VANCOUVER, British Columbia, Aug. 29 (UPI) --
People preoccupied with making ends meet had a drop in brain function
similar to a 13-point dip in IQ or the loss of a night's sleep,
researchers in Canada say.
The study, published in the journal Science, suggested a person's
thinking and reasoning ability could be diminished by the exhausting
effort of tasks like scrounging to pay bills and surviving from
day-to-day. As a result, less "mental bandwidth" remains for education,
training, time-management and other steps that could help break out of
the cycles of poverty, the study said.
Jiaying Zhao of the University of British Columbia, who conducted the
study as a graduate student at Princeton University, said poverty
consumes so much mental energy that those in poor circumstances have
little remaining brainpower to concentrate on other areas of life.
As a result, those with few resources are more likely to make bad decisions that perpetuate their financial woes, Zhao said.
Tuesday, September 3, 2013
Labor Participation Rate Hits 34-Year Low
Labor Participation Rate Hits 34-Year Low
by Wynton Hall 29 Aug 2013, 7:28 AM PDT
The percentage of Americans who have a job or are looking for one, known as the labor force participation rate (LFPR), has plunged to a 34-year low, according to a new report from staffing company Express Employment Professionals.
...
"Following the Great Recession, we've entered into the Great Shift," says Express Employment Professionals CEO Bob Funk, who previously served as chairman of the Kansas City Federal Reserve Bank. "This is a period defined by the Boomer retirement, Millennial frustration, and growing reliance on government programs. All indicators suggest this shift is not sustainable."
The New York Times reported on the study and suggested that "another cause [of the Great Shift] may be the rise in the number of workers on disability."
A record 8,733,461 people now receive disability benefits, a figure greater than the population of New York City.
Today, nearly 90 million Americans are no longer in the labor force.
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/08/28/Labor-Participation-Rate-Hits-34-Year-Low
by Wynton Hall 29 Aug 2013, 7:28 AM PDT
The percentage of Americans who have a job or are looking for one, known as the labor force participation rate (LFPR), has plunged to a 34-year low, according to a new report from staffing company Express Employment Professionals.
...
"Following the Great Recession, we've entered into the Great Shift," says Express Employment Professionals CEO Bob Funk, who previously served as chairman of the Kansas City Federal Reserve Bank. "This is a period defined by the Boomer retirement, Millennial frustration, and growing reliance on government programs. All indicators suggest this shift is not sustainable."
The New York Times reported on the study and suggested that "another cause [of the Great Shift] may be the rise in the number of workers on disability."
A record 8,733,461 people now receive disability benefits, a figure greater than the population of New York City.
Today, nearly 90 million Americans are no longer in the labor force.
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/08/28/Labor-Participation-Rate-Hits-34-Year-Low
US exports wealth-creating jobs to China
Watch the full Keiser Report E492 on Tuesday.
In this episode of the Keiser Report, Max Keiser and Stacy Herbert present an American Labor Day special in which they compare the situation for the American worker and consumer with that of the Chinese. They also look at the headlines from China regarding ‘secret gardens’ and contaminated soil. In the second half, Max talks to Dan Collins of TheChinaMoneyReport.com about housing bubbles, infrastructure, food safety and more in China.
Massive Expansion: Pakistan, India, Afghanistan likely to become SCO members
Source: APP
Pakistan, India, Afghanistan and Mongolia are expected to become full members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) at its next summit, said former Secretary General of Ministry of Foreign Affairs Akram Zaki on Wednesday. Speaking at an international conference entitled “SCO’s Role in Regional Stability: Prospect of Its Expansion” organized by Islamabad Policy Research Institute here, Akram Zaki said China and the Russian Federation had supported Pakistan, India and other countries’s membership of the SCO.
Pakistan, India, Afghanistan and Mongolia are expected to become full members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) at its next summit, said former Secretary General of Ministry of Foreign Affairs Akram Zaki on Wednesday. Speaking at an international conference entitled “SCO’s Role in Regional Stability: Prospect of Its Expansion” organized by Islamabad Policy Research Institute here, Akram Zaki said China and the Russian Federation had supported Pakistan, India and other countries’s membership of the SCO.
The SCO is a Eurasian political, economic and
military organization, which was founded in Shanghai in 2001 replacing
the Shanghai Five that came into being in 1996.
At present Russia, China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and
Uzbekistan are members of the SCO while Pakistan, Afghanistan, Mongolia
and Iran have observer status and Turkey, Sri Lanka and Belarus are
dialogue partners. The upcoming summit of the SCO will be held in
Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan on September 13.
Zaki said the criteria for admission of new members was decided in 2010 and 2011. Pakistan, which was admitted to the SCO as observer in 2005, has attended its several meetings and pleaded the case for full membership.
Participation in the SCO meetings has provided Pakistan the opportunity to increase contacts and cooperation with the Russian Federation, Zaki noted.
Experts and officials from Pakistan, Germany, Tajikistan, Belgium, Kyrgyzstan and China participated in the seminar.
Deputy Secretary General of Shanghai Cooperation Organization Mirzosharif Jalolov said people-to-people contacts were important to make multilateral cooperation at SCO meaningful.
He said besides focusing on security issues, the SCO had cooperative arrangements in areas of banking, trade and business.
The experts observed that the SCO, which started as an organization to resolve security concerns, cross border terrorism, and extremism, gradually moved towards political issues and economic and cultural cooperation.
They agreed that the SCO had played a positive role in reducing tensions, settling border disputes, maintaining stability and developing cooperation among the member states.
They termed the withdrawal of ISAF and US forces from Afghanistan in 2014 an important timeline, saying that maintaining peace and stability in that country was vital to ensure regional security.
Thomas Renard, senior research fellow at the Royal Institute of International Relations, Belgium, said the European Union was willing to engage the SCO but at present no mechanism of cooperation existed between the two organizations.
Wang Shida, Assistant Research Fellow at the China Institute of Contemporary International Relations, Beijing, emphasised that China wanted to ensure peaceful environment outside its borders for its own economic development.
China keenly wants peace and stability in Afghanistan, he said and added that it increased its bilateral trade with Afghanistan from $ 250 million in 2002 to $ 500 million in recent years.
Zaki said the criteria for admission of new members was decided in 2010 and 2011. Pakistan, which was admitted to the SCO as observer in 2005, has attended its several meetings and pleaded the case for full membership.
Participation in the SCO meetings has provided Pakistan the opportunity to increase contacts and cooperation with the Russian Federation, Zaki noted.
Experts and officials from Pakistan, Germany, Tajikistan, Belgium, Kyrgyzstan and China participated in the seminar.
Deputy Secretary General of Shanghai Cooperation Organization Mirzosharif Jalolov said people-to-people contacts were important to make multilateral cooperation at SCO meaningful.
He said besides focusing on security issues, the SCO had cooperative arrangements in areas of banking, trade and business.
The experts observed that the SCO, which started as an organization to resolve security concerns, cross border terrorism, and extremism, gradually moved towards political issues and economic and cultural cooperation.
They agreed that the SCO had played a positive role in reducing tensions, settling border disputes, maintaining stability and developing cooperation among the member states.
They termed the withdrawal of ISAF and US forces from Afghanistan in 2014 an important timeline, saying that maintaining peace and stability in that country was vital to ensure regional security.
Thomas Renard, senior research fellow at the Royal Institute of International Relations, Belgium, said the European Union was willing to engage the SCO but at present no mechanism of cooperation existed between the two organizations.
Wang Shida, Assistant Research Fellow at the China Institute of Contemporary International Relations, Beijing, emphasised that China wanted to ensure peaceful environment outside its borders for its own economic development.
China keenly wants peace and stability in Afghanistan, he said and added that it increased its bilateral trade with Afghanistan from $ 250 million in 2002 to $ 500 million in recent years.
Congressional hawks tie Syria to military budget cuts
Washington (CNN) -- It always comes back to the budget.
With Congress facing a
crucial debate on attacking Syria over chemical weapons use,
conservatives are signaling their price for support may be increased
funding for a shrinking military budget.
Two hawkish Republicans
-- Sens. John McCain of Arizona and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina --
went to the White House on Monday to argue their call for a robust
military campaign against Syria intended to significantly weaken the
regime of President Bashar al-Assad.
Implicit with such a
campaign would be the needed restoration of military funding cut by
austerity measures and transformation policies in recent years,
including the forced spending cuts known as sequestration imposed by
Congress for the current fiscal year.
"We cannot keep asking
the military to perform mission after mission with a sequestration and
military cuts hanging over their heads," GOP Rep. Buck McKeon of
California, the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, told CNN
on Monday. "We have to take care of our own people first."
While McKeon made clear
that his concern is about future preparedness rather than current
capability, he argued a bedrock conservative stance against having the
military be a major contributor to cost-cutting in Washington.
"I have no concerns of
their capability. They're the strongest, best equipped, best trained
military," he said. "What I'm looking at is what they've been hit with
the last couple years. Where will they be the next time they're asked?"
Noting that "the world
has not gotten safer," McKeon complained that "we're cutting back $1
trillion out of our military, asking them to do more with less."
McKeon: stop asking the military to do more with less
"That has to stop," he
said, calling for President Barack Obama to "fix" the across-the-board
spending cuts on the military and other discretionary government
spending that doesn't include entitlement programs such as Medicare and
Medicaid.
After meeting with
Obama, both McCain and Graham said they were encouraged by the
president's intended approach, which includes more military aid for
Syria's opposition while degrading the capabilities of al-Assad's
forces.
However, they said they
need more detailed assurances that the U.S. strategy would be
sufficiently strong and sustainable before they could recommend it to
their colleagues, who will vote in coming weeks on whether to authorize
military action.
"There seems to be
emerging from this administration a pretty solid plan to upgrade the
opposition" in Syria and to "get regional players more involved" in
shifting the balance of the Syrian civil war against the al-Assad
regime, Graham said.
Both McCain and Graham
said congressional rejection of a resolution authorizing U.S. military
force in Syria would be catastrophic and undermine the credibility of
the nation and the president.
Syria issue exacerbates budge wars
The Syria issue exacerbates an already hostile budget environment between the two parties.
With fiscal year 2013
ending in four weeks, Congress has yet to pass a 2014 budget and is
expected to consider a short-term measure to extend spending at current
levels for weeks or months to allow time for further negotiations.
A major issue of the
budget debate is whether to recalibrate spending to soften or eliminate
the impact of the forced cuts of sequestration. While both sides say
that is the right move, they remain unable to agree on how to make it
happen.
Obama and Democrats want
to maintain or increase spending on education, technology and
infrastructure, while Republicans seek to shrink overall government
spending. The two sides also differ on tax reform, another key component
of spending policy.
In addition, the government says it needs an increase in its borrowing limit -- the debt ceiling -- sometime next month.
Some Republicans
advocate a government shutdown unless Democrats capitulate on spending
cuts, especially to a call by tea party conservatives such as Sen. Ted
Cruz of Texas to eliminate from next year's budget the funds needed to
implement the 2010 health care reform law.
Congress to debate Syria resolution
Congress will not vote
on Obama's request to authorize the use of force against Syria until
sometime after it officially returns from recess September 9. To launch
the debate on Capitol Hill, Senate and House committees will hold
hearings this week.
Secretary of State John
Kerry, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman
Gen. Martin Dempsey will appear at the first hearing by the Senate
Foreign Relations Committee on Tuesday, sources said.
In addition, Obama will
meet Tuesday with House Speaker John Boehner and House Democratic leader
Nancy Pelosi, as well as leaders of national security committees in
Congress.
Conservatives have increased references to overall military spending in recent days when commenting on the Syria situation.
"I have watched what's
happened in the last 4 1/2 years with the president downgrading our
military," Sen. James Inhofe of Oklahoma, the top Republican on the
Senate Armed Services Committee, told CNN on Friday. "And it's to the
point where we're in a position right now where we don't have the assets
to get involved in another intervention."
He warned that firing
cruise missiles at Syria would inevitably lead to greater involvement
and that administration officials must "make sure that you tell us how
you're going to pay for it, what resources you're going to use, what
assets you're going to use and that they're there."
GOP Rep. Mike Pompeo of
Kansas, who sits on the House Intelligence Committee, argued Monday for a
bigger mission than the limited strikes Obama has said he has been
considering.
"It does us no good to
just lob a few missiles into Syria," Pompeo said. "This is in the
context of an Iranian-backed enterprise with Bashar al-Assad, with
Hezbollah. You have al Qaeda now having the ability to move on the
ground and perhaps get chemical weapons. America has interests that are
much more broad than some short strike could possibly accomplish and so
we need a strategic vision with real definable and achievable goals."
The administration's "flood the zone" strategy
Obama and his team also
emphasize the national security angle when arguing for a military
response to what they call a major chemical weapons attack by al-Assad's
regime on August 21 on Damascus suburbs.
The president, along
with Vice President Joe Biden and White House Chief of Staff Denis
McDonough, was making phone calls to House and Senate members to try to
firm up commitments ahead of the congressional vote.
A conference call with
House Democrats also was planned as part of what a senior administration
official called a strategy to "flood the zone." In the calls, the
official said, the White House will be making the same case it did
during a classified Capitol Hill briefing Sunday.
The argument is that
failure to take action against Syria would undermine the deterrent of
international action against chemical weapons use, emboldening al-Assad
and his key allies -- Hezbollah and Iran -- who will see a lack of
consequences for such a flagrant violation.
On the administration side, there is no mention -- yet -- of the military budget.
Italy imposes tax on high-frequency trading
Italy is first country to impose a levy on derivatives deals. Photo: ehnmark/Flickr.
Italy implemented a new tax on high-frequency trading on Monday, becoming the first country to impose a levy on an opaque and little-regulated market.
It applies to transactions involving Italian stocks or indices and is calculated based on the product's overall value.
A tax on all share transactions was installed in March.
"This is a complete novelty because no country had yet gone so far," business daily Il Sole 24 Ore said.
Investors have been concerned it could cut trading volumes and there have been delays with the new law because of confusion about how it would be applied.
Market operators on Monday noted that trading volumes had gone down, Il Sole 24 Ore said, adding however that it was "premature" to draw conclusions.
"The volumes on contract for difference (a type of equity derivative) with the FTSE MIB index have gone down 12 percent compared to the first few hours of trading last Monday," one operator said.
The report said the estimated yearly intake from the tax is €200-250 million - lower than previous estimates - and there could be additional costs from investor flight to avoid the tax.
Ten other European countries are preparing to introduce similar taxes on financial transactions, a prospect that has concerned experts worried about a possible wider impact on the economy.
AFP (news@thelocal.it)
Labor Day: 90 Million Americans Without Jobs; 36% Of the Population
Over the past four and a half years, we’ve fought our way back from the worst recession of our lifetimes. And thanks to the grit and resilience of the American people, we’ve begun to lay a foundation for stronger, more durable economic growth.Except like everything else coming out of Washington, President Obama loaded his speech with platitudes and wishful thinking, failing to mention the reality of what’s happening in our economy – and especially our labor force.
According to a report from the Bureau of Labor and Statistics, we’re far from having a laid a foundation of recovery and are, in fact, on a trajectory not of durable economic growth, but one of a complete collapse of our way of life.
If the health of our labor force is to be an indication of America’s economic health and survival, then the only plausible assessment is that we are about to flat line as a nation:
The Bureau of Labor Statistics has reported alarming unemployment figures that are reaching the most desperate levels since the Department of Labor began collecting the data during the Truman administration three years after the end of World War II.Over one-third of able-bodied Americans are not working. That is the stark reality of the situation.
On Aug. 2, the BLS reported nearly 90 million Americans were not currently in the labor force in July, with the percentage of the civilian non-institutional population not in the labor force now registered at 36 percent.
…
According to John Williams, an economist known for arguing the government reports manipulated “shadow statistics” of economic data for political purposes, the real unemployment rate for July was 23.3 percent, not the 7.4 percent reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
WND
The President and his Sirens would like us to believe that they have taken the necessary steps to increase the number of jobs and improve wages, but nothing could be further from the truth.
In fact, if anything, it’s a fact that the President’s mandates, such as his healthcare legislation, are turning us into a part-time nation:
The Obama administration continues to discount the huge impact its health overhaul law is having in turning America into a part-time nation, calling reports anecdotal and not based on complete data.For every full time job created in the United States in 2013, we’ve created four part-time jobs. Historically, during times of economic growth and progress, the situation was reversed.
To paraphrase Groucho Marx: Who are you going to believe? Me, or your own eyes?
An avalanche of “anecdotes” continues to pile up as workers across the country are having their hours cut and their health benefits slashed across a broad range of industries.
Everything, from the President claiming we are recovering from the worst recession of our lifetimes to American job creation, is upside down.
The worst part of it?
While Americans celebrate the resilience of the American economy over their barbecue grills today, our nation is being systematically decimated through Obamacare mandates, taxation and a destruction of our currency.
Over the last four years the individual wealth of our nation has been vaporized, and given the policies being implemented by our government, that’s only the beginning of the destruction of the middle class.
We are on a path of pain and impoverishment, and unfortunately few of our fellow countrymen realize what’s really happening.
The next stage of collapse is in our sights, and it isn’t going to be pretty.
Millions of Americans who failed to prepare and insulate themselves from the coming destruction will be blindsided when it hits. Now is the time. Develop manageable and sustainable strategies that will ready you for what’s coming.
All signs point to serious trouble ahead.
PHOTO ESSAY ~~ SOLIDARITY WITH FAST FOOD WORKERS ON LABOUR DAY
For some today is a holiday …. for others it’s a day of struggle.
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Photos © by Bud Korotzer
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….. Let’s make it a Happy Holiday for all!
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Hungary Tells Banksters To Get The F*&%^ Out Of Their Country And Take The IMF With You (Videos)
More countries need to follow suit here. Get the IMF out of every thing
and send it on its destructive way. The global economy is going down in
flames and seeing any country telling these banksters to piss off is
truly inspiring! This is the first step to economic freedom for Hungary.
(Before It’s News)
(Before It’s News)
Heroic Measures
The Hungarians have done it again. As this writer likes to recount
whenever he can, those tough people were the ones who, in October, 1956,
had finally had enough of Jews terrorizing, torturing and murdering
them. As we can relive in David Irving’s Uprising,
they stormed the buildings housing their Jewish overlords in the secret
police and other departments of Communist terror. The freedom fighters
dragged their Jewish tormentors into the streets and killed them. They
shot them and lynched them by the hundreds. Trees and lampposts had
Jews swinging from them all around Budapest. It must have been
glorious.
Incredibly, the Hungarians are again leading the way to freedom from Jewish rule. The Hungarian government has done the one and only great thing that any government can do: it has issued debt-free currency. For the past two years, Hungary has paid off its fake “debt” to the IMF and banking gangsters with the new Hungarian equivalent of 2.2 billion Euros and their formerly dead economy is prospering like mad. This has made the Jews both incredulous and of course very angry.
Do we suppose America could not do the identical things? By that I mean the ’56 thing and the currency thing. These are the two elements of a Defense Against Jewish Aggression. All predatory Jews must be killed, number one, starting with the most notorious and destructive ones. There are so many in this category that we can begin just about anywhere.
Doing this, we shall eventually find ourselves in Manhattan, pulling Jews out of the Federal Reserve Bank, Goldman Sachs, the CFR and the ADL, among other dens of Jewish iniquity. Manhattan is the Comstock Lode of predatory Jews, just as Hollywood is on the other coast. There are dens of Jewish iniquity in every city in America and they must all be eradicated.
People sometimes ask, how can you trust the Congress to issue debt-free currency? Won’t they just inflate and deflate the money supply to suit themselves, as the Fed has been doing for a hundred years with congressional permission?
When the Jews are removed from the equation, when no profit is possible in the issuance of currency, when Jewish intrigue is prohibited by Americans with guns, everything changes. When Americans with guns are in charge, the whole complexion of our society will change. Congress will do as it is told by us, until we change the design of our government and dismiss the Congress.
We can also see how destructive the executive branch has been since 1861. We certainly don’t require its services any longer. America is a presidential dictatorship, so the office of the president must be eliminated. No one must be given the obscene power over humanity that these psychos have been granted – by us.
The Supreme Court has been a dirty joke since John Marshall made his fake pronouncement in 1803, claiming that five black-robed magicians would be deciding what was “constitutional.” As I’ve written before, the Supreme Court rarely finds any federal atrocity “unconstitutional,” whether it’s slavery, civil war or crimes against the peace. In 2000, the court actually decided that George W. Bush would be president despite his having lost the election to Gore. And of course what that five-judge junta did was “constitutional.” The results of that slimy maneuver were too terrible to contemplate. Bush turned over the government to Jewish plotters who called themselves “neo-conservatives.” Those Jews gave us 9/11 and total war against the natural people of the Middle East and western Eurasia.
The nature of the American government has been so toxic to life that it must be overthrown by force and violence, never to rear its vicious head again. The three branches of the federal government must be destroyed and all practitioners executed as the vilest traitors to mankind, whether Jew or Gentile.
The lesson to our traitors must be so severe that no one is ever again tempted to try to rule us. Jews can’t help themselves so they must be removed from temptation. Jews must rule us so they must be eradicated.
What sort of government should we have? Let’s try no government for a while.
We were under no central government for about eight years until the federal albatross landed on our backs by deceit in 1789. The new Americans briefly had the greatest freedom in human history but the bankers and their stooges, such as Hamilton and Madison, were not happy. So we wound up with a bank-run empire for all the trouble, terror, bloodshed and hardship the revolutionaries had suffered for six and a half years.
On this subject of the American Revolution, we must realize that it was more of a French victory than an American one. Without French soldiers and officers and especially the French navy that destroyed much of the British fleet, there would have been no revolutionary victory. Without the German soldiers reinforcing both the French and American forces, victory over the English dictatorship would not have been possible. The new American government thanked the French by ignoring the Reign of Terror and the country that delivered us from English tyranny and not lifting a finger to prevent those men and their families from all having their heads chopped off.
Should the French have helped us? I would say no. (Who killed more Frenchmen in WWII, the Germans or the Americans?)
It was a very strange revolution and it almost produced freedom from central government. It was soon revealed, however, that the whole thing was a cruel Masonic deception, as Patrick Henry realized when he examined the new, secret Constitution in 1788. Americans must first come to terms with the fact that the Constitution has been the machine of dictatorship from the day it was foisted on the new country. It must be cursed and repudiated before we can free ourselves from the American form of despotism.
In its place we need nothing but the willingness to fight and kill the enforcers who insist that they are authorized by the president, the Congress and the Supreme Court to arrest us, disappear us, torture and kill us, which they in fact are so authorized. The Constitution was designed with just this ultimate goal at some point in the distant future. We have reached that point, now that the Patriot Act, the Military Commissions Act and the National Defense Authorization Act, all passed by the Congress and signed by Republican and Democrat presidents, have been declared “constitutional” by the Supreme Court. We are freed from any constraints to attack any and all representatives of the federal government with force and violence for their monstrous crimes against us and the peoples of other countries.
We must allow no replacement for this monster system which has robbed us of our savings, our jobs, our lives and our morality. The federal government must be almost utterly destroyed. The fifty state governments must be reduced drastically as well. Again, the one and only legitimate function of a federal government is to issue debt-free currency. This was done in the pre-Revolutionary colonies, it was done by the Russians until the Jewish takeover in 1917 and by the Germans in the 1930s. The colonies were attacked by the Rothschild-controlled English; the Russians and Germans were destroyed by the Jewish allies in World Wars I and II.
The route to this new way of life is the Hungarian Model of executing Jewish tyrants and eliminating usury, which is the essence of Judaism. Usury is the Jewish practice of government-licensed, Jewish-created debt-based currency and federal indebtedness (to Jewish “lenders” who actually lend nothing but “credit”). Hungary is the latest proof that there is never a need for governments to borrow and put the people in debt to private bankers. Such a criminal racket must be punished by death, so destructive it has proven to be.
America has attacked and invaded Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Sudan since 9/11. Each of those countries had government-run central banks that issued their own currencies, completely independent of the Rothschild cartel. After our invasions, each country’s central bank was handed over to the private Jewish cartel. Syria also has a central bank that is not connected to Rothschild. This is the main reason Obama wants to hit Syria and is also the main reason that these Jewish rats must be eliminated without mercy. They have no mercy for their victims who probably haven’t any idea of the real reason for their being attacked by America, which is to seize control of their central bank.
This was the main reason for our destroying Germany in World War II – their huge success with debt-free currency. As soon as the National Socialist Party was destroyed, its main characters hanged and the whole idea outlawed forever, Germany’s monetary system was given to the Rothschild syndicate.
Lincoln deserved to be assassinated in 1860, as soon as he was elected, for his planned crimes against his own people, but not for issuing debt-free US Notes. His murder was a teaching tool of the bankers. No one had a stronger motive for assassinating Kennedy in 1963 than the owners of the Federal Reserve. He had deprived them of the interest on over four billion dollars that he issued in US Notes that spring. He declared war on the bankers and planned to wipe them out by replacing the debt-based Federal Reserve Note with the debt-free United States Note.
We can see how important debt-based currency is to the bankers who profit from it. For that reason it must become the most important matter to us. All those who profit from this destructive monetary monopoly must be killed – there is no other way to save ourselves from total ruin. For millions it is already too late. The money monopolists have caused hundreds of millions of normal people to be slaughtered without the slightest hesitation or shred of mercy. Millions of American homes have been fraudulently seized by bank pirates, millions of American lives ruined and families destroyed. These are death penalty crimes against humanity and all are based on the Jewish lie of debt-based currency issued by a corporation.
Now to heroic measures. It doesn’t get much more heroic than what the Hungarians have shown us. Their model must become our method.
Heroism is the key to our survival, just as it always was and will be. We must have our heroic role models. They are totally absent in our lives at present, thanks to the Hollywood Jews. These cunning rats well know the Gentile craving for heroes and heroes were well-supplied in the early days of the big studios. By the 60’s, though, the smart, tough hero was forbidden and was replaced with the soul-destroying anti-hero, exemplified by Paul Newman, whose every movie was the ultimate unpleasant expression of the anti-hero.
Men, real men, crave an heroic reason for their lives. This is why the militia movement exploded in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. The militia movement offered American men the chance to be heroes or at least to see themselves as heroes. No celluloid role models were required – one’s self-awareness of being part of a new armed resistance movement was enough. It was a winner for a few years until the rats figured a cruel way to turn it into a dirty word at Oklahoma City. The natural craving in us is still there and is now starting to re-emerge.
The greatest heroes in human history were the million or so volunteers from all countries in Europe who, of their own volition, joined the German SS battalions to fight the Jewish allies wherever they were hell-bent on invading Europe, from the east and west. They were the finest specimens of manhood of all time, perhaps never to be imitated. But we must do our best to do just that.
The SS guys were fighting the New World Order, just as we shall be doing. So we have to stop thinking of them as the bad guys. The Americans were the bad guys. The same kinds of Americans who came for Brandon Raub, the same kinds of Americans who ran Abu Ghraib and are running Guantanamo were slaughtering the good guys with their Soviet buddies for three and a half years, doing the dirty work for the Jews. The Chuck Yeagers, blasting German farmers off their tractors with their P-51s because they’d run out of military targets and wanted to kill someone – anyone – before the war ended.
Our need for real heroism – not fake US government mass murdering anti-heroism – can find fulfillment in the resistance movement. I think the highest expression of the resistance movement, just as the SS was the highest expression of the German defense forces, will be DAJA (Defense Against Jewish Aggression). It is time for DAJA.
We are reportedly facing another contrived crisis by October, approximately one month from now as this is being written. As evidence of this, we have learned here in Teton County, Idaho that our imported sheriff (New York City?!) was summoned this past week to a secret FEMA meeting in Washington, DC. This is the same guy who told our fire-bombed neighbors not to worry overmuch because the fire-bomb was meant for the Campbells by people who were not happy with a speech I’d made in February about gun control. Those people turned out to be the FBI, which now stands for Fire-Bombing Imbeciles, who actually used an FBI-registered vehicle for tailing/intimidating our friends, over and over.
We all kind of assumed that martial law would start in the cities, which is probably true. But now, with the presence of our sheriff at the FEMA conclave in DC, attempted martial law will presumably also occur here in our valley, probably pretty soon. The sheriff owes us for his dreamy, all-expense-paid junket to the district of criminals. We are also informed that we have naturally made it to the top of the surveillance list. We’ve had at least three break-ins that resulted in stolen meds and a revolver and no doubt are wired for audio/video productions.
So, heroic measures are called for – here, there and everywhere.
We here shall be discussing this strange development now that I’m home for a few weeks. It’s probably fortuitous that drilling is experiencing a slowdown so that I can be here to contribute to the defense of the county, since I probably brought on the attention in the first place with a very provocative speech, the text of which is on this website. There is no other likely reason that the sheriff of a very small county in flyover country, population 10,000, should be wined and dined by the FEMA gangsters in DC. I think I’m the only person at present calling publicly for the overthrow of the federal government by force and violence.
We shall be going over immediate action drills and likely choke and ambush points, both ours and theirs. We shall make sure that everyone’s radio is working and we’re all on the right frequency. I recommend the same for all readers of this essay, except of course the ones we’ll be ambushing.
This is naturally a big step for most normal people, the decision to pull triggers on treacherous enforcers of the dictatorship. For us and most of our fellow residents here, though, it’s the next logical thing to do. The question that’s usually asked of residents here is, “Are you going to fight, or get on the truck?” It’s a shocking question to some people but so far, no one has said that he or she plans to get on the truck.
Heroism is the missing ingredient in our empty American lives. I began to crave it at around eight or nine years of age when I saw the previews for the first episode of “Davy Crockett” in early December of 1954. I’d been reared on Johnny Mack Brown and Jock Mahoney and guns and fist-fighting but Davy Crockett depicted pure heroism on all levels – physical, mental and political. In the end, he put his money where his mouth was and fought the good fight.
The Crockett thing struck a chord or central masculine nerve in America. Millions of us were affected. But it went downhill from there and no comparable role model was ever again offered by the lords of entertainment, who must have been very unsettled by the mass Crockett phenomenon.
That is what we are expected to do: fight the good fight. We are expected to crave a good fight and another one after that. We must shuck off the cowardice that has been implanted into us methodically by social scientists in school, religion, law, entertainment and in our work. Heroes exhibit courage, strength and unselfishness despite all physical and psychological intimidation and aggression.
Heroism is the vital component that will turn everything around. The Jews figure hopefully that our heroism is all gone, but they are whistling past the graveyard. They’ve done their best to wipe it out of our gene pool but it’s still there. That’s why they demand that the veterans be disarmed. When he was in uniform he was harmless to the Jews but once out of uniform, his awakening anger over his experience combined with the heroic component produces a very dangerous threat to the architects of the vet’s problems. Hence, all vets are now considered by the Jews to be mentally unfit to possess firearms. Only the Jews have the unmitigated gall to propose such a vile concept.
I’m pretty confident that this new veteran disarmament policy, enunciated recently by Senator Dianne Feinstein and not contradicted by any Jew anywhere, will contribute to the deaths of many Jews in this country. Feinstein declared war on the veterans and on all future veterans, i.e., the currently serving soldiers, sailors, marines and airmen who have been psychologically damaged, drug addicted, physically maimed and killed while making the Mid East safe for Jews by killing their Moslem enemies. Killing them, we now know, in the millions.
Obama can’t “put boots on the ground” in Syria because most currently serving men and women are unfit for combat due to various mental and physical injuries suffered in Iraq and Afghanistan, as we can easily verify from the suicide statistics. This is why Obama needs a replacement force for occupation (martial law) duties in this country. He’s not going to get it.
In the meantime, due to one pretext or another, we will be dealing with militarized police at roadblocks and home invasions. There will be more Boston neighborhood raids in all cities and big towns. They will be testing, testing, testing and gauging our responses to escalating aggression and provocations. That is, they will be doing this unless we respond properly at the first opportunity and do quite a bit better than those pathetic Bostonites.
Let’s do this: let’s assume that where we live is going to get the Boston treatment by some very treacherous bums sporting the finest equipment that we could buy them. Let’s assume this is going to occur by October 1. Maybe it won’t, but that’s the current gen. That gives us all about a month to meet with friends and trusted neighbors – call it Neighborhood Watch – and organize a high-power response to any home invasion. Give personal guarantees that whoever gets busted will be reinforced within minutes by his/her colleagues. The neighbor(s) will not be put in patrol cars or police vans and taken away. The cars or vans will be attacked and disabled and the neighbor(s) removed to safety. All attackers of the neighbors shall be executed on the spot. When it is figured out who sent the attackers, the NW (Neighborhood Watch) shall attack those culprits with the same effect (death).
Once a trusted public servant betrays that trust and actually joins an effort to disarm us or disappear us without charge, as in the shocking case of Brandon Raub, he must be killed. He obviously can never be trusted again. The resistance will be based on trust, which is always the most precious commodity. Breach of trust will be punished by death - there is no alternative.
There are smart-phone apps available that warn of police roadblocks. I don’t have one but this could be handy as long as it lasts. Lacking that, NW will learn of new roadblocks as they are being formed. The roadblocks must be destroyed as quickly as gunfighters can plan and execute an assault, be it from long-range rifles or by driving into it with three or four gunfighters on board.
If some soft form of martial law is declared next month, either locally or nationwide, all travel by us will have to be by at least a two-vehicle convoy. The vehicle behind will cover the one in front if it is stopped by a cop for any reason, which means no reason other than intimidation or worse. The second vehicle will stop close enough for a sure shot at the intimidator(s), who should be quickly shot and left on the road as an object lesson to others, minus weapons, which won’t be needed anymore and are actually ours anyway. If the second vehicle is stopped, the lead vehicle will hang a U and come back to engage the threat in the same manner.
This is the attitude we in the resistance must adopt. Kill or get killed.
This is how martial law will be eliminated, in the best Hungarian manner. If we do this a few times, the accessories to treason, the enforcers, will take early retirement - or they will die.
Incredibly, the Hungarians are again leading the way to freedom from Jewish rule. The Hungarian government has done the one and only great thing that any government can do: it has issued debt-free currency. For the past two years, Hungary has paid off its fake “debt” to the IMF and banking gangsters with the new Hungarian equivalent of 2.2 billion Euros and their formerly dead economy is prospering like mad. This has made the Jews both incredulous and of course very angry.
Do we suppose America could not do the identical things? By that I mean the ’56 thing and the currency thing. These are the two elements of a Defense Against Jewish Aggression. All predatory Jews must be killed, number one, starting with the most notorious and destructive ones. There are so many in this category that we can begin just about anywhere.
Doing this, we shall eventually find ourselves in Manhattan, pulling Jews out of the Federal Reserve Bank, Goldman Sachs, the CFR and the ADL, among other dens of Jewish iniquity. Manhattan is the Comstock Lode of predatory Jews, just as Hollywood is on the other coast. There are dens of Jewish iniquity in every city in America and they must all be eradicated.
People sometimes ask, how can you trust the Congress to issue debt-free currency? Won’t they just inflate and deflate the money supply to suit themselves, as the Fed has been doing for a hundred years with congressional permission?
When the Jews are removed from the equation, when no profit is possible in the issuance of currency, when Jewish intrigue is prohibited by Americans with guns, everything changes. When Americans with guns are in charge, the whole complexion of our society will change. Congress will do as it is told by us, until we change the design of our government and dismiss the Congress.
We can also see how destructive the executive branch has been since 1861. We certainly don’t require its services any longer. America is a presidential dictatorship, so the office of the president must be eliminated. No one must be given the obscene power over humanity that these psychos have been granted – by us.
The Supreme Court has been a dirty joke since John Marshall made his fake pronouncement in 1803, claiming that five black-robed magicians would be deciding what was “constitutional.” As I’ve written before, the Supreme Court rarely finds any federal atrocity “unconstitutional,” whether it’s slavery, civil war or crimes against the peace. In 2000, the court actually decided that George W. Bush would be president despite his having lost the election to Gore. And of course what that five-judge junta did was “constitutional.” The results of that slimy maneuver were too terrible to contemplate. Bush turned over the government to Jewish plotters who called themselves “neo-conservatives.” Those Jews gave us 9/11 and total war against the natural people of the Middle East and western Eurasia.
The nature of the American government has been so toxic to life that it must be overthrown by force and violence, never to rear its vicious head again. The three branches of the federal government must be destroyed and all practitioners executed as the vilest traitors to mankind, whether Jew or Gentile.
The lesson to our traitors must be so severe that no one is ever again tempted to try to rule us. Jews can’t help themselves so they must be removed from temptation. Jews must rule us so they must be eradicated.
What sort of government should we have? Let’s try no government for a while.
We were under no central government for about eight years until the federal albatross landed on our backs by deceit in 1789. The new Americans briefly had the greatest freedom in human history but the bankers and their stooges, such as Hamilton and Madison, were not happy. So we wound up with a bank-run empire for all the trouble, terror, bloodshed and hardship the revolutionaries had suffered for six and a half years.
On this subject of the American Revolution, we must realize that it was more of a French victory than an American one. Without French soldiers and officers and especially the French navy that destroyed much of the British fleet, there would have been no revolutionary victory. Without the German soldiers reinforcing both the French and American forces, victory over the English dictatorship would not have been possible. The new American government thanked the French by ignoring the Reign of Terror and the country that delivered us from English tyranny and not lifting a finger to prevent those men and their families from all having their heads chopped off.
Should the French have helped us? I would say no. (Who killed more Frenchmen in WWII, the Germans or the Americans?)
It was a very strange revolution and it almost produced freedom from central government. It was soon revealed, however, that the whole thing was a cruel Masonic deception, as Patrick Henry realized when he examined the new, secret Constitution in 1788. Americans must first come to terms with the fact that the Constitution has been the machine of dictatorship from the day it was foisted on the new country. It must be cursed and repudiated before we can free ourselves from the American form of despotism.
In its place we need nothing but the willingness to fight and kill the enforcers who insist that they are authorized by the president, the Congress and the Supreme Court to arrest us, disappear us, torture and kill us, which they in fact are so authorized. The Constitution was designed with just this ultimate goal at some point in the distant future. We have reached that point, now that the Patriot Act, the Military Commissions Act and the National Defense Authorization Act, all passed by the Congress and signed by Republican and Democrat presidents, have been declared “constitutional” by the Supreme Court. We are freed from any constraints to attack any and all representatives of the federal government with force and violence for their monstrous crimes against us and the peoples of other countries.
We must allow no replacement for this monster system which has robbed us of our savings, our jobs, our lives and our morality. The federal government must be almost utterly destroyed. The fifty state governments must be reduced drastically as well. Again, the one and only legitimate function of a federal government is to issue debt-free currency. This was done in the pre-Revolutionary colonies, it was done by the Russians until the Jewish takeover in 1917 and by the Germans in the 1930s. The colonies were attacked by the Rothschild-controlled English; the Russians and Germans were destroyed by the Jewish allies in World Wars I and II.
The route to this new way of life is the Hungarian Model of executing Jewish tyrants and eliminating usury, which is the essence of Judaism. Usury is the Jewish practice of government-licensed, Jewish-created debt-based currency and federal indebtedness (to Jewish “lenders” who actually lend nothing but “credit”). Hungary is the latest proof that there is never a need for governments to borrow and put the people in debt to private bankers. Such a criminal racket must be punished by death, so destructive it has proven to be.
America has attacked and invaded Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Sudan since 9/11. Each of those countries had government-run central banks that issued their own currencies, completely independent of the Rothschild cartel. After our invasions, each country’s central bank was handed over to the private Jewish cartel. Syria also has a central bank that is not connected to Rothschild. This is the main reason Obama wants to hit Syria and is also the main reason that these Jewish rats must be eliminated without mercy. They have no mercy for their victims who probably haven’t any idea of the real reason for their being attacked by America, which is to seize control of their central bank.
This was the main reason for our destroying Germany in World War II – their huge success with debt-free currency. As soon as the National Socialist Party was destroyed, its main characters hanged and the whole idea outlawed forever, Germany’s monetary system was given to the Rothschild syndicate.
Lincoln deserved to be assassinated in 1860, as soon as he was elected, for his planned crimes against his own people, but not for issuing debt-free US Notes. His murder was a teaching tool of the bankers. No one had a stronger motive for assassinating Kennedy in 1963 than the owners of the Federal Reserve. He had deprived them of the interest on over four billion dollars that he issued in US Notes that spring. He declared war on the bankers and planned to wipe them out by replacing the debt-based Federal Reserve Note with the debt-free United States Note.
We can see how important debt-based currency is to the bankers who profit from it. For that reason it must become the most important matter to us. All those who profit from this destructive monetary monopoly must be killed – there is no other way to save ourselves from total ruin. For millions it is already too late. The money monopolists have caused hundreds of millions of normal people to be slaughtered without the slightest hesitation or shred of mercy. Millions of American homes have been fraudulently seized by bank pirates, millions of American lives ruined and families destroyed. These are death penalty crimes against humanity and all are based on the Jewish lie of debt-based currency issued by a corporation.
Now to heroic measures. It doesn’t get much more heroic than what the Hungarians have shown us. Their model must become our method.
Heroism is the key to our survival, just as it always was and will be. We must have our heroic role models. They are totally absent in our lives at present, thanks to the Hollywood Jews. These cunning rats well know the Gentile craving for heroes and heroes were well-supplied in the early days of the big studios. By the 60’s, though, the smart, tough hero was forbidden and was replaced with the soul-destroying anti-hero, exemplified by Paul Newman, whose every movie was the ultimate unpleasant expression of the anti-hero.
Men, real men, crave an heroic reason for their lives. This is why the militia movement exploded in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. The militia movement offered American men the chance to be heroes or at least to see themselves as heroes. No celluloid role models were required – one’s self-awareness of being part of a new armed resistance movement was enough. It was a winner for a few years until the rats figured a cruel way to turn it into a dirty word at Oklahoma City. The natural craving in us is still there and is now starting to re-emerge.
The greatest heroes in human history were the million or so volunteers from all countries in Europe who, of their own volition, joined the German SS battalions to fight the Jewish allies wherever they were hell-bent on invading Europe, from the east and west. They were the finest specimens of manhood of all time, perhaps never to be imitated. But we must do our best to do just that.
The SS guys were fighting the New World Order, just as we shall be doing. So we have to stop thinking of them as the bad guys. The Americans were the bad guys. The same kinds of Americans who came for Brandon Raub, the same kinds of Americans who ran Abu Ghraib and are running Guantanamo were slaughtering the good guys with their Soviet buddies for three and a half years, doing the dirty work for the Jews. The Chuck Yeagers, blasting German farmers off their tractors with their P-51s because they’d run out of military targets and wanted to kill someone – anyone – before the war ended.
Our need for real heroism – not fake US government mass murdering anti-heroism – can find fulfillment in the resistance movement. I think the highest expression of the resistance movement, just as the SS was the highest expression of the German defense forces, will be DAJA (Defense Against Jewish Aggression). It is time for DAJA.
We are reportedly facing another contrived crisis by October, approximately one month from now as this is being written. As evidence of this, we have learned here in Teton County, Idaho that our imported sheriff (New York City?!) was summoned this past week to a secret FEMA meeting in Washington, DC. This is the same guy who told our fire-bombed neighbors not to worry overmuch because the fire-bomb was meant for the Campbells by people who were not happy with a speech I’d made in February about gun control. Those people turned out to be the FBI, which now stands for Fire-Bombing Imbeciles, who actually used an FBI-registered vehicle for tailing/intimidating our friends, over and over.
We all kind of assumed that martial law would start in the cities, which is probably true. But now, with the presence of our sheriff at the FEMA conclave in DC, attempted martial law will presumably also occur here in our valley, probably pretty soon. The sheriff owes us for his dreamy, all-expense-paid junket to the district of criminals. We are also informed that we have naturally made it to the top of the surveillance list. We’ve had at least three break-ins that resulted in stolen meds and a revolver and no doubt are wired for audio/video productions.
So, heroic measures are called for – here, there and everywhere.
We here shall be discussing this strange development now that I’m home for a few weeks. It’s probably fortuitous that drilling is experiencing a slowdown so that I can be here to contribute to the defense of the county, since I probably brought on the attention in the first place with a very provocative speech, the text of which is on this website. There is no other likely reason that the sheriff of a very small county in flyover country, population 10,000, should be wined and dined by the FEMA gangsters in DC. I think I’m the only person at present calling publicly for the overthrow of the federal government by force and violence.
We shall be going over immediate action drills and likely choke and ambush points, both ours and theirs. We shall make sure that everyone’s radio is working and we’re all on the right frequency. I recommend the same for all readers of this essay, except of course the ones we’ll be ambushing.
This is naturally a big step for most normal people, the decision to pull triggers on treacherous enforcers of the dictatorship. For us and most of our fellow residents here, though, it’s the next logical thing to do. The question that’s usually asked of residents here is, “Are you going to fight, or get on the truck?” It’s a shocking question to some people but so far, no one has said that he or she plans to get on the truck.
Heroism is the missing ingredient in our empty American lives. I began to crave it at around eight or nine years of age when I saw the previews for the first episode of “Davy Crockett” in early December of 1954. I’d been reared on Johnny Mack Brown and Jock Mahoney and guns and fist-fighting but Davy Crockett depicted pure heroism on all levels – physical, mental and political. In the end, he put his money where his mouth was and fought the good fight.
The Crockett thing struck a chord or central masculine nerve in America. Millions of us were affected. But it went downhill from there and no comparable role model was ever again offered by the lords of entertainment, who must have been very unsettled by the mass Crockett phenomenon.
That is what we are expected to do: fight the good fight. We are expected to crave a good fight and another one after that. We must shuck off the cowardice that has been implanted into us methodically by social scientists in school, religion, law, entertainment and in our work. Heroes exhibit courage, strength and unselfishness despite all physical and psychological intimidation and aggression.
Heroism is the vital component that will turn everything around. The Jews figure hopefully that our heroism is all gone, but they are whistling past the graveyard. They’ve done their best to wipe it out of our gene pool but it’s still there. That’s why they demand that the veterans be disarmed. When he was in uniform he was harmless to the Jews but once out of uniform, his awakening anger over his experience combined with the heroic component produces a very dangerous threat to the architects of the vet’s problems. Hence, all vets are now considered by the Jews to be mentally unfit to possess firearms. Only the Jews have the unmitigated gall to propose such a vile concept.
I’m pretty confident that this new veteran disarmament policy, enunciated recently by Senator Dianne Feinstein and not contradicted by any Jew anywhere, will contribute to the deaths of many Jews in this country. Feinstein declared war on the veterans and on all future veterans, i.e., the currently serving soldiers, sailors, marines and airmen who have been psychologically damaged, drug addicted, physically maimed and killed while making the Mid East safe for Jews by killing their Moslem enemies. Killing them, we now know, in the millions.
Obama can’t “put boots on the ground” in Syria because most currently serving men and women are unfit for combat due to various mental and physical injuries suffered in Iraq and Afghanistan, as we can easily verify from the suicide statistics. This is why Obama needs a replacement force for occupation (martial law) duties in this country. He’s not going to get it.
In the meantime, due to one pretext or another, we will be dealing with militarized police at roadblocks and home invasions. There will be more Boston neighborhood raids in all cities and big towns. They will be testing, testing, testing and gauging our responses to escalating aggression and provocations. That is, they will be doing this unless we respond properly at the first opportunity and do quite a bit better than those pathetic Bostonites.
Let’s do this: let’s assume that where we live is going to get the Boston treatment by some very treacherous bums sporting the finest equipment that we could buy them. Let’s assume this is going to occur by October 1. Maybe it won’t, but that’s the current gen. That gives us all about a month to meet with friends and trusted neighbors – call it Neighborhood Watch – and organize a high-power response to any home invasion. Give personal guarantees that whoever gets busted will be reinforced within minutes by his/her colleagues. The neighbor(s) will not be put in patrol cars or police vans and taken away. The cars or vans will be attacked and disabled and the neighbor(s) removed to safety. All attackers of the neighbors shall be executed on the spot. When it is figured out who sent the attackers, the NW (Neighborhood Watch) shall attack those culprits with the same effect (death).
Once a trusted public servant betrays that trust and actually joins an effort to disarm us or disappear us without charge, as in the shocking case of Brandon Raub, he must be killed. He obviously can never be trusted again. The resistance will be based on trust, which is always the most precious commodity. Breach of trust will be punished by death - there is no alternative.
There are smart-phone apps available that warn of police roadblocks. I don’t have one but this could be handy as long as it lasts. Lacking that, NW will learn of new roadblocks as they are being formed. The roadblocks must be destroyed as quickly as gunfighters can plan and execute an assault, be it from long-range rifles or by driving into it with three or four gunfighters on board.
If some soft form of martial law is declared next month, either locally or nationwide, all travel by us will have to be by at least a two-vehicle convoy. The vehicle behind will cover the one in front if it is stopped by a cop for any reason, which means no reason other than intimidation or worse. The second vehicle will stop close enough for a sure shot at the intimidator(s), who should be quickly shot and left on the road as an object lesson to others, minus weapons, which won’t be needed anymore and are actually ours anyway. If the second vehicle is stopped, the lead vehicle will hang a U and come back to engage the threat in the same manner.
This is the attitude we in the resistance must adopt. Kill or get killed.
This is how martial law will be eliminated, in the best Hungarian manner. If we do this a few times, the accessories to treason, the enforcers, will take early retirement - or they will die.
San Bernardino Becomes 3rd California City to Get Bankruptcy Protection
AP/Grant Hindsley
San Bernardino on Wednesday became the third California
city in recent years to be awarded bankruptcy protection by a judge.
San Bernardino on Wednesday became the third California city in recent years to be awarded bankruptcy protection by a judge, setting the stage for a battle between the Southern California city's creditors and its retirees -- a fight that could provide a playbook for other cities facing similar financial burdens.
San Bernardino follows Vallejo, which was awarded Chapter 9 protection in 2008, and Stockton, which was granted protection in April of this year. (Mammoth Lakes, a California resort town, filed for bankruptcy in 2012, but won dismissal of its case after settling the $43 million development lawsuit that initially forced the city to seek protection from its creditors.)
The California Public Employees' Retirement System (CalPERS) remains the lone objector to San Bernardino's Chapter 9 claim -- the local union withdrew its objection last month after the city dropped its effort to reject collective bargaining agreements. As the nation's largest retirement system, the $260 billion CALPERS fund presents a formidable opponent. Vallejo did not attempt to reduce its pension obligations when it declared bankruptcy, a decision many believe was made to avoid a fight with CalPERS.
In her ruling, Judge Meredith Jury said it had been obvious for months that the city's finances were beyond rescue. "I don't think anyone in this courtroom seriously thought the city was anything but insolvent," she said, according to news accounts.
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San Bernardino, a city of 240,000 that is located one hour east of Los Angeles, has already gone where no city has gone before when it temporarily suspended its payments to CalPERS after declaring bankruptcy Aug. 1, 2012. It resumed payments this year, but the city's unfunded pension liability of about $143 million and the $50.4 million in bonds it issued in 2005 to help cover pension obligations and defaulted on, remain looming financial burdens. In its objection, CalPERS claimed that San Bernardino did not qualify for bankruptcy status largely because it ignored years of warnings about a looming financial crisis and was filing for Chapter 9 protection merely out of convenience.
Many observers believe that Wednesday's ruling is an important test for the federal law used by Detroit and other cities with overwhelming pension payment costs. Detroit Emergency Manager Kevyn Orr has called for cuts to current and future pension benefits in any bankruptcy plan it puts forth, should it win Chapter 9 status. (Detroit filed for bankruptcy on July 18, becoming the largest U.S. city to do so.) Labor unions are fighting the bankruptcy on the claim that workers' benefits are protected by Michigan's state constitution.
Pension liabilities are also an issue in Stockton's bankruptcy, which was given the green light by a judge in April to begin forming its restructuring plan. Stockton's Chapter 9 status was being challenged by its bond insurer, Assured Guaranty, which argued that the city of 300,000 did not attempt to renegotiate its pension debt with CalPERS and therefore did not exhaust all possible outlets before filing for Chapter 9.
By approving Stockton's bankruptcy protection, the judge essentially kicked that question to the restructuring hearings where Assured Guaranty is expected to continue challenging the notion that CalPERS is exempt from being treated like any other creditor.
Some court watchers say that the issues present in San Bernardino and Stockton could eventually lead to a U.S. Supreme Court decision on how bankrupt cities deal with their pension liabilities.
South African Gold Mining Strikes As Peak Gold Production Collapse Continues
by GoldCore
Today’s AM fix was USD 1,391.25, EUR 1,052.46 and GBP 893.14 per ounce.
Friday’s AM fix was USD 1,392.75, EUR 1,051.85 and GBP 899.19 per ounce.
Gold fell $12.80 or 0.91% Friday, closing at $1,394.30/oz. Silver fell $0.42 or 1.76%, closing at $23.43. Platinum rose $3.04 or 0.2% to $1,516.74/oz, while palladium was down $14.76 or 2% to $719.22/oz.
Gold in USD, 3 Day – (GoldCore)
For the week, gold and silver were both down 0.14% and 2.29% respectively.
Gold prices rallied $83.10, or 6.3%, in August. Silver surged 19.5% over the month.
Gold futures rose momentarily on the open in Asia prior to being hammered lower. Gold rose from Friday’s close at $1,395.05 to $1,397.20/oz prior to a wave of selling that sent gold plummeting.
Gold fell for December delivery declined as much as 1.4% to 276.2 yuan/gram on the Shanghai Futures Exchange. Gold fell by more than $20 to $1,373.40/oz prior to a quick recovery in volatile trade (see chart). Silver saw similar trading action but has recovered all the initial losses and surged over 2.7% which bodes well for trading today.
The less imminent risk of a war with Syria has increased risk appetite and led to higher stock markets and some profit taking and selling by speculators with a focus on the short term.
Banks, hedge funds and other large speculators increased their net-long position in New York gold futures in the week ended August 27, according to U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) data.
Speculative long positions, or bets prices will rise, outnumbered short positions by 78,289 contracts on the Comex. Net-long positions rose by 17,893 contracts, or 30%, from a week earlier.
Miners, producers, jewelers and other commercial users were net short 87,638 contracts, an increase of 19,973 contracts, or 30%, from the previous week.
In silver futures, net long positions decreased last week according to the CFTC data.
Speculative long positions, or bets prices will rise, outnumbered short positions by 16,380 contracts on the Comex. Net-long positions fell by 2,128 contracts, or 11%, from a week earlier.
Miners, producers, jewelers and other commercial users were net short 24,374 contracts, an increase of 1,100 contracts, or 5%, from the previous week.
Gold in USD, 1 Year – (GoldCore)
South Africa’s National Union of Mineworkers, which represents about two thirds of gold miners in the country, will start a strike over pay from tomorrow.
South African gold mining companies are liaising with police regarding the strikes which are set to start tomorrow. The miners are liaising with police “on the highest level” to maintain peace, Charmane Russell, external spokeswoman for Chamber of Mines at Russell & Associates, told Bloomberg by phone.
There are concerns of unrest after the Marikana platinum massacre last year, when dozens of miners were shot dead by South African police in the worst mining violence in decades.
South Africa was throughout the 20th century and as recently as 1996, the world’s largest gold producer at almost 17 million ounces. South Africa has in recent years become less important to the global gold industry. However, should supplies be further hampered it may impact the already, very tight physical gold market.
South African Journal of Science
South Africa now ranks sixth in gold production year to date, on a pace of just more than 5 million ounces of annual production, just ahead of Papua New Guinea and behind China, Australia, United States, Russia and Peru.
South Africa produced over 1,000 tonnes of gold in 1970 but production has fallen an incredibly 75% , to below 250 tonnes in recent years (see chart above). This collapse sees gold production at levels last seen in 1922. This has happened despite the massive technological advances of recent years, more intensive mining practices and a far greater availability of capital.
Recently, the decline in South African gold production has been attributed to national electrical issues and power outages, operational delays, safety issues and industrial unrest. However, the scale of decline at a time when there has not been a corresponding decline in base metals mined in South Africa suggests that geological constraints may be leading to lower production of gold and other precious metals.
Other large gold producing nations are also seeing declines (see table below).
Peak oil is a phenomenon many will be aware of – peak gold remains a foreign concept to most.
Peak gold is the date at which the maximum rate of global gold extraction is reached, after which the rate of global production enters terminal decline. The term derives from the Hubbert peak of a resource.
Global Gold Production – (Bloomberg)
The geological evidence suggests that we may be close to peak gold. It is signalled in the fact that most of the larger gold producing countries (such as Australia, the U.S., South Africa, Canada, Peru, Indonesia) have all seen production drops in recent years. China and Russia are the two only large producers to have seen production increases.
Peak gold has yet to be considered and analysed by the international financial and investment community but there is a risk that it has happened or will happen soon with a consequent impact on the gold mining industry and on gold prices in the 21st Century.
Today’s AM fix was USD 1,391.25, EUR 1,052.46 and GBP 893.14 per ounce.
Friday’s AM fix was USD 1,392.75, EUR 1,051.85 and GBP 899.19 per ounce.
Gold fell $12.80 or 0.91% Friday, closing at $1,394.30/oz. Silver fell $0.42 or 1.76%, closing at $23.43. Platinum rose $3.04 or 0.2% to $1,516.74/oz, while palladium was down $14.76 or 2% to $719.22/oz.
Gold in USD, 3 Day – (GoldCore)
For the week, gold and silver were both down 0.14% and 2.29% respectively.
Gold prices rallied $83.10, or 6.3%, in August. Silver surged 19.5% over the month.
Gold futures rose momentarily on the open in Asia prior to being hammered lower. Gold rose from Friday’s close at $1,395.05 to $1,397.20/oz prior to a wave of selling that sent gold plummeting.
Gold fell for December delivery declined as much as 1.4% to 276.2 yuan/gram on the Shanghai Futures Exchange. Gold fell by more than $20 to $1,373.40/oz prior to a quick recovery in volatile trade (see chart). Silver saw similar trading action but has recovered all the initial losses and surged over 2.7% which bodes well for trading today.
The less imminent risk of a war with Syria has increased risk appetite and led to higher stock markets and some profit taking and selling by speculators with a focus on the short term.
Banks, hedge funds and other large speculators increased their net-long position in New York gold futures in the week ended August 27, according to U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) data.
Speculative long positions, or bets prices will rise, outnumbered short positions by 78,289 contracts on the Comex. Net-long positions rose by 17,893 contracts, or 30%, from a week earlier.
Miners, producers, jewelers and other commercial users were net short 87,638 contracts, an increase of 19,973 contracts, or 30%, from the previous week.
In silver futures, net long positions decreased last week according to the CFTC data.
Speculative long positions, or bets prices will rise, outnumbered short positions by 16,380 contracts on the Comex. Net-long positions fell by 2,128 contracts, or 11%, from a week earlier.
Miners, producers, jewelers and other commercial users were net short 24,374 contracts, an increase of 1,100 contracts, or 5%, from the previous week.
Gold in USD, 1 Year – (GoldCore)
South Africa’s National Union of Mineworkers, which represents about two thirds of gold miners in the country, will start a strike over pay from tomorrow.
South African gold mining companies are liaising with police regarding the strikes which are set to start tomorrow. The miners are liaising with police “on the highest level” to maintain peace, Charmane Russell, external spokeswoman for Chamber of Mines at Russell & Associates, told Bloomberg by phone.
There are concerns of unrest after the Marikana platinum massacre last year, when dozens of miners were shot dead by South African police in the worst mining violence in decades.
South Africa was throughout the 20th century and as recently as 1996, the world’s largest gold producer at almost 17 million ounces. South Africa has in recent years become less important to the global gold industry. However, should supplies be further hampered it may impact the already, very tight physical gold market.
South African Journal of Science
South Africa now ranks sixth in gold production year to date, on a pace of just more than 5 million ounces of annual production, just ahead of Papua New Guinea and behind China, Australia, United States, Russia and Peru.
South Africa produced over 1,000 tonnes of gold in 1970 but production has fallen an incredibly 75% , to below 250 tonnes in recent years (see chart above). This collapse sees gold production at levels last seen in 1922. This has happened despite the massive technological advances of recent years, more intensive mining practices and a far greater availability of capital.
Recently, the decline in South African gold production has been attributed to national electrical issues and power outages, operational delays, safety issues and industrial unrest. However, the scale of decline at a time when there has not been a corresponding decline in base metals mined in South Africa suggests that geological constraints may be leading to lower production of gold and other precious metals.
Other large gold producing nations are also seeing declines (see table below).
Peak oil is a phenomenon many will be aware of – peak gold remains a foreign concept to most.
Peak gold is the date at which the maximum rate of global gold extraction is reached, after which the rate of global production enters terminal decline. The term derives from the Hubbert peak of a resource.
Global Gold Production – (Bloomberg)
The geological evidence suggests that we may be close to peak gold. It is signalled in the fact that most of the larger gold producing countries (such as Australia, the U.S., South Africa, Canada, Peru, Indonesia) have all seen production drops in recent years. China and Russia are the two only large producers to have seen production increases.
Peak gold has yet to be considered and analysed by the international financial and investment community but there is a risk that it has happened or will happen soon with a consequent impact on the gold mining industry and on gold prices in the 21st Century.
“Labor Day” should be renamed “Corporation Day” or “War Day”
Labor’s Demise As A Countervailing Power
Dr. Paul Craig Roberts
Infowars.com
Sunday, September 4, 2011
It is Labor Day weekend, 2011, but labor has nothing to celebrate.
The jobs that once gave American workers a stake in capitalism have left
and gone away. Corporations in pursuit of near-term profits have moved
labor’s jobs to China, India, Indonesia, Taiwan, South Korea and Eastern
Europe.
Labor arbitrage, that is, the substitution of foreign labor that is paid less than its productivity for American labor, has enriched Wall Street, shareholders and corporate CEOs, but it has devastated American employment, household incomes, tax base, and the outlook for the US economy.
This Labor Day week-end’s job report, announced by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) on Friday, September 2, says zero net new jobs were created in August, a number 250,000 less than the amount of monthly job creation necessary to make progress in reducing America’s high rate of unemployment.
The zero figure is actually an optimistic number. As John Williams (shadowstats.com) has made clear, problems with the BLS’s seasonal adjustments and “birth-death” model during the prolonged downturn that began in December 2007 result in the BLS over-estimating new jobs and underestimating lost jobs.
Seasonal adjustments and the “birth-death” model were designed with a growing economy in mind and result in miscounts during downturns. For example, the “birth-death” model estimates new jobs that are created from new start-up companies that are not yet reporting, and it estimates the job losses from companies that have gone out of business. In a growing economy, start-ups exceed jobs losses, but the situation reverses during downturns or during periods of sub-normal job growth. For the past forty-four months, the “birth-death” model has overestimated the number of new jobs created. When the annual revisions are made to the job reports, the excess jobs are taken out, but it is seldom headline news.
The reason that nearly four years of economic stimulus, consisting of large federal budget deficits and near zero interest rates, hasn’t revived the economy is that the jobs that Americans once had have been moved offshore. Stimulus cannot put Americans back to work in jobs that have been given to foreign countries.
Post-World War II Keynesian economists, such as Paul Krugman and Robert Reich, think that if the federal government would add more stimulus by enlarging the already massive federal deficit, new jobs would somehow be created to take the place of those that have left. This is a delusion. Not only have the supply chains necessary to support US economic activity been disrupted and broken by offshoring, but also the same incentive–excess supplies of foreign labor that produces more value than it is paid–that sent jobs abroad is still operative.
In a word, the US economy has been de-industrializing, moving from a developed to an underdeveloped economy, for the past two decades. It has been the case for many years that when the US economy manages to eke out new jobs, they are in non-tradable domestic services, such as health care and social assistance, waitresses and bar tenders, retail clerks. Non-tradable employment consists of jobs that do not produce goods and services that could be exported to reduce the large US trade deficit.
The long-term deterioration in the US economy has been covered up by “reforming” the official measures of unemployment and inflation. The U3 measure of unemployment, the current 9.1% unemployment rate, only measures unemployment among those who are actively seeking a job. Those who have become discouraged by the inability to find a job and have ceased looking are not counted as being among the unemployed, and the U3 measure makes no adjustment for those who are forced into part-time jobs because there is no full-time employment.
The government knows that the U3 “headline” unemployment rate is seriously understated and provides a broader measure known as U6. This measure, which is seldom reported by the financial media, includes short-term discouraged workers (those who have not looked for jobs for six months or less) and an adjustment for those who wish full time employment but can only find part time work. Currently, this measure of unemployment stands at 16.2%.
In 1994 the Clinton “progressive” administration defined long-term discouraged workers out of existence. Consequently, no official unemployment rate includes long-term (more than six months) discouraged workers as unemployed. John Williams estimates this number and adds it to the U6 measure to produce a current rate of US unemployment of 22.7%, an unemployment rate 2.5 times higher than the official rate.
Similar understatement exists in the measure of inflation known as the Consumer Price Index. In order to reduce cost-of-living adjustments to Social Security checks and to hold down other inflation adjustments, the “progressive” Clinton administration accepted the Boskin Commission’s recommendation to introduce substitution into what had been a fixed, weighted, basket of goods used to measure the cost of a constant standard of living. In the new “reformed” measure, if the price of an item increases, say New York strip steak, the index assumes that consumers switch to a less expensive cut, such as round steak. Thus, the price increase doesn’t show up in the CPI.
Consumers, or a number of them, do tend to behave in this way. However, since the basket of goods comprising the CPI is no longer constant, but changes with price changes, the CPI has become a variable measure of the cost of living that reduces the inflation rate by measuring a lower standard of living.
John Williams estimates the CPI according to the previous official methodology that used a fixed basket of goods. He finds the rate of inflation to be much higher than is reported by the substitution-based methodology. http://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data/inflation-charts
The understatement of inflation serves to boost real Gross Domestic Product growth. In order to compare how much larger (or smaller) the economy is this year compared to last year, the GDP figure has to be adjusted for inflation. If the economy grew 5% in nominal terms and inflation was 3%, then GDP grew 2% in real terms, that is, real goods and services, as opposed to mere price rises, increased 2% over the year.
When John Williams adjusts US GDP with the former or traditional measure of inflation, he finds that there has been no growth in real GDP for several years. In other words, during the period of “economic recovery” the economy has actually been declining.
American economic decline began with offshoring during the Clinton administration. Instead of addressing this threat, the Clinton administration launched the neoconservative program of American Empire with American and NATO naked aggression against Serbia, sending the Serbian leader off to be tried as a war criminal for resisting the dissolution of his country.
The Bush/Cheney regime elevated the pursuit of American Empire under cover of “the war on terror.” Based entirely on lies and falsified intelligence, Bush/Cheney launched wars against the Taliban, who were unifying Afghanistan, and against Saddam Hussein in Iraq.
In the 1980s Hussein was used by Washington to launch a war against the revolutionary government in Iran that had overthrown the American puppet government, headed by the Shah of Iran. Ever since Washington lost its puppet rule over the Iranians, Washington has refused diplomatic relations with Iran. In the place of diplomatic relations, Washington demonizes Iran in order to set the country up for another attack a la Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Pakistan, and Yemen. Syria is next.
Saddam Hussein’s service to Washington was overlooked when it became more important to eliminate support for Hamas and Hezbollah, two barriers to Israel’s expansion in the Middle East, than to maintain Washington’s gratitude to an Iraqi pawn.
Despite unequivocal reports from arms inspectors that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction and most certainly had nothing whatsoever to do with 9/11, top Bush/Cheney regime officials demonized Iraq as the greatest threat to America. The imagery of mushroom clouds from nuclear weapons was evoked, A war was launched entirely on false pretexts that destroyed a country and left over one million Iraqis dead and four million displaced. What Washington did to Iraq is what the Nazis were tried and executed for at the Nuremberg Trials.
Obama was elected in order to stop the illegal and senseless wars. Instead, Obama both continued the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and expanded the wars into Libya, Pakistan, and Yemen. Since the deregulation of the financial system under the Bush/Cheney regime and the “war on terror,” the entire economy of the US has been sacrificed for the benefit of the financial sector and the military/security complex.
Labor Day is an anachronism. It should be renamed Corporation Day or War Day to celebrate the success of Bush/Obama in eliminating labor unions as a countervailing power to corporate power and the elevation of War as the highest goal of the American state.
Dr. Paul Craig Roberts is the father of Reaganomics and the former head of policy at the Department of Treasury. He is a columnist and was previously an editor for the Wall Street Journal. His latest book, “How the Economy Was Lost: The War of the Worlds,” details why America is disintegrating.
Dr. Paul Craig Roberts
Infowars.com
Sunday, September 4, 2011
Labor arbitrage, that is, the substitution of foreign labor that is paid less than its productivity for American labor, has enriched Wall Street, shareholders and corporate CEOs, but it has devastated American employment, household incomes, tax base, and the outlook for the US economy.
This Labor Day week-end’s job report, announced by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) on Friday, September 2, says zero net new jobs were created in August, a number 250,000 less than the amount of monthly job creation necessary to make progress in reducing America’s high rate of unemployment.
The zero figure is actually an optimistic number. As John Williams (shadowstats.com) has made clear, problems with the BLS’s seasonal adjustments and “birth-death” model during the prolonged downturn that began in December 2007 result in the BLS over-estimating new jobs and underestimating lost jobs.
Seasonal adjustments and the “birth-death” model were designed with a growing economy in mind and result in miscounts during downturns. For example, the “birth-death” model estimates new jobs that are created from new start-up companies that are not yet reporting, and it estimates the job losses from companies that have gone out of business. In a growing economy, start-ups exceed jobs losses, but the situation reverses during downturns or during periods of sub-normal job growth. For the past forty-four months, the “birth-death” model has overestimated the number of new jobs created. When the annual revisions are made to the job reports, the excess jobs are taken out, but it is seldom headline news.
The reason that nearly four years of economic stimulus, consisting of large federal budget deficits and near zero interest rates, hasn’t revived the economy is that the jobs that Americans once had have been moved offshore. Stimulus cannot put Americans back to work in jobs that have been given to foreign countries.
Post-World War II Keynesian economists, such as Paul Krugman and Robert Reich, think that if the federal government would add more stimulus by enlarging the already massive federal deficit, new jobs would somehow be created to take the place of those that have left. This is a delusion. Not only have the supply chains necessary to support US economic activity been disrupted and broken by offshoring, but also the same incentive–excess supplies of foreign labor that produces more value than it is paid–that sent jobs abroad is still operative.
In a word, the US economy has been de-industrializing, moving from a developed to an underdeveloped economy, for the past two decades. It has been the case for many years that when the US economy manages to eke out new jobs, they are in non-tradable domestic services, such as health care and social assistance, waitresses and bar tenders, retail clerks. Non-tradable employment consists of jobs that do not produce goods and services that could be exported to reduce the large US trade deficit.
The long-term deterioration in the US economy has been covered up by “reforming” the official measures of unemployment and inflation. The U3 measure of unemployment, the current 9.1% unemployment rate, only measures unemployment among those who are actively seeking a job. Those who have become discouraged by the inability to find a job and have ceased looking are not counted as being among the unemployed, and the U3 measure makes no adjustment for those who are forced into part-time jobs because there is no full-time employment.
The government knows that the U3 “headline” unemployment rate is seriously understated and provides a broader measure known as U6. This measure, which is seldom reported by the financial media, includes short-term discouraged workers (those who have not looked for jobs for six months or less) and an adjustment for those who wish full time employment but can only find part time work. Currently, this measure of unemployment stands at 16.2%.
In 1994 the Clinton “progressive” administration defined long-term discouraged workers out of existence. Consequently, no official unemployment rate includes long-term (more than six months) discouraged workers as unemployed. John Williams estimates this number and adds it to the U6 measure to produce a current rate of US unemployment of 22.7%, an unemployment rate 2.5 times higher than the official rate.
Similar understatement exists in the measure of inflation known as the Consumer Price Index. In order to reduce cost-of-living adjustments to Social Security checks and to hold down other inflation adjustments, the “progressive” Clinton administration accepted the Boskin Commission’s recommendation to introduce substitution into what had been a fixed, weighted, basket of goods used to measure the cost of a constant standard of living. In the new “reformed” measure, if the price of an item increases, say New York strip steak, the index assumes that consumers switch to a less expensive cut, such as round steak. Thus, the price increase doesn’t show up in the CPI.
Consumers, or a number of them, do tend to behave in this way. However, since the basket of goods comprising the CPI is no longer constant, but changes with price changes, the CPI has become a variable measure of the cost of living that reduces the inflation rate by measuring a lower standard of living.
John Williams estimates the CPI according to the previous official methodology that used a fixed basket of goods. He finds the rate of inflation to be much higher than is reported by the substitution-based methodology. http://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data/inflation-charts
The understatement of inflation serves to boost real Gross Domestic Product growth. In order to compare how much larger (or smaller) the economy is this year compared to last year, the GDP figure has to be adjusted for inflation. If the economy grew 5% in nominal terms and inflation was 3%, then GDP grew 2% in real terms, that is, real goods and services, as opposed to mere price rises, increased 2% over the year.
When John Williams adjusts US GDP with the former or traditional measure of inflation, he finds that there has been no growth in real GDP for several years. In other words, during the period of “economic recovery” the economy has actually been declining.
American economic decline began with offshoring during the Clinton administration. Instead of addressing this threat, the Clinton administration launched the neoconservative program of American Empire with American and NATO naked aggression against Serbia, sending the Serbian leader off to be tried as a war criminal for resisting the dissolution of his country.
The Bush/Cheney regime elevated the pursuit of American Empire under cover of “the war on terror.” Based entirely on lies and falsified intelligence, Bush/Cheney launched wars against the Taliban, who were unifying Afghanistan, and against Saddam Hussein in Iraq.
In the 1980s Hussein was used by Washington to launch a war against the revolutionary government in Iran that had overthrown the American puppet government, headed by the Shah of Iran. Ever since Washington lost its puppet rule over the Iranians, Washington has refused diplomatic relations with Iran. In the place of diplomatic relations, Washington demonizes Iran in order to set the country up for another attack a la Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Pakistan, and Yemen. Syria is next.
Saddam Hussein’s service to Washington was overlooked when it became more important to eliminate support for Hamas and Hezbollah, two barriers to Israel’s expansion in the Middle East, than to maintain Washington’s gratitude to an Iraqi pawn.
Despite unequivocal reports from arms inspectors that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction and most certainly had nothing whatsoever to do with 9/11, top Bush/Cheney regime officials demonized Iraq as the greatest threat to America. The imagery of mushroom clouds from nuclear weapons was evoked, A war was launched entirely on false pretexts that destroyed a country and left over one million Iraqis dead and four million displaced. What Washington did to Iraq is what the Nazis were tried and executed for at the Nuremberg Trials.
Obama was elected in order to stop the illegal and senseless wars. Instead, Obama both continued the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and expanded the wars into Libya, Pakistan, and Yemen. Since the deregulation of the financial system under the Bush/Cheney regime and the “war on terror,” the entire economy of the US has been sacrificed for the benefit of the financial sector and the military/security complex.
Labor Day is an anachronism. It should be renamed Corporation Day or War Day to celebrate the success of Bush/Obama in eliminating labor unions as a countervailing power to corporate power and the elevation of War as the highest goal of the American state.
Dr. Paul Craig Roberts is the father of Reaganomics and the former head of policy at the Department of Treasury. He is a columnist and was previously an editor for the Wall Street Journal. His latest book, “How the Economy Was Lost: The War of the Worlds,” details why America is disintegrating.
Derivatives: The Unregulated Global Casino for Banks
|
|
| LONG STORY: A derivative is a legal bet
(contract) that derives its value from another asset, such as the future
or current value of oil, government bonds or anything else. Ex- A
derivative buys you the option (but not obligation) to buy oil in 6
months for today's price/any agreed price, hoping that oil will cost
more in future. (I'll bet you it'll cost more in 6 months). Derivative
can also be used as insurance, betting that a loan will or won't default
before a given date. So its a big betting system, like a Casino, but
instead of betting on cards and roulette, you bet on future values and
performance of practically anything that holds value. The system is not
regulated what-so-ever, and you can buy a derivative on an existing
derivative. Most large banks try to prevent smaller investors from gaining access to the derivative market on the basis of there being too much risk. Deriv. market has blown a galactic bubble, just like the real estate bubble or stock market bubble (that's going on right now). Since there is literally no economist in the world that knows exactly how the derivative money flows or how the system works, while derivatives are traded in microseconds by computers, we really don't know what will trigger the crash, or when it will happen, but considering the global financial crisis this system is in for tough times, that will be catastrophic for the world financial system since the 9 largest banks shown below hold a total of $228.72 trillion in Derivatives - Approximately 3 times the entire world economy. No government in world has money for this bailout. Lets take a look at what banks have the biggest Derivative Exposures and what scandals they've been lately involved in. Derivative Data Source: ZeroHedge. |
| One Hundred Dollars |
| $100 - Most counterfeited money denomination in the world. Keeps the world moving. |
| Ten Thousand Dollars |
| $10,000 - Enough for a great vacation or to buy a used car. Approximately one year of work for the average human on earth. |
| 100 Million Dollars |
| $100,000,000 - Plenty to go around for everyone. Fits nicely on an ISO / Military standard sized pallet. $1 Million is the cash square on the floor. |
| 1 Billion Dollars |
| $1,000,000,000 - This is how a billion dollars looks like. 10 pallets of $100 bills. |
| 1 Trillion Dollars |
| $1,000,000,000,000
- When they throw around the word "Trillion" like it is nothing, this
is the reality of $1 trillion dollars. The square of pallets to the
right is $10 billion dollars. 100x that and you have the tower of $1
trillion that is 465 feet tall (142 meters). |
|
| $100 Million Dollars = 1 year of work for 3500 average Americans |
| It takes 3500 Americans 1 year of work to make $100 Million dollars. The 155 million Americans who worked with earnings in 2005 on average made $28,567 / year. In front of the 3500 people is the $100 Million pallet that they all have to work for 1 year to earn. Look carefully to see a stack of $1 Million and the 35 average Americans required to earn that $1 Million in 1 year. |
| Bank of New York Mellon |
| BNY has a derivative exposure of $1.375 Trillion dollars. Considered a too big to fail (TBTF) bank. It is currently facing (among others) lawsuits fraud and contract breach suits by a Los Angeles pension fund and New York pension funds, where BNY Mellon allegedly overcharged the funds on many millions of dollars and concealed it. |
| State Street Financial |
| State Street has a derivative exposure of $1.390 Trillion dollars. Too big to fail (TBTF) bank. It has been charged by California Attorney General (among other) lawsuits for massive fraud on California's CalPERS and CalSTRS pension funds - similar to BNY (above). |
| Morgan Stanley |
| Morgan Stanley has a derivative exposure of $1.722 Trilion dollars. Its a too big to fail (TBTF) bank. It recently settled a lawsuit for over-paying its employees while accepting the tax payer funded bailout. Vice Chairman of Morgan Stanley had a license plate that said "2BG2FAIL" on his Porsche Cayenne Turbo. All this while $250 million of bailout money ended up in the hands of Waterfall TALF Opportunity, run by the Morgan Stanley's owners' wives-- Marry a banker for a $250M tax-payer cash injection. The bank also got a SECRET $2.041 Trillion bailout from the Federal Reserve during the crisis, beyond the tax payer bailout. |
| Wells Fargo |
| Wells Fargo has a derivative exposure of $3.332 Trillion dollars. Its a too big to fail (TBTF) bank. WF has been charged for its role in allegedly pursuing illegal foreclosures and deceptive loan servicing. Wells Fargo was just slapped with a $85 million fine by Federal Reserve for putting good credit borrowers into bad-credit rating (high rate) loans. In March 2010, Wachovia (owned by Wells Fargo) paid $110 million fine for allowing transactions connected to drug ... and a $50 million fine for failing to monitor cash used to ship 22 tons of cocaine. It also failed to monitor $378.4 billion (that's $378400 millions dollars) worth of transactions to Mexican "casas de cambio" (think WesternUnion, anonymous cash transfer) usually linked to drug cartels. Beyond that, WF lets its' VIP employees live in foreclosed mansions. WF knows how to cash your legit check, then claim "fraud" and close your account. WF also re-orders your transactions to create more overdraft fees. Wells Fargo's Wachovia also got a SECRET $159 billion bailout from the Federal Reserve. Wells Fargo paid NO taxes in 2008-2010 and had a tax rate of NEGATIVE 1.4% while making $49 billion in profit during the same time. |
| HSBC |
| HSBC has a derivative exposure of $4.321 Trilion dollars. HSBC is a Hong Kong based bank and its original name is The Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation Limited. You will find HSBC working a lot with JP Morgan Chase. Both HSBC and JP Morgan Chase have strong interest in gold & precious metals. HSBC and JP Morgan Chase are often involved together in financial scandals. Lately HSBC has been sued for allegedly funneling more than $8.9 billion to the largest ponzi-scheme in his... - Bernie Maddof's investment business. HSBC (along w/ JP Morgan Chase) has been sued for alleged conspiracy suppressing the price of silver and gold, partially through precious metal DERIVATIVES and making billions of dollars on it. State of Hawaii is suing HSBC (and other banks) for deceptive credit card lending practices. DZ Bank in Germany is suing HSBC (and JP Morgan) for deceptive (lying) practices when selling home-loan-backed securities. HSBC is also under investigation for laundering billions of dollars. |
| Goldman Sachs |
| Goldman Sachs has a derivative exposure of $44.192 Trillion dollars. The $1 Trillion pillars towers are double-stacked @ 930 feet (248 m). The White House is standing next to the Statue of Liberty. Goldman Sachs has advantage over other banks because it has awesome connections in US Government. A lot of former Goldman employees hold high-level US Government positions (chart). Mitt Romney's top donor is Goldman Sachs, and one of Obama's best donors. Ex-CEO of Goldman Sachs, Hank Paulson became the Secretary of Treasury under Bush and during the 2008 financial crisis authored the TARP bill demanding $700 billion bail-out. In UK, Goldman Sachs escaped £10 million bill on a failed tax avoidance scheme with help of good connections. The bank is the largest player in the food commodities market, earned $955m from food speculation in 2009" - That's your $$$. Goldman Sachs employees are arming themselves with guns in case there is a populist uprising against the bank. Goldman Sachs calls their investors "muppets". and use clients to make money for themselves, disregarding the clients. The bank was fined $22 million for sharing valuable nonpublic information with top clients (Think insider trading with best clients). Goldman Sachs was part-owner America's leading website for prostitution ads until the ownership stake was exposed. Goldman Sachs helped Greece conceal its debt with secret loans, while simultaneously taking advantage of Greece. Goldman Sachs got a $814 billion SECRET bailout from the Federal Reserve during the 2008 crisis. Goldman Sachs got $10 billion of the 2008 TARP bailout, and in the same year paid $10.9 billion in employee compensation and "benefits", while paying a tax rate of 1%. That means an average of $327,000 to each Goldman Sach's employee. |
| Bank of America |
| Bank of America has a derivative exposure of $50.135 Trillion dollars. BofA is sticking the tax-payers with a MASSIVE bill, by moving derivatives to accounts insured by the federal government @ total of $53.7 trillion as of 06/2011. During 2011-12 BofA has been in need of cash, so Warren Buffett gave BofA $5 billion. Same year BofA sold its stake in China Construction Bank to raise $1.8 billion in cash. Bank of America paid $22 million to settle charges of improperly foreclosing on active-duty troops BofA recruited 3 cyber attack firms to attack WikiLeaks. but the Anonymous hacker group hacked the security firms first. BofA was sued for $31 billion in home-loan losses in 2011, the bank is involved in many lawsuits, too many to document. BofA also received a SECRET $1.344 trillion dollar bailout from the Federal Reserve. |
| Citibank |
| Citibank has a derivative exposure of $52.102 Trillion dollars. The $1 Trillion dollar towers are double-stacked @ 930 feet (248 m). Citibank customers have been arrested for trying to close their accounts, while in in Indonesia a man was interrogated to death in Citibank's special "questioning room". In 2011 Citibank paid a fine of $285 million for selling home-loan backed bonds to investors, while betting they would lose value (think derivatives/insurance). The man in charge of the unit at Citibank became Obama's Chief of Staff. 2 weeks before getting hired by Obama he got $900,000 from Citibank for great performance. This was after Citigroup took out $45 billion in bailout money. Citibank knowingly passed over bad loans to the Federal Housing Administration to insure. Citigroup also received a SECRET $2.513 trillion dollar bailout from the Federal Reserve. |
| JP Morgan Chase (JPM) |
| JP Morgan Chase has a derivative exposure of $70.151 Trillion dollars. $70 Trillion is roughly the size of the entire world's economy. The $1 Trillion dollar towers are double-stacked @ 930 feet (248 m). JP Morgan is rumored to hold 50->80% of the copper market, and manipulated the market by massive purchases. JP Morgan (JPM) is also guilty of manipulating the silver market to make billions. In 2010 JP Morgan had 3 perfect trading quarters and only lost money on 8 days. Lawsuits on home foreclosures have been filed against JP Morgan. Aluminum price is manipulated by JP Morgan through large physical ownership of material and creating bottlenecks during transport. JP Morgan was among the banks involved in the seizure of $620 million in assets for alleged fraud linked to derivatives. JP Morgan got $25 billion taxpayer in bailout money. It has no intention of using the money to lend to customers, but instead will use it to drive out competition. The bank is also the largest owner of BP - the oil spill company. During the oil spill the bank said that the oil spill is good for the economy. JP Morgan Chase also received a SECRET $391 billion dollar bailout from the Federal Reserve. In 2012, JP Morgan (JPM) took a $2 billion loss on "Poorly Executed" Derivative Bets. |
| 9 Biggest Banks' Derivative Exposure - $228.72 Trillion |
| Note the little man standing in front of white house. The little worm next to lastfootball field is a truck with $2 billion dollars. There is no government in the world that has this kind of money. This is roughly 3 times the entire world economy. The unregulated market presents a massive financial risk. The corruption and immorality of the banks makes the situation worse.  If you don't want to bank with these banks, but want to have access to free ATM's anywhere-- most Credit Unions in USA are in the CO-OP ATM network, where all ATM's are free to any COOP CU member and most support depositing checks. The Credit Unions are like banks, but invest all their profits to give members lower rates and better service. They don't have shareholders to worry about or have derivatives to purchase and sell. Keep an eye out in the news for "derivative crisis", as the crisis is inevitable with current falling value of most real assets. Derivative Data Source: ZeroHedge |
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