PRIVACY IS DEAD EVERYWHERE

Inside TAO: Documents Reveal Top NSA Hacking Unit

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/the-nsa-uses-powerful

-toolbox-in-effort-to-spy-on-global-networks-a-940969.html

 By SPIEGEL Staff

 In January 2010, numerous homeowners in San Antonio, Texas, stood baffled in front of their closed garage doors. They wanted to drive to work or head off to do their grocery shopping, but their garage door openers had gone dead, leaving them stranded. No matter how many times they pressed the buttons, the doors didn’t budge. The problem primarily affected residents in the western part of the city, around Military Drive and the interstate highway known as Loop 410.

In the United States, a country of cars and commuters, the mysterious garage door problem quickly became an issue for local politicians. Ultimately, the municipal government solved the riddle. Fault for the error lay with the United States’ foreign intelligence service, the National Security Agency, which has offices in San Antonio. Officials at the agency were forced to admit that one of the NSA’s radio antennas was broadcasting at the same frequency as the garage door openers. Embarrassed officials at the intelligence agency promised to resolve the issue as quickly as possible, and soon the doors began opening again

 It was thanks to the garage door opener episode that Texans learned just how far the NSA’s work had encroached upon their daily lives. For quite some time now, the intelligence agency has maintained a branch with around 2,000 employees at Lackland Air Force Base, also in San Antonio. In 2005, the agency took over a former Sony computer chip plant in the western part of the city. A brisk pace of construction commenced inside this enormous compound. The acquisition of the former chip factory at Sony Place was part of a massive expansion the agency began after the events of Sept. 11, 2001.

On-Call Digital Plumbers

One of the two main buildings at the former plant has since housed a sophisticated NSA unit, one that has benefited the most from this expansion and has grown the fastest in recent years — the Office of Tailored Access Operations, or TAO. This is the NSA’s top operative unit — something like a squad of plumbers that can be called in when normal access to a target is blocked.

According to internal NSA documents viewed by SPIEGEL, these on-call digital plumbers are involved in many sensitive operations conducted by American intelligence agencies. TAO’s area of operations ranges from counterterrorism to cyber attacks to traditional espionage. The documents reveal just how diversified the tools at TAO’s disposal have become — and also how it exploits the technical weaknesses of the IT industry, from Microsoft to Cisco and Huawei, to carry out its discreet and efficient attacks.

The unit is “akin to the wunderkind of the US intelligence community,” says Matthew Aid, a historian who specializes in the history of the NSA. “Getting the ungettable” is the NSA’s own description of its duties. “It is not about the quantity produced but the quality of intelligence that is important,” one former TAO chief wrote, describing her work in a document. The paper seen by SPIEGEL quotes the former unit head stating that TAO has contributed “some of the most significant intelligence our country has ever seen.” The unit, it goes on, has “access to our very hardest targets.”

A Unit Born of the Internet

Defining the future of her unit at the time, she wrote that TAO “needs to continue to grow and must lay the foundation for integrated Computer Network Operations,” and that it must “support Computer Network Attacks as an integrated part of military operations.” To succeed in this, she wrote, TAO would have to acquire “pervasive, persistent access on the global network.” An internal description of TAO’s responsibilities makes clear that aggressive attacks are an explicit part of the unit’s tasks. In other words, the NSA’s hackers have been given a government mandate for their work. During the middle part of the last decade, the special unit succeeded in gaining access to 258 targets in 89 countries — nearly everywhere in the world. In 2010, it conducted 279 operations worldwide.

Indeed, TAO specialists have directly accessed the protected networks of democratically elected leaders of countries. They infiltrated networks of European telecommunications companies and gained access to and read mails sent over Blackberry’s BES email servers, which until then were believed to be securely encrypted. Achieving this last goal required a “sustained TAO operation,” one document states.

This TAO unit is born of the Internet — created in 1997, a time when not even 2 percent of the world’s population had Internet access and no one had yet thought of Facebook, YouTube or Twitter. From the time the first TAO employees moved into offices at NSA headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland, the unit was housed in a separate wing, set apart from the rest of the agency. Their task was clear from the beginning — to work around the clock to find ways to hack into global communications traffic.

Recruiting the Geeks

To do this, the NSA needed a new kind of employee. The TAO workers authorized to access the special, secure floor on which the unit is located are for the most part considerably younger than the average NSA staff member. Their job is breaking into, manipulating and exploiting computer networks, making them hackers and civil servants in one. Many resemble geeks — and act the part, too.

Indeed, it is from these very circles that the NSA recruits new hires for its Tailored Access Operations unit. In recent years, NSA Director Keith Alexander has made several appearances at major hacker conferences in the United States. Sometimes, Alexander wears his military uniform, but at others, he even dons jeans and a t-shirt in his effort to court trust and a new generation of employees.

The recruitment strategy seems to have borne fruit. Certainly, few if any other divisions within the agency are growing as quickly as TAO. There are now TAO units in Wahiawa, Hawaii; Fort Gordon, Georgia; at the NSA’s outpost at Buckley Air Force Base, near Denver, Colorado; at its headquarters in Fort Meade; and, of course, in San Antonio.

One trail also leads to Germany. According to a document dating from 2010 that lists the “Lead TAO Liaisons” domestically and abroad as well as names, email addresses and the number for their “Secure Phone,” a liaison office is located near Frankfurt — the European Security Operations Center (ESOC) at the so-called “Dagger Complex” at a US military compound in the Griesheim suburb of Darmstadt.

But it is the growth of the unit’s Texas branch that has been uniquely impressive, the top secret documents reviewed by SPIEGEL show. These documents reveal that in 2008, the Texas Cryptologic Center employed fewer than 60 TAO specialists. By 2015, the number is projected to grow to 270 employees. In addition, there are another 85 specialists in the “Requirements & Targeting” division (up from 13 specialists in 2008). The number of software developers is expected to increase from the 2008 level of three to 38 in 2015. The San Antonio office handles attacks against targets in the Middle East, Cuba, Venezuela and Colombia, not to mention Mexico, just 200 kilometers (124 miles) away, where the government has fallen into the NSA’s crosshairs.

Mexico’s Secretariat of Public Security, which was folded into the new National Security Commission at the beginning of 2013, was responsible at the time for the country’s police, counterterrorism, prison system and border police. Most of the agency’s nearly 20,000 employees worked at its headquarters on Avenida Constituyentes, an important traffic artery in Mexico City. A large share of the Mexican security authorities under the auspices of the Secretariat are supervised from the offices there, making Avenida Constituyentes a one-stop shop for anyone seeking to learn more about the country’s security apparatus.

Operation WHITETAMALE

That considered, assigning the TAO unit responsible for tailored operations to target the Secretariat makes a lot of sense. After all, one document states, the US Department of Homeland Security and the United States’ intelligence agencies have a need to know everything about the drug trade, human trafficking and security along the US-Mexico border. The Secretariat presents a potential “goldmine” for the NSA’s spies, a document states. The TAO workers selected systems administrators and telecommunications engineers at the Mexican agency as their targets, thus marking the start of what the unit dubbed Operation WHITETAMALE.

Workers at NSA’s target selection office, which also had Angela Merkel in its sights in 2002 before she became chancellor, sent TAO a list of officials within the Mexican Secretariat they thought might make interesting targets. As a first step, TAO penetrated the target officials’ email accounts, a relatively simple job. Next, they infiltrated the entire network and began capturing data.

Soon the NSA spies had knowledge of the agency’s servers, including IP addresses, computers used for email traffic and individual addresses of diverse employees. They also obtained diagrams of the security agencies’ structures, including video surveillance. It appears the operation continued for years until SPIEGEL first reported on it in October.

The technical term for this type of activity is “Computer Network Exploitation” (CNE). The goal here is to “subvert endpoint devices,” according to an internal NSA presentation that SPIEGEL has viewed. The presentation goes on to list nearly all the types of devices that run our digital lives — “servers, workstations, firewalls, routers, handsets, phone switches, SCADA systems, etc.” SCADAs are industrial control systems used in factories, as well as in power plants. Anyone who can bring these systems under their control has the potential to knock out parts of a country’s critical infrastructure.

The most well-known and notorious use of this type of attack was the development of Stuxnet, the computer worm whose existence was discovered in June 2010. The virus was developed jointly by American and Israeli intelligence agencies to sabotage Iran’s nuclear program, and successfully so. The country’s nuclear program was set back by years after Stuxnet manipulated the SCADA control technology used at Iran’s uranium enrichment facilities in Natanz, rendering up to 1,000 centrifuges unusable.

The special NSA unit has its own development department in which new technologies are developed and tested. This division is where the real tinkerers can be found, and their inventiveness when it comes to finding ways to infiltrate other networks, computers and smartphones evokes a modern take on Q, the legendary gadget inventor in James Bond movies.

Having Fun at Microsoft’s Expense

One example of the sheer creativity with which the TAO spies approach their work can be seen in a hacking method they use that exploits the error-proneness of Microsoft’s Windows. Every user of the operating system is familiar with the annoying window that occasionally pops up on screen when an internal problem is detected, an automatic message that prompts the user to report the bug to the manufacturer and to restart the program. These crash reports offer TAO specialists a welcome opportunity to spy on computers.

SPIEGEL ONLINE

The original Microsoft error message exploited by the NSA

When TAO selects a computer somewhere in the world as a target and enters its unique identifiers (an IP address, for example) into the corresponding database, intelligence agents are then automatically notified any time the operating system of that computer crashes and its user receives the prompt to report the problem to Microsoft. An internal presentation suggests it is NSA’s powerful XKeyscore spying tool that is used to fish these crash reports out of the massive sea of Internet traffic.

The automated crash reports are a “neat way” to gain “passive access” to a machine, the presentation continues. Passive access means that, initially, only data the computer sends out into the Internet is captured and saved, but the computer itself is not yet manipulated. Still, even this passive access to error messages provides valuable insights into problems with a targeted person’s computer and, thus, information on security holes that might be exploitable for planting malware or spyware on the unwitting victim’s computer.

Although the method appears to have little importance in practical terms, the NSA’s agents still seem to enjoy it because it allows them to have a bit of a laugh at the expense of the Seattle-based software giant. In one internal graphic, they replaced the text of Microsoft’s original error message with one of their own reading, “This information may be intercepted by a foreign sigint system to gather detailed information and better exploit your machine.” (“Sigint” stands for “signals intelligence.”)

SPIEGEL ONLINE

An NSA internal slide: “This information may be intercepted by a foreign SIGINT system to gather detailed information and better exploit your machine.”

One of the hackers’ key tasks is the offensive infiltration of target computers with so-called implants or with large numbers of Trojans. They’ve bestowed their spying tools with illustrious monikers like “ANGRY NEIGHBOR,” “HOWLERMONKEY” or “WATERWITCH.” These names may sound cute, but the tools they describe are both aggressive and effective.

According to details in Washington’s current budget plan for the US intelligence services, around 85,000 computers worldwide are projected to be infiltrated by the NSA specialists by the end of this year. By far the majority of these “implants” are conducted by TAO teams via the Internet.

Increasing Sophistication

Until just a few years ago, NSA agents relied on the same methods employed by cyber criminals to conduct these implants on computers. They sent targeted attack emails disguised as spam containing links directing users to virus-infected websites. With sufficient knowledge of an Internet browser’s security holes — Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, for example, is especially popular with the NSA hackers — all that is needed to plant NSA malware on a person’s computer is for that individual to open a website that has been specially crafted to compromise the user’s computer. Spamming has one key drawback though: It doesn’t work very often.

Nevertheless, TAO has dramatically improved the tools at its disposal. It maintains a sophisticated toolbox known internally by the name “QUANTUMTHEORY.” “Certain QUANTUM missions have a success rate of as high as 80%, where spam is less than 1%,” one internal NSA presentation states.

A comprehensive internal presentation titled “QUANTUM CAPABILITIES,” which SPIEGEL has viewed, lists virtually every popular Internet service provider as a target, including Facebook, Yahoo, Twitter and YouTube. “NSA QUANTUM has the greatest success against Yahoo, Facebook and static IP addresses,” it states. The presentation also notes that the NSA has been unable to employ this method to target users of Google services. Apparently, that can only be done by Britain’s GCHQ intelligence service, which has acquired QUANTUM tools from the NSA.

A favored tool of intelligence service hackers is “QUANTUMINSERT.” GCHQ workers used this method to attack the computers of employeesat partly government-held Belgian telecommunications company Belgacom, in order to use their computers to penetrate even further into the company’s networks. The NSA, meanwhile, used the same technology to target high-ranking members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) at the organization’s Vienna headquarters. In both cases, the trans-Atlantic spying consortium gained unhindered access to valuable economic data using these tools.

The insert method and other variants of QUANTUM are closely linked to a shadow network operated by the NSA alongside the Internet, with its own, well-hidden infrastructure comprised of “covert” routers and servers. It appears the NSA also incorporates routers and servers from non-NSA networks into its covert network by infecting these networks with “implants” that then allow the government hackers to control the computers remotely. (Click here to read a related article on the NSA’s “implants”.)

In this way, the intelligence service seeks to identify and track its targets based on their digital footprints. These identifiers could include certain email addresses or website cookies set on a person’s computer. Of course, a cookie doesn’t automatically identify a person, but it can if it includes additional information like an email address. In that case, a cookie becomes something like the web equivalent of a fingerprint.

A Race Between Servers

Once TAO teams have gathered sufficient data on their targets’ habits, they can shift into attack mode, programming the QUANTUM systems to perform this work in a largely automated way. If a data packet featuring the email address or cookie of a target passes through a cable or router monitored by the NSA, the system sounds the alarm. It determines what website the target person is trying to access and then activates one of the intelligence service’s covert servers, known by the codename FOXACID.

This NSA server coerces the user into connecting to NSA covert systems rather than the intended sites. In the case of Belgacom engineers, instead of reaching the LinkedIn page they were actually trying to visit, they were also directed to FOXACID servers housed on NSA networks. Undetected by the user, the manipulated page transferred malware already custom tailored to match security holes on the target person’s computer.

The technique can literally be a race between servers, one that is described in internal intelligence agency jargon with phrases like: “Wait for client to initiate new connection,” “Shoot!” and “Hope to beat server-to-client response.” Like any competition, at times the covert network’s surveillance tools are “too slow to win the race.” Often enough, though, they are effective. Implants with QUANTUMINSERT, especially when used in conjunction with LinkedIn, now have a success rate of over 50 percent, according to one internal document.

Tapping Undersea Cables

At the same time, it is in no way true to say that the NSA has its sights set exclusively on select individuals. Of even greater interest are entire networks and network providers, such as the fiber optic cables that direct a large share of global Internet traffic along the world’s ocean floors.

One document labeled “top secret” and “not for foreigners” describes the NSA’s success in spying on the “SEA-ME-WE-4” cable system. This massive underwater cable bundle connects Europe with North Africa and the Gulf states and then continues on through Pakistan and India, all the way to Malaysia and Thailand. The cable system originates in southern France, near Marseille. Among the companies that hold ownership stakes in it are France Telecom, now known as Orange and still partly government-owned, and Telecom Italia Sparkle.

The document proudly announces that, on Feb. 13, 2013, TAO “successfully collected network management information for the SEA-Me-We Undersea Cable Systems (SMW-4).” With the help of a “website masquerade operation,” the agency was able to “gain access to the consortium’s management website and collected Layer 2 network information that shows the circuit mapping for significant portions of the network.”

It appears the government hackers succeeded here once again using the QUANTUMINSERT method.

The document states that the TAO team hacked an internal website of the operator consortium and copied documents stored there pertaining to technical infrastructure. But that was only the first step. “More operations are planned in the future to collect more information about this and other cable systems,” it continues.

But numerous internal announcements of successful attacks like the one against the undersea cable operator aren’t the exclusive factors that make TAO stand out at the NSA. In contrast to most NSA operations, TAO’s ventures often require physical access to their targets. After all, you might have to directly access a mobile network transmission station before you can begin tapping the digital information it provides.

Spying Traditions Live On

To conduct those types of operations, the NSA works together with other intelligence agencies such as the CIA and FBI, which in turn maintain informants on location who are available to help with sensitive missions. This enables TAO to attack even isolated networks that aren’t connected to the Internet. If necessary, the FBI can even make an agency-owned jet available to ferry the high-tech plumbers to their target. This gets them to their destination at the right time and can help them to disappear again undetected after as little as a half hour’s work.

Responding to a query from SPIEGEL, NSA officials issued a statement saying, “Tailored Access Operations is a unique national asset that is on the front lines of enabling NSA to defend the nation and its allies.” The statement added that TAO’s “work is centered on computer network exploitation in support of foreign intelligence collection.” The officials said they would not discuss specific allegations regarding TAO’s mission.

Sometimes it appears that the world’s most modern spies are just as reliant on conventional methods of reconnaissance as their predecessors.

Take, for example, when they intercept shipping deliveries. If a target person, agency or company orders a new computer or related accessories, for example, TAO can divert the shipping delivery to its own secret workshops. The NSA calls this method interdiction. At these so-called “load stations,” agents carefully open the package in order to load malware onto the electronics, or even install hardware components that can provide backdoor access for the intelligence agencies. All subsequent steps can then be conducted from the comfort of a remote computer.

These minor disruptions in the parcel shipping business rank among the “most productive operations” conducted by the NSA hackers, one top secret document relates in enthusiastic terms. This method, the presentation continues, allows TAO to obtain access to networks “around the world.”

Even in the Internet Age, some traditional spying methods continue to live on.

REPORTED BY JACOB APPELBAUM, LAURA POITRAS, MARCEL ROSENBACH, CHRISTIAN STÖCKER, JÖRG SCHINDLER AND HOLGER STARK

ARTICLE TWO

 The NSA Actually Intercepted Packages to Put Backdoors in Electronics

http://gizmodo.com/the-nsa-actually-intercepted-packages-to-put-backdoors-1491169592

 BY LILY HAY NEWMAN

When it comes to modern firewalls for corporate computer networks, the world’s second largest network equipment manufacturer doesn’t skimp on praising its own work. According to Juniper Networks’ online PR copy, the company’s products are “ideal” for protecting large companies and computing centers from unwanted access from outside. They claim the performance of the company’s special computers is “unmatched” and their firewalls are the “best-in-class.” Despite these assurances, though, there is one attacker none of these products can fend off — the United States’ National Security Agency.

ANZEIGE

Specialists at the intelligence organization succeeded years ago in penetrating the company’s digital firewalls. A document viewed by SPIEGEL resembling a product catalog reveals that an NSA division called ANT has burrowed its way into nearly all the security architecture made by the major players in the industry — including American global market leader Cisco and its Chinese competitor Huawei, but also producers of mass-market goods, such as US computer-maker Dell.

A 50-Page Catalog

These NSA agents, who specialize in secret back doors, are able to keep an eye on all levels of our digital lives — from computing centers to individual computers, and from laptops to mobile phones. For nearly every lock, ANT seems to have a key in its toolbox. And no matter what walls companies erect, the NSA’s specialists seem already to have gotten past them.

This, at least, is the impression gained from flipping through the 50-page document. The list reads like a mail-order catalog, one from which other NSA employees can order technologies from the ANT division for tapping their targets’ data. The catalog even lists the prices for these electronic break-in tools, with costs ranging from free to $250,000.

In the case of Juniper, the name of this particular digital lock pick is “FEEDTROUGH.” This malware burrows into Juniper firewalls and makes it possible to smuggle other NSA programs into mainframe computers. Thanks to FEEDTROUGH, these implants can, by design, even survive “across reboots and software upgrades.” In this way, US government spies can secure themselves a permanent presence in computer networks. The catalog states that FEEDTROUGH “has been deployed on many target platforms.”

Master Carpenters

The specialists at ANT, which presumably stands for Advanced or Access Network Technology, could be described as master carpenters for the NSA’s department for Tailored Access Operations (TAO). In cases where TAO’s usual hacking and data-skimming methods don’t suffice, ANT workers step in with their special tools, penetrating networking equipment, monitoring mobile phones and computers and diverting or even modifying data. Such “implants,” as they are referred to in NSA parlance, have played a considerable role in the intelligence agency’s ability to establish a global covert network that operates alongside the Internet.

Some of the equipment available is quite inexpensive. A rigged monitor cable that allows “TAO personnel to see what is displayed on the targeted monitor,” for example, is available for just $30. But an “active GSM base station” — a tool that makes it possible to mimic a mobile phone tower and thus monitor cell phones — costs a full $40,000. Computer bugging devices disguised as normal USB plugs, capable of sending and receiving data via radio undetected, are available in packs of 50 for over $1 million.

‘Persistence’

The ANT division doesn’t just manufacture surveillance hardware. It also develops software for special tasks. The ANT developers have a clear preference for planting their malicious code in so-called BIOS, software located on a computer’s motherboard that is the first thing to load when a computer is turned on.

This has a number of valuable advantages: an infected PC or server appears to be functioning normally, so the infection remains invisible to virus protection and other security programs. And even if the hard drive of an infected computer has been completely erased and a new operating system is installed, the ANT malware can continue to function and ensures that new spyware can once again be loaded onto what is presumed to be a clean computer. The ANT developers call this “Persistence” and believe this approach has provided them with the possibility of permanent access.

Another program attacks the firmware in hard drives manufactured by Western Digital, Seagate, Maxtor and Samsung, all of which, with the exception of the latter, are American companies. Here, too, it appears the US intelligence agency is compromising the technology and products of American companies.

Other ANT programs target Internet routers meant for professional use or hardware firewalls intended to protect company networks from online attacks. Many digital attack weapons are “remotely installable” — in other words, over the Internet. Others require a direct attack on an end-user device — an “interdiction,” as it is known in NSA jargon — in order to install malware or bugging equipment.

There is no information in the documents seen by SPIEGEL to suggest that the companies whose products are mentioned in the catalog provided any support to the NSA or even had any knowledge of the intelligence solutions. “Cisco does not work with any government to modify our equipment, nor to implement any so-called security ‘back doors’ in our products,” the company said in a statement. Contacted by SPIEGEL reporters, officials at Western Digital, Juniper Networks and Huawei also said they had no knowledge of any such modifications. Meanwhile, Dell officials said the company “respects and complies with the laws of all countries in which it operates.”

Many of the items in the software solutions catalog date from 2008, and some of the target server systems that are listed are no longer on the market today. At the same time, it’s not as if the hackers within the ANT division have been sleeping on the job. They have continued to develop their arsenal. Some pages in the 2008 catalog, for example, list new systems for which no tools yet exist. However, the authors promise they are already hard at work developing new tools and that they will be “pursued for a future release.”

 

Monsanto and Trans Pacific Partnership with Ellen Brown

http://globalwarming-arclein.blogspot.ca/2013/12/monsanto-and-trans-pacific-partnership.html

 BY ELLEN BROWN

This is the continuing saga of Monsanto et al to optimize their business model which is coming under increasing challenge and outright rejection by consumers.  What bothers me is just how few have been able to stand up to them. So far it has been on the edges.

What it going to kill this is surely the biology itself.  The cost structure is already creaking and the absolute need to properly rejuvenate soils just to sustain fertility is a natural deadline.  Super weeds are also signaling failure.

At the same time, conversion to organic protocols is becoming more clearly understood and easier to implement.  Once begun there is no going back.

I am disturbed by the attempt by these multinationals to write their advantage into any trade agreement.  That it infers surrendering sovereignty to Trans national corporation seems wishful thinking but we must remain vigilant.

WHY MONSANTO AND TRANS-PACIFIC PARTNERSHIP EQUAL GLOBAL FOOD DOMINANCE

Control oil and you control nations,” said U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in the 1970s. ”Control food and you control the people.”

Global food control has nearly been achieved, by reducing seed diversity with GMO (genetically modified) seeds that are distributed by only a few transnational corporations. But this agenda has been implemented at grave cost to our health; and if the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) passes, control over not just our food but our health, our environment and our financial system will be in the hands of transnational corporations.

Profits Before Populations

According to an Acres USA interview of plant pathologist Don Huber, Professor Emeritus at Purdue University, two modified traits account for practically all of the genetically modified crops grown in the world today. One involves insect resistance.

The other, more disturbing modification involves insensitivity to glyphosate-based herbicides (plant-killing chemicals). Often known as Roundup after the best-selling Monsanto product of that name, glyphosate poisons everything in its path except plants genetically modified to resist it.

Glyphosate-based herbicides are now the most commonly used herbicides in the world. Glyphosate is an essential partner to the GMOs that are the principal business of the burgeoning biotech industry. Glyphosate is a “broad-spectrum” herbicide that destroys indiscriminately, not by killing unwanted plants directly but by tying up access to critical nutrients.

Because of the insidious way in which it works, it has been sold as a relatively benign replacement for the devastating earlier dioxin-based herbicides. But a barrage of experimental data has now shown glyphosate and the GMO foods incorporating it to pose serious dangers to health.

Compounding the risk is the toxicity of “inert” ingredients used to make glyphosate more potent. Researchers have found, for example, that the surfactant POEA can kill human cells, particularly embryonic, placental and umbilical cord cells. But these risks have been conveniently ignored.

The widespread use of GMO foods and glyphosate herbicides helps explain the anomaly that the U.S. spends more than twice as much per capita on healthcare as the average developed country, yet it is rated far down the scale of the world’s healthiest populations. The World Health Organization has ranked the U.S. last out of 17 developed nations for overall health.

Sixty to seventy percent of the foods in U.S. supermarkets are now genetically modified. By contrast, in at least 26 other countries—including Switzerland, Australia, Austria, China, India, France, Germany, Hungary, Luxembourg, Greece, Bulgaria, Poland, Italy, Mexico and Russia—GMOs are totally or partially banned; and significant restrictions on GMOs exist in about sixty other countries.

A ban on GMO and glyphosate use might go far toward improving the health of Americans. But the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a global trade agreement for which the Obama Administration has sought Fast Track status, would block that sort of cause-focused approach to the healthcare crisis.

Roundup’s Insidious Effects

Roundup-resistant crops escape being killed by glyphosate, but they do not avoid absorbing it into their tissues. Herbicide-tolerant crops have substantially higher levels of herbicide residues than other crops. In fact, many countries have had to increase their legally allowable levels—by up to 50 times—in order to accommodate the introduction of GM crops.

In the European Union, residues in foods are set to rise 100 to 150 times if a new proposal by Monsanto is approved. Meanwhile, herbicide-tolerant “super-weeds” have adapted to the chemical, requiring even more toxic doses and new toxic chemicals to kill the plant.

Human enzymes are affected by glyphosate just as plant enzymes are: the chemical blocks the uptake of manganese and other essential minerals. Without those minerals, we cannot properly metabolize our food. That helps explain the rampant epidemic of obesity in the United States. People eat and eat in an attempt to acquire the nutrients that are simply not available in their food.

According to researchers Samsell and Seneff in Biosemiotic Entropy: Disorder, Disease, and Mortality:

“Glyphosate’s inhibition of cytochrome P450 (CYP) enzymes is an overlooked component of its toxicity to mammals. CYP enzymes play crucial roles in biology… Negative impact on the body is insidious and manifests slowly over time as inflammation damages cellular systems throughout the body. “Consequences are most of the diseases and conditions associated with a Western diet, which include gastrointestinal disorders, obesity, diabetes, heart disease, depression, autism, infertility, cancer and Alzheimer’s disease.”

More than 40 diseases have been linked to glyphosate use, and more keep appearing. In September 2013, the National University of Rio Cuarto, Argentina, published research finding that glyphosate enhances the growth of fungi that produce aflatoxin B1, one of the most carcinogenic of substances.

A doctor from Chaco, Argentina, told Associated Press, “We’ve gone from a pretty healthy population to one with a high rate of cancer, birth defects and illnesses seldom seen before.” Fungi growths have increased significantly in U.S. corn crops.

Glyphosate has also done serious damage to the environment. According to an October 2012 report by the Institute of Science in Society:

“Agribusiness claims that glyphosate and glyphosate-tolerant crops will improve crop yields, increase farmers’ profits and benefit the environment by reducing pesticide use. Exactly the opposite is the case… [T]he evidence indicates that glyphosate herbicides and glyphosate-tolerant crops have had wide-ranging detrimental effects, including glyphosate resistant super weeds, virulent plant (and new livestock) pathogens, reduced crop health and yield, harm to off-target species from insects to amphibians and livestock, as well as reduced soil fertility.”

Politics Trumps Science

In light of these adverse findings, why have Washington and the European Commission continued to endorse glyphosate as safe? Critics point to lax regulations, heavy influence from corporate lobbyists, and a political agenda that has more to do with power and control than protecting the health of the people.

In the ground-breaking 2007 book Seeds of Destruction: The Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation, William Engdahl states that global food control and depopulation became U.S. strategic policy under Rockefeller protégé Henry Kissinger. Along with oil geopolitics, they were to be the new “solution” to the threats to U.S. global power and continued U.S. access to cheap raw materials from the developing world.

In line with that agenda, the government has shown extreme partisanship in favor of the biotech agribusiness industry, opting for a system in which the industry “voluntarily” polices itself. Bio-engineered foods are treated as “natural food additives,” not needing any special testing.

Jeffrey M. Smith, executive director of the Institute for Responsible Technology, confirms that U.S. Food and Drug Administration policy allows biotech companies to determine if their own foods are safe. Submission of data is completely voluntary. He concludes:

“In the critical arena of food safety research, the biotech industry is without accountability, standards, or peer-review. They’ve got bad science down to a science.”

Whether or not depopulation is an intentional part of the agenda, widespread use of GMO and glyphosate is having that result. The endocrine-disrupting properties of glyphosate have been linked to infertility, miscarriage, birth defects and arrested sexual development.

In Russian experiments, animals fed GM soy were sterile by the third generation. Vast amounts of farmland soil are also being systematically ruined by the killing of beneficial microorganisms that allow plant roots to uptake soil nutrients.

In Gary Null’s eye-opening documentary Seeds of Death: Unveiling the Lies of GMOs, Dr. Bruce Lipton warns, “We are leading the world into the sixth mass extinction of life on this planet… Human behavior is undermining the web of life.”

The TPP and International Corporate Control

As the devastating conclusions of these and other researchers awaken people globally to the dangers of Roundup and GMO foods, transnational corporations are working feverishly with the Obama administration to fast-track the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a trade agreement that would strip governments of the power to regulate transnational corporate activities.

Negotiations have been kept secret from Congress but not from corporate advisers, 600 of whom have been consulted and know the details. According to Barbara Chicherio in Nation of Change:

“The Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) has the potential to become the biggest regional Free Trade Agreement in history… The chief agricultural negotiator for the U.S. is the former Monsanto lobbyist, Islam Siddique. If ratified the TPP would impose punishing regulations that give multinational corporations unprecedented right to demand taxpayer compensation for policies that corporations deem a barrier to their profits. “They are carefully crafting the TPP to insure that citizens of the involved countries have no control over food safety, what they will be eating, where it is grown, the conditions under which food is grown and the use of herbicides and pesticides.”

Food safety is only one of many rights and protections liable to fall to this super-weapon of international corporate control. In an April 2013 interview on The Real News Network, Kevin Zeese called the TPP “NAFTA on steroids” and “a global corporate coup.” He warned:

“No matter what issue you care about—whether its wages, jobs, protecting the environment… this issue is going to adversely affect it…. If a country takes a step to try to regulate the financial industry or set up a public bank to represent the public interest, it can be sued.”

Return to Nature: Not Too Late

There is a safer, saner, more earth-friendly way to feed nations. While Monsanto and U.S. regulators are forcing GM crops on American families, Russian families are showing what can be done with permaculture methods on simple garden plots.

In 2011, 40% of Russia’s food was grown on dachas (cottage gardens or allotments). Dacha gardens produced over 80% of the country’s fruit and berries, over 66% of the vegetables, almost 80% of the potatoes and nearly 50% of the nation’s milk, much of it consumed raw. According to Vladimir Megre, author of the best-selling Ringing Cedars Series:

“Essentially, what Russian gardeners do is demonstrate that gardeners can feed the world – and you do not need any GMOs, industrial farms, or any other technological gimmicks to guarantee everybody’s got enough food to eat. Bear in mind that Russia only has 110 days of growing season per year – so in the U.S., for example, gardeners’ output could be substantially greater. Today, however, the area taken up by lawns in the U.S. is two times greater than that of Russia’s gardens – and it produces nothing but a multi-billion-dollar lawn care industry.”

In the U.S., only about 0.6 percent of the total agricultural area is devoted to organic farming. This area needs to be vastly expanded if we are to avoid “the sixth mass extinction.” But first, we need to urge our representatives to stop Fast Track, vote no on the TPP, and pursue a global phase-out of glyphosate-based herbicides and GMO foods. Our health, our finances and our environment are at stake.

Ellen Brown is an attorney, president of the Public Banking Institute and the author of twelve books, including the best-selling Web of Debt. In The Public Bank Solution, her latest book, she explores successful public banking models historically and globally. Her blog articles are at EllenBrown.com.

Regional Scheme for the Pacific Rim The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP)

http://www.thenewamerican.com/world-news/item/16347-regional-scheme-for-the-pacific-rim

This article is part of our special report “How the Free Trade Agenda Is Knocking Down America.” This report warns that the free trade agenda is a dangerous and deceptive bait and switch. The intent is not to create genuine free trade but to transfer economic and political power to regional arrangements on the road to global governance. Because of what is at stake, we encourage you to read the entire special report and to become involved. (click here for the PDF) 

 By  William F. Jasper

With little fanfare or public notice, the Obama administration has pushed full speed ahead over the past year with negotiations on the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a so-called free trade agreement loaded with potential for enormous political and economic harm for Americans. The TPP, which currently involves 12 nations — Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, the United States, and Vietnam (Japan is negotiating for membership and is likely to join soon) — is really intended as an interim arrangement, on the road to an expanded Free Trade Area of the Asia Pacific (FTAAP) that would include all 21 nations of the grouping known as the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC). That includes China and Russia.
The architects and promoters of the TPP and FTAAP frequently point with admiration to the “integration” process of the European Union (EU) as the model they would like to see implemented for the Asia-Pacific rim nations. As with the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), the Trans-Pacific Partnership has been designed to follow the EU example of relentless widening and deepening, constantly eroding national sovereignty, while building “transnational governance” that is not restrained by the checks and balances of national constitutions.

Secrecy vs. Transparency

If there is one word that is used more often than “reform” by governments, politicians, and international organizations — and abused even more frequently and egregiously — it is “transparency.” As with the United Nations and the World Trade Organization (WTO), the White House and the U.S. Trade Representative’s (USTR) office regularly proclaim their commitment to transparency while doing everything possible to hide their actions from their constituents. The USTR’s “Fact Sheet: Transparency and the Trans-Pacific Partnership” is intended to give the impression that the Obama administration is forthrightly providing the American people with all the up-to-date information they need to accurately evaluate the agreements that are being made in their name, and that would, if accepted by Congress, devastatingly impact their lives, their liberty, and their future.

The USTR “Fact Sheet” cites as evidence of its transparency efforts the number of consultations it has held with its selected trade advisory committees and privileged “Civil Society stakeholders.” It states, for instance:

Over the course of the TPP negotiations, USTR has conducted more than 147 meetings with the trade advisory committees. Since June 11, 2010, USTR has posted 110 TPP documents to a website for cleared trade advisors to review and provide comments.

This transparency boast actually exposes a dangerous feature of the TPP process: The TPP documents are not available to the average American citizen, only to “cleared trade advisors.” And who are the “cleared trade advisors”? According to the USTR, these are “representatives from industry, agriculture, services, labor, state and local governments, and public interest groups.” But, apparently, that does not include elected representatives of the American people, since members of Congress have been forced to plead, and threaten in order to get a peep at the secret TPP texts.

For instance, Senator Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee’s subcommittee on International Trade, Customs, and Global Competitiveness, requested copies of the TPP draft documents but was stonewalled by the USTR. When Senator Wyden threatened to propose a measure in the Senate that would force transparency on the proc­ess, the USTR agreed to grant the senator a peek at the documents, though his staff was not permitted to see them. This type of secretive process has no legitimate place in our system of government, and it obviously puts Congress at a distinct disadvantage in the TPP process, since the real work of examining the detailed legal texts normally falls to congressional staff members who are often experts in particular areas of domestic and foreign policy.

Wyden spokeswoman Jennifer Hoelzer told the online Huffington Post that it was also “insulting” that members of Congress and their staff are denied access to documents that industry officials on the “cleared” trade advisory committees are given free access to. “I would point out how insulting it is for them to argue that members of Congress are to personally go over to USTR to view the trade documents,” Hoelzer said. But they are not allowed to make copies. However, Hoelzer pointed out, “An advisor at Halliburton or the MPAA [Motion Picture Association of America] is given a password that allows him or her to go on the USTR website and view the TPP agreement anytime he or she wants.”

The USTR has responded to mounting criticism over its “transparency deficit” with a PR campaign that has featured a succession of meetings and consultations with “stakeholders” that are substantively meaningless but give the appearance of democratic legitimacy. The USTR transparency fact sheet states:

USTR invited over 250 Civil Society stakeholders to a briefing held on June 19, 2012 and provided non-governmental organizations the opportunity to discuss specific issues with USTR negotiators.

Moreover, it says:

USTR will continue to engage with stakeholders to find ways to increase transparency in the TPP negotiations, while moving ahead toward an innovative, groundbreaking 21st-century trade agreement that will support more jobs for working Americans here at home.

The Controlled Opposition

The Obama administration’s standard response to any question or objection is to replay the all-purpose, shop-worn mantra that it — and the Bush and Clinton administrations before it — monotonously, mindlessly intones: “More trade equals more jobs and more prosperity…. More trade equals more jobs and more prosperity.” End of discussion, end of debate.

And when pressed into a corner, the TPP advocates will “engage” and “brief” a pre-selected coterie of activist stakeholders who constitute the usual controlled opposition. According to the USTR, these stakeholders are “leaders from the AFL-CIO, Citizens Trade Campaign, Coalition for a Prosperous America, the Emergency Committee for American Trade, Friends of the Earth, Grocery Manufacturers Association, Maine Citizens Trade Policy Commission, Public Citizen, and the Sierra Club — among others.”

This is the same lineup of “Civil Society Organizations” (CSOs) that is providing faux grassroots participation for the TTIP planned economic and political merger of the United States with the EU (see our article “EU/U.S. — Transatlantic Convergence“). No surprise there; we have seen the same CSO/NGO players engaged in the same deceptive games during the battles over the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP), the World Trade Organization (WTO), and the many other trade-agreement fights. The purpose of these sham opposition groups is to foster the false perception of widespread public involvement in the TPP process and strong public consensus for the TPP objectives. Even when these “opposition” groups publicly object to truly objectionable features of these trade agreements, it is usually for the wrong reasons, and invariably they argue that the proposed new trade authority be given more powers and go beyond trade issues to deal with the environment, labor, financial services, etc. By establishing themselves as the noisiest adversaries, and the only ones the establishment politicians and media deem credible, they successfully co-opt the opposition label and prevent any genuine opponents from rising to the fore. Then they can be counted on to fold, sell out, or walk out at the critical moment and leave the field wide open for passage of the agreement. Not surprisingly, virtually all of these ostensibly grassroots organizations are actually astro-turf groups funded by grants from government agencies, the big tax-exempt foundations, major corporations, and big labor unions.

The TPP proponents are only too happy to accommodate this fake vox populi; as with the TTIP, they are including virtually everything — including the kitchen sink — in the Trans-Pacific Partnership. The White House, the USTR, the State Department, and the private organizations promoting the TPP openly admit that this agreement is not simply a trade agreement, not simply about lowering tariffs. It encompasses — among other things — customs, telecommunications, investment services, technical barriers to trade, sanitary and phytosanitary measures, intellectual property, regulatory coherence, development, non-conforming measures and cross-border trade in services, rules of origin, competition, agriculture, textiles, and environment. Each of these “deepening” areas is pregnant with incredible potential for havoc.

What Are They Hiding?

As just one example of the enormous dangers that are lurking in the hundreds (or thousands) of pages of still-secret texts, consider the leaked TPP draft text on intellectual property that would threaten Internet freedom — as well as American sovereignty — with new TPP surveillance requirements. As The New American reported last year, the leaked document would mandate that TPP member nations enact regulations that require Internet service providers (ISPs) to privately enforce copyright protection laws. “Current U.S. law,” noted The New American’s Joe Wolverton, “specifically the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), would be supplanted by TPP Article 16.3. This provision in the TPP draft document paves the way for a new copyright enforcement scheme that extends far beyond the limits currently imposed by DMCA.”

The Electronic Frontier Foundation pointed out the TPP threat to Internet freedom:

Private ISP enforcement of copyright poses a serious threat to free speech on the Internet, because it makes offering open platforms for user-generated content economically untenable. For example, on an ad-supported site, the costs of reviewing each post will generally exceed the pennies of revenue one might get from ads. Even obvious fair uses could become too risky to host, leading to an Internet with only cautious and conservative content.

The net effect would be to squeeze out the smaller, independent ISPs, further cartelizing our communications and news media, and eventually wiping out the burgeoning alternative Internet-based news media.

Another TPP draft document leaked last year would require the United States to agree to exempt foreign corporations from our laws and regulations. Foreign businesses could challenge any of our federal, state, or local laws and regulations as being unfair practices in restraint of trade. Who would adjudicate these types of cases? They would be decided by an international arbitration tribunal overseen by the secretary-general of the United Nations.

This is an all-out assault on national sovereignty, unconstitutionally transferring legislative powers from the U.S. Congress; state legislatures; and local, city, and county governments to unaccountable international bureaucrats, and judicial powers from our federal and state courts to black-robed TPP globalists. It would also confer huge advantages on foreign businesses and large multinationals, while concomitantly putting American businesses — especially small and medium-sized enterprises — at a competitive disadvantage. American businesses would remain shackled with the onerous regulatory burden of EPA, FDA, ADA, OSHA, etc., while their foreign competitors could operate here unimpeded by those same strictures.

How many more similar dangers (or worse) are hidden in the TPP texts? Based on what has already been leaked so far, should Congress not already be demanding total transparency, with full and immediate access to all of the TPP negotiation texts?

At the 12th round of TPP negotiations, held in Dallas, Texas, in May of 2012, stakeholder participants requested that the negotiation texts be made public so that stakeholders could formulate more informed evaluations, questions, and responses. How Barbara Weisel, assistant U.S. trade representative for Southeast Asia and the Pacific and the lead negotiator for the United States at TPP, replied to this reasonable request is chillingly instructive. According to the USTR’s own website, “Weisel said that while the U.S. position is that constantly evolving TPP chapter texts cannot be released to the public, the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative has been and remains committed to discussing in-depth with a wide range of stakeholders the formation of U.S. positions, the substance of negotiations as they take place, and how issues should be handled by negotiators as talks continue.”

The “TPP chapter texts cannot be released to the public”! That’s the Obama administration’s “transparency”!

From TPP to FTAAP

We mentioned at the beginning of this article that the TPP is actually intended as a door opener to an even larger and more ambitious Free Trade Area of the Asia Pacific (FTAAP). That is not merely the conjecture of this writer; U.S. officials and the original architects of the TPP have stated this explicitly.

A very important source of statements in this regard is the pro-TPP book published in January of this year by the Peter G. Peterson Institute for International Economics (PIIE), entitled Understanding the Trans-Pacific Partnership, coauthored by Jeffrey J. Schott, Barbara Kotschwar, and Julia Muir. The PIIE is one of the premier global think tanks and has played an especially important role in promoting the WTO, IMF, United Nations, and free trade agreements (FTAs), including NAFTA, CAFTA, TPP, and FTAAP. Schott, the primary author of the study, has been in the forefront of the establishment wonks designing and promoting FTAs. The PIIE study states (in Chapter 1):

Over time, the TPP is expected to evolve into a major integration arrangement covering most of the members of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum.

Again in Chapter 1, we find:

The TPP is regarded as an interim arrangement or stepping stone toward a broader, regionwide Free Trade Area of the Asia Pacific (FTAAP), possibly within a decade, as envisaged by APEC leaders in Bogor [Indonesia] in November 1994 and reaffirmed more recently by them in their meeting in Honolulu in November 2011. TPP negotiators are not only thinking about new countries joining the ongoing talks but also planning and constructing the trade pact with a view toward future linkages with other APEC members, including and especially China.

Chapter 6 of the PIIE book is revealingly entitled “Moving from TPP to FTAAP.” It declares:

The current TPP architects envision building an eventual FTAAP on the comprehensive foundations of the TPP accord, with other APEC countries joining the pact in coming years.

Perhaps the most important admissions in Understanding the Trans-Pacific Partnership are to be found in the book’s preface by PIIE’s director, C. Fred Bergsten. As much as anyone, Dr. Bergsten shepherded APEC and TPP into existence. “Twenty years ago,” Bergsten writes in the preface, “I chaired the Eminent Persons Group (EPG) established by the leaders of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum to develop a long-term vision for economic integration of the region.”

Bergsten then goes on to note that “the seeds of a Free Trade Area of the Asia Pacific (FTAAP) began to take serious root about a decade ago, with proposals from APEC’s Business Advisory Council, and now have multiple green shoots — the biggest and sturdiest of which is the ongoing negotiation of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).”

Those familiar with Dr. Bergsten’s background and connections recognize that these admissions are all the more important because he, Schott, and the other PIIE authors are channeling the party line of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and the Trilateral Commission (TC), two of the most influential globalist organizations pushing for a New World Order that envisions a global monetary authority and a world government under the United Nations. Bergsten is a longtime member and leading intellectual of both the CFR and TC. The PIIE is named for and chaired by Peter G. Peterson, a longtime chairman of the CFR. The PIIE board of directors and advisory board, as well as its roster of scholars and fellows, is a register of prominent CFR and TC members, including David Rockefeller, former chairman of the CFR and founder of the TC. Many of the PIIE’s leaders have held Cabinet positions in various administrations. Leading the Obama TPP/FTAAP effort are CFR/TC members Michael Froman (U.S. trade representative) and Robert Hormats (undersecretary of state).

During the George W. Bush administration, U.S. Trade Representative Susan Schwab (CFR) praised APEC at the organ­ization’s 2007 meeting in Cairns, Australia, and endorsed the FTAAP.

“FTAAP is a visionary proposal that APEC is well-suited to take on,” said Amb. Schwab. “By more effectively knitting together the dynamic economies of the region, an FTAAP would some day yield enormous social and commercial benefits for the people of the Asia-Pacific region, including the United States.”

The dangers of the TPP are becoming daily more obvious. The secrecy of the TPP negotiation process and the threats to national sovereignty that have already been exposed due to leaks of text drafts show it to be incompatible with our American constitutional system. The fact that its authors and promoters admit the TPP is just a “steppingstone” to an even more expansive and more dangerous FTAAP, should be sufficient to guarantee its defeat. However, defeating the TPP and FTAAP will require a coordinated, sustained effort by American patriots over the next few months to take this information to their fellow citizens. It will take — in the words of Samuel Adams — “an irate, tireless minority keen to set brush fires in people’s minds.” And then the heat and light from those brushfires must be directed at members of Congress so that they will honor their constitutional duty to stop the TPP.

The above article is part of our special report “How the Free Trade Agenda Is Knocking Down America.” This report warns that the free trade agenda is a dangerous and deceptive bait and switch. The intent is not to create genuine free trade but to transfer economic and political power to regional arrangements on the road to global governance. Because of what is at stake, we encourage you to read the entire special report and to become involved. (click here for the PDF) 

The Unspoken Truth on 9/11: “September 11, The New Pearl Harbor”

http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-unspoken-truth-on-911-september-11-the-new-pearl-harbor/5354760

Introduction by Jefferson’s Voice

We have many heroes in our midst and some of the most tireless and courageous are those who have been very active in the 9/11 Truth movement for over ten years.  It is impossible to overstate the importance of recognizing the magnitude of damage done to the American republic from the 9/11 false flag attack.  It was the fulcrum event launching the global war on terror resulting in the deaths of thousands of US soldiers, disabling many more, killing millions of innocent civilians in the middle east and devastating the lives of tens of millions.  The effects at home have been nothing short of catastrophic as (1) a steady metastasis of an encroaching police state eviscerates our Constitution and civil liberties; (2) a black hole of military expenditures accelerates America’s trajectory into fiscal insolvency; and (3) as an event that provided a smokescreen for large scale criminal activity to include financial and corporate crime.

The 9/11 false flag could be said to be the second major coup, after JFK’s assassination, to be foisted on a mostly unsuspecting American public ultimately intended to deprive us of our God given rights to freedom, dignity, and self determination, gifted to us by the greatest minds of the Enlightenment and the countless men and women who made the ultimate sacrifice for generations of Americans.  9/11 spawned a form of malignant cancer on our civilization that must be exposed now at this critical juncture in our collective history.

Thankfully, the 9/11 Truth movement is still working hard to educate the public and has written extensively and produced documentaries to that end.  The most recent 9/11 Truth film “September 11: The New Pearl Harbor” is a brilliant example, utilizing expert researchers who “knock it out of the ballpark” and thus shame disinformation propagandists as establishment buffoons.  While the subject matter is sobering, to say the least, never before have I relished an opportunity to cheer on the “good guys”.  Please watch the documentary in full and then share this with everyone you know and in as many internet forums and networks as you possibly can so we can come together as one voice to defend our basic human rights. 

May God bless those fighting the good fight for Truth, Justice, and Freedom.

Jefferson’s Voice

Go to this link and SAVE IT  then click on PLAY NOW

http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-unspoken-truth-on-911-september-11-the-new-pearl-harbor/5354760

Here are links from a different source in case there’s trouble with the above one.

 1/3 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tzxrsIGR9Lg

2/3 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dRVCBQ0DVuk

3/3 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ylvD–PJd5s

By David Ray Griffin

There have been several good films and videos about 9/11. But the new film by award-winning film-maker Massimo Mazzucco is in a class by itself.

For those of us who have been working on 9/11 for a long time, this is the film we have been waiting for.

Whereas there are excellent films treating the falsity of particular parts of the official account, such as the Twin Towers or WTC 7, Mazzucco has given us a comprehensive documentary treatment of 9/11, dealing with virtually all of the issues.

There have, of course, been films that treated the fictional official story as true. And there are films that use fictional stories to portray people’s struggles after starting to suspect the official story to be false.

But there is no fiction in Mazzucco’s film – except in the sense that it clearly and relentlessly exposes every part of the official account as fictional.

Because of his intent at completeness, Mazzucco has given us a 5-hour film. It is so fascinating and fast-paced that many will want to watch it in one sitting. But this is not necessary, as the film, which fills 3 DVDs, consists of 7 parts, each of which is divided into many short chapters.

These 7 parts treat Air Defence, The Hijackers, The Airplanes, The Pentagon, Flight 93, The Twin Towers, and Building 7. In each part, after presenting facts that contradict the official story, Mazzucco deals with the claims of the debunkers (meaning those who try to debunk the evidence provided by the 9/11 research community).

The Introduction, reflecting the film’s title, deals with 12 uncanny parallels between Pearl Harbor and September 11.

The film can educate people who know nothing about 9/11 (beyond the official story), those with a moderate amount of knowledge about the various problems with the official story, and even by experts. (I myself learned many things.)

Mazzucco points out that his film covers 12 years of public debate about 9/11. People who have been promoting 9/11 truth for many of these years will see that their labors have been well-rewarded: There is now a high-quality, carefully-documented film that dramatically shows the official story about 9/11 to be a fabrication through and through.

This is truly the film we have been waiting for.

Part I, II, and III

Availability: The film is freely available to the world at:

1. The film-maker’s own website, complete with detailed index:http://www.luogocomune.net/site/modules/sections/index.php?op=viewarticle&artid=167

OLDDOGS COMMENTS

This series of films should be watched by every person in America, and I mean if you do not do everything in your power to watch it and then demand everyone you know watch it, then you are not worthy of calling yourself an American. We can no longer tolerate the people sitting on their hands while America burns to the ground.

THE CONVENTION OF STATES SCAM AND THE WAR OVER THE CONSTITUTION

 http://www.newswithviews.com/Publius/huldah123.htm

By Publius Huldah

How the States Sold the Reserved Powers to the Feds

Our Constitution is a glorious document. This one page chart depicts the Structure of the federal government we created when we ratified our Constitution; and lists the “limited & enumerated powers” we delegated to the federal government over the Country at Large.

In a nutshell, our Constitution authorizes the federal government to handle the following objects for the Country at Large:

• Military defense, international commerce & relations;
• Control immigration & naturalization of new citizens;
• Domestically, to create a uniform commercial system: weights & measures, patents & copyrights, money based on gold & silver, bankruptcy laws, mail delivery & some road building; and
• With some of the amendments, secure certain civil rights.

Basically, that’s it. As stated in the 10th Amendment, all others powers are reserved by the States or The People.

But for 100 years, almost everyone in our Country has ignored our Constitution. Thus, instead of restricting spending to the enumerated objects of its powers, the people we send to Congress spend money on what anybody wants- and so gave us a debt of $17 trillion. Instead of restricting lawmaking to the enumerated objects of its powers, the people we send to Congress make laws on whatever they like. The President we elected tramples all over the Constitution; and due to the connivance, cowardice, and ignorance of Congress, the supreme Court, State governments, and the American People, is seizing totalitarian power.
WE are in terrible trouble.

And it is the phony right wing which is seducing the American People into taking the final jump off the cliff.

Michael Farris, head of the Convention of States[1]project, begins his video with this spiel:

“We all know that our government is way off track. The debt is astronomical and is going to cripple not only our own freedom and our own economy, but our children and our grandchildren are going to be effectively slaves, paying for all the things that we’re spending money on today.”

That part of his video is true.

But the purpose of their spiels is to make you believe they are on your side. You must look behind the spiels and think carefully about what they are proposing as “solutions”. Much is at stake:

THIS IS THE WAR over our Constitution and Country. And here are the two sides:

Learn & Enforce our Existing Constitution!

One side proposes that we learn & enforce our existing Constitution of limited & enumerated powers. We show that our Framers advised us to enforce our Constitution by (1) electing better representatives to annul the acts of the usurpers,[2] or by (2) nullification of unconstitutional acts.

To illustrate: What would our Country’s financial condition be if WE THE PEOPLE had enforced the enumerated powers on Congress?

It is the enumerated powers which list the objects on which Congress may appropriate funds:

• immigration office (Art. I, §8, cl.4)
• mint (Art. I, §8, cl. 5)
• Attorney General (Art. I, §8, cl. 6)
• post offices & post roads (Art. I, §8, cl. 7)
• patent& copyright office (Art. I, §8, cl. 8)
• federal courts (Art. I, §8, cl. 9)
• military (Art. I, §8, cls. 11-16)
• the civil list (Art. I, §6, cl.1)
• [and other objects listed in various other articles, sections, &clauses]

Do you get the idea? The Constitution itemizes what Congress is permitted to spend money on. See also the two geographical areas over which Congress was delegated “general legislative powers”: Art. I, §8, next to last clause, & Art. IV, §3, cl. 2).

The reason we have a debt of $17 trillion is because everyone ignored the Constitution; so Congress spent money on objects outside the scope of its enumerated powers.

Amend Away our Existing Constitution?

But the Randy Barnett[3]/ Rob Natelson/ Michael Farris/ Mark Levincamp want a “convention” so they can gut our existing Constitution by amending out the limited & enumerated powers with new amendments which grant general powers to the federal government; or they seek to re-write the Constitution altogether.

Here are illustrations of how the limited & enumerated powers can be amended out of our Constitution:

It has already been shown how the so-called balanced budget amendment would transform our Constitution from one of enumerated spending powers to one of general spending powers, where spending would be limited only by the amount of revenue the federal government generates or a certain percentage of the GDP.[4] But under our existing Constitution, the federal government’s expenditures are limited by the constitutional grants of authority – the enumerated powers. The problem is everyone ignores the enumerated powers – they never learned what they are!

Here is another illustration: Michael Farris, the grand master of The Spiel, has managed to convince many parents that the only way to protect their parental rights is an amendment to the Constitution which delegates to the federal and State governments constitutional power over their children!

And Mark Levin’s suggested amendments would gut our Constitution. Most increase the powers of the federal government by making constitutional what is now unconstitutional because it is not an enumerated power. The amendments pertaining to “overrides” undermine the Constitution as the objective standard of what is lawful and what is not – and substitute majority vote therefore. These “overrides” would erase the Constitution and replace it with majority (mob) rule.

Or is “re-writing the Constitution” their actual goal?

Farris says in the video:

“…sometimes what you need is not a change of personnel, you need a change of structure. The Founders understood the importance of structure…”

Does that give you cold chills?

How does Farris seek to change the structure?

Please – all of you – look at this one page chart which depicts The Structure of the federal government our Framers gave us: What needs changing? Isn’t enforcement what we need?

Jordan Sillars, Communications Director for Farris’ Convention of States Project, let the cat out of the bag:

On September 15, 2013, a discussion on my Face Book page was started about Mark Levin’s clamoring for a “convention of states.”

On or before September 19, Jordon Sillars posted a comment wherein he said:

“… 3. I think the majority of Americans are too lazy to elect honest politicians. But I think some men and women could be found who are morally and intellectually capable of re-writing the Constitution…” [boldface mine].

On September 19 at 1:20 p.m., I responded:

“So, this really is about “re-writing the Constitution”, isn’t it?

And could you name these individuals who are “morally and intellectually capable of re-writing the Constitution”?”

Sillars thereafter deleted his comments, but not before I obtained a screen shot of his quoted comment which you can see here.

Why did he delete his comments?

Now let’s look more at what Farris says in his video:

The False Statements & Silly Arguments of the Proponents of a “convention of States”

1. After his introduction about the $17 trillion debt, Farris goes on to say:

“The States have the power under Article V to call a convention of the States for the purpose of proposing amendments to the Constitution…”

His statement is false.

The Truth is the States have no authority to call the convention. That power is delegated to Congress. Article V says:

“The Congress, whenever two thirds of both Houses shall deem it necessary, shall propose Amendments to this Constitution, or, on the Application of the Legislatures of two thirds of the several States, shall call a Convention for proposing Amendments…” [emphasis mine]

Congress calls it. Not the States.

Furthermore, Dr. Edwin Vieira has pointed out:

‘The language “shall call a Convention for proposing Amendments” sets out a constitution duty in Congress. It embraces a constitutional power as well. That brings into play Article I, Section 8, Clause 18, which delegates to Congress the power “[t]o make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers [that is, in Article I, Section 8, Clauses 1 through 17], and all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof”. The power to “call a Convention for proposing Amendments” is one of those “all other Powers”. Therefore, pursuant to that power, Congress may enact whatever “Law[ ] which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the * * * Power [to call a Convention]’.

So! Since Article V vests in Congress the power to call the convention; and since Article I, §8, last clause, vests in Congress the power to make all laws necessary & proper to execute its delegated powers;[5] Congress would be within its constitutional authority to organize the Convention anyway it wants, and to appoint whomsoever it wishes as delegates.[6]

Now look at this: The chart on Article V shows that James Madison, Father of our Constitution, remarked on the vagueness of the term, “call a Convention for the purpose”:

“How was a Convention to be formed? – by what rule decide? – what the force of its acts?” (Sep. 10); and “difficulties might arise as to the form, the quorum, & c., which in constitutional regulations ought to be as much as possible avoided”(Sep. 15, 1787).

Phyllis Schlafly also raised Twenty Questions about a Constitutional Convention.

Congress, pursuant to Article V and Article I, §8, last clause, has the constitutional power to answer all these questions by means of a law.

Folks! The Farris/Natelson/ Levin camp is not telling you the truth when they say the States decide these issues!

2. Farris then says in his video:

“…in Article V of the Constitution [the Founding Fathers] gave us the solution…”

“…they gave the power to the States to create a new set of rules when the federal government overstepped its boundaries. We can re-calibrate the rules to take power away from Washington D.C. and give it back to the people and to the States.”

His statements are both false and silly.

Here is the false part of what he said:

It was not the consensus at the Federal Convention of 1787 that the purpose of Article V was so States could make amendments to the Constitution in order to take power away from a federal government which had usurped power by violating the Constitution.

This chart shows what happened at the Federal Convention of 1787 re development of Article V.

Two delegates (Randolph & Mason, who didn’t sign the Constitution) supported the notion that amendments might be used if the national government should become oppressive. And they didn’t want Congress to have any power over amendment procedures. Their view was the minority view.

Other delegates (Gov. Morris, Hamilton & Madison) thought Congress ought to be able to propose amendments. One delegate (Mr. Gerry) worried about States obtaining a convention and binding the Union to innovations which subverted State Constitutions. Hamilton spoke of amendments to correct defects which would probably appear in the Constitution.

So the final version of Article V provides two methods of proposing amendments to the Constitution. Congress either:

• Proposes the amendments; or
• “Calls” a convention when the Legislatures of 2/3 of the States apply for it. [Now see Art. I, §8, last clause.]

Now for the silly parts of what Farris said (and there are two silly parts):

3. Farris tells us the solution to a federal government which “overstep[s] its boundaries” [violates the Constitution] is to amend the Constitution.

He proposes “to take power away from Washington D.C.”[power the federal government has usurped] by “re-calibrate[ing] the rules”.

In other words, the solution to a federal government which violates the Constitution is to amend the Constitution.

Do you see how silly this is?

4. Farris and his camp also imply that the States are victims of federal tyranny, and are the virtuous & wise ones who can fix our Country if they can just get a convention to propose amendments.

But the States are the ones who sold you out to the federal government in the first place! I’ll show you:

The 10th Amendment says:

“The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

What happened to these reserved powers?

The States sold them to the federal government.

Let’s use education as an illustration of how the States sold to the federal government your reserved power to educate your own children in the way you see fit.

The Creator God who, as recognized by our Declaration of Independence, endowed us with unalienable rights; assigned to parents the responsibility to provide for the education &moral instruction of their children: Proverbs 1:8-9, 6:20-21, 13:1, 22:6 & 23:19-22; Genesis 18:19; Deuteronomy 4:9-10 & 6:1-7; Ephesians 6:1-4; 2 Timothy 1:5 & 3:15-17.

Is “education” one of the enumerated powers delegated to the federal government for the Country at large? No. So the federal government has no constitutional authority to get involved. Accordingly, all acts of Congress pertaining to education for the Country at Large, the federal Department of Education, and all their rules & programs are unconstitutional as outside the scope of powers delegated to the federal government.

So why does the federal government dictate all things respecting education?

Because your States sold your God-given responsibility to educate your own children-and your reserved power to do so-to the federal government. This has been going on for a long time; but most recently your State sold you out for federal grants with the federal government’s “race to the top” and “common core” schemes.[7]

You have to be ignorant, unthinking,& gullible – a greenhorn -to believe that The States are the men in the white hats who can fix all this with a convention to propose amendments.

Conclusion

The federal government is not the problem – it is the result of our own ignorance, pride and folly.

WE THE PEOPLE, who are “the natural guardians of the Constitution” (Federalist No. 16, next to last para) didn’t trouble ourselves to learn the enumerated powers of Congress and the President. Do you know them?

I ask my Readers who have been supporting the “convention of States” scheme: Have you studied our Founding Principles set forth in The Declaration of Independence? Have you studied the text of the Constitution so that you know what it says?

If not, how are you qualified to know how to “fix” a Constitution you never learned?

Are you willing to stake your lives & liberties, and those of your progeny, on whether those in the Barnett/Natelson/Farris/ Levin camp (1) know what they are talking about, and (2) are telling the truth?

Why? Because you like them? Because they provide a scapegoat which permits you to blame-shift? And you think you can “get even”?

Wise voices in this Country are warning you about the scam. Foremost among them is Phyllis Schlafly, who has been warning of this danger for decades. Yet, such is the ignorant conceit of the greenhorns that they sneer at those who are warning them.

I trust you now see the connection between the moral corruption of a People and tyranny.

Endnotes:

1. Use your own head! Do not be manipulated by other peoples’ choice of words. Rob Natelson formerly referred to what he wants as a “constitutional convention”. Now, he calls it a “Convention of the States” – that is the term his cohorts & minions now use. Why did they change what they called it?
2. But our elections are no longer honest. The States took federal grant money to buy voting machines which can be rigged.
3. Randy Barnett’s “Bill of Federalism” is ten proposed amendments which would transform our Constitution from one of enumerated powers to one of general & unlimited powers. Mark Levin’s proposed amendments are similar to Barnett’s.
4. The GDP is computed by an agency in the Executive Branch. So under the BBA, spending would be limited by numbers under the control of the federal government: By how much they tax you; or by a number (GDP) the Executive Branch computes.You think that is a fine idea?
5. The Federalist Papers tell us what the “necessary & proper” clause (Art. I, §8, last clause) means: The clause delegates to Congress power to pass all laws necessary & proper to execute its declared powers (Federalist No. 29, 4th para); a power to do something must be a power to pass all laws necessary & proper for the execution of that power (Federalist No. 33, 4th para); “the constitutional operation of the intended government would be precisely the same if [this clause] were entirely obliterated as if [it] were repeated in every article” (Federalist No. 33, 2ndpara); and thus the clause is “perfectly harmless”, a tautology or redundancy. (Federalist No. 33, 4thpara). See also Federalist No. 44, 10th-17thparas. In other words, the clause permits the execution of powers already declared and granted. Do not be misled by Rob Natelson’s post on the “necessary & proper” clause! Why did Natelson ignore what The Federalist Papers say about this clause? Why did he fabricate the song & dance set forth in his post?
6. Think this through also: Even if Congress, as a matter of grace, permitted the States to appoint delegates, how would delegates from your State be chosen? Who controls your State? Would the powers in your State choose you? Or do you believe Michael Farris would choose the leaders?
7. This happened in your State because The People in your State elected to State government people who sold you out. See this website on federal grants: You think your State Legislators, who have been gobbling up all the federal grant money they can get, will fix our Country at a “convention” to propose amendments?

© 2013 Publius Huldah – All Rights Reserved

Publius Huldah is a retired attorney who now lives in Tennessee. Before getting a law degree, she got a degree in philosophy where she specialized in political philosophy and epistemology (theories of knowledge). She now writes extensively on the U.S. Constitution, using the Federalist Papers to prove its original meaning and intent. She also shows how federal judges and politicians have ignored Our Constitution and replaced it with their personal opinions and beliefs.

E-Mail: publiushuldah@gmail.com

Farce of Globalism: World Bank Becomes Top Cop?

 http://www.thedailybell.com/editorials/34855/Farce-of-Globalism-World-Bank-Becomes-Top-Cop/

Editorial,

The World Bank has a new mission. The Economic Times tells us that the World Bank has a new enemy to confront. It is not poverty but “corruption.”

Here’s more:

Corruption top foe in developing countries: World Bank … World Bank chief Jim Yong Kim said Thursday that corruption was the top problem faced by developing countries as he unveiled a new weapon to root out graft.

“In the developing world, corruption is public enemy number one,” Kim said at a conference at World Bank headquarters in Washington. “Every dollar that a corrupt official or a corrupt business person puts in their pocket is a dollar stolen from a pregnant woman who needs health care; or from a girl or a boy who deserves an education.”

Kim said the private sector should be “part of the solution.” “Oil, gas, and mining firms are increasingly disclosing their contracts with governments,” he said, providing “a chance” to monitor the activities of both corporate and public officials.

Kim announced that the World Bank will create a single pool of technical experts in rule of law, public sector, financial and state management, and public procurement as a major tool to fight corruption.

This is surely part of the evolution of internationalism, as we have been tracking it. How can you tell? Just look at the main elements of Western control set up after World War Two. Among them are the United Nations, World Bank, IMF and NATO. Each of these organizations is continuously expanding. Also, we can tell by who created them that the Western banking establishment is behind them.

The Cold War, a somewhat manufactured crisis, in our opinion, was responsible for the expansion of NATO and the UN. “Caring” for impoverished countries and people was responsible for the expansion of the World Bank and NATO.

Of course, we know from various exposes that the IMF and World Bank do not deal directly with people they are supposed to be helping. Instead, their officials make deals with top bureaucrats. The bureaucrats are basically bribed to take huge handouts from the World Bank to “improve” public facilities, etc. When the expansions sour due to bribe taking and corruption, the bureaucrats in charge vanish, often to other countries or luxurious retirements on various tropical islands.

The next generation of bureaucrats is left to deal with the bitter dregs of wasted funding. Then the IMF swoops in to lend money at high cost to allow the country’s unsuspecting population to pay back IMF “loans.” Population after population has been rightfully shocked to find out that its countries are bankrupt and public facilities like waterworks are up for sale to the highest bidder.

Make that “low bidder,” as multinationals surreptitiously controlled by the globalist banking community pay very little for acquisitions. And then, of course, the prices of basic services are raised considerably to those who depend on them.

Thus vast corporate creatures – handmaidens of a global elite – are continually acquiring fundamental resources as they centralize power and authority to benefit a blossoming international governance. All this has been done behind the scenes, but now as what we call the Internet Reformation continues to expose the Way the World Really Works, those who are committed globalists have sped up the apparent takeover.

Every day it seems the IMF is more activist, with its top people rallying around the idea that the IMF should become the world’s central bank.

The UN meanwhile drives hundreds of leaders of various corrupt countries into vast conferences that produce global resolutions on everything from trade to environmentalism and, of course, the pseudo science of global warming.

And now, it seems, a new task has been found for the World Bank. It will be to clean up corruption.

The IMF is not suited to be the world’s central bank because monopoly central banks don’t work, because the IMF’s SDR scrip is inefficient and because the IMF generally is a corrupt and useless body, filled with grasping bureaucrats who understand quite well the gap between the IMF’s stated goals and reality.

The UN has always been an entirely corrupt body – an authoritarian, even fascist government in waiting. It is inefficient, wasteful, ruinous and just as hypocritical as the IMF or other world bodies. As for the World Bank, its corruption is so extensive that one is almost tempted to say it is indeed the organization that should monitor corruption worldwide because of its extensive internal experience.

Forbes magazine ran a fairly thorough article on the corruption inherent in the World Bank back in mid-2012 entitled, “World Bank Spins Out Of Control: Corruption, Dysfunction Await New President.”

… It’s presidential inauguration time in Washington. Not for the person who will helm the federal government – that comes in six months – but instead for Dr. Jim Yong Kim, the man taking the reins of an organization even more lumbering, and far less accountable: the World Bank.

With 188 member countries and an army of 9,000 employees and consultants, Kim will lead one of the world’s most powerful institutions – charged with saving the worlds poor – but also one of its most dysfunctional. It is an endlessly expanding virtual nation-state with supranational powers, a 2011 aid portfolio of $57 billion and little oversight by the governments that fund it. ‘

And – according to dozens of interviews over the past few weeks, atop hundreds more over the past five years, plus a review of thousands of pages of internal documents – problems have gotten worse, not better, at the World Bank despite more than a decade of reform attempts.

Kim, the Dartmouth College president tapped by President Obama to lead the bank, stands little chance of fixing things, say insiders, unless he is prepared to completely revamp the current system. The inmates are running the asylum, says a former director.

Some specific points from the article:

– Part of the problem is structural: Internal reports, reviewed by FORBES, show, for example, that even after Zoellick implemented a budget freeze some officials operated an off-budget system that defies cost control, while others used revolving doors to game the system to make fortunes for themselves or enhance their positions within the bank.

– Why not track all the cash? Good luck: Bank sources cite up to $2 billion that may have gone unaccounted for recently amid computer glitches.

– Sadly, the last part is cultural: The bank, those inside and outside it say, is so obsessed with reputational risk that it reflexively covers up anything that could appear negative, rather than address it.

– Whistle-blower witch hunts undermine the one sure way to root out problems at a Washington headquarters dominated by fearful yes-men and yes-women, who – wary of a quick expulsion back to their own countries – rarely offer their true opinions.

– In 2005 George W. Bush tapped Paul Wolfowitz as president to clean the place up. To his credit, Wolfowitz made rooting out corruption his primary mission. But the former Pentagon official also came in like an occupying power. According to internal documents obtained by FORBES, the board and Wolfowitz engaged in a game of trench warfare so vicious that the minutes of some board meetings had to be sanitized to keep the world from knowing what was really going on.

– Numerous managers and vice presidents that I spoke with inside the bank say that corruption continues unabated. Five years ago a commission led by Paul Volcker drilled into the bank and called it a massive problem.

We can see from the above that the idea of the World Bank leading the fight against international sociopolitical corruption is generally farcical.

And I have not even touched on the “transparency meme” being cultivated by the same rogues and rascals running these vast repositories of waste.

Central banks are trying very hard to be transparent, for instance, but their function is essentially one of criminal incompetence. No matter the stated reasons, central banks are in the business of bankrupting the middle class on a regular basis and then assuming those bankrupt assets at minimal cost.

The reason that these enormous global facilities are receiving more and more power and authority is not because they work well or even work at all. It is because the internationalists who set them up want them to expand as a way of building world government.

Call it directed history. These agents of globalism will continually acquire power no matter the reality of their missions. They were never what they appeared to be. In the 21st century, it becomes increasingly apparent as the Internet Reformation era advances.

Federal Reserve 100 Years of Failure

http://www.activistpost.com/2013/12/federal-reserve-100-years-of-failure.html

By James Hall

Researching economic publications on the first century of the Federal Reserve System provides a wealth of financial information that attempts to explain the way the central bank works. Rarely will the academic studies and official reports address the raw nature of a money creation by a private banking monopoly. The common practice of disparaging sources outside government or corporatist business circles, attempts to avoid addressing, much less confronting the plutocracy that controls the debt created money system.

One such source list of the ownership of the Federal Reserve, compiled by Thomas D. Schauf appears on The Federal Reserve Scam! However, before getting to the particulars of the actual families behind the central banking cabal, it is important to go directly to the source of the primary chronicler who investigated and exposed the scheme. The late, Eustace Mullins – Secrets of The Federal Reserve, video reveals the entire sordid background.

Now review 25 Fast Facts About The Federal Reserve You Need To Know, from ETF Daily News that advises investors. The way these items play into the central banking model practiced by all 187 nations that belong to the IMF, demonstrates that banksters of the most select rank, are behind continued debt bubbles that are strangling the world.

On the Left Hook site by Dean Henderson, a five part series on the Federal Reserve provides added documentation. Mr. Henderson cites from Part 1 in this series, The Federal Reserve Cartel: The Eight Families, “They are the Goldman Sachs, Rockefellers, Lehmans and Kuhn Loebs of New York; the Rothschilds of Paris and London; the Warburgs of Hamburg; the Lazards of Paris; and the Israel Moses Seifs of Rome.”

Watch the video above by G Edward Griffin Creature From Jekyll Island A Second Look at the Federal Reserve. Mr. Griffin explains the broad picture in simple and clear terms.

With such definitive information available and widely known within financial circles, why is the public so content to remain in the dark? They live under the aftermaths of the Federal Reserve is a Cache of Stolen Assets, but resign themselves to the oblivion of lost expectations and the burden of diminished opportunities.

Think about who really owns the land, the buildings and the resources in our country. In order to really understand the scope and extent of the economy, the differential between actual Main Street enterprise, that feeds, clothes and shelters the population, is minuscule when compared to the financial assets, both liquid and real property, that is under the command and control of the central bank.

The political class and the business establishment simply refuse to buck the controllers of the currency. Attempts for a Jackals of Jekyll Island – Federal Reserve Audit, are pushed aside because any accountability for the Fed would ripple throughout the entire world fiat paper banking system. “The FED’s grip on the global moneychangers’ racket is based upon maintaining the U.S. Federal Reserve funny money, as the reserve currency for the planet. The value and worth of Treasury Bills and Bonds are on the path to have the value of.

Reichsbank marks. Recognize the enemy that is destroying the country and world economy.”The Cato Institute provides a working paper, Has the Fed Been a Failure?, that traces the history, avowed mission and actual results of the Federal Reserve System. This scholarly approach acknowledges that other financial frameworks are “relatively easy to identify viable alternatives to the adoption of the Federal Reserve Act in 1913.”

“However, recent work suggests that there has been no substantial overall improvement in the volatility of real output since the end of World War II compared to before World War I . . . the Fed cannot be credited with having reduced the frequency of banking panics or with having wielded its last-resort lending powers responsibly. In short, the Federal Reserve System, as presently constituted, is no more worthy of being regarded as the last word in monetary management than the National Currency System it replaced almost a century ago.”

Lastly, the essay, Who Owns The Federal Reserve?, by Ellen Brown, substantiates that the “Fed is privately owned, and its shareholders are private banks. In fact, 100% of its shareholders are private banks. None of its stock is owned by the government.”

Since the adoption of a private banking, money creation venture, the dollar has lost virtually its entire store of value. The currency has lost its universal acceptance, as multiple alternatives circulate to replace its reserve status.

The Federal Reserve’s First 100 Years: A Dismal Record by Dan Ferris, identifies the ultimate consequence of the stewardship under a central bank. “The century prior to the Fed, despite setbacks, was a century of improvement in the dollar’s value. The century after it, despite enormous gains in productivity, was a century of rampant Federal Reserve destruction of the dollar’s value.”

This failure to maintain and preserve the integrity of the dollar is no accident. The actual purpose of the architects of the Federal Reserve System has never changed. Consolidate the control of money into a concealed cartel of banking houses that ultimately decide economic and political policy.

Dispensing of credit to corporatist projects, owned or run by reliable operatives of the cabal is the objective. The only beneficiaries are the original stockholders.

“Under the terms of the Federal Reserve Act, public stock was only to be sold in the event the sale of stock to member banks did not raise the minimum of $4 million of initial capital for each Federal Reserve Bank when they were organized in 1913 (12 USCA 281). Each Bank was able to raise the necessary amount through member stock sales, and no public stock was ever sold to the non-bank public.”

For the rest of Americans, the Federal Reserve conspiracy is an ongoing theft syndicate. It only takes the will to admit the undeniable. Without the courage to abolish this usury monster, the next century will witness the total destruction of the country.

Original article archived here

James Hall is a reformed, former political operative. This pundit’s formal instruction in History, Philosophy and Political Science served as training for activism, on the staff of several politicians and in many campaigns. A believer in authentic Public Service, independent business interests were pursued in the private sector. Speculation in markets, and international business investments, allowed for extensive travel and a world view for commerce. Hall is the publisher ofBREAKING ALL THE RULES. Contact batr@batr.org

Judicial Discipline Reform

http://Judicial-Discipline-Reform.org/OL/DrRCordero-Honest_Jud_Advocates.pdf

 Dr. Richard Cordero, Esq.

Good suggestions from a member of New York’s Judicial Discipline Reform as to how to reform the corrupted judicial system…

Do the President’s lies for the personal and political gain of passing and implementing Obamacare warrant calls for his resignation or impeachment?

The request that he release the FBI vetting report on his justiceship nominee J. Sotomayor

By Dr. Richard Cordero, Esq.

Judicial Discipline Reform

New York City

Dr.Richard.Cordero.Esq@gmail.com

http://Judicial-Discipline-Reform.org/OL/DrRCordero-Honest_Jud_Advocates.pdf

Former President Bush’s Attorney General, Alberto Gonzales, was forced to resign because he had lied to Congress and had lost its trust.

Now, an ever-greater number of Americans believe that President Obama lied to them when he said that under his Affordable Health Care Act, or Obamacare, they would be able to keep their current health insurance.

Instead, the insurance of millions of them has been cancelled and they have been left by insurers with no more option than a more expensive insurance with features that they may not need but that are in compliance with Obamacare as now the President pretends to understand what his own signature piece of legislation offers.

His motive for lying to them would have been to induce them to support the passage and implementation of Obamacare.

Many Americans think that he is untrustworthy.

A. The President’s graver lie about Then-Judge/Now-Justice Sotomayor’s honesty

How would Americans react if they learned that the President also lied when he vouched for the integrity of his first nominee to the Supreme Court, Then-Judge Sotomayor, although he knew that The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Politico[^107a] suspected her of concealing assets of her own. Concealment of assets is a crime in itself and is undertaken either to evade taxes or launder them of their illegal provenance, both of which are also crimes(id. >ol:5fn10).

*NOTE: All [bracketed] and (parenthetical) blue text is references to supporting passages and footnotes, respectively, found in the study, Exposing Judges’ Unaccountability and Consequent Riskless Wrongdoing: Pioneering the news and publishing field of judicial unaccountability reporting. That study is in the file downloadable through the external link http://Judicial-Discipline-Reform.org/OL/DrRCordero-Honest_Jud_Advocates.pdf. In the study and everything else in the file, the blue text represents active cross-referential internal links that facilitate jumping to supporting passages and footnotes to check them.

Unlike those preeminent and trusted media outlets, the Department of Justice and its FBI had subpoena, search & seizure, contempt, and penal powers to conduct a more intrusive investigation when vetting all candidates being considered as replacement for Retiring Justice Souter.

By exercising those powers, the FBI could both confirm such suspicion and even find the whereabouts of the concealed assets. It could do so because the very documents that Then-Judge Sotomayor submitted to the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Judicial Nominations and that it posted on its website[^107b] showed that she could not account for the income that she herself had declared[^107c]. The FBI could inform thereof the President in its vetting report on Justiceship Candidate Sotomayor before he nominated any of his candidates for the Supreme Court(jur:77§5).

After his first election, the President disregarded the known tax evasion of Tim Geithner, Tom Daschle, and Nancy Killefer and nominated them to his cabinet[¹⁰⁸].

So it was in character for him to disregard the incriminating information about J. Sotomayor’s concealment of assets, nominate her, and lie about her honesty. He had a motive: to cater to those petitioning for another woman and the first Latina for the Supreme Court, and receive in exchange their support for passing Obamacare.

By so doing, President Obama in self-interest saddled the American public with a life-tenured dishonest justice who for the next 30 or more years can be shaping the law of the land with one hand and covering her concealed assets with the other, for she cannot declare them, but must keep them concealed(68§3) to avoid incriminating herself and risking calls for her resignation.

Just as felons cannot serve as jurors, a judge who breaks the law shows contempt for it and cannot be expected to respect it enough to apply it fairly and impartially.

Indeed, the revelations by Life magazine of the financial improprieties of Justice Abe Fortas forced him first to withdraw his name for the chief justiceship and subsequently to resign on May 14, 1969(92§d).

B. The Obama-Sotomayor story can reveal graver lies and wrongdoing

Whether one is for or against Obamacare is utterly irrelevant as is whether one is Democrat or Republican.

What matters is how revealing the involvement of a sitting president and a sitting justice nominated by him in concealment of assets and its cover-up for personal and political gain can reveal their unfitness for office. That revelation can so outrage the national public as to convince the media that there is a large and avid audience for the Obama-Sotomayor story(jur:xxxv) that justifies making the necessary investment in manpower, money, and public relations to:

a. conduct a Follow the money! search(102§a) for the concealed assets of J. Sotomayor, which can be facilitated by obtaining the unique expertise therein of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists(ol:1,2), and lead to a bankruptcy fraud scheme(66§2);

b. investigate the circumstances in the Federal Judiciary that enable her to conceal assets despite her duty to file publicly her annual financial disclosure report[²¹³]; and

c. determine how many of her peers engage through coordination(88§a) in financial wrongdoing(102¶¶236-237) and other kinds of wrongdoing(5§3), which can lead the media to

d. conduct a Follow the wire! investigation(105§b) of the extent to which the Federal Judiciary either has abused its own vast Information Technology resources of infrastructure and expertise(Lsch:11¶2b.ii) or in exchange for its approval of NSA’s requests has benefited from NSA’s IT resources to interfere with the communications of complainants of judges’ wrongdoing(ol:19§D). Federal judges rubberstamp annually up to 100%(ol:5fn7) of NSA’s secret requests for secret orders of surveillance. They have two powerful motives for abusing IT resources: to secure the continued stream to themselves of wrongful benefits, and to prevent the exposure of their participation in, or toleration of, wrongful conduct –e.g. concealment of assets; running a bankruptcy fraud scheme(jur:66§2; 42fn60); interference with third-party communications, which, unlike surveillance, is a crime under 18 U.S.C. §2511(ol:20¶¶11-12)–.

Revealing that the Judiciary and its judges interfere in crass self-interest with complainants’ communications would stir up a scandal more intense than that of NSA’s snooping on millions of Americans in the interest of national security.

C. Scandal in the Presidency and the Judiciary leading to judicial reform

An Obama-Sotomayor scandal can launch an unprecedented, Watergate-like generalized media investigation of the Federal Judiciary and its judges.

Emboldening the media would be the fact that while the judges, whether individually or as a class through explicit or implicit coordination(90§§b-c) among themselves, can retaliate against a single journalist or media outlet that is investigating one of them, the judges cannot retaliate against all journalists and media outlets at the same time, for thereby they would reveal their non-coincidental, intentional, wrongful motive for sending the abusive message, ‘This is what happens to you(Lsch:17§III) when you mess with us!’

The ever more numerous journalists and media outlets revealing ever more blatant wrongdoing by judges can so intensely outrage the national public as to make it politically unavoidable for Congress and DoJ-FBI to conduct official investigations, even hold nationally televised public hearings, such as those on the Watergate Scandal(jur:4¶¶10-14) and those held by the 9/11 Commission.

That historic investigation of the Federal Judiciary and its judges can embolden the media to investigate state judges and judiciaries too. The revelations of their wrongdoing can likewise so outrage a state public as to make it unavoidable for the state authorities to investigate them.

That is the strategy for advocates of honest judiciaries and even political partisans and visceral enemies of President Obama who nevertheless search for solid grounds on which to stake their call for his resignation or impeachment:

To take advantage of current widespread disbelief in the trustworthiness of the President and distrust of government(ol:11) by investigating the Obama-Sotomayor story of personal wrongdoing and inter-branch connivance so as to provoke in the public ‘reformative outrage’(83§§2-3).

Reformative outrage will be the public’s reaction to revelations that judges engage in even criminal wrongdoing(133§4), not excusable as the exercise of judicial discretion, because they are held by politicians unaccountable[¹⁷], who have also allowed them to cloak their activities in pervasive secrecy(27§e).

So judges do wrong risklessly and in coordination.

Risklessness renders their wrongdoing more alluring and profitable since costly detection-prevention and defensive measures are unnecessary.

Coordination makes it more effective and expands its reach.

The President knew that, for to cover for herself and her peers(43¶80), J. Sotomayor perjuriously withheld from the Senate a case that would have exposed them(68§3). Let the President deny it and then demand that he order all FBI vetting reports on Then-Justiceship Candidate and Now-Justice Sotomayor released.

D. The potential international ramification that the investigation can have

The investigation of the President Obama-J. Sotomayor story(jur:xxxv)can also reveal whether the President lied about not knowing that NSA was snooping on 35 foreign heads of state or government:

It is inconceivable that he has been briefed on the latest security developments every morning for years, but has never blurted ‘How did you get that information?!’ It is precisely the most privacy-breaching information that the briefers would disclose to him and boast about because ‘With $X we got this; if you give us $X x 2, we will get more and you, Mr. President, will gain an informational advantage over world leaders’.

The power and prestige of any bureaucracy is directly related to its budget, which determines its means and capabilities. NSA has managed to increase its budget from $5.5 billion under President Bush to $10.8 billion under President Obama(ol:5fn11).

How would those 35 NSA-snooped foreign heads of state or government and others similarly situated react if it were established as a fact rather than on circumstantial evidence that President Obama lied about not knowing that they were being snooped? Would they not lose face before their own people if they treated a person known to be a liar as if he carried the seal of trustworthiness of the President of the United States? Would he risk being booed by showing up to address large popular gatherings (as the president of South Africa was at the funeral ceremonies for Nelson Mandela?

E. Your choice: suffer, whine, be one of many or become a Champion of Justice

Exposing judges’ wrongdoing can lead to its positive objective: to cause an outraged public to force politicians, lest they be voted out of, or not into, office, to undertake historic judicial reform(158§§6-7). The precedent for this is what the Tea Party has forced politicians to do.

The reform can impose concrete, non-discretionary duties on judges and judiciaries to attain:

1. transparency, for “Justice should not only be done, but should manifestly and undoubtedly be seen to be done”[⁷¹]; so the secrecy of their closed-door adjudicative, administrative, policy-making, and disciplinary meetings and no press conferences must give way to their being forced to function on the same open-door basis as Congress, legislatures, and the Executive;

2. accountability, to terminate Judges Above the Law by bringing them down to where the People, their masters, can hold them accountable as what they are: their public servants;

3. discipline, administered by independent citizen boards(160§8) after removal of the immunity that judges have arrogated to themselves(26§d) by self-applying the undemocratic, by-the-grace-of-God-ruling principle “The King Can Do No Wrong”; and

4. liability, so that judges and judiciaries can be held by the boards subject, as the rest of government is(ol:5fn9), to compensate jointly and severally their wrongdoing victims.

The application of those principles to judges and judiciaries forced by the public’s reformative outrage at their objective wrongdoing can be ever more expansively applied to the other branches. This can bring about a new We the People-government relation where the People exercise ‘reverse surveillance’(ol:17) on their servants: the People’s Sunrise.

As one of the People, you have a choice: You can remain a silent journalist, other professional, or a student among thousands or a judicial complainant among millions screaming at judges to no avail.

Or you can choose to be a courageous, principled, unique person and thinking strategically, take advantage of proper timing, when the audience is most receptive to a scoop.

If the latter, you can set in motion a process of exposure that leads to historic reform, first in the Federal Judiciary, then in the rest of government at the federal and state levels.

Even if acting as this generation’s Deep Throat of Watergate fame(106§c), you can become to a grateful nation its Champion of Justice.

To that end, you can help organize a presentation(Lsch:2) by this author to expose judges’ wrongdoing, set forth the Obama-Sotomayor story, and lay out a plan of action(Lsch:10§B) reasonably calculated to lead to reform. It can be held at a law, journalism, business, or Information Technology school, a media outlet, or a civil rights organization.

By developing the number, experience, and skills of those who help you organize that presentation, you can thus end up as the Producer of the Coalition for Justice(Lsch:12§C).

Dare trigger history!(dcc:11)

http://Judicial-Discipline-Reform.org/OL/DrRCordero-Honest_Jud_Advocates.pdf

©2013 Richard Cordero. All rights reserved. A non-exclusive license is hereby granted for distributing and reprinting this article, provided it is distributed and reprinted in its entirety, without addition or modification and with inclusion of this copyright note; proper attribution is made to the author, Dr. Richard Cordero, Esq.; and its link accompanies it: http://Judicial-Discipline-Reform.org/OL/DrRCordero-Honest_Jud_Advocates.pdf >ol:63-65.

Obama Administration issues Martial Law Directive

http://www.whiteoutpress.com/articles/q42013/obama-administration-issues-martial-law-directive/

WhiteoutPress

December 11, 2013
December 11, 2013. Washington. Bureaucrats and politicians will never use the term Martial Law. Instead, the phrase ‘continuity of government’ is substituted. In reality, they’re the same thing. Last month, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence – the head of the entire US intelligence and security apparatus – released instructions for the implementation of Martial Law in America.

James Clapper, Director of the Office of National Intelligence. Image courtesy of Legend of Pine Ridge blog.

The federal government’s planning for Martial Law in America stopped being a conspiracy theory after the attacks on 9/11. Numerous Executive Orders, Presidential Directives, and other unilateral dictates by the Executive Branch have spelled out in great detail how Martial Law can and will be enforced in the event of a national emergency. But the timing of the latest Intelligence Directive – November 12, 2013 – makes many Americans wonder what exactly the Obama administration knows that the rest of us don’t.

Legitimate concerns vs. tyrannical dictators

History offers us two examples, both American, of why a ‘continuity of government’ program is needed. During the War of 1812, the British had burned Washington DC to the ground. The President of the United States, James Madison, was left fleeing through the woods, alone in the dark. While the first lady, Dolly Madison, was the last to leave and stood fearless against the enemy’s torches as she frantically and selflessly saved America’s most sacred national treasures.

Flash forward to the final days of the Civil War and Confederate President Jefferson Davis. Two of his three commanding Generals, Lee and Johnston, had just surrendered their armies and the majority of his country was in enemy hands. But without the consent of the people, and against the wishes of his Army, Jefferson Davis assumed the rolls of a tyrannical dictator and refused to surrender. History recalls how Davis was never able to set up his covert, authoritarian government and was apprehended while disguised as a woman attempting to evade capture.

One big difference

The above examples show why a continuity of government plan is needed by any government on any level. But there’s something frighteningly different about the above examples compared to the Bush and Obama administrations’ joint efforts today. In the past, continuity and security programs were designed to protect the federal government from take-over by a foreign power. Now, the programs appear aimed at protecting the government from a take-over by the American people.

Contrary to common misconceptions, these aren’t ‘conspiracy theories.’ The White House, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Department of Homeland Security, and the rest all publicly release many of the Orders, Directives and memos that explain exactly what will happen in the case of a national emergency. But among the thousands of documents, from the Patriot Act to EO 12333, there is a string of orders gaining national attention by civil libertarians that has ominous and fearful implications.

NSPD 51 & HSPD 20 – National Continuity Policy

On May 9, 2007, President George W. Bush signed a, ‘National Security and Homeland Security Presidential Directive.’ The combined document included, ‘National Security Presidential Directive 51 (NSPD 51)’ and ‘Homeland Security Presidential Directive 20 (HSPD 20).’

The first paragraph of the 2007 Presidential Directive describes its intended purpose:

‘This directive establishes a comprehensive national policy on the continuity of Federal Government structures and operations and a single National Continuity Coordinator responsible for coordinating the development and implementation of Federal continuity policies. This policy establishes “National Essential Functions,” prescribes continuity requirements for all executive departments and agencies, and provides guidance for State, local, territorial, and tribal governments, and private sector organizations in order to ensure a comprehensive and integrated national continuity program that will enhance the credibility of our national security posture and enable a more rapid and effective response to and recovery from a national emergency.’

---

In plain speak, this Presidential Directive was President Bush’s attempt to declare himself, or the office of the President to be more specific, as the dictatorial power during any national emergency, including natural disasters, economic disasters, wars, etc.

Section 6 of the Directive describes the exact three individuals who will assume authority for the entire federal government in the event of an emergency, including all three branches of government and the nation’s military. The US President shall assume unlimited and unchallenged authority and all decision-making responsibilities. The President’s wishes will be carried out by two specific individuals – the Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism (APHS/CT) and the Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs (APNSA).

NSPD 51/HSPD 20 specifically states:

‘The President shall lead the activities of the Federal Government for ensuring constitutional government. In order to advise and assist the President in that function, the Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism (APHS/CT) is hereby designated as the National Continuity Coordinator. The National Continuity Coordinator, in coordination with the Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs (APNSA), without exercising directive authority, shall coordinate the development and implementation of continuity policy for executive departments and agencies. The Continuity Policy Coordination Committee (CPCC), chaired by a Senior Director from the Homeland Security Council staff, designated by the National Continuity Coordinator, shall be the main day-to-day forum for such policy coordination.’

Click here to view the full NSPD51/HSPD20 Presidential Directive

ICD 118 – Intelligence Community Continuity Program

On November 12, 2013 – less than a month ago – the Director of National Intelligence James Clapper signed, ‘Intelligence Community Directive 118.’ While most Americans mistakenly believe the NSA or the CIA wield the most power when it comes to secret, covert spy programs, the truth is they are only two of America’s sixteen spy agencies that all fall under the authority and control of one man – the Director of National Intelligence.

When President Bush signed NSPD 51/HSPD 20 in 2007, he gave himself the authority to assume one-man national rule over the entire United States. When Director of National Intelligence James Clapper signed ICD 118 last month, he created the structure and dictates by which it will happen.

As ICD 118 explains, ‘This Intelligence Community (IC) Directive (ICD) governs the implementation of NSPD-51 by the IC to ensure an integrated approach to the provision of national intelligence to national leaders under all conditions.’ The Directive just issued by National Intelligence Director Clapper seems to be a detailed outline of how his intelligence agencies plan to carry out their responsibilities in the event that the White House assumes control of the government. But there’s more.

Long term Martial Law

Perhaps the most ominous part of last month’s Intelligence Community Directive 118 was its reference to overall time frames. When most Americans imagine a national emergency, they envision a powerful storm or earthquake, with a week or two of emergency management by the federal government. A worst case scenario might include another war that may last a year or two. But America’s intelligence community is imagining something much more long term.

In detailing its roll in providing the President and national leaders with timely and accurate intelligence during a national emergency, ICD 118 promises to produce a detailed assessment of their ongoing responsibilities every two years. The document states:

‘The DNI will: a. Oversee and integrate IC continuity activities to ensure that: (1) The President, the Vice President, statutory successors, and other national leaders, as appropriate, are provided with timely, insightful, objective, and relevant national intelligence wherever they are located and in all conditions; (2) National intelligence is furnished to the National Continuity System; and (3) Sensitive Compartmented Information security across the programs and networks of the National Continuity System is appropriately managed. b. In coordination with the Attorney General and the Secretary of Homeland Security, produce a biennial assessment of the foreign and domestic threats to the Nation’s continuity of government, in accordance with NSPD-51.’

Summary and final question

Many Americans argue that city, county and state governments are capable of taking care of themselves during a national emergency. The federal government is needed to protect from exterior threats. But now, in addition to protecting Americans from foreign invaders, the federal government is protecting Americans from themselves. In other words, the government apparatus is protecting itself from any possible rebellion or revolution here at home, no matter how unlikely.

And while civil libertarians argue about the legality of such a unilateral power grab by the White House and the Executive Branch, others are fearfully wondering about the timing of the most recent Intelligence Directive. President Bush created the program for Martial Law in 2007. Why did America’s entire security apparatus suddenly release the details by which they will carry out Martial Law last month, six years later? Is there something more to the timing?

Read the complete text of Intelligence Community Directive 118

The End of Childhood in the Era of the Emerging American Police State

http://us4.campaign-archive1.com/?u=f6eb78f457b7b82887b643445&id=c08d7980f0&e=84f74f6a6a

By John W. Whitehead

It wouldn’t be a week in America without another slew of children being punished for childish behavior under the regime of zero tolerance which plagues our nation’s schools. Here are some of the latest incidents.

In Pennsylvania, a ten-year-old boy was suspended for shooting an imaginary “arrow” at a fellow classmate, using nothing more than his hands and his imagination. Johnny Jones, a fifth grader at South Eastern Middle School, was suspended for a day and threatened with expulsion under the school’s weapons policy after playfully using his hands to draw the bowstrings on a pretend “bow” and “shoot” an arrow at a classmate who had held his folder like an imaginary gun and “shot” at Johnny.  Principal John Horton characterized Johnny’s transgression as “making a threat” to another student using a “replica or representation of a firearm” through the use of an imaginary bow and arrow.

In Utah, a seven-year-old boy was arrested and berated by police because he ran away from school. The boy showed up at his mother’s house late in the afternoon, at which point he explained that he had left the school of his own accord. The mother called the school and explained what happened, at which point the principal decided to call the police, despite knowing the boy was in the protection of his mother. An officer arrived at the house, told the boy to “straighten up,” took him outside, handcuffed him, and yelled at him saying, “Is this the life you want?”

In Colorado, a six-year-old boy was suspended and accused of sexual harassment for kissing the hand of a girl in his class whom he had a crush on. Child psychologist Sandy Wurtele commented on the case noting that for first graders like Hunter Yelton things like kissing are a normal part of development, and that the school’s reaction sends mixed messages to developing minds. After a good deal of negative publicity, Canon City Schools Superintendent Robin Gooldy decided to alter the offense from “sexual harassment” to “misconduct.”

In New York, three students were arrested while waiting for a bus to arrive and take them to a basketball scrimmage. The three were part of a group of a dozen basketball players who were waiting on a downtown sidewalk as per their coach’s instructions, when they were approached by a police officer who demanded they disperse. They explained that they were waiting for a bus, but the officer decided to arrest them anyway. Even when the coach arrived and explained to the officer that the boys were simply waiting for a bus so they could get to their scrimmage, the officer would not relent. He actually threatened to arrest the coach as well.

While any normal society would condemn all these acts as absurd and harmful to young people, we live in a world in which parents, teachers, and students have all been conditioned to fear the slightest bending of the rules, even when it’s obvious that no harm has been done and that no crime has been committed. We are living in the age of fear and paranoia, an age which threatens the very core concepts of childhood development, and even the basic facets of our democratic society.

Add to the execution of zero tolerance policies the phenomenon of “lockdowns” of public schools, which are sometimes prompted by legitimate threats, but more often by nearby domestic disturbances and false alarms, in which students are corralled into closets and hallways, met with police officers armed to the hilt, searched by drug-sniffing dogs, and generally made to feel as if they are living in a war zone. This trend of acclimating children to a mindset in which they should always be fearful, on edge, and deferential to authority is compounded by so-called “drills” in which police officers pretend they are spree shooters. Dahlia Lithwick, writing for Slate, notes that these bizarre attempts to prepare kids for an active shooter situation do not really prepare students for emergency situations, but rather simply frighten them.

In fact, their true purpose, as I document in my book A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, seems to be simply to acclimate children to the mindset of paranoia and absolute deference to authority which has taken hold of the American populace at large. Children, who are naturally suspect of illegitimate authority, are being conditioned to accept any and all orders from on high, even those which they inherently know are wrong.

In the face of this madness, some schools have begun scaling back the zero tolerance regime. For example, schools in Broward County, Florida, which saw over 1,000 student arrests in 2011, have begun a policy that de-emphasizes arrests, expulsions, and suspensions in favor of counseling and keeping kids that run into trouble in school.

As Broward County Schools superintendent Robert W. Runcie noted, “A knee-jerk reaction for minor offenses, suspending and expelling students, this is not the business we should be in. We are not accepting that we need to have hundreds of students getting arrested and getting records that impact their lifelong chances to get a job, go into the military, get financial aid.”

Since implementing the new policies, “school-based arrests have dropped by 41 percent, and suspensions, which in 2011 added up to 87,000 out of 258,000 students, are down 66 percent from the same period in 2012.” Still, most school districts across the country maintain a strict adherence to zero tolerance policy.

Alongside the zero tolerance mess is the general censorship of student viewpoints when discussing topics which are not approved by school administrators. For example, when a Pennsylvania student newspaper decided to run an editorial explaining why they found the term “Redskin,” the nickname of the school’s athletic teams, insensitive, and why they would no longer use the name in the school newspaper, the school administration reprimanded the students and demanded they continue to use the term. In another case, a student journalist in Virginia was reprimanded for writing a column on sexuality-based bullying, also known as “slut-shaming,” because the article contained words and phrases such as “sexual” and “breast-feeding.”

Considering students in high school are on the cusp of adulthood, legally and otherwise, the attempts to censor them when they engage in debates that are occurring on a daily basis on television and in the newspapers isn’t simply obnoxious, but threatens the integrity of society as well. If students are being taught to self-censor, they will be ineffective citizens. They will internalize ideas contrary to basic American principles, namely that all people should be allowed to speak their minds as they see fit.

In fact, according to the Knight Foundation, students who are taught on the value of the First Amendment are more likely to agree with statements such as “people should be allowed to express unpopular opinions” or “newspapers should be allowed to publish freely without government approval.” However, for those who’ve not received such instruction, they seem more doubtful of the value of free speech.

Thus, one can easily see how the zero tolerance/censorship regime which dominates American public education can easily translate into a disaster for civil society at large in the coming years.

We’ve chosen to terminate natural childhood development in favor of strict adherence to authority and muting unique, interesting, and valid viewpoints in favor of maintaining the status quo. Worse than this, however, is the fact that we’re setting ourselves up for the complete destruction of our democratic society and our democratic institutions in favor of an authoritarian bureaucratic apparatus which manages a population of automatons, unable to think for themselves.

Call it the end of childhood, call it the end of innocence, call it the end of imagination. What it will eventually amount to is the termination of freedom in the United States.

OLDDOGS COMMENTS

The acceptance of authoritarianism is the death of democracy, and the birth of slavery.

 

Syria: Media Disinformation, War Propaganda and the Corporate Media’s “Independent Bloggers”

http://www.globalresearch.ca/syria-media-disinformation-war-propaganda-and-the-corporate-medias-independent-bloggers/5361476

By Phil Greaves

A glaring example of one of the major pitfalls emerging in supposed “new media” has arisen during the conflict in Syria. Most notably in the form of YouTube blogger, and self-proclaimed weapons expert Eliot Higgins, aka “Brown Moses”. The clique of highly ideological analysts, think-tankers and journalists Higgins’ regularly works with and consults – alongside the dubiously funded western NGO’s he receives payment from – provide a stark indication as to the factions within the corporate media circus this supposedly independent blogger is operating in unison with.

Higgins has provided the western corporate media apparatus the opportunity to present its war-propaganda as having a “new media” facade of impartial legitimacy. Yet it is the same capitalistic “old media” apparatus endlessly promoting his work – consisting of scouring Jihadist war-porn and agitprop on YouTube for tidbits that may bolster corporate media narratives – as an invaluable tool in tracking human rights abuses, arms trafficking, and risk-free coverage of fast evolving conflicts. Yet contrary to the innocuous portrayal of an unemployed YouTube addict in Leicester becoming a credible analyst of a conflict in the Middle East; Higgins’ blog has been thrust into the foreground not through the benefit of impartiality or public appraisals, but through corporate “benefactors” with vested interest operating alongside the same “old media” organizations and stenographers.

Bloggers such as Higgins promoting themselves as working from an impartial standpoint are actually nothing of the sort and work in complete unison with mainstream journalists and western NGO’s – both in a practical capacity, and an ideological one. As noted at the Land Destroyer blog and others; Higgins was initially pushed into the limelight by the Guardians’ former Middle East editor Brian Whitaker, a “journalist” with the honor of being a lead proponent of almost every smear campaign and piece of western propaganda directed at the Syrian government, while wholeheartedly promoting the Bin Ladenite “rebels” as secular feminist freedom fighters and repeatedly spouting the liberal opportunist mantra of western military “action”, which realistically means Imperialist military intervention. Whitaker and Higgins played a lead role in bolstering corporate media’s fantasy narratives throughout the joint NATO-Al Qaeda insurgency in Libya during 2011, with many of the anti-Gaddafi claims they propagated subsequently proven to be speculative at best, outright propaganda at worst.

Furthermore, Whitaker’s promotion of “The Gay Girl in Damascus” is but one embarrassing anecdote within the litany of completely fabricated narratives both he and the Guardian have made efforts to advance, while making equal effort to marginalize and discredit journalism and opinion that contradict western-desired narratives. It was during Whitaker’s period of running the Guardian’s “Middle East Live blog” – providing daily scripted coverage of the “Arab Spring” in a pseudo-liberal “new media” format – that he and other Guardian journalists first began to promote Higgins’ YouTube findings as credible evidence. Regular readers commenting on the Guardian blog quickly recognized the duplicity and close relationship between Higgins and the Guardian staff, resulting in his propagandistic comments being scrutinized, debunked, and ridiculed on an almost daily basis. Curiously, Whitaker has since left the Guardian and the “MELive” blog has been cancelled due to “staffing shortages” and the ridiculous excuse of a lull in worthwhile coverage. Yet the Guardians skewed standpoint on Syria, along with Whitaker and Higgins relationship, have remained steadfast.

The working relationship between Higgins and the corporate media became almost uniform during the course of the Syrian conflict; an unsubstantiated anti-Assad, or pro-rebel narrative would predictably form in the corporate media (cluster bombs, chemical weapons, unsolved massacres,) at which point Higgins would jump to the fore with his YouTube analysis in order to bolster mainstream discourse whilst offering the air of impartiality and the crucial “open source” faux-legitimacy. It has become blatantly evident that the “rebels” in both Syria and Libya have made a concerted effort in fabricating YouTube videos in order to incriminate and demonize their opponents while glorifying themselves in a sanitized image. Western media invariably lapped-up such fabrications without question and subsequently built narratives around them – regardless of contradictory evidence or opinion. Yet such media, and more importantly, the specific actors propagating it fraudulently to bolster the flimsiest of western narratives has continued unabated – primarily as a result of the aforementioned “old media” organs endlessly promoting it.

Following award-winning journalist Seymour Hersh’s groundbreaking essay in the London Review of Books, which exposes the Obama administrations intelligence surrounding the alleged chemical attacks in Ghouta as reminiscent of the Bush administrations outright lies and fabrications leading to the US invasion and occupation of Iraq, Higgins took it upon himself to rush through a rebuttal, published by the establishment media outlet Foreign Policy magazine – a predictable response as Higgins represents the principal source for the “Assad did it” media crowd. Accordingly, the “old media” stenographers that originally promoted Higgins became the vanguard force pushing his speculative Ghouta theories above Hersh’s – to hilarious effect.

A particularly revealing example of Higgins’ unwillingness to depart from mainstream discourse came shortly after the alleged Ghouta attacks. The findings of a considerable open-source collaborative effort at the WhoGhouta blog were repeatedly dismissed as ridiculous or unverifiable by Higgins. The bloggers at WhoGhouta drew more or less the same logical and somewhat scientific conclusions outlined in the Hersh piece, but in much greater detail. Yet Higgins chose to ignore WhoGhouta’s findings and instead rely on his own set of assumptions, dubious videos, and an unqualified ex-US soldier that seems determined to defy both logical and scientific reality. The estimated range of the rockets allegedly used in the attack, with the alleged azimuth that pointed to Syrian army launch points breathlessly promoted by Higgins and his patrons at Human Rights Watch (HRW), and of course corporate media, were convincingly debunked mere weeks after the attack at the WhoGhouta blog, yet Higgins chose to stick to his orchestrated narrative until the bitter end, only revising his wild speculation on rocket range once the obvious became too hard to conceal.

As Higgins is a self-declared advocate of “open source investigative journalism”, it is perplexing that he attempted to marginalize and dismiss the many findings from independent observers and instead concentrated on bolstering the dubious narratives of the US government and western corporate media. Unless of course, he is tied to a particular narrative and desperate to conceal anything that contradicts it.

Predictably, Higgins now claims the Syrian army are indeed capable of firing the alleged rockets from anywhere in the region of Ghouta, no longer is the alleged launch-zone exclusive to the Syrian army’s Republican Guards base; effectively nullifying the original fabrications he relied on to build his earlier accusation alongside HRW.

It is no longer necessary to address the ins and outs of the Ghouta debate, as a comprehensive review by others has already highlighted the strawman nature of Higgins’ feeble refutation of Hersh, (see here,) not to mention the plethora of literature that has effectively demolished the US governments “intelligence” summary and the much-politicised UN report that Higgins originally built his fantasies from. Rather, the focus of this article is the pernicious nature of the “new media” model currently being promoted by Higgins et al, as a credible alternative to the corporate “old media” model. If the corrupt acolytes of “old media” are promoting their own versions of “new media” to the public, then the public aren’t really getting anything “new” apart from a YouTube generation of ill-informed and gullible recruits to the same old systems.

Prominent members of “new media” have invariably been pushed to the foreground of mainstream coverage by the very same corporate media institutions and establishment journalists that the public has rightly become exceedingly skeptical of. It is becoming an accepted normality for the lackeys of “old media” to determine what now represent the figureheads and platforms of “new media”, with large corporate organizations and their Jurassic minions making concerted efforts to raise the profile of, and offer incentives to bloggers who invariably say or write exactly what’s required to bolster the “old media’s” still-dominant narratives.

The complete lack of historical materialism, geopolitical insight, critical distance, logical reasoning and dialectics, and crucially, an open political position, afforded by simplistically narrow-framed blogs such as Higgins’ gives the corporate media class a malleable tool it can easily manipulate to bolster its propaganda.

The Ghouta debate again provides an example of the way in which narrow frames of reference are manipulated by corporate media to subvert logical reasoning and the lack of solid evidence. Higgins’ simplistic narrative conveniently dismisses the fundamental argument that the Syrian government – winning its fight against an internationally orchestrated and funded terrorist insurgency – had nothing to gain from using chemical weapons, and everything to lose, while the rebels in Ghouta found themselves in the exact opposite conundrum. Motive generally tends to be a sticking point in a court of law, but not even an afterthought in the puerile “courts” of the corporate media and its underlings. Higgins’ argument also dismisses the fact that prior to the August 21st attack, it was the Syrian government that invited the UN inspection team to investigate the use of chemical weapons, and then supposedly launched a massive chemical weapons attack a mere 15 miles from the UN teams base. Such logical reasoning is afforded no space in the conspiracy theories of Higgins and the corporate media; instead the discourse is filled with obfuscation, misleading tangents and speculation.

The dynamic of young, supposedly independent minded bloggers and writers being co-opted by corporate media is by no means a new dynamic, as the self-proclaimed “leftist” Owen Jones can happily attest to. Since Jones’ rise to fame and employment with the corporate-owned establishment newspaper the Independent, he has become the archetypal Fabian opportunist, preaching a reform-based bourgeois social democracy, while duplicitously portraying himself as some sort of socialist Marxist. Jones now deems it reasonable, no doubt civilized, that he should “no-platform” speakers at western anti-War events in order to marginalize anyone accused of having an unacceptable opinion to that of the dominant media class of corporate vultures. Jones has become a caricature of himself, more eager to spend his time promoting the UK Labour party on war-mongering podiums of the BBC (for a fee of course) and appease the corporate stenographers and celebrities he is surrounded by, than to hear – or, heaven forbid, sit beside – a nun from a war-zone in the Middle East that disagrees with western prescriptions and corporate propaganda.

To avoid the pitfalls outlined above, a totally new model of journalism is required, a model that is not designed, or even accepted, by the current dominant corporate media class. A model in which writers and journalists have the space and freedom to express their opinions in an open and forthright manner – discarding the charade of objectivity. A model in which publicly oriented media is free from the chains of corporate power, advertising, celebrity subversions, and, more importantly, monetary incentive.

Thus, the question remains: in a capitalist incentive-driven world, is journalistic freedom and honesty even attainable? Or is the omnipotent corporate-media-system and its inherent corruption an inevitable side-effect of the sickness that is Crony Capitalism?

Phil Greaves is a UK based writer/analyst, focusing on UK/US Foreign Policy and conflict analysis in the Middle East post WWII. http://notthemsmdotcom.wordpress.com/

Copyright © 2013 Global Research

Will Digital Currency Replace the US Dollar? Wall Street Strategy to Make Bitcoin the Global Currency?

http://www.globalresearch.ca/will-digital-currency-replace-the-us-dollar-wall-street-strategy-to-make-bitcoin-the-global-currency/5361021

 By Matthias Chang

 Bitcoin – The Potential Monsanto of Digital Currency?

Its ultimate objective is to control, control of the “alternative currency” when the Petro-Dollar collapses. Bitcoin is “GMO Money”!

In my last article posted on 22nd November, 2013 to the website,www.futurefastforward.com entitled ―Bitcoin – The Flipside Of Bernanke‘s Digital Money ‗Printed / Created‘ Out Of Thin Air‖, I promised to write a more detailed account of Bitcoin after you, the readers have embarked on your own research and revert to me on your findings. Let us now compare our respective research.

From my research, I have come to the following conclusions.

The Premise for Bitcoin

Bitcoin started quietly, almost a non-event, but lately (especially in 2013) it has been aggressively promoted by Mainstream media, but more importantly by some very important and powerful financial elites.

This ought to alert anyone who is concerned about the state of the dying global fiat money system.

To me, this is the irrefutable admission by the financial powers that there has been in place a strategic plan for the replacement of the US dollar as the global reserve currency and a restructuring of the global fiat (paper) money system with a global fiat (digital) money system – Bitcoin.

It is also important to note that just as the US dollar (the lynch-pin of the fiat monetary system) is being buttressed (―backed‖) by oil (energy) giving rise to the Petro-Dollars, the new global monetary system based on Bitcoin is likewise buttressed by ―energy.

In my book, “The Shadow Money-lenders and the Global Financial Tsunami” which is a compilation of all my email ―Red Alerts‖ which I had sent out to friends all over the world from 2006 to early 2008, I had warned of the impending collapse of the fiat money system in 2007. I had also warned of the intense currency wars that would follow. This has all come to pass.

The introduction of Bitcoin is another admission that the financial powers are also considering the replacement of the FED as well as the central banks of the developed economies (i.e. ECB, BOE, BOJ etc.) sometime in the future and substitute the control by central banks with super-super computers networking the global economy controlled by a handful of techno-corporations and behind this front, the power of the 0.01 per cent financial elites. Let me assure you that this is no conspiracy theory.

The template may or may not follow Monsanto‘s control of the global food-chain via the control of seeds, the ―currency of the food-chain‖. It is sufficient to bear in mind that what is necessary is to control the technology that creates Bitcoin, the ―monetary seed‖ for the new financial system.

Bitcoin is the latest financial weapon of the global financial elites in the present intense currency war and will be used by the financial elites aligned with the Western Axis to compete against the gold–backed currencies of countries led by China and Russia! The Western Axis powers hope to triumph over the powers of the gold-backed currencies through the global internet matrix. But, I have my doubts.

The Strategy to Make Bitcoin the Global Currency

To replace the present fiat monetary system, the global financial elites have employed the following strategies:

To demonise Gold and depress the true value of gold;·

To promote Bitcoin as the ultimate alternative currency by price manipulation; and·

Energy (oil, gas· & computer power) to back Bitcoin.

In the first phase of this grand strategy, the Controllers of Bitcoin have decided to focus on the markets of the developed world. This is common sense as the technological infrastructure is already in place in the developed world.

In this phase, the Controllers would by-pass the global banking institutions and will focus on the existing alternative payment systems widely used in internet marketing such as PayPal, E-Bay, MoneyGram etc. This is because, Bitcoin can only survive and grow in the internet environment as it is a technology-based currency. Bitcoin cannot be used in the same way as fiat paper money is used. It is not a “cash” currency. It is digital!

This makes sense because in our daily lives, more and more transactions are being facilitated through the internet, our mobile phone, credit cards etc. Paper money is used less and less.

In the Second phase, and after assuming total or near total control of all internet markets, only Bitcoin would be accepted as ―legal tender‖ for payment of goods and services. No Bitcoin, no sales for goods and services! The Controllers would not need any laws to compel full compliance as in the present case with fiat paper money when laws must be enacted to compel acceptance of paper money as ―legal tender‖ in full discharge of all debts!

In the final phase, it is my belief that banks will be transformed from their present form and structure to be inter-alia ―Bitcoin Exchanges or Clearing House‖. This is one of the items in the Controllers‘ Wish List.

This is indeed a very elegant structure and it will surely appeal to all reformers who are against central banks, the present structure of global banking institutions and paper fiat money. The call to end government / Central Bank control of money would no doubt be greeted with enthusiasm and relief given the present policies of the FED and other central banks enriching Wall Street and the 0.01 per cent of the global population.

The debasing of global currencies is being carried out with the approval and connivance of the global financial elites as a prelude to the use of Bitcoin because the present financial architecture can no longer be sustained. The debt-based fiat money system is so toxic that it is beyond repair.

A Utopia of Equality or Jumping from the Frying Pan to the Fire?

A good starting point in this discussion is to know about the origins of the internet since Bitcoin can only survive and grow in such an environment (I am merely simplifying the discussion to avoid unnecessary technical jargon).

Let me quote Wikipedia:

The history of the Internet began with the development of electronic computers in the 1950s. The public was first introduced to the concepts that would lead to the Internet when a message was sent over the ARPANet from computer science Professor Leonard Kleinrock’s laboratory at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), after the second piece of network equipment was installed at Stanford Research Institute (SRI). Packet sitched networks such as ARPANET, Mark I at NPL in the UK, CYCLADES, Merit Network, Tymnet, and Telenet, were developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s using a variety of protocols. The ARPANET in particular led to the development of protocols for internetworking, in which multiple separate networks could be joined together into a network of networks.

The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) was one of the world’s first operational packet switching networks, the first network to implement TCP/IP, and the progenitor of what was to become the global Internet. The network was initially funded by the Advanced Research Projects

Agency (ARPA, later DARPA) within the U.S. Department of Defense for use by its projects at universities and research laboratories in the US. The packet switching of the ARPANET, together with TCP/IP, would form the backbone of how the Internet works. The packet switching was based on concepts and designs by American engineer Paul Baran, British scientist Donald Davies[ and Lawrence Roberts of the Lincoln Laboratory. The TCP/IP communication protocols were developed for ARPANET by computer scientists Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf.

Should we be really surprised by Edward Snowden‘s exposé that NSA in conjunction with other intelligence establishments have total control of all communications through the internet, smart phones etc.?

What about some of Bitcoin‘s technologies?

Are they also based on intelligence establishments‘ technologies?

You Bet!

One of the technologies is derived from the US Intelligence establishment – the objective is to ensure that communication between operatives would remain anonymous.

The program that ―hides user identities‖ is TOR, developed by the US Naval Research laboratory and endorsed by Senator Hillary Clinton (Schuman’s former co-Senator from the state of New York) as ―an important tool for freedom of expression around the world‖. Indeed, the TOR Project claims that over 80% of its funding in 2012 came directly from the U.S Government [Source: Tor Project Annual Report 2012]

Therefore, it is contended that by using this particular technology, transactions between two persons using Bitcoin would also be anonymous! This assumes that the inventor of the technology would not be able to access such transactions and discover the identity of the users. Founders of Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Skype etc. are promoting Bitcoin. And these companies have all been used by the NSA to gather your personal details.

The Controllers of Bitcoin are marketing Bitcoin as the latest development of Edison’s Dollars, the financial proposal of the great inventor Thomas Edison who during the 1920s depression opposed the Federal Reserve‘s control of the US dollar and introduced a new concept to help farmers get interest free financing for their harvest. It was a commodity-based ―currency.

According to Edison: ―

…the relative value of the earth‘s produce appears to be constant, a money unit representing basic commodities and nothing else would be equally constant, that…and further, since the relative value of the earth‘s produce is constant there is no reason why the farmer should not finance himself, as the gold miner does, simply by turning his output into money directly.‖ (Source: New York Times, 1922.)

Thomas Edison wanted to reduce the power of the FED. Instead of centralising power in the hands of the FED, Edison wanted to decentralise the control of money across 36 commodities and 12 warehouses that stores these commodities so as to enable interest free financing for the farmers.

Therefore, comparing Edison‘s dollars to Bitcoin is like comparing chalk and cheese!

To hoodwink the public about the history of Edison‘s dollars, the Controllers refer to three economists that supposedly laid the basis for Bitcoin and how they would get rid of the FED –1) Irving Fisher, 2) John Maynard Keynes and 3) Dr. Milton Friedman. The mouthpiece of this historical revisionism is none other than Michael Robinson, a Pulitzer Prize nominated financial journalist, as well as an adviser to some venture capital funds.

Yet, these three economists are ardent supporters of fiat money and the FED.

Therefore, the theoretical foundation for Bitcoin is in fact the fiat money system as we know it today.

What the Controllers are advocating and as I have been saying for so long, is the replacement of one kind of fiat money (paper fiat money) with another kind of fiat money (digital fiat money)!

If the Controllers are following the teachings of the abovementioned three economists, there cannot be any other conclusions.

Michael Robinson attributed Dr. Milton Friedman as saying, “We don’t need the FED. Replace the FED with a computer… that would print a specified number of paper dollars, same number month after month, week after week, year after year…”

So, here we have the great idea allegedly from Dr. Milton Friedman, replacing the FED with a computer. It begs the questions, ―Who controls the computer?‖ Surely, if a specified number of paper dollars are to be printed, month after month, week after week, year after year what is there to prevent the Controller of the computer to change the number of paper money to be printed and the frequency of the printing? After all, the Bitcoin system is such that no one knows who actually controls the system.

It has been said that the original amount of Bitcoins that has been ―mined‖ (i.e. created by the computer) is only 21,000,000 (21 million). This is to convey the impression that Bitcoin is limited and cannot be created out of thin air. The Controllers must take us for fools, as there is absolutely no difference between Bernanke creating digital money out of thin air by a click of a computer mouse and Bitcoin being created likewise by a click or several clicks of a computer mouse.

Then comes the sales pitch. If you ―invest‖ (buy) Bitcoins early (or has bought them in 2009) you would be very rich now, as the price of Bitcoin has skyrocketed to over US$1,000. And the price could go as high as US$100,000. This is a Ponzi scheme. The inner circle or ―founders‖ who created the initial amount of Bitcoins (not more than 21 million Bitcoins, valued at US$1 per coin) would have made a killing in the Bitcoin market.

There is absolutely no difference to Bernanke‘s FED launching QE 1, QE2, Twist, QE3 which benefited in the first instance the fat cats of Wall Street (who paid themselves huge bonuses amounting US$Billions) before the money starts trickling down to the masses. And when the money reaches Joe Six-Packs, the purchasing power of the paper money or the FED‘s digital money would have depreciated sharply.

The FED‘s monetary base up till 2008 was a mere US$800 billion + or – 5 per cent. It was somewhat limited (like the 21 million Bitcoins). Then the FED and Wall Street got greedy and it is now over US$ 3 trillion! Source; Money & Markets

Up to the time of the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy the FED’s monetary base stood at $849.8 billion. As at October 30, 2013 it has risen to a whopping $3,607.7 billion. That’s an expansion of $2,757.8 billion — over $2.7 trillion. This $2.7 trillion expansion has all taken place within just six years and one month. And it is continuing at the pace of US$85 Billion per month. Source: US Federal Reserve Bank

It would be very naïve for anyone to think that the private corporations that controls Bitcoin, having made US$ Billions in less than a year would not aspire to make US$ Trillions by ―mining‖ (i.e. creating) more Bitcoins, no different from the FED‘s QE programs. Better still the Controllers do not even have to account to anyone for any additional amount of Bitcoins thus created as no one would be wiser.

Bitcoin supposedly backed by “Energy”

The Founders and Controllers of Bitcoin say that Bitcoin is ―backed by energy‖ in that in the future scenario, all energy consumption would have to be paid by Bitcoin. This sales pitch is no surprise to me as energy (oil and gas) keeps the global economy humming – we need energy to drive our cars, light up our buildings, keep our homes warm and cozy during winter, to cook our food etc. And since Petro-dollar is no longer in fashion it would surprise no one that the Seven Sisters (i.e. the seven largest oil companies in the world led by Exxon) would want a big slice of the pie, more so when it is ―Made in the USA‖!

So Petro-Dollar is replaced by Bitcoin!

Guess who are also very eager about Bitcoin?

To name a few – Warren Buffet (the insiders‘ insider), Bill Gates (―It‘s a techno tour de force.‖) and Eric Schmidt, Chairman of Google (It‘s changing society‖). These three and the other members of the 0.01 per cent have already cornered the Bitcoin Ponzi scheme. If you are one of the late-comers, you are one of hundreds of thousands being led to the slaughter house.

Do you for a moment think that these guys would change the FED for a computer if they are not in control?

Conclusions

Given the above scenario, it is my belief that the next global war would be fought in Cyberspace – a cyber war that would destroy economies by paralysing the financial system, specifically the payment system.

However, I am placing my bets on a Gold-Backed Monetary System for when the Bitcoin Ponzi scheme is exposed people will scramble for gold and gold-backed currencies.

Just imagine watching your computer digits VAPORISED BEFORE YOUR EYES and there is nothing you can do about it.

All your transactions are anonymous. The only evidence that you have Bitcoins is in your ―Bitcoin computer ledger‖ or your ―Bitcoin wallet‖. It is not in a vault. The money trail is wiped out. Who do you complain to since the reason you went into Bitcoin is to maintain your anonymity, your privacy and as the promoters of Bitcoin keep touting – to escape from the taxman?

Come back to reality!

Don‘t believe the hype from Mainstream media such as:

Forbes – “The currency of a US$10 trillion global market. Mankind is better for it.”
Time Magazine – “Governments couldn’t debase it. Banks couldn’t blow it. Perfect money!”
Fox Business – “May become the world’s payment method.”
MasterCard has jumped on the bandwagon – “Desperate times call for desperate measures.”

They know that the petro-dollar is dying and soon would be dead. They need a quick replacement. Uncle Sam does not have gold. Next best alternative, and the sales pitch – virtual gold!
When people such as Lisa Shield, VP of the Council for Foreign Relations are pitching for Bitcoin, you know that the elites of the N.W.O. are really desperate.

The writing is on the wall.

Petro-dollar is being replaced!

The US$ as the global reserve currency is dying!

It has been contended by some analysts that the future global currency war would be between Bitcoin versus Gold-backed currencies. I have my doubts, but make no mistakes the next war will be a war for currency supremacy.

Countries of the developing world like Malaysia with little or no gold reserves would be devastated.

There is still time to accumulate gold, but not much.

Whatever the future scenario, we better be prepared for it.

New World Order Dead Ahead

 http://farmwars.info/?p=12078

 OLDDOGS COMMENTS

If at least half of the citizens would read this article, I have no doubt there would be blood running on WALL STREET. If your closest friend, brother, or spouse would do these things to you, would you not take action? There are times and events when “an eye for an eye” is more than justified and these people deserve all the pain and grief that is possible to inflict on another person. If I were a rich man, I would be offering bounties on their eyeballs that could not be resisted. Does it not make your blood boil to read the details of how other people are working night and day to destroy you? What about your loved ones? Are they going to ever have a chance to enjoy all that life has to offer, or are they going to be murdered in cold blood for some minor infraction of the law? What about your parents, will they starve? Don’t you realize we can all work together and stop this travesty from happening? For those of you who read this and just shrug it off, God help you! For those with the courage to live, get involved and learn.

By Olde Reb

Farm Wars

It would be the epitome of human folly to ignore the repetition of the same Wall Street financiers who have routinely inflicted financial chaos and abject poverty by debt upon the under-developed world for decades;

who now have leading roles in enforcing national IOU’s in Europe which they created and are now devastating each nation;

who created and manage the $17 trillion debt of the United States;

who are additionally the putative recipients of hidden profit from their Federal Reserve Ponzi scheme that embezzles trillions of dollars from the U.S. government;

who permeate and use the U.S. Treasury for their business enrichment;

who are additionally major lobbyists and the largest campaign contributors for candidates.

The 2008 worldwide financial chaos started on Wall Street with a sudden realization Mortgage Backed Securities (MBS) were junk bonds. European banks holding these securities panicked from devalued reserves. (do you think some European bankers told some NYC bankers they would be swimming with concrete boots if they did not buy $700 billion of toxic bonds real quick ?) Loans ceased to be available. Construction ceased while taxes from manufacturers and retailers plummeted. Tax revenue could not cover governments’ fixed expenses. Financial operations of European nations became managed by creditors to guarantee payments on loans while social programs and government salaries were slashed. Economists without a PhD would say a bubble burst.

Is there evidence the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank (WB) have similarly created debt in lesser-developed nations for decades and the same financiers are now moving up to European nations? Is this the advance of the New World Order that has been touted by the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) for 50 years? Is the $17 trillion debt of the United States handled by the same financiers and is it now in the initial stages of collection? Has the major funding for these financiers for the past 80 years come from profit concealed by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York (FRBNY) which legally belongs to the U.S. government?

The answer is a collective YES.

The frustrating part is that the financiers received and hid the entire value of the U.S. debt when it was created but they will additionally ravish the U.S. when their fraudulent Ponzi scheme collapses.

THE LOAN ARRANGERS

Goldman Sachs (Goldman) assisted Greek politicians (who also ran the national bank) in 2003 to cook the books and impose massive debt upon the citizens (via derivatives and CDS) without their knowledge. Goldman made an initial gross profit of 600 million Euro on the arrangement and then made bets the “shitty” bonds would fail. The chaos of Greece has resulted in massive layoffs of government and civilian employees, loss of governmental services, impoverishment of the nation, riots, and has reduced much of society to dumpster diving. A Goldman man is now the Greek prime minister. The debt arranged by Goldman has been turned over to a troika of the IMF, ECB, and EC that is also supervising the finances of Cyprus and Portugal.

Goldman agents are also alleged to control the finances of Germany, Italy, Belgium, France, and UK to guarantee payment of debt. Even the CEO of the European Common Bank (ECB) is from Goldman. /1 Spain, Portugal, Ireland and Iceland each have severe economic problems of similar origins.

The loan arrangements of the WB and the IMF have resulted in impoverishment of many nations. After preliminaries, the following “conditionalities” are demanded. A select elite operates businesses manufacturing exports paying poverty wages while confiscated agricultural land produces items for export. Foreign contractors controlled by the elite have priority on required work. Food and essentials must be imported with control by the elite. National assets such as hospitals, utilities, and roads must be privatized for the lenders’ profit. Currency is devalued to benefit the creditors. /2 Society becomes a few rich elite with masses living in squalor; the middle class is eliminated. /3 Nations are plunged into destitution while Wall Street financiers receive $10 to $100 million in annual compensation.

The IMF and WB were established at the Bretton Woods conference in 1944 with primary architects being Alger Hiss and John Maynard Keynes. The first U.S. delegate to the IMF was Harry Dexter White. The agencies have headquarters in Washington D.C.. The IMF determines quota for shareholder nations based upon ability to pay. The U.S. quota for 2013 is SDR 42.1 billion (about US$64 billion). The U.S. has a 17.69 percent shareholder dominant control alleged by one source to be exercised by Timothy Geithner and Ben Bernanke. Another document lists Meg Lundsager as Director on the Executive Board to the IMF. One source identifies the U.S. government as paying 41 percent of total quotas while another IMF source lists 17.69 percent. The IMF holds 2,814 metric tons of gold among other assets.

The U.S. is also the dominant 15.86 percent shareholder of the WB. Robert Zoellick from Goldman was president of the WB from 2007 to 2012. He has also served as deputy Secretary of State. Lewis Preston from JP Morgan served as president from 1991 to 1995. Alden Clausen from Bank of America was president from 1981 to 1988. Ministers of Finance usually represent nations except for the U.S. The two organizations have an annual meeting together. Construction bonds are sold to raise capital. The groups claim that programs are derived from the United Nations to minimize U.S. government interference.

Members of the WB must first join the IMF by paying an assigned quota, and also pay 88 percent of the IMF assessment to the WB. Then, in summary, the nation must pay US$141,000 and $1.3 million in other assets to purchase shares of the WB. The nation is further obligated to have $22 million available in callable assets. Refusal to join or engage in a project can result in an initial penalty of trade sanctions.

The United States is the exclusive nation that has veto power over any policy change of the IMF and the WB. It is incontrovertible that Wall Street controls the two entities while they have an international government facade.

Ms. Lael Brainard, Undersecretary of the U.S. Treasury, formally requested the U.S. contribute $64 billion to the IMF on April 24, 2013. /4 The clarity of financial commitments and handling of U.S. obligations, as evidenced by the video of the committee hearing, appears to make the “shitty” Goldman debt to Greece a simple IOU. Obscuration is very profitable for financiers. One wonders if the IMF is ready to transfer physical possession of gold as collateral (at $32 per ounce) to the U.S. (not to FRBNY) for $64 billion.

Rampant corruption within the WB has been reported by whistle blower Senior Counsel Karen Hudes who exposed programs of the Bank of International Settlements (BIS) and the Federal Reserve to control nations. She was promptly sacked (pardon the pun). /5

The CEO of the IMF has confirmed the objective of world government. /6

INITIATING DEBT

Joseph Stiglitz, former chief economist for the WB, has commented that a ten percent commission for a corrupt politician (such as a finance minister) in a hidden bank account can readily result in a huge debt imposed upon the citizenry beyond their ability to pay. A private debt then becomes a public obligation.

A typical project will raise funds to build a huge electrical power plant or some other large capital investment. The financiers sell bonds backed by the government. The loan requires construction be performed by firms chosen by the lenders. The electrical power will be used to process the nearby aluminum mining owned by the lenders. After construction is finished, the export of ingots to the U.S. is determined to be unprofitable and is discontinued. The nation loses the revenue of the mining but must still pay for the construction bonds, which results in national financial chaos and austerity.

Iceland, as a different methodology, was fleeced by foreign bankers that corrupted the CEOs of Iceland’s three banks. 7 The common thread is that monumental taxes are imposed to pay a pseudo-government debt arranged by a foreign financier which crushes the nation .

Chossudovsky documented numerous third world nations impoverished by the IMF through currency devaluation. The European Common Bank (ECB) is restricted in its issuance of Euros by a requirement to obtain authorization from member states. This controls the issuance of fiat money. (An alternate fiat currency by the IMF could be SDRs.) If the European nations give the ECB authority for unrestricted printing of the Euro (to save Europe from financial disaster, of course) it will affect each and every nation of the Common Market. It will allow stealing the wealth of each member nation by the printing press just as interest bearing Federal Reserve Notes replaced U.S. Notes in the United States during 1913 to 1933. It will put all of Europe under perpetual inescapable debt.

[QUESTION: Is the Euro issued with the same fraudulent hidden profit scheme the Federal Reserve uses for Federal Reserve Notes? See footnote 33. The Rothschilds have used this scam for centuries.]

The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR, created by David Rockefeller) is a social façade of businesses and organizations to multiply gains and eliminate competition. The organization’s secret agenda is to promote a “New World Order” that would be led by the financial elite; it is touted as the utopian society. /8

The interlocking Board of Directors of major businesses which allows control by Wall Street involving Rockefeller trusts and foundations has been known for decades. /9 Recent research concludes sixty percent of global revenue is through Transnational Corporations controlled by financial interests on Wall Street. One percent of corporations control more than 40 percent of world trade. 10 Such concentration is identified to cause economic instability. /11 The common ownership of commercial enterprises with government coercive power to eliminate competition does not appear to be in the best interest of the people.

The relationship between international financial institutes is not completely harmonious despite the close affiliation. Stories circulate that Dominique Strauss-Kahn was promoting a new world reserve currency to replace the U.S. Dollar. A visit to New York City is alleged to have led to incarceration and trumped up criminal charges. Charges were dropped after he resigned as head of the IMF. /12 Several years ago the BIS announced it was going to audit the Federal Reserve. It is not known to have occurred.

The Wall Street Journal informs us the IMF is projecting tax increases in a considerable number of “advanced” nations such as the U.S., Europe, and Japan. The story relates it will be a “significant” tax on the wealthy. We all know how that goes. Does David Rockefeller pay any personal taxes? Tim Geithner only pays taxes when he wants congressional approval for a government appointment. The IMF is telling us the middle class is going to get reamed (the IMF says the U.S. has way too low of a tax rate) just like what has been done in the under-developed nations. The future U.S. society will consist of the abject poor and the elite—no middle class. 13

ENTER THE ENFORCERS

It would be a mistake to blame greedy politicians for all of the rapacious debts. John Perkins informs us that if the financier’s offer of a loan is refused, the CIA “jackals” are called in for a “wet operation” (murder). /14 It is assumed similar pressure may be put on nations to coerce membership in the WB and IMF. Colonel Gaddafi refused to join and paid the price.

The CIA’s School of the Americans (now WHINSEC) brings foreign military leaders to the U.S. for training. The sessions include recruiting CIA assets along with teaching torture and suppression of protests against their local government. It also permits screening and recruitment of future puppet leaders for nations that require a coup if a ruler becomes reluctant to pay a debt. Al Queda was created by the CIA in the 1980’s (with Osama ben Laden as the leader to drive the USSR out of Afghanistan. When Osama wanted the U.S. out of Afghanistan, he had to go.) and is now spun as the cause for endless violence, terrorism and martial law. /15

Numerous sources including the congressional Church Committee have confirmed nefarious acts by the CIA. They include initiating terrorism disguised as revolutions and assassination squads not always in the best interests of the U.S. /16 /17 Blackwater (now Academi) mercenaries have acknowledged being operatives of the CIA. The CIA as the muscle arm of the CFR should be obvious; the U.S. government does not have a financial gain from exploitation.

The CIA has been identified by an Italian Supreme Court judge as the controlling element used by the Bilderberg organization to manipulate governments such as in Operation Gladio involving numerous murders. /18 Rulers who put national interests before financiers’ exploitative interest are demonized by the U.S. as building nuclear weapons, or abusing the indigenous people, or harboring terrorists, or using chemical weapons, or possessing weapons of mass destruction, or some such. If the methodology developed by CIA agent Kermit Roosevelt in 1954 (of recruiting local malcontents and dregs of society with promises of grandeur and supplies of weapons for a rebellion against tyranny) to overthrow the miscreant ruler fails, the U.S. media (all members of the CFR) will be used to inflame the masses to support U.S. military aggression. Recipients of CIA/Wall Street largess include Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden, Fidel Castro, Muammar al-Gaddafi, Chavez, Samosa, Noriega, Shah Pahlavi, Stalin, and Hitler.

If nationalistic priorities preempt exploitation, the ruler must go. Hitler was TIME magazine’s 1938 Man of the Year, but then he attacked Stalin. Antony Sutton has documented Wall Street’s sponsoring of Stalin while publicly demonizing him. When Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn made the same observation, his U.S. speaking tour was abruptly canceled. Wall Street could not let JP Morgan’s $60 million investment in the Bolshevik Revolution (that gave Morgan the Czar’s largest gold hoard in the world) be attacked. If prompt policy decisions were not available from Moscow, they could be obtained from Manhattan.

The U.S. military is the ultimate force to squelch any recalcitrant nation or depose any ruler who establishes a central bank that is not subservient to the BIS. A compliant press to ballyhoo national defense and security is assured by CFR members for the proper spin to gain public support. War mongering is a most profitable business for the CFR. /19 The CIA uses the U.S. military as a cover, as a supplier of material, and as a source of mercenaries. /20 U.S. embassies are routinely used as an operational base for the CIA and at least one (Libya) has been alleged to be a torture prison and the source of arms for foreign rebels. It is Wall Street that determines the next nation the U.S. must destroy. /21

President Obama, his parents, and his grandparents have a lengthy history with the CIA. /22

President George H.W. Bush was CIA Director in 1976. As President, he invaded Iraq in 1991 over weapons of mass destruction that were never found. Numerous other lies to hype aggression have been documented. He called for a New World Order in a speech before Congress on September 11, 1990 and in a speech before the United Nations on September 21, 1992. Colonel Oliver North confessed that Bill Clinton, as Governor of Arkansas, facilitated the CIA operation of gun running and drug smuggling after Ollie was granted immunity by Congress. The fatal mistake by President Carter was to slash funding for the CIA and his termination of 500 agents. Fletcher Prouty claims that Bush (as ex-head of the CIA) and the head of the Democrat National Committee successfully made a deal with the Iranians to defeat Carter with the “October Surprise.”

JFK made an Oath to shatter the CIA after he took the blame for the CIA’s sabotaging the Bay of Pigs invasion. He also planned for the U.S. to discontinue the CIA’s war in Vietnam. Did Richard Nixon’s nixing of the CIA’s use of Tibetans for warmongering with China lead to the CIA’s blundering men burgling Watergate? Tapes released in 2013 reveal that Nixon was concerned that factors would torpedo the summit between the U.S. and the Soviet. He warned Kissinger that if they did, he would publicly denounce them on prime time television. The CIA is suggested to have torpedoed Ike’s dream of peace talks with Khrushchev by using a sabotaged CIA U2. /23 Messin’ with the CIA can have repercussions.

Yugoslavia (Bosnia) was a victim of a more traditional invasion by the U.S. military after the nation refused to be controlled by the BIS banking system and would not allow western powers to exploit their vast natural resources. /24

Military action and false flag tactics by the CIA have been evidenced from Tonkin Bay and the Bay of Pigs. Even before the CIA, HMS Lusitania was a thinly disguised British naval vessel carrying civilians and 500 tons of contraband military explosives deliberately sent into a German submarine patrolled area at reduced speed without escort or evasive maneuvering — it was a set-up used to hype the U.S. into WW I. Similarly, the Japanese diplomatic code was broken 17 months before the “non-surprise” attack on Pearl Harbor. 25 The oil from Indonesia occupied by Japan was coveted by Wall Street. The 9/11 terrorist attack which collapsed three towers of the World Trade Center has endless evidence the official report conflicts with any rational analysis. The monumental resources necessary to produce the preliminary conditions, the acts of violence, and the cover-up of forensic evidence far exceed the capability of any cave dweller in Afghanistan./ 26

THE EXECUTIVE BRANCH

The US Department of Treasury has been involved with the Financial Stability Board (FSA,“the fourth pillar of international economic control”) of the World Trade Organization (WTO). They and G20 now assert international regulation of shadow banking. A report claims, among other things, to contain authorization to seize bank deposits as in Cyprus. /27 Compliance with Wall Street objectives is historically confirmed.

Greg Palast has posted an expose’ of an internal memo dated 1997 from Tim Geithner to the Deputy Secretary of the U.S. Treasury Larry Summers. The memo relates how the U.S. Treasury is negotiating (in secret and on behalf of Wall Street)  for the FSA to redefine commodity to include the “end game” of financial instruments. All foreign governments would then be required to guarantee payment of derivatives held n their banks. /28

Implementation of the plan was led by Geithner and is asserted to have caused the European chaos. The memo includes the private telephone number of five major Wall Street CEO’s so the acceptability of the negotiations could be readily confirmed.

Larry Summers, the boss of the above scheme suggested by Palast to be a criminal offense, has been the Chief Economist at the WB and has worked for a hedge fund. As Secretary of the Treasury he strongly opposed regulation of Credit Default Swaps and other financial controls, and was nominated for CEO of the Federal Reserve. Tim Geithner went from a Treasury neophyte to the IMF then to CEO of FRBNY, to tax evader, to Treasury Secretary who wanted a trillion dollar bailout for banks and for the Fed to have expanded powers, to potential CEO of Federal Reserve.

Total exposure of derivatives (creations of Goldman that now has a minimum $41 Trillion exposure; $70 Trillion by Morgan Chase) may exceed $600 or $1,000 trillion and is largely held by four Wall Street banks. A successful hedge fund operator recently kept a $2 billion profit made on derivatives while depositors will have their bank accounts seized when derivatives tank. Small wonder the government is buying arms and ammunition for many government agencies to suppress public reactions. State police forces are also being militarized to control demonstrations.

TREATIES, PACTS, AND PARTNERSHIPS

A 1972 Executive treaty gave control of 68 percent of U.S. National Parks to the United Nations. Legislation has since required Senate approval of treaties but Secretary of State, John Kerry, claims to be able to make valid U.N. arms control agreements. Executive negotiation and international agreements are touted to supersede any provision of national sovereignty or any act of Congress.

Another early treaty was North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which, according to some reports, bankrupt Detroit for the benefit of CFR members. The land grab by United Nations Agenda 21 involves UN control over huge areas imposed under the guise of environment protection for the economic benefit of elites. /29

The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) is being negotiated by the Trade Representative (an Executive office) “to accord non-discriminatory treatment to investments and investors from each others’ jurisdiction for both new and expanded investments, with only limited exceptions (taken on a negative list basis).” Parenthesis in original. /30 This is understood to read: Wall Street financiers cannot be excluded from local markets. Sovereignty over investment questions would lie in the WTO to decide disagreements. Any new investment cannot be challenged on a national basis and any absconding of money (theft) is legal unless it is specifically listed on a negative list.

The TTIP usurpation of sovereignty over the United States and European nations is being secretly fast-tracked by President Obama at the negotiations of July 2013. The CFR is pushing for bankers to have financial control of the U.S. similar to the troika control of Europe. /31 The CFR and CIA are claimed to be responsible for creating the EU with the U.S. to be merged later.

The Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) has involved negotiations with nine nations for seven years pursuing similar control over: “…trademark, geographical indication (cellphone and GPS ?), copyright and related rights (control of the Internet?), patents, trade secrets (protection for CFR members only?), genetic resources (such as GM crops?), and traditional knowledge (any adverse comment on world government is a crime?)…” /32 An international body would adjudicate questions over these items. The concentration of authority is similar to WB/IMF demands imposed upon creditor nations. Jonathan Turley identifies the TPP ambition to control a monopoly market in pharmaceuticals. /33

Clearly, treaties are used to further NWO control and assistance comes from within the United States government in accordance with the objectives of Wall Street.

THE FEDERAL RESERVE

Is the United States immune to this worldwide exploitation by Wall Street now being experienced in Europe? Clearly not so. The lingo of austerity to condition the public to hardship is already in the media. Government spending and taxation is escalating while the people are warned of reduced government benefits and jobs (and airline traffic delays). The $17 trillion in national debt hangs like a Sword of Damocles while the people are not aware of the fraudulent nature of the inescapable obligation nor the dire consequences of debt collection.

Every dollar of deficit spending ($4 Billion EVERY DAY –7/52 !!) is hidden profit for the Federal Reserve Board of Governors ({BOG}, with ownership assumed but assured to include Goldman and other Wall Street banks) using the auction accounts of Treasury securities. The $8 trillion annual receipts and disbursements of the auction accounts are exclusively handled by the FRBNY. They have never been subject to external audit nor are they reported to Congress as required by law. No viable alternate mathematical conclusion for revenue from deficit spending securities has been found. /34

The profit of the Federal Reserve (Fed) legally belongs to the government and assuredly the purloined funds have helped finance the Wall Street cabal. Concealment of funds that belong to the government is embezzlement. The Fed operates a Ponzi scheme that is inherently designed to self-destruct. The debt created can never be paid. Issuing a Treasury security to the Fed for deficit spending creates the principal of the “loan.” The interest to pay the loan does not exist. (The fractional reserve practice of the commercial banks does not change this. Each dollar of fractional reserve has been created from a Treasury security or its numerical multiple.) A contract that cannot be culminated is void from its inception — it is an act of fraud. /35 The Wall Street bankers are alleged to be owners of the (privately owned) BOG. Whether the BOG is operating as a government contractor rather than a government agency, or has lost sovereign immunity for systemic violation of its statutory charter or as a criminal embezzler, depends upon the viewpoint. /36

[NOTE: The Federal Reserve banks have recent congressional authority to write checks on their own accounts (i.e., to create money as used in the quantitative easing {QE} purchases) in the same manner as commercial banks. They are not restricted by a reserve requirement as are the commercial banks. The Fed can potentially write any amount to cover all loss from derivatives held by Wall Street banks that become worthless. The guaranteeing of derivatives, which were created by Goldman, will be like the banks writing themselves a check then having the public pay them for it.]

Every action of the Federal Reserve for the past five years, which cloaks its operation in as much secrecy as possible, has been to protect Wall Street and international bankers. A Federal Reserve whistle blower relates the more than $1 trillion created by QE’s was to rescue New York banks; it was not to help the economy or homeowners. /37 To conclude the $17 trillion national debt (and growing exponentially)  will be forgiven is naive. Wall Street banks that handle the redemption of Treasury securities will foreclose in any number of ways. The devouring of Greece and Cyprus will be but a morsel compared to the frenzied gorging on the citizens of the U.S. being endlessly plundered.

[The FRBNY is reported to hold 7,700 tons of gold in its vaults asserted to belong to other nations. The hoard has never been audited. Germany’s demand for the return of their gold has been refused. Gold bars from Fort Knox sold to China were found to be bogus with the Fed being implicated. /38 ]

Wall Street banks also control the Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation (DTCC) which handles $1.7 quadrillion in securities annually. The ownership of equity or securities held by DTCC is valued at $40 trillion book entry transfers of shares are made for financial market purchases. John Q. Public believes he owns shares in XYZ Inc; actually, DTCC owns the shares. Dividends from companies go to DTCC for distribution. Delays in the transfers of ownership stock have been made at the option of DTCC. Facilitation of naked short selling is also a recorded practice. The bottom line is to reflect on confiscation of depositors’ money with claims they are a subordinate equity position. The Cyprus pattern of seizure (as was done with MF Global) will continue to expand to guarantee banks holding derivatives do not face bankruptcy but, naturally, the elite will be exempt.

INCREASE DEFICIT SPENDING

Democrats quickly contributed to Fed profit by deficit spending with a social agenda including conservation projects, WPA, food stamps, housing assistance, medical care, and such while the Republicans of the “Old Right” were more frugal. Murray Rothbard relates /39 that Joe McCarthy unwittingly helped open the government spigot. With Bill Buckley’s war mongering in NATIONAL REVIEW trumpeting the communist menace and red-baiting, the “New Right” increased government deficit spending on militarism. That not only gave direct profit to the owners of the Fed but also profited the manufacturing members of the CFR. “[T]he more (Murray Rothbard) circulated among these (National Review) people, the greater (his) horror because (he) realized with growing certainty that what they wanted above all was total war against the Soviet Union; their fanatical warmongering would settle for no less.” Rothbard concludes Buckley had been a CIA agent and NATIONAL REVIEW was a CIA operation. (id 161, 169.)

The issue is not Democrats verses Republicans, nor liberal verses conservative, nor progressive verses neocon; the issue is Wall Street verses the People.

Mr. Buckley did not reveal the Soviet Union was the result of $60 Million invested by JP Morgan to finance the “cheapest revolution I every bought.” The Bolshevik Revolution relied upon crucial U.S. government assistance to get the two kingpins to Moscow. The prize for Morgan (a shill for the Rothschild family) was the world’s largest hoard of gold held by the murdered Czar. The USSR was a straw enemy controlled out of Manhattan but ballyhooed as a need to build an indispensable U.S. military power. /40 The 1945 Communist expansion in the Far East was also a deliberate U.S. foreign policy. /41 After the collapse of Communism, the war mongering was packaged as protecting the U.S. from terrorism. The CIA is invariably found supplying arms to at least one faction of the acts of terrorism. Frequently, the tyrant being deposed had been pressured to purchase military armament from the U.S. — with U.S. (taxpayer) subsidized money of course. If the first customer does not buy, the second one will and then the CIA will threaten the first. General Smedley Butler was recruited by Wall Street to run for President in the 1930‘s. He chose instead to reveal their perfidy. 42

The election of either political party into control of Congress then carries the potential to be used to profit Wall Street. Politicians love to spend somebody else’s money to buy votes at home and let the next generation pay the hidden cost of it. Whether it is money for a medical program, or a new bridge, or to build solar panels, or a new airport, or sports stadium with matching funds from state or local governments, the debt is financed through Wall Street and the piper does not play for free. Wall Street does not demand economic ventures backed by the government to be cost effective.

Corruption by politicians in the United States is eliminated by definition. Campaign contributions, lobbyist’s gifts and perks, and insider market tips are defined by law to be legal — or result in winks. Some surveys suggest the group with the fastest increase in net worth is politicians. Opposition to legislation favorable to Wall Street will find political opponents with huge campaign war chests. And thus, for a few pieces of silver, are politicians intimidated to sell the birthright of the Nation, but much influence can be made without even being elected.

REVOLVING DOOR EMPLOYMENT

Numerous Goldman employees have worked for the U.S. government in key positions. They include Barack Obama with Goldman being his largest campaign contributor ($884,907). An unknown freshman congressman was able to get elected President, and reelected, without a birth certificate (a record of live birth available to a parent upon request without a doctor’s certification was offered) or challenge by either political party – and with judicial immunity. The Manhattan office of both political parties agreed to the plan. The Barack Obama record of constitutional trampling, of unrestrained spending, of claims of executive immunity from accountability, of consolidating all political power within the executive penumbra, is unprecedented. /43 A lengthy list of Goldman employees who moved to government positions has been compiled. /44 Should pundits conclude Goldman already controls the U.S. government?

Hank Paulsen (ex CEO of Goldman, sometimes Paulson) as Secretary of the Treasury begged Congress for $700 billion to save his $500 million in Goldman stock from bankruptcy with the pretense of saving American International Group (AIG) and the Nation. /45 Paulsen also eliminated more than $200 million in taxes with his brief government employment. Goldman received more than $14 billion from the bailout of AIG. More than a $1.5 billion benefit went to Goldman from the “fiscal cliff” settlement of December 2012. /46 Goldman borrowed $784 billion from the Fed between 2008 to 2010, while 953 employees received bonuses over a million dollars.

An extensive listing of putative criminal actions by Goldman, including deliberate fraudulent actions that caused the 1929 collapse, has been compiled. Goldman created derivatives and MBS are identified as causes of the current chaos. /47

CONCLUSION

The U.S. government is facilitating a national self-destruction for the benefit of Wall Street’s megalomaniac obsession. The pattern has been field tested by the IMF and WB for decades and is now being used in Europe. The $17 trillion U.S. debt is the end goal collection.

Every dollar of the $17 trillion national debt has been a profit for the Fed hidden by the FRBNY. When the economy slows as debt instruments (derivatives, MBS) are exposed as worthless (market value is destroyed), more deficit spending is required to “stimulate” the economy (read– maintain the status quo by inflating values and buying derivatives and MBS to rescue TBTF Wall Street banks). Stocks (owned by the rich) increase in value from inflation but fixed assets (CD’s, life insurance, etc., owned by the middle class) lose value. The stumbling economy causes reductions in tax revenue which defunds social programs (i.e., austerity) while the public is told the government debt is inviolable. Seizure of assets in bank accounts and DTCC will occur. The government will have a fire sale of government assets to Wall Street — on the financiers’ terms — as in Greece. Owners of the Fed will acquire the entire United States and the people will be paupers — just like in Haiti.

©2013 Olde Reb

References:

1 http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/12996-goldman-sachs-global-coup-de-tat

2 Michael Chossudovsky, GLOBALIZATION OF POVERTY AND THE NEW WORLD ORDER; cf: Google WAR BY OTHER MEANS video by John Pilger for the rape of the Philippines; VICIOUS CIRCLE OF DEBT AND DEPRESSION by Ismael Hossein-zadeh; PERPETUAL POVERTY: by Doug Bandow.

3 http://www.counterpunch.org/2010/05/14/the-vicious-circle-of-debt-and-depression

4 http://financialservices.house.gov/uploadedfiles/042413_mpt_memo.pdf

5 http://www.thenewamerican.com/economy/economics/item/15473-world-bank-insider-blows-whistle-oncorruption-federal-reserve

6 http://www.thedailybell.com/1425/IMF-Article-Predicts-New-World-Order.html

7 MELTDOWN ICELAND by Roger Boes identifies Goldman as a prime cause.

8 TRAGEDY AND HOPE by Carroll Quigley; MEMOIRS by David Rockefeller; NAKED CAPITALIST by Cleon Skousen (a critical analysis of Quigley)

9 ROCKEFELLER FILE by Gary Allen.

10 http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-11-24/10-corporations-control-almost-everything-you-buy

11 http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21228354.500-revealed–the-capitalist-network-that-runs-theworld.html

12 http://www.voltairenet.org/article169953.html

13 http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304355104579232480552517224

14 CONFESSION OF ECONOMIC HIT MAN by John Perkins; KILLING HOPE by William Blum.

15 http://www.veteranstoday.com/2013/04/20/the-cias-founding-of-al-qaeda-documented

16 http://www.scribd.com/doc/49566880/CIA-ROGUE-AGENCY-RUN-AMUCK

17 HIGH TREASON by John Groden; PLAUSIBLE DENIAL by Mark Lane; ACT OF TREASON by Mark North

18 http://deadlinelive.info/2013/04/12/italian-supreme-court-president-writes-book-linking-bilderberg-tooperation-gladio-and-the-cia-2/#comment-82358

19 JFK AND THE UNSPEAKABLE by James Douglas; BROTHERHOOD OF DARKNESS by Dr. Stanley Monteith (200 years of false flag operations)

20 PRESIDENTS SECRET WARS by John Prados; CIA’S SECRET WAR by Kenneth Conboy; WAY OF THE KNIFE by Mark Mazzetti; also any of Fletcher Prouty.’s books.

21 IMPERIAL HUBRIS by Michael Schener based upon his years as a CIA analyst among others.

22 http://exopolitics.bloGoldman.com/exopolitics/2012/01/hidden-story-behind-jesse-ventura-piers-morgans-cnn-clash-over-obama-cia-ties.html

23 http://www.scribd.com/doc/49566880/CIA-ROGUE-AGENCY-RUN-AMUCK

24 http://www.veteranstoday.com/2013/09/22/the-evisceration-of-yugoslavia-part-1-bnl-yugo-andeagleburger/

25 INFAMY by John Toland; FINAL SECRETS OF PEARL HARBOR by Robert Theobald; PERPETUAL WAR FOR PERPETUAL PEACE by Harry Elmer Barnes.

26 http://www.911truth.org/

27 http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/08/29/us-g20-shadoW.B.anking-rules-idUSBRE97S0TX20130829

28 http://www.gregpalast.com/larry-summers-and-the-secret-end-game-memo

29 http://www.newswithviews.c om/Schoen/karen105.htm

www.narlo.org/agenda21.html;

http://my.brainshark.com/False-Choices-The-Story-of-Agenda-21-713151488

30 http://www.transatlantictrade.org/issues/investment

31 http://www.thenewamerican.com/world-news/item/15975-eu-official-pooling-sovereignty-onceunthinkable-now-the-model

32 http://www.ustr.gov/about-us/press-office/fact-sheets/2011/november/outlines-trans-pacific-partnershipagreement

33 http://www.jonathanturley.org/2013/11/25/obama-administration-pushes

34 Federal Reserve Heist http://www.scribd.com/doc/101937790;

http://www.scribd.com/doc/48194264/rip-offby-the-Federal-Reserve-revised

35 RIP OFF BY THE FEDERAL RESERVE, http://www.scribd.com/doc/48194264/rip-off-by-the-Federal-Reserve-revised

36 http://www.scribd.com/doc/153024003/Amended-Complaint-Federal-Reserve-whistleblower

37 http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/Federal-reserve-whistleblower-tells-america-the-realreason-for-quantitative-easing

38 http://www.exohuman.com/wordpress/2011/02/fake-gold-bars-sold-to-china

39 BETRAYAL OF THE AMERICAN RIGHT by Murray Rothbard

40 Numerous writings by Antony Sutton and Fletcher Prouty.

41 HOW THE FAR EAST WAS LOST by Anthony Kubek; WHILE YOU SLEPT by John T. Flynn.

42 WAR IS A RACKET by Smedley Butler

43 http://www.nachumlist.com/goldmansachsobama.htm

44 http://www.whiteoutpress.com/articles/q42012/list-of-goldman-sachs-employees-in-the-white-house

45 http://articles.marketwatch.com/2006-06-30/news/30767746_1_paulson-goldman-sachs-stock-unit

46. http://www.moneynews.com/Wolinsky/crony-capitalism-Goldman/2013/01/03/id/469864

47 http://deanhenderson.wordpress.com/2012/11/18/goldman-sachs-onc. (the objective of World Control by the Bankers is stated in Paragraph Four). cf.

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2013/07/global-power-project-part-5-banking-on-influence-with-goldman-sachs.html

 

U S Sheriffs Rise Up Against Federal Government: Sheriff Threatens Feds With SWAT Team ~ Grass Roots Take Charge!

R.E. Sutherland, M.Ed./sciences  becworks@gmail.com

Freelance Investigative Science Reporter since 1996

http://politicalvelcraft.org/2011/11/14/u-s-sheriffs-rise-up-against-federal-government-sheriff-threatens-feds-with-swat-team/

As more people became dissatisfied with federal government controls and land grabs, it was inevitable that local law enforcement would eventually see the bigger picture.

Obama’s Idiocracy

At the northern California fairgrounds of Yreka last month, seven California sheriffs and another from Oregon gathered with a large group of citizens to say that they are finally going to do something about it.

“A giant has been awakened,” said Plumas County, Calif. Sheriff Greg Hagwood, “and they didn’t count on that,” speaking of the federal bureaucracy.

With exposure of the Emergency Management Center in San Luis Obispo a few decades ago, California began to offer the rest of the nation some evidence of the psychological conditioning aimed from the federal level at state, county and city law enforcement.

Dean Wilson, sheriff of Del Norte County (Sacramento), is a great example of this great awakening.

He received the loudest and longest applause  for his candor in confessing past faults after apologizing for not understanding the central government assault and land grab being committed against the people and what he should have been doing about it.

Only in the past year has he done a turnaround and begun to behave as a county sheriff instead of an extension of federal law enforcement.

“I had spent a good part of my life enforcing the penal code, but not understanding my oath of office,” he told the audience. “I was ignorant and naïve, but now I know of the assault against our people by the federal government.”

Host sheriff John Lopey of Siskiyou County, speaking about the federal environmental intervention, said: “I have told federal and state officials over and over that, yes, we want to preserve the environment, but you care more about the fish, frogs, trees and birds than you do about the  human race. When will you start to balance your decisions to the needs of the people?”

Later he told the audience, “We are right now in a fight for our survival.”

Glenn Palmer, sheriff of Grant County, Oregon, said, “If an elected official has not taken an oath of office, he does not belong in office.”

AFP readers are familiar with the work of former Arizona Sheriff Richard Mack, who has spent the latter half of his life teaching sheriffs that they are the top law enforcement officers in their counties despite continuing federal intervention attempts.

The ears that were deaf for so long may finally be starting to hear.

“It’s becoming a national movement now,” Mack told AFP, citing Immigration and Naturalization Service failure at the Mexican borders, the phony drug war, plus IRS and other unconstitutional intervention within these states.

His plans to take this movement national will be launched at a January meeting, where he anticipates 200 sheriffs will be in attendance.

“The county sheriff is the last line of defense guarding our people’s liberty,” he said.

Retired USAF Col. Richard Niemela of Reston, Va. has been exposing the federal monster for years.

He told AFP:

“It’s the surreptitious domination by international globalists insidiously using unauthorized and illegal tactics to render null and void those historic and unique powers of the sheriff.”

American Free Press

ARTICLES:

When Saving Interest Rates Go Negative: Time For Quark!

Rothschild’s NWO Manifesto: Absconding The United States Judicial System ~ In An Attempt To Prevent Incarceration Blowback!

‘Taqiyya’ Obama Didn’t Promise Us A Website: He Promised Us We Could Keep Our Health Insurance And Our Doctor!

Breaking: Rothschild Czar Charlie Schumer Caught Smuggling In Senate.

• Sheriff Threatens Feds With SWAT Tea
• Pope Francis Meets With Russian President Putin: While Barry Soetoro Invokes Massive Austerity Removing U.S. Embassy From The Vatican!

Nevada Sheriff Tony DeMeo Stops Federal Government: Feds Engaging In Illegal Confiscation Of Cattle And Water Rights Of County Property Owner.

Oregon Sheriff Gil Gilbertson Gives Federal Agents The Boot: Feds Have No Jurisdiction!

20 Drills that Prove the New Enemy is the American People

Ron Paul Austrian Economic’s Capitalism vs Paul Krugman Keynesian Economic’s Communism.

NY Sheriffs Protect Bill Of Rights Defy Cuomo: We Will Not Take Guns From Law-Abiding U.S. Citizens.

Ron Paul, The Tide Turned Against The Rothschild Warmongers: A Great Victory!

New Global Challenge: Can We de-Rothschild The World? Pravda.Ru

Obama’s Federal Stooges Beginning To Understand The Power Of Sheriffs: Sheriff Warns Federal Agents They Will Be Arrested If They Interfere!

Arizona Sheriff: ‘If Decapitating Police Officers Is Not Terrorism, What is?’: More Troops At Korean Border Than Deadly U.S. Mexican Border.

Vatican vs Illuminati

Pope Francis Warns Against The “Prêt-à-porter” Of Wealth Distribution That Advocates “Depravity Of Free Will”.

86% Of United kingdom Citizens Moving Forward To Reclaim Their Gun Rights!

A Global Awakening: Nuremberg, When History Repeats, Do We Notice?

Sheriffs

• Gun Facts
• Guy Fawkes
• Republic-vs-Democracy
• Sovereignty
• U.S. Republic Militias
• The Greatest Lie Ever Told: Global Warming Was A Corporatist Lie From Start To Finish.
• McCain’s Syrian Rebels Responsible For ‘Biggest Massacre’ Of Christians In Syria As Population Continues To Be Targeted.
• Crash The Crony Political Justice System: Jury’s Power Of Nullification Is The U.S. Republic’s Justice!
• Two Authors Warned Us About Rothschild’s Banking Cabal: Baum & Tolkien ~ Wizard Of Oz & Lord Of The Rings
• Arizona Judge Stood Firm With Sheriff Mack (unmasker4maine.wordpress.com)

http://www.blogpingtool.com

SO, WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?

 http://www.activistpost.com/2013/12/using-violence-against-sstate-is-not.html

 By Jefferson’s Voice

In response to an idiotic video promoting passivism, found here.

Brain dead pacifism and Hollywood style heroism are both nonstarters.

1. We need to use attacks on the second amendment to wake up more people and fight tooth and nail to roll back restrictions. Did you notice how many traditional “conservatives” started to wake up when gun restriction efforts went into full gear?

2. We must immediately begin NETWORKING more. TPTB are using very effective tactics right now to splinter the liberty movement into various factions: Tea Party conservatives; Christian patriots; Libertarian minded activists; independents and former “progressives” who oppose empire and the NWO; left-leaning anti-NWO types such as Webster Tarpley (and some Veteran’s Today writers). Some of this splintering is being accomplished with the help of a prominent figure in controlled opposition who has been mostly useful in our efforts to wake up people. The bulk of these divisive tactics center around bashing Christians; bashing “conspiracy theorists”; setting up free market capitalism as the fall guy for bankster crony oligopolism; and stoking a view of Libertarianism as the new pro-global techno-free-market with growing popularity especially in the younger age groups only to have the movement co-opted in a bait and switch. This new political target is being lead down the same path TPTB were trying to lead the young Occupiers which is a new and improved banking/money/economic paradigm – the end of capitalism as we know it but much worse as an absolute totalitarianism. For the Occupiers it was the Venus Project. There doesn’t seem to be a name as yet for the next generation enslavement meme.

We must not let ourselves be divided and mislead.

3. We need to work on more effective OUTREACH AND SYNTHESIS. Remember Aaron Russo‘s admonitions about how we need to come together to expose the central controllers, their agenda, and their modus operandi. Help others connect the dots as often as you can. Digital currency, capital controls, bail-ins, monetary inflation, dismantling the legacy systems (pensions, social security, etc.), surveillance, destruction of civil liberties (e.g. NDAA and loss of habeas corpus!), Affordable Care Act to establish a centralized database and for rationing, gun control, smart grid, biometric identification, etc. Weave together the narrative every chance you get!

That’s a heck of a start if we pull together.

I don’t know what Robert Murphy‘s background is. If his book collection, including the topics of Reagan, Truman, and Climate Change, is any indication, he hasn’t made it very far down the rabbit hole. He states the obvious about why it’s nuts to attempt some kind of armed revolution yet the bromides he proffers amount to nothing more BOILING FROG SYNDROME.

We can do much better if we network and use our brains and not on Murphy’s indolent timetable.

Sorry, Robert Murphy, if you haven’t noticed we are getting our BUTTS KICKED and we are RUNNING OUT OF TIME, Big Brother is here and soon our skies will be filled with drones.

Einstein said it best, we can’t solve our problems using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them. It’s time to think outside the box [Matrix].

OLDDOGS COMMENTS

This article needs to be circulated far and wide, so please send it to all of your contacts. Just copy paste the entire page to your email client and educate the people. Time is running out, and the people must come together with one thought in mind. UNITED WE STAND, DIVIDED WE FALL. Regardless of what your hot subject is, the Powers That Be are organized, relentless, and UNITED. If you do not want America to be another 3^rd world country, Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country……………….REMEMBER THAT FROM TYPING CLASS????????????? THE TIME TO GET OFF YOUR BACK SIDE AND GET INVOLVED HAS ALREADY PASSED. DO IT!

HERE IS ANOTHER GOOD IDEA FROM THE COMMENT SECTION,

Anonymous said…

Make lists. Names and addresses of local police and politicians. Swat team members. Names and addresses of doctors, particularly trauma surgeons. Names of people who have professional licenses for civil engineering, energy, water and sewer. Lists of cell towers and where they are located. Locations of telecommunications central offices. Local residents that work for any federal agency from USDA, FBI, ect. Businesses that wholesale pharmaceuticals, ammunition, medical supplies, communications equipment, diesel engine parts. welding supplies and tools and parts for heavy equipment. Places where fuels are stored are public info from the EPA. ect. These organizations are made up of people, and people cannot do bad things raid homes and protect their families at the same time. And when some asks why? Tell them civil defense or protecting your community from terrorism, the same reason they use to justify a $500,000 military assault vehicle for a civilian police force. As people we have become disconnected from our neighbors. Time to reconnect. Like a good boy scout, BE PREPARED!

Email your comments to olddog@anationbeguiled.com And I will forward them to Jefferson’s Voice.

Anti-Federalists Prophesied The End Of Freedom

http://www.economicpolicyjournal.com/2013/12/anti-federalists-prophesied-end-of.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+economicpolicyjournal%2FKpwH+%28EconomicPolicyJournal.com%29

By Ilana Mercer

On the eve of the federal convention, and following its adjournment in September of 1787, the Anti-Federalists made the case that the Constitution makers in Philadelphia had exceeded the mandate they were given to amend the Articles of Confederation, and nothing more. The Federal Constitution augured ill for freedom, argued the Anti-Federalists. These unsung heroes had warned early Americans of the “ropes and chains of consolidation,” in Patrick Henry‘s magnificent words, inherent in the new dispensation.

After 200 years of just such “consolidation”—in the magisterial “Liberty, Order, And Justice: An Introduction to the Constitutional Principles of American Government”—constitutional scholar James McClellan distilled the Anti-Federalist argument with the respect it deserves.

As “strong advocates of States’ Rights,” Anti-Federalists held that “self-government, independence, and individual liberty were best protected at the local level. A distant and powerful central government,” the kind cooked up at the Philadelphia convention, was anathema to these “cherished values.” To that end, Anti-Federalists fought to preserve the “loose-knit relationship” that had existed between the “Confederation government and the States.”

Should the Federal Constitution be ratified, there would be “no checks, no real balances,” thundered Patrick Henry. Instead, the country would live under a “powerful and mighty empire.” Writing under the assumed name “Agrippa,” yet another Anti-Federalist scoffed at the idea of an enormous “uncompounded republic,” “containing 6 million white inhabitants,” all “reduced to the same standard of morals or habits and of laws.” This “in itself is an absurdity,” mocked “Agrippa.”

The Tower of Babel that is 21st century America is home not to 6 but 317 million alienated, antagonistic individuals, diverse to the point of distrust. These modern-day Americans, some of whose ancestors were brought together by a “profound intellectual and emotional attachment to individual liberty,” possess little by way of “social capital” to unify them. Surveys say Americans today avoid one another and hunker down unhappily in front of the TV, instead. This would have hardly surprised “Agrippa.”

So, too, did Anti-Federalists predict the problem of representatives who had been imbued with excessive power. “Once elected, representatives would be far from home, comfortable in their jobs, enjoying a big salary … living in some distant, yet-to-be-built city far removed from the watchful eye of the people they represented.”

Sound familiar?

From “Brutus” came perhaps the most “perceptive and far-reaching examinations of congressional power from the Anti-Federalist perspective.” Writing in the New York Journal, “Brutus” observed that “the ‘most natural and grammatical construction’ of the General Welfare Clause in Article I is that it authorizes the Congress ‘to do anything which in their judgment will tend to provide for the general welfare, and this amounts to the same thing as general and unlimited power of legislation in all cases.”

“If only the high-minded Framers had written the Constitution with crooks in mind,” lamented this column in 2008. “Brutus” was not nearly as charitable. Bitterly did he complain about a Constitution that was “written ‘in general and indefinite terms, which are either equivocal, ambiguous, or which require definition.'”

The Commerce Clause has given us the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. “ACA,” or “Obamacare,” forces 21st century Americans to purchase the federal government’s version of health insurance, or risk punishment. The Clause was the focus of scathing Anti-Federalist critique. “What is meant by ‘the power to regulate?” they demanded to know. “What, precisely, is ‘commerce'”? The new Constitution, argued the prescient Anti-Federalists, is mum on these matters, providing little by way of precision in definition.

Brilliant too was “Brutus” in his prediction that, if instituted, the “new system of government” would see the Federal judiciary “swallow up the State courts.” Back then, “Brutus” saw Article III, Section 2, of the Constitution as vesting the judicial branch with the kind of power that would bring about “the entire subversion of the legislative, executive, and judiciary power of the individual states.”

As the saying goes, “a prophet is not without honor save in his own country.”

To observe Obama (and predecessor) in action is to realize that Massachusetts delegate Elbridge Gerry and New York Anti-Federalist “Cato” were prophets who deserve a lot more honor in their own country. Both forewarned of an imperial presidency in the making. “‘The president,’ wrote “Cato,” has so much power that his office ‘differs very immaterially from the establishment of monarchy in Great Britain.'”

Indeed, President Barack Obama habitually “uses executive orders to circumvent federal legislation.” He exempts his “friends or political cronies” from oppressive laws his subjects must obey. And he orders the suspension of “duly enacted [immigration] law”—even “barring enforcement”—because he does not like the law.

A propagandized population has a hard time choosing worthy heroes. It is high time Americans celebrate the Anti-Federalists, for they were correct in predicting the fate of freedom after Philadelphia.

To deny that the Anti-Federalists were right is to deny reality.

Having prophesied that Philadelphia was the beginning of the end of the freedoms won in the American Revolution, our Anti-Federalist philosophical fathers fought to forestall the inevitable. They failed.

ILANA Mercer is a classical liberal writer, based in the United States. She pens WND’s longest-standing paleolibertarian column.  ILANA is a fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies. She is the author of “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons For America From Post-Apartheid South Africa.”  ILANA’s website is WWW.IlanaMercer.com . She blogs at www.barelyablog.com

OLDDOGS COMMENTS

America can only be compared to a stupid cook who goes to the pantry and puts a little of everything in it into what ever kind of soup he/she is cooking, with the results being, the soups putrid. A new guest can be excused, but those who keep going back are the real dumb asses. Keep on voting, fools! When the truth sounds disgusting to you, then you should stop reading. A democracy produces lemmings as citizens.

Facebook’s dark plans for the future are given away in its patent applications.

http://www.pakalertpress.com/2013/12/06/facebooks-future-plans-for-data-collection-beyond-all-imagination/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+pakalert+%28Pak+Alert+Press%29

By Darwin Bond-Graham

“No one knows who will live in this cage in the future, or whether at the end of this tremendous development, entirely new prophets will arise, or there will be a great rebirth of old ideas and ideals, or, if neither, mechanized petrification, embellished with a sort of convulsive self-importance. For of the fast stage of this cultural development, it might well be truly said: ‘Specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved.’”

—Max Weber, 1905

On November 12 Facebook, Inc. filed its 178th patent application for a consumer profiling technique the company calls “inferring household income for users of a social networking system.”

“The amount of information gathered from users,” explain Facebook programmers Justin Voskuhl and Ramesh Vyaghrapuri in their patent application, “is staggering — information describing recent moves to a new city, graduations, births, engagements, marriages, and the like.” Facebook and other so-called tech companies have been warehousing all of this information since their respective inceptions. In Facebook’s case, its data vault includes information posted as early as 2004, when the site first went live. Now in a single month the amount of information forever recorded by Facebook —dinner plans, vacation destinations, emotional states, sexual activity, political views, etc.— far surpasses what was recorded during the company’s first several years of operation. And while no one outside of the company knows for certain, it is believed that Facebook has amassed one of the widest and deepest databases in history. Facebook has over 1,189,000,000 “monthly active users” around the world as of October 2013, providing considerable width of data. And Facebook has stored away trillions and trillions of missives and images, and logged other data about the lives of this billion plus statistical sample of humanity. Adjusting for bogus or duplicate accounts it all adds up to about 1/7th of humanity from which some kind of data has been recorded.

According to Facebook’s programmers like Voskuhl and Vyaghrapuri, of all the clever uses they have already applied this pile of data toward, Facebook has so far “lacked tools to synthesize this information about users for targeting advertisements based on their perceived income.” Now they have such a tool thanks to the retention and analysis of variable the company’s positivist specialists believe are correlated with income levels.

They’ll have many more tools within the next year to run similar predictions. Indeed, Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Twitter, and the hundreds of smaller tech lesser-known tech firms that now control the main portals of social, economic, and political life on the web (which is now to say everywhere as all economic and much social activity is made cyber) are only getting started. The Big Data analytics revolutions has barely begun, and these firms are just beginning to tinker with rational-instrumental methods of predicting and manipulating human behavior.

There are few, if any, government regulations restricting their imaginations at this point. Indeed, the U.S. President himself is a true believer in Big Data; the brain of Obama’s election team was a now famous “cave” filled with young Ivy League men (and a few women) sucking up electioneering information and crunching demographic and consumer data to target individual voters with appeals timed to maximize the probability of a vote for the new Big Blue, not IBM, but the Democratic Party’s candidate of “Hope” and “Change.” The halls of power are enraptured by the potential of rational-instrumental methods paired with unprecedented access to data that describes the social lives of hundreds of millions.

Facebook’s intellectual property portfolio reads like cliff notes summarizing the aspirations of all corporations in capitalist modernity; to optimize efficiency in order to maximize profits and reduce or externalize risk. Unlike most other corporations, and unlike previous phases in the development of rational bureaucracies, Facebook and its tech peers have accumulated never before seen quantities of information about individuals and groups. Recent breakthroughs in networked computing make analysis of these gigantic data sets fast and cheap. Facebook’s patent holdings are just a taste of what’s arriving here and now.

The way you type, the rate, common mistakes, intervals between certain characters, is all unique, like your fingerprint, and there are already cyber robots that can identify you as you peck away at keys. Facebook has even patented methods of individual identification with obviously cybernetic overtones, where the machine becomes an appendage of the person. U.S. Patents 8,306,256, 8,472,662, and 8,503,718, all filed within the last year, allow Facebook’s web robots to identify a user based on the unique pixelation and other characteristics of their smartphone’s camera. Identification of the subject is the first step toward building a useful data set to file among the billion or so other user logs. Then comes analysis, then prediction, then efforts to influence a parting of money.

Many Facebook patents pertain to advertising techniques that are designed and targeted, and continuously redesigned with ever-finer calibrations by robot programs, to be absorbed by the gazes of individuals as they scroll and swipe across their Facebook feeds, or on third party web sites.

Speaking of feeds, U.S. Patent 8,352,859, Facebook’s system for “Dynamically providing a feed of stories about a user of a social networking system” is used by the company to organize the constantly updated posts and activities inputted by a user’s “friends.” Of course embedded in this system are means of inserting advertisements. According to Facebook’s programmers, a user’s feeds are frequently injected with “a depiction of a product, a depiction of a logo, a display of a trademark, an inducement to buy a product, an inducement to buy a service, an inducement to invest, an offer for sale, a product description, trade promotion, a survey, a political message, an opinion, a public service announcement, news, a religious message, educational information, a coupon, entertainment, a file of data, an article, a book, a picture, travel information, and the like.” That’s a long list for sure, but what gets injected is more often than not whatever will boost revenues for Facebook.

The advantage here, according to Facebook, is that “rather than having to initiate calls or emails to learn news of another user, a user of a social networking website may passively receive alerts to new postings by other users.” The web robot knows best. Sit back and relax and let sociality wash over you, passively. This is merely one of Facebook’s many “systems for tailoring connections between various users” so that these connections ripple with ads uncannily resonant with desires and needs revealed in the quietly observed flow of e-mails, texts, images, and clicks captured forever in dark inaccessible servers of Facebook, Google and the like. These communications services are free in order to control the freedom of data that might otherwise crash about randomly, generating few opportunities for sales.

Where this fails Facebook ratchets up the probability of influencing the user to behave as a predictable consumer. “Targeted advertisements often fail to earn a user’s trust in the advertised product,” explain Facebook’s programmers in U.S. Patent 8,527,344, filed in September of this year. “For example, the user may be skeptical of the claims made by the advertisement. Thus, targeted advertisements may not be very effective in selling an advertised product.” Facebook’s computer programmers who now profess mastery over sociological forces add that even celebrity endorsements are viewed with skepticism by the savvy citizen of the modulated Internet. They’re probably right.

Facebook’s solution is to mobilize its users as trusted advertisers in their own right. “Unlike advertisements, most users seek and read content generated by their friends within the social networking system; thus,” concludes Facebook’s mathematicians of human inducement, “advertisements generated by a friend of the user are more likely to catch the attention of the user, increasing the effectiveness of the advertisement.” That Facebook’s current So-And-So-likes-BrandX ads are often so clumsy and ineffective does not negate the qualitative shift in this model of advertising and the possibilities of un-freedom it evokes.

Forget iPhones and applications, the tech industry’s core consumer product is now advertising. Their essential practice is mass surveillance conducted in real time through continuous and multiple sensors that pass, for most people, entirely unnoticed. The autonomy and unpredictability of the individual —in Facebook’s language the individual is the “user”— is their fundamental business problem. Reducing autonomy via surveillance and predictive algorithms that can placate existing desires, and even stimulate and mold new desires is the tech industry’s reason for being. Selling their capacious surveillance and consumer stimulus capabilities to the highest bidder is the ultimate end.

Sounds too dystopian? Perhaps, and this is by no means the world we live in, not yet. It is, however, a tendency rooted in the tech economy. The advent of mobile, hand-held, wirelessly networked computers, called “smartphones,” is still so new that the technology, and its services feel like a parallel universe, a new layer of existence added upon our existing social relationships, business activities, and political affiliations. In many ways it feels liberating and often playful. Our devices can map geographic routes, identify places and things, provide information about almost anything in real time, respond to our voices, and replace our wallets. Who hasn’t consulted “Dr. Google” to answer a pressing question? Everyone and everything is seemingly within reach and there is a kind of freedom to this utility.

Most of Facebook’s “users” have only been registered on the web site since 2010, and so the quintessential social network feels new and fun, and although perhaps fraught with some privacy concerns, it does not altogether feel like a threat to the autonomy of the individual. To say it is, is a cliché sci-fi nightmare narrative of tech-bureaucracy, and we all tell one another that the reality is more complex.

Privacy continues, however, too be too narrowly conceptualized as a liberal right against incursions of government, and while the tech companies have certainly been involved in a good deal of old-fashioned mass surveillance for the sake of our federal Big Brother, there’s another means of dissolving privacy that is more fundamental to the goals of the tech companies and more threatening to social creativity and political freedom.

Georgetown University law professor Julie Cohen notes that pervasive surveillance is inimical to the spaces of privacy that are required for liberal democracy, but she adds importantly, that the surveillance and advertising strategies of the tech industry goes further.

“A society that permits the unchecked ascendancy of surveillance infrastructures, which dampen and modulate behavioral variability, cannot hope to maintain a vibrant tradition of cultural and technical innovation,” writes Cohen in a forthcoming Harvard Law Review article.

“Modulation” is Cohen’s term for the tech industry’s practice of using algorithms and other logical machine operations to mine an individual’s data so as to continuously personalize information streams. Facebook’s patents are largely techniques of modulation, as are Google’s and the rest of the industry leaders. Facebook conducts meticulous surveillance on users, collects their data, tracks their movements on the web, and feeds the individual specific content that is determined to best resonate with their desires, behaviors, and predicted future movements. The point is to perfect the form and function of the rational-instrumental bureaucracy as defined by Max Weber: to constantly ratchet up efficiency, calculability, predictability, and control. If they succeed in their own terms, the tech companies stand to create a feedback loop made perfectly to fit each and every one of us, an increasingly closed systems of personal development in which the great algorithms in the cloud endlessly tailor the psychological and social inputs of humans who lose the gift of randomness and irrationality.

“It is modulation, not privacy, that poses the greater threat to innovative practice,” explains Cohen. “Regimes of pervasively distributed surveillance and modulation seek to mold individual preferences and behavior in ways that reduce the serendipity and the freedom to tinker on which innovation thrives.” Cohen has pointed out the obvious irony here, not that it’s easy to miss; the tech industry is uncritically labeled America’s hothouse of innovation, but it may in fact be killing innovation by disenchanting the world and locking inspiration in a cage.

If there were limits to the reach of the tech industry’s surveillance and stimuli strategies it would indeed be less worrisome. Only parts of our lives would be subject to this modulation, and it could therefore benefit us. But the industry aspires to totalitarian visions in which universal data sets are constantly mobilized to transform an individual’s interface with society, family, the economy, and other institutions. The tech industry’s luminaries are clear in their desire to observe and log everything, and use every “data point” to establish optimum efficiency in life as the pursuit of consumer happiness. Consumer happiness is, in turn, a step toward the rational pursuit of maximum corporate profit. We are told that the “Internet of things” is arriving, that soon every object will have embedded within it a computer that is networked to the sublime cloud, and that the physical environment will be made “smart” through the same strategy of modulation so that we might be made free not just in cyberspace, but also in the meatspace.

Whereas the Internet of the late 1990s matured as an archipelago of innumerable disjointed and disconnected web sites and databases, today’s Internet is gripped by a handful of giant companies that observe much of the traffic and communications, and which deliver much of the information from an Android phone or laptop computer, to distant servers, and back. The future Internet being built by the tech giants —putting aside the Internet of things for the moment— is already well into its beta testing phase. It’s a seamlessly integrated quilt of web sites and apps that all absorb “user” data, everything from clicks and keywords to biometric voice identification and geolocation.

United States Patent 8,572,174, another of Facebook’s recent inventions, allows the company to personalize a web page outside of Facebook’s own system with content from Facebook’s databases. Facebook is selling what the company calls its “rich set of social information” to third party web sites in order to “provide personalized content for their users based on social information about those users that is maintained by, or otherwise accessible to, the social networking system.” Facebook’s users generated this rich social information, worth many billions of dollars as recent quarterly earnings of the company attest.

In this way the entire Internet becomes Facebook. The totalitarian ambition here is obvious, and it can be read in the securities filings, patent applications, and other non-sanitized business documents crafted by the tech industry for the financial analysts who supply the capital for further so-called innovation. Everywhere you go on the web, with your phone or tablet, you’re a “user,” and your social network data will be mined every second by every application, site, and service to “enhance your experience,” as Facebook and others say. The tech industry’s leaders aim to expand this into the physical world, creating modulated advertising and environmental experiences as cameras and sensors track our movements.

Facebook and the rest of the tech industry fear autonomy and unpredictability. The ultimate expression of these irrational variables that cannot be mined with algorithmic methods is absence from the networks of surveillance in which data is collected.

One of Facebook’s preventative measures is United States Patent 8,560,962, “promoting participation of low-activity users in social networking system.” This novel invention devised by programmers in Facebook’s Palo Alto and San Francisco offices involves a “process of inducing interactions,” that are meant to maximize the amount of “user-generated content” on Facebook by getting lapsed users to return, and stimulating all users to produce more and more data. User generated content is, after all, worth billions. Think twice before you hit “like” next time, or tap that conspicuously placed “share” button; a machine likely put that content and interaction before your eyes after a logical operation determined it to have the highest probability of tempting you to add to the data stream, thereby increasing corporate revenues.

Facebook’s patents on techniques of modulating “user” behavior are few compared to the real giants of the tech industry’s surveillance and influence agenda. Amazon, Microsoft, and of course Google hold some of the most fundamental patents using personal data to attempt to shape an individual’s behavior into predictable consumptive patterns. Smaller specialized firms like Choicestream and Gist Communications have filed dozens more applications for modulation techniques. The rate of this so-called innovation is rapidly telescoping.

Perhaps we do know who will live in the iron cage. It might very well be a cage made of our own user generated content, paradoxically ushering in a new era of possibilities in shopping convenience and the delivery of satisfactory experiences even while it eradicates many degrees of chance, and pain, and struggle (the motive forces of human progress) in a robot-powered quest to have us construct identities and relationships that yield to prediction and computer-generated suggestion. Defense of individual privacy and autonomy today is rightly motivated by the reach of an Orwellian security state (the NSA, FBI, CIA). This surveillance changes our behavior by chilling us, by telling us we are always being watched by authority. Authority thereby represses in us whatever might happen to be defined as “crime,” or any anti-social behavior at the moment. But what about the surveillance that does not seek to repress us, the watching computer eyes and ears that instead hope to stimulate a particular set of monetized behaviors in us with the intimate knowledge gained from our every online utterance, even our facial expressions and finger movements?

OLDDOGS COMMENTS

Whatever the algorithm is for discovering the hot button of America’s sheeple, I would love to know it, because there is little evidence we will ever mobilize their curiosity with mere facts. Since they have no desire for an autonomous lifestyle, and the personal responsibility that accompanies it, there is little inducement available.

“A society that permits the unchecked ascendancy of surveillance infrastructures, which dampen and modulate behavioral variability, cannot hope to maintain a vibrant tradition of individual autonomy, and it seems their highest aspiration is to be intellectually capable of navigating between an archipelago of personality disorders.

Carbon Currency A New Beginning for Technocracy?

http://www.augustforecast.com/2010/01/26/carbon-currency-a-new-beginning-for-technocracy/

By Patrick Wood, Editor

Intro­duc­tion

Critics who think that the U.S. dollar will be replaced by some new global cur­rency are per­haps thinking too small.

On the world horizon looms a new global cur­rency that could replace all paper cur­ren­cies and the eco­nomic system upon which they are based.

The new cur­rency, simply called Carbon Cur­rency, is designed to sup­port a rev­o­lu­tionary new eco­nomic system based on energy (pro­duc­tion, and con­sump­tion), instead of price. Our cur­rent price-based eco­nomic system and its related cur­ren­cies that have sup­ported cap­i­talism, socialism, fas­cism and com­mu­nism, is being herded to the slaugh­ter­house in order to make way for a new carbon-based world.

It is plainly evi­dent that the world is laboring under a dying system of price-based eco­nomics as evi­denced by the rapid decline of paper cur­ren­cies. The era of fiat (irre­deemable paper cur­rency) was intro­duced in 1971 when Pres­i­dent Richard Nixon decou­pled the U.S. dollar from gold. Because the dollar-turned-fiat was the world’s pri­mary reserve asset, all other cur­ren­cies even­tu­ally fol­lowed suit, leaving us today with a global sea of paper that is increas­ingly unde­sired, unstable, unusable.

The deathly eco­nomic state of today’s world is a direct reflec­tion of the sum of its sick and dying cur­ren­cies, but this could soon change.

Forces are already at work to posi­tion a new Carbon Cur­rency as the ulti­mate solu­tion to global calls for poverty reduc­tion, pop­u­la­tion con­trol, envi­ron­mental con­trol, global warming, energy allo­ca­tion and blanket dis­tri­b­u­tion of eco­nomic wealth.

Unfor­tu­nately for indi­vidual people living in this new system, it will also require author­i­tarian and cen­tral­ized con­trol over all aspects of life, from cradle to grave.

What is Carbon Cur­rency and how does it work?

In a nut­shell, Carbon Cur­rency will be based on the reg­ular allo­ca­tion of avail­able energy to the people of the world. If not used within a period of time, the Cur­rency will expire (like monthly min­utes on your cell phone plan) so that the same people can receive a new allo­ca­tion based on new energy pro­duc­tion quotas for the next period.

Because the energy supply chain is already dom­i­nated by the global elite, set­ting energy pro­duc­tion quotas will limit the amount of Carbon Cur­rency in cir­cu­la­tion at any one time. It will also nat­u­rally limit man­u­fac­turing, food pro­duc­tion and people movement.

Local cur­ren­cies could remain in play for a time, but they would even­tu­ally wither and be fully replaced by the Carbon Cur­rency, much the same way that the Euro dis­placed indi­vidual Euro­pean cur­ren­cies over a period of time.

Sounds very modern in con­cept, doesn’t it? In fact, these ideas date back to the 1930′s when hun­dreds of thou­sands of U.S. cit­i­zens were embracing a new polit­ical ide­ology called Tech­noc­racy and the promise it held for a better life. Even now-classic lit­er­a­ture was heavily influ­enced by Tech­noc­racy: George Orwell’s 1984, H.G. Well’s The Shape of Things to Come and Huxley’s “sci­en­tific dic­ta­tor­ship” in Brave New World.

This paper inves­ti­gates the rebirth of Tech­noc­racy and its poten­tial to recast the New World Order into some­thing truly “new” and also totally unex­pected by the vast majority of modern critics.

Back­ground

Philo­soph­i­cally, Tech­noc­racy found it roots in the sci­en­tific autoc­racy of Henri de Saint-Simon (1760 – 1825) and in the pos­i­tivism of Auguste Comte (1798– 1857), the father of the social sci­ences. Pos­i­tivism ele­vated sci­ence and the sci­en­tific method above meta­phys­ical rev­e­la­tion. Tech­nocrats embraced pos­i­tivism because they believed that social progress was pos­sible only through sci­ence and tech­nology. [Schunk, Learning The­o­ries: An Edu­ca­tional Per­spec­tive, 5th, 315]

The social move­ment of Tech­noc­racy, with its energy-based accounting system, can be traced back to the 1930′s when an obscure group of engi­neers and sci­en­tists offered it as a solu­tion to the Great Depression.

The prin­cipal sci­en­tist behind Tech­noc­racy was M. King Hub­bert, a young geo­sci­en­tist who would later (in 1948 – 1956) invent the now-famous Peak Oil Theory, also known as the Hub­bert Peak Theory. Hub­bert stated that the dis­covery of new energy reserves and their pro­duc­tion would be out­stripped by usage, thereby even­tu­ally causing eco­nomic and social havoc. Many modern fol­lowers of Peak Oil Theory believe that the 2007 – 2009 global reces­sion was exac­er­bated in part by record oil prices that reflected validity of the theory.

Hub­bert received all of his higher edu­ca­tion at the Uni­ver­sity of Chicago, grad­u­ating with a PhD in 1937, and later taught geo­physics at Columbia Uni­ver­sity. He was highly acclaimed throughout his career, receiving many honors such as the Rock­e­feller Public Ser­vice Award in 1977.

In 1933, Hub­bert and Howard Scott formed an orga­ni­za­tion called Tech­noc­racy, Inc. Tech­noc­racy is derived from the Greek words “techne” meaning skill and “kratos”, meaning rule. Thus, it is gov­ern­ment by skilled engi­neers, sci­en­tists and tech­ni­cians as opposed to elected offi­cials. It was opposed to all other forms of gov­ern­ment, including com­mu­nism, socialism and fas­cism, all of which func­tion with a price-based economy.

As founders of the orga­ni­za­tion and polit­ical move­ment called Tech­noc­racy, Inc., Hub­bert and Scott also co-authored Tech­noc­racy Study Course in 1934. This book serves as the “bible” of Tech­noc­racy and is the root doc­u­ment to which most all modern tech­no­cratic thinking can be traced. Tech­noc­racy pos­tu­lated that only sci­en­tists and engi­neers were capable of run­ning a com­plex, technology-based society. Because tech­nology, they rea­soned, changed the social nature of soci­eties, pre­vious methods of gov­ern­ment and economy were made obso­lete. They dis­dained politi­cians and bureau­crats, who they viewed as incom­pe­tent. By uti­lizing the sci­en­tific method and sci­en­tific man­age­ment tech­niques, Tech­nocrats hoped to squeeze the mas­sive inef­fi­cien­cies out of run­ning a society, thereby pro­viding more ben­e­fits for all mem­bers of society while con­suming less resources.

The other inte­gral part of Tech­noc­racy was to imple­ment an eco­nomic system based on energy allo­ca­tion rather than price. They pro­posed to replace tra­di­tional money with Energy Credits.

Their keen focus on the effi­cient use of energy is likely the first hint of a sus­tained ecological/environmental move­ment in the United States. Tech­noc­racy Study Course stated, for instance,

Although it (the earth) is not an iso­lated system the changes in the con­fig­u­ra­tion of matter on the earth, such as the ero­sion of soil, the making of moun­tains, the burning of coal and oil, and the mining of metals are all typ­ical and char­ac­ter­istic exam­ples of irre­versible processes, involving in each case an increase of entropy. (Tech­noc­racy Study Course, Hub­bert & Scott, p. 49)

Modern emphasis on cur­tailing carbon fuel con­sump­tion that causes global warming and CO2 emis­sions is essen­tially a product of early Tech­no­cratic thinking.

As sci­en­tists, Hub­bert and Scott tried to explain (or jus­tify) their argu­ments in terms of physics and the law of ther­mo­dy­namics, which is the study of energy con­ver­sion between heat and mechan­ical work.

Entropy is a con­cept within ther­mo­dy­namics that rep­re­sents the amount of energy in a system that is no longer avail­able for doing mechan­ical work. Entropy thus increases as matter and energy in the system degrade toward the ulti­mate state of inert uniformity.

In layman’s terms, entropy means once you use it, you lose it for good. Fur­ther­more, the end state of entropy is “inert uni­for­mity” where nothing takes place. Thus, if man uses up all the avail­able energy and/or destroys the ecology, it cannot be repeated or restored ever again.

The Technocrat’s avoid­ance of social entropy is to increase the effi­ciency of society by the careful allo­ca­tion of avail­able energy and mea­suring sub­se­quent output in order to find a state of equilibrium, or bal­ance. Hubbert’s focus on entropy is evi­denced by Tech­noc­racy, Inc.’s logo, the well-known Yin Yang symbol that depicts balance.

To facil­i­tate this equi­lib­rium between man and nature, Tech­noc­racy pro­posed that cit­i­zens would receive Energy Cer­tifi­cates in order to operate the economy:

“Energy Cer­tifi­cates are issued indi­vid­u­ally to every adult of the entire pop­u­la­tion. The record of one’s income and its rate of expen­di­ture is kept by the Dis­tri­b­u­tion Sequence, so that it is a simple matter at any time for the Dis­tri­b­u­tion Sequence to ascer­tain the state of a given customer’s bal­ance… When making pur­chases of either goods or ser­vices an indi­vidual sur­ren­ders the Energy Cer­tifi­cates prop­erly iden­ti­fied and signed.

“The sig­nif­i­cance of this, from the point of view of knowl­edge of what is going on in the social system, and of social con­trol, can best be appre­ci­ated when one sur­veys the whole system in per­spec­tive. First, one single orga­ni­za­tion is man­ning and oper­ating the whole social mech­a­nism. The same orga­ni­za­tion not only pro­duces but also dis­trib­utes all goods and services.

“With this infor­ma­tion clearing con­tin­u­ously to a cen­tral head­quar­ters we have a case exactly anal­o­gous to the con­trol panel of a power plant, or the bridge of an ocean liner.” [Tech­noc­racy Study Course, Hub­bert & Scott,p. 238 – 239]

Two key dif­fer­ences between price-based money and Energy Cer­tifi­cates are that a) money is generic to the holder while Cer­tifi­cates are indi­vid­u­ally reg­is­tered to each cit­izen and b) money per­sists while Cer­tifi­cates expire. The latter facet would greatly hinder, if not alto­gether pre­vent, the accu­mu­la­tion of wealth and property.

Tran­si­tion

At the start of WWII, Technocracy’s pop­u­larity dwin­dled as eco­nomic pros­perity returned, how­ever both the orga­ni­za­tion and its phi­los­ophy survived.

Today, there are two prin­cipal web­sites rep­re­senting Tech­noc­racy in North America: Tech­noc­racy, Inc., located in Fer­n­dale, Wash­ington, is rep­re­sented at www.technocracy.org. A sister orga­ni­za­tion in Van­couver, British Columbia is Tech­noc­racy Van­couver, can be found at www.technocracyvan.ca.

While Technocracy’s orig­inal focus was exclu­sively on the North Amer­ican con­ti­nent, it is now growing rapidly in Europe and other indus­tri­al­ized nations.

For instance, the Net­work of Euro­pean Tech­nocrats was formed in 2005 as “an autonomous research and social move­ment that aims to explore and develop both the theory and design of tech­noc­racy.” The NET web­site claims to have mem­bers around the world.

Of course, a few minor league orga­ni­za­tions and their web­sites cannot hope to create or imple­ment a global energy policy, but it’s not because the ideas aren’t still alive and well.

A more likely influ­ence on modern thinking is due to Hubbert’s Peak Oil Theory intro­duced in 1954. It has fig­ured promi­nently in the ecological/environmental move­ment. In fact, the entire global warming move­ment indi­rectly sits on top of the Hub­bert Peak Theory.

As the Cana­dian Asso­ci­a­tion for the Club of Rome recently stated, “The issue of peak oil impinges directly on the cli­mate change ques­tion.” (see John H. Walsh, “The Impending Twin Crisis,” One Set of Solu­tions?, p.5.)

The Modern Proposal

Because of the con­nec­tion between the envi­ron­mental move­ment, global warming and the Tech­no­cratic con­cept of Energy Cer­tifi­cates, one would expect that a Carbon Cur­rency would be sug­gested from that par­tic­ular com­mu­nity, and in fact, this is the case.

In 1995, Judith Hanna wrote in New Sci­en­tist, “Toward a single carbon cur­rency”, “My pro­posal is to set a global quota for fossil fuel com­bus­tion every year, and to share it equally between all the adults in the world.”

In 2004, the pres­ti­gious Har­vard Inter­na­tional Review pub­lished “A New Cur­rency” and stated,

For those keen to slow global warming, the most effec­tive actions are in the cre­ation of strong national carbon cur­ren­cies. For scholars and pol­i­cy­makers, the key task is to mine his­tory for guides that are more useful. Global warming is con­sid­ered an envi­ron­mental issue, but its best solu­tions are not to be found in the canon of envi­ron­mental law. Carbon’s ubiq­uity in the world economy demands that cost be a con­sid­er­a­tion in any regime to limit emis­sions. Indeed, emis­sions trading has been anointed king because it is the most respon­sive to cost. And since trading emis­sions for carbon is more akin to trading cur­rency than elim­i­nating a pol­lu­tant, pol­i­cy­makers should be looking at trade and finance with an eye to how carbon mar­kets should be gov­erned. We must antic­i­pate the policy chal­lenges that will arise as this bottom-up system emerges, including the gov­er­nance of seams between each of the nascent trading sys­tems, lia­bility rules for bogus per­mits, and judi­cial coop­er­a­tion. [Emphasis added]

HIR con­cludes that “after seven years of spin­ning wheels and wrong analo­gies, the inter­na­tional regime to con­trol carbon is headed, albeit ten­ta­tively, down a pro­duc­tive path.”

In 2006, UK Envi­ron­ment Sec­re­tary David Miliband spoke to the Audit Com­mis­sion Annual Lec­ture and flatly stated,

“Imagine a country where carbon becomes a new cur­rency. We carry bankcards that store both pounds and carbon points. When we buy elec­tricity, gas and fuel, we use our carbon points, as well as pounds. To help reduce carbon emis­sions, the Gov­ern­ment would set limits on the amount of carbon that could be used.” [Emphasis added]

In 2007, New York Times pub­lished “When Carbon Is Cur­rency” by Hannah Fair­field. She point­edly stated “To build a carbon market, its orig­i­na­tors must create a cur­rency of carbon credits that par­tic­i­pants can trade.”

Point­ Carbon, a leading global con­sul­tancy, is part­nered with Bank of New York Mellon to assess rapidly growing carbon mar­kets. In 2008 they pub­lished “Towards a Common Carbon Cur­rency: Exploring the prospects for inte­grated global carbon mar­kets.” This report dis­cusses both envi­ron­mental and eco­nomic effi­ciency in a sim­ilar con­text as orig­i­nally seen with Hub­bert in 1933.

Finally, on November 9 2009, the Tele­graph (UK) pre­sented an article Everyone in Britain could be given a per­sonal carbon allowance:

“Imple­menting indi­vidual carbon allowances for every person will be the most effec­tive way of meeting the tar­gets for cut­ting green­house gas emis­sions. It would involve people being issued with a unique number, which they would hand over when pur­chasing prod­ucts that con­tribute to their carbon foot­print, such as fuel, air­line tickets and elec­tricity. Like with a bank account, a state­ment would be sent out each month to help people keep track of what they are using. If their “carbon account” hits zero, they would have to pay to get more credits.” [Emphasis added]

As you can see, these ref­er­ences are hardly minor league in terms of either author­ship or con­tent. The under­cur­rent of early Tech­no­cratic thought has finally reached the shore where the waves are lap­ping at the beach.

Technocracy’s Energy Card Prototype

In July 1937 an article by Howard Scott in Tech­noc­racy Mag­a­zine described an Energy Dis­tri­b­u­tion Card in great detail. It declared that using such an instru­ment as a “means of accounting is a part of Technocracy’s pro­posed change in the course of how our socioe­co­nomic system can be organized.”

Scott fur­ther wrote,

“The cer­tifi­cate will be issued directly to the indi­vidual. It is non­trans­fer­able and non­nego­tiable; there­fore, it cannot be stolen, lost, loaned, bor­rowed, or given away. It is non­cu­mu­la­tive; there­fore, it cannot be saved, and it does not accrue or bear interest. It need not be spent but loses its validity after a des­ig­nated time period.”

This may have seemed like sci­ence fic­tion in 1937, but today it is wholly achiev­able. In 2010  Tech­noc­racy, Inc. offers an updated idea of what such an Energy Dis­tri­b­u­tion Card might look like. Their web­site states,

“It is now pos­sible to use a plastic card sim­ilar to today’s credit card embedded with a microchip. This chip could con­tain all the infor­ma­tion needed to create an energy dis­tri­b­u­tion card as described in this booklet. Since the same infor­ma­tion would be pro­vided in what­ever forms best suits the latest tech­nology, how­ever, the con­cept of an “Energy Dis­tri­b­u­tion Card’ is what is explained here.”

If you study the card above, you will also note that is serves as a uni­versal iden­tity card and con­tains a microchip. This reflects Technocracy’s phi­los­ophy that each person in society must be metic­u­lously mon­i­tored and accounted for in order to track what they con­sume in terms of energy, and also what they con­tribute to the manufacturing process.

Carbon Market Players

The modern system of carbon credits was an invention of the Kyoto Protocol and started to gain momentum in 2002 with the establishment of the first domestic economy-wide trading scheme in the U.K. After becoming international law in 2005, the trading market is now predicted to reach $3 trillion by 2020 or earlier.

Gra­ciela Chichilnisky, director of the Columbia Con­sor­tium for Risk Man­age­ment and a designer of the carbon credit text of the Kyoto Pro­tocol, states that the carbon market “is there­fore all about cash and trading” but it is also a way to a prof­itable and greener future. (See Who Needs a Carbon Market?)

Who are the “traders” that pro­vide the open door to all this profit? Cur­rently leading the pack are JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley.

Bloomberg noted in Carbon Cap­i­tal­ists on December 4, 2009 that

“The banks are preparing to do with carbon what they’ve done before: design and market deriv­a­tives con­tracts that will help client com­pa­nies hedge their price risk over the long term. They’re also ready to sell carbon-related finan­cial prod­ucts to out­side investors.”

At JP Morgan, the woman who orig­i­nally invented Credit Default Swaps, Blythe Mas­ters, is now head of the depart­ment that will trade carbon credits for the bank.

Con­sid­ering the sheer force of global banking giants behind carbon trading, it’s no wonder ana­lysts are already pre­dicting that the carbon market will soon dwarf all other com­modi­ties trading.

Con­clu­sion

Where there is smoke, there is fire. Where there is talk, there is action.

If M. King Hub­bert and other early archi­tects of Tech­noc­racy were alive today, they would be very pleased to see the seeds of their ideas on energy allo­ca­tion grow to bear fruit on such a large scale. In 1933, the tech­nology didn’t exist to imple­ment a system of Energy Cer­tifi­cates. How­ever, with today’s ever-advancing com­puter tech­nology, the entire world could easily be man­aged on a single computer.

This article intended to show that

• Carbon Cur­rency is not a new idea, but has deep roots in Technocracy
• Carbon Cur­rency has grown from a con­ti­nental pro­posal to a global proposal
• It has been con­sis­tently dis­cussed over a long period of time
• The par­tic­i­pants include many promi­nent global leaders, banks and think-tanks
• The con­text of these dis­cus­sions have been very consistent
• Today’s goals for imple­menting Carbon Cur­rency are vir­tu­ally iden­tical to Technocracy’s orig­inal Energy Cer­tifi­cates goals.

Of course, a cur­rency is merely a means to an end. Who­ever con­trols the cur­rency also con­trols the economy and the polit­ical struc­ture that goes with it. Inquiry into what such a system might look like will be a future topic.

Tech­noc­racy and energy-based accounting are not idle or the­o­ret­ical issues. If the global elite intends for Carbon Cur­rency to sup­plant national cur­ren­cies, then the world eco­nomic and polit­ical sys­tems will also be fun­da­men­tally changed forever.

What Tech­noc­racy could not achieve during the Great Depres­sion appears to have finally found trac­tion in the Great Recession.

Bib­li­og­raphy & Resources

Scott & Hub­bert, Tech­noc­racy Study Course, Tech­noc­racy, Inc., 1934

Hanna, Toward a single carbon cur­rency, New Sci­en­tist, 1995

Victor & House, A New Cur­rency, Har­vard Inter­na­tional Review, Summer 2004

Hannah Fair­field, When Carbon Is Cur­rency, New York Times, May 6, 2007

M. King Hub­bert & The Tech­noc­racy Tech­nate Design, His­tor­ical blog

Everyone in Britain could be given a per­sonal carbon allowance’, Tele­graph (UK)

Net­work of Euro­pean Tech­nocrats, web­site for Europe

Tech­noc­racy, Inc. ‚web­site for U.S.

Tech­noc­racy Van­couver, web­site for Canada

Asso­ci­a­tion for the study of Peak Oil & Gas, web­site for Peak Oil Carbon Cur­rency: A New Begin­ning for Tech­noc­racy?,4.5 out of 5 based on 2 rat­ings

Related Posts

• Technocracy’s Endgame: Global Smart Grid
• Find­ings & Fore­casts 04/24/2013: Technocracy
• Tech­noc­racy And The Making of China

• Tran­shu­manism, Tech­noc­racy, Total Sur­veil­lance Society

OLDDOGS COMMENTS

I realize we face some very powerful, determined, and capable people, but if the people of planet Earth do not rise up and bury these bastards in their own excrement, I will die alone fighting them! I have never been so full of hate for anything or any one, or so disgusted with my fellow man. There will be no reason to live in the world they want to build and control, but there will be wailing and gashing of teeth because men are now too cowardly to die for their freedom. Now go to: http://atomic-temporary-19493231.wpcomstaging.com/?p=7719 FOR THE SOLUTION.

UK Royal Mint Working On Plans To Issue Gold Backed Physical Bitcoins

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-12-01/uk-royal-mint-

working-plans-issue-gold-backed-physical-bitcoins

By Tyler Durden

The implicit, and ever more explicit, institutional acceptance of the dominant cryptocurrency Bitcoin (we say dominant because as we pointed out last week, there has been an unprecedented spike of digital currencies one can pick and choose from) continues when following the surge in vendors willing to transact in BTC over Thanksgiving, the latest news comes from the birthplace of the modern central bank, the UK, where we learn that none other than the UK Royal Mint has been working on plans since this summer to issue physical Bitcoins in collaboration with the Channel Island of Alderney.

But where the story gets downright surreal is that as the FT reports, the same symbolic Bitcoin token issued by the Royal Mint “would have a gold content – a figure of £500-worth has been proposed – so that holders could conceivably melt and sell the metal if the exchange value of the currency were to collapse.” In brief: a perfect, and utterly incomprehensible, fusion of (opposing) hard, soft and digital currencies all rolled into one…

From the FT:

The tiny Channel Island of Alderney is launching an audacious bid to become the first jurisdiction to mint physical Bitcoins, amid a global race to capitalise on the booming virtual currency.

The three-mile long British crown dependency has been working on plans to issue physical Bitcoins in partnership with the UK’s Royal Mint since the summer, according to documents seen by the Financial Times.

It wants to launch itself as the first international centre for Bitcoin transactions by setting up a cluster of services that are compliant with anti-money laundering rules, including exchanges, payment services and a Bitcoin storage vault.

So, convert a digital currency into fiat, issue plastic (or some other material) tokens (appropriately covered in some goldish color) representing “value” because suddenly the currency (supposedly) has the blessing of central banks, and then store them in some basement? Brilliant.

Just how is the UK Royal Mint involved?

The special Bitcoin would be part of the Royal Mint’s commemorative collection, which includes limited edition coins and stamps that are normally bought by collectors. It would have a gold content – a figure of £500-worth has been proposed – so that holders could conceivably melt and sell the metal if the exchange value of the currency were to collapse.

Wait, what: gold-backed Bitcoins? If so, that would be truly revolutionary because for the first time a Treasury (and by implication, a central bank) is effectively hinting that not only are they willing to fiat-ize Bitcoin, but also have the symbolic BTC token (after all Bitcoin is a digital currency by definition) serve as a commodity trap. Because once enough gold-backed physical Bitcoins are locked up in some basement in the UK, who has the master key? That’s a rhetorical question by the way.

Naturally, the UK Mint is not quite eager to disclose full details while the plan is still being finalized:

David Janczewski, head of new business at the Royal Mint confirmed it had been approached by the finance minister of Alderney to “explore the possibility of manufacturing a physical commemorative coin with a Bitcoin theme”.

“Discussions have not progressed further and at this stage it remains nothing more than a concept,” he added.

But the controversy around Bitcoin has made the Alderney plan a sensitive subject. The Treasury, which owns the Royal Mint, declined to comment on the plans. George Osborne, the British chancellor, also holds the title of Master of the Mint.

Since there is understandably much confusion over what the minting process of a physical gold-backed token representing a digital currency, with the backing of an entity that does the bidding of an issuer that only believes in fiat currencies, here is the FT with the blow by blow.

An independent company will provide the Bitcoins. If the price plunged, neither Alderney nor the Royal Mint would lose anything.

The company would put the Bitcoins in an escrow account at an agreed price.

 Meanwhile, the Royal Mint would take customers’ orders for its minted Bitcoins and receive money from those coin sales.

The virtual Bitcoins backing the physical coins would be held in digital storage facilities by Alderney.

The Mint would issue the commemorative Bitcoin, paying for the value of the gold content itself. Alderney would receive royalties from sales of the coins.

Coins could be redeemed for sterling at any point in Alderney for the price of a Bitcoin on that day.

All we can do at this point is sit back in wonder and amusement as we hit the pinnacle of monetary confusion, whereby the UK Royal Mint, willing to take full advantage of retail confusion, will mix hard, soft and digital currency, and produce a product… that is locked away on an island that belongs to the UK.

And all we can say is “brilliant”, because if there is a better plan to meld the sentiment of both hard and digital-currency (and hence, anti-fiat) advocates, and to redirect it in a “fiat” pathway, we have yet to hear it.

OLDDOGS COMMENTS

Do not ever forget this statement, THOSE, WHO CONTROL THE VALUE OF YOUR MONEY, ARE NOT TO BE TRUSTED! EVER!

15 Signs That We Are Near The Peak Of An Absolutely Massive Stock Market Bubble

http://www.activistpost.com/2013/12/15-signs-that-we-are-near-peak-of.html

 By Michael Snyder

One of the men that won the Nobel Prize for economics this year says that “bubbles look like this” and that he is “most worried about the boom in the U.S. stock market.”  But you don’t have to be a Nobel Prize winner to see what is happening.  It should be glaringly apparent to anyone with half a brain. The financial markets have been soaring while the overall economy has been stagnating.  Reckless injections of liquidity into the financial system by the Federal Reserve have pumped up stock prices to ridiculous extremes, and people are becoming concerned.

In fact, Google searches for the term “stock bubble” are now at the highest level that we have seen since November 2007. Despite assurances from the mainstream media and the Federal Reserve that everything is just fine, many Americans are beginning to realize that we have seen this movie before.  We saw it during the dotcom bubble, and we saw it during the lead up to the horrible financial crisis of 2008.  So precisely when will the bubble burst this time?  Nobody knows for sure, but without a doubt this irrational financial bubble will burst at some point.  Remember, a bubble is always the biggest right before it bursts, and the following are 15 signs that we are near the peak of an absolutely massive stock market bubble…

#1 Bob Shiller, one of the winners of this year’s Nobel Prize for economics, says that “bubbles look like this” and that he is “most worried about the boom in the U.S. stock market.”

#2 The total amount of margin debt has risen by 50 percent since January 2012 and it is now at the highest level ever recorded.  The last two times that margin debt skyrocketed like this were just before the bursting of the dotcom bubble in 2000 and just before the financial crisis of 2008.  When this house of cards comes crashing down, things are going to get very messy…

“When the tablecloth gets pulled out from under the place settings, you’re going to have a lot of them crash and smash on the floor,” said Uri Landesman, president of Platinum Partners hedge fund. “That margin’s going to get pulled and everyone’s going to have to cover. That’s when you get really serious corrections.”

#3 Since the bottom of the market in 2009, the Dow has jumped 143 percent, the S&P 500 is up165 percent and the Nasdaq has risen an astounding 213 percent.  This does not reflect economic reality in any way, shape or form.

#4 Market research firm TrimTabs says that the S&P 500 is “very overpriced” right now.

#5 Marc Faber recently told CNBC that “we are in a gigantic speculative bubble”.

#6 In the United States, Google searches for the term “stock bubble” are at the highest level that we have seen since November 2007 – just before the last stock market crash.

#7 Price to earnings ratios are very high right now…

The Dow was trading at 17.8 times the past four quarters of earnings of its 30 components, according to The Wall Street Journal on Friday. That was up from 13.7 times its earnings a year ago. The S&P 500 is trading at 18.7 times earnings. The Nasdaq-100 Index is trading at 21.5 times earnings. At the very least, the ratios are signaling that stock prices are rich.

#8 According to CNBC, Pinterest is currently valued atmore than 3 billion dollars even though it has never earned a profit.

#9 Twitter is a seven-year-old company that has never made a profit.  It actually lost 64.6 million dollars last quarter.  But according to the financial markets it is currently worth about 22 billion dollars.

#10 Right now, Facebook is trading at a valuation that is equivalent to approximately 100 years of earnings, and it is currently supposedly worth about 115 billion dollars.

#11 Howard Marks of Oaktree Capital recently stated that he believes that “markets are riskier than at any time since the depths of the 2008/9 crisis”.

#12 As Graham Summers recently noted, retail investors are buying stocks at a level not seen since the peak of the dotcom bubble back in 2000.

#13 David Stockman, a former director of the Office of Management and Budget under President Ronald Reagan, believes that this financial bubble is going to end very badly…

We have a massive bubble everywhere, from Japan, to China, Europe, to the UK.  As a result of this, I think world financial markets are extremely dangerous, unstable, and subject to serious trouble and dislocation in the future.

#14 Bob Janjuah of Nomura Securities believes that there “could be a 25% to 50% sell off in global stock markets” over the next couple of years.

#15 According to Tyler Durden of Zero Hedge, the U.S. stock market is repeating a pattern that we have seen many times before.  According to him, we are experiencing “a well-defined syndrome of ‘overvalued, overbought, overbullish, rising-yield’ conditions that has appeared exclusively at speculative market peaks – including (exhaustively) 1929, 1972, 1987, 2000, 2007, 2011 (before a market loss of nearly 20% that was truncated by investor faith in a new round of monetary easing), and at three points in 2013: February, May, and today.”

As I mentioned at the top of this article, this stock market bubble has been fueled by quantitative easing.  Easy money from the Fed has been artificially inflating stock prices, and this has greatly benefited a very small percentage of the U.S. population.  In fact, 82 percent of all individually held stocks are owned by the wealthiest 5 percent of all Americans.

When this stock market bubble does burst, those wealthy Americans are going to be in for a tremendous amount of pain.

But there are some people out there that argue that what we are witnessing is not a stock market bubble at all.  That includes Janet Yellen, the new head of the Federal Reserve.  Recently, she insisted that there is absolutely nothing to be worried about…

“Stock prices have risen pretty robustly,” Yellen said. “But I think that if you look at traditional valuation measures, you would not see stock prices in territory that suggests bubble-like conditions.”

We shall see who was right and who was wrong.  Let’s all file that one away and come back to it in a few years.

So where are stocks going next?

If you had the answer to that question, you could probably make a lot of money.

Yes, the current bubble could burst at any moment, or stocks could continue going up for a little while longer.

After all, the S&P 500 has risen in December about 80 percent of the time over the past thirty years.

Perhaps that will be the case this December as well.

Perhaps not.

Do you feel lucky?

This article first appeared here at the Economic Collapse Blog.  Michael Snyder is a writer, speaker and activist who writes and edits his own blogs The American Dream and Economic Collapse Blog. Follow him on Twitter here.