"You can have my ignorance when you pry it from my cold dead mind"

The above words are from Les Visible. It's a great line.

Wherever the American dream is buried, I bet it is the epitaph on the tombstone ... or should be.

Since sorrow never comes too late,
And happiness too swiftly flies.
Thought would destroy their paradise.
No more, where ignorance is bliss,
'Tis folly to be wise.

Thomas Gray

Have you ever been involved in a conversion where you try to interject a bit of information, maybe even what could be considered truth that's relevant to our lives and get the response; "I don't want to know?"

It's frustrating. Being passionate about the truth, about exposing the crimes and lies of our time often means one expects everyone else to feel that same passion. It just doesn't work that way. You preach to the choir, they shout and sing, but getting new converts to your position is a slow and difficult process. Folks hold their beliefs close to the heart and think they must in order to survive.

It's a cliche now ... "Everything I Know is Wrong" but still not a bad philosophy. I always thought it meant to never stop learning and don't believe everything you see and hear. When thrown in with the "seek and ye shall find" meme it forms the basics of a lifetime of searching. Simple but effective.

Of course, many are going to tell you that everything you know is still wrong. Just asking questions, especially the politically incorrect kind, gets you labeled as a heretic because control, manipulation and social engineering work much better if the masses sleepwalk.

Ignorance is never really bliss. No matter how ugly the truth, it still beats a pretty lie.

This is a Racism Test

Click this link ...... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRCnkKUW4n8

A Brutal Case of Backwards Justice in America

Michael Ellner said this about our crazy society: "Just look at us. Everything is backwards. Everything is upside down. Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, governments destroy freedom, the major media destroy information, and religion destroys spirituality."

This past week, BART police officer Johannes Mehserle was convicted in State court of involuntary manslaughter in the case of the New Year's Day 2009 fatal police shooting of an unarmed man, 22-year-old Oscar Grant. The local black community is rightfully outraged, but this is much bigger than race -- it’s about how our society defines justice.

Strip away all the labels; the fact remains that an armed man shot an unarmed restrained man in the back, period. This case should not be about an alleged black troublemaker and an overzealous white cop. Their race shouldn’t matter; the circumstances of why Grant was detained shouldn’t matter; and Mehserle being a cop shouldn’t matter either. Grant was a sovereign, unarmed, outnumbered, restrained, and harmless American citizen and was shot in the back in cold blood. To make matters worse, Grant was being toyed with by the cops like a domesticated cat does with a mouse before he ultimately rips him to shreds.

The scene was unequivocally premeditated first-degree murder. Furthermore, the backup police officers who witnessed, participated in, and lied about the event should also be prosecuted as accomplices, just as you and I would be if we had done the same thing.

A justice system that allows an officer of the law to shoot a restrained man in the back with little more than a slap on the wrist, while citizens defending themselves and their families from an intruder is charged with a crime, is severely backwards. We can now chalk up our justice system as yet another gross failure of America.

I guess by now we should not be surprised that this is how our criminal government works in our upside-down society. After all, we were told that 19 members of Al Qaeda attacked us on September 11th, killing over 3000 people, and we proceed to kill well over 1 million innocent Iraqis who had nothing to do with 9/11. Does anyone still believe our decision-makers are the good guys?

It seems in every case that the media uses race, religion, patriotism, or any red herring they can conjure up to distract us from the obvious truth about right and wrong, justice, and common human decency.

Ain’t No Money in Being Productive

There ain’t no money in being productive. The only money to be made is in feasting upon the carcass of this once great nation.

Seriously. Think about it. What sector of the economy is making serious money right now? The banking industry. And how do they make money? By taking funds from the fed at near 0% interest rates and then doing a couple of things. They can lend it to the Federal Government at interest and make money on the spread. They can trade in the stock market for their own account; a rigged game with their nano second front running at the expense of their retail & wholesale customers. All of the majors had a perfect quarter last quarter meaning they had no trading day losses. Easy to do if you know in advance what everyone else is going to do.

Let’s take it back a step in time. Let’s take it back to the vulture capitalists. Do you know they make their money? By being a brilliant capitalist? That’s what they would want you to believe. No, they make money by using borrowed money to buy family owned businesses, saddling the company with debt, taking a multi million dollar fee from the borrowed money for doing so, operating the company for a while and then selling it on for a larger amount to someone else using borrowed money saddling the company with more debt, and taking out a profit in the transaction. Brilliant, right? Depends. If you are the vulture, you get a nice check. If you are the worker at the company, you eventually lose your job as the company closes because the company could no longer service the debt payments. In other words extracting money from the carcass of productivity. Geniuses, all and they are worshiped as gods of capitalism.

Step forward to the world of mortgage securitization. It is clear from the SEC’s complaint against Goldman Sachs and the Magnetar case out of Chicago exposed by the NY Times and Pro Publica that the brilliant ones came to the conclusion a long time ago that it was more lucrative to feast upon destruction than it was to be constructive. In both those cases, securitized loan trusts were set up designed to fail and then the very ones who created those securitized pools bet against their investors for those vehicles to fail. They made billions by selling credit default swaps based upon their known, guaranteed failure while screwing their customers with their foreknowledge.

In the real estate world, the only thing moving are the foreclosures and the turnover thereof. Some may say this is expunging the system of a bad hangover, I’m not so sure. The whole system is based upon credit – meaning money issued as debt. It takes a productive job to be able to have the money to service debt. If there are no productive jobs, who is going to be left to buy the houses? And even if the ones who have the few remaining money paying jobs buy these houses as rental properties, who are they going to rent to? You have, no doubt, heard about the ever growing tent cities? It’s a shame, all of these houses sitting empty, and all of these people living in tents. In my book, the foreclosure/real estate industry is feeding on the carcass.

And productive work? Forget about it. No one seems to be interested anymore.

A case in point. There is a technology sitting on the shelf right now which quite literally turns you shit into gold. It takes fresh, raw humanure and extracts line grade methane gas from it at volumetric parity. What does that mean? It means for every gallon of poo which is processed, you get a gallon of line grade natural gas. And what would that mean were it implemented in a community? It would mean the municipal waste treatment plant would go from a money sucking, power sucking critical community infrastructure liability, to a money generating, power creating community infrastructure asset. It pays for itself. It pays for its operation, it pays for its replacement.

Is it used? No. And do you want to know why? Because the patents have expired. No one is willing to develop it to a community wide application because it can be done by anyone. Unless it can be protected with patents, no one is willing to “risk” the money to develop it. Productive? Absolutely. Does it make money? Absolutely. Will it be developed? What, are you kidding?

There is the primary economy, the secondary economy, and the tertiary economy. The primary economy is directly tied to the land. Farming, forestry, mining. The secondary economy is what is done to the primary economy. Transportation, manufacturing, distribution. The tertiary economy is the financial services which provides the grease (money) to make the primary and secondary function smoothly.

Up until now, whenever there have been difficulties in the primary or secondary economy, tweaking and tinkering with the tertiary could alter the way the primary or secondary functioned and things would be fine. For a while. But eventually, those tweaks stopped working because the level of complexity became so great, it becomes overbearing.

That’s where we are now. So what is wrong that the tertiary is the only way to create money? It should be the primary or secondary, the productive work, which creates wealth, not the tertiary. How did it get so wrong?

Here is what is wrong. It is money as debt.

Why is there price inflation? Classic economics would tell you it is too much money chasing too few goods. If that were the case, more goods would alleviate the problem. But it doesn’t.

Why?

Very few businesses are self financing. Most use borrowed money. If borrowed money is used, it must be paid back with interest. The only way to cover the interest cost is to raise prices. So if your supplier uses borrowed money, and you use borrowed money (and even if you don’t’ use borrowed money), the interest money needs to be found.

When money is borrowed into existence, the interest money doesn’t come with it so there is more owed back than exists. Everyone screams about how we need to pay off the debt, but the way things are currently set up, if we did that, you wouldn’t have any money to buy groceries, gas, clothes, rent, mortgage. It wouldn’t exist. It would all grind to a halt.

It is the duty of the sovereign to provide the coin of the realm. This duty was abdicated in this country for the fourth time in our history 100 years ago to private hands for their private profit. And profit they have indeed. They are the only ones making money these days. Productive work doesn’t pay. Soft hands pay.

Until this duty is reclaimed by the sovereign, until money becomes the public utility it needs to be, we shall forever be enslaved to the monied class. Productive work will decline, and a financial elite shall feed upon the carcass while the rest starve amongst plenty. The primary and secondary economies are grinding to a halt as the tertiary economy removes the grease from the wheels of commerce. Non productive work, feasting upon the dying carcass of the productive class will be the only thing that pays.

And here’s the kick.

Eventually, the primary and secondary economies grind to a complete halt which means the tertiary economy does too. And it all comes tumbling down. For everyone.

And what is the solution?

The magic number three.

1) The sovereign has the right, nay, the duty, to provide the coin of the realm and must reclaim its duty. The sovereign has no need to “borrow” money. It exists in abundance simply because the sovereign exists.

2) There can be no fractional reserve banking. Fractional reserve banking creates money out of nothing and is counterfeit. It usurps the right and duty of the sovereign and must be met with fierce retribution.

3) All levels of the sovereign, city, county, state and federal, must accept only the sovereign’s coin as payment of taxes. This gives immediate legitimacy and circulation to the sovereign’s coin.

Somewhere along the line, things became horribly mixed up. Money became commerce. Money is not commerce. Money is what enables commerce. Pops told me a long time ago that this country started to go to hell when General Motors got out of the business of making cars and into the business of making money. “They have it backwards” he would say.

Until we can get away from the idea that money is commerce, the primary and secondary economies shall continue to grind to a halt and there shall be immense pain for the country.

The Financial Con Of The Decade Explained So Simply Even A Congressman Will Get It

Sometimes, when chasing the bouncing ball of fraud and corruption on a daily basis, it is easy to lose sight of the forest for the millions of trees (all of which have a 150% LTV fourth-lien on them, underwritten by Goldman Sachs, which is short the shrubbery tranche). Luckily, Charles Hugh Smith, of oftwominds.com has taken the time to put it all into such simple and compelling terms, even corrupt North Carolina congressmen will not have the chance to plead stupidity after reading this.

Of course, to those familiar with the work of Austrian economists, none of this will come as a surprise.

1. Enable trillions of dollars in mortgages guaranteed to default by packaging unlimited quantities of them into mortgage-backed securities (MBS), creating umlimited demand for fraudulently originated loans.

2. Sell these MBS as "safe" to credulous investors, institutions, town councils in Norway, etc., i.e. "the bezzle" on a global scale.

3. Make huge "side bets" against these doomed mortgages so when they default then the short-side bets generate billions in profits.

4. Leverage each $1 of actual capital into $100 of high-risk bets.

5. Hide the utterly fraudulent bets offshore and/or off-balance sheet (not that the regulators you had muzzled would have noticed anyway).

6. When the longside bets go bad, transfer hundreds of billions of dollars in Federal guarantees, bailouts and backstops into the private hands which made the risky bets, either via direct payments or via proxies like AIG. Enable these private Power Elites to borrow hundreds of billions more from the Treasury/Fed at zero interest.

7. Deposit these funds at the Federal Reserve, where they earn 3-4%. Reap billions in guaranteed income by borrowing Federal money for free and getting paid interest by the Fed.

8. As profits pile up, start buying boatloads of short-term U.S. Treasuries. Now the taxpayers who absorbed the trillions in private losses and who transferred trillions in subsidies, backstops, guarantees, bailouts and loans to private banks and corporations, are now paying interest on the Treasuries their own money purchased for the banks/corporations.

9. Slowly acquire trillions of dollars in Treasuries--not difficult to do as the Federal government is borrowing $1.5 trillion a year.

10. Stop buying Treasuries and dump a boatload onto the market, forcing interest rates to rise as supply of new T-Bills exceeds demand (at least temporarily). Repeat as necessary to double and then triple interest rates paid on Treasuries.

11. Buy hundreds of billions in long-term Treasuries at high rates of interest. As interest rates rise, interest payments dwarf all other Federal spending, forcing extreme cuts in all other government spending.

12. Enjoy the hundreds of billions of dollars in interest payments being paid by taxpayers on Treasuries that were purchased with their money but which are safely in private hands.

Charles' conclusion does not need further commentary as it is absolutely spot on:

Since the Federal government could potentially inflate away these trillions in Treasuries, buy enough elected officials to force austerity so inflation remains tame. In essence, these private banks and corporations now own the revenue stream of the Federal government and its taxpayers. Neat con, and the marks will never understand how "saving our financial system" led to their servitude to the very interests they bailed out.

The circle is now complete: in "saving our financial system," the public borrowed trillions and transferred the money to private Power Elites, who then buy the public debt with the money swindled out of the taxpayer. Then the taxpayers transfer more wealth every year to the Power Elites/Plutocracy in the form of interest on the Treasury debt. The Power Elites will own the debt that was taken on to bail them out of bad private bets: this is the culmination of privatized gains, socialized risk.

In effect, it's a Third World/colonial scam on a gigantic scale: plunder the public treasury, then buy the debt which was borrowed and transferred to your pockets. You are buying the country with money you borrowed from its taxpayers. No despot could do better.

As for part two of this epic con we are all living through, Charles explains as follows:

The Con of the Decade (Part II) meshes neatly with the first Con of the Decade. Yesterday I described how the financial Plutocracy can transfer ownership of the Federal government's income stream via using the taxpayer's money to buy the debt that the taxpayers borrowed to bail out the Plutocracy.

In order for the con to work, however, the Power Elites and their politico toadies in Congress, the Treasury and the Fed must convince the peasantry that low tax rates on unearned income are not just "free market capitalism at its best" but that they are also "what the country needs to get moving again."

The first step of the con was successfully fobbed off on the peasantry in 2001: lower the taxes paid by the most productive peasants marginally while massively lowering the effective taxes paid by the financial Plutocracy.

One Year Later, No Sign of Improvement in America's Income Inequality Problem:

Income inequality has grown massively since 2000. According to Harvard Magazine, 66% of 2001-2007's income growth went to the top 1% of Americans, while the other 99% of the population got a measly 6% increase. How is this possible? One thing to consider is that in 2001, George W. Bush cut $1.3 trillion in taxes, and 32.6% of the cut went to the top 1%. Another factor is Bush's decision to increase the national debt from $5 trillion to $11 trillion. The combination of increased government spending and lower taxes helped the top 1% considerably.

The second part of the con is to mask much of the Power Elites' income streams behind tax shelters and other gaming-of-the-system so the advertised rate appears high to the peasantry but the effective rate paid on total income is much much lower.

The tax shelters are so numerous and so effective that it takes thousands of pages of tax codes and armies of toadies to pursue them all: family trusts, oil depletion allowances, tax-free bonds and of course special one-off tax breaks arranged by "captured" elected officials.

Step three is to convince the peasantry that $600 in unearned income (capital gains) should be taxed in the same way as $600 million. The entire key to the U.S. tax code is to tax earned income heavily but tax unearned income (the majority of the Plutocracy's income is of course unearned) not at all or very lightly.

In a system which rewarded productive work and provided disincentives to rampant speculation and fraud, the opposite would hold: unearned income would be taxed at much higher rates than earned income, which would be taxed lightly, especially at household incomes below $100,000.

If the goal were to encourage "investing" while reining in the sort of speculations which "earn" hedge fund managers $600 million each (no typo, that was the average of the top 10 hedgies' personal take of their funds gains), then all unearned income (interest, dividends, capital gains, rents from property, oil wells, etc.) up to $6,000 a year would be free--no tax. Unearned income between $6,000 and $60,000 would be taxed at 20%, roughly half the top rate for earned income. This would leave 95% of U.S. households properly encouraged to invest via low tax rates.

Above $60,000, then unearned income would be taxed the same as earned income, and above $1 million (the top 1/10 of 1% of households) then it would be taxed at 50%. Above $10 million, it would be taxed at 60%. Such a system would offer disincentives to the speculative hauls made by the top 1/10 of 1% while encouraging investing in the lower 99%.

Could such a system actually be passed into law and enforced by a captured, toady bureaucracy and Congress? Of course not. But it is still a worthy exercise to take apart the rationalizations being offered to justify rampant speculative looting, collusion, corruption and fraud.

The last step of the con is to raise taxes on the productive peasantry to provide the revenues needed to pay the Plutocracy its interest on Treasuries. If the "Bush tax cuts" are repealed, the actual effective rates paid on unearned income will remain half (20%) of the rates on earned income (wages, salaries, profits earned from small business, etc.) which are roughly 40% at higher income levels.

The financial Plutocracy will champion the need to rein in Federal debt, now that they have raised the debt via plundering the public coffers and extended ownership over that debt.

Now the con boils down to insuring the peasantry pay enough taxes to pay the interest on the Federal debt--interest which is sure to rise considerably. The 1% T-Bill rates were just part of the con to convince the peasantry that trillions of dollars could be borrowed "with no consequences." Those rates will steadily rise once the financial Power Elites own enough of the Treasury debt. Then the game plan will be to lock in handsome returns on long-term Treasuries, and command the toady politicos to support "austerity."

The austerity will not extend to the financial Elites, of course. That's the whole purpose of the con. "Some are more equal than others," indeed.

h/t Andrew

With news like this, who needs PR?

Do you really need to read a government press release to be told that you're being pillaged for your own good?

Contrary to the American press' reputation for giving voice to the voiceless, the largest voice is given to the most powerful monopolies, whose fallacies, lies, and assumed righteousness are amplified and multiplied with precious little skepticism.

Perhaps you have seen the following justification for the U.S. military occupation of Iraq; a version has appeared for years in news reports and official releases.

"The persistent violence also has raised concerns about the readiness of Iraq’s government to take over responsibility for security as the U.S. prepares to withdraw its forces by the end of next year." ["Al-Qaida in Iraq adopting Taliban tactics," AP, 6/17/10]

While that may seem logical at first glance, one eventually wonders whether the editor is counting on a reader's ignorance of the obvious: U.S. forces were in Iraq at the time. Apparently, the U.S. military occupation — which is obviously not achieving its goals of peace and stability — must continue anyway.

You also may have read that U.S. and NATO forces only "accidentally" kill civilians in an effort to "gain the trust of the Afghan people," and that it's all part of a "counterinsurgency strategy" — which was "used successfully against both Sunni and Shiite insurgents in Iraq" — aimed at "securing the Afghan population"; while, when "insurgents" kill civilians, they are "seeking to sow fear and undermine confidence in . . . government." ["NATO accepts blame for killing 6 Afghan civilians," AP, 7/9/10]

Another way the popular press influences public opinion in favor of empire is by presenting only one side's war-making as violent and extreme, and therefore contemptible: "Army offensives and U.S. missile strikes are believed to have decreased militant attacks in Pakistan, but the violence is far from ended." ["Major militant attacks in Pakistan in 2010," AP, 7/9/10] "But the violence ..." means more war is necessary.

That report goes on to list only those attacks reported to have been perpetrated by the "militants," who — perhaps due to their lack of a standing army, drones, and F-18s — are not capable of such noble actions as "offensives" and "strikes."

Government officials speak through the editor, and vice versa. The NYT and the AP are quite at ease with preaching American exceptionalism, using the U.S. government's own terminology and apologies for various aggression:

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton faced sharp rebukes from Pakistani audiences Friday, including one woman who accused the U.S. of conducting "executions without trial" [scare quotes] in aerial drone strikes. Slapping back, Clinton questioned Pakistan's commitment to fighting terrorists [no scare quotes]. . . .

As she sparred with Pakistani citizens and journalists, Clinton faced sharp questions about the secret U.S. program that uses unmanned aircraft to launch missiles to kill terrorists along the porous, ungoverned border with Afghanistan [excuse for drone strikes].

But she refused to go into detail about the classified strikes that have killed both key terror leaders and bystanders [unlike bystanders, innocent civilians wouldn't just stand by as those terrorists do their terrorism], long a source of outrage among Pakistan's population despite an equally deadly campaign of militant-spawned bombings. ["Pakistanis confront Clinton over drone attacks" AP, 10/31/9]

"Despite an equally deadly campaign of militant-spawned bombings" means those Pakistanis have contempt only for Americans.

Similarly, in federal affairs, readers are led to perceive that most "lawmakers" opposed to "economic stimulus," "defense appropriations," or "health care reform" are driven merely by ideology or the threat of being unseated in the election. While that may be true in many cases, it is no reason to ignore those who defy the stereotype.

If anyone should have their voices amplified, it would be the empire's victims and opposition. Instead, those who oppose an aggressive foreign policy, or immoral and unconstitutional legislation, are made to look as though their opposition is purely political or dishonest; an all-powerful and ever-expanding central authority is tacitly accepted as a divine inevitability.

With a press like that, who needs a Ministry?

WSJ: The Estate Tax Death Panel -- Too Rich to Live Past 2010?

Weekend Wall Street Journal, Too Rich to Live?:

The estate tax is set to come roaring back in January. That sets the stage for a perverse calculus: End it all—or leave a massive bill for your heirs to deal with.

It has come to this: Congress, quite by accident, is incentivizing death.

When the Senate allowed the estate tax to lapse at the end of last year, it encouraged wealthy people near death's door to stay alive until Jan. 1 so they could spare their heirs a 45% tax hit. Now the situation has reversed: If Congress doesn't change the law soon—and many experts think it won't—the estate tax will come roaring back in 2011. Not only will the top rate jump to 55%, but the exemption will shrink from $3.5 million per individual in 2009 to just $1 million in 2011, potentially affecting eight times as many taxpayers.

The math is ugly: On a $5 million estate, the tax consequence of dying a minute after midnight on Jan. 1, 2011 rather than two minutes earlier could be more than $2 million; on a $15 million estate, the difference could be about $8 million.

Of course, there is a "death incentive" whenever Congress raises the estate tax. But it hasn't happened in decades; the top rate has held steady or fallen since 1942, according to tax historian Joseph Thorndike of Tax Analysts, a nonprofit group. In fact, the jump from zero to 55% would be "the largest increase in a major tax that we've ever seen," Mr. Thorndike says.

That possibility presents a bizarre menu of options for wealthy older people—and their heirs. Estate planning was never cheerful, but now it is getting downright macabre, at least for the tax averse.

"You don't know whether to commit suicide or just go on living and working," says Eugene Sukup, an outspoken critic of the estate tax and the founder of Sukup Manufacturing, a maker of grain bins that employs 450 people in Sheffield, Iowa. Born in Nebraska during the Dust Bowl, the 81-year-old Mr. Sukup is a National Guard veteran and high school graduate who founded his firm, which now owns more than 70 patents, with $15,000 in 1963. He says his estate taxes, which would be zero this year, could be more that $15 million if he were to die next year. ...

Senators are divided among three possible solutions. Some favor the pre-Bush rate of 55%, while others advocate a 35% rate (with a more generous exemption). A third group prefers the old 45% rate. ...

The IRS has yet to issue guidance explaining current estate-tax law, and no one knows if Congress will include retroactive elements when members deal with the tax. ...

Mr. Aucutt, who has practiced estate-tax law for 35 years, expects to see "truly gruesome" cases toward the end of the year, given the huge difference between 2010 and 2011 rates. Without knowing what the estate tax is, has been or will be, advisers say it is difficult to offer counsel that applies broadly, as techniques that work under one version of the law backfire in others. ...

What about the options for taxpayers who are so eager to reduce their heirs' tax burden that they are considering ending their lives? Three states—Oregon, Washington and Montana—allow versions of the practice. ... Still, states strongly discourage what's becoming known as "suicide tourism" with elaborate residency and documentation requirements.

Similarly, some countries, such as Switzerland and the Netherlands, have long allowed physicians to aid patients in dying. But only Switzerland extends this benefit to foreigners.

(Hat Tip: Scott Radmall.)