20 Examples Of How America Is Rapidly Going Down The Toilet
By Michael, on June 13th, 2013
Deep corruption is eating away at every level of American society like cancer. We can see this in our families, we can see this in our businesses, and we can especially see this in our government. We have the highest rate of divorce in the world, we have the highest rate of teen pregnancy in the world, we have the highest rate of obesity in world, and nobody has higher rates of cancer, heart disease and diabetes than we do. The suicide rate is soaring and our economy is falling apart. Meanwhile, our politicians seem absolutely clueless and we have piled up the biggest mountain of debt that the world has ever seen. Has America ever been in such bad shape before? The following are 20 examples of how America is rapidly going down the toilet…
#1 Why do so many members of the media have family members that work for the White House? Is this one of the reasons why the mainstream media is so soft on Obama? Just check out the following list which was recently compiled by the Washington Post…
The list of prominent news people with close White House relations includes ABC News President Ben Sherwood, who is the brother of Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall, a top national-security adviser to President Obama. His counterpart at CBS, news division president David Rhodes, is the brother of Benjamin Rhodes, a key foreign-policy specialist. CNN’s deputy Washington bureau chief, Virginia Moseley, is married to Tom Nides, who until earlier this year was deputy secretary of state under Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Further, White House press secretary Jay Carney’s wife is Claire Shipman, a veteran reporter for ABC. And NPR’s White House correspondent, Ari Shapiro, is married to a lawyer, Michael Gottlieb, who joined the White House counsel’s office in April.
#2 Why are IRS agents training with AR-15 rifles? Exactly who do those IRS agents expect to be using those weapons against?
#3 The city of Detroit is on the verge of declaring the largest municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history, but a 41-year-old city worker is about to starting drawing a $96,000 annual pension…
Matt Schenk isn’t your average retiree. He’s 41, works full-time and collects $194,000 a year at the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department.
But as soon as next month, he’ll start collecting an estimated $96,000 annual pension, courtesy of an early retirement incentive offered to Wayne County appointees. It had no age restriction.
#4 The number of sexual assaults in the U.S. military is up 35 percent since 2010.
#5 The suicide rate for Americans between the ages of 35 and 64 rose by close to 30 percent between 1999 and 2010. The number of Americans that are killed by suicide now exceeds the number of Americans that die as a result of car accidents.
#6 The United States has the highest rate of obesity on the planet by far. The U.S. also has the highest rate of cancer, the highest rate of heart disease and the highest rate of diabetes.
#7 An illegal immigrant brutally raped and killed a 9-month-old girl in Richland, Washington recently, but you won’t hear anything about it from the big mainstream news networks because it might hurt the immigration bill being pushed through Congress.
#8 Even though the United States has been able to fully secure the border between North Korea and South Korea for the past 60 years, U.S. Senator Check Schumer says that it would take “years and years and years” to secure the border between the United States and Mexico.
#9 All over America illegal immigrants are turning pleasant communities into crime-infested cesspools. The following is what Doug Hoagland says is going on down in California…
The vision of my future is bleak, so is yours. There’s no need for me to list and link the abuses of power that are imposed on us by the government, unless you have been living in a cave for the last year or so you will know about the constant erosion of our civil liberties, the removal of our rights is gathering pace.
Everyday another piece of legislation determines what we can and can’t do. Not outlandish things, simple things, everyday things, things that we should be able to take for granted like catching rainwater, growing veggies wherever we like on our property, making a phone call without the intrusion of government eavesdroppers and information gatherers.
It’s not just happening here either. Almost the entire Northern Hemisphere is moving in the same direction. The UK and the Eurozone, even though they have big stuff like bankruptcy and record unemployment to worry about, continue to impose idiotic and restrictive laws on their citizens.
I’ve been asking myself why a lot recently. Why do this, what’s the point of doing these things now? Why not next week or next month?
The government sites the War on Terror, they are doing this for our own good, to keep us safe. How does stopping me growing veggies in my front yard keep me safe from terrorism?
Those of us that have woken up to the fact that TPTB intend to subjugate us , commit us to servitude, know these Draconian measures have little to do with the war on terror, we know its about the New World Order that is slowly but surely coalescing into a dark insidious mass that will descend over all of us, blocking out the sunshine that came with the freedoms we once knew.
I still though keep coming back to the question of why now? The world at the moment is a very fragmented place, too fragmented for TPTB to have a hope of imposing the New World Order that they hanker for. There are lots more countries to invade before there is a hope of success yet the onslaught of attacks on our rights are speeding up.
It’s also becoming clear to them that more and more people are waking up, becoming aware of what is happening. In my opinion they didn’t plan on this, they planned on carrying on, quietly introducing small changes to assure that normalcy bias did the bulk of the work for them.
Hitler did the same. He said:
“The best way to take control over a people and control them utterly is to take a little of their freedom at a time, to erode rights by a thousand tiny and almost imperceptible reductions. In this way the people will not see those rights and freedoms being removed until past the point at which these changes can be reversed.” (source)
This was working, and will continue to work to an extent but the fact that people are waking up is not something they planned on. The reaction to the Bilderberg shindig in the UK is proof positive of this. Lizzie Bennett a blogger said:
“Things are changing in the UK, I have never known so many people question what the government says and does. There is a definite shift in the way the British perceive what’s happening around them, and what’s being imposed on them by the government. The Bilderberg meeting has really shaken things up, so many had never even heard of them until recently, now the police have had to move the protest line back an extra half a mile as more and more turn up to protest. It’s not the huge change some of us hope for but it’s a start, it’s making people question who these people are, what they do, and what the implications of these closed door meetings might be. The EU restricting seeds and plants and the power station shutdowns have actually helped people wake up. All of a sudden it’s like they think ‘oh shit, that’s going to affect me’ and they start to listen.”
That’s the key to stopping them, people need to listen, we all know that but its difficult and sometimes even impossible to make people see that all this stuff is going to affect them. They need a kick, they need to see something that will directly affect their lifestyle big time before they will say ‘enough’.
We have all spent time trying to convince others that the time has come to stand up and be counted, most have us have been called stupid, alarmist or downright crazy for telling people to prepare and this has caused a lot of us to stop trying to warn people.
We joke among ourselves about them sitting glued trance-like to the idiot box in the corner, taking no notice and paying no heed to what’s happening around them. Some of those people will NEVER change, it’s just not in their make up, others, eventually might…if something that blows their mind were to happen, like the grid going down preventing them from watching their favorite shows.
As it happens there’s a distinct possibility of that happening. Whilst we are up in arms about the constant attacks on us by our government other things are quietly going on in the background that they hope and possibly pray we will not notice.
Over the next couple of years coal fired power stations across the country are going to shut down reducing the electricity supply by a minimum of 34 gigawatts, and that’s based on data from 2012, it has most likely increased over the last year. The same is happening in the UK and across Europe, dictated by various versions of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)
The situation is particularly dire in the UK and rolling power outages have been predicted to start within the next eighteen months due to a massive loss of generating capacity.
The Sun however may beat the power stations to it. We are almost at the maximum of sun cycle 24. Although they can occur at any time ‘grid-killer’ flares are more likely at the maximum. Cycle 24 has been long and has had the lowest number of sunspots of any cycle for almost a hundred years.
For this reason cycle 25 is not looking good. Long cycles with a low number of sunspots affect the next cycle in many ways, one of them being that future sunspot numbers will be reduced. In addition to the possibility of a major flare wiping out the grid as we reach the maximum the next three decades could well be marked by exceptional cold winters such as those experienced during the Dalton and/or Maunder minimum. Both were periods of time when low sunspot cycles were followed by exceptionally cold winters. Decades of cold winters.
Livingston and Penn experts in the field have written many academic papers on the subject and they feel there is a strong possibility that sun cycle 25 will produce sunspots in numbers so low that the Northern Hemisphere of the planet will cool quickly and to temperatures not seen since the ‘Little Ice Age’.
Dependence on the grid is for most people as natural as breathing. The grid going down would cause panic, confusion, riots, looting and much more. The grid going down when winters would be several degrees colder than even the coldest winters of recent years would be a disaster for huge numbers of the population. Only those who have prepared, those who are awake would have a chance of surviving.
These are not the people the government would like to survive, they would prefer to rescue sheep who will then show them unending gratitude.
Are they using the time they have available to highlight those who may be leaders, those who have the brain power and logic to organize their communities? Those people would be very dangerous to the overall NWO agenda, especially when that agenda involves reducing the population of the planet rather than keeping them alive during such a crisis.
I wrote a while ago about the leaking nuclear waste tanks at Hanford, they are probably not the only tanks that are leaking.
Fukushima is still belching out radioactivity.
The Cascadia, San Andreas and New Madrid fault lines are all building up stress and based on historic data are overdue. So is Yellowstone supervolcano.
Could factors such as these be increasing the rate that our liberty is destroyed? Is it things like this what they are preparing for? Gathering information while they can, so they know where to look for the ‘trouble makers’
We are not the only ones waking up. The government is waking up to the fact that our numbers are growing daily, that the message is spreading that all is not well and that worse is yet to come.
Obama’s Super Secret Treaty Which Will Push The Deindustrialization Of America Into Overdrive
By Michael, on June 3rd, 2013
Did you know that Barack Obama has been secretly negotiating the most important trade agreement since the formation of the World Trade Organization? Did you know that this agreement will impose very strict Internet copyright rules, ban all “Buy American” laws, give Wall Street banks much more freedom to trade risky derivatives and force even more domestic manufacturing offshore? If you have not heard about this treaty, don’t feel bad. Obama has refused to even give Congress a copy of the draft agreement and he has banned members of Congress from attending the negotiations. The plan is to keep this treaty secret until the very last minute and then to railroad it through Congress and have it signed into law by October. The treaty is known as “the Trans-Pacific Partnership”, and the nations that are reported to be involved in the development of this treaty include the United States, Canada, Japan, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand, Chile, Peru, Brunei, Singapore, Vietnam and Malaysia. Opponents of this treaty refer to it as “the NAFTA of the Pacific”, and if it is enacted it will push the deindustrialization of America into overdrive.
The “one world” economic agenda that Barack Obama has been pushing is absolutely killing the U.S. economy. As you will see later in this article, we are losing jobs and businesses at an astounding pace. And each new “free trade” agreement makes things even worse.
For example, just check out the impact that the recent free trade agreement that Obama negotiated with South Korea is having on us…
A 10 percent decline of U.S. exports to Korea
The U.S. trade deficit with Korea has climbed 37 percent
U.S. auto industry has been crippled
Loss of U.S. control where international trade, banking and finance is concerned
A projected 159,000 jobs will be lost
Wait a second – I though that “free trade” agreements were actually supposed to increase exports.
So why have they declined by 10 percent?
Did someone make a really bad deal?
And of course we have all seen the economic devastation that NAFTA has wrought.
When NAFTA was pushed through Congress in 1993, the United States actually had a trade surplus with Mexico of 1.6 billion dollars. By 2010, we had a trade deficit with Mexico of 61.6 billion dollars.
And “free trade” with China has turned out to be a complete and total nightmare as well.
Back in 1985, our trade deficit with China was approximately 6 million dollars (million with a little “m”) for the entire year.
In 2012, our trade deficit with China was 315 billion dollars. That was the largest trade deficit that one nation has had with another nation in the history of the world.
But instead of learning from the mistakes of the past, Barack Obama is pressing for more “free trade” agreements.
The New York Times is calling the Trans-Pacific Partnership “the most significant international commercial agreement since the creation of the World Trade Organization in 1995“. It is reportedly going to include a whole host of provisions which would never be able to get through Congress on their own. Even though this treaty will affect all of our daily lives, the Obama administration is keeping this treaty a total secret. In fact, Obama won’t even show it to Congress even though members of Congress have asked repeatedly to see it…
The agreement, under negotiation since 2008, would set new rules for everything from food safety and financial markets to medicine prices and Internet freedom. It would include at least 12 of the countries bordering the Pacific and be open for more to join. President Obama has said he wants to sign it by October.
Although Congress has exclusive constitutional authority to set the terms of trade, so far the executive branch has managed to resist repeated requests by members of Congress to see the text of the draft agreement and has denied requests from members to attend negotiations as observers — reversing past practice.
While the agreement could rewrite broad sections of nontrade policies affecting Americans’ daily lives, the administration also has rejected demands by outside groups that the nearly complete text be publicly released.
So exactly who in the world does this guy think that he is? Why won’t Obama let us know exactly what is in this treaty?
Fortunately, there have been a few leaks. One thing that we have discovered is that this new treaty would reportedly ban all “Buy American laws“.
That certainly would not be popular if it got out.
The American people wanted nothing to do with the very strict Internet copyright provisions of SOPA and loudly expressed their displeasure to members of Congress.
Unfortunately, now the provisions of SOPA are back. It is being reported that most of the provisions of SOPA have been quietly inserted into this treaty. If this treaty is enacted, those provisions will become law and the American people will not be able to do anything about it.
A draft agreement leaked Wednesday shows the Obama administration is pushing a secretive trade agreement that could vastly expand corporate power and directly contradict a 2008 campaign promise by President Obama. A U.S. proposal for the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade pact between the United States and eight Pacific nations would allow foreign corporations operating in the U.S. to appeal key regulations to an international tribunal. The body would have the power to override U.S. law and issue penalties for failure to comply with its ruling. We speak to Lori Wallach, director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch, a fair trade group that posted the leaked documents on its website. “This isn’t just a bad trade agreement,” Wallach says. “This is a ‘one-percenter’ power tool that could rip up our basic needs and rights.” [includes rush transcript]
Guest:
Lori Wallach, director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: We turn now to a controversial trade pact between the United States and eight Pacific nations that until now has remained largely secret. It’s called the Trans-Pacific Partnership, or TPP. A chapter from the draft agreement leaked Wednesday outlines how it would allow foreign corporations operating in the United States to appeal key regulations to an international tribunal. The body would have the power to override U.S. law and issue penalties for failure to comply with its rulings.
The agreement is being negotiated by the U.S. trade representative, Ron Kirk, appointed by President Obama. But the newly revealed terms contradict promises Obama made while running for president in 2008. One campaign document read in part, quote, “We will not negotiate bilateral trade agreements that stop the government from protecting the environment, food safety, or the health of its citizens; [or] give greater rights to foreign investors than to U.S. investors.”
AMY GOODMAN: Earlier leaks from the draft Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement exposed how it included rules that could increase the cost of medication and make participating countries adopt restrictive copyright measures.
No one from the U.S. trade representative’s office was able to join us, but in a statement to Democracy Now!, they said, quote, “Nothing in our TPP investment proposal could impair our government’s ability to pursue legitimate, non-discriminatory public interest regulation.”
For more, we’re joined by Lori Wallach, director of the fair trade group Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch. The leaked documents were posted on her organization’s website early Wednesday morning.
Lori, welcome to Democracy Now! Explain what the documents show and what this agreement is about.
LORI WALLACH: Well, it’s been branded as a trade agreement, but really it is enforceable corporate global governance. The agreement requires that every signatory country conform all of its laws, regulations and administrative procedures to what are 26 chapters of very comprehensive rules, only two of which have anything to do with trade. The other 24 chapters set a whole array of corporate new privileges and rights and handcuff governments, limit regulation. So the chapter that leaked—and it’s actually on the website of Citizens Trade Campaign, it’s a national coalition for fair trade—that chapter is the chapter that sets up new rights and privileges for foreign investors, including their right to privately enforce this public treaty by suing our government, raiding our Treasury, over costs of complying with the same policies that all U.S. companies have to comply with. It’s really outrageous.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, Lori, there’s been a quite a bit of complaint, even in Congress, about the secretive nature of these continuing negotiations. About 600 or so corporate advisers have access to information that even members of Congress don’t? Could you talk about how that has come about?
LORI WALLACH: Well, this is how you get a text and in a potential agreement that is this outrageous. I mean, this isn’t just a bad trade agreement, this is a one-percenter power tool that could rip up our basic needs and rights. How that happens is the negotiations have been done in total secrecy. So, for two-and-a-half years, until this leak emerged, people have suspected what’s going on, because, as you said, under U.S. law there are 600 official advisers, they have security clearance to see the text, they advise the U.S. position. Meanwhile, the senator, Ron Wyden, who is the chairman of the trade committee in the Senate, the committee with jurisdiction over the TPP, has been denied access to the text, as has his staff, who has security clearance, to a point where this man who has supported agreements like this in the past has filed legislation demanding he have the right to see the agreement that he’s supposed to be having oversight with. He’s on the Intelligence Committee, and he has security clearance, so he can see our nuclear secrets. He just can’t see this corporate bill of rights that is trying to be slipped into effect in the name of being a trade agreement. It’s a very elegant Trojan horse strategy. You brand it one thing, and then you put an agenda that could not survive sunshine into this agreement.
We have been able also to get some of the texts on patents, expanding patents for Big Pharma, jacking up medicine prices. And we have analysis on our website, tradewatch.org, as well as information about how to get involved, because these agreements are a little bit like Dracula. You drag them in the sunshine, and they do not fare well. But all of us, and also across all of the countries involved, there are citizen movements that are basically saying, “This is not in our name. We don’t need global enforceable corporate rights. We need more democracy. We need more accountability.”
AMY GOODMAN: Lori Wallach—
LORI WALLACH: And this agreement is the antithesis.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to read part of the comment we got from the U.S. trade representative’s office when we invited them on today’s show. They wrote, quote, “The Obama Administration has infused unprecedented transparency into the TPP negotiations. We have worked with Members of Congress … [and] invited stakeholders to every round of negotiations where they have given presentations and met with individual negotiating teams. … We are always looking for ways to enhance provisions on transparency and public participation.” Lori Wallach, your comment?
LORI WALLACH: Well, to start with, the idea of transparency of the current negotiators is a one-way mirror. We can basically talk to them and do presentations. But as this leak shows, nothing that the public interest organizations—and it’s a huge array of organizations, from faith groups to consumer groups, environmental, labor—nothing that we have said is now reflected in the U.S. position in this negotiation, which I’m sad to say is the most extreme. I mean, the U.S. is even opposing proposals in this agreement to try and make sure countries have the ability to use financial regulation to ensure financial stability. The U.S. positions don’t reflect what we’ve been saying, but we can talk at them.
But just to put this in perspective, in the last negotiation of a big regional agreement—that was the Free Trade Area of the Americas in the 1990s, 34 countries, very complicated agreement—two years into the negotiation, the entire draft text was published officially by the governments. Here we are, three years into this negotiation with eight countries, and they will not publish a sentence. In fact, it finally leaked that they had signed a special agreement not to release any draft text for four years after negotiations are done—a secrecy agreement on top of the normal secrecy. And when asked, Ron Kirk, the trade representative, why—in the past, the U.S. has sent out draft texts. The WTO, hardly a paradigm of transparency, publishes draft texts. “What the—what’s going on?” he was asked. He said, “Well, in the past, for instance, the Free Trade Area of the Americas, when the text was revealed, we couldn’t finish it.” Now, what sort of indictment is that of what they are doing behind closed doors, that merely allowing the public who will live with the results and Congress to know what’s up is going to somehow derail the plans to lock us in? Because what’s really important to understand about these agreements, it’s not about trade, and it’s like cement. Once the cement dries in these agreements, you can’t change the rules, unless all the agreement—all the other countries agree to amend the agreement.
So what we’re talking about with this leaked chapter is literally a parallel system of justice. People have domestic laws and courts, trying to defend our rights and get our needs met. Corporations would have a parallel system of private attorneys, three of them, no conflict-of-interest laws. The U.S. and the other countries would submit themselves to the jurisdiction of this corporate kangaroo court, and these three random attorneys would have the right to order the U.S. government to pay unlimited amounts of our tax dollars to corporations and investors who, A, claim regulatory costs need to be refunded, or, B, are saying they’re not being treated well enough, regardless if the policies they dislike are the exact same ones that apply to all of us. Even under NAFTA’s system, which has some of this, $350 million have already been paid out to corporations by governments, over toxics bans, zoning laws, timber rules. This is a sneaky outrage. And if people actually put a spotlight on it, we can stop it.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: So, Lori, I wanted to ask you—you mentioned the eight nations that are involved in the negotiations. Which nations are they? And also, the issue of the way this is being negotiated, the number could expand dramatically in the future. Can you talk about that?
LORI WALLACH: Well, the reason why it is so incredibly important that this agreement be exposed is this could well be the last agreement that’s negotiated. So, many of your listeners and viewers have been involved in the sneaky way trade agreements have been used by corporations to limit regulation and to foster a race to the bottom since NAFTA. And each of these agreements has gotten bolder, more expansive in its limits on government regulation and in its granting of corporate powers. This one could be the end, because what they intend to do is leave it open, once it’s done, for any other country to join. So, this is an agreement that ultimately could have the whole world in it as a set of binding corporate guarantees of new rights and privileges, enforced with cash sanctions and trade sanctions. It is not an exaggeration to say that the TPP threatens to become a regime of binding global governance, right at the time that the Occupy movement and movements around the world are demanding more power and control. This is the fightback. This is locking in the bad old way plus. And in addition, the way that the agreement is being negotiated, these rules would require that you not only change all of your existing laws—so good progressive laws would have to be gotten rid of—but that, in the future, you don’t create new laws.
Now, the agreement now includes Australia, Brunei, New Zealand, Singapore, Chile, Peru and Vietnam, as well as the U.S., plus Malaysia has now joined. And the agreement includes all of the NAFTA-style privileges that promote offshoring. But more drastically, it has all sorts of new corporate privileges, so the right to extend medicine and seed monopolies to jack up medicine prices, even the right to challenge formularies, medicine prescription group buying plans. For instance, what the Obama administration has put in their health reform bill, they are at the negotiating table behind closed doors trying to kill the right to use for other countries. Or the financial rules would have just a limit. Countries aren’t allowed to ban risky financial products or services, at the same time that we’re trying to issue regulations under financial reform. And the agreement even meddles with how we spend our local tax dollars. For folks around the country who are doing sweat-free campaigns, who are doing living wage campaigns, green buying campaigns, this agreement says, A, you can’t have local preferences, so no “buy New York” state preference to recycle money back in your state, your tax dollars, no “buy American,” but also conditions like a product has to have recycled content or that that uniform has to be sweat-free. Those kind of conditions can be challenged. It is an incredible corporate power tool. It’s only gotten this far because it’s been secret. And people in the other countries don’t want it either. But our country is the one that’s largely pushing the most radical provisions, which is why it was so important for this text, which everyone can see an analysis of at tradewatch.org, to be made public, to make people aware of what’s really going on.
AMY GOODMAN: Lori, the last round of negotiations on the trade agreement took place in Dallas. While there, Obama’s appointed trade representative, Ron Kirk, spoke at an event for the local business community. The Yes Men took the opportunity to present Kirk, the former mayor of Dallas, with a mock award. This is a clip.
GIT HAVERSALL: Hello. Thank you so much for being here. My name is Git Haversall. And on behalf of the Texas Corporate Power Partnership, we are very, very pleased to announce that the U.S. trade negotiators are the winners of our 2012 Corporate Power Tool Award. I would like to personally thank the negotiators for their relentless efforts. The TPP agreement is shaping up to be a great way for us to maximize our profits, regardless of what the public of this nation or any other nation thinks is right.
AMY GOODMAN: The next round of negotiations on TPP are scheduled over the July 4th holiday weekend. Lori Wallach, can you comment on this? And also, what I assume would be President Obama’s response, if talking behind the scenes, like perhaps tonight when he’s going to be at Sarah Jessica Parker house with—with raising a lot of money—the financial sector is donating $37 million to Mitt Romney so far, the Obama administration’s haul, $4.8 million—that even his own Wall Street supporters are going over to Romney right now, so he would say he is doing better than Romney would in trying to take on these guys.
LORI WALLACH: I think that, for President Obama, there are two scenarios. One is, he has not been on top of what these negotiators are doing. This really has been under the radar. It’s so important that the text finally came out, because it sends a warning to Congress, to the public, etc., and that basically he’s got negotiators on the loose. They are many of the same people who during the Clinton administration got us into NAFTA, that recycled back into the trade negotiating team. The other alternative explanation is just the money one, which is, it is the case that this is an agreement the 1 percent loves. This is sort of one-percenter fantasy. It’s not just that on the margins and in national governments you have to keep fighting with all your money and lobbying to try and get what you want; this would lock it in for the future, indefinitely.
AMY GOODMAN: Lori Wallach, we want to thank you very much for being with us, director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch. And we will continue to watch this.
This is Democracy Now! When we come back, whistleblower Jesselyn Radack on what a number in Congress are calling national security leaks. Stay with us.
Abby Martin speaks to the legislative representative for the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, Mike Dolan, about the Trans-pacific Partnership (TPP), the Obama administration’s efforts for a new trade agreement with the EU, and the negative implications of said agreements.
The Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement is being negotiated in secret between more than 12 countries around the Pacific region. Find out why it’s the biggest threat to the Internet you’ve probably never heard of.
Turkish police break up ‘Occupy Taksim Park’ protest in Istanbul
Police descended on an Istanbul’s Taksim Gezi park in the early hours to clear out protesters occupying it. The demonstrators, who had been camping out in the park for three days, say it is the last green space in Istanbul, one of the largest cities in the world.
Police in Istanbul have clashed with protesters occupying the city’s Taksim Gezi park. The activists have been camping there for three days in an attempt to stop it being demolished.
Local media said that authorities used tear gas and pepper spray to disperse the crowd. At least one person was reportedly hospitalised.
The determined environmentalists are continuing to occupy the park, even after being chased out early on May 30 by police.
Thousands of protesters in Istanbul clashed with police in the most violent rally Turkey has seen in years. Hundreds have been injured and dozens arrested in fierce rioting which the media has dubbed the Turkish Spring as it spreads across the country. FOLLOW LIVE UPDATES: http://on.rt.com/2dow77 PHOTO GALLERY: http://on.rt.com/3fto6s
http://www.democracynow.org – As Republicans move to cut billions of dollars in funding for food stamps, a new report finds one in six Americans live in a household that cannot afford adequate food. In “Nourishing Change: Fulfilling the Right to Food in the United States,” the International Human Rights Clinic at New York University’s School of Law reports that of these 50 million people going hungry, nearly 17 million are children. Food insecurity has skyrocketed since the economic downturn, with an additional 14 million people classified as food insecure in 2011 than in 2007. The report comes as Congress is renegotiating the Farm Bill and proposing serious cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly known as the Food Stamp Program. Millions of Americans currently rely on the program to feed themselves and their families. The report’s co-author, Smita Narula of the International Human Rights Clinic at NYU’s School of Law, joins us to discuss her findings and why she is calling on the U.S. government to ensure that all Americans have access to sufficient, nutritious food.
To hear Republicans — and some Democrats — in Congress talk, you’d think food-stamp dollars just disappear into a black hole. The prevailing debate in the Senate and House versions of the farm bill, which contains funding for food stamps (the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP), is over how much to cut.
But when more than 15 percent of Americans remain impoverished, slashing food assistance for the poor makes no sense in humanitarian, economic or public-health terms.
The House bill which is gaining steam after passage by the Agriculture Committee last week, is the more draconian of the two. It would chop $20 billion over 10 years from SNAP, and its changes to food-stamp eligibility rules would cut off vital sustenance for about 2 million low-income people, including seniors and families with children.
According to the Congressional Budget Office, 210,000 children in low-income families would lose their free school meals under the House plan.
The Senate version would cut far less, though a final figure will be hashed out by a conference committee in June. But the attacks on food assistance for the poor are deeply misguided and are only going to get worse.
The proposed House budget from Rep. Paul D. Ryan, R-Wis., seeks to gut food stamps by an additional $135 billion through block grants to states.
Yet government and other studies clearly show that food stamps are among the most wisely spent public dollars, providing essential nourishment and public health benefits to low-income people as well as economic stimulus to rural and urban communities.
These are returns on spending that you won’t find in the corporate tax giveaways and military spending boondoggles routinely supported by both political parties. even as they scream for austerity when it comes to slashing “entitlements” and food assistance for the poor.
The Trust for America’s Health, a health advocacy organization that focuses on disease prevention, warned recently of the consequences of cutting food stamps: “If the nation continues to underfund vital public health programs, we will never achieve long-term fiscal stability, as it will be impossible to help people get/stay healthy, happy and productive.”
Indeed, According to a 2011 study by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, “research shows that low-income households participating in SNAP have access to more food energy, protein and a broad array of essential vitamins and minerals in their home food supply compared to eligible nonparticipants.”
http://www.democracynow.org – Filmmakers Tia Lessin and Carl Deal say plans for their new documentary to air on public television have been quashed after billionaire Republican David Koch complained about the PBS broadcast of another film critical of him, “Park Avenue: Money, Power and the American Dream,” by acclaimed filmmaker Alex Gibney. Lessin and Deal were in talks to broadcast their film, “Citizen Koch,” on PBS until their agreement with the Independent Television Service fell through. The New Yorker reports the dropping of “Citizen Koch” may have been influenced by Koch’s response to Gibney’s film, which aired on PBS stations, including WNET in New York late last year.
“Citizen Koch” tells the story of the landmark Citizens United ruling by the Supreme Court that opened the door to unlimited campaign contributions from corporations. It focuses on the role of the Koch-funded Americans for Prosperity in backing Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, who has pushed to slash union rights while at the same time supporting tax breaks for large corporations. The controversy over Koch’s influence on PBS comes as rallies were held in 12 cities Wednesday to protest the possible sale of The Tribune newspaper chain, including the Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune, to Koch Industries, run by David Koch and his brother Charles.
….
Did Public Television Commit Self-Censorship to Appease Billionaire Funder David Koch? (2 of 2)
http://www.democracynow.org – Filmmakers Tia Lessin and Carl Deal say plans for their new documentary to air on public television have been quashed after billionaire Republican David Koch complained about the PBS broadcast of another film critical of him, “Park Avenue: Money, Power and the American Dream,” by acclaimed filmmaker Alex Gibney. Lessin and Deal were in talks to broadcast their film, “Citizen Koch,” on PBS until their agreement with the Independent Television Service fell through. The New Yorker reports the dropping of “Citizen Koch” may have been influenced by Koch’s response to Gibney’s film, which aired on PBS stations, including WNET in New York late last year.
“Citizen Koch” tells the story of the landmark Citizens United ruling by the Supreme Court that opened the door to unlimited campaign contributions from corporations. It focuses on the role of the Koch-funded Americans for Prosperity in backing Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, who has pushed to slash union rights while at the same time supporting tax breaks for large corporations. The controversy over Koch’s influence on PBS comes as rallies were held in 12 cities Wednesday to protest the possible sale of The Tribune newspaper chain, including the Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune, to Koch Industries, run by David Koch and his brother Charles.
A clean environment is important to us all. We have an obligation to maintain our resources and sustain our environment for future generations. Sustaining our environment has led us down the road to environmentalism. Then a strange thing happened. Environmentalism came to a fork in the road. While the rhetoric took one route, the agenda took another. Explore this topic and discover how Agenda 21 will affect you.
This classic video produced by George W. Hunt exposes how the progenitors of the hijacked environmental movement, people like Maurice Strong, the Rothschild family and David Rockefeller, always intended the scam to achieve global population reduction along with a global carbon tax based on a cap and trade system controlled by them.
Pelosi introduces a bill to follow the 1992 RIO Earth Summit and conform to Agenda 21 and local agenda 21 sustainable community practices and follow international law.
Taken from C-SPAN archives, filmed on Oct. 2, 1992
Private property rights in California are being subjected to Agenda 21, a United Nation’s declaration on the collective society’s right to control private property.
Environmentalists and TreeHuggers rejoiced today with the joint announcement from Barack Obama of the USA, Stephen Harper of Canada and Enrique Peña Nieto of Mexico announce the agreement to fully implement Agenda 21 throughout the three countries. The multi-trillion Amero project will ensure a greener, healthier, fairer and more equally distributed future for the 99%.
Glenn Beck/Screen capture
Readers may remember that Agenda 21 started in Rio in 1992 and has been spreading ’round the globe ever since, as Treehugger types push the idea of living a low impact life with a small carbon footprint, eliminating greenhouse gas emissions and saving the planet for all species. As one agender put it,
The objective of sustainable development is to integrate economic, social and environmental policies in order to achieve reduced consumption, social equity, and the preservation and restoration of biodiversity.
protecting biodiversity means giving the land back to the animals./Screen capture
In order to preserve that biodiversity and habitat, President Obama has announced the implementation of the wildlife reserve and corridor system across the USA, that will return most of the nation to its natural habitat.
Library of Congress/Public Domain
The Hoover Dam and others on major rivers will be deconstructed so that they can be returned to their natural state. This will cause some problems for cities like Phoenix and others in California that depend on the river’s water; the people will have to be relocated as there won’t be any water for drinking or lawns.
Fortunately, there are thousands of empty houses in Detroit and Buffalo and other northern cities that will be made available for occupation by the transplanted Phoenicians, who will be welcomed back, and given jobs on urban farms.
Since production of fertilizer requires fossil fuels and these contribute to climate change, all farming will be organic and done mainly by hand. This will provide a huge number of jobs for millenials now looking for work; a hundred and fifty years ago 80% of the population of North America worked in agriculture; now it is 3%. This is a great opportunity to put people back to work in productive jobs with lots of fresh air, exercise and sunshine.
Apartments produced in the LifeEdited Industries factories will accommodate families of all sizes and incomes; to keep consumption of materials and energy down, space will be rationed to 200 square feet per person, with a maximum unit size of 600 square feet. This will help control population growth, a major source of environmental problems. After all, Agenda 21 style living has been described as:
a future in which people would be forced to live with five others in 20-by-20 living spaces with push-button furniture in high-rises across major cities. The complexes would serve three vegetarian meals a day, feature mosques and have a 24-7 on-call doctor to discuss taking one’s own life.
Secretary of Education Arne Duncan addressing higher education sustainability leaders at the September 20-21Sustainability Education Summit: “Citizenship and Pathways for a Green Economy.” He says his department is late to sustainability and education, but it’s getting underway.
William F. Jasper, investigative reporter for The New American magazine, uncovers the real objective behind the Earth Charter. Many U.S. city and educational officials have already been persuaded to endorse this pro-UN manifesto. Learn why this campaign, masquerading as a plan to protect the environment, is potentially lethal to family, faith, and freedom. A must-see video presentation!
Step by step, piece by piece, the Wildlands Project is coming to fruition. The Project, foundational to the U.N.Biodiversity Treaty which was never ratified by the U.S. Senate, calls for approximately 50 percent of the United States to be set aside as “wildlands”, where no human can enter. Much has been accomplished over the past 10 years toward that goal, and the pace is stepping up, with the help of the federal agencies first under Clinton/Gore and now under Obama/Biden.
What, you may ask, is the Wildlands Project? It is a grandiose plan to transform at least half of the continental United States into an area free of modern industry and human habitation.
The father of this radical vision for a new green America is none other than Dave Foreman , principal founder of the eco-terrorist group EarthFirst!, and until 1997, a director of the Sierra Club . Carl Pope took the reign in 2002.
A vast network of powerful and influential environmental groups are taking great strides toward reaching the Wildlands’ goals. They are working toward the resurrection of a pre-industrial North America — the continent once known to Native Americans as “Turtle Island.” Foreman, in his own words, summarizes the Wildlands Project as a “bold attempt to grope our way back to 1492.” What kind of progressive notion is that, you might ask.
The deep ecology movement operates behind a sham of new age language and pseudoscience. Idealistic neo-pagans were courted and seduced by a pseudo spiritual rhetoric that masquerades the hidden agenda for power, money and control. They fell in love with the idea of this socially engineered, new earth religion “Gia”. This relationship came with weighty strings attached and they, lost in their beautiful delusions, danced at the puppet masters’ command.
Even so, these people consider themselves to be enlightened and always right, while they consider those with differing views to be ignorant and unenlightened. These eco-centrics have created their own vocabulary and terminology and this green “newspeak” has grown deep and extensive roots within our popular and political culture.
Wildlife Corridor Conservation Act Introduced
Politicians and other agents of Agenda 21 are inundating us with overlapping schemes that quietly and deliberately drown our property rights and freedom. For surefire evidence, take a look at U.S. Congress – H.R. 5101 Wildlife Corridors Conservation Act of 2010. This bill includes transboundary tax-payer funded projects for wild animal bridges and tunnels, increasing roadless areas and other means to capture more natural resources and private property for government and its partners.
H.R. 5101 states that “The Secretary, in cooperation with the States and Indian tribes, shall develop a Habitat and Corridors Information System, that shall include maps and descriptions of projected shifts in habitats and corridors of fish and wildlife species in response to climate change; and to assess the impacts of existing development on habitats and corridors.” The System is charged with identifying, prioritizing and describing “key parcels of non-Federal land (i.e. state lands and private property) located within the boundaries of units of the National Park System, National Wildlife Refuge System, National Forest System, or National Grassland System that are critical to maintenance of wildlife habitat and migration corridors.” This is way over and above what the federal government has already swallowed up under other guises.
Congress and other elites are desperately clinging to the fraud of man-made global warming in an attempt to illegitimately wrest control of private property. Many people still nominally own and pay taxes on their private property but if their property is even slightly proximate to the imagined wildlife corridors, then animals rule as “new habitat” is created for them in response to “climate change” and other “threats” (meaning people). It doesn’t matter that grandma’s house has been there for 100 years and she and the animals get along fine. Not anymore, with this bill government will determine what if any use might be made of land that falls in or near corridors invented ostensibly to protect animals (in truth this is done to take private property and to control the human population).
The difference between this bill and previous wildland’s programs is that this one doesn’t just have teeth, it has fangs. Not only does it have “strong language calling on agencies to actually take steps to protect corridors” but it also calls for a funding mechanism (more taxes) to support “such protective action.” In short, we will be footing the bill for the global elite to further control our property and diminish our freedom under the guise of habitat protection. And “the Secretary of the Interior may transfer funds to the Foundation under this subsection in advance, without regard to when expenses are incurred.” How many of us can get paid whenever we want, even if we haven’t yet done the work?
Here are a few examples of Wildlife Corridor Program across the United States. Once again they are bad programs hiding behind pretty pictures and phony words. Rim of the Valley Los Angeles Basin, California, Buffalo Commons Plains States, USA and Yellowstone to Yukon or “Y to Y” plus there are many more.
Norman MacLeod of Washington explains that HR 5101 incorporates the legislative provisions of Section 481 of HR 2454 (the House version of the climate bill) and Section 6009 of the Kerry-Lieberman climate bill draft. These sections authorize a wildlife corridors information system. HR 5101 builds on this with implementation programs, mostly to be housed with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Funding mechanisms and public-private structures are included. The bill has been referred to the House Natural Resources Committee.
This bill is intended to lead to the formal creation of several continental-scale wildlife corridor systems that include core habitat, connectivity, and buffer systems that will impact livelihoods, homes, ranches, farms, access to resources, outdoor recreation and more.
Buzzwords for a New Millennium
Biological diversity is a broad term which crops up in many environmental documents. It is used to define any kind of life form and its interrelation(s) to all the other life forms within any particular ecosystem a/k/a biome.
Bioregions, also known as biosphere reserves, are geo-political regions formed from land areas constituting similar ecosystems. The United Nations prefers the term “eco-regions,” and the Department of the Interior refers to them as Ecosystem Management Areas.
Under such a plan, areas that are now defined by state boundaries in the U.S., would be reorganized to follow similar landscape features. For example, the mountainous regions of Tennessee, North Carolina, Virginia, Georgia, Kentucky and West Virginia would constitute the Southern Appalachian Bioregion.
According to the enviro¬gurus, all human activity is damaging to a biosphere. Following that reasoning, they believe that people must be heavily regulated or removed in order to protect the balance of biodiversity within eco-regions.
First, a core area is established where no human activity is allowed. Core areas are the central component of the Wildlands Reserve program. Core areas are large and are taken mostly from National Forest and Park lands and adjacent private lands. Around the core is a buffer zone, consisting primarily of private land. Buffer zones may contain some housing development and human activity. According to the “grand plan,” however, no new development must be permitted. A transition area will surround the buffer zone. Human activity, such as tourism, or even some human settlement will be allowed. The transition area boundaries can be flexible. A corridor is an area of land that connects core areas with other core areas. Corridors generally follow rivers, streams and wildlife migration routes. Corridors consist of both public and private lands.
According to the Wildlands Project, no commercial development, housing or communities would be allowed within such a corridor. Imagine a national park that was 2,500 miles long, two counties wide and which passed through ten states from the Canadian border to the Gulf of Mexico. This is the Mississippi River Corridor, as designated by Congress. Numerous and costly studies will be made in this region in order to develop a unified federal program to control this ten-state area. Are you beginning to see how this plan will work?
There are sixty-eight other designated Heritage Areas and Corridors across our country in nearly every state of the Union. (this was true in 1999 – there may be more at this time)
THE ROAD RIP: Road Removal and Implementation Project
A common characteristic of core wilderness areas and interconnecting corridors is the absence of roads. Road RIP is an NGO dedicated to removing existing roads and preventing the construction of new roads. Since this paper was first written, many “road removal” projects have been implemented.
The original Road RIP radicals prepared handbooks for local activists that describe step-by-step procedures for challenging road construction and “Six Steps to Close a Road.” Sample letters, a comprehensive flow chart of the procedure and sample forms are provided to the organization’s chapters. The author of the work, Keith Hammer, is credited with forcing the Forest Service to remove or commit to remove more than 1,000 miles of roads in the Flathead National Forest.
The group is not content to close only roads in the national forests. Their ambitions run much higher. According to their literature:
“The best road density goal for maintaining and restoring ecological and evolutionary processes is ZERO—NO ROADS AT ALL. And what we call a road includes everything from interstate highways to two-track logging roads, off-road vehicle trails, and snowmobile routes. They are all swaths of ecological destruction.” And back to 1492 we go.
PRIVATE PROPERTY
In order for the Wildlands Project to be successful, thousands upon thousands of acres of private property need to be incorporated into biosphere reserves. Landowners were once free to use their land as they saw fit, as long as their actions did not harm other people. That changed with a 1972 decision by the Supreme Court of Wisconsin. In Just v. Marinette County, the Court ruled that:
“An owner of land has no absolute and unlimited right to change the essential natural character of his land so as to use it for a purpose for which it was unsuited in its natural state. ”
Simply put, the Wisconsin ruling set a legal precedence that a property owner could not “harm” the land itself. Fortunately, following cases favored landowners although the legal definition of “harm” was expanded and modified.
The Wildlands Project and other environmental organizations now campaign to “educate” the courts and public what they consider to be inappropriate land uses that “harms” others. The arguments which the eco-activists have dreamed up are convoluted and complex. They claim that when wetlands are filled, others are harmed by excessive run off and by the loss of the run off to the aquifer. When private property is clear cut others are harmed by the loss of biodiversity and so on, ad nauseum. They know the legal game and play it well. If they don’t want you to have it (property), they will find a way to take (legally steal) it from you.
The Sweet Home decision is an excellent example of how the Supreme Court is expanding the definition of harm. It was based on the notion that landowners can harm the land itself, which in turn, would affect and harm people.
“Others” that are affected are often unidentified souls that may be indirectly impacted by the loss of some imagined benefit. This case has left the door wide open for government restrictions upon private property owners. A favorite scheme used to implement the Wildlands Project, is for the federal government to offer a variety of flexible conservation easements to property owners. The owner retains title to the property and continues to pay taxes on it even though specific uses of the property are relinquished to the easement holder. Further, they often receive a pittance for the rights they gave up and future generations are robbed of the property uses which were forfeited.
The Nature Conservancy and other land trusts have led the way in exploiting this technique of separating resource utilization from the bundle of rights which traditionally have been considered private property rights and other non-profits have learned those techniques.
From the Global to the National to the Local
It is no coincidence that an article about the Wildlands Project first appeared in the 1992 special issue of Wild Earth, * an EarthFirst! publication. After all, the United Nation’s Convention on Biological Diversity also took place that very same year, and come to think about it, so did the release of Al Gore’s book, Earth in the Balance.
Not surprisingly, one of Al Gore’s first acts as Vice President was to establish an Ecosystem Management Policy. This directive was implemented via various resource management agencies within our federal government. (It should be noted that the Sierra Club published a map of the new America, broken down into 18 bioregions. )
Codex Alimentarius Lecture by Ian R. Crane – 1 thru 9
Uploaded on Jun 20, 2008
1 of 9
Taken from ConCen:
Never heard of Codex Alimentarius? That’s exactly what they want!
The UN plan to eradicate organic farming & to destroy the Natural Health Industry.
With biting political analysis, Ian R. Crane probes the track record of those who openly crave the introduction of a One World hierarchical Government. He exposes the agenda of those who have presided over events leading directly to the launching of the illegal wars in Afghanistan & Iraq and who continually demonstrate their desire to perpetuate a state of permanent global conflict; whilst systematically eroding personal freedom, through the process of gradualism.
An increasing number of people have complained about governments and central banks in recent years, even using the word “tyranny” to describe them. They are, of course, called names in the establishment press: conspiracy theorists, mainly.
Calling someone a name, however, does not erase their argument (at least not among rational people) and both the governments and the big banks stand accused.
Up till now, however, these accusations were never accepted by the general public. The average guy really didn’t want to hear about the evils of government money. After all, that was the only thing he had ever used to buy food, clothes, gasoline, cars, and so on. He didn’t want to acknowledge the accusations because he feared what might happen to him without his usual money.
Now, however, we have a brand new currency (called Bitcoin) available to us: something radically different. This gives us a new way to directly address the subject of monetary tyranny, providing a clear test for the governments and money masters of the world:
If they are truly NOT tyrannical, they will leave this new currency alone.
In other words, Bitcoin is a test for “the powers that be.” The way they deal with this new method of exchange will reveal their true nature.
If they ignore Bitcoin, they refute the charges of tyranny. If they attack it, they verify those charges.
After all, what honest reason could there be to attack an inherently peaceful tool for transferring value?
Prospective Reasons
Reasons to attack Bitcoin have recently appeared in the “public square.” Here are the three most popular ones, each followed with some analysis:
1. It can be used for money laundering.
Of course it can be used for money laundering — ANY currency can be used for money laundering. Currencies are neutral — that is their purpose! Currencies are valuable precisely because they can be exchanged for anything else — that’s why we use them!
Moreover, dollars and Euros and Pounds are used for money laundering every day. Consider the recent money laundering crimes of HSBC and Wachovia/Wells Fargo. These banks laundered hundreds of billions of dollars for violent drug cartels. And consider that this amount of laundered money is several hundred times the value of every Bitcoin in existence.
No one from either bank went to jail. Neither bank was shut down. Neither bank suffered more than a minor fine. So, how much of a concern can money laundering really be to governments and banks? Clearly not much.
But, since they accuse Bitcoin of being used for bad things, let’s be clear about the situation:
– Every mafioso uses government money.
– Every drug smuggler uses government money.
– Every terrorist uses government money.
– Every pornographer uses government money.
– Every criminal of every type uses government money.
They also use the telephone system and the mail and banks and a wide variety of government services. But government money is good and Bitcoin is bad?
The argument fails.
2. It could destabilize the current system.
A tiny, new currency is a threat to the long-established king of the hill? Comparing Bitcoin to dollars, Euros and Yen is like comparing an ant to a dinosaur. This is a threat?
Please understand also that no one is forcing anyone to use Bitcoin. If you don’t think it’s a great idea, you don’t have to use it. If its price movements (relative to dollars) bother you, you don’t have to use it. How is that destabilizing to the current system? It is entirely separate.
And what of the current system? It was falling apart on its own before the Bitcoin program was ever written. And I could go on at length on the insane levels of government debt, hundreds of trillions in derivatives, rehypothecation, and innocent people being forced to bail-out failed banks.
The current system has massive problems, but none of them can be blamed on Bitcoin.
This argument fails also.
3. Bitcoin provides no customer protection.
Well, no, it doesn’t. Bitcoin is a currency, not a legal system.
What is implied by this argument is that the government banking system does protect customers. That is an outright lie. People are ripped-off via the banking system every day. And more than that, consider what happened just a month ago in Cyprus: Thousands of innocent people were ripped-off BY the banking system — purposely — all at once and without recourse. This argument is, really, an insult to one’s intelligence.
And I should add something else: If Bitcoin is used properly, the crime of identity theft (a big problem with government money) vanishes — there is no identity available to be stolen.
So, again, the argument fails. Only those people who believe anything a government says will buy it.
In the End
In the end, it is said, we judge ourselves. Bitcoin has now put governments and banks in the position of judging themselves. They will write their own verdicts.
It should be interesting to watch.
[Editor's Note: Paul Rosenberg is the "outside the Matrix" author of FreemansPerspective.com, a collection of insights on topics ranging from Internet privacy and economic freedom, to alternative currencies. Join our free e-letter list to receive other articles like this one... and immediately get a report that explains in a unique way how the US Government got into the mess it's in, the dangers that creates for us, and how to protect ourselves from it.]
Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein tesifies before the Senate in April 2010
Mark Wilson/Getty Images
They weren’t murderers or anything; they had merely stolen more money than most people can rationally conceive of, from their own customers, in a few blinks of an eye. But then they went one step further. They came to Washington, took an oath before Congress, and lied about it.
Thanks to an extraordinary investigative effort by a Senate subcommittee that unilaterally decided to take up the burden the criminal justice system has repeatedly refused to shoulder, we now know exactly what Goldman Sachs executives like Lloyd Blankfein and Daniel Sparks lied about. We know exactly how they and other top Goldman executives, including David Viniar and Thomas Montag, defrauded their clients. America has been waiting for a case to bring against Wall Street. Here it is, and the evidence has been gift-wrapped and left at the doorstep of federal prosecutors, evidence that doesn’t leave much doubt: Goldman Sachs should stand trial.
The great and powerful Oz of Wall Street was not the only target of Wall Street and the Financial Crisis: Anatomy of a Financial Collapse, the 650-page report just released by the Senate Subcommittee on Investigations, chaired by Democrat Carl Levin of Michigan, alongside Republican Tom Coburn of Oklahoma. Their unusually scathing bipartisan report also includes case studies of Washington Mutual and Deutsche Bank, providing a panoramic portrait of a bubble era that produced the most destructive crime spree in our history — “a million fraud cases a year” is how one former regulator puts it. But the mountain of evidence collected against Goldman by Levin’s small, 15-desk office of investigators — details of gross, baldfaced fraud delivered up in such quantities as to almost serve as a kind of sarcastic challenge to the curiously impassive Justice Department — stands as the most important symbol of Wall Street’s aristocratic impunity and prosecutorial immunity produced since the crash of 2008.
To date, there has been only one successful prosecution of a financial big fish from the mortgage bubble, and that was Lee Farkas, a Florida lender who was just convicted on a smorgasbord of fraud charges and now faces life in prison. But Farkas, sadly, is just an exception proving the rule: Like Bernie Madoff, his comically excessive crime spree (which involved such lunacies as kiting checks to his own bank and selling loans that didn’t exist) was almost completely unconnected to the systematic corruption that led to the crisis. What’s more, many of the earlier criminals in the chain of corruption — from subprime lenders like Countrywide, who herded old ladies and ghetto families into bad loans, to rapacious banks like Washington Mutual, who pawned off fraudulent mortgages on investors — wound up going belly up, sunk by their own greed.
Read Full Article Here
******************************************************************************
Everything Is Rigged: The Biggest Price-Fixing Scandal Ever
The Illuminati were amateurs. The second huge financial scandal of the year reveals the real international conspiracy: There’s no price the big banks can’t fix
Conspiracy theorists of the world, believers in the hidden hands of the Rothschilds and the Masons and the Illuminati, we skeptics owe you an apology. You were right. The players may be a little different, but your basic premise is correct: The world is a rigged game. We found this out in recent months, when a series of related corruption stories spilled out of the financial sector, suggesting the world’s largest banks may be fixing the prices of, well, just about everything.
You may have heard of the Libor scandal, in which at least three – and perhaps as many as 16 – of the name-brand too-big-to-fail banks have been manipulating global interest rates, in the process messing around with the prices of upward of $500 trillion (that’s trillion, with a “t”) worth of financial instruments. When that sprawling con burst into public view last year, it was easily the biggest financial scandal in history – MIT professor Andrew Lo even said it “dwarfs by orders of magnitude any financial scam in the history of markets.”
That was bad enough, but now Libor may have a twin brother. Word has leaked out that the London-based firm ICAP, the world’s largest broker of interest-rate swaps, is being investigated by American authorities for behavior that sounds eerily reminiscent of the Libor mess. Regulators are looking into whether or not a small group of brokers at ICAP may have worked with up to 15 of the world’s largest banks to manipulate ISDAfix, a benchmark number used around the world to calculate the prices of interest-rate swaps.
Interest-rate swaps are a tool used by big cities, major corporations and sovereign governments to manage their debt, and the scale of their use is almost unimaginably massive. It’s about a $379 trillion market, meaning that any manipulation would affect a pile of assets about 100 times the size of the United States federal budget.
It should surprise no one that among the players implicated in this scheme to fix the prices of interest-rate swaps are the same megabanks – including Barclays, UBS, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and the Royal Bank of Scotland – that serve on the Libor panel that sets global interest rates. In fact, in recent years many of these banks have already paid multimillion-dollar settlements for anti-competitive manipulation of one form or another (in addition to Libor, some were caught up in an anti-competitive scheme, detailed in Rolling Stone last year, to rig municipal-debt service auctions). Though the jumble of financial acronyms sounds like gibberish to the layperson, the fact that there may now be price-fixing scandals involving both Libor and ISDAfix suggests a single, giant mushrooming conspiracy of collusion and price-fixing hovering under the ostensibly competitive veneer of Wall Street culture.
Why? Because Libor already affects the prices of interest-rate swaps, making this a manipulation-on-manipulation situation. If the allegations prove to be right, that will mean that swap customers have been paying for two different layers of price-fixing corruption. If you can imagine paying 20 bucks for a crappy PB&J because some evil cabal of agribusiness companies colluded to fix the prices of both peanuts and peanut butter, you come close to grasping the lunacy of financial markets where both interest rates and interest-rate swaps are being manipulated at the same time, often by the same banks.
“It’s a double conspiracy,” says an amazed Michael Greenberger, a former director of the trading and markets division at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and now a professor at the University of Maryland. “It’s the height of criminality.”
The bad news didn’t stop with swaps and interest rates. In March, it also came out that two regulators – the CFTC here in the U.S. and the Madrid-based International Organization of Securities Commissions – were spurred by the Libor revelations to investigate the possibility of collusive manipulation of gold and silver prices. “Given the clubby manipulation efforts we saw in Libor benchmarks, I assume other benchmarks – many other benchmarks – are legit areas of inquiry,” CFTC Commissioner Bart Chilton said.
But the biggest shock came out of a federal courtroom at the end of March – though if you follow these matters closely, it may not have been so shocking at all – when a landmark class-action civil lawsuit against the banks for Libor-related offenses was dismissed. In that case, a federal judge accepted the banker-defendants’ incredible argument: If cities and towns and other investors lost money because of Libor manipulation, that was their own fault for ever thinking the banks were competing in the first place.
“A farce,” was one antitrust lawyer’s response to the eyebrow-raising dismissal.
“Incredible,” says Sylvia Sokol, an attorney for Constantine Cannon, a firm that specializes in antitrust cases.
The federal rescue of Wall Street didn’t fix the economy – it created a permanent bailout state based on a Ponzi-like confidence scheme. And the worst may be yet to come
It has been four long winters since the federal government, in the hulking, shaven-skulled, Alien Nation-esque form of then-Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, committed $700 billion in taxpayer money to rescue Wall Street from its own chicanery and greed. To listen to the bankers and their allies in Washington tell it, you’d think the bailout was the best thing to hit the American economy since the invention of the assembly line. Not only did it prevent another Great Depression, we’ve been told, but the money has all been paid back, and the government even made a profit. No harm, no foul – right?
Wrong.
It was all a lie – one of the biggest and most elaborate falsehoods ever sold to the American people. We were told that the taxpayer was stepping in – only temporarily, mind you – to prop up the economy and save the world from financial catastrophe. What we actually ended up doing was the exact opposite: committing American taxpayers to permanent, blind support of an ungovernable, unregulatable, hyperconcentrated new financial system that exacerbates the greed and inequality that caused the crash, and forces Wall Street banks like Goldman Sachs and Citigroup to increase risk rather than reduce it. The result is one of those deals where one wrong decision early on blossoms into a lush nightmare of unintended consequences. We thought we were just letting a friend crash at the house for a few days; we ended up with a family of hillbillies who moved in forever, sleeping nine to a bed and building a meth lab on the front lawn.
But the most appalling part is the lying. The public has been lied to so shamelessly and so often in the course of the past four years that the failure to tell the truth to the general populace has become a kind of baked-in, official feature of the financial rescue. Money wasn’t the only thing the government gave Wall Street – it also conferred the right to hide the truth from the rest of us. And it was all done in the name of helping regular people and creating jobs. “It is,” says former bailout Inspector General Neil Barofsky, “the ultimate bait-and-switch.”
The bailout deceptions came early, late and in between. There were lies told in the first moments of their inception, and others still being told four years later. The lies, in fact, were the most important mechanisms of the bailout. The only reason investors haven’t run screaming from an obviously corrupt financial marketplace is because the government has gone to such extraordinary lengths to sell the narrative that the problems of 2008 have been fixed. Investors may not actually believe the lie, but they are impressed by how totally committed the government has been, from the very beginning, to selling it.
THEY LIED TO PASS THE BAILOUT
Today what few remember about the bailouts is that we had to approve them. It wasn’t like Paulson could just go out and unilaterally commit trillions of public dollars to rescue Goldman Sachs and Citigroup from their own stupidity and bad management (although the government ended up doing just that, later on). Much as with a declaration of war, a similarly extreme and expensive commitment of public resources, Paulson needed at least a film of congressional approval. And much like the Iraq War resolution, which was only secured after George W. Bush ludicrously warned that Saddam was planning to send drones to spray poison over New York City, the bailouts were pushed through Congress with a series of threats and promises that ranged from the merely ridiculous to the outright deceptive. At one meeting to discuss the original bailout bill – at 11 a.m. on September 18th, 2008 – Paulson actually told members of Congress that $5.5 trillion in wealth would disappear by 2 p.m. that day unless the government took immediate action, and that the world economy would collapse “within 24 hours.”
To be fair, Paulson started out by trying to tell the truth in his own ham-headed, narcissistic way. His first TARP proposal was a three-page absurdity pulled straight from a Beavis and Butt-Head episode – it was basically Paulson saying, “Can you, like, give me some money?” Sen. Sherrod Brown, a Democrat from Ohio, remembers a call with Paulson and Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke. “We need $700 billion,” they told Brown, “and we need it in three days.” What’s more, the plan stipulated, Paulson could spend the money however he pleased, without review “by any court of law or any administrative agency.”
The White House and leaders of both parties actually agreed to this preposterous document, but it died in the House when 95 Democrats lined up against it. For an all-too-rare moment during the Bush administration, something resembling sanity prevailed in Washington.
So Paulson came up with a more convincing lie. On paper, the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 was simple: Treasury would buy $700 billion of troubled mortgages from the banks and then modify them to help struggling homeowners. Section 109 of the act, in fact, specifically empowered the Treasury secretary to “facilitate loan modifications to prevent avoidable foreclosures.” With that promise on the table, wary Democrats finally approved the bailout on October 3rd, 2008. “That provision,” says Barofsky, “is what got the bill passed.”
But within days of passage, the Fed and the Treasury unilaterally decided to abandon the planned purchase of toxic assets in favor of direct injections of billions in cash into companies like Goldman and Citigroup. Overnight, Section 109 was unceremoniously ditched, and what was pitched as a bailout of both banks and homeowners instantly became a bank-only operation – marking the first in a long series of moves in which bailout officials either casually ignored or openly defied their own promises with regard to TARP.
Congress was furious. “We’ve been lied to,” fumed Rep. David Scott, a Democrat from Georgia. Rep. Elijah Cummings, a Democrat from Maryland, raged at transparently douchey TARP administrator (and Goldman banker) Neel Kashkari, calling him a “chump” for the banks. And the anger was bipartisan: Republican senators David Vitter of Louisiana and James Inhofe of Oklahoma were so mad about the unilateral changes and lack of oversight that they sponsored a bill in January 2009 to cancel the remaining $350 billion of TARP.
So what did bailout officials do? They put together a proposal full of even bigger deceptions to get it past Congress a second time. That process began almost exactly four years ago – on January 12th and 15th, 2009 – when Larry Summers, the senior economic adviser to President-elect Barack Obama, sent a pair of letters to Congress. The pudgy, stubbyfingered former World Bank economist, who had been forced out as Harvard president for suggesting that women lack a natural aptitude for math and science, begged legislators to reject Vitter’s bill and leave TARP alone.
In the letters, Summers laid out a five-point plan in which the bailout was pitched as a kind of giant populist program to help ordinary Americans. Obama, Summers vowed, would use the money to stimulate bank lending to put people back to work. He even went so far as to say that banks would be denied funding unless they agreed to “increase lending above baseline levels.” He promised that “tough and transparent conditions” would be imposed on bailout recipients, who would not be allowed to use bailout funds toward “enriching shareholders or executives.” As in the original TARP bill, he pledged that bailout money would be used to aid homeowners in foreclosure. And lastly, he promised that the bailouts would be temporary – with a “plan for exit of government intervention” implemented “as quickly as possible.”
Sen. Sherrod Brown and Sen. David Vitter hold a news conference to announce the details of ‘Too Big to Fail’ legislation.
Chris Maddaloni/CQ Roll Call
Last week, on April 24th, Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio and Louisiana Republican David Vitter introduced legislation called the “Terminating Bailouts for Taxpayer Fairness Act of 2013 Act,” or the “Brown-Vitter TBTF Act” for short. The bill is a gun aimed directly at the head of the Too-Big-To-Fail beast.
During the Dodd-Frank negotiations a few years ago, Brown teamed up with Delaware Democrat Ted Kaufman to introduce an amendment that would have physically capped the size of the biggest banks. The amendment was bold and righteous but was slaughtered on the floor by a 61-33 margin, undermined by leaders of both parties – 27 Democrats voted against it.
Brown-Vitter offers a different and, in a way, more elegant solution to the problem than Brown-Kaufman. Rather than impose size limits, it simply insists that banks with over $500 billion in assets maintain higher capital reserves than are currently required. Companies like J.P. Morgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup and Bank of America will have to keep capital reserves of about 15 percent, about twice the current amount.
The bill only has such tough requirements for just those few megabanks, which sounds unfair, except that the aim of the bill, precisely, is to level the playing field. Right now, the biggest U.S. banks enjoy a massive inherent market advantage in that they’re able to borrow money far more cheaply than other banks, because everybody on earth knows the government will never let them fail and will always bail them out in a pinch, making their debt essentially U.S.-government guaranteed. Studies have shown that these banks borrow money at about 0.8 percent more cheaply than other banks, and that this implicit government subsidy is worth about $83 billion a year just to the top 10 banks in America. This bill would essentially wipe out that hidden subsidy and make the banks bailout-proof.
As soon as Brown-Vitter was introduced, a very interesting thing happened. The Independent Community Bankers of America, or ICBA, issued a press release boosting the bill. “ICBA strongly supports this legislation,” the release read, “and urges all community banks to join the association in advocating passage of legislation to end too-big-to-fail.”
This was a big thing. It was the first time since the crisis that a prominent financial industry group opposed the will of the TBTF banks. I remember covering Dodd-Frank and being told by a number of members in the House and the Senate that the sentiment of many community bankers was for breaking up or at least curtailing the power of companies like Chase and Bank of America, but that the community banking lobby was not yet prepared to take that step.
But now, after the London Whale, the LIBOR scandal, the outrageous HSBC settlement and nearly five years of rapacious market-dominating behavior by these state-backed banks, the community banks have finally split off from TBTF.
This is another in a series of defections on this issue that in the past year has included many Republican politicians, numerous important financial regulators (even the New York Fed has taken a semi-stand against TBTF) and, hilariously, the creator of Too-Big-To-Fail himself, former Citigroup CEO and legendary lower-Manhattan raging asshole Sandy Weill. Weill was the man for whom the Glass-Steagall Act was repealed back in the nineties, so that his already-completed Citigroup merger could be legalized. But even he came out last year and said we have to break up the banks.
Naturally, there was going to be a response to Brown-Vitter from Wall Street. And we got it last week, shockingly not from one of the banks or a lobbying firm connected to the banks, but from the Standard and Poor’s ratings agency – supposedly a strict, humorlessly conservative auditor that should always abhor risk and look favorably upon greater safety and security. The very fact that such a company came out against a bill forcing banks to have safer balance sheets is in itself absolute proof of how completely fucked and corrupt our current system is.
The S&P report, entitled “Brown-Vitter Bill: Game-Changing Regulation For U.S. Banks”, is so incredibly hysterical in its tone that, reading it, one cannot help but deduce that people on Wall Street are genuinely afraid of this bill. The paper essentially hints that forcing banks to retain more capital could lead to world financial collapse, the onset of a new Ice Age, mammoths roaming Nebraska, etc. “The ratings implications of the Brown-Vitter bill, if enacted, for all U.S. banks would be neutral to negative,” the report read. In the second paragraph, it reads:
If congress enacts the bill as proposed, Standard and Poor’s Ratings Services would have concerns about the economic impact on banks’ creditworthiness stemming from the transition to substantially higher capital requirements.
Having a ratings agency bent to monopolistic bank influence give a bad rating to a piece of legislation designed to . . . curb monopolistic bank influence is a bad surrealistic joke, like a Rene Magritte take on lobbying – Ceci n‘est pas une Too-Big-To-Fail!
Remember, one of the primary causes of the financial crisis in the first place was the corruption of the independent ratings agencies. In the crisis years, companies like S&P and Moody’s and Fitch were so desperate to avoid losing business from the big investment banks (who paid the ratings firms to rate products like mortgage-backed securities) that these companies often gave embarrassingly overenthusiastic grades to a generation of toxic assets.
The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission in its final report placed blame for the crisis squarely on the shoulders of these firms. “The three credit rating agencies were key enablers of the financial meltdown. The mortgage-related securities at the heart of the crisis could not have been marketed and sold without their seal of approval,” the FCIC report read. “This crisis could not have happened without the rating agencies.”
So intellectually compromised ratings agencies were guilty before, because they were too quick to help Too-Big-To-Fail banks sell bad products into the world marketplace.
Now, an intellectually-compromised ratings agency is helping sell the very Too-Big-To-Fail system in an attempt to beat back a reform bill – an agency that once stated explicitly that it does not take public positions on legislation.
Years ago, Standard and Poor’s was involved a similar situation. In the mid-2000s, the Senate was considering creating a regulatory body with receivership powers that could have oversight over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. S&P, seemingly doing the bidding of Fannie and Freddie (which wanted no part of any new regulatory oversight), warned that such legislation might lead to a downgrade of the so-called Government-Sponsored Entities, or GSEs. In other words, if you pass this bill, we’re going to take a financial axe to Fannie and Freddie.
When then-Senator John Sununu asked then-S&P president Kathleen Corbet if it didn’t seem to her like the ratings agency was meddling in the legislative process by issuing such a dire warning, Corbet testily replied in the negative.
“First of all, Senator,” she said. “Standard & Poor’s does not advocate positions on any legislation.”
With that in mind, here are some of passages from S&P’s new report, “Brown-Vitter Bill: Game-Changing Regulation For U.S. Banks”:
If the requirements force banks to deleverage, a credit crunch could ensue and the U.S. economy might be thrown off course . . . the U.S. banking industry could become less competitive in world financial markets . . . All in all, the bill’s goal of ending TBTF could lead to unintended consequences – a destabilized financial system.
So Standard and Poor’s does not advocate positions on any legislation, mind you. It just thinks the world as we know it will end if this particular bill passes.
In reality, of course, about the only things that would be “destabilized” if TBTF ended would be the compensation packages for a small group of overpaid banking executives like Jamie Dimon. Another consequence might be that ratings agencies would actually have to work for a living, and earn reputations for honesty and integrity in the market, instead of getting endless streams of free money from big banks to give sparkly AAA ratings to every half-baked security or derivative instrument their obese, Fed-fattened clients cranked out.
Due to the social nature of this site, it may contain copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We believe this constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit, to those who have expressed a prior interest in participating in this community for educational purposes. For more information go to: http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html#107. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond ‘fair use’, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.
Any materials (ie. graphics, articles , commentary) that are original to this blog are copyrighted and signed by it's creator. Said original material may be shared with attribution. Please respect the work that goes into these items and give the creator his/her credit. Just as we share articles , graphics and photos always giving credit to their creators when available. Credit and a link back to the original source is required.
If you have an issue with anything posted here or would prefer we not use it . Please contact me. Any items that are requested to be removed by the copyright owner it will be removed immediately. No threats needed or lawsuit required. If there is a problem and you do not wish your work to be showcased then we will happily find an alternative from the many sources readily available from creators who would find it amenable to having their work presented to the subscribers of this feed.
Thank you for your time and attention, blessings to all :)
By Michael, on June 13th, 2013
Deep corruption is eating away at every level of American society like cancer. We can see this in our families, we can see this in our businesses, and we can especially see this in our government. We have the highest rate of divorce in the world, we have the highest rate of teen pregnancy in the world, we have the highest rate of obesity in world, and nobody has higher rates of cancer, heart disease and diabetes than we do. The suicide rate is soaring and our economy is falling apart. Meanwhile, our politicians seem absolutely clueless and we have piled up the biggest mountain of debt that the world has ever seen. Has America ever been in such bad shape before? The following are 20 examples of how America is rapidly going down the toilet…
By Michael, on June 3rd, 2013
