A Bowl Full Of "Nicely Saids"

All censorships exist to prevent anyone from challenging current conceptions
and existing institutions. All progress is initiated by challenging current
conceptions, and executed by supplanting existing institutions. Consequently,
the first condition of progress is the removal of censorships.– George Bernard Shaw
(1856-1950) Irish comic dramatist
Source: The Author’s Apology, 1902
Do we really want to live in a world of police checkpoints, surveillance cameras, and metal detectors?  Do we want to imprison every disturbed or alienated individual who fantasizes about violence?  Do we really believe government can provide total security?  Or can we accept that liberty is more important than the illusion of state-provided security? Freedom is not defined by safety.  Freedom is defined by the ability of citizens to live without government interference unless they use force or fraud against others.  Government cannot create a world without risks, nor would we really wish to live in such a fictional place.  Only a totalitarian society would even claim absolute safety as a worthy ideal, because it would require total state control over its citizens’ lives.– Dr. Ron Paul ( http://bit.ly/qYJv6P )
I never liked the atmosphere of Washington. I early saw that it was impossible to build up a race of which the leaders were spending most of their time, thought and energy in trying to get into office, or in trying to stay there after they were in.”– Booker T. Washington.

0% Interest Rates Lock in Inflation

The decision by the Fed, last week, to keep a key interest rate at near zero percent for 2 years is historic because the Fed has never done this before.  This action will have profound negative effect on the U.S. dollar and its buying power.  It also signals that even the Fed thinks the economy is not going to get better for at least 2 years.  This action will affect every American and telegraphs a policy of inflation by the government.  In November of 2009, I predicted this very path in a post called “The Fix is In.”  Back then, I said, “It appears the “fix” is in as far as the road plan for the U.S. dollar and economy.  The government and the Fed appear to have chosen a path of inflation for America and the world.    This is not an official announced plan but it might as well be.”   (Click here for the original post.)

Zero percent interest on a key Fed rate confirms my prediction right along with the rising inflation in just about everything except housing.  In an extensive post about inflation this week, Theburningplatform.com said, “The storyline being sold to you by Bernanke, his Wall Street masters, and their captured puppets in Washington DC is that deflation is the great bogeyman they must slay. They make these statements from their ivory jewel encrusted towers as the real people in the real world deal with reality. The reality since Ben Bernanke announced his QE2 policy in August 2010 is:

 •Unleaded gas prices are up 45%.
 •Heating oil prices are up 46%.
 •Corn prices are up 71%.
 •Soybean prices are up 26%.
 •Rice prices are up 13%.
 •Pork prices are up 31%.
 •Beef prices are up 25%.
 •Coffee prices are up 38%.
 •Sugar prices are up 48%.
 •Cotton prices are up 13%.
 •Gold prices are up 42%.
 •Silver prices are up 115%.
 •Copper prices are up 23%.
(Click here for the complete and most excellent post from Theburningplatform.com)
The official inflation rate is 3.6%, but anybody with an IQ above 70 knows that’s a statistical lie.  According to economist John Williams of Shadowstats.com, the true annual inflation rate is around 11% (if calculated the way Bureau of Labor Statistics did it in 1980).  In his latest report, Williams warns the dollar is in serious trouble because the Fed is not interested in fighting inflation when it needs to continue propping up the banking system.  The Shadowstats.com report said, “Massive, fundamental dollar dumping and dumping of dollar-denominated assets could start at any time, with little or no further warning.  With a U.S. government unwilling to balance or even address its uncontainable fiscal condition; with the federal government and Federal Reserve ready to prevent a systemic collapse, so long as it is possible to print and spend whatever money is needed; and with the U.S. dollar at risk of losing its global reserve currency status; much higher inflation lies ahead, in a circumstance that rapidly could evolve into hyperinflation.” 
Near zero percent interest rates keeps downward pressure on the dollar, but it will retard the investment needed to create jobs in the private sector.  Peter Schiff, CEO of Euro Pacific Capital, says the banks are sucking up most of the available capital and using it for no-risk trades.  In a recent post also titled “The Fix is In,” Schiff said, “It was bad enough that the Fed held rates far too low, but at least a fig leaf of uncertainty kept the most brazen speculators in partial paralysis. But by specifically telegraphing policy, the Fed has now given cover to the most parasitic elements of the financial sector to undertake transactions that offer no economic benefit to the nation. Specifically, it will simply encourage banks to borrow money at zero percent from the Fed, and then use significant leverage to buy low yielding treasuries at 2 to 4 percent. The result is a banker’s dream: guaranteed low risk profit. In other words it will encourage banks to lend to the government, which already borrows too much, and not lend to private borrowers, whose activity could actually benefit the economy.”  (Click here for the complete post from Mr. Schiff.)
Politicians say they want to create jobs, but they stand silent and let the banks and the Fed do just the opposite.  No one will utter a word about fixing the failed system America has right now.  There is no way to have an economic “recovery” if the banks are allowed to be propped up with phony accounting and money printing.  Sour debt needs to be washed out of the system, but that is not happening.  Instead, more debt is piled on, and the few benefit at the expense of the many.  It is not deflation that will ruin life for most Americans; it is inflation that is here and growing.  As George Orwell famously said, “Truth is treason in the empire of lies.”

Breaking The Silver Manipulation Barrier

 The days of manipulating the price of silver are near an end. Why? Because demand is outstripping supply and China has launched a commodities exchange that is not leveraged to compete with the US exchange that is heavily leveraged.

In 2011, so far gold has been the champion investment above and beyond any contender, including stocks and equities. At the announcement of the S&P downgrade of America’s credit rating, only gold showcased immunity. In fact, gold has thrived (as we predicted) in the face of any potential economic threat, from deflation in stocks, to inflation of fiat currencies. Some may wonder, though, where silver has been while its big brother is flexing its investment muscle? While traditionally, silver tends to follow market surges in gold, the past eight months have been rather confusing for the cheaper metal. Admittedly, silver has performed far beyond the predictions of slow witted mainstream skeptics, but it still has not come anywhere near its true potential, especially in light of gold’s incredible strides. Many may be wondering how it was possible for gold to stampede into the $1800 an ounce range after the downgrade while silver stayed completely static at around $40 an ounce. The behavior of commodities markets has been, indeed, very strange…

The common assertion by MSM pundits is that because silver has a larger industrial market than gold, silver is affected more negatively when stocks decline. This is absurd logic. Silver is still very much an alternative currency and just as much a hedge against market instability as gold is. All told, silver should actually be MORE apt to increase during economic uncertainty than gold, because of its wider industrial usage and subsequent decreasing supply. The “utility argument” for decreasing silver values just doesn’t fly.

As many are well aware, silver is a much smaller market than gold, with fewer primary players in control of tighter trade. Most of us are also well aware that one of these players, JP Morgan Chase, was exposed as a massive silver manipulator in 2010 by commodities trader Andrew Maguire. Gold and silver investors have been demanding a Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) investigation of such manipulation for decades. These demands fell on deaf ears, and claimants were quickly disregarded as “conspiracy theorists”. Issuers of ETFs (paper silver or gold) have long circulated silver equities supposedly backed by real metal, but when investors began to notice that the amount of paper issued far surpassed the amount of real silver in actual circulation, the scale of the manipulation in progress became quite clear. Global banks were purposely driving down the value of silver by creating the illusion that there is a greater silver supply than there actually is. JP Morgan has also been caught red handed initiating coordinated naked short selling of silver equities as a way to fool average investors into believing that demand for the metal is falling.

With the Maguire revelation, the hope was that the CFTC would finally do their job and take market manipulation seriously. So far, they have not. Maguire’s evidence and testimony have been ignored, investigations were limited to a few pointless committee hearings, and the global bank ETF fraud continues.

Another snake in the grass when it comes to precious metals investment is the COMEX itself. The COMEX is not a free market by any means of the term. It is in fact a highly micromanaged exchange owned and operated by an organization called the CME Group based out of Chicago. CME is the preeminent hand in the flow of trade in all commodities (at least until recently). Their main method for stifling the rise in metals is the use of “margin hikes”. Buying silver equities “on margin” allows investors to borrow capital from a company with a certain percentage of their own cash as collateral, in order to get more silver than they would using their personal funds alone. When the silver margin sits at 50%, for example, an investor with $10,000 can borrow from the company to buy $20,000 worth of securities (ETFs). However, if the CME increases the margin from 50% to 75%, that investor will have to quickly increase his collateral by 25% or lower his silver holdings. CME has the ability to make these changes at will, and such margin hikes have the ability to trigger massive sell-offs in metals, especially silver. In May of this year, as silver edged towards $50 an ounce, CME hiked margins four times! Three times in the span of only seven days! Investors scrambled to unload their ETF’s, which they could no longer afford to collateralize, and silver’s price plummeted to around $30 an ounce.

The CME (and the idiots who defend the CME) often claim that they must raise margins aggressively in order to offset market volatility caused by “speculators”. Strangely, though, there was NO VOLATILITY in silver markets in May. Not until the CME actually increased margins, creating an engineered dump of equities. This forced reduction in silver prices also greatly benefits consistent short selling manipulators like JP Morgan and HSBC, but that’s just a coincidence, I’m sure.

Obviously, someone out there does not like the idea of silver crossing the historic $50 an ounce mark…

So, the next logical question is; how long will this manipulation go on, and how can we fight back? The keys to the end of commodities manipulation may already be in play, while methods for combating centralized control of metals are increasing. Here’s why…

China Competes With The Comex

As of this summer China now has its own Comex, called the Hong Kong Mercantile Exchange. The exchange opened for trade on May 18^th (the CME’s incredible margin hikes in silver began only weeks before, which suggests to me that they were trying to preempt the positive effects the HKMEX would have on metals). The HKMEX moved into action only five months after the Chinese Pan American Gold Exchange was instituted. The exchange issues its own ETF’s in gold and silver. These securities, though, are not based on leverage or derivatives like most Comex based ETFs. The bottom line; the Comex global monopoly on commodities trade is over:

http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/bizchina/2011-01/13/content_11846539.htm

http://af.reuters.com/article/metalsNews/idAFL3E7II0W920110718

This would explain gold’s unstoppable expansion into the $1800 range, and how silver was able to climb back after the CME’s brutal margin manipulation into the $40 range. Only last week, the CME issued a margin hike on gold of 22%. Despite this the fall in gold was minimal, showing that their influence, though vast, is beginning to wane. With competition, manipulation becomes more difficult, and room for growth is created.

The new Hong Kong Exchange coupled with the now explosive buying of physical PM’s by Chinese consumers is slowly but surely overriding the long prevailing manipulations of corporate robber barons intent on ensuring gold and silver are never treated as a currency alternative to the dollar. Silver markets in the East were set into motion a bit more slowly than gold markets were, but given a little more time, I suspect that the resultant spike in silver prices will be the same.

Global Silver Investment Growing

World investment in silver rose by an impressive 40% in 2010 and industrial use increased by 12%, while global supply from mining production only increased by 5%. Growth of demand severely outweighs the growth of supply. After the opening of the HKMEX, China rushed into silver markets. The CME margin hikes that caused the substantial drop in silver spot price in May only served to create a buying opportunity for those investors smart enough to see the writing on the wall. After the S&P downgrade of the U.S. AAA credit rating, silver values did not skyrocket like gold’s, but in the face of extensive manipulation attempts by the CME and major banks, silver’s steadfast hold to its current prices says quite a bit about is resiliency.

One very important factor to consider is that silver is the common man’s currency, and has been for thousands of years. Both gold and silver are solid hedges against financial crisis, especially inflation. However, silver retains more accessibility. As gold continues its climb into the thousands of dollars per ounce, silver will become more appealing to those of us who want to protect our savings, but can’t afford gold. Being that the economic crisis we currently face is unfolding in almost every nation, the demand for a safe haven will increase exponentially. It is only a matter of time before silver is engulfed by an enormous surge of buyers.

With the Federal Reserve continuing to print progressively devaluing dollars, the European Central Bank announcing its own TARP measures, and China in the midst of a full-on inflationary battle royale, national currencies are undoubtedly losing market favor. Gold’s price will soon become unreachable for common people, but silver will be there to fill the void.

How To Break The Barrier

Methods for smaller investors to fight back against the market manipulations of large banks have been sparse, and often limited to desperate appeals to the CFTC and the government, who are bought and paid for, and who have no intention of ever stopping global financiers from dragging their unwashed behinds across the face of the planet. Relying on bureaucrats to mend the wounds they themselves encouraged or inflicted is foolhardy, to say the least. Top down solutions are NOT an option now, and I’m not sure if they ever were. This leaves us with only one other choice; to fix the problem with our own hands from the bottom up. This is, of course, easier said than done…

In the case of silver manipulation, what we are faced with is an unprecedented effort to subvert and suppress an alternative system so that the mainstream system can continue to assert control over our financial lives. To effectively confront this issue, we must first end our reliance of the mainstream system. The longer we continue to participate in the fraud, the longer it will go on. Here are just a few strategies for decoupling, and walking away from the rigged game…

1) End The ETF Casino: If you play the ETF lottery, for god sakes, STOP! You are only perpetuating the con-game that is paper silver. While the allure of speed of light silver trade can be overwhelming, the bottom line is that even though you may think you have the market right where you want it, you don’t. ETFs are an amazing rip off. Trade fees can nickel and dime smaller traders to death. ETFs being held, even without trade, lose value through numerous surcharges as companies nibble away at your holdings. Most ETFs also will NOT allow you to take physical delivery of silver when cashing out your equities unless you have extensive holdings, and even then, it may take months for the silver to reach your doorstep. Because banks issue ETFs for silver they don’t actually have, they would never allow you to exchange them for physical if they can help it. Otherwise, the scam would be exposed, and they would be out of business.

Playing the margins is shear stupidity when you realize that global banks are hell bent on suppressing silver values. There is no rhyme or reason to silver ETFs and margin hikes beyond the whims of corporate puppeteers. Mainstream analysts can pretend as if there is a hard science to this brand of investment, but in reality, it is a large and very expensive joke. Unless you have a crystal ball, your only other tactic for discerning when to sell is pure luck. The very idea of the CME being able to control the price of physical by hiking the margins of paper securities that represent silver that doesn’t even exist is a farce beyond reckoning.

Buy physical, not paper. Be a part of the solution, not part of the problem.

2) Vault Storage Depositories: If you aren’t a buy and hold investor, and insist on participating in short term selling strategies, there is an effective (and smarter) alternative to ETFs and the fake paper market. Silver and gold vault storage depositories allow you to buy and store large quantities of physical metal while having the option of liquidating your holdings for cash just as quickly as if you were selling ETFs. Depositories do not charge hidden fees and do not reduce your silver holdings while they are in the vault. What you put in is what you get back. Period.

Because your silver is already sitting in their vault, a mere phone call allows you to liquidate a portion or all of your stock into cash whenever you wish, just like ETFs, but without the fraud. On top of this, depositories will deliver any or all of your silver or gold on demand to your doorstep, usually within 48 hours. If a sizable number of silver investors switched from ETFs to vault depositories, the ETF market would crumble, and market manipulation would end.

3) Encourage Physical Trade: Max Keiser’s ‘Crash JP Morgan’ campaign was an excellent first step in encouraging silver investment by showing average Americans that they can hurt the big banks simply by purchasing something they don’t want you to have. The next logical step would be to, of course, encourage larger ETF investors to demand physical delivery on their holdings by showing them the folly of the market itself, and, to encourage average investors to actually utilize the silver they buy not just to crash the banks, but for organized trade.

The construction of silver based barter markets must become a priority. Owning silver is not enough. We must start to use it in place of dollars if we are to have any control over our own economy. Barter efforts like this are becoming much more common, but we are still a far cry from full scale utilization of alternative currencies. With the implosion of

the dollar, it will only be a matter of time before metals take primacy as a means of trade, so why not get a head start now? Eventually, the increased circulation of physical will allow the free market to determine the natural value of silver and gold, instead of the subjugated paper market, until finally, the mainstream spot price is completely irrelevant.

4) Offer Incentives: For business owners or for those who are involved in private barter, offering incentives to those who pay in physical would encourage more silver investment, and by extension, more silver circulation as a currency. Add a certain percentage above spot price for silver trade, or, offer a discount on goods or services to those who pay in silver. Businesses, for that matter, could very well give their employees the option of being paid in silver, completing the currency circle and the flow of commerce. The more silver is used day to day, the harder it is for banks to control, and the more its value will rise.

All economies larger than a small village need a unit of trade beyond the barter of goods and services. They also need a unit of trade that maintains its value and buying power, instead of devaluing, inflating, and destroying the savings of those who hold it. Precious metals are the only existing option that can take on this role, and silver is the most attainable for average people. There is a reason why MSM analysts and establishment economists have been trying to crush interest in PM’s for years. There is a reason why global banks have gone out of their way to suppress the market values of metals. The second Americans realize there are other choices, other systems for living and working beyond the controlled paradigm we have been handed, the illusion slips away, and centralization becomes a memory. This is true for all aspects of economic structure, social structure, and political structure, not just for silver or gold. Ultimately, though, we have to start somewhere, and silver is as good a place as any.

Former Obama WH Economist: Unemployment Won’t Drop Below 8% Before End of 2012

The White House economic adviser who determined in 2009 that if President Barack Obama's stimulus bill were passed unemployment would not go above 8 percent, now says he was wrong and that he does not think unemployment will go below 8 percent before the end of 2012--the last year of the four-year term Obama won in 2008.
Jared Bernstein, the former chief economist and economic advisor to Vice President Joe Biden, wrote a report along with Christina Romer, the chairwoman of President Barack Obama’s Council of Economic Advisors, in January 2009 predicting that the stimulus would keep unemployment at less than 8 percent. On Monday, Bernstein told CNSNews.com that his projection was flawed.

Massive blow to Obama as appeals court rules against healthcare mandate

Court found that Congress exceeded its authority by requiring Americans to buy coverage

Reversed a lower court decision that threw out the entire healthcare law

Will now move to Supreme Court to be decided

President Barack Obama's healthcare law suffered a setback on Friday when a U.S. appeals court ruled that it was unconstitutional to require all Americans to buy insurance or face a penalty.The U.S. Appeals Court for the 11th Circuit, based in Atlanta, found that Congress exceeded its authority by requiring Americans to buy coverage, but also reversed a lower court decision that threw out the entire healthcare law.
The legality of the individual mandate, a cornerstone of the healthcare law, is widely expected to be decided by the U.S. Supreme Court. Opponents have argued that without the mandate, which goes into effect in 2014, the entire law falls.

Obama has championed the mandate as a way to try to slow the soaring costs of healthcare while expanding coverage to the more than 30 million Americans without it

The law, adopted by Congress in 2010 after a bruising battle, is expected to be a major political issue in the 2012 elections as Obama seeks another term in office and as all the major Republican presidential candidates have opposed it.
Obama has championed the individual mandate as a major accomplishment of his presidency and as a way to try to slow the soaring costs of healthcare while expanding coverage to the more than 30 million Americans without it.
The White House said it strongly disagreed with the ruling and voiced confidence the decision would not stand.
'Today's ruling is one of many decisions on the Affordable Care Act that we will see in the weeks and months ahead. In the end, we are confident the Act will ultimately be upheld as constitutional,' Obama aide Stephanie Cutter said in a statement.

 

More...

• U.S. consumer confidence hits 30-YEAR low as Americans tire of high unemployment, low wages and squabbling politicians
• Mr President, you're history! GOP rivals unite in personal attacks on Obama as they kick-start race to take him on in 2012 election
• Obama pleads frustration to the workers of Michigan before jetting to Manhattan for celebrity fundraiser (then he's off on $50k Martha’s Vineyard vacation)

The Supreme Court is expected to take up the healthcare law during its upcoming term that begins in October with a ruling possible by the summer of 2012, just a few months before Obama faces re-election.
Twenty-six states had challenged the mandate, arguing that Congress had exceeded its authority by imposing such a requirement, but the Obama administration had argued it was legal under the Commerce Clause of the U.S. Constitution.
A divided three-judge panel of the appeals court found that it did not pass muster under that clause or under the Congress' power to tax. The administration has said the penalty for not buying healthcare coverage is akin to a tax.
'This economic mandate represents a wholly novel and potentially unbounded assertion of congressional authority: the ability to compel Americans to purchase an expensive health insurance product they have elected not to buy, and to make them re-purchase that insurance product every month for their entire lives,' the majority said in its opinion.

Decision: Judge Frank Hull, who was appointed by President Bill Clinton, was one of the appeal court judges who deemed the bill unconstitutional

That opinion was jointly written by Judges Joel Dubina, who was appointed to the appeals court by Republican President George H.W. Bush, and by Frank Hull, who was appointed by President Bill Clinton, a Democrat.
Republicans have sought to undercut or repeal the healthcare law at every level of government -- in federal court, in the state legislatures and in the U.S. Congress.
The decision contrasts with one by the U.S. Appeals Court for the 6th Circuit, based in Cincinnati, which had upheld the individual mandate as constitutional. That case has already been appealed to the Supreme Court.
The Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit, based in Richmond, has yet to rule on a separate challenge by the state of Virginia. A federal judge in that state had ruled the mandate unconstitutional as well.
The state of Florida had led the 26 states to challenge the insurance requirement, winning a ruling by a federal judge in Florida that the entire law was unconstitutional.
Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi said: 'Today we have prevailed in preventing Congress from infringing on the individual liberty protected by the U.S. Constitution.'
However, the 11th Circuit did not agree that the entire Obama healthcare law should be tossed out.

Michele Bachmann's presidential campaign includes a strong push to repeal Obamacare and she said the decision was a 'welcome relief'

Many provisions are already being implemented, including allowing children to stay on their parents' health insurance plan until age 26 and banning lifetime coverage limits.
Further, the Obama administration on Friday issued new incentives for states and people to participate in health insurance exchanges, including tax credits and funding grants for the states.
The Obama administration did win some support from the appeals court for the individual mandate.
One of the three judges, Stanley Marcus, dissented from the majority opinion.
The majority 'has ignored the undeniable fact that Congress' commerce power has grown exponentially over the past two centuries and is now generally accepted as having afforded Congress the authority to create rules regulating large areas of our national economy,' wrote Marcus, also a Clinton appointee to the appeals court. 
Michele Bachmann called the ruling a 'welcome relief' and she urged the Obama administration to rethink the entire healthcare bill in light of the ruling.
She said in a statement: 'Removing the individual mandate from Obamacare deprives it of the revenue necessary to pay for the bill.
'Implementing the remaining provisions without the mandate would dramatically increase our budget deficit and do further harm to our economy.'

Jon Stewart: The Media is Pretending Ron Paul Doesn’t Exist

Last night, Jon Stewart questioned why the media has been systematically ignoring Ron Paul.

By all measures, Ron Paul is doing quite well in the 2012 Republican race. Last weekend, he came in a close second behind Bachmann in Iowa’s straw poll, he won the straw poll at this year’s CPAC and he consistently scores in the top three for most other polls.
Yet, as Jon Stewart points out, when the media speaks of the Republican race, most tend to focus on Mitt Romney, Michele Bachmann, and now Rick Perry, in that order, and sometimes Sarah Palin, who hasn’t entered the race and may never, god willing.
So why is the media systematically ignoring Paul as Stewart demonstrates in the video below? Not only do his views reflect the Tea Party’s views (small government, no income tax, greater freedoms), but he responds to debate and media questions with cogent, direct answers, seems to know basic American history, and steers clear entirely of phony so-called patriotic gimmicks like presenting an apple pie to a 100-year-old woman.
Part of the reason may be that Paul’s libertarian approach to issues such as ending the Fed and completely upending American foreign policy are so change-oriented that he appears unelectable and thus not worth taking seriously. This is his third bid for the presidency—he’s proven himself to be unelectable twice now.
But at the same time, with the rise of the Tea Party, 2011 is way friendlier to Libertarian politics than any time in recent history. Part of the reason for the media’s treatment of Paul may be that he’s simply too consistent, logically sound, un-crazy and serious about actual issues to put asses in seats.
With Michele Bachmann’s cringe-inducing socially conservative platitudes and laughter-inducing gaffes, and Rick Perry with his deep tan, Texas swagger and Prayer-a-palooza antics, little old Ron Paul might just frankly not be as good Television.
But if the past is any gauge for the future—and it usually is—Paul and his followers will be holding on tight until the very end. And this election year, with the Tea Party in full swing, is probably the one to take him most seriously.

The United States Of Europe: A Proposed “Economic Government” Would Integrate Europe To A Degree Not Seen Since The Roman Empire

EU moves toward a 'United States of Europe' as a single entity with no remaining national sovereignty. The excuse for doing so is the deepening economic crisis, [but the leaders of the new EU will be the same ones who created the crisis.]

Are you ready for "The United States Of Europe"?  The integration of Europe is about to go to another level.  As the European debt crisis deepens, there are cries all over the EU for full economic integration in Europe.  On Wednesday, French President Nicolas Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel sent a letter to European Council President Herman Van Rompuy which stated that they want a new "economic government" for Europe to be formed.  According to the letter, Sarkozy and Merkel want the leaders of the eurozone countries to "elect" a president for the new "economic government".  The idea would be that the president would hold twice-yearly summits to address the debt problems that Europe is facing right now.  But many pro-EU critics are already howling that Sarkozy and Merkel have not gone nearly far enough.  A whole lot of "experts" in Europe are proclaiming that without full economic integration and the creation of "eurobonds", Europe is doomed.  Jennifer McKeown, an economist for Capital Economics, put it this way when asked what would happen if eurobonds are not created fairly soon: "The likely outcome is the eurozone ceases to exist".
This is often how huge changes occur in our world today.  First a huge problem is created, then there is a negative reaction and then a solution is presented to us.  Right now in Europe, the problem is the sovereign debt crisis.  We are being told that the only way that the eurozone can survive is if all of the countries agree to much deeper economic integration.
In an article for Seeking Alpha, Cliff Wachtel broke down the choices facing the people of Europe in the following manner....

• The continued existence of the EZ in its current form in exchange for vastly limited sovereignty. In particular, with limited financial autonomy, with some kind of centralized budget approval and or spending veto power over individual states.
• Continued full sovereignty in exchange for a dissolved or radically altered EZ, probably one contracted down to member states with similar needs and reliable fiscal management.

Some choice, eh?
While some are applauding the possibility of increased integration in the eurozone, others are warning about the potential consequences.
For example, a Daily Mail article entitled "Rise of the Fourth Reich, how Germany is using the financial crisis to conquer Europe" contained the following assessment of what deeper economic integration for Europe would mean....

This would entail a loss of sovereignty not seen in those countries since many were under the jackboot of the Third Reich 70 years ago.
For be in no doubt what fiscal union means: it is one economic policy, one taxation system, one social security system, one debt, one economy, one finance minister. And all of the above would be German.

Nigel Farage was also deeply critical of the new proposal by Sarkozy and Merkel....

Bit by bit, eurozone members are losing their sovereignty as the European superstate is created. Nothing in these proposals will calm the markets. I am also prepared to bet that the European political elite will not ask the permission of their peoples via a referendum to make this happen.

But Sarkozy and Merkel seem unconcerned about the critics.  In fact, they have announced plans to have a common corporate tax rate by 2013 and to coordinate work on their national budgets.
So if the leadership of the German and French governments both want deeper economic integration for Europe, will anyone else in the eurozone be strong enough to resist it?
Probably not.
EU Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso is already calling the proposals put forth by Sarkozy and Merkel "an important political contribution by the leaders of the two largest euro area economies to this debate and the on-going work."
Countries such as Greece, Portugal, Italy and Spain are already deeply financially dependent on Germany.  Either they will have to leave the eurozone (which would be a financial disaster for them) or they will have to go along with what Germany and France want.
But economic integration in Europe certainly will not be easy.  There is still a lot of resistance in the EU to the idea of a "United States of Europe".  Many in the northern countries are very opposed to further economic integration with the financially irresponsible nations of southern Europe.
Craig Alexander, the chief economist at Toronto-Dominion Bank, recently made the following statement regarding the problems of trying to more fully integrate Europe.

"The problem is the political system in Europe can’t cope with the jump from the current system to a fiscal union in one go."

So it will certainly be very interesting to see what happens.  There still is a very real chance that the EU could break up and the euro could implode.  Absolutely nothing is set in stone right now.
But the leaders of the EU are going to do whatever they can to keep it together.  They truly believe that a fully united Europe under the banner of the EU is what is best for the continent.
In the end, however, the real goal is to unite the entire world.  Regional governments such as the EU are seen as an intermediate step toward a truly global government.  As I have written about previously, the globalists hope one day to have a truly global economy that uses a new global currency.
In a recent opinion piece, former EU bigwig Javier Solana made the following statement....

Truly effective global governance is the strategic horizon that humanity must pursue today with all its energy.
It sounds difficult to achieve, and so it will be. But it has nothing to do with pessimism. The challenge of governing global risks is nothing less than the challenge of preventing the “end of history” – not as the placid apotheosis of liberal democracy’s global victory, but as the worst collective failure we can imagine.

People like Solana truly believe that if we can eventually unite the entire world that it will bring in a new era of peace and prosperity.
Many of them believe that if they can get the world to form 10 or 12 "regional unions" first, eventually they will be able to get all of those regional unions to form one giant global superstate.
Globalists such as Solana are convinced that they are doing this for the good of mankind.  They really believe that war and poverty can be wiped out if we are all under one giant government.
But as we have seen in the past, the larger the governments get, the worse the tyranny tends to become.  Setting up a "one world government" may seem like a good idea to some people, but the truth is that it would set the stage for greater oppression than we have ever seen before.
Those that love liberty and freedom should be 100% opposed to a "United States of Europe" and they should definitely be 100% opposed to a "one world government".

The Real Reason the SEC Has Been Shredding Documents For Decades

SEC Attorney Reveals that Agency Has Shredded Documents for Decades to Cover Up Wall Street Fraud
What should we make of the new revelations by Securities and Exchange Commission attorney Darcy Flynn (background here, here and here) that the SEC has been shredding documents for decades?
As many commentators have noted, the SEC did this to cover up fraud on Wall Street.
The Entire Government Strategy Is To Cover Up Fraud
William K. Black – professor of economics and law, and the senior regulator during the S & L crisis – says that that the government’s entire strategy now – as during the S&L crisis – is to cover up how bad things are:

The entire strategy is to keep people from getting the facts.

Top Government Officials Created the Conditions In Which Fraud Would Flourish
I noted last year:

It is not only a matter of covering up fraud that has already happened. The government also created an environment which greatly encouraged fraud.
Here are just a few of many potential examples:

• The government-sponsored rating agencies committed massive fraud (and see this)

• The Treasury department allowed banks to “cook their books”

• Business Week wrote on May 23, 2006:

“President George W. Bush has bestowed on his intelligence czar, John Negroponte, broad authority, in the name of national security, to excuse publicly traded companies from their usual accounting and securities-disclosure obligations.”

• Regulators knew of and allowed the use of debt-hiding accounting tricks by the big banks
  

• Tim Geithner was complicit in Lehman’s accounting fraud, (and see this), and pushed to pay AIG’s CDS counterparties at full value, and then to keep the deal secret. And as Robert Reich notes, Geithner was “very much in the center of the action” regarding the secret bail out of Bear Stearns without Congressional approval. William Black points out: “Mr. Geithner, as President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York since October 2003, was one of those senior regulators who failed to take any effective regulatory action to prevent the crisis, but instead covered up its depth”

• The former chief accountant for the SEC says that Bernanke and Paulson broke the law and should be prosecuted

• Freddie and Fannie helped to create the epidemic of mortgage fraud

• The government knew about mortgage fraud a long time ago. For example, the FBI warned of an “epidemic” of mortgage fraud in 2004. However, the FBI, DOJ and other government agencies then stood down and did nothing. See this and this. For example, the Federal Reserve turned its cheek and allowed massive fraud, and the SEC has repeatedly ignored accounting fraud. Indeed, Alan Greenspan took the position that fraud could never happen

• Bernanke might have broken the law by letting unemployment rise in order to keep inflation low

• Paulson and Bernanke falsely stated that the big banks receiving Tarp money were healthy, when they were not

• Arguably, both the Bush and Obama administrations broke the law by refusing to close insolvent banks

• Congress may have covered up illegal tax breaks for the big banks

• Of course, deregulation by Larry Summers, Robert Rubin, Phil Gramm and many other high-level politicians and regulators also helped to grease the skids for fraud

Economist James K. Galbraith wrote in the introduction to his father, John Kenneth Galbraith’s, definitive study of the Great Depression, The Great Crash, 1929:

The main relevance of The Great Crash, 1929 to the great crisis of 2008 is surely here. In both cases, the government knew what it should do. Both times, it declined to do it. In the summer of 1929 a few stern words from on high, a rise in the discount rate, a tough investigation into the pyramid schemes of the day, and the house of cards on Wall Street would have tumbled before its fall destroyed the whole economy. In 2004, the FBI warned publicly of “an epidemic of mortgage fraud.” But the government did nothing, and less than nothing, delivering instead low interest rates, deregulation and clear signals that laws would not be enforced. The signals were not subtle: on one occasion the director of the Office of Thrift Supervision came to a conference with copies of the Federal Register and a chainsaw. There followed every manner of scheme to fleece the unsuspecting ….

This was fraud, perpetrated in the first instance by the government on the population, and by the rich on the poor.
***
The government that permits this to happen is complicit in a vast crime.

In other words, the fraud started at the very top with Greenspan, Bush, Paulson, Negraponte, Bernanke, Geithner, Rubin, Summers and all of the rest of the boys.
As William Black told me today:

In criminology jargon: they created an intensely criminogenic environment. I have no knowledge whether the national security aspects played any role, but the anti-regulatory dogma was devastating.

(Here’s the definition for criminogenic.)
I noted last month:

Fraud caused the Great Depression and it has caused the current financial crisis. But fraud is not not being prosecuted, and so it will occur again and again, and prevent a sustainable economic recovery.
Numerous economists have been saying this for years. As I pointed out in March:

Nobel prize winning economist George Akerlof has demonstrated that failure to punish white collar criminals – and instead bailing them out- creates incentives for more economic crimes and further destruction of the economy in the future. Indeed, William Black notes that we’ve known of this dynamic for “hundreds of years”.

Now mainstream journalists are starting to catch on.
Market Watch senior columnist Brett Arends writes:

No one has been punished. Executives like Dick Fuld at Lehman Brothers and Angelo Mozilo at Countrywide, along with many others, cashed out hundreds of millions of dollars before the ship crashed into the rocks. Predatory lenders and crooked mortgage lenders walked away with millions in ill-gotten gains. But they aren’t in jail. They aren’t even under criminal prosecution. They got away scot-free. As a general rule, the worse you behaved from 2000 to 2008, the better you’ve been treated. And so the next crowd will do it again. Guaranteed.

Gretchen Morgenson and Louise Story point out in the New York Times that:

As the financial storm brewed in the summer of 2008 … Federal prosecutors officially adopted new guidelines about charging corporations with crimes — a softer approach that, longtime white-collar lawyers and former federal prosecutors say, helps explain the dearth of criminal cases despite a raft of inquiries into the financial crisis.
Though little noticed outside legal circles, the guidelines were welcomed by firms representing banks. The Justice Department’s directive, involving a process known as deferred prosecutions, signaled “an important step away from the more aggressive prosecutorial practices seen in some cases under their predecessors,” Sullivan & Cromwell, a prominent Wall Street law firm, told clients in a memo that September.
***
“If you do not punish crimes, there’s really no reason they won’t happen again,” said Mary Ramirez, a professor at Washburn University School of Law and a former assistant United States attorney. “I worry and so do a lot of economists that we have created no disincentives for committing fraud or white-collar crime, in particular in the financial space.”

(This appears to be true on both sides of the Atlantic.)
And Frank Rich reports in a much-discussed piece in the New Yorker:

What haunts the Obama administration is what still haunts the country: the stunning lack of accountability for the greed and misdeeds that brought America to its gravest financial crisis since the Great Depression. There has been no legal, moral, or financial reckoning for the most powerful wrongdoers. Nor have there been meaningful reforms that might prevent a repeat catastrophe. Time may heal most wounds, but not these. Chronic unemployment remains a constant, painful reminder of the havoc inflicted on the bust’s innocent victims. As the ghost of Hamlet’s father might have it, America will be stalked by its foul and unresolved crimes until they “are burnt and purged away.”
After the 1929 crash, and thanks in part to the legendary Ferdinand Pecora’s fierce thirties Senate hearings, America gained a Securities and Exchange Commission, the Public Utility Holding Company Act, and the Glass-Steagall Act to forestall a rerun. After the savings-and-loan debacle of the eighties, some 800 miscreants went to jail. But those who ran the central financial institutions of our fiasco escaped culpability (as did most of the institutions). As the indefatigable Matt Taibbi has tabulated, law enforcement on Obama’s watch rounded up 393,000 illegal immigrants last year and zero bankers. The Justice Department’s bally­hooed Operation Broken Trust has broken still more trust by chasing mainly low-echelon, one-off Madoff wannabes.
***
Those in executive suites at the top of that chain have long since fled the scene with the proceeds, while bleeding shareholders, investors, homeowners, and ­cashiered employees were left with the bills. The weak Dodd-Frank financial-reform law that rose from the ruins remains largely inoperative ….

I pointed out in January that fraud is Wall Street’s business model, which is being supported by the government:

Nobel prize-winning economist George Akerlof demonstrated that if big companies aren’t held responsible for their actions, the government ends up bailing them out. So failure to prosecute directly leads to a bailout.
Moreover, as I noted last month:

Fraud benefits the wealthy more than the poor, because the big banks and big companies have the inside knowledge and the resources to leverage fraud into profits. Joseph Stiglitz noted in September that giants like Goldman are using their size to manipulate the market. The giants (especially Goldman Sachs) have also used high-frequency program trading (representing up to 70% of all stock trades) and high proportions of other trades as well). This not only distorts the markets, but which also lets the program trading giants take a sneak peak at what the real traders are buying and selling, and then trade on the insider information. See this, this, this, this and this.
Similarly, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, and Morgan Stanley together hold 80% of the country’s derivatives risk, and 96% of the exposure to credit derivatives. They use their dominance to manipulate the market.
Fraud disproportionally benefits the big players (and helps them to become big in the first place), increasing inequality and warping the market.
[And] Professor Black says that fraud is a large part of the mechanism through which bubbles are blown.
***
Finally, failure to prosecute mortgage fraud is arguably worsening the housing crisis. See this and this.

The government has not only turned the other cheek, but aided and abetted the fraud.
***
And this environment is ongoing today. See this, for example.
***
Even when the government has prosecuted financial crime (because public outrage became too big to ignore), the government has settled for pennies on the dollar [as a way to quietly bail out the big banks].

Economist Noted 150 Years Ago That Corruption At the Top Leads to Lawlessness By The People
I’ve repeatedly noted that corruption at the top leads to lawlessness by the people.
William K. Black – Associate Professor of Economics and Law at the University of Missouri at Kansas City, and the former head S&L regulator – notes that conservative French economist Frédéric Bastiat said the same thing more than 150 years ago.
Specifically, Bastiat said that corruption and “plunder” by government officials causes lawlessness among the people.

NWO Target: White America

“Here in America we are descended in blood and in spirit from revolutionists and rebels – men and women who dare to dissent from accepted doctrine. As their heirs, may we never confuse honest dissent with disloyal subversion.” – Dwight D. Eisenhower

Last month, Paul Joseph Watson’s article called, “DHS Video Characterizes White Americans as Most Likely Terrorists,” highlighted the absurdist propaganda campaign by the Department of Homeland Security to discredit white, middle class resistance to the two-party political establishment in Washington, the private Federal Reserve cartel, and the emerging global dictatorial government. Watson wrote:

A new promotional video released by the Department of Homeland Security characterizes white middle class Americans as the most likely terrorists, as Big Sis continues its relentless drive to cement the myth that mad bombers are hiding around every corner, when in reality Americans are just as likely to be killed by lightning strikes or peanut allergies.

The video is part of Homeland Security’s $10 million dollar “See Something, Say Something” program that encourages Americans to report “suspicious activity,” which in every case throughout history has been a trait of oppressive, dictatorial regimes.

The aim of the DHS is to mask the reality that the greatest sources of terrorism in America and around the world are state intelligence agencies like the Central Intelligence Agency, MI6, Russia’s FSB and Israel’s Mossad, which operate in the shadows, and hide behind the protection of unconstitutional state secrecy laws.
The instrument of false flag terrorism used by secret services is combined with political persecution, both of which are two main characteristics of totalitarian and authoritarian regimes.
Since the propaganda war against Muslims proved successful by producing two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, a new group is now coming under attack by the totalitarian, psyop state in Washington: politically educated white Americans, i.e. people who support presidential candidate Ron Paul, listen to 9/11 truth-teller Alex Jones, and demand the end of the kleptocratic Federal Reserve System.
Americans who care about the security of America and want to restore the constitution are being targeted by the DHS, the Obama administration, and the U.S. intelligence community as “domestic terrorists.” Their dissent is being called terrorism and a threat to the state because the evil establishment sees no other way of dealing with the crises that have been caused by their disastrous economic and political policies.
But the hijackers of the U.S. government can no longer conceal their acts of treason and state terror from the American people and the world. The crimes and deceptions by the Federal Reserve, the CIA, Wall Street, corporate monopolies, Congress, the White House, and the Treasury are bubbling up to the surface of reality.
Scapegoating and demonizing whole groups of people is a tried and true tactic of tyrants. It worked on September 11, 2001 against Arabs and Muslims, who were falsely blamed for the 9/11 attacks. And it will work again, this time against another group for a new crisis or disaster.
That other group is the Tea Party and right-wing Christians, and the new crisis is the economic collapse. Two weeks ago, Vice President Joe Biden accused members of the Tea Party of acting”like terrorists,” in the debt ceiling debate.
The intent behind the “conservatives are terrorists” charge is to make the American people pay for the criminal bankers’s crimes and looting of the public purse. Biden and the entire political class is fine with the financial terrorists getting away with societal murder on Wall Street, but he is annoyed that a large segment of the American population is getting serious about restoring the constitution and bringing America’s debt under control.
Predictably, the non-governmental Federal Reserve, which is the institution that is most responsible for the global economic collapse and the impoverishment of America, is being protected by all agencies of the U.S. government.
The treasonous Fed is a thousand times worse than the Mafia, but it is guarded by brainwashed cops and military forces as if it is a legitimate government institution.
People who protest against the Federal Reserve are smeared as criminals, racists and terrorists. As Paul Joseph Watson writes in his article, “War On Terror’s New Targets: Veterans, Tea Partiers, Anti-Fed Activists”:

In March 2009 it came to light that the End the Fed protests, which took place at banks and regional Federal Reserve branches across the country the previous year on November 22, were being monitored closely by the United States Army Reserve Command, who implied that those protesting against the Fed and the bankster bailout were essentially terrorists.

On November 22, 2008, Alex Jones led a rally at the Federal Reserve Bank in Dallas Texas. The Dallas protest is specifically mentioned in the official Army document. Ron Paul’s brother was also in attendance.

A Rasmussen poll that was published on August 8, 2011 revealed that, “A majority of voters reject the depiction of Tea Party activists as terrorists.” But this propaganda campaign by the hijacked federal government is still in its early stages, so from the standpoint of the tyrants in Washington the American people may come around to their perspective.
Of course, a few false flag terrorist attacks here and there would give a great PR boost to their criminal campaign against white, middle class, Christian Americans who are waking up to the evil new world order.
America and freedom in the West will be completely destroyed if we allow propaganda smoke screens such as “domestic terrorists are a big threat to national security” to distract us from the reality that war criminals and banking looters control our governments. They are the real threat to civilization and global security.
What the crooks in Washington are doing to the American people is nothing new. It is the nature of a corrupt, authoritarian system to deflect public attention away from its crimes and shortcomings, and blame societal problems that it created through its cruel policies on an innocent and powerless group in society.
So as long as the mindless public herd unquestioningly accepts the word of government authority, there will be innocent scapegoats and persecuted groups that totalitarian governments will use to advance their corrupt political agenda.
Kenneth M. Gould, author of the 1944 book, “They Got The Blame: The Story of Scapegoats in History,” said:

“Every normal person resents being “used” by others for selfish purposes. If he knows what is going on, he objects to being tricked into helping carry out plans that do not really benefit himself, but only the propagandist who has deceived him. There are many ways of poisoning the public mind against some scapegoat group, especially when the modern press, radio, and movies are controlled by dictatorial governments or “high-pressure salesmen” for special interests. But behind them you can almost always smell a fraud put over by some “master mind” for his own advantage.

In the free atmosphere of America, such vicious intrigue can never take deep root. Americans don’t like to be suckers.” (Gould: They Got The Blame. 1944. Association Press: New York. Pg. 53.)

The “free atmosphere of America” that Gould mentioned wouldn’t exist today if there wasn’t an Internet which is the greatest free press in human history.
The Internet is a powerful weapon of communication that is allowing the modern descendants of the European Enlightenment to raise public conciousness about false flag terrorism, the political use of scapegoating in America and the West, and the secret agenda to establish a dictatorial world government.
With the power of truth and the Internet on our side, we can counter-attack the authoritarian lies propagated by the major media, break down the cultural wall of silence around 9/11 truth, and destroy the totalitarian propaganda that paints rebellious Americans as “domestic terrorists.”
The terrorists who should concern civilized society are not Muslim extremists or Christian extremists, but the state extremists and terrorists who have captured power in Washington, London, and Tel Aviv. They are destroying the rule of law, freedom, America and global civilization.
“Let’s say Al-Qaeda did 9/11, just for laughs,” said Alex Jones on July 21, 2011, “they’ve used it to set up a grid for the American people. And they’re now telling minorities, who are the majority in most cities, ‘Hey, It’s whitey. Get him.’ . . . So first they tell white racists, ‘Hey, give up your rights cause it’s only for the Muslims,’ now they say, ‘Hey, give up your rights blacks and hispanics, it’s for whitey.’”
In the end, Alex added, “everybody loses their rights.”
The divide and conquer strategy works every time because most people are vain, stupid and selfish who don’t like to think for themselves. The left loves to hate the right, and the right loves to hate the left, not knowing that they are both being played against each other like slaves by a powerful, corrupt and organized oligarchy.
But we can win back all our rights in the West if we stop believing government propaganda and come together to bring the traitors behind 9/11, 7/7 and other acts of state terrorism to justice.

12 Signs That We Are Getting Dangerously Close To War With Syria

Are you ready for another war?  Now that Barack Obama and most of the other major leaders of the western world are publicly calling for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to step down, we are getting dangerously close to war with Syria.  It is not going to happen next week, and it is almost certainly not going to happen next month.  But right now the U.S. government is going down the exact same road that it went down with Libya.  There is all kinds of talk about how Assad has lost “legitimacy”, “human rights violations” have been declared, sanctions have been imposed and Syrian government assets have been frozen.  But just like with Gaddafi, Assad has no intention of ever stepping down.  He is not going to resign just because the U.S. and the EU ask him too.  The opposition in Syria is certainly not strong enough to remove Assad, so just about the only way that it will be accomplished is through direct military action.  Right now the U.S. and the EU are basically painting themselves into a corner with their bold declarations about Assad.  But when the time comes will they be willing to risk starting World War III in order to remove him from power?
So what is all the hubbub about?  Well, the Syrian government has been cracking down on the recent protest movement really hard.  Some human rights groups estimate that at least 2,000 people have been killed and at least 10,000 have been arrested since the protests began last March.
And as we have seen in Libya, the U.S. and the EU are now willing to conduct military operations in foreign nations in order to protect civilians from their own governments.  The precedent for a “humanitarian” military operation has already been set.
But with Syria things are going to be different.  For one thing, Syria has much closer ties with both Russia and China than Libya did.  Russia and China are not about to approve any military operation against Syria.
And the Assad regime is much stronger than the Gaddafi dictatorship.  In Libya, if Gaddafi gets killed the game will more or less be over.  In Syria, taking down Assad will not end things.
Right now it appears that Assad is trying to cool things down.  He has told the United Nations that operations against protesters have stopped.
But that didn’t stop a chorus of leaders in the U.S. and the EU from declaring today that Assad has lost “legitimacy” and that he must step down.
The Obama administration and the EU have now put Assad on the same level as Gaddafi and Saddam Hussein.  There is no going back.  They aren’t going to turn around 6 months from now and say that now it is okay for Assad to stay in power.
They have crossed a line and there is no going back.  It is the same roadmap that was used leading up to the airstrikes in Libya.
The relationship between the western world and the Assad regime will never be the same again.  You can count on that.
The following are 12 signs that we are getting dangerously close to war with Syria….
#1 Barack Obama is demanding that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad step down….

“We have consistently said that President Assad must lead a democratic transition or get out of the way. He has not led. For the sake of the Syrian people, the time has come for President Assad to step aside.”

#2 U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was far more blunt in calling for Assad to resign….

“The transition to democracy in Syria has begun, and it is time for Assad to get out of the way”

#3 British Prime Minister David Cameron, French President Nicolas Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel issued a joint statement in which they demanded that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad step down….

“Our three countries believe that President Assad, who is resorting to brutal military force against his own people and who is responsible for the situation, has lost all legitimacy and can no longer claim to lead the country”

#4 EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton is calling for Assad to resign….

“The EU notes the complete loss of Bashar al-Assad’s legitimacy in the eyes of the Syrian people and the necessity for him to step aside.”

#5 Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper says that Assad should “vacate his position, relinquish power and step down immediately“.
#6 The U.S. government has imposed a fresh round of economic sanctionson Syria.  These include sanctions targeting Syrian oil and gas sales.
#7 There are reports that EU officials will also impose new economic sanctions against Syria on Friday.  These sanctions will also reportedly include sanctions targeting oil and gas sales.  Approximately 90 percent of Syrian oil exports go to the EU, and oil and gas account for about 25 percent of Syria’s GDP.
#8 The U.S. government has frozen all Syrian government assets in the United States.
#9 Presidential candidate Mitt Romney supports these moves against Syria and believes that we need to do more to “move” Syria “toward modernity”….

“America must show leadership on the world stage and work to move these developing nations toward modernity”

#10 At least 12,000 refugees from Syria have flooded into neighboring Turkey, and Turkey has been reinforcing its military forces along the border area.  In recent days Turkey’s warnings to Syria have become more heated.
#11 The United Nations is “temporarily” removing some of its staff from Syria.
#12 A U.N. fact-finding mission has determined that the Syrian government is guilty of multiple human rights violations….

“The mission found a pattern of human rights violations that constitutes widespread or systematic attacks against the civilian population, which may amount to crimes against humanity”

Without a doubt, the pressure on the Syrian government is going to be very intense?
So what if Assad gets desperate?
What will he do?
What is his play?
Well, if he really feels backed into a corner he may pull out one of the only cards that he has left – a war with Israel.
There would be nothing like war with Israel to unite the Islamic world.  It would be a way that Assad could get all of his neighbors in the Middle East back on his side.
But in the event of a war between Syria and Israel, there is a very good chance that the U.S. and /or the EU would intervene.
And that could potentially be the spark that sets off World War III.
Even before this recent crisis in Syria, tensions in the Middle East were rising to very dangerous levels.  Another major war could literally start at any time.  The Middle East is a timebomb that could go off at any moment.
We live in very unstable times, and it is almost as if someday is trying to push the Middle East towards war.  Let us hope for peace, but let us also realize that war is becoming more likely every single day.

Titanic Battle or Insider Trading? The S&P Downgrade and the Bilderbergers: All Part of the Plan?

What just happened in the stock market?

Last week, the Dow Jones Industrial Average rose or fell by at least 400 points for four straight days, a stock market first.
The worst drop was on Monday, 8-8-11, when the Dow plunged 624 points. Monday was the first day of trading after US Treasury bonds were downgraded from AAA to AA+ by Standard and Poor’s.
But the roller coaster actually began on Tuesday, 8-2-11, the day after the last-minute deal to raise the U.S. debt ceiling — a deal that was supposed to avoid the downgrade that happened anyway five days later.  The Dow changed directions for eight consecutive trading sessions after that, another first.
The volatility was unprecedented, leaving analysts at a loss to explain it. High frequency program trading no doubt added to the wild swings, but why the daily reversals?  Why didn’t the market head down and just keep going, as it did in September 2008?
The plunge on 8-8-11 was the worst since 2008 and the sixth largest stock market crash ever. According to Der Spiegel, one of the most widely read periodicals in Europe:
Many economists have been pointing out that last week’s panic resembled the fear that swept financial markets after the collapse of US investment bank Lehman Brothers in September 2008.
Then as now, banks stopped lending each other money. Then as now, banks’ cash deposits at the central bank doubled within days.
But on Tuesday, August 9, the market gained more points from its low than it lost on Monday. Why? A tug of war seemed to be going on between two titanic forces, one bent on crashing the market, the other on propping it up.
The Dubious S&P Downgrade
Many commentators questioned the validity of the downgrade that threatened to be another Lehman Brothers. Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, said in a statement:
“The Treasury Department revealed that S&P’s decision was initially based on a $2 trillion error in accounting. However, even after this enormous error was corrected, S&P went ahead with the downgrade. This suggests that S&P had made the decision to downgrade independent of the evidence.  [Emphasis added.]
Paul Krugman, writing in the New York Times, was also skeptical, stating:
[E]verything I’ve heard about S&P’s demands suggests that it’s talking nonsense about the US fiscal situation. The agency has suggested that the downgrade depended on the size of agreed deficit reduction over the next decade, with $4 trillion apparently the magic number. Yet US solvency depends hardly at all on what happens in the near or even medium term: an extra trillion in debt adds only a fraction of a percent of GDP to future interest costs . . . .
In short, S&P is just making stuff up — and after the mortgage debacle, they really don’t have that right.
In an illuminating expose posted on Firedoglake on August 5, Jane Hamsher concluded:
It’s becoming more and more obvious that Standard and Poor’s has a political agenda riding on the notion that the US is at risk of default on its debt based on some arbitrary limit to the debt-to-GDP ratio. There is no sound basis for that limit, or for S&P’s insistence on at least a $4 trillion down payment on debt reduction, any more than there is for the crackpot notion that a non-crazy US can be forced to default on its debt. . . .
It’s time the media and Congress started asking Standard and Poors what their political agenda is and whom it serves.

Who Drove the S&P Agenda?
Jason Schwarz shed light on this question in an article on Seeking Alpha titled “The Rise of Financial Terrorism”. He wrote:
[A]fter the market close on Friday August 5th, we received word that S&P CEO Deven Sharma had taken control of the ratings agency and personally led the push for a U.S. downgrade. There is a lot of evidence that he has deliberately tried to trash the U.S. economy. Even after discovering that the S&P debt calculations were off by $2 trillion, Sharma made the decision to go ahead with the unethical downgrade. This is a guy who was a key contributor at the 2009 Bilderberg Summit that organized 120 of the world’s richest men and women to push for an end to the dollar as the global reserve currency.
[T]hrough his writings on “competitive strategy” S&P CEO Sharma considers the United States the PROBLEM in today’s world, operating with what he implies is an unfair and reckless advantage. The brutal reality is that for “globalization” to succeed the United States must be torn asunder . . .
Also named by Schwarz as a suspect in the market manipulations was Michel Barnier, head of European Regulation.  Barnier triggered an alarming 513-point drop in the Dow on August 4, when he blocked the plan of Hans Hoogervorst, newly appointed Chairman of the International Accounting Standards Board, to save Europe by adopting a new rule called IFRS 9. The rule would have eliminated mark-to-market accounting of sovereign debt from European bank balance sheets. Schwarz writes:
We all should be experts on the dangers of mark-to-market accounting after observing the U.S. banking crisis of 2008/2009 and the Great Depression in the 1930s. Mark-to-market was repealed at 8:45 a.m on April 2, 2009, which finally put a stop to the short term liquidity crisis and at the same time ushered in a stock market recovery. Banks no longer had to raise capital as long term stability was brought back to the system. The exact same scenario would have happened in 2011 Europe under Hoogervorst’s plan. Without the threat of failure by those banks who hold high amounts of euro sovereign debt, investors would be free to move on from the European crisis and the stock market could resume its fundamental course.
Schwarz notes that Barnier, like Sharma, was a confirmed attendee at past Bilderberger conferences. What, then, is the agenda of the Bilderbergers?

The One World Company
Daniel Estulin, noted expert on the Bilderbergers, describes that secretive globalist group as “a medium of bringing together financial institutions which are the world’s most powerful and most predatory financial interests.” Writing in June 2011, he said:
Bilderberg isn’t a secret society. . . . It’s a meeting of people who represent a certain ideology. . . . Not OWG [One World Government] or NWO [New World Order] as too many people mistakenly believe. Rather, the ideology is of a ONE WORLD COMPANY LIMITED.
It seems the Bilderbergers are less interested in governing the world than in owning the world. The “world company” was a term first used at a Bilderberger meeting in Canada in 1968 by George Ball, U.S. Undersecretary of State for Economic Affairs and a managing director of banking giants Lehman Brothers and Kuhn Loeb. The world company was to be a new form of colonialism, in which global assets would be acquired by economic rather than military coercion. The company would extend across national boundaries, aggressively engaging in mergers and acquisitions until the assets of the world were subsumed under one privately-owned corporation, with nation-states subservient to a private international central banking system.
Estulin continues:
The idea behind each and every Bilderberg meeting is to create what they themselves call THE ARISTOCRACY OF PURPOSE between European and North American elites on the best way to manage the planet. In other words, the creation of a global network of giant cartels, more powerful than any nation on Earth, destined to control the necessities of life of the rest of humanity.
. . . This explains what George Ball . . . said back in 1968, at a Bilderberg meeting in Canada: “Where does one find a legitimate base for the power of corporate management to make decisions that can profoundly affect the economic life of nations to whose governments they have only limited responsibility?”
That base of power was found in the private global banking system. Estulin goes on:
The problem with today’s system is that the world is run by monetary systems, not by national credit systems. . . . [Y]ou don’t want a monetary system to run the world. You want sovereign nation-states to have their own credit systems, which is the system of their currency. . . . [T]he possibility of productive, non-inflationary credit creation by the state, which is firmly stated in the US Constitution, was excluded by Maastricht [the Treaty of the European Union] as a method of determining economic and financial policy.
The world company acquires assets by preventing governments from issuing their own currencies and credit. Money is created instead by banks as loans at interest. The debts inexorably grow, since more is always owed back than was created in the original loans.  (For more on this, see here.) If currencies are not allowed to expand to meet increased costs and growth, the inevitable result is a wave of bankruptcies, foreclosures, and sales of assets at firesale prices. Sales to whom?  To the “world company.”

Battle of the Titans
If that was the plan behind the market assaults on August 4 and August 8, however, it evidently failed. What turned the market around, according to Der Spiegel, was the European Central Bank, which saved the day by embarking on a program of buying Spanish and Italian bonds. Sidestepping the Maastricht Treaty, the ECB said it would engage in the equivalent of “quantitative easing,” purchasing bonds with money created with accounting entries on its books.  It had done this earlier with Greek and Irish sovereign debt but had resisted doing it with Spanish and Italian bonds, which were much larger obligations. On Tuesday, August 16, the ECB announced that it was engaging in a record $32 billion bond-buying spree in an attempt to appease the markets and save the Eurozone from collapse.
Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke was also expected to come through with another round of quantitative easing, but his speech on August 9 made no mention of QE3. As blogger Jesse Livermore summarized the market’s response:
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. . [T]he markets sold off rather rapidly as no announcement was made about  QE3. . . . It wasn’t until . . . the last 75 min of market activity [that] the DJIA gained 639 pts to close at a day high of 11,242. That begs the question, where did that injection of capital come from? The President’s Working Group on Financial Markets? Or did the “policy tools” to promote price stability by any chance include the next round of Quantitative Easing unannounced?
Was that QE3 Incognito, Ben?
Titanic Battle or Insider Trading?


That leaves the question, why the suspicious downgrade on August 5, AFTER the government had made major concessions just to avoid default, and despite the embarrassing revelation that S&P’s figures were off by $2 trillion? Suspicious bloggers have pointed out that Lehman Brothers was brought down by a massive bear raid on 9-11-08, echoing the disaster of 9-11-01; that the S&P downgrade hit the market on 8-8-11; and that the S&P fell exactly 6.66% and the Dow fell exactly 5.55% on that date. In Illuminati lore, these are power numbers, of the sort chosen for power moves.
But we don’t need to turn to numerology to find a motive for proceeding with the downgrade. On August 12, MSN.Money reportedthat it “wasn’t much of a surprise”:
Wall Street had heard a rumor early on that the downgrade was coming. News sites reported the rumor all day.
Unless it was all a huge coincidence, it’s likely that someone in the know leaked the information. The questions are who and whether the leak led to early insider trading.
The Daily Mail had the story of someone placing an $850 million bet in the futures market on the prospects of a US debt downgrade:
The latest bet was made on July 21 on trades of 5,370 ten-year Treasury futures and 3,100 Treasury bond futures, reported ETF Daily News.
Now the investor’s gamble seems to have paid off after Standard and Poor’s issued a credit rating downgrade from AAA to AA+ last Friday.
Whoever it is stands to earn a 1,000 per cent return on their money, with the expectation that interest rates will be going up after the downgrade.
The Securities Exchange Commission announced on August 8 that it is investigating the downgrade. According to the Financial Times, the move is part of a preliminary examination into potential insider trading.
Whatever can be said about the first two weeks of August, their market action was unprecedented, unnatural, and bears close observation.