The Smell of Collapse is in the Air – Part 3

Read The Smell of Collapse is in the Air – Part 1 and Part 2.
We live in a world of exploding debt, unsustainable deficit spending, Quantitative Easing, corrupt politicians, and “forever” wars that benefit the political and financial elite. We will need help to survive the collapse of failing economic and political systems.

Collapse – From Our Debt Addiction

Bill Bonner:

“The feds decided to fight fire with fire. To solve the debt problem, they added debt! The genius of this plan was, we admit, not immediately obvious.”

“The feds have always had one overriding goal: to transfer money and power to themselves. They create no wealth. The can only get it by taking from others. The crisis – which was nothing more than a natural market correction in an unnaturally extreme debt cycle, caused largely by the feds – gave them cover for larceny on an ever grander scale.”

Egon Von Guerytz:

“We have had a century of false prosperity based on printed money and credit… These four extremely shaky legs, Central bank printing, Bank leverage, Government borrowing and Derivatives manufacturing have created a world of delusional wealth and illusory prosperity. Also, there is a total absence of moral and ethical values. We are in the final stages of an era of extreme decadence, an era that sadly cannot and will not have a happy ending.”

Dan Norcini:

“In a debt based system, more and more, larger and larger, amounts of debt have to be taken on for the economy to grow. It is difficult to do that if consumers are afraid to spend with the same reckless abandon as they did during the boom years.”

Karl Denninger:

“What Bernanke did yesterday [the no-taper caper] was guarantee a crash.”

Egon Von Guerytz:

“Why will the dollar go down? For the simple reason that the US has created a mountain of debt of enormous proportions. This is a debt mountain which can never be repaid with real money. This is why the US will have to print unlimited amounts of dollars over the next few years. But this will only add to the problems the US faces.

“The collapsing currency will drive prices of goods and services exponentially higher. But the falling dollar will also start a vicious downward spiral with other countries selling the dollar assets, including their Treasury bonds, and that will lead to even more money printing. This will cause the dollar to fall even faster and interest rates will surge more quickly during this period as well.”

Collapse – Before or After the Next Big War?

Ernest Hemmingway:

“The first panacea for a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency; the second is war. Both bring a temporary prosperity; both bring a permanent ruin. But both are the refuge of political and economic opportunists.”

Bill Holter:

“A war is necessary. It is necessary so that fingers can be pointed to it as the reason for all things bad… Not many pay attention anyway but a war, more than anything else will distract attention to the real deal. The real deal being that the global Ponzi scheme is collapsing.”

Strauss & Howe – “The Fourth Turning”:

“History offers even more sobering warnings: Armed confrontation usually occurs around the climax of Crisis. If there is confrontation, it is likely to lead to war. This could be any kind of war – class war, sectional war, war against global anarchists or terrorists, or superpower war. If there is war, it is likely to culminate in total war, fought until the losing side has been rendered nil – its will broken, territory taken and leaders captured.”

Collapse – Seek Protection & Safety With Gold

Dr. Paul Craig Roberts:

“So what the Fed is doing is simply keeping the system going as long as it can. I don’t see how they can avoid a crash. It they stop QE it’s going to crash. If they don’t stop it, it’s going to crash later. So the Fed is manipulating everything to keep the system intact. And to repeat myself, they can do that until there is a run on the dollar, and when there is a run on the dollar they lose control. At that point (the price of) gold and silver will explode.”

Peter Cooper:

“In order to reset the monetary system this time Mr. Rickards argues that the gold reserves of the global central banks will be absolutely essential with 20-40 per cent gold backing sufficient.

That will mean a revaluing of bullion to around $7,000 an ounce or otherwise there will not be enough of it to do the job. Central banks will be in a position where they have to do this rather than constantly suppress the gold price to create an illusion of low inflation, he contends.”

Robin Griffiths – Historic Fed Decision’s Impact on Gold and Major Markets:

“The (gold) charts indicate that a capitulation sell-off has taken place, completing the bear part of a cycle still in secular uptrend. Central banks have been trying to disrupt the bull move but they have simply ended up with nothing in their vaults. They have lent or sold so much of the precious metal that it would take seven years of production to rebuild their reserves to the levels they were at two years ago.”

Western Central Banks have supported collapsing western currencies and economies by selling off the one real asset – gold – that has no counter-party risk. This seems less like a sensible decision and more like an act of desperation. The result has been a massive transfer of gold from western commercial and central bank vaults to the east, where China, Russia and others have imported huge quantities of gold from London, Switzerland, and New York.

Discussion

1. The U.S. economy is run largely for the benefit of the political and financial elite. (An excellent explanation is given here.) Ever-increasing debt is necessary for the transfer of wealth to the political and financial elite.
   
2. It seems that BORROWING MORE money to extend current wars and to fight additional wars in the Middle East is a major component of the U.S. economy. What price will we pay in terms of lives, jobs, commodity price inflation, and the standard of living for the middle and lower classes? It is clear that expensive and pointless wars will accelerate the timing for a financial collapse.
   
3. The United States, Europe, and Japan have chosen to print money and create more debt to “solve” their excessive debt problems. Few expect this will end well and history suggests some form of collapse is highly likely.
   
4. The United States, Europe, and Japan have created a crushing mountain of debt that is ever-increasing and can only be rolled over (extend and pretend), but not repaid. Which currency and economy will collapse first? How long will the United States dollar maintain its “reserve currency status” and how dire will the consequences be when that “exorbitant privilege” (French Minister of Finance) is lost?
   
5. When the dollar weakens or collapses against other better managed currencies, how drastically will gold and silver appreciate? There is no bubble in gold yet, but remember that “there is no fever like gold fever,” so another bubble in gold seems inevitable. Gold fever will visit those countries that have abused their monetary systems, mismanaged their currencies, and who confuse actual wealth with unbacked paper money, which is merely a depreciating currency based on debt IOUs.
   
6. What about the $1,000,000,000,000,000 (a $ Quadrillion or so) in global derivatives? Could a spike in interest rates cause those “weapons of mass financial destruction” (Warren Buffett) to collapse the international banking system and a few Western economies? For perspective, remember the economic crash of 2008, the 2006-07 housing crash, the tech stocks crash of 2000, and many other financial crashes that enriched a few at the expense of the many. It can happen again!
   
7. Are you prepared? I’ll say it again – protect yourself with gold and silver stored outside the banking system!
   

Stay safe! It is wise to admit that strange and previously unthinkable events are now more likely to occur in the U.S. and Europe – such as stolen MFGlobal customer accounts, Cyprus “bail-in,” and partially nationalized Polish retirement funds.
Additional concerns that may contribute to a financial collapse include QE to infinity, unsustainable deficit spending, middle-east wars, a government shut-down, Obamacare, an unknown risk from about $1,000 Trillion in derivatives, and loss of faith and trust in governments and central banks.
A financial collapse may not occur in the next few months, but the risks and instabilities seem to increase every quarter. Gold and silver, stored outside the banking system, seem more necessary after each new political crisis, government scandal, QE creation, and financial bail-out.
Read: Gold, Silver, and the Status Quo
Read: Silver: The $100 History
GE Christenson
aka Deviant Investor

5 Seemingly Harmless Groups That Wield Terrifying Power

Everyone knows a conspiracy theorist who, at the slightest provocation, will spout a stream of cerebro-diarrhea about the secret organizations that control every minute aspect of our lives from the shadows. Well, it turns out you owe that guy a burrito, because he was totally right about everything ... except for the "secret" part. The sinister organizations making society dance like a puppet aren't illuminati or freemasons -- they're boring, ordinary groups gone mad with power. Groups like ...

#5. The Auto Clubs That Invented Jaywalking to Shift Blame to Pedestrians

General Photographic Agency/Valueline/Getty Images

Sure, we all hate it when some arrogant pedestrian has the audacity to get their blood all over our hood, but put yourself in the shoes of that oblivious walk-monkey for a second: Isn't it a little strange that, if you happen to cross the road at the wrong spot, you're the lawbreaker, even if you don't inconvenience any drivers at all? Motorcycles, bicycles -- hell, even horses supposedly have equal rights to the road. But you, with your primitive feet, have absolutely no business being there, and you're basically volunteering for a real-life game of Frogger every time you cross the street in a non-stripy section.

Sega
Except that you'd never have the stones to rock the vest/tie/no shirt combo.

But that wasn't always the case. When cars first arrived on the scene, they weren't guaranteed the right of way -- if a car hit a pedestrian, it was a shocking and public tragedy. The driver would face charges of something like "technical manslaughter" even when the accident was considered unavoidable. The thinking was that you're the one shooting about in a murder machine -- the burden of caution is on you.
It was auto clubs like AAA that first worked to make drivers the lords of the blacktop. Back in 1923, people started calling for physical speed limiters on cars to prevent accidents, and auto clubs (under heavy influence from the boys in Detroit) realized that slower cars would result in fewer owners, fewer sales, and fewer memberships. With an astoundingly subtle, graceful, not even slightly racist campaign, they lobbied and successfully kept American cars faster than your mom at a Loverboy concert.

Cincinnati Post
Although the idea of walling off Cincinnati does sound appealing to most modern Americans.

The bigger victory, though, was shifting the blame for accidents away from errant, roguish, begoggled old-timey automobilists over to those devil-may-care pedestrians. The concept of jaywalking basically didn't exist until the 1920s -- why would it? Streets were made for people to get around, and most people got around by walking. Now they suddenly had to get the hell out of the road to make way for cars. It makes sense to us today in our auto-centric culture, but picture that moment when it happened: It would be like waking up one morning to find that you could no longer walk down the hallway in your apartment building because too many people were getting hit by Segways.
So with the legislation in place, it came time to focus on changing people's perceptions. And much like cigarettes and Japanese card-battle games, auto makers found that they had to hit them young. AAA paid for the safety education of millions of students, telling children to use crosswalks and look both ways. Who could argue with that? It was all in the name of saving those precious young sales.

Thomas Northcut/Stockbyte/Getty Images, Photos.com

Lives. We mean saving lives. Same difference, right?

#4. Credit Reporting Agencies Who Sell You to the Highest Bidder (Or Any Bidder)

Comstock/Comstock/Getty Images

As far as society is concerned, your entire worth as a human being boils down to a single number on a single piece of paper: your credit score. Somehow, we all accidentally entered into a Logan's Run-type situation, but instead of coming when we turn 30, the men in black jumpsuits show up when we inevitably overcharge our Home Depot card trying to build a trebuchet in our living room.

Justin Sullivan/Getty Images News/Getty Images
"We'd have approved you and hooked you up with moat financing. Just sayin'."

And that's not the unsettling part. See, credit ratings are controlled by just three private companies: Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion. But these companies rule far more than your credit score. Recently, Experian landed a sweet deal with the Social Security Administration under which they control your access to online Social Security statements and benefits. That's particularly scary because it turns out that Experian isn't exactly great at online security: Last year, Irish regulators opened an investigation into their security practices due to the more than 80 breaches of their consumer database since 2006. If you're wondering why the Irish were investigating the issue, it's because Experian -- the company that controls access to U.S. Social Security benefits and the credit reports of U.S. consumers -- is based in Dublin. Ireland's not exactly Thunderdome or anything -- we're sure they have a fine workforce -- but we're outsourcing our own benefits and the maintenance of the single most important number in our lives?

Jupiterimages/Photos.com/Getty Images
And you just know you're going to get screwed when they convert your number to metric credit.

Don't freak out.
Yet.
Because it keeps going!
You know all those pre-approved credit offers that you get in the mail and use as kindling for your flaming trebuchet balls of justice? Those companies know to send you all that crap because the credit reporting agencies can sell your information to any third party they damn well please. And they're not just selling your name, address, and credit score -- they even sell unlisted phone numbers. Presumably because they, like Cracked, know that everything is better in lists.

#3. The Medical-Industrial Complex That Exists Solely to Bankrupt You

Dynamic Graphics/Creatas/Getty Images

We all know that the health care industry has the second most jacked up perception of value in the country, slightly behind defense contractors and just above printer ink. But you might not know exactly how bad it really is, so here -- check out this comparison of the cost of medical procedures in the U.S. versus the rest of the world:

New York Times
Seems appropriate that the one where they get to jam something up your ass has the best value, percentage wise.

An angiogram in the U.S. costs 26 times what it does in Canada. Canada is right there! Depending on where you live in the States, you could conceivably look out your window at the Canadian border and literally watch $879 burst into flames. But why? It's not (solely) because of socialization, or the lack thereof -- it's because the hospitals and insurance companies are involved in a sort of cold war of blatant fraud that leads to constantly escalating prices. Each hospital has a "chargemaster" -- a list of what it charges for every item or service. No two hospitals' chargemasters are quite the same, but they all have one thing in common: gigantic markups. But the insurance companies know it's a hot steaming wad of crap, so they use their largess to haggle with the hospitals and get upwards of 70 percent discounts off the list prices. Hospitals then have to mark everything up, because they know those bastard insurance companies are only going to pay 30 percent of the asking price. You see where this is going: Those without the necessary influence to haggle (i.e., you, the uninsured jerkwad with third-degree trebuchet burns) are pretty well screwed.

Michael Blann/Digital Vision/Getty Images
"Sorry, your policy only covers catapults."

People don't think to question it because most of them have never even heard of a chargemaster, and the health industry has managed to steer the health care debate away from asking why we're paying $77 for a single gauze pad when we could buy a whole goddamn box of the things at Walmart for 10 bucks and focusing instead on who should pay for it.
But how have they managed to so completely foul up something as fundamental as health care? The answer is obvious: money. Hospitals are a for-profit industry, and one does have to spend money to make money. Lobbyists for defense, aerospace, oil, and gas have tossed a combined $2.8 billion at Washington since 1998. The medical-industrial complex has spent about twice that.

Jupiterimages/Photos.com/Getty Images
Everyone else is playing checkers. They're playing che$$.

Five and a half billion dollars buys you a whole lot of influence; we'd recommend holding off on laying siege to your dickhead neighbor Chad's rec room until this whole thing settles down.

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Looting the Pension Funds

All across America, Wall Street is grabbing money meant for public workers

Illustration by Victor Juhasz

By Matt Taibbi

In the final months of 2011, almost two years before the city of Detroit would shock America by declaring bankruptcy in the face of what it claimed were insurmountable pension costs, the state of Rhode Island took bold action to avert what it called its own looming pension crisis. Led by its newly elected treasurer, Gina Raimondo – an ostentatiously ambitious 42-year-old Rhodes scholar and former venture capitalist – the state declared war on public pensions, ramming through an ingenious new law slashing benefits of state employees with a speed and ferocity seldom before seen by any local government.
Detroit's Debt Crisis: Everything Must Go
Called the Rhode Island Retirement Security Act of 2011, her plan would later be hailed as the most comprehensive pension reform ever implemented. The rap was so convincing at first that the overwhelmed local burghers of her little petri-dish state didn't even know how to react. "She's Yale, Harvard, Oxford – she worked on Wall Street," says Paul Doughty, the current president of the Providence firefighters union. "Nobody wanted to be the first to raise his hand and admit he didn't know what the fuck she was talking about."
Soon she was being talked about as a probable candidate for Rhode Island's 2014 gubernatorial race. By 2013, Raimondo had raised more than $2 million, a staggering sum for a still-undeclared candidate in a thimble-size state. Donors from Wall Street firms like Goldman Sachs, Bain Capital and JPMorgan Chase showered her with money, with more than $247,000 coming from New York contributors alone. A shadowy organization called EngageRI, a public-advocacy group of the 501(c)4 type whose donors were shielded from public scrutiny by the infamous Citizens United decision, spent $740,000 promoting Raimondo's ideas. Within Rhode Island, there began to be whispers that Raimondo had her sights on the presidency. Even former Obama right hand and Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel pointed to Rhode Island as an example to be followed in curing pension woes.
What few people knew at the time was that Raimondo's "tool kit" wasn't just meant for local consumption. The dynamic young Rhodes scholar was allowing her state to be used as a test case for the rest of the country, at the behest of powerful out-of-state financiers with dreams of pushing pension reform down the throats of taxpayers and public workers from coast to coast. One of her key supporters was billionaire former Enron executive John Arnold – a dickishly ubiquitous young right-wing kingmaker with clear designs on becoming the next generation's Koch brothers, and who for years had been funding a nationwide campaign to slash benefits for public workers.
Nor did anyone know that part of Raimondo's strategy for saving money involved handing more than $1 billion – 14 percent of the state fund – to hedge funds, including a trio of well-known New York-based funds: Dan Loeb's Third Point Capital was given $66 million, Ken Garschina's Mason Capital got $64 million and $70 million went to Paul Singer's Elliott Management. The funds now stood collectively to be paid tens of millions in fees every single year by the already overburdened taxpayers of her ostensibly flat-broke state. Felicitously, Loeb, Garschina and Singer serve on the board of the Manhattan Institute, a prominent conservative think tank with a history of supporting benefit-slashing reforms. The institute named Raimondo its 2011 "Urban Innovator" of the year.
The state's workers, in other words, were being forced to subsidize their own political disenfranchisement, coughing up at least $200 million to members of a group that had supported anti-labor laws. Later, when Edward Siedle, a former SEC lawyer, asked Raimondo in a column for Forbes.com how much the state was paying in fees to these hedge funds, she first claimed she didn't know. Raimondo later told the Providence Journal she was contractually obliged to defer to hedge funds on the release of "proprietary" information, which immediately prompted a letter in protest from a series of freaked-out interest groups. Under pressure, the state later released some fee information, but the information was originally kept hidden, even from the workers themselves. "When I asked, I was basically hammered," says Marcia Reback, a former sixth-grade schoolteacher and retired Providence Teachers Union president who serves as the lone union rep on Rhode Island's nine-member State Investment Commission. "I couldn't get any information about the actual costs."
This is the third act in an improbable triple-fucking of ordinary people that Wall Street is seeking to pull off as a shocker epilogue to the crisis era. Five years ago this fall, an epidemic of fraud and thievery in the financial-services industry triggered the collapse of our economy. The resultant loss of tax revenue plunged states everywhere into spiraling fiscal crises, and local governments suffered huge losses in their retirement portfolios – remember, these public pension funds were some of the most frequently targeted suckers upon whom Wall Street dumped its fraud-riddled mortgage-backed securities in the pre-crash years.
Today, the same Wall Street crowd that caused the crash is not merely rolling in money again but aggressively counterattacking on the public-relations front. The battle increasingly centers around public funds like state and municipal pensions. This war isn't just about money. Crucially, in ways invisible to most Americans, it's also about blame. In state after state, politicians are following the Rhode Island playbook, using scare tactics and lavishly funded PR campaigns to cast teachers, firefighters and cops – not bankers – as the budget-devouring boogeymen responsible for the mounting fiscal problems of America's states and cities.
Secrets and Lies of the Bailout
Not only did these middle-class workers already lose huge chunks of retirement money to huckster financiers in the crash, and not only are they now being asked to take the long-term hit for those years of greed and speculative excess, but in many cases they're also being forced to sit by and watch helplessly as Gordon Gekko wanna-be's like Loeb or scorched-earth takeover artists like Bain Capital are put in charge of their retirement savings.

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Audit: Army paid $16M to deserters, AWOL soldiers

(AP) — Even as the Army faces shrinking budgets, an audit shows it paid out $16 million in paychecks over a 2 ½-year period to soldiers designated as AWOL or as deserters, the second time since 2006 the military has been dinged for the error.
A memo issued by Human Resources Command at Fort Knox, Ky., found that the Army lacked sufficient controls to enforce policies and procedures for reporting deserters and absentee soldiers to cut off their pay and benefits immediately. The oversight was blamed primarily on a failure by commanders to fill out paperwork in a timely manner.
The payments from 2010 to 2012 represent only a fraction of the Army's nearly $44 billion projected payroll for 2013
http://news.yahoo.com/audit-army-paid-16m-deserters-awol-soldiers-150621055.html
Check out the member blogs, videos, and discussions http://12160.info/

Governments stealing from bank accounts

 Don't Buy Silver Or Gold

Until You Read This Free Report And Learn The Secrets Of The Pros

 

WASHINGTON – The questionable practice of “bail-ins” begun by Cyprus a year ago to keep banks solvent is beginning to spread to other nations, and holders of large deposits are starting to see their balances plunge literally overnight.

A “bail-in,” as opposed to a bailout that countries especially in Europe have been seeking from the International Monetary Fund and the European Union, is a recognition that such outside monetary injections won’t be forthcoming.

Consequently, banks have been seeking money from another source – their large depositors. The funds are simply taken and applied to a bank’s recapitalization in lieu of government bailouts.

The practice essentially is a transfer from a personal savings account to the bank’s operating account, without the customers’ permission or even any notice.

The example set in Cyprus when the island nation confronted its financial crisis now is spreading to such other countries as Italy, Poland, New Zealand and now Canada.

Get “I Want Your Money” and find out what may be coming to your neighborhood.

Financial experts agree that the practice soon could spread to the United States.

The “bail-in” a year ago in Cyprus developed after the island nation was refused further outside financing from the IMF and the European Central Bank of the EU, of which the Mediterranean island is a member.

Cyprus never was looked upon as a place to spend money. Instead, it was seen more as a place to safely hide large deposits of cash for private individuals and companies not only in Europe and Russia but for major shareholders and top executives from all over the world.

Hiding huge sums of cash was made easy in Cyprus with such mechanisms as outright bank deposits, shell companies and holding companies, with massive transfers taking place between them.

“Cyprus was a leader – in some circles and for some applications, the leader – in quiet storage, management and structuring of exceptionally large sums for private individuals and corporations all over the world,” financial expert Franklin Raff wrote in a March 2013 WND article.

“Cypriots were fast learners in the fields of global asset protection and ‘tax optimization,’” Raff said. “Cyprus’ 2004 entrance into the E.U. gave financial operations a deeper veneer of legitimacy and security.

“All of this meant almost a decade of rapidly expanding business,” he said. “This was surely from Europeans and Russians wary of unpredictable tax laws and indiscriminate, extralegal confiscations, but also from entities in North America and elsewhere.”

Because a long line of EU banks had been bailed out at major public expense during the 2008-2009 financial crisis, the EU decided to turn down two of Cyprus’ major banks, Laiki and the Bank of Cyprus, for similar help.

In an effort to save the Cypriot economy from collapse, the government passed a law that took some 4.3 billion euros in deposits belonging to some 14,000 depositors just in the Laiki bank alone, leaving each depositor with no more than 100,000 euros, the limit on deposit insurance under EU regulations.

Ultimately, Laiki bank folded, with depositors’ diminished assets transferred to the Bank of Cyprus.

In an effort to recapitalize the Bank of Cyprus, Cypriot officials imposed a 47.5 percent loss on deposits exceeding the 100,000 euro limit, exchanging the seized deposits for shares in the bank.

Depositors in Cyprus lost an estimated total of 10.6 billion euros.

In viewing the recapitalization experience in Cyprus, financial experts say “bail-ins” are increasingly becoming accepted practice around the world due to the lack of any outside bailouts.

In jeopardy will be all private bank accounts and private pension funds.

Financial sources say that the government of Poland just “raided” private pension funds in an effort to reduce the size of the government debt.

According to a Reuters report, the Polish government will transfer to the state many of the assets held by private pension funds, slashing public debt but putting in doubt the future of the multi-billion-euro funds, much of which is foreign-owned.

“The Polish government is doing the best that it can to make this sound like some sort of complicated legal maneuver, but the truth is that what they have done is stolen private assets without giving any compensation in return,” said financial expert Michael Snyder writing for the Financial Collapse blog.

Now, finance ministers in the EU are undertaking a similar approach.

They have approved a plan to force bondholders and shareholders to finance future bank failures before going to taxpayers for bailouts.

This will apply to bondholders and shareholders with deposits over 100,000 euros. Those with less than 100,000 euros of insured deposits will be protected.

“What this means is that if you have over 100,000 euros in a bank account in Europe, you could lose every single bit of the unprotected amount if your bank collapses,” Snyder said.

Italy also is organizing a form of its own “bail-in” for the country’s oldest bank as it has halted any further interest payments and doesn’t intend to make up for the missed payments if and when they resume.

While deposits will remain untouched for now, financial experts believe it will only be a matter of time before its depositors experience a Cypriot-type “bail-in.”

In Canada, the government has actually written a “bail-in” provision into its new government budget proposal in its “Economic Action Plan 2013.”

“This new budget actually proposes to implement a ‘bail-in’ regime for systemically important banks’ in Canada,” Snyder said.

Snyder believes that governments throughout the world will be eyeing depositors’ money as part of the solution to halt future failures of major banks.

“As a result, there is no longer any truly ‘safe’ place to put your money,” Snyder said.

“One of the best ways to protect yourself is to spread your money around,” he said. “In other words, don’t put all of your eggs in one basket. If you have your money in a bunch of different places, it is going to be much harder for the government to grab it all.

“But if you don’t listen to the warnings and you continue to keep all of your wealth in one giant pile somewhere, don’t be surprised when you get wiped out in a single moment someday,” he added.

That certainly was the experience of the Andrew Georgiou family in Cyprus earlier this year. Literally overnight, his life’s savings of 750,000 euros, except for 100,000 euros which were covered by deposit insurance, were wiped out. Georgiou subsequently had a heart attack, though he survived.

He, like hundreds of other depositors in Cyprus, has gone to court against the central bank and the Cypriot government, but the outcome is far from certain.

 

Until You Read This Free Report And Learn The Secrets Of The Pros

A “bail-in,” as opposed to a bailout that countries especially in Europe have been seeking from the International Monetary Fund and the European Union, is a recognition that such outside monetary injections won’t be forthcoming.

Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2013/09/governments-coming-to-steal-savings-accounts/#ZPeBHMwsLeZ6Zwhz.99

Feds Botch New $100 Bills (Again), Taxpayers Left With the Tab

Due to a printing error committed by its Washington, D.C., facility, the Federal Reserve’s rollout of the new $100 bill has hit yet another serious snag, David Wolman writes for The New Yorker, citing a document from the Bureau of Engraving and Printing.

The Federal Reserve has for the past few years been meaning to introduce a sleeker, sharper and more technologically advanced $100 bill. In fact, the new bill was supposed to be released in 2011. However, the scheduled release was pushed back because of a printing error that left blank spots on the bill.

And now there’s another problem involving a thing called “mashing,” according to bureau spokeswoman Darlene Anderson.

The new $100 bill. (Image source: U.S. Treasury)

Wolman explains: “When too much ink is applied to the paper, the lines of the artwork aren’t as crisp as they should be, like when a kid tries to carefully color inside the lines—using watercolors and a fat paintbrush.”

“Mashing,” according to Anderson, is “infrequent.”

Still, the latest printing error has left stacks of the redesigned bills “clearly unacceptable” – and they are mixed with passable ones, said bureau director Larry Felix in a July memo, adding that the Fed will return more than 30 million hundred-dollar notes and demand its money back.

This means that another 30 billion dollars’ worth of paper “sits in limbo awaiting examination,” writes Wolman.

Due to the lack of quality control, Fed officials announced they will not accept any $100 notes from the Washington, D.C., facility until further notice. This means it falls on the printing facility in Fort Worth, Texas, to help the Fed meet its Oct. 8 deadline for putting the new bills into circulation and delivering its cash orders.

And the Fed doesn’t really have a choice.

“There are dire consequences involved here because BEP sells Federal Reserve notes to the Board to finance our entire operation,” Felix’s memo reads. “If the BEP does not meet the order, the BEP does not get paid.”

Though it’s difficult to put a dollar amount on the cost of the printing error (the Fed has little interest in figuring this out), it will most likely be taken out on U.S. taxpayers.

“Taxpayers will have to pay to inspect, correct, produce, transport, and secure all the additional money that will replace the botched notes. Disposing of the bad bills? That’s on taxpayers, too, as are the additional hours spent making up for the mistake by employees of the bureau,” Wolman writes.

And let’s not forget the psychological toll the printing SNAFUs could take. Faith in U.S. currency is everything. If people lose faith in the ability of the Fed to produce trustworthy and reliable bills, those bill may lose their value.

“The situation is akin to a magician getting caught unloading a crate of bunnies from the back of his truck,” Wolman explains.

“It threatens to injure the aura—the almightiness—of the dollar that enables most people to go about their business without ever stopping to examine the bills in their hand or to contemplate what gives them value.”

–

Federal Contractors Employ More Low-Wage Workers Than Walmart and McDonald’s Combined, While Paying Top Execs. $24 Billion

Crowd: We can’t survive on eight twenty-five!
Jessica Desvarieux, Capitol Hill Correspondent: Eight twenty-five is currently the minimum wage for federally contracted employees in D.C. Workers like 54-year-old Melissa Roseboro are making around that, and she says it’s simply not enough to live on.
Melissa works part-time as a cook for McDonald’s at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington. And the conditions have gotten so bad that she says she can’t even pay her bills.
Melissa Roseboro, Low-Wage Worker: You know, a lot of people out here, we are struggling day to day [incompr.] homeless. I even have to go try to [incompr.] just to make ends meet.
Desvarieux: Workers are calling for help from President Obama, demanding the president sign an executive order mandating government contractors to pay a higher wage, similar to how President Johnson signed an executive order in 1965 mandating government contractors not discriminate against prospective employees based on race.

Fast forward almost 50 years and the fight for fair pay continues.
Crowd: We can’t survive on eight twenty-five!
Desvarieux: Many are barely surviving, and taxpayers are the ones subsidizing this low-wage economy, according to a study by public policy organization Demos. Data shows that hundreds of billions of public funds go to private companies that pay low wages. There are more than half a million low-wage private sector jobs funded by federal contracts. Demos found that government contracts support almost two million low-wage jobs. That’s more than McDonald’s and Walmart combined.
But not all federal contract employees fit into this category. Executive pay can be as high as $760,000 a year. And a new report from Demos shows that nearly $24 billion a year goes to paying salaries of federal contractor executives.
Now a group of senators and congressmen have called on President Obama to step in and sign an executive order to raise the minimum wage to a living wage. Of those calling for higher pay was independent senator Bernie Sanders from Vermont.
Bernie Sanders, U.S. Senator (I-Vt): Most of the new jobs being created in this country today are part-time jobs. They are low-wage jobs. And we have got to get a handle not only on unemployment, not only on income and wealth inequality; we have got to get a handle on raising wages throughout this country so that workers do not depend upon starvation wages.
The Real News also spoke with Democratic Congressman Keith Ellison and asked why there hasn’t be more progress on the bill for a higher minimum wage or the executive order, considering the proposal was sent in July.
Keith Ellison, U.S. Representative (D-Mn): But we haven’t seen the president put pen to paper and sign the executive order, even working on the people who work for federal contractors. And we believe it’s time to do that. We’ve got 49 members of the House who agree that the president needs to sign an executive order. And we believe that he should do it and he should do it now.
Now, somebody asked: well, why hasn’t he done it? You know, I specifically asked him that question directly. He told me it was under advisement. I hope that he’s working on it. And, of course, the naysayers might say, well, it has budgetary implications; with the sequester maybe it might be tough. And there might be reasons, but I’m telling you that this is a fight worth having.
Desvarieux: President Obama has said in the past that no American should work full-time and live in poverty. And today protestors are making sure that he’s keeping his word. Several of them were invited into the White House to speak to officials about their day-to-day struggles.
Roseboro: When you go to tell your story, then, you know, they are really amazed. But I do know this much, that they know that it’s a lot of us out here. You know. And I don’t know why I actually say they are amazed, because we’re–it’s a lot of us out here. You know, it’s not our first time doing this, even though we’re doing this the first time at the White House.
Desvarieux: Melissa and several other low-wage workers fighting with the group Good Jobs Nation wrapped up their meeting with officials from the White House. While there, they presented letters and a petition with 250,000 signatures calling for a higher pay.
Melissa says she remains hopeful that the change that she voted for by electing President Obama will one day come.
For The Real News Network, Jessica Desvarieux, Washington.
Copyright: Truth Out