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Gary Edwards

Google News - 0 views

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    An incredible story is unfolding in Egypt where the new military government is digging through volumes of documents seized in raids on the Muslim Brotherhood. The documents are said to show that Barak Obama has been funneling Billions of dollars into the Muslim Brotherhood. excerpt: "Bare Naked Islam has done extensive reporting on the "bribes." The ... Evidence we have obtained lends credibility to the charges of "gifts" (bribes) being taken in U.S. dollars from the U.S. Embassy in Cairo" that were distributed to top ministerial level officials in the Mursi government. Via Almesryoon: "A judicial source stated that over the past few days, a number of complaints have beenfiled with the Attorney General Hisham Barakat. These complaints accuse the leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood and leaders of the centrist party of receiving gifts from the American embassy in Cairo. The sponsors of these complaints stated that among these leaders are Mohamed Badie, General Guide of the Muslim Brotherhood, Khairat Al-Shater, deputy leader and businessman, Mohamed Beltagy leading the group, Essam el-Erian, deputy head of the Freedom and Justice Party of, and Abu Ela Mady, head of the Wasat Party, Essam Sultan, deputy head of the Wasat Party." The strength of these allegations is seemingly bolstered by another case alluded to by the newspaper in which a document is referenced. This document reportedly reveals monthly "gifts" being paid to Muslim Brotherhood leaders in Egypt by the Prime Minister Hamad bin Jassim bin Jabor Al Thani, Minister of Foreign Affairs to the Mursi government. These monthly payments were said to be denominated in U.S. dollars to each leader. Evidence for such allegations are substantiated by a document we have obtained. It includes the names of several recipients of funds and even includes their signatures acknowledging receipt of the funds. This ledger, obtained from inside the Mursi government, lends additional credibility to the rep
Paul Merrell

Russia and China: Watch Out Moody's, Here We Come! | New Eastern Outlook - 0 views

  • In 1945 it was easy to get a defeated Europe to agree to Bretton Woods Gold Exchange Standard in which all currencies would be fixed to the US dollar and the dollar alone fixed to gold at $35 an ounce, where it remained until the system collapsed in August 1971 and Nixon abandoned gold-dollar convertibility. By then Europe was booming with modern reconstructed industry and the USA was becoming a rustbelt. France and Germany demanded US gold bullion instead of inflated dollars, and US gold reserves were vanishing. After 1971, the dollar flooded the world unfettered by gold reserve requirements and US military might during the Cold War forced Japan, Western Europe and others including OPEC to accept constantly inflating paper US dollars. From 1970 until about 2000 the volume of dollars in the world had risen some 2,900%. Because the dollar was the world “reserve currency” needed by all for trade in oil, goods, grains, the world was forced to swallow a de facto mammoth inflation after 1971.First appeared: http://journal-neo.org/2015/01/22/watch-out-moody-s-here-we-come/
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    The established New York credit agencies would play a strategic role in this post-1971 dollar system. During the 1970's the US Government's Securities & Exchange Commission, charged with oversight of bond and stock markets, issued a ruling giving the then-dominant New York credit rating agencies-Moody's and Standard & Poor's (and later Fitch Ratings)-a de facto guaranteed monopoly in an unregulated market, when they ruled that only "Nationally Recognized Statistical Rating Organizations" would be qualified to issue appropriate ratings, i.e. only Moody's and S&P. Corruption was made endemic to the US ratings game and Washington was party to the dirty deal. By the end of the 1970's, using the vast amount of OPEC "petro-dollars" from the two oil price shocks in 1973 and 1979, New York international banks, using London, began to loan to the rest of the world to finance imports of oil and other essentials. The New York credit rating agencies, previously primarily rating US corporate bonds, expanded into the new foreign debt markets as the largest and only established rating agencies in the new phase of dollarization and globalization of capital markets. They set up branches in Germany, France, Japan, Mexico, Argentina and other emerging markets much like the US Big Five accounting firms. During the 1980s the rating agencies played a key role in down-rating the debt of the Latin American debtor countries such as Mexico and Argentina. Their ratings determined if the debtor countries could borrow or not. Financial market insiders in London and New York openly spoke of the "political" rating agencies using their de facto monopoly to advance the agenda of Wall Street and the Dollar System behind it. Then in the 1990's, the New York rating agencies played a decisive role in spreading the "Asia Crisis" of 1997-98. With the precise timing of its downgrades they could worsen the panic because they had been suspiciously silent right up un
Gary Edwards

Will The Dollar Standard Collapse? - 0 views

  • Before I begin, I’ll make a prediction, since I’m an investor and my job is to predict. I increasingly believe that the dollar will collapse, and its ramifications could be as violent as when the credit markets cracked in July 2007. Currency collapses are nothing new, just as the bursting of a credit market bubble was nothing new. A dollar collapse could very well lead to carnage in domestic asset markets, whether it be the stock market, bond market, etc. Also, US imports and the overvalued dollar are fueling many of the export-oriented economies abroad, so a dollar collapse could wreak havoc on foreign asset markets as well. And once it happens, we’re going to view the collapse of the dollar as an obvious event that we should have long seen coming. Just as we now view the subprime wreckage and bursting of the real estate bubble as an event we should have easily predicted.The problem is timing. Does the dollar collapse in 2009, or 2015? And is it a slow depreciation, or a sudden 50% fall? Those are tougher questions. Richard Duncan predicted the dollar’s demise in 2002. His error of timing discredited an otherwise brilliant book.
  • In a sentence, “The Dollar Crisis” is about how the world changed in 1971. That was when Richard Nixon dropped the gold standard (or its close cousin, the Bretton Woods international monetary system). Here’s the youtube video: Youtube Bretton Woods. The end of the gold standard ushered in a new era of large trade imbalances and the buildup of foreign currency reserves, and these trade imbalances and large foreign currency reserves have had significant impacts on the global economy that many people don’t realize. Huge trade imbalances and large foreign reserves didn’t really exist during the gold standard. During the gold standard, a country’s money supply was determined by the amount of gold it had. Banks’ reserves were either gold or indirectly tied to gold, and so the amount of money they could lend, and that the nation could print, was backed by the nation’s gold reserves. To see the implications of that sort of monetary system on trade imbalances, let’s take a hypothetical United States and China, where the US is buying lots of goods from China. The US gets goods; China gets dollars. China takes its excess dollars, gives them to the US, and gets gold in exchange. The US gold reserves would decline, causing credit contraction in the US. This would lead to recession; prices would adjust downwards; and falling prices would enhance the trade competitiveness of the US. The US would stop exporting so many goods from China as China’s costs of production begin rising relative to the United States’. The US would stop being a net importer; gold would flow back in; and equilibrium on the balance of payments would be re-established.Under the gold standard, trade imbalances were unsustainable and self-correcting.
  • Today, in the system of fiat money, that’s no longer the case.
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    The Dollar Crisis Quick Synopsis:     * Abandoning the gold standard in 1971 has resulted in large global trade imbalances and a massive buildup of foreign currency reserves     * These trade imbalances and buildup of foreign reserves have resulted in frequent booms and busts since 1971     * The Japanese bust of 1989, the Asian economic crisis of 1997, and the current US credit market collapse have resulted from the post-1971 paper money monetary system     * Abandoning the gold standard has gradually resulted in a very overvalued US dollar, and that the dollar is headed for disaster     *  "The dollar standard is inherently flawed and increasingly unstable. Its collapse will be the most important economic event of the 21st century."
Gary Edwards

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

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    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.
Gary Edwards

Seth Lipsky: The Gold Standard Goes Mainstream - WSJ.com - 0 views

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    Excellent discussion of where the Republican Party stands in relationship to the destruction of the dollar and new interest in linking the dollar to GOLD.  Good stuff.  Personally i'm in the Ron Paul camp, hook, line and sinker. excerpt: "In the ferment within today's Republican Party, the gold standard has become almost the centrist position. On the left would be those who favor a system of discretionary activism in which brilliant technocrats, such as Ben Bernanke at the Fed, use their judgment in setting interest rates. A bit to their right would be advocates of a rule, such as John Taylor's rule linking interest rates to various conditions, or one that requires the Fed to target the price of gold but stops short of defining the dollar in terms of specie. In the center would be advocates of a classical gold standard, in which a dollar is defined as a fixed amount of gold. These include, among others, Mr. Lehrman, James Grant of Grant's Interest Rate Observer, publisher Steve Forbes, economist Judy Shelton, and Sean Fieler of the American Principles Project. A bit further to the right would be partisans of the Austrian school of economics, including Rep. Paul. He advocates less for a gold standard than for an idea of Friedrich Hayek, the Nobel laureate who came to favor what he called the denationalization of money and a system centered on private coinage and currency that would compete with government-issued money. Further right are purists such as the radical constitutionalist Edwin Vieira Jr., who would simply price things in weights of gold or silver. A good bit of overlap exists among the camps, but Congress has come alive to all points on this spectrum. Rep. Kevin Brady, a Texas Republican who is vice chairman of the Joint Economic Committee, is seeking to pass the Sound Dollar Act, which would end the Fed's mandate to keep unemployment down, instead having the central bank focus only on stable prices. Rep. Paul is pressing the Free Competition in Curr
Gary Edwards

Next Leg Of The Ponzi Revealed - Foreign Central Banks To Begin Buying US Stocks Outrig... - 0 views

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    Another great chart detailing the Feds destruction of our currency.  Is this money laundering or a giant ponzi scheme? The good news is that the stock market is on a tear.  The bad news?  International banksters are gobbling up US corporate stocks with the Trillions of freshly printed dollars our Federal Reserve Cartel was kind enough to provide.   Recall that the July 2010 GAO audit of the Federal Reserve Banksters revealed an eye-popping $16.1 Trillion dollars had been distributed to domestic and international banksters between December 2007 and January 2010.   Where did the money go?  How do those dollars make their way back into the world economy?  And what will happen to the value of the dollar when these vast sums do show up in world financial markets? The banksters are not lending.  And companies are not borrowing.  The Trillions flooding the worlds banksters was originally thought to provide liquidity and keep the economy churning.  While there are many competing answers to the question of why this massive bailout and reboot didn't work, were now witnessing the wholesale purchase of corporate ownership with those dollars.   "Don't want to borrow those Trillions?  Good.  We'll buy you then." Sorry, but this looks like a gigantic money laundering scheme where hot dollars are dumped off in exchange for real assets. excerpt:  In other words, while the Fed's charter forbids it from buying US equities outright, it certainly can promise that it will bail out such bosom friends as the Bank of Israel, the Swiss National Bank, and soon everyone else, if and when their investment in Apple should sour. Luckily, this means that the exponential phase in risk is approaching as everyone will now scramble to frontrun central bank purchases no longer in bonds, but in stocks outright, leading to epic surges in everything risk related, then collapse and force the Fed to print tens of trillions to bail everyone out all over again, rinse repea
Gary Edwards

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

  • 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?
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    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

Is The US Finally Ready For Revolution? - Democratic Underground - 1 views

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    Written in June of 2012, before the national elections, this commentary remains the ringing truth.  Maybe more Americans are ready to listen this fourth of July? ........................... "Is America Ready For Revolution? I have always strongly believed that it's not possible to be a good Christian without standing up against social injustice and government corruption in all its forms. As I take a look around me today I find a lot of things wrong with our country. In fact, I have been a proponent for radical change for several years now, and I have written and published 2 books on this very topic. Where shall I begin? In God-blessed America, the land of the free where everyone is an economic slave, our founding fathers' sacred idea of a government "of the people, by the people, for the people" has become but a cruel joke. Former president George W. Bush has notoriously called our Constitution - our supreme law of the land - "that (expletive) piece of paper". The federal government is currently spending at least $60 billion per month on military excursions in Afghanistan, the Middle East, and northern and western Africa - including operating between 800 and 1,000 foreign military bases all over the world. Our country's over-used flying drone aircraft kills hundreds daily overseas, many of whom are only innocent bystanders. Meanwhile here on the home front, one in seven people are on food stamps, and at any given time one in four American children are going hungry today. Our country spends more money incarcerating people than it does on education. What's up with that? Our political system is openly rigged against the best interests of the American people. A massive market mechanism is securely entrenched in our political system where political influence is openly bought and sold. Tens of thousands of highly-paid middlemen called "lobbyists" facilitate the legal transfer of billions between moneyed special interests and our so-called "representatives" i
Gary Edwards

Global Financial Meltdown Coming? Clear Signs That The Great Derivatives Crisis Has Now... - 0 views

  • No one “understands” derivatives. How many times have readers heard that thought expressed (please round-off to the nearest thousand)? Why does no one understand derivatives? For many; the answer to that question is that they have simply been thinking too hard. For others; the answer is that they don’t “think” at all. Derivatives are bets. This is not a metaphor, or analogy, or generalization. Derivatives are bets. Period. That’s all they ever were. That’s all they ever can be.
  • One very large financial institution that appears to be in serious trouble with these financial weapons of mass destruction is Glencore.  At one time Glencore was considered to be the 10th largest company on the entire planet, but now it appears to be coming apart at the seams, and a great deal of their trouble seems to be tied to derivatives.  The following comes from Zero Hedge… Of particular concern, they said, was Glencore’s use of financial instruments such as derivatives to hedge its trading of physical goods against price swings. The company had $9.8 billion in gross derivatives in June 2015, down from $19 billion in such positions at the end of 2014, causing investors to query the company about the swing. Glencore told investors the number went down so drastically because of changes in market volatility this year, according to people briefed by Glencore. When prices vary significantly, it can increase the value of hedging positions. Last year, there were extreme price moves, particularly in the crude-oil market, which slid from about $114 a barrel in June to less than $60 a barrel by the end of December.
  • That response wasn’t satisfying, said Michael Leithead, a bond fund portfolio manager at EFG Asset Management, which managed $12 billion as of the end of March and has invested in Glencore’s debt.
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  • According to Bank of America, the global financial system has about 100 billion dollars of exposure overall to Glencore.  So if Glencore goes bankrupt that is going to be a major event.  At this point, Glencore is probably the most likely candidate to be “the next Lehman Brothers”. And it isn’t just Glencore that is in trouble.  Other financial giants such as Trafigura are in deep distress as well.  Collectively, the global financial system has approximately half a trillion dollars of exposure to these firms… Worse, since it is not just Glencore that the banks are exposed to but very likely the rest of the commodity trading space, their gross exposure blows up to a simply stunning number:
  • For the banks, of course, Glencore may not be their only exposure in the commodity trading space. We consider that other vehicles such as Trafigura, Vitol and Gunvor may feature on bank balance sheets as well ($100 bn x 4?)
  • Call it half a trillion dollars in very highly levered exposure to commodities: an asset class that has been crushed in the past year. The mainstream media is not talking much about any of this yet, and that is probably a good thing.  But behind the scenes, unprecedented moves are already taking place. When I came across the information that I am about to share with you, I was absolutely stunned.  It comes from Investment Research Dynamics, and it shows very clearly that everything is not “okay” in the financial world… Something occurred in the banking system in September that required a massive reverse repo operation in order to force the largest ever Treasury collateral injection into the repo market.   Ordinarily the Fed might engage in routine reverse repos as a means of managing the Fed funds rate.   However, as you can see from the graph below, there have been sudden spikes up in the amount of reverse repos that tend to correspond the some kind of crisis – the obvious one being the de facto collapse of the financial system in 2008:
  • What in the world could possibly cause a spike of that magnitude? Well, that same article that I just quoted links the troubles at Glencore with this unprecedented intervention… What’s even more interesting is that the spike-up in reverse repos occurred at the same time – September 16 – that the stock market embarked on an 8-day cliff dive, with the S&P 500 falling 6% in that time period.  You’ll note that this is around the same time that a crash in Glencore stock and bonds began.   It has been suggested by analysts that a default on Glencore credit derivatives either by Glencore or by financial entities using derivatives to bet against that event would be analogous to the “Lehman moment” that triggered the 2008 collapse. The blame on the general stock market plunge was cast on the Fed’s inability to raise interest rates.  However that seems to be nothing more than a clever cover story for something much more catastrophic which began to develop out sight in the general liquidity functions of the global banking system. Back in 2008, Lehman Brothers was not “perfectly fine” one day and then suddenly collapsed the next.  There were problems brewing under the surface well in advance. Well, the same thing is happening now at banking giants such as Deutsche Bank, and at commodity trading firms such as Glencore, Trafigura and The Noble Group. And of course a lot of smaller fish are starting to implode as well.  I found this example posted on Business Insider earlier today…
  • On September 11, Spruce Alpha, a small hedge fund which is part of a bigger investment group, sent a short report to investors. The letter said that the $80 million fund had lost 48% in a month, according the performance report seen by Business Insider. There was no commentary included in the note. No explanation. Just cold hard numbers.
  • Wow – how do you possibly lose 48 percent in a single month? It would be hard to do that even if you were actually trying to lose money on purpose. Sadly, this kind of scenario is going to be repeated over and over as we get even deeper into this crisis. Meanwhile, our “leaders” continue to tell us that there is nothing to worry about.  For example, just consider what former Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke is saying…
  • Former Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke doesn’t see any bubbles forming in global markets right right now. But he doesn’t think you should take his word for it. And even if you did, that isn’t the right question to ask anyway. Speaking at a Wall Street Journal event on Wednesday morning, Bernanke said, “I don’t see any obvious major mispricings. Nothing that looks like the housing bubble before the crisis, for example. But you shouldn’t trust me.”
  • I certainly agree with that last sentence.  Bernanke was the one telling us that there was not going to be a recession back in 2008 even after one had already started.  He was clueless back then and he is clueless today. Most of our “leaders” either don’t understand what is happening or they are not willing to tell us. So that means that we have to try to figure things out for ourselves the best that we can.  And right now there are signs all around us that another 2008-style crisis has begun. Personally, I am hoping that there will be a lot more days like today when the markets were relatively quiet and not much major news happened around the world. Unfortunately for all of us, these days of relative peace and tranquility are about to come to a very abrupt end.
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    "Warren Buffett once referred to derivatives as "financial weapons of mass destruction", and it was inevitable that they would begin to wreak havoc on our financial system at some point.  While things may seem somewhat calm on Wall Street at the moment, the truth is that a great deal of trouble is bubbling just under the surface.  As you will see below, something happened in mid-September that required an unprecedented 405 billion dollar surge of Treasury collateral into the repo market.  I know - that sounds very complicated, so I will try to break it down more simply for you.  It appears that some very large institutions have started to get into a significant amount of trouble because of all the reckless betting that they have been doing.  This is something that I have warned would happen over and over again.  In fact, I have written about it so much that my regular readers are probably sick of hearing about it.  But this is what is going to cause the meltdown of our financial system. Many out there get upset when I compare derivatives trading to gambling, and perhaps it would be more accurate to describe most derivatives as a form of insurance.  The big financial institutions assure us that they have passed off most of the risk on these contracts to others and so there is no reason to worry according to them. Well, personally I don't buy their explanations, and a lot of others don't either.  On a very basic, primitive level, derivatives trading is gambling.  This is a point that Jeff Nielson made very eloquently in a piece that he recently published…"
Gary Edwards

How World War I Paved the Way for the Warfare State :: The Mises Economics Blog: The Ci... - 0 views

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    Part ONE "by David Stockman Remarks To The Committee For The Republic, Washington DC, February 2014 (Part 1 of 6 Parts) [From David Stockman's Contra Corner.] Flask in hand, Boris Yelstin famously mounted a tank outside the Soviet Parliament in August 1991. Presently, the fearsome Red Army stood down-an outcome which 45 years of Cold War military mobilization by the West had failed to accomplish. At the time, the U.S. Warfare State's budget- counting the pentagon, spy agencies, DOE weapons, foreign aid, homeland security and veterans--was about $500 billion in today's dollars.  Now, a quarter century on from the Cold War's end, that same metric stands at $900 billion. This near doubling of the Warfare State's fiscal girth is a tad incongruous.  After all, America's war machine was designed to thwart a giant, nuclear-armed industrial state, but, alas, we now have no industrial state enemies left on the planet. The much-shrunken Russian successor to the Soviet Union, for example, has become a kleptocracy run by a clever thief who prefers stealing from his own citizens. Likewise, the Red Chinese threat consists of a re-conditioned aircraft carrier bought second-hand from a former naval power--otherwise known as the former Ukraine. China's bubble-ridden domestic economy would collapse within six weeks were it to actually bomb the 4,000 Wal-Mart outlets in America on which its mercantilist export machine utterly depends. On top of that, we've been fired as the world's policeman, al Qaeda has splintered among warlords who inhabit the armpits of the world from Yemen to Somalia and during last September's Syria war scare the American people even took away the President's keys to the Tomahawk missile batteries.  In short, the persistence of America's trillion dollar Warfare State budget needs some serious "splainin". The Great War and Its Aftermath My purpose tonight is to sketch the long story of how it all happened, starti
Gary Edwards

Fed's EXPLICIT Goal Is to Devalue the Dollar by 33% ... and NEGATIVE Yield Bonds Are Co... - 0 views

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    Forbes' Charles Kadlec notes: The Federal Reserve Open Market Committee (FOMC) has made it official: After its latest two day meeting, it announced its goal to devalue the dollar by 33% over the next 20 years. The debauch of the dollar will be even greater if the Fed exceeds its goal of a 2 percent per year increase in the price level. *** The Fed has announced a course of action that will steal - there is no better word for it - nearly 10 percent of the value of American's hard earned savings over the next 4 years.
Paul Merrell

Federal Chief Information Officers (CIO) Council Wins Rosemary Award - 0 views

  • Hillary Clinton E-Mail Controversy Illuminates Government-Wide Failure National Security Archive Lawsuit Established E-Mails as Records in 1993 CIO Council Repeats as Rosemary "Winner" for Doubling Down On "Lifetime Failure" Only White House Saves Its E-Mail Electronically, Agencies No Deadline Until 2016
  • The Federal Chief Information Officers (CIO) Council has won the infamous Rosemary Award for worst open government performance of 2014, according to the citation published today by the National Security Archive at www.nsarchive.org. The National Security Archive had hoped that awarding the 2010 Rosemary Award to the Federal Chief Information Officers Council for never addressing the government's "lifetime failure" of saving its e-mail electronically would serve as a government-wide wakeup call that saving e-mails was a priority. Fallout from the Hillary Clinton e-mail debacle shows, however, that rather than "waking up," the top officials have opted to hit the "snooze" button. The Archive established the not-so-coveted Rosemary Award in 2005, named after President Nixon's secretary, Rose Mary Woods, who testified she had erased 18-and-a-half minutes of a crucial Watergate tape — stretching, as she showed photographers, to answer the phone with her foot still on the transcription pedal. Bestowed annually to highlight the lowlights of government secrecy, the Rosemary Award has recognized a rogue's gallery of open government scofflaws, including the CIA, the Treasury Department, the Air Force, the FBI, the Justice Department, and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper.
  • Chief Information Officer of the United States Tony Scott was appointed to lead the Federal CIO Council on February 5, 2015, and his brief tenure has already seen more references in the news media to the importance of maintaining electronic government records, including e-mail, and the requirements of the Federal Records Act, than the past five years. Hopefully Mr. Scott, along with Office of Management & Budget Deputy Director for Management Ms. Beth Cobert will embrace the challenge of their Council being named a repeat Rosemary Award winner and use it as a baton to spur change rather than a cross to bear.
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  • Many on the Federal CIO Council could use some motivation, including the beleaguered State Department CIO, Steven Taylor. In office since April 3, 2013, Mr. Taylor is in charge of the Department's information resources and IT initiatives and services. He "is directly responsible for the Information Resource Management (IRM) Bureau's budget of $750 million, and oversees State's total IT/ knowledge management budget of approximately one billion dollars." Prior to his current position, Taylor served as Acting CIO from August 1, 2012, as the Department's Deputy Chief Information Officer (DCIO) and Chief Technology Officer of Operations from June 2011, and was the Program Director for the State Messaging and Archival Retrieval Toolset (SMART). While Hillary Clinton repeatedly claimed that because she sent her official e-mail to "government officials on their State or other .gov accounts ... the emails were immediately captured and preserved," a recent State Department Office of Inspector General report contradicts claims that DOS' e-mail archiving system, ironically named SMART, did so.
  • The report found that State Department "employees have not received adequate training or guidance on their responsibilities for using those systems to preserve 'record emails.'" In 2011, while Taylor was State's Chief Technology Officer of Operations, State Department employees only created 61,156 record e-mails out of more than a billion e-mails sent. In other words, roughly .006% of DOS e-mails were captured electronically. And in 2013, while Taylor was State's CIO, a paltry seven e-mails were preserved from the Office of the Secretary, compared to the 4,922 preserved by the Lagos Consulate in Nigeria. Even though the report notes that its assessments "do not apply to the system used by the Department's high-level principals, the Secretary, the Deputy Secretaries, the Under Secretaries, and their immediate staffs, which maintain separate systems," the State Department has not provided any estimation of the number of Clinton's e-mails that were preserved by recipients through the Department's anachronistic "print and file" system, or any other procedure.
  • The unfortunate silver lining of Hillary Clinton inappropriately appropriating public records as her own is that she likely preserved her records much more comprehensively than her State Department colleagues, most of whose e-mails have probably been lost under Taylor's IT leadership. 2008 reports by CREW, right, and the GAO, left, highlighted problems preserving e-mails. Click to enlarge. The bigger issue is that Federal IT gurus have known about this problem for years, and the State Department is not alone in not having done anything to fix it. A 2008 survey by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) and OpenTheGovernment.org did not find a single federal agency policy that mandates an electronic record keeping system agency-wide. Congressional testimony in 2008 by the Government Accountability Office indicted the standard "print and file" approach by pointing out:
  • "agencies recognize that devoting significant resources to creating paper records from electronic sources is not a viable long-term strategy;" yet GAO concluded even the "print and file" system was failing to capture historic records "for about half of the senior officials."
  • Troublingly, current Office of Management and Budget guidance does not require federal agencies to manage "all email records in an electronic format" until December 31, 2016. The only part of the federal government that seems to be facing up to the e-mail preservation challenge with any kind of "best practice" is the White House, where the Obama administration installed on day one an e-mail archiving system that preserves and manages even the President's own Blackberry messages. The National Security Archive brought the original White House e-mail lawsuit against President Reagan in early 1989, and continued the litigation against Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, until court orders compelled the White House to install the "ARMS" system to archive e-mail. The Archive sued the George W. Bush administration in 2007 after discovering that the Bush White House had junked the Clinton system without replacing its systematic archiving functions. CREW subsequently joined this suit and with the Archive negotiated a settlement with the Obama administration that included the recovery of as many as 22 million e-mails that were previously missing or misfiled.
  • s a result of two decades of the Archive's White House e-mail litigation, several hundred thousand e-mails survive from the Reagan White House, nearly a half million from the George H.W. Bush White House, 32 million from the Clinton White House, and an estimated 220 million from the George W. Bush White House. Previous recipients of the Rosemary Award include: 2013 - Director of National Intelligence James Clapper (for his "No, sir" lie to Senator Ron Wyden's question: "Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?") 2012 - the Justice Department (in a repeat performance, for failing to update FOIA regulations to comply with the law, undermining congressional intent, and hyping its open government statistics)
  • Rogue Band of Federal E-mail Users and Abusers Compounds Systemic Problems Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and other federal officials who skirt or even violate federal laws designed to preserve electronic federal records compound e-mail management problems. Top government officials who use personal e-mail for official business include: Clinton; former U.S. Ambassador to Kenya Scott Gration; chairman of the U.S. Chemical Safety Board Rafael Moure-Eraso; and former Secretary of State Colin Powell, who told ABC's This Week "I don't have any to turn over. I did not keep a cache of them. I did not print them off. I do not have thousands of pages somewhere in my personal files." Others who did not properly save electronic federal records include Environmental Protection Agency former administrator Lisa Jackson who used the pseudonym Richard Windsor to receive email; current EPA administrator Gina McCarthy, who improperly deleted thousands of text messages (which also are federal records) from her official agency cell phone; and former Internal Revenue Service official Lois Lerner, whose emails regarding Obama's political opponents "went missing or became destroyed."
  • 2011- the Justice Department (for doing more than any other agency to eviscerate President Obama's Day One transparency pledge through pit-bull whistleblower prosecutions, recycled secrecy arguments in court cases, retrograde FOIA regulations, and mixed FOIA responsiveness) 2010 - the Federal Chief Information Officers' Council (for "lifetime failure" to address the crisis in government e-mail preservation) 2009 - the FBI (for having a record-setting rate of "no records" responses to FOIA requests) 2008 - the Treasury Department (for shredding FOIA requests and delaying responses for decades) 2007 - the Air Force (for disappearing its FOIA requests and having "failed miserably" to meet its FOIA obligations, according to a federal court ruling) 2006 - the Central Intelligence Agency (for the biggest one-year drop-off in responsiveness to FOIA requests yet recorded).
  • The destruction of other federal records was even more blatant. Jose Rodriguez, the former CIA official in charge of the agency's defunct torture program ordered the destruction of key videos documenting it in 2005, claiming that "the heat from destroying [the torture videos] is nothing compared to what it would be if the tapes ever got into the public domain;" Admiral William McRaven, ordered the immediate destruction of any emails about Operation Neptune Spear, including any photos of the death of Osama bin Laden ("destroy them immediately"), telling subordinates that any photos should have already been turned over to the CIA — presumably so they could be placed in operational files out of reach of the FOIA. These rogues make it harder — if not impossible — for agencies to streamline their records management, and for FOIA requesters and others to obtain official records, especially those not exchanged with other government employees. The US National Archives currently trusts agencies to determine and preserve e-mails which agencies have "deemed appropriate for preservation" on their own, often by employing a "print and file" physical archiving process for digital records. Any future reforms to e-mail management must address the problems of outdated preservation technology, Federal Records Act violators, and the scary fact that only one per cent of government e-mail addresses are saved digitally by the National Archive's recently-initiated "Capstone" program.
  •  
    Complete with photos, names, titles, of the 41 federal department and independent agency CIOs. The March 2015 Insopector General report linked from the article belies Hillary Clinton's claim that all emails she sent to State Department staff had been preserved by the Department.   
Gary Edwards

Benghazi report: Trinkets of treason - 1 views

  •  
    The truth is dribbling out, thn=anks to Douglas J. Hagmann and Canada Free Press .....................  We've been aligned and hostage to the Saudi Royal Family ever since FDR met with King Ibn Saud, Feb 14th, 1945 near the end of WWII.  It was at this meeting that FDR promised protection for the Saudi family in exchange for the right to develop Saudi oil and sell that oil exclusively in dollars.  Hence the "petro dollar" - backed by Saudi oil instead of GOLD. That agreement, and our subsequent history of our military and state departments acting to further Saudi interests has dominated America.  Our troops and military resources ae mercenaries fighting for Saudi dominance of the Globalist ruling elites.  Our politicians are bought and paid for by the Saudi Globalist Alliance.  They have sold their souls for power and money, with the destruction of the USA Constitution the only thing standing between the Globalist and their quest to rule the world. excerpt: We are witnessing one of the biggest government cover-ups since Watergate. A cover-up that involves murder, arms trafficking, and lies by high ranking officials under oath. It involves the murderous attacks in Benghazi, and congressional investigators just released a 46-page interim progress report that at least exposes Hillary Rodham Clinton and the White House lying under oath. Where's the accountability? Where's the outrage? Where's the media? A 46-page interim progress report of an ongoing investigation across five House Committees by the U.S. House of Representatives was released on Tuesday, April 23, 2013. The executive summary states that former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton signed off on a reduction of diplomatic security forces suggesting that this reduction of security was, in large part, to blame for the attack in Benghazi on September 11, 2012.  The report emphasizes that this is "inconsistent" with her sworn testimony of January 23, 2013. Simply stated, Hillary Rod
Paul Merrell

America, the Election, and the Dismal Tide « LobeLog - 0 views

  • I thought about that March night as the election results rolled in, as the New York Times forecast showed Hillary Clinton’s chances of winning the presidency plummet from about 80% to less than 5%, while Trump’s fortunes skyrocketed by the minute. As Clinton’s future in the Oval Office evaporated, leaving only a whiff of her stale dreams, I saw all the foreign-policy certainties, all the hawkish policies and military interventions, all the would-be bin Laden raids and drone strikes she’d preside over as commander-in-chief similarly vanish into the ether. With her failed candidacy went the no-fly escalation in Syria that she was sure to pursue as president with the vigor she had applied to the disastrous Libyan intervention of 2011 while secretary of state.  So, too, went her continued pursuit of the now-nameless war on terror, the attendant “gray-zone” conflicts — marked by small contingents of U.S. troops, drone strikes, and bombing campaigns — and all those munitions she would ship to Saudi Arabia for its war in Yemen. As the life drained from Clinton’s candidacy, I saw her rabid pursuit of a new Cold War start to wither and Russo-phobic comparisons of Putin’s rickety Russian petro-state to Stalin’s Soviet Union begin to die.  I saw the end, too, of her Iron Curtain-clouded vision of NATO, of her blind faith in an alliance more in line with 1957 than 2017. As Clinton’s political fortunes collapsed, so did her Israel-Palestine policy — rooted in the fiction that American and Israeli security interests overlap — and her commitment to what was clearly an unworkable “peace process.”  Just as, for domestic considerations, she would blindly support that Middle Eastern nuclear power, so was she likely to follow President Obama’s trillion-dollarpath to modernizing America’s nuclear arsenal.  All that, along with her sure-to-be-gargantuan military budget requests, were scattered to the winds by her ringing defeat.
  • Clinton’s foreign policy future had been a certainty.  Trump’s was another story entirely.  He had, for instance, called for a raft of military spending: growing the Army and Marines to a ridiculous size, building a Navy to reach a seemingly arbitrary and budget-busting number of ships, creating a mammoth air armada of fighter jets, pouring money into a missile defense boondoggle, and recruiting a legion of (presumably overweight) hackers to wage cyber war.  All of it to be paid for by cutting unnamed waste, ending unspecified “federal programs,” or somehow conjuring up dollars from hither and yon.  But was any of it serious?  Was any of it true?  Would President Trump actually make good on the promises of candidate Trump?  Or would he simply bark “Wrong!” when somebody accused him of pledging to field an army of 540,000 active duty soldiers or build a Navy of 350 ships. Would Trump actually attempt to implement his plan to defeat ISIS — that is, “bomb the shit out of them” and then “take the oil” of Iraq?  Or was that just the bellicose bluster of the campaign trail?  Would he be the reckless hawk Clinton promised to be, waging wars like the Libyan intervention?  Or would he follow the dictum of candidate Trump who said, “The current strategy of toppling regimes, with no plan for what to do the day after, only produces power vacuums that are filled by terrorists.” Outgoing representative Randy Forbes of Virginia, a contender to be secretary of the Navy in the new administration, recently said that the president elect would employ “an international defense strategy that is driven by the Pentagon and not by the political National Security Council… Because if you look around the globe, over the last eight years, the National Security Council has been writing that. And find one country anywhere that we are better off than we were eight years [ago], you cannot find it.”
  • Such a plan might actually blunt armed adventurism, since it was war-weary military officials who reportedly pushed back against President Obama’s plans to escalate Iraq War 3.0.  According to some Pentagon-watchers, a potentially hostile bureaucracy might also put the brakes on even fielding a national security team in a timely fashion. While Wall Street investors seemed convinced that the president elect would be good for defense industry giants like Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics, whose stocks surged in the wake of Trump’s win, it’s unclear whether that indicates a belief in more armed conflicts or simply more bloated military spending. Under President Obama, the U.S. has waged war in or carried out attacks on at least eight nations — Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, Libya, and Syria.  A Clinton presidency promised more, perhaps markedly more, of the same — an attitude summed up in her infamous comment about the late Libyan autocrat Muammar Gaddafi: “We came, we saw, he died.”  Trump advisor Senator Jeff Sessions said, “Trump does not believe in war. He sees war as bad, destructive, death and a wealth destruction.”  Of course, Trump himself said he favors committing war crimes like torture and murder.  He’s also suggested that he would risk war over the sort of naval provocations — like Iranian ships sailing close to U.S. vessels — that are currently met with nothing graver than warning shots. So there’s good reason to assume Trump will be a Clintonesque hawk or even worse, but some reason to believe — due to his propensity for lies, bluster, and backing down — that he could also turn out to be less bellicose.
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  • Given his penchant for running businesses into the ground and for economic proposals expected to rack up trillions of dollars in debt, it’s possible that, in the end, Trump will inadvertently cripple the U.S. military.  And given that the government is, in many ways, a national security state bonded with a mass of money and orbited by satellite departments and agencies of far lesser import, Trump could even kneecap the entire government.  If so, what could be catastrophic for Americans — a battered, bankrupt United States — might, ironically, bode well for the wider world.
  • At the time, I told my questioner just what I thought a Hillary Clinton presidency might mean for America and the world: more saber-rattling, more drone strikes, more military interventions, among other things.  Our just-ended election aborted those would-be wars, though Clinton’s legacy can still be seen, among other places, in the rubble of Iraq, the battered remains of Libya, and the faces of South Sudan’s child soldiers.  Donald Trump has the opportunity to forge a new path, one that could be marked by bombast instead of bombs.  If ever there was a politician with the ability to simply declare victory and go home — regardless of the facts on the ground — it’s him.  Why go to war when you can simply say that you did, big league, and you won? The odds, of course, are against this.  The United States has been embroiled in foreign military actions, almost continuously, since its birth and in 64 conflicts, large and small, according to the military, in the last century alone.  It’s a country that, since 9/11, has been remarkably content to wage winless, endless wars with little debate or popular outcry.  It’s a country in which Barack Obama won election, in large measure, due to dissatisfaction with the prior commander-in-chief’s signature war and then, after winning a Nobel Peace Prize and overseeing the withdrawal of troops from Iraq, reengaged in an updated version of that very same war — bequeathing it now to Donald J. Trump. “This Trump.  He’s a crazy man!” the African aid worker insisted to me that March night.  “He says some things and you wonder: Are you going to be president?  Really?”  It turns out the answer is yes. “It can’t happen, can it?” That question still echoes in my mind.
  • I know all the things that now can’t happen, Clinton’s wars among them. The Trump era looms ahead like a dark mystery, cold and hard.  We may well be witnessing the rebirth of a bitter nation, the fruit of a land poisoned at its root by evils too fundamental to overcome; a country exceptional for its squandered gifts and forsaken providence, its shattered promises and moral squalor. “It can’t happen, can it?” Indeed, my friend, it just did.
Gary Edwards

Of Bailouts, Bonuses, and Generational Responsibility from The Daily Bail - 0 views

  • When one transfers the learned behavior of selfishness to the world of economics, it is east to see how we got to the world of adjustable rate mortgages, thirty-to-one leverage, credit default swaps, and thirty year hedge fund workers acting as is million dollar paychecks was an otherwise normal entitlement.  If it felt good, it was therefore right – and by all means, don’t rock the boat.  And what we are witnessing today in Washington and Wall Street in response to our economic crisis is nothing but a conscious and willing decision to pass off to the next generation the cost of our mistakes.
  • the fundamental principles of capitalism – namely that bad actors need to fail.
  • First and most foremost, the Congress needs to institute a modernized version of Glass-Stegall and separate commercial banking from investment banking activities. What we have seen in the abolishment Glass-Stegall (please thank Mr. Rubin formerly of Goldman Sachs) is the creation of federally subsidize casinos masquerading as publicly traded financial institutions.  They kept profits from over-leveraged bets and were kind enough to pass their losses onto the taxpayers.  Second, Congress needs to repeal legislation (Gramm-Leach) that allowed financial institutions not only to leverage in ways previously not permitted, but which also granted banks and financial situations exemption from federal gambling laws. Third, and this is where moral outrage hits home to those on Wall Street, we cannot live in a country in which any company is allowed to manipulate the levers of government in such a way as to make itself obscenely rich at the expense of the public.
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  • We saw as we proceeded through life that pursuing one’s self-interest was rewarded just as often than doing what was right, that morals were relative, and that there would be no consequences to bad behavior. It became de rigueur to assume that our parents (and their lawyers) would save us from our bad behavior.
  • no consequences to irresponsible behavior.
  • it is hard to avoid the reality that my generation, the baby boomers who are now approaching retirement, have caused the greatest collapse of the world economy since the 1930s, and in the process damaged this country in ways we are now only beginning to understand.
  • Goldman is only the largest corporate contributor to the Obama administration
  • he nation will not die; to the contrary, it would become stronger if we permit free markets to work, and allow the next-generation to live unburdened by our mistakes and arrogance.
  • Capitalism remains the best economic system on the planet, but when those who have profited handsomely seek to socialize losses caused by their errors, then those in power in Washington have a moral responsibility to demand an accounting.  Our anger comes from the fact that our leaders have failed in their public obligations at the expense of the interests on Wall Street, and in the process created the greatest social divide that this country has seen in the past 40 years.
  • our nation has one of the highest ratios of debt to GDP on the globe
  • Finally, the administration should demand (I know it won’t) that Goldman Sachs return the approximately $13 billion it received in backdoor payments through AIG when AIG received $180 billion in bailout money. That $13 billion belongs to the taxpayers of this country, and the decision to allow Goldman to receive that money perhaps stands as the greatest moral outrage of this entire sordid affair.  
  • Looking back more eighteen months after the first signs of distress in our economy appeared, it seems that leaders in Congress and Wall Street have erred in a manner never before witnessed in this nation.  In the process, they have conspired through their collective arrogance, greed, and ignorance to damage the economy of the country (if not the world), make many themselves rich beyond the imaginations of most Americans, and in the process commit the greatest financial rape of the American public in the history of the country.  And if that does resonate, then either you have not been paying attention for the past two years, or you have received your paycheck form Goldman Sachs.
  • The proposal in question was Ryan's "Roadmap for America's Future," a sweeping plan to stave off the nation's looming economic and fiscal collapse by changing the tax code, overhauling the health care system, and reforming the nation's major entitlement programs. Its debt-reducing claims aren't based on mere fantasy -- the Congressional Budget Office has determined that the plan would boost economic growth while making Medicare and Social Security solvent. And it accomplishes these aims without raising taxes or affecting the benefits of current retirees.
  • There's no doubt where the Treasury will turn for finance. We are about to see the greatest stuffing of banks with government securities the world has ever seen. American banks will be forced to gorge on Treasury securities, and disgorge bank reserves. Where else can the government get the next trillion to spend on things like wars, unemployment benefits, and food stamps?There are a few obvious things to think about here. At the rate of $120 billion a month, it will only take about nine months to blow through over a trillion dollars in free bank reserves. Each Treasury auction will find it more difficult to sell all of the treasury securities, and it will take rising interest rates to coax out even more reserves from the banks. (When you need to borrow over $4 billion a day, even a trillion dollars doesn't last long.)
  •  
    Wow!  This is the best response to the financial collapse i have read to date.  Exceptional in clarity, but written with a tone of mixed sorrow and shame.  Mr. Gallow places the blame exactly where it should be placed.  It's a generational thing with one exception Mr. Gallow overlooks - the Obama margin of victory was very much due to the massive turnout and votes of post baby boomer generations.  We boomers may have created and caused the financial collapse and destruction of America, but they were dumb enough to put the decline of capitalism and ordered liberty on marxist steroids. excerpt:  .... this is the first time that I have been so angered by incompetence and greed in government and Wall Street to express publicly my own thoughts.  In simple terms, what has dawned on me is that my generation, the "Baby Boomers" between the ages of 45 and 65, has emerged not as not the most significant or talented generation in our history (as we thought we were), but rather as the most self-absorbed and reckless. Because ours will be the first generation in the history of this country to leave to its successors a nation in worse shape than that which it inherited; put differently, we will be the first generation in this nation to have taken from our parents and stolen from our children. .. it is hard to avoid the reality that my generation, the baby boomers who are now approaching retirement, have caused the greatest collapse of the world economy since the 1930s, and in the process damaged this country in ways we are now only beginning to understand. ... Looking back more eighteen months after the first signs of distress in our economy appeared, it seems that leaders in Congress and Wall Street have erred in a manner never before witnessed in this nation.  In the process, they have conspired through their collective arrogance, greed, and ignorance to damage the economy of the country (if not the world), make many themselves rich beyond the imaginations of mo
Gary Edwards

The Daily Bell - Gerald Celente on Multinationalism, Breaking the Chains and Individual... - 0 views

  • Gerald Celente: As I said, they're in a trap and it's a tapering trap, the quantitative easing trap. They can't keep printing more money because it's going to devalue the currency. And by the way, this is complicated, because it's not only the United States that's doing it; most of the central banks are doing it. China, the Europeans – they're all pumping money into their systems to keep them afloat. They're all in a trap. A time comes when you just can't keep doing it anymore. You can only take heroin so much before it kills you. This is monetary methadone and it's not going to cure the problem so they're going to have to stop. When it stops, that's when we go back into a recession and/or a depression.
  • Is it a depression? Is it a depression if you live in Greece or Spain or Portugal? Is it a depression if you're among the over 12% unemployed in Italy? When you look at John Williams's ShadowStats, in the US we're looking at about 22% unemployment. So yes, it's a depression for a lot of people. And then again, median household income in the US, accounting for inflation, is 10% below 1999 levels. That's a fact. So if you're earning 10 percent less for your family than you were in 1999 and the costs have skyrocketed since then, particularly in healthcare, food, rent, property, gas and other costs, do you think you're living in a depression? Daily Bell: Is central banking an art, a science or just a fraud?
  • Gerald Celente: Neither. It's a criminal operation. Throughout the 1800s, one of the major issues of every presidential election was whether or not to have a central bank. They fought it successfully not to have one until 1913. These are private banks that are running our country and many others. This goes back to the scriptures; it's Christ chasing the moneychangers out of the temple. The moneychangers have just got new names – Deutsche Bank, Societe Generale, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, and, of course, JPMorgan Chase got that name because you're going to have to chase them to get your money because they just put a limit on how much you can withdraw or deposit each month in certain accounts, with a limit of $50,000.
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  • Daily Bell: It seems like people don't believe in central banking anymore so why does it continue? What holds it up in a so-called democracy where people have a vote? Gerald Celente: Most people don't even know what a central bank is and they still believe the lie that the Federal Reserve is a quasi-government institution when it's not. It's a totally private bank. Most people don't even know that. So most people are uninformed and like in all countries, they follow their leaders. Very few people rebel. There was an incident that happened in late October in the States. Hillary Clinton was speaking in Buffalo, delivering her model for what is required to solve complex problems. There was a heckler in the crowd who she admonished by saying, "... which doesn't include yelling. It includes sitting down and talking." What patronizing bullshit. You know what happened? The audience of 6,500 stood up and gave her a standing ovation that extended on and on. So it's the people. The people can blame the politicians all they want, but as I see it, it's the people's responsibility for the state of their nation.
  • Daily Bell: What's the employment picture like going forward in the US?
  • Gerald Celente: Lower paying jobs, less benefits, more temporary jobs and I think the question at the end is rather than going forward in the US it should be what's going forward in Slavelandia, because that's what it's become. You get out of college and you're an indentured servant. For the rest of your life you have to pay off your debt for your degree in worthlessness, for the most part. There are degrees that are worth something but not a lot of them. Where are you going to work? Name the company – Macy's? Starbucks? You can become a barista. Are they going to start teaching Shipping & Handling 101 in college? What are they going to do? Who are you going to work for? What are you going to do – stock shelves? This is better than slavery because when they had the plantation you had to take care of the slaves. Now you can just use them up and send them home. It's kind of like Bangladesh right here in the good 'ol USA.
  • Daily Bell: How about the rest of the world? Give us a global summary.
  • Gerald Celente: The global summary is this: Everybody can see what happened when the Federal Reserve talked about tapering several months ago. All of a sudden you saw the emerging markets start to crash; they dropped about 11% in a year before the Fed reversed its policy because all the hot, low-interest rate money that was leaving the US was flowing into the emerging markets, where you could borrow the money cheaply. So when they started to talk about tapering the hot money started flowing out of these countries, such as India, Brazil. They were really suffering from it and so were their stock markets. So without the cheap money flowing from the central banks, the entire global economy goes on stall and then it turns negative. You can see what's going on in China now; they're facing a banking crisis. Real estate prices in cities like Shanghai and Beijing have gone up over 20% in a year and no matter how the government tries to deflate it, the housing bubble keeps growing. The banks also have a lot of bad loans they're carrying. Now the Chinese government is trying to restrain that free-flow of cheap money, and what happens to their stock market when they do? It dives and the contagion spreads to other Asian equity markets. They all start dropping. It's all tied to cheap money and when the cheap money spigot begins to tighten up the global economy goes down. As I've made very clear, when the interest rates go up the economies go down – it's as simple as that. They've run out of this game. Compare this with the Great Depression, when it began essentially in 1930. This recession begin in 2008. It's now 2013 – we're only in 1935.
  • Daily Bell: China and the BRICS seem to be making noises about setting up their own monetary infrastructure without the dollar. Will that happen?
  • Gerald Celente: Yes, they are making noise, but reality is another issue, and the currency issue is complicated. The dollar goes down but where are you going to go, the euro? We were talking briefly about what's going on in Europe. There's financial market propaganda boasting that the worst of the eurozone crisis is over. They're bragging that The GDP of Spain was just reported to have gone up 0.1% and they made a big deal out of it. "The recession's over" is the B.S. message. No, the recession is not over! They're cooking the numbers to make a rotten situation look less rotten. In countries like Greece and Spain, youth unemployment is running above 50% and overall unemployment around 30%. The recession continues unabated, and there's absolutely no way out of this and they can't print their way out. Portugal, Italy, Greece, Spain, Ireland are doing terrible – what would anyone substitute euros for dollars? And what other currency choices are there, the yuan? As I mentioned, China has plenty of its own problems. They've been dumping a lot of cash into that society to keep it going. You know what China's greatest fear is? It's not the Spratly Islands or the South and China Sea territorial problems that are going on between them, the Philippines, Vietnam or the Japanese. China's greatest fear is its people. They've got 1.2 billion of them and if they're hungry or not happy there's going to be a lot of problems.
  • Again, what do you substitute the dollar for, Brazil's real or the Indian rupee? Remember, we saw what happened when the hot money started leaving the emerging market countries. The South African rand is also under pressure. The BRIC nations can speak as much as they want and they may have the greatest intention to create another reserve currency, but the fact is their economies are not robust or independent enough to create one at this time. As I said, talk is one thing, facts are another and although the world is less dependent on the dollar it is still by far the major reserve currency of the world and I don't see that rapidly changing unless there's a catastrophe that would cause it to happen. However, over the years, I do expect a new reserve model to develop.
  • Daily Bell: Let's talk about military action, particularly in Syria where Al Qaeda types have been fighting on the side of the US and NATO. Why does the US want to destabilize Syria and what country will be next – Iran? Russia?
  • Gerald Celente: We wrote about this in the Trends Journal going back to 2011. After Libya fell, Syria was the only port that the Chinese and the Russians had in the Mediterranean – the Port of Tartus. And also, Syria's only real ally in that area is Iran and, of course, Hezbollah in Lebanon. So with Syria out of the way there's nothing in the Middle East other than Iran to stop the continued spread of US influence and control in that area. It's really more about that than anything we see – again, having more control over that area for the US to do as it wants, with Iran really being the main target.
  • When President Obama backed off his red line threat and didn't attack Syria that was a tipping point. And, as important, the vast majority of Americans opposed the attack plan. That was a significant statement. The country said it was tired of war – and so are a lot of other nations.
  • Gerald Celente: Again, talk about morality and the recent Amnesty International report that said the United States was breaking international law in its use of drones to kill people that were convicted of nothing in addition to innocent people. How much more immoral could you get?
  • I can tell you how much immoral. How about starting wars in Afghanistan and Iraq – in Iraq with the proof that a war was started that killed at least a half a million people that was started under fake reasons; lies that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and ties to al Qaeda. An Afghan war that's the longest war in American history, the war in Libya that they called a time-limed, scope-limited kinetic action that's destroyed the entire nation. You want to talk about immorality? How about the "too big to fail"? The government mandated immoral act of stealing money from the American people to give it to the banks, financiers and favored corporations? They say the fish rots from the head down and that's it; the fish has rotted in America for a long time. It didn't start with Obama. It goes back to Bush, Clinton, and keeps going back. Society gets the message from the top and, as I see it, they're simply following their leaders. For example, if their leader can start wars, rob people, take their money, why shouldn't I? Why should I operate on a moral level when immorality is condoned at the top?
  • Most recently, the United States government, in virtually every fashion of behavior, has been fascist. I don't say that by throwing the word out loosely. It's called the merger of corporate state and powers. It goes back to "too big to fail." Under capitalism there's no such thing. You're not too big to fail; you fail. Big, small, medium, you fail – it's capitalism.
  • Not anymore. You have your money taken from you by government order and it's transferred to the people who are the most favored by those in power. That's the only reason why the stock market keeps going up and why the multinationals are doing so well. That's where the $85 billion a month that the Federal Reserve is using in their quantitative easing is going. Then when you look at the other levels of immorality, as I mentioned, why shouldn't people feel as though they can do anything the government is doing? That's why it just keeps getting worse and worse. It's reflected in the music, the politics, every element of culture – both pop culture and political culture.
  • Under the dictates of the eurozone and globalization, the love of one's culture and pride of nation is denounced as "populism."
  • Daily Bell: Let's talk hard money. Can you give us an update on the price action of gold and silver? How about equity? Where is the stock market headed? We think the big boys are trying to rev it up and go for one last killing. Your thoughts?
  • Gerald Celente: The stock market will continue to rise as long as interest rates stay low. That's the best estimate you could give. They keep all of this quantitative easing that, for example, benefits the big private equity firms. Look what's going on in the United States with Blackstone Group. They own 40,000 homes. Where are they getting the money? Deutsche Bank is loaning them tons of money because they're getting money with overnight rates near zero, and they in turn loan it to the "bigs" really cheaply so it is just another example of what's keeping the whole stock market scam going.
  • As long as the money stays cheap the stock market keeps going up. As the money stays cheap gold and silver go up, and you're seeing gold making a bit of a rebound lately because of, again going back to the employment numbers in the States – there is no recovery, the jobs stink, they're not creating enough jobs. The tapering keeps going on, which is a devaluation of the currency, and quantitative easing continues. As long as money stays cheap gold goes up. Now, gold may go down when quantitative easing and tapering slow down. However, that's only going to be temporary because when that happens the bond market's going to explode, when interest rates go up, there's going to be another financial crisis. My best analysis at this time is the second quarter of 2014. The 'experts' are saying the stock market is booming. It has gone from a 14,000 high in 2007 to mid-15,000 now. Accounting for inflation, the stock market has to be about 15,750 just to be back at the 2007 level.
  • Daily Bell: There are other trends, of course, ones you often mention. You spoke to us last time about the New Millennium Renaissance.
  • Gerald Celente: Back to the renaissance... To me, that's the only thing that's going to change the future. We need a cultural, artistic and moral redevelopment, a restoration. Every issue that we've been talking about so far is based on human behavior and the human spirit – morality or immorality. Until morality is restored and the human spirit rises, nothing's going to change. As I was mentioning before, the fish rots from the head down. If you see the people at the head acting immorally, and from the head all the way down, why shouldn't you or I act immorally? What license do they have to steal that we don't? What license do they have to kill that we shouldn't?
Paul Merrell

U.S. Wages Have Fallen EVERY Quarter of the 'Recovery' - Jeff Nielson | Sprott Money - 0 views

  • For 6 ½ long years, we have been bombarded with the mythology known as “the U.S. economic recovery” by the mainstream media. Exposing this fantasy is simple, since the gulf between myth and reality has grown to such absurd proportions.There is no better starting point than the farcical claim by Barack Obama that “10 million new jobs” have been created during this non-existent recovery. In fact, the U.S. government’s own numbers show that the total number of employed Americans has fallen by more than 3 million over that span, in spite of the population growth over those past 6 ½ years.
  • Updated, the U.S. civilian participation rate has now fallen to a 36-year low, and as the chart clearly shows, it has fallen at a faster rate since the start of this mythical recovery.The lie: “10 million new jobs created”. The fact: more than 3 million jobs lost. This is a reality-gap of 13 million jobs, or exactly 2 million jobs per year. The U.S. economy hasn’t been “creating” 1.5 million new jobs per year. It’s been losing roughly ½ million jobs every year of this fantasy-recovery.Then we have the “heartbeat” of the U.S. economy, its velocity of money. A chart of this heartbeat shows that it has plummeted far lower than at any other time in the 56-year history of this data series. This doesn’t merely show a dying economy, it shows a dead economy.
  • As for the supposed “GDP growth” over this 6 ½ year span, falsifying this statistic requires nothing more than lying about the rate of inflation. Here again, the lie is obvious. The U.S. (and other Western governments) pretend that inflation is near-zero, while in the real world, food and housing prices have been soaring at the fastest rate in our lifetime over the past 10 – 15 years.Then we have U.S. energy consumption. Again the picture is clear. Overall U.S. energy consumption peaked in 2007 and has been falling since then, while official gasoline consumption has been plummeting for several years. Growing economies use more energy. Shrinking economies use less energy. Case closed.All this is old news to regular readers, however. What has been less easy to document in any sort of definitive way has been the fall in U.S. wages. The problem is that to express wages meaningfully, we must use “real dollars”, i.e. we must adjust these wages for inflation. With the U.S. government only providing nominal data about U.S. wages, and consistently lying about the actual inflation rate; we have lacked the data to make any conclusive statement.A recent boast by the U.S. government/Corporate media (i.e. another false claim) has now provided us with a clearer picture here, going back to the beginning of this imaginary recovery. In trying to downplay the absence of any wage-growth in the U.S. in Q2 of this year; the propaganda machine made this claim:…That is down from a 2.6 percent increase in the first quarter [of 2015], which was the biggest in 6 ½ years. [emphasis mine]
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  • The claim is that nominal wages in the U.S. rose at the fastest rate “in 6 ½ years” in the first quarter of 2015, i.e. the highest rate during the entire pseudo-recovery. Now let’s discount that number with the (real) rate of inflation, in order to get a real-dollar number for U.S. wages.
  • Thus the U.S. government itself has now provided us with a definitive picture on U.S. wages. During Q1 of this year, the high-water mark for U.S. wage “growth” during the entire Recovery; U.S. wages were still falling. Ipso facto, U.S. wages have been falling every quarter of this recovery.Now we begin to see the whole truth in the U.S. labour market, versus the absurd, official claim of lots of “new jobs” and “rising wages”. U.S. employment has been falling, not rising, every quarter, every year. U.S. wages have been falling, not rising, every quarter, every year. But that picture is still incomplete.The total number of hours worked by the Working Poor is also falling, and in 18 out of 20 of the U.S.’s industrial sectors, total number of hours worked is still lower than during the so-called Great Recession. This is also reflected in the fall in the percentage of full-time employees.
  • To summarize: since the beginning of the imaginary U.S. economic recovery, there are millions fewer Americans who are now employed. Their wages have been falling for every quarter of the “recovery”, and they are also working fewer hours. Growing economies create more jobs; shrinking economies lose jobs. Strong economies have rising (real) wages; weak economies have falling wages. Once again we see the supposed U.S. recovery is pure mythology.However, with respect to the destruction of the U.S. standard of living, to truly appreciate what has been done to the U.S. population (and the populations of nearly all of the Corrupt West), we must look at the picture over a much longer term. In the 40 years before the beginning of this imaginary recovery, the wages of the Average American fell by roughly 50% (in real dollars).
  • Now the descent of the majority of the U.S. population to Third World status becomes crystal clear. From 1970 to the beginning of 2009 (i.e. the current “recovery”), U.S. wages fell roughly 50%. Then came the mythical Recovery, and U.S. wages have continued to fall, quarter after quarter after quarter. The Great Recovery has been worse than the Great Recession which came before it.What do we call it when a nation experiences a “great recession”, and then the economy continues to crumble at an even faster rate after that, year after year? We call it a Greater Depression.Shrinking economy. Losing jobs. Falling wages. Declining energy consumption. No “heartbeat”. Has anything been left out, in describing this U.S. economic Armageddon? Certainly.The U.S. government is obviously bankrupt. The U.S. dollar is obviously worthless. The U.S. economy has been run completely into the ground. When the current, assorted bubbles are deliberately popped (almost certainly in 2016, or late-2015), and Old-Man Buffett goes on a massive shopping spree with the $60+ billion he is now currently hoarding; there will be nothing left but economic rubble. And Milton Friedman will be smiling, from (way) down in his final, resting place.
Gary Edwards

The Imminent $2.5 Trillion Debt Ceiling Hike Will Unleash A Gold Price Surge To $1,950 ... - 0 views

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    Tyler Durden does the numbers and presents us with a jaw dropping chart.  Simply put; $2.5 Trillion in new debt ceiling equals $2.5 Trillion in newly printed dollars.  And Gold will go up exactly in lock step with the rising debt ceiling. excerpt: Two weeks ago we presented a chart that shows the uncanny correlation between the debt ceiling and the price of gold. Now that we know the final amount of the next debt ceiling hike, somewhere in the $2.5 trillion ballpark, it allows us to extrapolate where gold will end up as a result of the debt ceiling hike which will likely be voted into law at 7pm PDT. A simple correlation rule of thumb allows us to predict that gold will be at $1,950 by the end of the year if it simply retains it close correlation to the debt ceiling. Should Bernanke announce that he will additionally need to monetize some or all of this incremental debt amount, we anticipate that gold will be well over $2,000 by the end of the year, courtesy of yet another round of accelerated dollar debasement, which also means that real gains in US stocks will be negated courtesy of the devaluation of the currency in which they are priced. The same, however, does not apply for gold, which with every passing day is priced in nothing but itself.
Paul Merrell

The EU Demands Argentina to Ban Food Exports to Russia: Arrogance and Stupidity | Globa... - 0 views

  • Imagine – Argentina – and the rest of Latin America – being urged by the EU, ultimate puppet of the US not to supply Russia with food stuff – vegetables, fruit, meat – after Argentina was ‘punished’ by a corrupt court in New York to pay 1.5 billion dollars to the fraudulent NML Capital et al vulture funds – out of its current agreed upon debt of US$29 billion – equivalent to Argentina’s total reserves. And yes, the hedge funds have to be paid 100%, when the remaining 93% of creditors agreed on a 20% reimbursement rate. – And, yes, Mr. Griesa, the bought NY judge, has blocked all of Argentina’s payments to the other creditors, unless his vulture clients are paid in full. So, Argentina is in forced default – having to pay now much higher interest rates on international money markets, if she is indeed still eligible for international credits. Unimaginable but true.
  • Under these circumstances, the boundless arrogance of Brussels expects Argentina to ascend to the US / EU sanctions on Russia to which Russia responded by banning all imports from the EU? – And is now seeking trading with South America? Not that Russia really needs food from South America – there is an enormous and willing Asia market open to them. Russia’s gesture is a helping hand to Argentina and South America to free themselves from the economic and political pressures constantly exerted on them by Washington. Argentina will laugh at such a ridiculously stupid request from the EU. Good for Russia – and good for Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Peru et al – to finally escape the claws of the predator empire of Washington and go the way of independence, namely towards a new area of economic sovereignty and world monetary system. Good for the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa), as they may finally come to a consensus among themselves and issue their own currency, backed by about one third of the world’s economic output and about half the world’s population.
  • If the BRICS are not yet ready with an alternative, dollar delinked currency to replace the western predatory money machine, Russia and China are. The two countries have forged a solid political and economic alliance during the past few years, have a combined GDP of US$ 21.1 trillion (China – US$ 19 trillion; Russia US$ 2.1 trillion – est. 2014), equal to about 27% of the world economic output – US$ 77.8 trillion (est. 2014). Russia has already announced that the ruble is backed 100% by gold – which is not a reference in itself, but enhances the solidity of their countries’ manufacturing and construction output. This compares with a US GDP of US$ 17 trillion, mostly based on the output of the war and security industrial complex, meaning a GDP of destruction – and on consumption, as well as hollow financial and legal services. While the BRICS are getting their act together, it is conceivable that Russia and China will issue shortly their own combined currency – the ‘Ruyuan’ or the ‘Yuanru’, delinked from the corrupt, predatory western monetary system; a new monetary alliance could also replace the dollar as reserve currency. Controlling more than a quarter of the world’s economic output and a majority chunk of the Asian market, a combined China-Russian currency would have an infinitely more solid backing than has the fiat dollar – as well as meanwhile also the fiat euro – to become a serious reserve currency. – It is only a question of time until much of the rest of the world will jump on the occasion and abandon the dollar.
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  • Peter Koenig is an economist and former World Bank staff.
Paul Merrell

Judicial Watch Played Into The Government's Hands -- Americans Are Blinded By Agendas -... - 0 views

  • Disinformation succeeds because so many people and interest groups across the political spectrum find that it serves their agendas as well as the agenda of the government. Consider for example the explanation of 9/11 that blamed Muslim terrorists for the attack. This served the interests of the neoconservatives, the private armaments companies, the US military, the private security companies, government security agencies such as the CIA, the left-wing, the right-wing, the Israel Lobby, and the print and TV media. The official explanation gave the neoconservatives the “new Pearl Harbor” that they needed for their program of invasions of Middle Eastern countries. The private armaments companies could look forward to decades of high profits. Wars always bring the military rapid promotions and higher retirement benefits. Private manufacturers of security equipment and spyware enjoy a rising demand for their products and have grown fat from the products sold to the TSA and NSA. Homeland Security has vastly expanded the federal workforce and administrative positions. The left-wing has proof of “blowback” caused by US interference in the internal affairs of other countries. The right-wing has proof that America has enemies against whom defense at all costs is necessary. The Israel Lobby has the US to overthrow the regimes in the way of Israel’s territorial expansion. The media has the story of the century with which to boost ratings and curry the favor of government.
  • In other words, the government’s story cannot stand the light cast by the facts and independent experts, and the government’s false story must be protected by shutting down the truth-telling experts. The government, Sunstein argued, needs to either gain control over these experts or to shut them down. Just as many different collections of interest groups and people have stakes in the Obama regime’s story of the killing of Osama bin Laden by US Navy SEALS in Abbottabad, Pakistan. This story and its selling by an enthusiastic media guaranteed Obama’s reelection. It served the emotions of super patriots desperate for revenge who wear their gullibility on their sleeves. It served the myth of CIA and NSA prowess. It served the reputation of the killing power of US Special Forces teams. It proved that America won even though it lost the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. All the trillions of dollars spent were worth it. We got revenge on the guy who did 9/11. No one remembered that the US government, unable to find bin Laden for 10 years, had settled on a different “9/11 mastermind,” Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and had him water-boarded 183 times until he confessed to being responsible for 9/11. If Khalid Sheikh Mohammed “was responsible for the 9/11 operation from A to Z,” why were SEALS sent, illegally, into Pakistan to murder bin Laden? As the FBI says, there is no evidence that bin Laden is responsible for 9/11. That is why bin Laden was not wanted on that charge by the FBI, as the FBI publicly stated.
  • How was bin Laden, who was known in 2001 to be suffering from terminal illnesses, including renal failure, and whose death was widely reported in 2001 still alive ten years later to be murdered by SEALs? What sense does it make that the greatest terrorist leader of our time only had two unarmed women to protect him. What sense does it make that the US would murder the terrorist mastermind with all the plots in his head instead of capturing and questioning him? How can anyone be so gullible as to believe such a nonsense tale as told to them by Obama and the presstitute media? Is America really a nation of utter fools? Like the 9/11 story, the story of bin Laden’s murder is losing credibility with the US population. Pakistani National TV shot Obama’s story down with an eyewitness interview that reported that not one single person, dead body, or any piece of evidence left Abbottadad, because the only helicopter that landed blew up when it attempted to leave and there were no survivors. No other helicopters landed. So there was no dead bin Laden to be buried at sea (there are no known witnesses to the alleged burial) and no photographs of a dead bin Laden.
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  • Judicial Watch has been trying to pry the (nonexistent) photos of a dead bin Laden from the government’s hands. For “national security reasons” the US government does not want anyone to see evidence that supports its far-fetched tale of bin Laden’s murder. The photographic evidence of a successful raid are off limits. They are like the alleged videos of the airliner hitting the Pentagon that we are not permitted to see for “national security reasons.” In other words, the photos and videos do not exist and never did. No government, not even the American one, would be so totally stupid as to withhold the evidence for its claims. The government, seeing its unbelievable stories lose believability at home and abroad used Judicial Watch’s lawsuit to boost the credibility of its story. Judicial Watch filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit for the photos that the Obama regime alleged to have of the murdered bin Laden but refused to release. Obviously, the government has no such photos and never had any such photos. But the government does not need evidence when it can rely on the gullibility of the American people.
  • As the government had no photos to release, the US government decided to use the opportunity presented by Judicial Watch to bolster its story that photos of bin Laden murdered and dead were once in its possession. The government released to Judicial Watch a document under the Freedom of Information Act that is an order from Special Operations Commander Admiral William McRaven to “destroy immediately” the photos of the dead bin Laden. Judicial Watch took the bait. Instead of realizing that there was no reason whatsoever for the government to destroy the only evidence that might support its claim to have murdered bin Laden, Judicial Watch focused on the illegality of destroying the evidence. Judicial Watch says that “Federal law contains broad prohibitions against the ‘concealment, removal, or mutilation generally’ of government records.” http://www.globalresearch.ca/top-pentagon-leader-ordered-destruction-of-bin-laden-death-photos/5368389 Judicial Watch played into the government’s hands. Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton was maneuvered by the government into defining the scandal as the destruction of evidence, “revealing both contempt for the rule of law and the American people’s right to know.” To the contrary, the real scandal is the massive lie that bin Laden was killed by a SEAL raid and the acceptance of this lie by the American people and Judicial Watch.
  • By damning the government for destroying evidence, Judicial Watch has given credibility to the government’s claim that SEALs murdered Osama bin Laden. The SEAL team credited with bin Laden’s murder was quickly eliminated when the team was loaded onto a 1960s vintage helicopter in Afghanistan. Apparently the team members were asking one another, “Were you on that mission that killed bin Laden?” Of course, no one was, and this information was too dangerous for the Obama regime.
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    Paul Craig Roberts goes on record as a 9-11 Truther and as a deep sceptic of Obama's claim that Seal Team 6 killed Osama bin Laden in 2011. 
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