Jailed In Biggest Insider Trading Bust Ever - 0 views

  • Two former Deutsche Bank corporate brokers have been sentenced to one of the longest prison terms possible for the crime of insider trading in the UK. As US financial market participants walk free in the streets managing their own “home office” money, Martyn Dodgson and Andrew Hind will be rotting in a Wandsworth prison cell (among the worst reputed of England’s prisons) for up to four and half years for what the judge called “persistent, prolonged and deliberately dishonest behavior.” As Bloomberg reports, the group, including three other defendants, formed part of the FCA’s biggest insider-trading investigation dubbed Operation Tabernula. The FCA accused Dodgson and Harrison of passing inside information on possible deals from their jobs between 2006 and 2010 to Hind who the agency claimed gave them to Parvizi and Anderson to trade on. All of the men denied the charge. But as Bloomberg reports, the sentences are among the longest handed down in an FCA insider-dealing case… Martyn Dodgson, 44, was sentenced Thursday in London (to 4 1/2 years in jail)&nbsp; alongside friend and accountant Andrew Hind, who was given a 3 1/2 year prison term for the same offense. The men were found guilty of insider dealing on Monday after a four-month trial.
Paul Merrell

Hezbollah: Israel Attacking Syria To Prevent ISIS Defeat - 0 views

  • Addressing the flurry of Israeli attacks against Syria in recent days, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah says he believes Israel is deliberately trying to help ISIS in an effort to prevent ISIS from suffering outright defeat in Syria amid growing pressure. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claimed the Friday attacks, which started the latest flurry, targeted a weapons convoy intended for Hezbollah forces, who are in Syria fighting alongside the government against ISIS and other rebel forces. Nasrallah, however, said that Israel has been using “all kinds of excuses” throughout the war to intervene, and that what they are really afraid of is an ISIS defeat, because that would mean a Hezbollah victory. This is largely in keeping with Israel’s own narrative on the Syrian Civil War, despite the pretense of neutrality.
  • sraeli officials have repeatedly expressed concern that the survival of the Assad government would mean that a Shi’ite ally of Iran would remain along their border. Moreover, last summer Israel’s Maj. Gen. Herzi Halevy, their military intelligence chief, publicly declared that Israel does not want to see ISIS defeated in the war, and prefers ISIS over the Assad government.
Paul Merrell

US Will Keep Ground Troops In Libya For 'Foreseeable Future' - 0 views

  • In a press briefing at the Pentagon today, African Command leader Gen. Thomas Waldhauser announced that the US intends to keep ground troops in Libya for the foreseeable future to support “friendly forces,” and to “degrade” the ISIS forces that remain in the country. Waldhauser did not specify how many US troops are in Libya now, or how many will stay, but did estimate that there were less than 200 ISIS fighters left in Libya. The US had announced the end of the anti-ISIS campaign in Libya back in December, but never fully withdrew from the country. The US forces were in Libya trying to help the “unity” government defeat ISIS in the city of Sirte. US officials repeatedly claimed the city was totally surrounded, and that no ISIS fighters would get away, though when the fighting finally ended, a substantial number of ISIS fighters did in fact get away.
  • Waldhauser hinted that the US operations in Libya would primarily be airstrikes going forward, saying that the US needs to have troops on the ground for “precision airstrikes” and “close-air support operations.” He added that the last US airstrikes, in January, involved US troops meeting face-to-face with allies on coordinating the strikes.
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    Odd. Someone told me we the U.S. had won the Libyan War.
Gary Edwards

The Top Twelve Reasons Why You Should Hate the Mortgage Settlement « naked ca... - 0 views

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    Must read stuff.  The Obama Foreclosure Settlement Act is a clever exit strategy for criminal Banksters having committed the most egregious fraud.  A $9 Trillion dollar problem, rife with criminal activities, is settled for a mere $25 Billion, much of which will come out of the taxpayers hide thanks to Fannie and Freddie guarantees.  This deal stinks of typical Obama crony banksterism.  Now we need to watch for how many millions the Banksters pour into the newly authorized Obama Super PACS.  Should be interesting. excerpt: As we've said before, this settlement is yet another raw demonstration of who wields power in America, and it isn't you and me. It's bad enough to see these negotiations come to their predictable, sorry outcome. It adds insult to injury to see some try to depict it as a win for long suffering, still abused homeowners. 1. We've now set a price for forgeries and fabricating documents. It's $2000 per loan. This is a rounding error compared to the chain of title problem these systematic practices were designed to circumvent. The cost is also trivial in comparison to the average loan, which is roughly $180k, so the settlement represents about 1% of loan balances. It is less than the price of the title insurance that banks failed to get when they transferred the loans to the trust. It is a fraction of the cost of the legal expenses when foreclosures are challenged. It's a great deal for the banks because no one is at any of the servicers going to jail for forgery and the banks have set the upper bound of the cost of riding roughshod over 300 years of real estate law....... 12. We'll now have to listen to banks and their sycophant defenders declaring victory despite being wrong on the law and the facts. They will proceed to marginalize and write off criticisms of the servicing practices that hurt homeowners and investors and are devastating communities. But the problems will fester and the housing market will continue to suffer. Inv
Gary Edwards

Why Isn't Wall Street in Jail? | Rolling Stone - Matt Taibi - 2 views

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    Must read stuff.  Very lengthy Bankster expose, this time involving Bankster connections to Obama, the political establishment, and the corruption of the DOJ, SEC and other regulatory agencies.  Very lengthy.  Includes stories about the misfortunes of those few honest individuals who tried to do the right thing in a sea of thieves, liars and crooks. excerpt: Nobody goes to jail. This is the mantra of the financial-crisis era, one that saw virtually every major bank and financial company on Wall Street embroiled in obscene criminal scandals that impoverished millions and collectively destroyed hundreds of billions, in fact, trillions of dollars of the world's wealth - and nobody went to jail. Nobody, that is, except Bernie Madoff, a flamboyant and pathological celebrity con artist, whose victims happened to be other rich and famous people. This article appears in the March 3, 2011 issue of Rolling Stone. The issue is available now on newsstands and will appear in the online archive February 18. The rest of them, all of them, got off. Not a single executive who ran the companies that cooked up and cashed in on the phony financial boom - an industrywide scam that involved the mass sale of mismarked, fraudulent mortgage-backed securities - has ever been convicted. Their names by now are familiar to even the most casual Middle American news consumer: companies like AIG, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America and Morgan Stanley. Most of these firms were directly involved in elaborate fraud and theft. Lehman Brothers hid billions in loans from its investors. Bank of America lied about billions in bonuses. Goldman Sachs failed to tell clients how it put together the born-to-lose toxic mortgage deals it was selling. What's more, many of these companies had corporate chieftains whose actions cost investors billions - from AIG derivatives chief Joe Cassano, who assured investors they would not lose even "one dollar" just months before hi
Gary Edwards

The Conservative Declaration - 0 views

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    "Add your name to the Conservative Declaration today".  Heritage Foundation has published a Conservative Declaration and is asking American Patriots to sign and make a sacred pledge to live by the principles that guided our nations founding fathers. .......        ......... Preamble ........... More than two centuries ago, a profound idea was born. .... A group of brave individuals joined together to proclaim that all people are fundamentally equal-equally endowed with the unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. .... They dared to decree that government exists to secure these God-given rights, deriving its just powers from the consent of the governed, not a central power. The result? The founding of the United States of America. But now that idea-America-is under siege by big-government radicals whose mission it is to slowly and deliberately dismantle our nation's foundational principles. With over-reaching regulation, out-of-control spending, high deficits, and a weakened national defense, America is looking less and less like the America of our Founding Fathers. This must be stopped! As we face an election like no other in our nation's history, conservatives must come together to stand for the principles on which our nation was founded and proclaim in unison our commitment to the ideals that our Founders proclaimed more than two centuries ago." .......... The Conservative Declaration ........ A beautifully written reaffirmation and pledge to honor the spirit of the founding fathers with our belief in the principles on which our nation was founded.   "We sign as individual citizens, united in our belief that our nation was established as a constitutional republic in which the power of government is limited under the rule of law, securing liberty and justice for all."
Gary Edwards

EconoMonitor : Great Leap Forward » BERNANKE'S OBFUSCATION CONTINUES: The Fed... - 0 views

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    Excellent summary of how deep the hole the Federal Reserve has dug for Americans.  Walks us from the 2008 crisis to the Levy Economics Institute $29.616 Trillion Bankster Bailout.  Incredibly well written commentary. excerpt: Bernanke argues we should look only at the lending at a peak instant of time. Think about it this way. A half dozen drunken sailors are at the bar, and the bartender refills their shot glasses with whiskey each time a drink is taken. At any instant, the bar-keep has committed only six ounces of booze. That is a useful measure of whiskey outstanding. But it is not useful for telling us how much the drunks drank. Bernanke would like us to believe that if the Fed newly lent a trillion bucks every day for 3 years to all our drunken bankers that we should total that as only a trillion greenbacks committed. Yes, that provides some useful information but it does not really measure the necessary intervention by the Fed into financial markets to save Wall Street. And that leads to the final way to measure the Fed's commitments to propping up our drunks on Wall Street: add up every single damned loan, guarantee and asset purchase the Fed made to benefit banks, banksters, real Housewives on Wall Street, fraudsters, and their cousins, aunts and uncles. This gives us the cumulative Fed commitments. The final important consideration is to separate "normal" Fed actions from the "extraordinary" or "emergency" interventions undertaken because of the crisis. That is easier than it sounds. After the crisis began, the Fed created a large alphabet soup of special facilities designed to deal with the crisis. We can thus take each facility and calculate the three measures of the Fed's commitments for each, then sum up for all the special facilities. And that is precisely what Nicola Matthews and James Felkerson have done. They are PhD students at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, working on a Ford Foundation grant under my direction, titl
Gary Edwards

The Libertarian View: Are Tariffs Bad? - 1 views

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    As many know, i spent quite a bit of time working for a Chinese Company seeking to enter the USA-European software market.  My task was to research the market, discover and define a market opportunity, design the product, and then work as product manager to get that service to market.  I took this job to better understand the Chinese marketplace and how sovereign Chinese companies work.  What i learned is how the Chinese seek to exploit and totally dominate open markets.  Software is just a category whose time has come.  and there are thousands of Chinese companies lining up.  The first step though is to fine tune the existing blueprint used by other Sina sovereigns.  amazing stuff. My take away from this experience is that the USA MUST set up a 30% tariff on ALL imports, and do so IMMEDIATELY!!!  Yesterday is not soon enough! As a newly minted libertarian, i wondered about the obvious conflict with Austrian Economics and their dedication to free markets and free trade?  I found the answer at this Libertarian forum, where many members were in heated discussion.  Comment #7 sums it up best i think.  Including a link to Ron Paul's Tariff-NAFTA speech. The thing is, the 30% Tariff should be part of an overall TAX REDUCTION PLAN.  I support the FAIR TAX and the Balanced Budget Amendment.  As an alternative to the Fair Tax, I would also support a 17% flat tax with no exceptions.  The ideal situation being an immediate, uncompromising, no exceptions 30% tariff on ALL imports coupled with the Fair Tax and the Balanced Budget Amendment.   And yes, i do believe this plan is consistent with the Founding Fathers Constitution.  But it took some kind of research to establish that opinion.   I've also concluded that "conservatism" is a convenient philosophical vehicle for the corrupt crony corporatism of both the military-industrial-complex, banksters and, international corporations.  Free trade and open markets concepts are perverted to become a thin veil
Gary Edwards

U.S. Senate: Senators Home - 0 views

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    Petition Time!  Last week, in a bipartisan action, the House of Representatives voted 267-159 to repeal the CLASS Act. excerpt from the Independent Woman's Voice call-to-action ; The CLASS Act is a microcosm of two of the primary problems that plague ObamaCare - it's unaffordable and completely unworkable. Indeed, that's why Department of Health & Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius had to pull the plug on the CLASS Act back in October. Sebelius was required to certify that CLASS - the health care law's provision to provide for long-term insurance for assisted living - would remain affordable and fiscally solvent for the next 75 years. To the surprise of only those who believe the fairy tail that ObamaCare will never add to the national debt, Secretary Sebelius was compelled to finally cease defending CLASS and abandon it. If only that same standard could be applied to all of ObamaCare. Now, the repeal of the CLASS Act moves on to the Senate. It's high time the Patriots mobilize to put pressure on the Senate to follow the House in repealing CLASS and sending it on to President Obama's desk. Not surprisingly the President has indicated he wouldn't sign repeal of CLASS.  Nonetheless, he should feel the pressure from the American people to do so.
Paul Merrell

Activists Take Credit for Notorious FBI Raid That Spilled Secrets-Forty-two Years Ago |... - 0 views

  • It’s a mystery I covered from the start and now it has been solved. A big breaking story this morning features startling revelations about the infamous raid by antiwar activists on the FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania, (yes, that’s the name) in 1971, on the night of the Ali-Frazier “fight of the century,” who are finally exposing themselves in a new book and film. The book is by the Washington Post reporter who received some of the leak files back then, Betty Medsger. The activists, none of them household names then or now, cleared out all the files there that day and this led to the first big scoops on illegal FBI surveillance and the notorious COINTELPRO program, which we covered so widely at Crawdaddy that decade. One of the perps even waved to Edward Snowden on the Today show today and said, “Hi, from one whistleblower to another.” And The New York Times has now posted a thirteen-minute video.
  • Of course, by 1971, there had been rumors and personal reports about undercover FBI snooping, including use of electronic surveillance, for years but with little black-and-white official evidence. Hell, we even had a break-in at the Crawdaddy office that seemed suspicious and, as a longtime (if minor) antiwar activist, I always figured I might have drawn some official attention. But the Media raid proved incredibly valuable, even as it made many of us more paranoid. Indeed, as NBC reports: Among the stolen files: plans to enhance “paranoia” among “New Left” groups by instilling fears that “there is an FBI agent behind every mailbox.” Another instructed agents in the Philadelphia area to monitor the “clientele” of “Afro-American type bookstores” and recruit informants among the “the Negro militant movement.” The raid and its results didn’t immediately stop COINTELPRO, then run by good old Deep Throat himself, Mark Felt.
  • the Media raid had finally produced some of the aims sought by the burglars. From NBC: “These documents were explosive,” said Medsger, who was the first reporter to write about them after receiving a batch of the files anonymously in the mail. Her book traces how the stolen files led to a landmark Senate investigation of intelligence and law enforcement agency abuses by the late Idaho Sen. Frank Church, and eventually to new Justice Department guidelines that barred the bureau from conducting investigations based on First Amendment protected political activity. After the burglary, said Medsger, “The FBI was never the same.” Glenn Greenwald weighs in on today’s revelations. He is, of course, supportive of the 1971 action.
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    The New York Times video is worth watching for its historical footage and the linked post by Glenn Greenwald adds valuable perspective about the failure of NYT and the LA Times to do anything with the documents. Only the Washington Post pushed the story. One might wonder if these days, any mainstream media might have covered the Snowden documents had The Guardian not told The Washington Post that the Guardian was going to run with the story regardless. 
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