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Gary Edwards

The Purchase Of Our Republic | Zero Hedge - 0 views

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shared by Gary Edwards on 06 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • The massive consolidation of wealth, combined with the removal of any limits on money in campaigns, has allowed for the purchase of our government. Today I am publishing a comprehensive and important guest essay, The Purchase of Our Republic, by longtime correspondent Y. Falkson.
  • Americans know that something is wrong, deeply wrong. They see signs of the problem everywhere: income inequality, growing concentration and power of mega corporations, political donations/corruption, the absence of jobs with decent salaries, the explosion of the US prison population, healthcare costs, student loan debt, homelessness, etc. etc.  However, the true causes and benefactors behind these problems are purposely hidden from view. What Americans see is Kabuki Theater of a functioning form of capitalism and democracy, but beyond this veneer our country has devolved into the exact opposite. Those who benefit from this crony capitalist state go to extreme lengths to paper over the reality and convince Americans that the system works, the American Dream is still a reality and that American democracy is in fact democratic. Below I hope to begin to outline some of the underlying dynamics and trends that have evolved in recent decades and led us so far from what we once were. As fun as it would be, the answer is not some evil conspiracy by the Illuminati, but rather the unfortunate result of three long term and mutually reinforcing components that have been attacking the fundamental roots of the structure of our Republic. The first is the increased concentr
  • When the average American goes to pick up some groceries, they are shopping at Walmart and buying something from P&G that is mostly made of Monsanto corn. Is that true choice? The same story plays out with our news and media (and other industries) where we have gone from 50 companies in 1983 to the big 6 which control over 90% of all media. Is choosing to watch one of 30 news channels, all of which are owned by News Corp (Rupert Murdoch) a real choice? This is not capitalism and they are not competing, not in the true sense of the word. Along with this consolidation of corporations in recent decades, their senior leaders have taken up a larger and larger piece of the pie at the expense of their employees. In particular, the ratio of CEO-to-worker pay has increased 1,000 percent since 1950. Unsurprisingly, Walmart is both the largest employer in the country and the worst CEO pay offender with a ratio of over 1000:1. This is at a time where worker productivity has increased significantly, something that historically correlated with increased pay. But no more. It’s a new twist on the old Soviet saying “we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us”, but now it’s closer to “we do all of the work and they pretend to pay us”.
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  • 1. Faux Capitalism = Wealth Consolidation / Income Inequality
  • While there is no true beginning to the story, we can start with the incredible build up and concentration of wealth among corporations in recent decades. The USA now boasts a cartel-like set of corporate titans in almost every industry. It goes beyond, but certainly includes, our Too Biggerer To Fail banks, merged from what was 37 banks in 1995 into a Frankenstein’s monster like 5 (Citigroup, JP Morgan-Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo and Goldman Sachs). In agriculture, Monsanto alone controls over 85% of all corn and soy bean crops, four companies control 83% of the beef market, 66% of the hog market and 58% of the chicken market. So while shopping at the grocery store might appear to be the manifestation of capitalism at its finest, it doesn’t take much digging to look behind the curtain to see how little competition truly exists.
  • ation of corporate and private wealth. Both of which are quickly yelled down in the media as anti-free market and class war hysteria. The second is the use of this wealth to capture all three branches of government in order to ensure the continued extraction of capital from the many and to the few.The rich might have climbed the ladder because they earned it, but they have then purchased government to pull up the ladder behind them. The consequence of the first two components is a democracy in name only that represents the very few.
  • Private Wealth: As a consequence of the royal tribute we pay to the C-suite class these days, we have likely surpassed the pre-Depression Roaring Twenties in terms of inequality.
  • This, amazingly, has only accelerated since the crisis in 2008 in thanks to bailouts, Quantitative Easing and other gifts from Congress and the Fed. The wealthy 1% and in particular the .01% have now grown their fortunes to levels that tax comprehension and even their ability to spend it (the decisions by a few billionaires such as Bill Gates to essentially donate his fortune is a tacit acknowledgement that our current system over provides wealth to a select few).
  • 2. Wealthy Purchase of Government Institutions / Elections
  • To squash or prevent competition, the oligopolies and oligarchs target their resources on the one place that can make competition illegal, our government.Something to keep in mind the next time you see a corporate billionaire grandstanding about the importance of “Free Markets” when their strategy is quite the opposite. As this capture of the government has taken place we have essentially shifted from capitalism and to crony capitalism. So we now have industries that have mastered the art of faking capitalism by turning our government into one that fakes democracy. This government takeover took time, but the purchase of all 3 branches of government has almost been completed by 2014. You don’t have to take my word for it, luckily that has now been empirically proven in an analysis of over 20 years of government policy where the clear conclusion was that policy makers respond solely to those in the top 90th percentile and essentially ignore the large majority of Americans.
  • So what is an incredibly wealthy capitalist CEO of a mega-corporation do once they control their industry and have essentially limitless wealth? Well in a competitive market, the only way to go from the top is down and the only thing that can make that happen is competition. Consequently, competition must be avoided whenever possible.
  • Purchase of the Executive Branch:
  • Let’s take a step back and take a glimpse at how the government was purchased, beginning with the executive branch. In 1980, Reagan’s election cost less than $300 million. When Bush beat Kerry in 2004, it cost almost 3x times as much, almost $900 Million. 4 years later, the 2008 election cost a record $1.3 Billion. It was in this election where Obama hammered the final nail in the coffin for government funded for elections. Obama, more so than any other candidate in recent decades had the widespread support of millions of small donors, but in the end I guess it wasn’t enough. So when Obama “leaned to the green”, it forever set the precedent that you can’t win without the backing of our nation’s oligarchs. Consequently, the money has only gushed in since as the cost of Obama’s reelection in 2012 skyrocketed to an unfathomable $7 billion. Needless to say this is slightly above the rate of inflation. Our Presidents are now preselected exclusively by a tiny fraction of Americans can have the money to fund what has become necessary for a legitimate run. Summary: Candidates spend years courting the super-rich to build up a multi-billion dollar war chest. Only those who succeed can actually run a campaign that an average American will be aware of. Then Americans get to choose one of the pre-selected “candidates”. No wonder voter turnout is so low… Executive branch, check!
  • – Note that media corporations benefit doubly as they can use their cash to fund elections, but are also the beneficiary of all that money as it is used for campaign spending.
  • Purchase of the Legislative Branch:
  • In addition, increasingly those who work on Congress (and regulators) were previously employed by these large corporations or expect to work there later. A recent example is Chris Dodd who left the Senate the head lobbyist for Hollywood at the MPAA, the guys behind SOPA and PIPA, but there are many many others.
  • Review: Congressmen beg for money to get elected, make sure to vote the way your benefactors would like, consequently get more money to get elected again. If at any point they do lose or quit, they take the big payday to work for those who have been paying them all along. Legislative Branch, Check!
  • The process has progressed similarly in Congress. In 1978, outside groups spent $303,000 on congressional races. In 2012 that was up to $457,000,000. That is over 1,500 times the level in 1978. It would be funny, if it was so blatant and terrifying. By many accounts, our “leaders” in Congress spend 50% or more of their time working the phones or fundraisers rather than trying (and failing) to actually do the “people’s business”. Let’s also take a minute to appreciate the hypocrisy of anyone that pretends that the money doesn’t influence our government. Businesses do not give to politicians for charity. This is a payment for services that has proven exceedingly reliable and profitable. The ROI for money invested in purchasing Congressman is what CEO dreams are made of. No wonder the incentive is to invest in Congress rather than R&D or marketing. There are very few places in the world or times in history where you can find ROI’s in the thousands, or even the tens of thousands.
  • Judicial Branch Endorsement of the Purchase of Government:
  • Last but not least, we have the enabling Judicial Branch. It only took a few purchased presidents to ensure the appointment of a majority of “free market” and “pro-business” judges. For instance, and disgracefully, Clarence Thomas was once legal counsel for Monsanto, but has not once recused himself from any cases involving Monsanto and always votes in their favor. These radicals have now fully endorsed and enabled the influx of money used to purchase the other branches. Specifically, 2 major decisions have completely opened the floodgates, Citizens United and McCutcheon. The first allowed unlimited contributions of corporate money into elections and brought us the notorious declaration that “corporations are people” and that “money is free speech”. This was more recently followed up with the private wealth equivalent in McCutcheon. In this ruling, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts said as part of his majority opinion (presumably with a straight face) “… nor does the possibility that an individual who spends large sums may garner influence over or access to elected officials or political parties”. And with this, the Supreme Court has fully endorsed both major sources of immense wealth to purchase our elections and consequently our government. Review: The rich fund Presidential elections, Presidents nominate “business-friendly” judges and then the bought Congress approves their nominations. New judge then votes to ensure even more money is allowed to purchase elections. Judicial Branch, CHECK!
  • 3. A Faux Republic Dependent Upon the Funders and Not the Voters
  • The Founder’s Hope and the Sad Reality:
  • Acknowledging where we are as a country, it is often helpful to look to where we started for some perspective. Unsurprisingly, this type of problem was not overlooked back in the 18th century. In 1776, James Madison stated that his goal was to design a republic in which “powerful interest groups would be rendered incapable of subdoing the general will”. Madison hoped, perhaps naively, that factions would be thwarted by competing with other factions. Sadly, we are now in a time where factions (aka wealthy special interests) subdue the will of the people and ensure the government responds to them alone on those issues where they have a “special interest” and consequently asymmetric stakes in the game (Charles Hugh Smith). As a result, these groups essentially collude to allocate their resources to their own issues, but do not “thwart” or compete with other factions as they do the same. It’s a pretty great system, as long as you’re one of the wealthy few who can use their money to drown out the poor and voiceless many. And just like that, what was once a Republic has become a corrupt shell of its past self. All the signs are still there; votes, elections, campaigns, branches of government, etc., but behind the scenes the only ones represented are those who can afford to be heard.
  • Summary: This massive consolidation of wealth, combined with the removal of any limits on money in campaigns, has allowed for the purchase of our government, or as Dick Durban once stated, “frankly they [the banks in this case] own the place”. If money = free speech, then those with all the money, have all the free speech.
  • What Might Help? Now that I have likely and thoroughly depressed the reader, let’s bounce around some ideas for what can be done. As stated in the beginning, this is not an unknown problem and many people are promoting a number of ways to fix or at least ameliorate the problem. I will briefly describe just a few which I think provide some direction any of us could easily implement or support.
  • Change the Rules: Laurence Lessig of Harvard Law has put forward a visionary proposal for re-writing the way that campaigns are financed in his book, Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress--and a Plan to Stop It. Put simply, he would like to empower every voter with a stipend, say $150 per election to give to whatever candidate or candidates they prefer. If you would like to accept this money, you would need to forgo any other contributions or support (one would hope including the indirect PAC kind). This would actually provide even more money than is used in current elections, but would effectively democratize the funding process. While there would still be a “funding election” that takes place before the actual election, the funding would not be unequally provided. Lessig’s work has only begun, as this sort of bill or likely constitutional reform is nearly impossible to achieve, but he has undertaken and I assume will continue to implement many brave and creative ways of bringing about the change all American’s should support. Most recently he has suggested we begin to fund, ironically enough, a Super PAC to end all Super PACs. It would be funded with the solitary goal of changing how money impacts our elections. Please support them here: www.mayone.us/
  • Change Our Day-to-Day: At the more micro level, Charles Hugh Smith believes that we will inevitably see our overly centralized and inefficient system erode away as it is replaced by more resilient, local and efficient businesses and societies outside of the current system. With that in mind, he recommends that “all anyone can do is the basic things--lower our energy footprint, stay healthy and avoid unnecessary medications and procedures, support local businesses, organic food growers, etc. In other words, what we can do is support local businesses that are part of the emerging economy rather than support corporate cartels.” Your Vote Does Matter: Do you live in Ohio, Florida or New Hampshire? Probably not. Despite what we are told every 4 years, there are actually states outside of the “swing states”, and even more surprising, the very large majority of Americans live in those states where your “vote doesn’t matter”. New Yorkers an Californians all know their state will turn Blue no matter who the candidates are and either don’t vote at all, or often vote for the Blue team in order to feel like they are on the winning side.
  • The truth is that if you see the election as Red vs. Blue, you vote probably doesn’t matter. But here is the trick, if all the people who think their vote didn’t matter decided to vote for whom they might actually believe in, then their votes just might matter.
  • What if all the growing number of “Independents” (who usually still vote Blue), chose to vote for a third party? What if a third party candidate won a state like New York or California? What if that candidate was one whose primary promise to the voters was to champion a change to the role of money in government (perhaps in line with what Lessig proposes)? Would you vote for such a person?I would argue you should. If California alone (with 55 electoral votes) were to vote for a 3rd party that would likely prevent either Red or Blue candidate from winning the requisite 270 electoral votes.
  • Think about the message that would send to both parties. I would predict that both sides would start to bend over backwards for an endorsement from that 3rd party and they would have to get it by taking up the same primary cause for reforming money in government. Consequently, at the root of our corrupted system which is perpetually ignored as both sides might suddenly become the big issue of the election. Then maybe we might begin to turn things around.
  • Sources: Charles Hugh Smith (oftwominds, Surivival+, etc.), Yves Smith (Naked Capitalism, Econned), Laurence Lessig (Republic Lost, multiple TED Talks), Matt Taibbi (blog at Rolling Stone and now at The Intercept), Zero Hedge, John Robb, Max Keiser, Clay Shirky (Cognitive Surplus), Aldous Huxley (Brave New World, Brave New World Revisited), George Orwell (1984), Michael Lewis, Daniel Kahneman (Thinking Fast and Slow), James Richards (Currency Wars), Han Joon Chang (23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism) and Joseph Stiglitz (Mismeasuring Our Lives) 
Paul Merrell

The American Deep State, Deep Events, and Off-the-Books Financing | Global Research - 0 views

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banksters CIA 9-11 arms-deals opium congtinuity-of-government

shared by Paul Merrell on 07 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • It is alleged that some of the bail money that released Sturgis and the other Watergate burglars was drug money from the CIA asset turned drug trafficker, Manuel Artime, and delivered by Artime’s money-launderer, Ramón Milián Rodríguez. After the Iran-Contra scandal went public, Milián Rodríguez was investigated by a congressional committee – not for Watergate, but because, in support of the Contras, he had managed two Costa Rican seafood companies, Frigorificos and Ocean Hunter, that laundered drug money.6
  • In the 1950s Wall Street was a dominating complex. It included not just banks and other financial institutions but also the oil majors whose cartel arrangements were successfully defended against the U.S. Government by the Wall Street law firm Sullivan and Cromwell, home to the Dulles brothers. The inclusion of Wall Street conforms with Franklin Roosevelt’s observation in 1933 to his friend Col. E.M. House that “The real truth … is, as you and I know, that a financial element in the larger centers has owned the Government ever since the days of Andrew Jackson.”18 FDR’s insight is well illustrated by the efficiency with which a group of Wall Street bankers (including Nelson Rockefeller’s grandfather Nelson Aldrich) were able in a highly secret meeting in 1910 to establish the Federal Reserve System – a system which in effect reserved oversight of the nation’s currency supply and of all America’s banks in the not impartial hands of its largest.19 The political clout of the quasi-governmental Federal Reserve Board was clearly demonstrated in 2008, when Fed leadership secured instant support from two successive administrations for public money to rescue the reckless management of Wall Street banks: banks Too Big To Fail, and of course far Too Big To Jail, but not Too Big To Bail.20
  • since its outset, the CIA has always had access to large amounts of off-the books or offshore funds to support its activities. Indeed, the power of the purse has usually worked in an opposite sense, since those in control of deep state offshore funds supporting CIA activities have for decades also funded members of Congress and of the executive – not vice versa. The last six decades provide a coherent and continuous picture of historical direction being provided by this deep state power of the purse, trumping and sometimes reversing the conventional state. Let us resume some of the CIA’s sources of offshore and off-the-books funding for its activities. The CIA’s first covert operation was the use of “over $10 million in captured Axis funds to influence the [Italian] election [of 1948].”25 (The fundraising had begun at the wealthy Brook Club in New York; but Allen Dulles, then still a Wall Street lawyer, persuaded Washington, which at first had preferred a private funding campaign, to authorize the operation through the National Security Council and the CIA.)26 Dulles, together with George Kennan and James Forrestal, then found a way to provide a legal source for off-the-books CIA funding, under the cover of the Marshall Plan. The three men “helped devise a secret codicil [to the Marshall Plan] that gave the CIA the capability to conduct political warfare. It let the agency skim millions of dollars from the plan.”27
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  • The international lawyers of Wall Street did not hide from each other their shared belief that they understood better than Washington the requirements for running the world. As John Foster Dulles wrote in the 1930s to a British colleague, The word “cartel” has here assumed the stigma of a bogeyman which the politicians are constantly attacking. The fact of the matter is that most of these politicians are highly insular and nationalistic and because the political organization of the world has under such influence been so backward, business people who have had to cope realistically with international problems have had to find ways for getting through and around stupid political barriers.21
  • In the 1960s and especially the 1970s America began to import more and more oil from the Middle East. But the negative effect on the U.S. balance of payments was offset by increasing arms and aviation sales to Iran and Saudi Arabia. Contracts with companies like Northrop and especially Lockheed (the builder of the CIA’s U-2) included kickbacks to arms brokers, like Kodama Yoshio in Japan and Adnan Khashoggi in Saudi Arabia, who were also important CIA agents. Lockheed alone later admitted to the Church Committee that it had provided $106 million in commissions to Khashoggi between 1970 and 1975, more than ten times what it had paid to the next most important connection, Kodama.31 These funds were then used by Khashoggi and Kodama to purchase pro-Western influence. But Khashoggi, advised by a team of ex-CIA Americans like Miles Copeland and Edward Moss, distributed cash, and sometimes provided women, not just in Saudi Arabia but around the world – including cash to congressmen and President Nixon in the United States.32 Khashoggi in effect served as a “cutout,” or representative, in a number of operations forbidden to the CIA and the companies he worked with. Lockheed, for one, was conspicuously absent from the list of military contractors who contributed illicitly to Nixon’s 1972 election campaign. But there was no law prohibiting, and nothing else to prevent their official representative, Khashoggi, from cycling $200 million through the bank of Nixon’s friend Bebe Rebozo.33
  • The most dramatic use of off-the-books drug profits to finance foreign armies was seen in the 1960s CIA-led campaign in Laos. There the CIA supplied airstrips and planes to support a 30,000-man drug-financed Hmong army. At one point Laotian CIA station chief Theodore Shackley even called in CIA aircraft in support of a ground battle to seize a huge opium caravan on behalf of the larger Royal Laotian Army.30
  • At the time of the Marshall Plan slush fund in Europe, the CIA also took steps which resulted in drug money to support anti-communist armies in the Far East. In my book American War Machine I tell how the CIA, using former OSS operative Paul Helliwell, created two proprietary firms as infrastructure for a KMT army in Burma, an army which quickly became involved in managing and developing the opium traffic there. The two firms were SEA Supply Inc. in Bangkok and CAT Inc. (later Air America) in Taiwan. Significantly, the CIA split ownership of CAT Inc.’s plane with KMT bankers in Taiwan – this allowed the CIA to deny responsibility for the flights when CAT planes, having delivered arms from Sea Supply to the opium-growing army, then returned to Taiwan with opium for the KMT. Even after the CIA officially severed its connection to the KMT Army in 1953, its proprietary firm Sea Supply Inc. supplied arms for a CIA-led paramilitary force, PARU, that also was financed, at least in part, by the drug traffic.28 Profits from Thailand filtered back, in part through the same Paul Helliwell, as donations to members from both parties in Congress. Thai dictator Phao Sriyanon, a drug trafficker who was then alleged to be the richest man in the world, hired lawyer Paul Helliwell…as a lobbyist in addition to [former OSS chief William] Donovan [who in 1953-55 was US Ambassador to Thailand]. Donovan and Helliwell divided the Congress between them, with Donovan assuming responsibility for the Republicans and Helliwell taking the Democrats.29
  • The power exerted by Khashoggi was not limited to his access to funds and women. By the 1970s, Khashoggi and his aide Edward Moss owned the elite Safari Club in Kenya.34 The exclusive club became the first venue for another and more important Safari Club: an alliance between Saudi and other intelligence agencies that wished to compensate for the CIA’s retrenchment in the wake of President Carter’s election and Senator Church’s post-Watergate reforms.35
  • As former Saudi intelligence chief Prince Turki bin Faisal once told Georgetown University alumni, In 1976, after the Watergate matters took place here, your intelligence community was literally tied up by Congress. It could not do anything. It could not send spies, it could not write reports, and it could not pay money. In order to compensate for that, a group of countries got together in the hope of fighting Communism and established what was called the Safari Club. The Safari Club included France, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, and Iran.36 Prince Turki’s candid remarks– “your intelligence community was literally tied up by Congress. …. In order to compensate for that, a group of countries got together … and established what was called the Safari Club.” – made it clear that the Safari Club, operating at the level of the deep state, was expressly created to overcome restraints established by political decisions of the public state in Washington (decisions not only of Congress but also of President Carter).
  • Specifically Khashoggi’s activities involving corruption by sex and money, after they too were somewhat curtailed by Senator Church’s post-Watergate reforms, appear to have been taken up quickly by the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), a Muslim-owned bank where Khashoggi’s friend and business partner Kamal Adham, the Saudi intelligence chief and a principal Safari Club member, was a part-owner.37 In the 1980s BCCI, and its allied shipping empire owned by the Pakistani Gokal brothers, supplied financing and infrastructure for the CIA’s (and Saudi Arabia’s) biggest covert operation of the decade, support for the Afghan mujahedin. To quote from a British book excerpted in the Senate BCCI Report: “BCCI’s role in assisting the U.S. to fund the Mujaheddin guerrillas fighting the Soviet occupation is drawing increasing attention. The bank’s role began to surface in the mid-1980′s when stories appeared in the New York Times showing how American security operatives used Oman as a staging post for Arab funds. This was confirmed in the Wall Street Journal of 23 October 1991 which quotes a member of the late General Zia’s cabinet as saying ‘It was Arab money that was pouring through BCCI.’ The Bank which carried the money on from Oman to Pakistan and into Afghanistan was National Bank of Oman, where BCCI owned 29%.”38
  • In 1981 Vice-president Bush and Saudi Prince Bandar, working together, won congressional approval for massive new arms sales of AWACS (airborne warning and control system) aircraft to Saudi Arabia. In the $5.5 billion package, only ten percent covered the cost of the planes. Most of the rest was an initial installment on what was ultimately a $200 billion program for military infrastructure through Saudi Arabia.41 It also supplied a slush fund for secret ops, one administered for over a decade in Washington by Prince Bandar, after he became the Saudi Ambassador (and a close friend of the Bush family, nicknamed “Bandar Bush”). In the words of researcher Scott Armstrong, the fund was “the ultimate government-off-the-books.” Not long after the AWACS sale was approved, Prince Bandar thanked the Reagan administration for the vote by honoring a request by William Casey that he deposit $10 million in a Vatican bank to be used in a campaign against the Italian Communist Party. Implicit in the AWACS deal was a pledge by the Saudis to fund anticommunist guerrilla groups in Afghanistan, Angola, and elsewhere that were supported by the Reagan Administration.42 The Vatican contribution, “for the CIA’s long-time clients, the Christian Democratic Party,” of course continued a CIA tradition dating back to 1948.
  • The activities of the Safari Club were exposed after Iranians in 1979 seized the records of the US Embassy in Tehran. But BCCI support for covert CIA operations, including Iran-Contra, continued until BCCI’s criminality was exposed at the end of the decade. Meanwhile, with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, Washington resumed off-budget funding for CIA covert operations under cover of arms contracts to Saudi Arabia. But this was no longer achieved through kickbacks to CIA assets like Khashoggi, after Congress in 1977 made it illegal for American corporations to make payments to foreign officials. Instead arrangements were made for payments to be returned, through either informal agreements or secret codicils in the contracts, by the Saudi Arabian government itself. Two successive arms deals, the AWACS deal of 1981 and the al-Yamamah deal of 1985, considerably escalated the amount of available slush funds.
  • It is reported in two books that the BCCI money flow through the Bank of Oman was handled in part by the international financier Bruce Rappaport, who for a decade, like Khashoggi, kept a former CIA officer on his staff.39 Rappaport’s partner in his Inter Maritime Bank, which interlocked with BCCI, was E.P. Barry, who earlier had been a partner in the Florida money-laundering banks of Paul Helliwell.40
  • After a second proposed major U.S. arms sale met enhanced opposition in Congress in 1985 from the Israeli lobby, Saudi Arabia negotiated instead a multi-billion pound long-term contract with the United Kingdom – the so-called al-Yamamah deal. Once again overpayments for the purchased weapons were siphoned off into a huge slush fund for political payoffs, including “hundreds of millions of pounds to the ex-Saudi ambassador to the US, Prince Bandar bin Sultan.”43 According to Robert Lacey, the payments to Prince Bandar were said to total one billion pounds over more than a decade.44 The money went through a Saudi Embassy account in the Riggs Bank, Washington; according to Trento, the Embassy’s use of the Riggs Bank dated back to the mid-1970s, when, in his words, “the Saudi royal family had taken over intelligence financing for the United States.”45 More accurately, the financing was not for the United States, but for the American deep state.
  • This leads me to the most original and important thing I have to say. I believe that these secret funds from BCCI and Saudi arms deals – first Khashoggi’s from Lockheed and then Prince Bandar’s from the AWACS and al-Yamamah deals – are the common denominator in all of the major structural deep events (SDEs) that have afflicted America since the supranational Safari Club was created in l976. I am referring specifically to 1) the covert US intervention in Afghanistan (which started about 1978 as a Safari Club intervention, more than a year before the Russian invasion), 2) the 1980 October Surprise, which together with an increase in Saudi oil prices helped assure Reagan’s election and thus give us the Reagan Revolution, 3) Iran-Contra in 1984-86, 4) and – last but by no means least – 9/11. That is why I believe it is important to analyze these events at the level of the supranational deep state. Let me just cite a few details.
  • 1) the 1980 October Surprise. According to Robert Parry, Alexandre de Marenches, the principal founder of the Safari Club, arranged for William Casey (a fellow Knight of Malta) to meet with Iranian and Israeli representatives in Paris in July and October 1980, where Casey promised delivery to Iran of needed U.S. armaments, in exchange for a delay in the return of the U.S. hostages in Iran until Reagan was in power. Parry suspects a role of BCCI in both the funding of payoffs for the secret deal and the subsequent flow of Israeli armaments to Iran.46 In addition, John Cooley considers de Marenches to be “the Safari Club player who probably did most to draw the US into the Afghan adventure.”47 2) the Iran-Contra scandal (including the funding of the Contras, the illegal Iran arms sales, and support for the Afghan mujahideen There were two stages to Iran-Contra. For twelve months in 1984-85, after meeting with Casey, King Fahd of Saudi Arabia, in the spirit of the AWACS deal, supported the Nicaraguan Contras via Prince Bandar through a BCCI bank account in Miami. But in April 1985, after the second proposed arms sale fell through, McFarlane, fearing AIPAC opposition, terminated this direct Saudi role. Then Khashoggi, with the help of Miles Copeland, devised a new scheme in which Iranian arms sales involving Israel would fund the contras. The first stage of Iran-Contra was handled by Prince Bandar through a BCCI account in Miami; the second channel was handled by Khashoggi through a different BCCI account in Montecarlo. The Kerry-Brown Senate Report on BCCI also transmitted allegations from a Palestinian-American businessman, Sam Bamieh, that Khashoggi’s funds from BCCI for arms sales to Iran came ultimately from King Fahd of Saudi Arabia, who “was hoping to gain favor with Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.”48
  • 3) 9/11 When the two previously noted alleged hijackers or designated culprits, al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi, arrived in San Diego, a Saudi named Omar al-Bayoumi both housed them and opened bank accounts for them. Soon afterwards Bayoumi’s wife began receiving monthly payments from a Riggs bank account held by Prince Bandar’s wife, Princess Haifa bint Faisal.49 In addition, Princess Haifa sent regular monthly payments of between $2,000 and $3,500 to the wife of Osama Basnan, believed by various investigators to be a spy for the Saudi government. In all, “between 1998 and 2002, up to US $73,000 in cashier cheques was funneled by Bandar’s wife Haifa … – to two Californian families known to have bankrolled al-Midhar and al-Hazmi.”50 Although these sums in themselves are not large, they may have been part of a more general pattern. Author Paul Sperry claims there was possible Saudi government contact with at least four other of the alleged hijackers in Virginia and Florida. For example, “9/11 ringleader Mohamed Atta and other hijackers visited s home owned by Esam Ghazzawi, a Saudi adviser to the nephew of King Fahd.”51
  • But it is wrong to think of Bandar’s accounts in the Riggs Bank as uniquely Saudi. Recall that Prince Bandar’s payments were said to have included “a suitcase containing more than $10 million” that went to a Vatican priest for the CIA’s long-time clients, the Christian Democratic Party.52 In 2004, the Wall Street Journal reported that the Riggs Bank, which was by then under investigation by the Justice Department for money laundering, “has had a longstanding relationship with the Central Intelligence Agency, according to people familiar with Riggs operations and U.S. government officials.”53 Meanwhile President Obiang of Equatorial Guinea “siphoned millions from his country’s treasury with the help of Riggs Bank in Washington, D.C.”54 For this a Riggs account executive, Simon Kareri, was indicted. But Obiang enjoyed State Department approval for a contract with the private U.S. military firm M.P.R.I., with an eye to defending offshore oil platforms owned by ExxonMobil, Marathon, and Hess.55 Behind the CIA relationship with the Riggs Bank was the role played by the bank’s overseas clients in protecting U.S. investments, and particularly (in the case of Saudi Arabia and Equatorial Guinea), the nation’s biggest oil companies.
  • The issue of Saudi Embassy funding of at least two (and possibly more) of the alleged 9/11 hijackers (or designated culprits) is so sensitive that, in the 800-page Joint Congressional Inquiry Report on 9/11, the entire 28-page section dealing with Saudi financing was very heavily redacted.56 A similar censorship occurred with the 9/11 Commission Report: According to Philip Shenon, several staff members felt strongly that they had demonstrated a close Saudi government connection to the hijackers, but a senior staff member purged almost all of the most serious allegations against the Saudi government, and moved the explosive supporting evidence to the report’s footnotes.57 It is probable that this cover-up was not designed for the protection of the Saudi government itself, so much as of the supranational deep state connection described in this essay, a milieu where American, Saudi, and Israeli elements all interact covertly. One sign of this is that Prince Bandar himself, sensitive to the anti-Saudi sentiment that 9/11 caused, has been among those calling for the U.S. government to make the redacted 28 pages public.58
  • This limited exposure of the nefarious use of funds generated from Saudi arms contracts has not created a desire in Washington to limit these contracts. On the contrary, in 2010, the second year of the Obama administration, The Defense Department … notified Congress that it wants to sell $60 billion worth of advanced aircraft and weapons to Saudi Arabia. The proposed sale, which includes helicopters, fighter jets, radar equipment and satellite-guided bombs, would be the largest arms deal to another country in U.S. history if the sale goes through and all purchases are made.59 The sale did go through; only a few congressmen objected.60 The deep state, it would appear, is alive and well, and impervious to exposures of it. It is clear that for some decades the bottom-upwards processes of democracy have been increasingly supplanted by the top-downwards processes of the deep state.
  • But the deeper strain in history, I would like to believe, is in the opposite direction: the ultimate diminution of violent top-down forces by the bottom-up forces of an increasingly integrated civil society.61 In the last months we have had Wikileaks, then Edward Snowden, and now the fight between the CIA and its long-time champion in Congress, Dianne Feinstein. It may be time to see a systemic correction, much as we did after Daniel Ellsberg’s release of the Pentagon Papers, which was followed by Watergate and the Church Committee reforms. I believe that to achieve this correction there must be a better understanding of deep events and of the deep state. Ultimately, however, whether we see a correction or not will depend, at least in part, on how much people care.
Gary Edwards

Jim Kunstler's 2014 Forecast - Burning Down The House | Zero Hedge - 0 views

www.zerohedge.com/...14-forecast-burning-down-house

Banksters

shared by Gary Edwards on 08 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 08 Jan 14
     
    Incredible must read analysis. Take away: the world is going to go "medevil". It's the only way out of this mess. Since the zero hedge layout is so bad, i'm going to post as much of the article as Diigo will allow: Jim Kunstler's 2014 Forecast - Burning Down The House Submitted by Tyler Durden on 01/06/2014 19:36 -0500 Submitted by James H. Kunstler of Kunstler.com , Many of us in the Long Emergency crowd and like-minded brother-and-sisterhoods remain perplexed by the amazing stasis in our national life, despite the gathering tsunami of forces arrayed to rock our economy, our culture, and our politics. Nothing has yielded to these forces already in motion, so far. Nothing changes, nothing gives, yet. It's like being buried alive in Jell-O. It's embarrassing to appear so out-of-tune with the consensus, but we persevere like good soldiers in a just war. Paper and digital markets levitate, central banks pull out all the stops of their magical reality-tweaking machine to manipulate everything, accounting fraud pervades public and private enterprise, everything is mis-priced, all official statistics are lies of one kind or another, the regulating authorities sit on their hands, lost in raptures of online pornography (or dreams of future employment at Goldman Sachs), the news media sprinkles wishful-thinking propaganda about a mythical "recovery" and the "shale gas miracle" on a credulous public desperate to believe, the routine swindles of medicine get more cruel and blatant each month, a tiny cohort of financial vampire squids suck in all the nominal wealth of society, and everybody else is left whirling down the drain of posterity in a vortex of diminishing returns and scuttled expectations. Life in the USA is like living in a broken-down, cob-jobbed, vermin-infested house that needs to be gutted, disinfected, and rebuilt - with the hope that it might come out of the restoration process retaining the better qualities of our heritage.
Paul Merrell

Homan Square revealed: how Chicago police 'disappeared' 7,000 people | US news | The Gu... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...o-police-disappeared-thousands

police Chicago-PD Homan stats

shared by Paul Merrell on 20 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • Police “disappeared” more than 7,000 people at an off-the-books interrogation warehouse in Chicago, nearly twice as many detentions as previously disclosed, the Guardian can now reveal.
  • From August 2004 to June 2015, nearly 6,000 of those held at the facility were black, which represents more than twice the proportion of the city’s population. But only 68 of those held were allowed access to attorneys or a public notice of their whereabouts, internal police records show. The new disclosures, the result of an ongoing Guardian transparency lawsuit and investigation, provide the most detailed, full-scale portrait yet of the truth about Homan Square, a secretive facility that Chicago police have described as little more than a low-level narcotics crime outpost where the mayor has said police “follow all the rules”. The police portrayals contrast sharply with those of Homan Square detainees and their lawyers, who insist that “if this could happen to someone, it could happen to anyone”. A 30-year-old man named Jose, for example, was one of the few detainees with an attorney present when he surrendered to police. He said officers at the warehouse questioned him even after his lawyer specifically told them he would not speak.
  • “The Fillmore and Homan boys,” Jose said, referring to police and the facility’s cross streets, “don’t play by the rules.” According to an analysis of data disclosed to the Guardian in late September, police allowed lawyers access to Homan Square for only 0.94% of the 7,185 arrests logged over nearly 11 years. That percentage aligns with Chicago police’s broader practice of providing minimal access to attorneys during the crucial early interrogation stage, when an arrestee’s constitutional rights against self-incrimination are most vulnerable. But Homan Square is unlike Chicago police precinct houses, according to lawyers who described a “find-your-client game” and experts who reviewed data from the latest tranche of arrestee records obtained by the Guardian.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • The narcotics, vice and anti-gang units operating out of Homan Square, on Chicago’s west side, take arrestees to the nondescript warehouse from all over the city: police data obtained by the Guardian and mapped against the city grid show that 53% of disclosed arrestees come from more than 2.5 miles away from the warehouse. No contemporaneous public record of someone’s presence at Homan Square is known to exist. Nor are any booking records generated at Homan Square, as confirmed by a sworn deposition of a police researcher in late September, further preventing relatives or attorneys from finding someone taken there.
  • But those documents do not tell the entire story of Homan Square. Chicago police have not disclosed any figures at all on people who were detained at Homan Square but never ultimately charged. Nor has it released any information about detentions or arrests before September 2004, claiming that information is burdensome to produce because it is not digital. (Chicago purchased the warehouse in 1995.) “It’s hard to believe that 7,185 arrests is an accurate number of arrestees at Homan Square,” said the University of Chicago’s Futterman. “Even if it were true that less than 1% of Homan arrestees were given access to counsel, that would be abhorrent in and of itself.”
  • 11.8% of detainees in the Homan Square logs were Hispanic, compared with 28.9% of the population. 5.5% of the detainees were white, compared with 31.7% of the population. Of the 68 people who Chicago police claim had access to counsel at Homan Square, however, 45% were black, 26% were Hispanic and another 26% were white.
  • Twenty-two people have told the Guardian that Chicago police kept them at Homan Square for hours and even days. They describe pressure from officers to become informants, and all but two – both white – have said the police denied them phone calls to alert relatives or attorneys of their whereabouts. Their accounts point to violations of police directives, which say police must “complete the booking process” regardless of their interest in interrogating a suspect and must also “allow the arrestee to make a reasonable number of telephone calls to an attorney, family member or friend”, usually within “the first hour” of detention. The most recent disclosure of Homan Square data provides the scale behind those accounts: the demographic trends within the 7,185 disclosed arrests at the warehouse are now far more vast than what the Guardian reported in August after launching the transparency lawsuit – but are consistently disproportionate in terms of race and constitutional access to legal counsel. 82.2% of people detained at Homan Square were black, compared with 32.9% of the Chicago population.
  • Despite the lack of booking and minimal attorney access at Homan Square, it is not a facility for detaining and interrogating the most violent of Chicago’s criminals. Drug possession charges were eventually levied in 5,386 of the disclosed Homan Square arrests, or 74.9%; heroin accounted for 35.4% of those, with marijuana next at 22.3%. The facility’s use by police has intensified in recent years. Nearly 65% of documented Homan Square arrests since August 2004 took place in the five years since Rahm Emanuel, formerly Barack Obama’s top aide, became mayor. (The Guardian has filed a Foia request with Emanuel’s office to disclose the extent of its involvement in Homan Square.) The 68 documented attorney visits are actually slightly higher, statistically speaking, than the extremely minimal legal access Chicago police provide suspects in custody during the initial stages of their arrest. The 2014 citywide total at declared police stations, according to First Defense Legal Aid, was 0.3%. On face value, the lawyer visit rate at Homan Square, according to the newly disclosed documents, was 0.9% over nearly 11 years.
  • Chicago attorneys say they are not routinely turned away from police precinct houses, as they are at Homan Square. The warehouse is also unique in not generating public records of someone’s detention there, permitting police to effectively hide detainees from their attorneys. “Try finding a phone number for Homan to see if anyone’s there. You can’t, ever,” said Gaeger. “If you’re laboring under the assumption that your client’s at Homan, there really isn’t much you can do as a lawyer. You’re shut out. It’s guarded like a military installation.”
  • “Often,” Futterman continued, “prisoners aren’t entered into the central booking system until they’re being processed – which doesn’t occur at Homan Square. They’re supposed to begin that processing right away, under CPD procedures, and at Homan Square the reality is, that isn’t happening or is happening sporadically and inconsistently, which leads to the whole find-your-client game.”
  • According to police, when they took a woman the Guardian will identify as Chevoughn to Homan Square in May 2007 regarding a theft, they allowed her attorney to see her. Chevoughn says that never happened. “I was there a very long time, maybe eight to 10 hours,” said Chevoughn, who remembered being “petrified”, particularly as police questioned her in what she calls a “cage”. “I went to Harrison and Kedzie,” Chevoughn said, referring to the cross streets of central booking. “That’s where I slept. It’s where they did fingerprinting, all that crap. That’s when my attorney came.”
  • Police arrested another man, whom the Guardian will call Anthony, in 2006 on charges of starting a garbage fire, and moved him to Homan Square. Police identified him as receiving an attorney there. But Anthony told the Guardian: “That’s not true.”
  • Paul Merrell on 20 Oct 15
     
    It's good to see The Guardian following through on this story.
Gary Edwards

$29,000,000,000,000: A Detailed Look at the Fed's Bailout by Funding Facility and Recip... - 0 views

ideas.repec.org/...wp_698.html

Liberty-Tryanny Liberty Banksters Federal-Reserve-Bankster-Cartel banksters

shared by Gary Edwards on 16 Dec 11 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 16 Dec 11
     
    Stunning stuff.  No need to bailout the European Banks because the Federal Reserve has already done that!!! The Levi Institute of Economics has published the details of the Federal Reserve's International Bankster bailout from late 2007 to 2009.  It's far more than the $16.2 Trillion the GAO audit uncovered in July of 2010.  It's far more than the $7.77 Trillion Bloomberg discovered in their Freedom of Information action against the Federal Reserve.  Researching the "recipients" of the USA Federal reserve Bankster largess, the Levi Institute documents a whopping $29 Trillion has been distributed to Bankster coffers at near zero percent interest.   Note that no debt, and no loans of any kind has been purchased, retired, restructured or otherwise dealt with.  The bad loans remain on the books, including crushing interest payments that continue to escalate and accrue.  Debtors continue to fall deeper into debt.  Foreclosure and default loom over public, private and sovereign debtors.  So where did the money go?  $29 Trill is more than enough to retire the entire USA national debt, with interest, and, every mortgage both public and private in the USA. abstract: There have been a number of estimates of the total amount of funding provided by the Federal Reserve to bail out the financial system. For example, Bloomberg recently claimed that the cumulative commitment by the Fed (this includes asset purchases plus lending) was $7.77 trillion. As part of the Ford Foundation project "A Research and Policy Dialogue Project on Improving Governance of the Government Safety Net in Financial Crisis," Nicola Matthews and James Felkerson have undertaken an examination of the data on the Fed's bailout of the financial system-the most comprehensive investigation of the raw data to date. This working paper is the first in a series that will report the results of this investigation. The extraordinary scope and magnitude of the recent financial crisis of 2007-09 required an
Gary Edwards

Peter Beinart: How Ron Paul Will Change the GOP in 2012 - The Daily Beast - 2 views

www.thedailybeast.com/...ll-change-the-gop-in-2012.html

Banksters Ron-Paul Libertarians Peter-Beinart

shared by Gary Edwards on 30 Dec 11 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 30 Dec 11
     
    Not a big Peter Beinhart fan, but this article explains a large part of the Ron Paul phenom. After a life time as a big C Goldwater-Reagan Constitutional Conservative, this summer i made a full transition to big C Constitutional Libertarian. The tipping point for me was the GAO audit of the Federal Reserve, where they discovered $16.1 Trillion of taxpayer dollars missing from the Federal Reserve Bankster Cartel management books. It went to a who's who of international Bankster Cartel members. None of the taxpayer funded "financial collapse of 2008" bailout dollars went to the purposes chartered by their legislation. That includees the TARP $850 Billion, the Obama Stimulous $1 Trillion, and the mega FRBC $16.1 Trillion. No bad debts were purchased and retired. No rotting mortgage securities were swept up and restructured. No shovel ready jobs either. And no one in government or banksterism having caused the financial collapse went to jail. Instead, the perps feasted on the bailout dollars. The debt remains on the books of international Banksters, collecting interest, thirsting for foreclosure. The Bankster Cartel members are flush with cash, but not lending. By law (The Federal Reserve Act of December 23rd, 1913), FRBC members must keep a significant amount of their assets on "reserve" at the Federal Reserve, at 6% interest. In exchange for managing this process and the exploding money supply, the taxpayers of the USA are obligated by law to pay the FRBC 1% per year of (assets under management" (the money supply). Take note: the FRBC takes the 1% per year payment for their services in the form of GOLD!! They will not take payment in the form of paper notes labeled legal tender "Federal Reserve Notes". They only take GOLD. My transition to Constitutional Libertarian begins with a strct reading of the Constitution (the How), the Declaration of Independence, (the Why), and belief in the Rule of Law, not man. The concept of achievi
Gary Edwards

The Project To Restore America - 0 views

www.theprojecttorestoreamerica.com

Federal-Reserve-Bankster-Cartel

shared by Gary Edwards on 18 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • One hundred years ago this month, on December 23, 1913, the Congress passed the Federal Reserve Act, establishing a national central-banking system in the United States. The governing board of the Federal Reserve was organized on August 12, 1914, and the Federal Reserve banks opened for operation on November 16, 1914.   On the surface, the preamble to the Act, which summarized the purpose of the new government-created institution, seemed fairly innocuous:   “An Act to provide for the establishment of Federal reserve banks, to furnish an elastic currency, to afford means of rediscounting commercial paper, to establish a more effective supervision of banking in the United States, and for other purposes.”
  • The Powers of the Federal Reserve   But what this meant was the start of the monopolization of monetary matters in the hands of a single politically appointed authority within the boundaries of the United States.   Those innocuously sounding functions listed in the Act’s preamble, however, gave the Federal Reserve the power to:   (a) Control the quantity of money and credit supplied in the United States.   (b) Influence the value, or purchasing power, of the monetary unit that is used by the citizenry of the country in all their transactions.   (c) Indirectly manipulate the rates of interest at which borrowers and lenders transfer savings for investment and other purposes, including the funding of government budget deficits.
  • A Century of Central Bank Mismanagement   The 100-year record of the Federal Reserve has been a roller coaster of inflations and recessions, including the disaster of the Great Depression of the 1930s, the “excessive exuberance” of the late 1990s that resulted in the “Dot.Com” bubble that burst in the early 2000s, and the recent boom-bust cycle of the last decade from which the U.S. economy is still slowly recovering.   The crucial and fundamental problem with the power and authority of the Federal Reserve is that it represents monetary central planning. In a world that has, for the most part, turned its back on the theoretical error and practical disaster of believing that governments have the wisdom and ability to centrally plan the economic affairs of a society, central banking remains one of the major remaining forms of socialism practiced around the globe.   Government control and planning of the monetary system has resulted in extensive political power over virtually every aspect of our economic life. In 1942 Gustav Stolper, a German free-market economist then in exile in America from war-torn Europe, published a book titled “This Age of Fables.” He pointed out:
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  • “Hardly ever do the advocates of free capitalism realize how utterly their ideal was frustrated at the moment the state assumed control of the monetary system . . . A ‘free’ capitalism with government responsibility for money and credit has lost its innocence. From that point on it is no longer a matter of principle but one of expediency how far one wishes or permits government interference to go. Money control is the supreme and most comprehensive of all governmental controls short of expropriation.”
  • Gary Edwards on 18 Dec 13
     
    Interesting two part summary of the Federal Reserve that emphasis' the essential relationship between central banking and socialism.  The author, Richard Ebeling, goes as far as to say that not only is central banking essential to socialism but also that free market - individual liberty capitalism cannot coexist with central banking. IIRC, there is a clause int he Federal Reserve Act of 1913 where the US Treasury can purchase back control of the money supply at a cost of $144 Million dollars.  Not sure where I read that, but the cancellation of near two thirds of the interest due on our national debt would work wonders for the dollar.
Gary Edwards

911: Lloyds of London Insurance brokers have sued Citigroup-AMEC et al. in respect of t... - 1 views

www.godlikeproductions.com/...pg1

9_11 911-Conspiracy-facts Lloyd's-of-London 911-Insurance-Fraud

shared by Gary Edwards on 22 Sep 11 - No Cached
  • We allege the Citigroup-AMEC partners sabotaged the diesel generators to feed fires lit by arsonists on the 11th, 12th or 13th floors of WTC7 where the Securities & Exchange Commission lost between 3,000 to 4,000 files. The SEC files contained evidence of insider trading by Citigroup-AMEC investment bank partners in the shares of initial public offerings during the high-tech boom. The House Financial Services Committee was seeking information about the treatment Citigroup's Salmon Smith Barney investing banking division may have given WorldCom executives. Salomon had offices in 7 World Trade Center and Citigroup says back-up tapes of corporate emails from September 1998 through December 2000 were stored at the building and destroyed in 9/11. Citigroup subsequently paid $2.65 billion to the settlement class which purchased WorldCom securities during the period from April 1999 through June 2002. www.thestreet.com/markets...36925.html www.citigroup.com/citigro...40510a.htm
  • At 5:20 p.m. on 9/11, 7 World Trade Center collapsed in its own footprint at a speed slightly slower than free fall under gravity in a manner consistent with a controlled demolition. Molten steel and partially evaporated steel members were found in the debris pile of WTC #1, 2 and 7. The thermal signature of 32 hot spots, 5 days and 10 days after the collapse, is consistent with all the buildings being rigged for demolition with an incendiary such as thermite.
  • We allege that the Citigroup-AMEC partnership now conspired to remove and destroy evidence of arson before filing bogus property insurance claims in an arrangement with Larry Silverstein and Silverstein Properties, including a claim for a double payment for the destruction of the Twin Towers. "Griffin quotes court documents to the effect that Silverstein had only $14 million invested in the insurance deal for the Twin Towers (compared to 50 times as much by his [off-book] lenders) through limited liability investment vehicles."
  • Gary Edwards on 22 Sep 11
     
    Incredible.  In 2006 Lloyd's of London sued a group comprised of Citigroup, AMEC and GMAC for a "concealed demolition" conspiracy resulting in insurance fraud.  This is complicated, but the key assertion is that World Trade Center building #1, #2, and #7 were rigged for demolition prior to the 9/11/01 attack.  The claim also alleges the involvement of Larry Silverstein, who had purchased these buildings a few months prior to the 9/11 attack, and made the subsequent and fraudulent insurance claim. Based on the Lloyd's of London report: "9/11 - A Citigroup-AMEC insurance fraud on Lloyd's of London?" .. by David Hawkins, Foundation Scholar, Cambridge University, Founder of the Citizen's Association of Forensic Economists at Hawks' CAFE .
Gary Edwards

The Money Wars - Casey Research - 0 views

www.caseyresearch.com/...money-wars

money GOLD BitCoin

shared by Gary Edwards on 25 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 25 Apr 13
     
    Breezy but very enlightening libertarian discussion about money, how it came to be and where it's going.  Excellent writing and research from the Casey Group - as usual. excerpt: The study of money is an ancient affair. Aristotle discusses it extensively, and the Books of Wisdom are filled with proverbial counsel on the matter. People spend time and effort accumulating money in hopes of establishing conditions for a better future. Because humans can paradoxically harbor laziness and ambition in their heart at the same time, they have reached two irrefutable and rather obvious conclusions about money: they would rather have more than less, and they would rather have it sooner than later. Because of these observations, humans go about three tasks: obtaining money, protecting money, and growing money. Before seeking to achieve those three objectives, it is important to define money. It is impossible to consistently do all three tasks if one does not understand the nature of money. An academic definition that sounds reasonable is that money is an agreed-upon medium of exchange that overcomes the limitations of barter and coincidence of wants. For money to be useful, it must be widely recognized and accepted by various market participants. Wide acceptance is among the most considered and sought characteristics of money, a trait known as liquidity. Until recently, money was either established by market discovery or by decree. The Laws of the Network have introduced a third mechanism, money established by network consensus. Honest Weights and Measures Gold has served as money since the beginning of recorded human history. Desired for its beauty and scarcity, gold is easy to divide and difficult to counterfeit. While many other commodities including tobacco, salt, pepper, and even sea shells have been used for settling accounts, natural discovery and social interaction have repeatedly established gold as a medium of choice, leading to the phrases "good as gold" and "the
Gary Edwards

End the Fed! Congress Debates the Federal Reserve: Reform or Abolish? - 0 views

www.thenewamerican.com/...eral-reserve-reform-or-abolish

Federal-Reserve-Bankster-Cartel Ron-Paul Libertarian

shared by Gary Edwards on 09 May 12 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 09 May 12
     
    synopsis: Tuesday May 8th, 2012 - Dr. Ron Paul Chaired the Congressional subcommittee holding the first hearings on the Federal Reserve Bankster Cartel.  Dr. Paul has become famous around the world for his tireless efforts to audit, expose, and abolish the central bank. Even making that effort the centerpiece of his "Restore the Constitution - Take Back America" run for the presidency.  He published a best-selling book in 2009 entitled "End the Fed", a title that has become a rallying cry for millions of Americans angry about the institution's multi-trillion-dollar bailouts, market manipulations, corruption, and debasement of the currency. The subcommittee hearing, entitled "The Federal Reserve System: Mend It or End It?", examined a range of different proposals to reform the nation's monetary system - it was supposed to look at six different options emanating from both parties. One of the measures on the agenda was Congressman Paul's own "Federal Reserve Board Abolition Act," legislation to dismantle the central bank and restore sound money based on market principles. "More and more people are beginning to understand just how destructive the Federal Reserve's monetary policy has been. I hope that this hearing will kick start a serious discussion on the need to rein in the Fed," Chairman Paul said in a statement about the event. "A hundred years is far too long for Congress to have taken a hands-off approach. The Fed continues to reward Wall Street banks while destroying the dollar's purchasing power and driving up the cost of living for average Americans. This reckless behavior must come to an end."
Gary Edwards

Housing Boom and Bust - Thomas Sowell - National Review Online - 0 views

www.nationalreview.com/...thomas-sowell

shared by Gary Edwards on 24 Mar 12 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 24 Mar 12
     
    A classic dissection of the financial collapse of 2008.  Genius! excerpt: EDITOR'S NOTE: The following is adapted from Thomas Sowell's new book, The Housing Boom and Bust. Let us go back to square one to consider the empirical consequences of policies in the housing market. Politicians in Washington set out to solve a national problem that did not exist - a nationwide shortage of "affordable housing" - and have now left us with a problem whose existence is as undeniable as it is painful. When the political crusade for affordable housing took off and built up steam during the 1990s, the share of their incomes that Americans were spending on housing in 1998 was 17 percent, compared to 30 percent in the early 1980s. Even during the housing boom of 2005, the median home took just 22 percent of the median American income. What created the illusion of a nationwide problem was that, in particular localities around the country, housing prices had skyrocketed to the point where people had to pay half their income to buy a modest-sized home and often resorted to very risky ways of financing the purchase. In Tucson, for example, "roughly 60% of first-time home buyers make no down payment and instead now use 100% financing to get into the market," according to the Wall Street Journal. Almost invariably, these locally extreme housing prices have been a result of local political crusades in the name of locally attractive slogans about the environment, open space, "smart growth," or whatever other phrases had political resonance at the particular time and place.
Gary Edwards

Obama Changed His Name in Canada? - YouTube - 1 views

www.youtube.com/watch

Birther Obama-birther Stephen-Pidgeon YouTube

shared by Gary Edwards on 02 Jul 12 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 02 Jul 12
     
    Unbelievable!  Interview with attorney Stephen Pidgeon. Attorney Pidgeon claims he found a record for a name change from "Barak Mounir Ubayd" to "Barack Hussein Obama" on October 14th, 1982 in Skookumchuck, British Columbia. Also argues that Obama's real father is Malcolm X, and that Obama did not attend Columbia University.  Instead, Obama spent those years in Moscow at the Patrice Mumbumba School of Marxism.  And yes, Atty Pidgeon backs up his claims with some very interesting evidence.  Attorney Pidgeon also discusses his new book titled "The Obama Error" which can be purchased here. The interview aired 6/3/2011 on TruNews Radio. - http://obamareleaseyourrecords.blogspot.com/2011/06/attorney-stephen-pidgeon-...
Paul Merrell

WASHINGTON: Americans' personal data shared with CIA, IRS, others in security probe | N... - 0 views

www.mcclatchydc.com/...cans-personal-data-shared.html

surveillance state 1st Amendment Privacy-Act book-purchases

shared by Paul Merrell on 17 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • WASHINGTON — U.S. agencies collected and shared the personal information of thousands of Americans in an attempt to root out untrustworthy federal workers that ended up scrutinizing people who had no direct ties to the U.S. government and simply had purchased certain books.Federal officials gathered the information from the customer records of two men who were under criminal investigation for purportedly teaching people how to pass lie detector tests. The officials then distributed a list of 4,904 people – along with many of their Social Security numbers, addresses and professions – to nearly 30 federal agencies, including the Internal Revenue Service, the CIA, the National Security Agency and the Food and Drug Administration.
  • The unprecedented creation of such a list and decision to disseminate it widely demonstrate the ease with which the federal government can collect and share Americans’ personal information, even when there’s no clear reason for doing so. The case comes to light amid revelations that the NSA, in an effort to track foreign terrorists, has for years been stockpiling the data of the daily telephone and Internet communications of tens of millions of ordinary Americans. Though nowhere near as massive as the NSA programs, the polygraph inquiry is another example of the federal government’s vast appetite for Americans’ personal information and the sweeping legal authority it wields in the name of national security. “This is increasingly happening – data is being collected by the federal government for one use and then being entirely repurposed for other uses and shared,” said Fred Cate, an Indiana University-Bloomington law professor who specializes in information privacy and national security. “Yet there is no constitutional protection for sharing data within the government.”
  • While the collection of the information likely passes constitutional muster, the federal agencies involved may have violated their own privacy policies by sharing the personal information of people who aren’t government employees, several legal experts agreed.
  • Paul Merrell on 17 Nov 13
     
    The inter-agency sharing of information described in this article sounds like a straightforward violation of several different sections of the federal Privacy Act. That Act places severe restrictions on inter-agency sharing of information that includes personal identifiers of members of the public, including the requirement of notifying the victims when a violation is discovered. The Act also provides a private right of action for anyone whose rights under the Act are violated with a statutory minimum damages award of $1,500 plus attorney fees and expenses of litigation.   
Paul Merrell

Is someone pinching pennies at Guantánamo prison? | Miami Herald - 0 views

www.miamiherald.com/...article38223438.html

war & peace GITMO-detainees mistreatment

shared by Paul Merrell on 10 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • Could the people at the Most Expensive Prison on Earth be pinching pennies?
  • Attorneys for the last 114 captives at the U.S. Navy base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, say they have been increasingly providing their clients with everything from T-shirts and socks and shoes to shampoo and vitamins to fill a long-term, unexplained need at the war on terror prison.Lawyers who have visited the prison as recently as this month say the captives’ U.S. military issue uniforms are faded, torn or tattered and their shoes have holes. In other instances, detainees tell their lawyers, personal hygiene supplies are cheap and simply don’t do the job. A case-in-point: When attorney Ramzi Kassem met detainee Shaker Aamer to share the news that the long-held Saudi prisoner was approved for transfer to Britain after Oct. 24, the captive was brought to their meeting in prison-issue canvas shoes held together by duct tape.
  • “Stuff’s just not getting replaced,” said attorney George Clarke who in late September spent about $300 on slip-on canvas shoes, plastic sandals, T-shirts and towels for his two detainee clients — both approved for repatriation, if the political situation improves in Yemen. “They say the stuff they get is crap. Or they’re not getting it.”Recently, he said, the detention center staff has been more accepting of contributions from the attorneys, suggesting prison commanders are confronted with a cash crunch or have realized they can pass along costs of basics to the private sector.
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  • At the prison, a spokesman declined to say whether the raggedy clothing reflected a new policy or budget cutbacks but dismissed a question on whether there was a supply issue. Detainee provisions “have not changed,” Navy Capt. Christopher Scholl said tersely by email. The prison would not provide a list of what constitutes basic issue prisoner provisions these days. Nor would Scholl address a question about whether the quality of prison-issue items had degraded.
  • The International Committee of the Red Cross would not say whether delegates have raised the issue in confidential talks with the prison commander. The Miami Herald spoke, separately, with 12 attorneys who have met captives in recent months and describe detainees showing up at legal meetings looking disheveled and needing replacement footwear or clothes. The attorneys say the appearance is noteworthy because through the years all but mentally ill captives have tried to tidy up for their legal meetings.“They’re looking pretty threadbare,” attorney Cori Crider of the nonprofit Reprieve legal defense group said from the U.S. Navy base Tuesday after she bought shampoo and socks for one prisoner. “It’s an escalating complaint that people are being left in rags.”The lawyers quote their clients as saying some supplies have disappeared entirely at the prison, which boasts Muslim sensitivity and humane treatment. Some just aren’t replaced frequently enough, they claim.
  • Into this vacuum attorneys who represent the detainees at no charge have for about nine months routinely spent hundreds of dollars on each trip to buy their clients basic provisions at the base commissary, the Navy Exchange, or NEX.In March, Chicago attorney Patricia Bronte, a solo practitioner, spent $136.25 on shoes and Gold Toe socks for her two Yemeni clients. She left them with a prison lawyer, who got them to the clients after she left the base — something she knows because she got thank-you notes via the prison’s legal mail system.
  • “I have noticed that sometimes the client appears at the meetings with shoes that look pretty beaten up. So I went to the NEX and I bought shoes and socks.” Also $6.12 in toothbrushes and toothpaste, according to her commissary receipt.“Understand, I’m not complaining. I don’t mind buying my clients shoes to improve their conditions,” she said. “It’s the gall of this country. To detain these guys for little or no reason for 14 years and not provide them with shoes is offensive.”
  • Prison officials had already stopped spending taxpayers’ money on books, videos and electronic games for the detainee diversion program, according to media visits in the past year, leaving it to the Red Cross and lawyers to donate to the Detainee Library. Kassem, the attorney, said his clients quoted guards and other prison staff as blaming budget cuts at the prison where the Pentagon maintains a 2,000-plus staff for 114 captives and has spent more than $5 billion. “Sometimes it’s a problem of poor toiletries — soap that doesn’t lather, toothpaste that doesn’t froth, deodorant that doesn’t prevent body odor,” said Kassem, a professor at the City University of New York School of Law whose legal clinic represents five Guantánamo detainees. Captives he sees in the prison’s iconic orange prison uniform are wearing old, torn and much less orange jumpsuits, he said.The prisoners are perplexed, Kassem said. “They’ve heard how much it costs per prisoner. They wonder, where’s all the money?”“Somebody’s pinching pennies, it seems,” he said, describing the prison-issue footwear on Aamer, the next detainee to be released, as “Oliver Twist tattered” despite repeated pleas for a replacement pair.
  • Over at the secret prison for former long-held CIA captives, Camp 7, the detainees are taking vitamin D furnished by defense attorneys Cheryl Bormann and Air Force Capt. Michael Schwartz.Walid bin Attash spent years without exposure to sunlight in a so-called CIA black site before he got to Camp 7 in 2006. Now, he’s told his lawyers, his medical record shows a severe vitamin D deficiency. He asked his defense team for a halal version of the supplement, which the prison doesn’t provide. One attorney, who asked not to be identified, quoted a prison medical officer as telling detainees “there’s no money for that.”So bin Attash’s lawyers ordered kosher vitamin D — no forbidden products in those gel caps — and gave it to the military staff attorney assigned to Camp 7. The prison’s medical officer has apparently doled them out to other former CIA black site captives because bin Attash needs a resupply sooner than a one-a-day distribution would require, Bormann said.“We’ve been having to purchase vitamin D for our client,” said Bormann, a criminal defense attorney with death-penalty experience. “It’s crazy.” At a civilian prison, she said, the lawyers wouldn’t have to buy and furnish it. They’d go to a federal or state judge, who would order the prison to provide it.
  • Lists of purchases provided by more than a dozen attorneys include toothbrushes, toothpaste, bar soap, shampoo, deodorant, slip-on sandals that double as slippers, white socks, white T-shirts, towels, no-lace sneakers, canvas slip-on shoes, pillows, books, individual DVD players, video games and audio tapes. Those reached the clients after a guard inspection — as did tahini, ginger, allspice, mint oil, mint tea, ginger tea, Nesquik, olive oil, ground cloves, henna and almonds, around Ramadan. Lawyers also said they have submitted other items that were rejected — notably black socks, hairbrushes, combs and aftershave (probably for its taboo alcohol content).
Gary Edwards

Disaster Averted? Not! The Back Story on the Debt Limit | Experts' Corner | Big Think - 0 views

bigthink.com/39713

Banksters Chicomms China-USA-debt Autry-Navarro Death-by-China

shared by Gary Edwards on 12 Aug 11 - No Cached
  • You see, it is an extremely important but little known fact that China's currency peg -- the #1 trade cheat the Dragon uses to vacuum jobs out of the USA -- actually compels them to loan us money no matter how loudly they insist that that they have a choice of investments. It works like this: American's proclivity to take both the wages from our Democratic stimulus job and the checks from our Republican tax refunds down to Wal-Mart for another cart full of Chinese products, not only creates more jobs in Guangzhou than it does Milwaukee but also leaves China bursting with US dollars. The Chinese government then soaks up a lot of those bucks from companies like Huawei by selling short term, high yield bonds that pay back in Yuan. They then march those dollars right back to the US treasury. In fact, they pay MORE to get the dollars out of private hands in China than they earn on the increasingly risky bet they are making in US debt! At this point you should be thinking, "WTF?"
  • If China's firms were allowed to trade their dollars for Chinese Yuan on the foreign exchanges, the dollar would fall against the Yuan and undermine China's unfair 40% advantage against every American (and European and Asian) product. If they trade those bucks for some other currency, like the Euro, the dollar is still being sold and it still falls, plus China's growth draws a them right back in searching to buy Yuan, which would then rise. If China purchases products or commodities on the open markets, those dollars would still be exchanged, the greenback would drop to competitive levels, the Yuan would rise to its real purchasing power and Americans would go back to work making things.
  • Wishing to avoid that horror of horrors at all costs, the Boys from Beijing must hold their noses and throw another billion good dollars after bad into the pit of the US treasury.
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  • Like Frodo's ring of power, the dollar can only be destroyed where it was created.
  • So when the President and the Congress reluctantly shake hands over this deal to avert disaster, understand that they have in great part only agreed to fuel the fire that has been burning down America's jobs factory for years, and thereby undermining government revenues and creating the apparent need for constant stimulus. 
  • So far, borrowing is the only way these folks of wee little imagination can see to sustain both the President's exorbitant level of spending and the Republican's stubborn pledge against tax increases.
  • The obvious solutions eludes them, which is either to stop borrowing from communist criminals and borrow at higher interest rates from Americans, or slap a significant tariff on China until they drop their currency peg and illegal trade barriers
  • The last decade of ultra low-interest rates, government stimulus efforts, and engagement with Communist China have clearly been an unmitigated disaster for the US economy.
  • Is anyone in DC listening?
  • Gary Edwards on 12 Aug 11
     
    Excellent article written by Peter Navarro and Greg Autry, authors of "Death by China: Confronting the Dragon -- A Global Call to Action". The authors explain why China MUST continue to buy US Treasuries regardless of the low rate of return and extremely high risk of default or ravage by inflation through the destruction of the dollar.  Very interesting.  But the game China is playing really looks unsustainable. The one thing the authors don't touch is the role International Banksters and their New World Corporations have played in this assault on American propserity.  I guess i have to get the book!   One last point; having worked for a Chinese Corporation desiring to enter the USA-European information technology markets, i don't doubt for a moment that Autry and Navarro have this exactly right.  We are at war, with Chicomms providing the shock troops for this latest Bankster - Bankster Corp assault on our liberty.
Gary Edwards

GDP Is..... Better Than Expected? - Or Filled With Outright Lies? The Market Ticker - 0 views

market-ticker.denninger.net/.......-Better-Than-Expected.html

obam-socialism marxism financial-crisis banksters

shared by Gary Edwards on 29 Oct 09 - Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 29 Oct 09
     
    Whoa!  Incredible fact filled analysis of the pre election GDP numbers released by Obama. excerpt:  Disposable personal income decreased in nominal terms q/o/q by 5.9% while in real terms (inflation adjusted) it decreased q/o/q by 7.4%!  That is an enormous swing in purchasing power and not in the right direction! Personal outlays increased $148.2 billion (5.8 percent) in the third quarter, compared with an increase of $8.2 billion (0.3 percent) in the second. Personal saving -- disposable personal income less personal outlays -- was $364.6 billion in the third quarter, compared with $533.1 billion in the second. The personal saving rate -- saving as a percentage of disposable personal income -- was 3.3 percent in the third quarter, compared with 4.9 percent in the second. So into decreasing personal income and disposable personal income people tried to spend anyway.  Best guess: most of this was "cash for clunkers", which is the worst sort of "spending" - it is the taking on of more debt by replacing a paid-off car with one that now comes with a shiny (and nasty) payment book.  The Trade: Go long auto repo outfits (aside: as far as I know there are no publicly-traded repo companies.) Nothing in here I like; to the contrary, this report sucks and on a drill-down appears to be full of outright lies.
Paul Merrell

Edward Snowden asks for asylum in Ecuador: live updates | World news | guardian.co.uk - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...n-leaves-hong-kong-moscow-live

surveillance state NSA Snowden asylum Ecuador

shared by Paul Merrell on 23 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • The NSA whistleblower left Hong Kong on an Aeroflot flight to Moscow, two days after the US charged him with espionage, before applying for asylum in Ecuador
  • WikiLeaks has released a statement claiming that Snowden is "bound for Ecuador" and is awaiting the processing of his application for asylum:  Mr Edward Snowden, the American whistleblower who exposed evidence of a global surveillance regime conducted by US and UK intelligence agencies, has left Hong Kong legally. He is bound for the Republic of Ecuador via a safe route for the purposes of asylum, and is being escorted by diplomats and legal advisors from WikiLeaks. Mr Snowden requested that WikiLeaks use its legal expertise and experience to secure his safety. Once Mr Snowden arrives in Ecuador his request will be formally processed. Former Spanish Judge Mr Baltasar Garzon, legal director of Wikileaks and lawyer for Julian Assange has made the following statement: "The WikiLeaks legal team and I are interested in preserving Mr Snowden’s rights and protecting him as a person. What is being done to Mr Snowden and to Mr Julian Assange - for making or facilitating disclosures in the public interest - is an assault against the people".
  • It’s past midnight in Hong Kong and late evening in Moscow, so time for a summary of the events so far on a day of extraordinary drama: • Edward Snowden, the NSA contractor whose revelations to the Guardian about the scale and scope of US spying and hacking activities has prompted global headlines, has fled Hong Kong and is now in Moscow. • His plane arrived in Russia shortly after 5pm local time. Snowden is not believed to have a Russian visa and is thought to be staying overnight at a capsule hotel inside Moscow's Sheremetyevo airport after reportedly being met on the tarmac by diplomatic cars.
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  • • Snowden was allowed to leave despite the US having filed a request for Hong Kong to arrest him. Hong Kong’s government said the documents sent by Washington did not fully meet legal requirements, the statement added, so Snowden was allowed to leave. It has since been reported that the US revoked Snowden’s passport on Saturday. It is not clear how he was allowed to leave Hong Kong if this happened. • Snowden is reportedly booked on a flight on Monday from Moscow to Havana, after which he is believed to be heading for another Latin American destination, reported variously as Venezuela or Ecuador. • The Ecuadorean ambassador to Russia is at the airport but said he had not met Snowden and was not entirely sure where he is.  • WikiLeaks has claimed in tweets it "assisted Mr Snowden's political asylum in a democratic country" and that its "legal advisers" are with him, including Sarah Harrison, a WikiLeaks staffer.
  • • There has been an angry reaction in the US to news of Snowden’s departure. Keith Alexander, head of the NSA, called Snowden “an individual who is not acting, in my opinion, with noble intent". • Snowden's departure came on the same day the South China Morning Post carried detailed reports of claims from him about US actions against China, including allegations of the hacking of phone text messages. China has said it is “gravely concerned” about the revelations. The country’s Xinhua news agency called the US “the biggest villain in our age" when it comes to hacking.
  • Paul Merrell on 23 Jun 13
     
    My favorite part so far, NSA head Gen. Keith Alexander called Snowden "an individual who is not acting, in my opinion, with noble intent". Let's consider for a moment that as a U.S. Army officer, Gen. Alexander, initially and upon each promotion, was required to "solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic, that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservations or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office upon which I am about to enter; So help me God."  http://www.army.mil/values/officers.html So what part of "support and defend the Constitution of the United States" is it that he didn't catch? U.S. military officers are required by law to disobey illegal commands. Can this man seriously believe that his mission does not violate the U.S. Constitution?  The Fourth and Fifth Amendments were direct reactions to the British Army's practice of invading Colonist's homes at will. destroying their privacy and seizing anything in sight including its residents, their papers, their personal effects, and their property without judicial warrant or due process and just compensation. But that is just what Gen. Alexander assists in. He is a usurper of our Constitution. But let's compare the courage of Edward Snowden and Keith Alexander: "Common experience shows how much rarer is moral courage than physical bravery.  A thousand men will march to the mouth of the cannon where one man will dare espouse an unpopular cause." - Clarence Darrow   "Few are willing to brave the disapproval of their fellows, the censure of the colleagues, the wrath of their society. Moral courage is a rarer commodity than bravery in battle or great intelligence. Yet it is the one essential, vital quality for those who seek to change a world that yields most painfully to change." -
Paul Merrell

The U.S. Has REPEATEDLY Defaulted | Washington's Blog - 2 views

www.washingtonsblog.com/...-has-repeatedly-defaulted.html

U.S. economy government-debt debt-default debt-battle

shared by Paul Merrell on 14 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • It’s a Myth that the U.S. Has Never Defaulted On Its Debt Some people argue that countries can’t default.  But that’s false. It is widely stated that the U.S. government has never defaulted.  However, that is also a myth.
  • Gary Edwards on 16 Oct 13
     
    Excellent article Paul! But it left me in tears. The bastardos are destroying the currency. Quick Count of The U.S. defaulting on its debt obligations: ... Continental Currency in 1779 ... Domestic debt between 1782 through 1790 ... Greenbacks in 1862 ... Liberty Bonds in 1934 ... 1933 Dollar to GOLD devaluation (1/35 th per ounce) ... 1971 Nixon ends GOLD backing of dollar, violating the terms of the Bretton Woods Agreement ... 1979 Treasury defaults, refusing to redeem maturing treasury bonds The only thing keeping the American Economy going is the massive rush to convert the fiat currency the Federal Reserve is churning out into hard assets; like land and corporate stock. In 2008 the Federal Reserve Bankster Cartel pumped $29 Trillion into the world banking system. They continue to pump $85 Billion per month into Bankster financial markets, buying up bad mortgage paper and backstopping the many insured derivatives scams now unwinding. The Banksters were bust in 2008, but are now flush with more dollars than anyone knows what to do with. Instead of "loaning" this money out, and investing in traditional business productivity, they use the freshly minted dollars to purchase hard assets. Business loans would provide profit based on interest - a gambit that requires confidence in the value of the dollar since the dollar is the measure of the economic reward. The purchase of hard assets is different. The "value" is not in the profitability of the investment, as measured in fiat currency. The value is in hard asset and any future economic power that asset holds through the expected currency crash. The only mystery here is that of military might. How do the banksters and global elites protect their assets in the future collapse they have made certain? Oh wait - private security companies capable of waging war. It's no accident that the early geopolitical energy wars of the 21st century saw a massive buildup of private corporate military and i
Gary Edwards

Professor Hoppe's new book: "The Competition of Crooks") | The God That Failed - 0 views

thegodthatfailed.org/...uner-the-competition-of-crooks

Hans-Hermann-Hoppe Libertarian Democracy

shared by Gary Edwards on 29 Dec 12 - No Cached
  • And perhaps then, finally, will come the realization that democracy – in whose name all these dirty tricks have been done – is nothing more than an especially insidious form of communism, and that the politicians who have wrought this immoral and economic madness and who have thereby enriched themselves personally (never, of course, being liable for the damages they have caused!), are nothing more than a despicable bunch of communist crooks.
  • democracy which is causally responsible for the fatal conditions afflicting us now
  • The number of productive people is constantly decreasing, and the number of people parasitically consuming the income and wealth of this dwindling number of productive people is increasing steadily. This can’t work in the long run.
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  • That the whole democratic house of cards has not yet completely collapsed speaks volumes about the still tremendous creative power of capitalism, even in the face of ever-increasing governmental strangulation.
  • And this fact also allows us to conjecture about what economic ‘miracles’ would be possible if we had unimpeded capitalism liberated from such parasitism.
  • the correct realization becomes generally accepted that the only antagonistic conflict of interest in society is the one between tax-payers, i.e. the exploited, and tax-consumers, i.e. the exploiters.:
  • In other words, between the class of people on the one hand who earn their income and assets by producing something that is bought voluntarily and valued accordingly by others; and the class of those on the other hand who produce nothing considered to be of value, but who live instead by living off and enriching themselves from the incomes and assets of other, productive people, forcibly taken via taxation – that is to say all government employees and all recipients of government “welfare assistance”, subsidies and monopolistic privileges.
  • book’s thesis is that the government is a monopolist of ultimate justice and law enforcement and that every monopoly is always bad from the perspective of the consumer – in this case the citizen. Your alternative solution is a private law society.
  • The basic idea is quite simple. Abolish monopoly and encourage competition.
  • I can only go to a state court of law, staffed by judges who themselves are paid from taxes to enforce government regulations.
  • In this way, government-staged robbery, assault, manslaughter, murder, war is “legally” sanctioned.
  • In a private law society, if we had such a conflict, we would instead approach arbitrators who are independent of both parties, and who are competing with other arbitrators for voluntarily paying customers.
  • We would not use an inherently biased judge working for and paid directly by the state, who is therefore partisan, but rather a neutral third party, to adjudicate the normal human legal conflicts arising between existing and recognized property rights and private contract law.
  • the mediation market.
  • My income from my work is my property (not the state’s) and the restaurant is my property (not the state’s).
  • Therefore, any government-imposed tax upon me or use restrictions upon my property (such as a smoking ban) would therefore be judged unlawful, as robbery and expropriation.
  • the state is nothing but a “great band of robbers,” a mafia, only a much larger, more overwhelming and dangerous one.
  • the subject of class consciousness
  • “there’s absolutely no reason in any case why the state should have anything at all to do with the production of money.”
  • And every newly printed bill causes a redistribution of social wealth.
  • More paper money doesn’t make a society richer overall. It’s just more paper. But every new piece of printed paper reduces the purchasing power of all the other previously-existing paper bills
  • these machinations, taking place every day on an almost unimaginable scale, are nothing more than a gigantic case of fraudulent theft.
  • in a competitive environment, a better kind of money would be produced. Why? Because there’ll always be a demand for means of exchange.
  • Gary Edwards on 29 Dec 12
     
    Interview with Hoppe where he once again pushes libertarian thinking forward.  Hoppe puts most of the blame on "democracy" itself, caling it "an insidious form of communism".  Good stuff.  Highlighted parts. excerpt: "That the whole democratic house of cards has not yet completely collapsed speaks volumes about the still tremendous creative power of capitalism, even in the face of ever-increasing governmental strangulation. And this fact also allows us to conjecture about what economic 'miracles' would be possible if we had unimpeded capitalism liberated from such parasitism. If, and when, this insight finally bears fruit will depend upon the class consciousness of the population. There is a Marxist myth, eagerly promoted by the state, of an irreconcilable clash of interests between employers (capitalists) and employees (workers), or between the rich and the poor. As long as this myth prevails in public opinion, nothing at all will change and disaster is inevitable. A fundamental change can only occur if, instead of this, the correct realization becomes generally accepted that the only antagonistic conflict of interest in society is the one between tax-payers, i.e. the exploited, and tax-consumers, i.e. the exploiters.: In other words, between the class of people on the one hand who earn their income and assets by producing something that is bought voluntarily and valued accordingly by others; and the class of those on the other hand who produce nothing considered to be of value, but who live instead by living off and enriching themselves from the incomes and assets of other, productive people, forcibly taken via taxation - that is to say all government employees and all recipients of government "welfare assistance", subsidies and monopolistic privileges. Only when the producer class clearly recognises this, and publicly speaks out; when the producers are finally confident to take the moral high ground and reject the insolent admonitions from the po
Paul Merrell

US Corporations Used Personal Armies To Uproot, Terrorize Colombia - 0 views

www.mintpressnews.com/...222821

war & peace corporate-wars Columbia Coke Chiquita BP United-Fruit

shared by Paul Merrell on 07 Dec 16 - No Cached
  • Some of the numerous foreign corporations accused of serious human rights abuses in Colombia include fruit companies Dole, Del Monte, and Chiquita, agribusiness giant Cargill, and other representatives of the fossil fuel industry like Texaco (formerly Texas Petroleum Company) and Exxon Mobil. Heeding corporate orders, paramilitary groups murdered union and labor rights activists, tortured and terrorized countless indigenous and Afro-Colombian people, and devastated entire villages of subsistence farmers to make way for mining, fossil fuel extraction, or plantations that would bring massive profits to foreign corporations. The Colombian military — and, in at least one high-profile massacre, the U.S. military — sometimes lent a hand in these human rights crimes. “Every human rights person I work with in Colombia believes the peace process is a necessary precondition” to ending corporate exploitation of Colombia, Dan Kovalik, a human rights and labor rights lawyer who teaches at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, told MintPress News.
  • In court, “Chiquita admitted to paying paramilitaries and giving them 3,000 Kalashnikov rifles between 1997 and 2004,” Kovalik said. Chiquita allied with the United Auto-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), one of the country’s most violent paramilitary groups, Steven Cohen noted in a report for ThinkProgress in 2014. The AUC, a group once designated as a terrorist group by the U.S. government, is responsible for thousands of deaths in Colombia. It turns out that Chiquita had been playing both sides of the conflict. Cohen reported: “By its own account, Chiquita made at least 100 payments — $1.7 million in total — to the AUC between 1997 and 2004. In the decade prior to that, the company had maintained a similar arrangement with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the nominally leftist rebel group chased out of the region by the combined (and coordinated) efforts of the AUC and Colombian military.”
  • “There’s been some recent reports that [Chiquita’s funding of paramilitaries] may have continued until very recently through a subsidiary,” Kovalik added. While these allegations remain unproven in court, they do suggest a staggering number of victims. Multiple lawsuits were consolidated in 2011, accusing Chiquita of being involved in the killings of as many as 4,000 Colombian nationals. While the evidence is clearest in the case of Chiquita, other international banana growers are suspect as well. “According to Salvatore Mancuso, a high-ranking paramilitarian in U.S. prison, Dole and Del Monte also worked with the paramilitaries,” Kovalik said. “All the banana companies have.” Mancuso is currently serving a 15-year sentence in a federal prison and has been spoken openly about the influence that corporations like Chiquita hold in Colombia.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • The influence of banana growers in Colombia pre-dates the ongoing civil war. In 1928, the Colombian government brutally shut down a strike by United Fruit Company banana pickers under threat from the U.S. government. Some estimates put the death toll from the military action as high as 2,000, including workers, women and children. United Fruit was once one of the most powerful corporations in the world, manipulating the governments and economies of multiple Latin American countries. Chiquita was a trademark of United Fruit until 1990, when the company renamed itself Chiquita Brands International in an effort to rehabilitate its image. (Chiquita was purchased by two Brazilian companies in 2015, and is now headquartered in Switzerland.)
  • “It should be noted under the peace agreement, at least the one that went down in October, Coca-Cola was one of the companies named [that will be] subjected to further investigation for paramilitary ties,” Kovalik said. Coca-Cola, or at least its Colombian bottlers, have also been linked to paramilitary groups and human rights abuses. The bottlers and the company’s Atlanta headquarters have faced multiple lawsuits over attacks on union organizers. A 2010 documentary, “The Coca-Cola Case,” focused on the soda giant’s role in turning Colombia into the “trade union murder capital of the world,” June Chua wrote in a review for Rabble.ca that year.
  • Colombia is rich with resources that foreign corporations are eager to exploit, particularly in the mining, agriculture, and biofuels industries. “Mining is probably the biggest threat now to indigenous people, Afro-Colombians and peasants, and will continue to be as the peace agreement goes forward,” Kovalik added. Justin Podur, an author and global political analyst, told MintPress that Colombian human rights activists frequently say that “displacement in Colombia is not a side effect of the war, it’s really the point of the war.” Whether by design or coincidence, decades of unrest created fertile ground for profit.
  • In one of the most shocking examples of fossil fuel companies supporting the death and displacement of Colombian people, Kovalik highlighted the “the Santo Domingo massacre, in which Occidental Petroleum were part of an operation to bomb the Santo Domingo community.”
  • In a 2005 article for Z Net on the massacre, Kovalik and Luis Galvis explained: “On December 13, 1998, in what has become one of the most notorious war crimes in Colombia, the hamlet of Santo Domingo was attacked by a U.S. cluster bomb from a Colombian Air Force helicopter. Seventeen civilians, including 7 children, were killed as a result of the bombing.” In 2002, the Los Angeles Times revealed that the bombing had actually been carried out at the behest of, and with the assistance of, the Houston-based oil company which had its headquarters in Los Angeles at the time. Times staff writer T. Christian Miller wrote: “Los Angeles-based Occidental Petroleum, which runs an oil complex 30 miles north of Santo Domingo, provided crucial assistance to the operation. It supplied, directly or through contractors, troop transportation, planning facilities and fuel to Colombian military aircraft, including the helicopter crew accused of dropping the bomb.”
  • And, earlier this year, Gilberto Torres, a Colombian union activist, sued BP in London. He alleges that in 2002, he was kidnapped and tortured for 42 days by paramilitaries who were following orders from the oil giant.
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